Spirit and Dust

Responsibility, the price of freedom

2012-02-02T14:30:00.001-08:00

We must question government. We haven't. We trusted our governing politicians and their media mouthpieces. That got us in trouble. They drifted toward those with the most money and got input from them, investing less and less of the long term interests of our whole nation in selecting information for dissemination. They become more and more beholden to a few extremely wealthy.

We the people fell under media-supported political pressure to trust that alliance between our elected representatives and powerful interests. Under their media pressure, we have fallen to their catch phrases like "smaller government is better." Thus American government, along with much of what many patriots hold dear, has diminished, not only in our minds, but in reality.

This led to abdicating our primary citizen role, the oversight of the regulatory function of our government, to a tiny elite. Having abdicated, we defaulted to blaming. The government was no longer ours, or us. The gap between our government and its citizens opened a power vacuum. Wealthy interests moved in. Soon sensible regulation was removed, and new regulations set in place undermining our government's capacity to protect our citizenry.

The result was loss of the means to work for life and liberty regardless of class or race. This remains a problem of government both too large and too small, for which better words are "disconnected" and "bumbling."

Now our international respect has been attacked, our taxes raised, our profits sunk and access to economic success drastically curtailed for most of us. Tragically, warfare has descending upon us, warfare benefiting the elite, and human tragedy and suffering have multiplied.

ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is the formal organization of the 1% elite orchestrating these destructive changes. This behind-closed-doors assembly writes almost all the legislation passed by congress, wrote Obamacare, and will write, if Obama would be defeated, the almost identical provisions of health legislation to replace Obamacare. Most members of congress have joined or are beholden to this organization.

Our founding fathers knew they had to change the European paradigm set in citizens' minds then: that concentration of wealth and power among a few citizens is simply inevitable. They struggled to write a constitution defying this paradigm. Liberty was what they wanted, and they knew this European paradigm would easily rise up and destroy American liberty again.

Now here we are, 2012. The old European paradigm is back. Once again we trust a few elite to govern. Once again, nearly all government decision making concentrates at the top. Most of all, we trust an illusory notion that smaller government is always better. So we have reduced government's functions benefiting the 99% of us, and expanded those benefiting the 1%.

Many of us now are concerned our nation's experiment with democracy is dying. We don't discuss our conflict between the European paradigm and our constitution. Our disagreements instead are those our politicians and media have inflamed among our populace, poisoning our reservoir well of American good will necessary to bring us the needed reforms. Stressed, we revert to reptile thinking: winner-take-all. We go at each other's throats, as is being choreographed in the 2012 electioneering campaigns in debates and other politicking. This sideshow element of our election year will certainly reach a record prominence in just a few months.

So these are the two root elements, essential to our American republican form of government, steadily eroding for decades: (1) Citizen oversight of (2) the regulatory function of government.

Losing these is why this congress has the lowest approval rating in American history. That's also why this 2012 election should and may well become an unprecedented tidal wave of change in congress. Either our election will tip toward a looming catastrophe, or, if a paradigm of citizen responsibility arises among the disenfranchised, disenchanted majority of our citizens, we'll move toward healing. Our two-party system, now bent toward adversarial discourse, seems unable to build that consensus.

The most hopeful trend is a small segment of patriotic American elite who, like Warren Buffet, recognize the dangers and really want to help our citizens restore the values and heritage that made us great. That's the genius of Lawrence Lessig's new book, Republic, Lost.

The following is continued from BigHornCountyNews.com:

This book rings with hope this mess can be turned around. Lessig is a long-time Republican leader, former clerk in the Supreme Court for Justice Scalia, and current philosophy, law and economics professor at Harvard. This is one of several reviews on Amazon:

October 22, 2011 This review is from: Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It (Hardcover) from Amazon.com copied Jan. 28, 2012

Lessig explores the concept of a government responsible to the PEOPLE, as the Constitution calls for, and how the current system of campaign finance has warped it so much toward being a government responsible to the CONTRIBUTORS that even the Supreme Court used those words (in the infamous Citizens United corporation-as-a-person decision). The picture he draws of moneyed influence is truly appalling--all the more so as the influence is almost never overt bribery, but often just hints and signals (as in "if you aren't able to vote for X, I'll have to contribute $1,000,000 to your opponent").

Can it be cured? Lessig offers several possible prescriptions, the most useful of which is a National Constitutional Convention…. There are many good ideas here, and the arguments are rich and comprehensive.

The other reviews Amazon has posted on line are well worth reading, if the book is unavailable at the library. I just lent my copy out.

Read this book if you want to understand what's really wrong with government, why nothing gets done, why the posturing and pandering grows and grows, and why life is getting steadily worse for the 99% of the population who aren't rich. And--especially--read it if you want to know what you can do to make things better.

Here's Fox News reporting on the cost to millions of Americans of deregulating the housing industry, specifically Freddie Mac. Will they point out the deregulation of the mortgage industry and loss of Glass Steagal and associated regulations from the 30's depression?

http://nation.foxnews.com/freddie-mac/2012/01/30/freddie-mac-bets-billions-against-struggling-homeowners

The Glass Steagal act figures prominently according to many economists in the collapse of 2008. Many analyses are available looking it up on line. Here's another:

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/10-years-later-looking-at-repeal-of-glass-steagall/

Our republican form of democracy originally prioritized encouraging citizens to participate in and question government. Abraham Lincoln spelled it out, "…that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." Back in Jefferson's days the European paradigm needed to change. Our nation was born, and we the citizens have taken just pride.

The framers of the Constitution were fed up with state "sovereignty" and decided on a strong central government, a judgment that has served the United States well, writes Robert Parry. Check this out on

http://consortiumnews.com

Still under the radar of politicians and media talk shows, "Americans Elect" a non-political party, has almost completed registration in 50 states for their selection of two candidates, for the offices of president and vice president, which cannot be from the same political party. This organization now boasts almost 3 million members, mostly delegates poised to join in the national convention on line in June. In that convention the delegates will make their final selection of president and vice president candidates, at a micro-miniscule cost in American politics, but with amazing openness and access to the process by ordinary Americans. Check out their web link, or do a search for a variety of opinion on this movement. It could drastically alter the two party landscape of American politics.

http://www.americanselect.org/about

Our government's invulnerability to regulation oversight by citizens has led to enormously costly deception in our country. Following is a short list:

War on Drugs. We have spent over a trillion dollars and sent a million people to prison, yet illegal drugs are cheaper and more prevelant than ever. See the review of this new documentary http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/31/the_house_i_live_in_new

War hype. The most lie-infused function of government, one we as a nation have given the most unquestioning trust, is the function to make war. This function consumes a huge portion of our of tax dollars, demands loyalty to the death of our bravest and strongest, and continues to successfully demand unquestioned support of the citizenry. Very few American leaders promote rational discussion of the cost to the nation and the world, and the strong evidence this imbalance, while posturing enormous military strength, in fact has undermined our true long-term national security at home and abroad at least since the Viet Nam war.

Foreign cash financing elections. We forget so easily. Remember Richard Nixon's demise? Remember the public outrage over the discovery of suitcase loads of cash flown in from foreign sources for the financing of his re-election? His practice of foreign funding of American political campaigns surreptitiously is not over.

Tax reform to cheat the rest of us. Citizens for Tax Justice has calculated that President Obama's "Buffett Rule" would, if in effect this year, raise $50 billion in a single year and affect only the richest 0.08 percent of taxpayers. http://www.nationofchange.org/analysis-buffett-rule-will-raise-50-billion-year-affect-just-008-percent-taxpayers-1327766301

"If you take the figures given by Romney - He made $45,000,000 last year, and paid taxes at the rate of 13.7% = $6,165,000. At the minimum proposed by Obama at 30%=$13,500,000. That's an ADDITIONAL $7,335,000 Romney would have to pay. I think that's fair - when I was working, even with my itemized deductions, at $40,000/year, I was paying close to 40%. On my paltry income. THAT ain't fair! No way. No how!" ——Ronni85 on Nation of Change comment blog Jan 28, 2012.

Lets put that into perspective. If this American citizen's 40% tax rate were reduced to Romney's rate at 15%, he would be paying about $1200. If Romney's rate were raised to 30%, still well under the Reagan rates, the 13.5 million he would pay would multiply an inch (6-8 lines of BHCnews print) at 22" a page would stretch out to over 500 pages, enough to reach almost a city block. This difference is what the right wing trumpets, supporting the rich.

Now Romney is of course wealthier, and pays much more in taxes. So let's compare the wealth difference to the above tax difference, with Ronni85's wealth, $40,000 a year for an inch of BHC news page, with Romney's 45 million. See the difference? Ronni pays more than double the amount of taxes Romney pays in percentage of income. The pages would reach across more than two city blocks.

That difference is what makes the last decades of tax breaks for the wealthy obscenely unfair, and has compounded our debt crisis.

"…It's worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They "fired" the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different. Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty…." That poverty cycle has been broken by citizen oversight of the unfair policies of the rich, the policies Obama rightly labels class warfare against the poor.

http://www.nationofchange.org/how-swedes-and-norwegians-broke-power-1-percent-1327762223

Food stamps presidents. It turns out the Bush administration oversaw the greatest rise in food stamps use this country has known, while the Obama administration has overseen a slight decrease. But neither president could really shake either the economic quagmire or the emotional ranting and raving around food stamps. Remember the quip of Newt Gingerich, "Obama the Food Stamp President?" Recall the chants emanating from the crowd gathered by Gingerich in Florida this week (CNN and MSNBC) when he tried to get them to send Obama back to Chicago, they said, "Send Obama to Kenya!" Any racism there? What about sending Newt to the Moon? Maybe he asked for that one.

Study after study affirms that citizens below the poverty level who could work if given a chance would gladly get off food stamps and other welfare provisions. It's a nasty tale that this policy, however in need of reform, figures prominently as and important cause of our current economic woes.

To quote words of President Johnson, "The poor don't need a handout. They need a hand up." Virtually everyone with any sense knows this. Pushing the fable of the welfare queen at the bottom of our economy blurs our vision so see the huge subsidy for the few welfare queens at the top. Of course, it's both. So the argument is useless and derogatory.

Others of our problems attributable to lies and deception in the media, usually originating from our government. These sites are some:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/21/1057176/-Citizens-United:-How-Did-it-Happen-%28VIDEO%29?via=search

Innocents in Guatanamo. One of the cheapest watches, available around the world and worn by millions, is a casio digital watch on the CIA's secret terrorist assessing list. Many Guantanamo prisoners were caught falsely when they innocently wore one on their wrist. A prime origin of many of the 70% innocents sent to Gauntanamo.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,758913,00.html

http://www.truth-out.org/ten-years-guantanamo-what-bush-cheney-and-rumsfeld-knew/1326049233

Bush's torture policy: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/061808a.html

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/061808a.html

mistreatment of war prisoners in Iraq http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/041609a.html

Guantanamo

guard reunited with ex-inmates http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8452937.stm

Terry Carrico, Ex-Guantánamo Prison Commander, Says Facility Should Close

Jan 6, 2012 4:45 AM EST

A decade after the prison camp opened, its first warden speaks out against U.S. detention policies in the war on terror and tells Aram Roston the facility should be closed.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/06/terry-carrico-ex-guantanamo-prison-commander-says-facility-should-close.html

http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/Retired-Generals-Admirals-on-Ten-Year-Anniversary-of-GTMO.pdf

http://www.truth-out.org/army-accuses-reservist-classified-information-truthout-guantanamo/1314206461

Iran. Our media has unanimously endorsed a lie supporting war hysteria against Iran. In fact, most if not all Israeli and American defense intelligence experts admit or actively state their observation that there is no evidence Iran is building, or even has an intent to build a nuclear weapon. All that's clear, with plenty of evidence to back, is that if inspectors are given free reign by Iran they will either be fired if they are truthful, like Hans Blix in Iran, or they will have to make up evidence. http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/24/usisrael-iran-not-building-nukes/

USDA and organic farming. Another government agency with long regulatory arms can be a threat to small organic farms, the greatest growth industry in farming in America gauged per capita:

http://www.cornucopia.org/2012/01/largest-corporate-dairy-biotech-firm-and-usda-accused-of-conspiring-to-corrupt-rulemaking-and-pollute-organics/

David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Why America needs Dr. Martin Luther King again

2012-01-19T20:18:00.001-08:00

Are we losing our civil rights in America today?

Is racism gaining a stronger foothold?

Here in Big Horn County, we have racial diversity that is unique among the rural counties of Montana. We benefit from the legacy of Dr. King’s struggle for our nation’s freedom, but we can easily be drawn into the recent national degradation of civil rights. This unfortunate trend is making a mockery of the gains those of us experienced with neighbors and friends back in the 60’s. Our loss of civil rights is most concentrated in our prisons. Our county has one of the highest incarceration rates in Montana, if not the entire U.S.

We have a tradition in America of listening to God’s words on behalf of the civil rights of those who suffer, and hearing the Godly path to real security. Jesus’ Sabbath reading from Isaiah at the Nazareth synagogue around 32 A.D. alludes to this central agenda of the prophets, including Jesus, as recorded by Evangelist St. Luke.

Luke 4:16 – “Now Jesus … stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and the regaining of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.'”

Two present day intellectuals, Randall Robinson and Michelle Anderson, point out that our “get tough on crime” rhetoric has led to class warfare in America. The title of Anderson’s new book captures the hidden nature of this new apartheid in America – “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

Of course real people sometimes wrongly suffer regardless of race in our criminal justice system, but the racial bias in prison, courts and law enforcement mocks the justice and freedom concepts written into our constitution. A few tidbits from Anderson’s and Robinson’s books:

Twelve percent of all non-violent drug arrests involve black people, yet 56 percent of all drug prosecutions are of blacks. While drug use and selling rates are the same among races nationwide, African Americans are incarcerated at rates more than double those of other races.

A higher percentage of blacks are imprisoned in America now than were imprisoned in South Africa at the height of apartheid. Today, there are more African Americans under correctional control, whether in prison or jail, on probation or on parole, than there were enslaved in 1850. To add insult to injury, our national incarceration rate is an almost laughable shame when compared to other civilized nations.

No other nation disenfranchises prisoners like we do. Even those who have served their time, reformed and returned as productive citizens, are banned from voting. More blacks are disenfranchised from voting now in America than were banned from voting in the registration laws of 1870, found unconstitutional.

Most devastating for slaves in America was the loss of family and even family memories because of forced separation of parents and children. Today, this family destruction is returning. Those freed from incarceration cannot return and recover their provider status with their families. They cannot get food stamps, cannot live with their families without the whole family being evicted from public housing, cannot get jobs, cannot get a car loan. They also live under pressure to return to crime and unfortunately, many succumb. Our criminal justice system has abysmal recidivism rates.

For generations, Montana prisoners have manufactured license plates. This is overseen by our government to guarantee no profiteering from the vulnerability of prisoners like in China or, thirty years ago, the Soviet Union. Everywhere else, that’s all changing.

Historically, prison-labor programs have allowed prisoners to work for the public sector, for example, to manufacture lisence plates. Advocates of prison labor point to reduced costs to the state, vocational training, and work ethic as benefits of such programs. However recent changes, promoted by ALEC, allow prison labor for private sector products and open the door to profiteering. The new prisons for profit program promoted in our twisted private enterprise system gives prisoners jobs. Absenteeism is not an issue. Workers can be controlled effectively, and have little recourse. Benefits, such as health care, are paid by the tax payer, as are room, board, and security. How will legitimate employers hope to compete with this no-cost, no union labor force?

With new laws and our massive American incarceration rates there is never a lack of workers. The multi-billionaire Koch brothers have significant investments in for-profit prisons also invest millions in media and policy think-tanks. To read about the return of slavery in America’s prisons, use the links below and pray/work for deliverance of those in captivity. Alternatively, have a rational fear session, from a prophet speaking in the tradition of the Bible’s prophets about judgment under God. Watching Dr. King’s 1968 speech on Viet Nam is useful for those who believe the Bible’s spirituality speaks to politics today:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b80Bsw0UG-U

or read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.

Click on the link “Viet Nam War”

‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑Other Sources:

Michelle Alexander, civil rights advocate and the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which has just been re-released in paperback. She won a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship and now holds a joint appointment at the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. Alexander served for several years as the director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, which spearheaded the national campaign against racial profiling. At the beginning of her career she served as a law clerk on the United States Supreme Court for Justice Harry Blackmun. She lives outside Columbus, Ohio.

Randall Robinson, founder and past president of TransAfrica and a law professor at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of An Unbroken Agony and the national best sellers The Debt, The Reckoning, Quitting America, and Defending the Spirit, as well as the novel The Emancipation of Wakefield Clay. He is the creator, co-producer, and host of the public television human rights series World on Trial. Robinson lives with his wife Hazel in St. Kitts, West Indies.

Our national incarceration rates:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States

ALEC and prison labor profits:

http://www.thenation.com/article/162478/hidden-history-alec-and-prison-labor

Michelle Alexander’s new book on the growing racial bias of our criminal justice system:

http://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Michelle-Alexander/dp/1595586431/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326516207&sr=8-1

Video of interview with Michelle Alexander and Randall Robinson:

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/13/on_eve_of_mlk_day_michelle

Public schools in low income communities inadvertently teach criminal mentality, preparing students for incarceration instead of success in America. http://www.truth-out.org/stop-school-prison-pipeline/1326636604

John Paul Lederach was a fellow student of mine in college. His experience and ideas are relevant to the dominant culture’s paradigm of conflict handling on the res. This I contend is near the root of the despair over racism, abuse, dysfunction and poverty around us. It’s a useful problem to address in health education, because the habits associated with the paradigm are so pervasive, concentrated in relational behaviors at all levels of society in this county, and the irrationality makes it a prime agenda for education.

http://blog.onbeing.org/post/15823286942/the-art-of-peace-from-conflict-resolution-to

--
David Graber
RR 1 Box 1211D
631 Woodley Ln
Hardin, MT 59034

406 665-3373
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org
Bonnie's email graberbj@gmail.com

Honoring our returning warriors

2012-01-05T19:09:00.001-08:00

Big Horn County families have proportionally many more loved ones returning from service in Iraq this New Year. They need a strong welcome home. Now is the time for an honest look at our partially-ended Iraq war, and critically examine the rationale to re run the Iraq war buildup with the next one, substituting "n" for the "q" in Iraq. We are following an almost identical script. It escapes me how an honest, open appraisal of our huge investment of taxpayer money and citizen blood could be anything but highly patriotic, and the best way to honor our veterans. But it's been given that brazenly stupid twist by packs of our paranoid neoconservative politicians and pundits, repeating the war propaganda script (see general-clark- propaganda-iraq-rerun).

It was about a month before Christmas in the late '50's with the moon just past full, enough light to see dimly this phenomenon in the original back 40 of my father's farm. He had just bought this adjacent pasture and timber ground, and went to the local sale barn to buy at auction some 50 head of spring lambs to fatten for the market before Christmas.

He was concerned that wooly critters, new in our valley, could incur a dog problem. So a billy goat and Corriedale buck were each outfitted with a bell just in case my father's worries became reality, and we the family could know what's really happening.

Then came November. My father woke my brother and me around 4:00 AM because the bells were ringing. Getting access to the problem took some effort and risk. The lights on our '51 Studebaker flatbed worked occasionally. With shotguns and enough buckshot shells, we three quickly jumped in. There were several correctly timed solid bumps turning the lights on just in time to miss a tree. We drove out of the timber up to an open flat meadow ridge and stopped.

The bells were close, but nothing else sounded amiss except a small dog's excited "yip-yip." We carefully closed the doors and ran lightly with guns loaded toward the far side of the ridge. Down in a shallow grassy cirque we saw in the moonlight a serious fracas. Three dogs were obsessed with their task, and didn't see us. We noted the carcasses of several lambs they had left mortally wounded, to go after another target. They weren't hungry; they had no real need for the carnage. The three dogs were totally focused and their mission was clear.

With the small one yipping and leading the way, they soon got another lamb down. As they ganged up to tear flesh into total submission we let loose with 12 gauge pumps and both triggers of a 10 gauge double barrel (Dad). We killed all three dogs, inadvertently finishing off the latest lamb.

Then we saw that one of the dogs we killed was ours. The other two belonged to neighbors. One neighbor tried to press charges for loss of a valuable bird dog, but got nowhere because both law and custom gave rights to farmers to protect their livelihood.

For a long time I wondered how our good farm dog, having learned not to do more than nip sheep in the heel, had, in the heat of the pack, quickly forgotten his reason for existence as our farm dog. In fact, we didn't know he was there, and he didn't come to greet us. What caused him to get so frenzied he couldn't hear the truck? What happened in his mind?

We aren't the only beings, us humans that is, who lose our common sense and civility when we run in a pack feeding greed with systemic destructive instincts. We can undermine our existence as a nation, if not our species, with the pack behavior that got us into our last four wars and kept the profits flowing. This is the unspoken truth behind our deceptive political paranoiacs who pack themselves up and run down with dripping fangs anything that wriggles wrong for them, but remains right and constitutional for 99% of the rest of us.

It's the same mind that now infests all branches of our government and all our political parties. How could Representative Dennis Kucinich, right about Iraq then, now be seen as so wrong about Iran (truthdigger-dennis-kucinich-01-01-2012)?

Now almost every American agrees with Obama that we cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran, and all options are on the table. What should we do to defend ourselves against an Iran gone nuclear? Start by asking an Iraq war vet. Check out what the Israeli intel chief says (December 29 Mossad-Israeli-Iran-Threat). Read the facts of what our own intelligence says.

Then pray we won't have another Middle East war retreat without victory after another million deaths and ten more years. Then start helping us build back the traditions that made America great since the 1770's, the most important being our tradition of an elected government of, by and for the people. Not for the government. Not for the corporations that profiteer from war. For the people.

For other American traditions now being brought down as those lambs were in the back 40 of my youth, and resources cited, read on

Innocent until proven guilty

The Bill of Rights of the Constitution

Education for all

The right to work for a living

A fair economy

Habeas Corpus

Freedom from unreasonable search, seizure and detention

Government respect when seeking entry to our homes

A military that defends our borders, and respects other nations and nationalities

Abiding by The Geneva Convention we helped create after World War II

Government leaders beholden to laws in no lesser degree than citizens

Freedoms and civil rights for citizens over corporations (latest Montana Supreme Court finding helps recover this one!)

Racial equality of opportunity

Freedom to exist, regardless of race, class, religion, ethnicity or gender.

health care access regardless of income or wealth

Trust busting, breaking up illegal monopolies

Truth in borrowing, lending, financing, buying and selling.

Here are some sources used in this column in BHC News January 4, 2012:

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/04/avoiding-another-long-war/ (a group of veteran intelligence professionals who have served in the CIA)

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/12/29/395711/mossad-israel-iran-existential-threat/?mobile=nc (for the Israeli intel chief Tamir Pardo on Iran threat)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBgRAWHJ89U (General Clark on war propaganda)

http://www.sojo.net/blogs/2011/12/29/time-go-deeper (Jim Wallis on 2011 and pessimism for 2012)

http://www.sojo.net/blogs/2011/12/23/heeding-bethlehem-call-freedom-comes-tenacity (Tom Getman on spiritual tenacity for freedom)

It's easy let our elected dogs, supposedly the safeguards for our American traditions, focus on those lambs as immediate prey instead of future family provision. It's more than greed; it's a simple diversion from the more complex task of guaranteeing fathers work for livelihood of our nation's children's children. Note the political sound bites of the season, picturing as prey: Obamacare, government regulation, Season's Greetings, gay marriage, immigrants, an Afro-American president with some Muslim influence in his heritage, fair taxes on the rich, Iran, habeas corpus, and other American traditions as listed above.

We sold our lambs, took our losses, and my father never raised sheep again. The neighbors agreed with us we did not want to tie up our dogs every night. So instead, we removed from all the dogs the opportunity to go berserk over sheep meat. As my father said that night, once a dog tastes sheep while running in a pack at night, there is no option but destroying it. Sheep slaughtering, after all, is in canine genes. They were created to be predators.

Humans were not. But those three dogs represent politics to me: Republicans, Democrats, and Tea Partiers. All three are despoiling our future national security as well as our well being as a nation.

The Tea Party dog is the latest and smallest on the block, ravenous, easily excited, often irrational, but a good bird dog with the right training. He is the lead attack dog on the sheep of our economy and national political conversation.

The Democrat dog is our farm dog, dedicated to the welfare of the whole family, but under cover of darkness sneaks off to serve the ravenous appetites of the 1%. This explains the current fed's political connections that allowed 7.7 trillion dollars to go to bailout Wall Street, ten times the amount congress and the nation were blissfully debating at $700,000,000,000, the amount we thought we taxpayers lent to those dogs on Wall Street. We still aren't supposed to know about the $7,700,000,000,000.00; note how little the TV and talk media have mentioned it.

The Republican dog would explain that only weak sheep would be culled. Trust me, he says, I'll give you plenty of jobs cleaning up my mess and feeding my puppies. Anyway, we are the energy sector pushing the Keystone Pipeline project, and we're in the 1% family too big to fail. We are so big we can guarantee future national security. This dog doesn't want us looking into the exaggerated job estimates, steel from the Far East creating jobs there instead of America, and the 4 to 41 billion subsidy—depending on sources of this hidden information—that we sink our teeth in from taxes on the 99%. This dog wants to keep hidden how the Republicans stopped Obama from cutting $4 billion of this government spending on unneeded energy sector subsidy. There's lots in this world for Americans to fear, and this dog wants to be our favorite watchdog.

The Republican dog would push the falsehood as truth that the big operators make more jobs for America. This is illustrated in the hugely inflated job numbers of the Keystone Pipeline, complete with ridiculous distortions like counting "permanent" jobs by job years—i.e. 500 jobs for 10 years would be 5,000 permanent jobs, the way these liars figure. Five hundred just happens to be the actual number of permanent jobs this project is projected by a third-party reliable source to provide, yet hear the Republicans bark their enthusiasm of more mutton money jobs we're all supposed to believe in. Yet our gov'ment needlessly spends 4 to 41 billion of our national treasury annually on subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, like Keystone Pipeline—an issue the Dempublican Super committee refused to address.

A realistic scientific appraisal of our planet's health for long term American if not human survival must be tied in with appropriate non-fossil energy investment, but it gets almost no press. Now that this seems the only realist alternative, why is there still no political party with any sense of how to do this in America? Why do we turn our noses up against 95% of the world's population in every climate change conference, and turn the other way as our dogs commit carnage against planet earth's future? It's time to dispose of the Republocrats in Congress and sell the sheep of short-term gain.

As much as we don't want to, it's time to tie up our dogs that don't need the bloody mess they make to fatten themselves on our economy, the resource we have tended as American families over the centuries. Other dogs can be elected to serve the real interests of our nation, more than the wealthy one percent.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/100282510

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/01/cain-kills-abel-the-first-class-war/

The first article is by a Baptist minister. Others are equally useful for any evaluative discussion of our latest war run up.

http://www.nationofchange.org/propaganda-re-runs-1325090084

Comments by General Wesley Clark

Iran stands accused of being very close to developing an atom bomb. In 2002, so was Iraq.

So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, "Are we still going to war with Iraq?" He replied, "Oh, it's worse than that." He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, "I just got this down from upstairs" -- meaning the Secretary of Defense's office -- "today." He continued, "This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran." I asked, "Is it classified?" He said, "Yes, sir." I said, "Well, don't show it to me." And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, "You remember that?" He said, "Sir, I didn't show you that memo! I didn't show it to you!"

..end..

Snip is from General Wesley Clark, speaking with Amy Goodman.

The propaganda parallels are so obvious as to reek of laziness. Can't they even make up better lies now?

http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/globallaborinstitute/research/Keystonexl.html

Follow the links on this site for official testimony and comprehensive scientific findings.

http://4closurefraud.org/2011/12/07/bernanke-letter-to-congress-re-bloomberg-7-7-trillion-secret-bailout-article/

The Rigged Keystone Pipeline Game

We in Big Horn County know a rigged game when we see one. That's when the outcome is set ahead of the game, and power brokers pay a few important players to rig the game in favor of the brokers, against the wishes of the public to access a livelihood.\.

The Keystone Pipeline federal EPA environmental review is a case in point. Who did it? For whose benefit? With what advance understanding, or surreptitious contract?

The Washington Post, after countless news media outlets simply regurgitating the power brokers' propaganda, finally broke through with some truth:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/keystone-pipeline-debate-heats-up/2011/11/04/gIQA824rpM_story.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/keystone-pipeline-jobs-claims-a-bipartisan-fumble/2011/12/13/gIQAwxFisO_blog.html

It turns out the estimate of 20,000 jobs created by the keystone XL project owner TransCanada is another case of liars who figure. The figures that don't lie are the 20,000 "one person, one year" jobs, rather than the much fewer jobs period, quoting Russ Girling, TransCanada's CEO who defended the lie. Translated, this means each year each worker is hired it counts as job. So if the project were to take 10 years, the way most of us in Big Horn County understand the word "jobs" it would be $2,000. It wouldn't take that long, but even so it begs the question, "How many permanent, as in lifetime, jobs will the Keystone XL project create?" Obviously, they don't want to project that information. The truth is uncomfortable.

That brings up the next question: "What priorities have been given to the workers and the economy of this country in TransCanada's business plan for the Keytsone XL project?" Once again, like too many of the too-big-to-fail enterprises of our great nation, they say one thing to please the government and the citizens, and then do the opposite, buying steel from the far East, getting pipes built in another country, and manipulating figures to mislead us with the truthful lie of 20,000 jobs for American workers.

http://stoptarsands.org/powerful-mini-documentary

http://stoptarsands.org/earthquake-keystone-xl-pipeline-route-proves-state-department-wrong

The U.S. State Department, which must green light the project, forecasts just 5,000 direct U.S. jobs over a two year construction period.

Even according to TransCanada, the amount of permanent jobs created would be only in the hundreds.

"Those are the real numbers," said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, director of international programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The Republicans have been acting as if this is a national jobs package, and it's not."

Meanwhile, one study from Cornell University said the pipeline could actually lead to a decline in jobs in the long run. One reason is that the pipeline would lead to higher fuel prices in the Midwest, the study said, and that would slow consumer spending and cost jobs. The study also said jobs could also be lost due to crop failures or other events associated with higher pollution levels the oil sands would bring. And it said more oil would mean a decline in green jobs.

http://www.truth-out.org/new-york-city-council-vote-against-corporate-personhood-citizens-united/1325701337 from comments on this website by

Thomas Spencer

His comments follow:

The SCOTUS made a very serious free speech error in allowing unlimited political contributions by corporations. Essentially, they gave corporations a First Amendment right to buy a Congress that will promote their greed at the expense of the human public well being. They agreed with the saying that "money talks", and decided that money was to have free speech.

This was NOT a matter of free speech as they asserted. It IS a matter of one-man-one-vote in a republican form of government. By allowing unlimited contributions by corporations they have essentially given them as many votes as they can afford. It is the equivalent of saying that votes can be had for every x number of dollars, or that only landowners can vote; a concept proposed and rejected by our founders. In addition, they have ignored the laws that prohibit political contributions by foreign interests because almost all publicly held companies have some stock owned by non citizens. Shouldn't it be a violation to let corporations with foreign ownership decide who is going to be a US public servant?

Corporations are NOT people; they are commercial and legal paper entities, and they have legal protections people do not. They do not have children who need good schools, they cannot get cancer from a polluted environment, they cannot lose their lives in wars of choice, they cannot be sent to prison or jail, and they do not benefit from a happy populace. Their sole interest is in monetary profit. When corporations enter political debates with vast expenditures and propaganda, they seek to further their own interest, not those of humans. Far too often their interests prevail at the expense of the public well being because of their immense wealth.

The ruling was a fiasco that threatens the very nature of our republic. It leads us towards an oligarchy (rule by an elite group), which in our case will be a plutocracy, a rule by wealthy paper entities with money, with some level of foreign ownership influence.

The kicker on the SCOTUS is Clarence Thomas's compromised integrity. He actually broke the law by not reporting income: and that income was from special interests that are bringing cases before the court. Not to mention his perceived lack of judicial competence.

It's really scary to know your republican form of government might depend on disease or accident to alter the bent of the SCOTUS. This is the second error they have made recently, the first being putting Bush in office: both obviously politically motivated. We have the worst Supreme Court in history. It's time for a constitutional amendment limiting SCOTUS terms or allowing for public recall.

--
David Graber

Hardin, MT 59034

The Real War on Christmas

2011-12-22T16:55:00.001-08:00

Each year Fox News broadcasts footage on the "war on Christmas," noting businesses that substitute the word "holiday" for "Christmas," or school districts that bow to non-Christian parents' demands to end singing of "Silent Night".

The idea vehemently defended by Fox is the Christmas of modern culture. But the first Christmas did not take place in a decorated home, around a tree bright with ornaments and flanked with piles of gifts, with the whole happy family gathered together singing carols. It was not announced by department store fliers, displayed in colored lights, or celebrated with warm beverages and frosted cookies.

Rather, the Creator of the Universe came to earth as a tiny infant in a dark and dangerous time of fear and repression. The Lord of All was born to a teenage mother, far from home and family support, isolated and rejected, in an animal shelter. His birth was not announced on the lawns of the government offices to the citizens of occupied Rome. It was announced to non-citizens on the outskirts of town, the working-class shepherds. They would welcome the sign: a baby in a manger. Christ the Savior is born, poor and homeless to non-citizens from Nazareth.

And the birth of the King of Kings was announced through the appearance of a star. This sign was heralded by foreign intellectuals. They traveled far to welcome the Christ. But it was not "good news" to the entrenched powers. King Herod wielded his mighty arm to defend the empire by ordering the slaughter of every male child in Bethlehem under the age of two.

So Christmas really happened first in violence, fear, grief and despair. "On those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned." --Isaiah 9:2b.

On one hand, Fox News defends the celebration of the Christmas holiday. And then, commentators herald the steady promotion of consumerism, the defense of wealth and power (and bonuses for bank execs), and regularly belittle or attack efforts to overcome poverty or protect the vulnerable.

On the other hand, the first Christmas offers the joyful promise of peace and the hope of reconciliation with God and among people. No other religion has its God becoming flesh, totally human and poor, born in such a vulnerable and dangerous environment with government oppression, yet bringing hope of complete salvation. Christ the Savior is born.

Fox News proffers the constant drumbeat of war, the reliance on military solutions to social conflict, the demonizing of our enemies, and trust in American dominance. It never mentions credible reports of over 160 children killed by American predator drones in Pakistan since we came up with this new weapon (civilian reports top 300, Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Aug 2011).

The real Christmas lifts up the Virgin Mary's song of praise for her baby boy: "He has brought the mighty down from their thrones, and lifted the lowly, he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich empty away." How could Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, and Ann Rand avoid labeling this language from Mary's Magnificat as "class warfare?"

The real war on Christmas is lost to those who bury their noses in the sand of our commercial culture. The effect is the same whether we never sing Silent Night in school, or we spin ourselves into a holiday frenzy that leaves no room for Christ. Christmas without God's true Salvation through Christ—the transformation of hearts, minds, people and powers—is a hollow shell. Talking only about personal individual salvation, as powerful and important as it is, misses most of the Bible's reason for the season, and hides the real war on Christmas

Is there room this year, in our safe, warm inn, to welcome a homeless, vulnerable stranger, the Son of God? Is there room in the most powerful nation on earth to trust in the Prince of Peace?

Here's Jim Wallis or Sojourners summary of this cultural war on Christmas, to whom I credit several of the ideas of my column:

http://www.sojo.net/blogs/2011/12/15/real-war-christmas-fox-news

The following is continued from Big Horn County News:

Quote from Jim Wallis:
"The real Christmas announces the birth of Jesus to a world of poverty, pain, and sin, and offers the hope of salvation and justice."

The first chapters of each of the four Gospels in the New Testament tell the story. Christmas is about the real presence of the Living God, Creator of the Universe, among us in real flesh—a tiny, vulnerable infant. The theological term for this reality is incarnation. No other religion has its God becoming flesh, prone to all the fallibility of humanity, born to a poor and homeless young mother in the midst of a military occupation by an empire.

"God's becoming flesh — human — and entering into history in the form of a vulnerable baby born to a poor, teenage mother in a dirty animal stall."—Jim Wallis of Sojourners

An interesting element is the origin of many of our commercial symbols of Christmas. Many of these originated with the Roman Empire, in its efforts to Christianize Europe, adopted the pagan symbols of the solstice celebrations. This includes the Christmas tree, the lights, and the date of December 25. The Empire just took away the pagan gods and left the symbols and the festivals and the date intact. But this history of tainted symbols has nothing to do either with the Bible's Christmas story, and while an interesting conflict, doesn't touch the Bible's allusion to a need for peace then and now.

While not overtly a Christmas story, Dr. Chi Huang's recounting of his medical service to street children of Bolivia comes as close as I have seen to a modern Christmas story. It really does reflect the values and struggles of the first Christmas story. This book is definitely adult material, When Invisible Children Sing, 1997. The author is a family friend.

--
David Graber

Hardin, MT 59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Fundamentally pro-life—The Advent of Christ

2011-12-09T21:12:00.001-08:00

Infanticide was brutally common in the Roman empire of Mary and Joseph's time. Abortion was also practiced, but the trauma and poor chances of any survival made it a rare procedure. Yet the beginning of Christianity was fundamentally pro-life. What can we learn from those first Christians?

Near the time of Mary's surprise pregnancy, Sepphoris, the Greek/Jewish/Roman city of 30,000 barely 4 miles from Nazareth, was swept with turmoil. Infanticide and abortion, along with starvation and executions, were already present in Galilee with Pax Romana ruthlessly imposed by the Roman occupation and influx of Hellenic culture and idolatry. Civil war could only increase these practices. This new chapter began when Judas, son of the Jewish guerilla leader Ezekias executed by Herod, broke in and looted the Roman arsenal in Sepphoris. He distributed the weaponry and declared the city liberated. The Jewish population hoped the abominations practiced by the heathen occupation were ended.

But victory was brief. True to form, the Romans ruthlessly quelled the rebellion. No Jew was left living in the city. Those who weren't able to escape to the countryside, or to risk surrender into slavery, were killed. Caesar, known to the Roman world as Filio Deus (Son of God) was to be worshiped by law as the god above all gods. He He permitted Herod Antipas to make Sepphoris his personal capital. He needed Jewish "tektones", carpenters and masons who previously farmed and were cheated out of their land by the economy of Rome. Being in virtual starvation and without hope to carve out an existence, they braved the journey into enemy territory. Daily they walked to Sepphoris from Nazareth and other nearby villages, and rebuilt the heathen temples, public baths and homes for the rich. Of course, most were not hired, and became the multitudes to which Jesus later ministered primarily.

Jesus almost certainly grew up to accompany his earthly carpenter father daily to work in Sepphoris, by then transformed into a center of Greek/Roman culture. Inevitably the Jewish families of Nazareth including Joseph, Mary and Jesus would have known about hunger, violence and sexual oppression rampant at the time near Roman frontier cities such as Sepphoris.

Such was the environment when Joseph discovered that his intended was pregnant. The options were deadly, and certainly, as Scripture implies, Joseph knew precedents. "Putting away" a young pregnant girl was an almost certain death sentence for mother and unborn. In a law-abiding rich Jewish family, the Leviticus law provided the death penalty. Among poorer families, less able to keep the law, such unfortunate girls were more likely put away. But this too was almost surely a death sentence. If they survived pregnancy, abortion, or suicidal depression, they could end up in a brothel working in the Roman baths or prostitution shrines for the occupation.

Because of these practices, combined with the economic and social pressure to birth male babies, by the end of the 2^nd century the Roman Empire suffered from gender imbalance. Especially in major cities, males outnumbered females 3:2. It was opposite in Christian communities where 60% or more were female. This happened because Christians rescued girl babies found abandoned on city streets, really infanticide euphemistically called "expose the infant." Christians also rescued young women caught in the dilemma similar to Mary, but without an angel visitation to her and to her betrothed.

Christianity spread not simply because of miracles. It also spread because Christian slaves such as those exiled from insurgency-prone provinces like Galilee and Judea advised their troubled masters "We Christians know how to live." Christians at that time fought against infanticide and abortion more as a symptom, showing unlimited compassion and care for the humanity of all, even enemies. Thus, by 250 AD, early Christians had built fundamentally pro-life communities throughout the Roman Empire. These communities featured disciplined training that amounted to pro-life transformation. It was essential to the astounding growth of Christianity exactly at the time of its greatest and most violent opposition. It was comprehensively and foundationally pro-life, unlike the narrow focus of today's pro-life activists.

This advent, along with Mary 2,000 years ago, let's connect the powerful few with the deprivation of many poor and lowly, down even to the preborn, and prioritize God's acts on all their behalf as she did in the pregnancy and birth of her Son:
"My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior . . .
He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly;
He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty."

—Selections from Luke 1:45ff

Following is a brief list of books and a video supporting a scholarly understanding of early Christianity, most of which are on my shelf.

Myers, Chad, Binding the Strong Man (Orbis, 1997) 500 pages. Essentially this a commentary on Mark's Gospel. But more than a commentary on individual words, it includes a plethora of ancient documents relevant to Mark's narrative and the background of its writing. Replete with scholarly sources cited, this reading of Mark's Gospel has a bias (p. xxii "forward" by Daniel Berrigan): "…an attentive analysis of the politics of Jesus; that Way of defiance, loving, albeit courageous, toward the worldly powers that in His time and ours ravage the world and legalize crime. Iniqitous authority, lawless and spurious, must be cast from its illegitimate throne; justice must be enthroned. This is the work of Jesus. It proceeds in the community of Jesus. Love, defiance. Instinctive affection toward persons, even the worldly powers; defiance of their power, its malfunctioning and maleficence."

Claiborne, Shane and Christ Haw, Jesus for President (The Simple Way, 2008). Entertaining artistic layout of quotes of many historical documents reflected in my column of December 2011 in the Big Horn County News. An example from p. 183: "Tacitus said that people feared the peace of Rome…because streams of blood and tears of unimaginable proportions followed in the 'peace'." And from a US soldier in Iraq, "We are dying and killing for abstract nouns like freedom and democracy…but this is not the gospel of Jesus Christ."

Heschel, Abraham, The Prophets (2007). Heschel, a rabbinical Old Testament scholar, was a good friend and theological influence on Dr. Martin Luther King for many years.

Sobrino, No Salvation Outside the Poor (2008). Sobrino is a Catholic theologian from Spain with vast experience in Central and South America.

Romero, Oscar, The Violence of Love (2004). Excerpts from Archbiship Romero's sermons and papers prior to his silencing by an assassin's bullets at the moment of consecration during Holy Mass at his church in El Salvador highlight this book. Some of this content is used in the documentary film, Romero, available at video outlets. It traces the fascinating transformation of this scholarly priest from avowed theological conservative to radical liberal because of his years of living with the Indians and poor of El Salvador.

Stark, Rodney, The Rise of Christianity (1997). Historical documents are organized into a fascinating detailed account of the first centuries of Christianity by this respected scholar. This book is a primary source for my column of December 2011, "Foundationally pro-life: The Advent of Christ"

McClaren, Brian, Everything Must Change: When the World's Biggest Problems and Jesus' Good News Collide (Sep 2009) McLaren was invited to address a coalition of Christian leaders for a week in Ruwanda and Botswana following the genocide, trying to process the grief of the nation with Biblical vision. Participants discovered the Bible's words from Jesus and the prophets made clear that God's priorities focus on the greatest causes of human suffering and premature death, rather than on the "spiritual" agenda adopted by most denominations in Christian mission to Africa. The title of the book comes from an exclamation, with tears, of one of the participants.

From Jesus to Christ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NLQfZdkzzM

First produced by PBS, this documentary in three parts and is long and detailed, but not boring. It was shot on site in locations in which the history occurred. Important and little known documentation of early Christianity is in this series, but the narrative is tainted by an agenda to discredit some dearly-held Christian beliefs. It's an excellent video documentary except for this bias.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Has America gone lazy?

2011-11-25T19:27:00.001-08:00

Last week, President Obama shared his thoughts about complacency in America over the last two decades – and he used the word lazy. The words were barely out of his lips last Tuesday when Republican presidential candidates pounced on the morsel and regurgitated it on their blogs. Buried under the ludicrous salivations is a huge cache of truth.

From 2001 to 2003 while I was in China, I was questioned over and over by workers, college students and business leaders – whenever people gathered to practice their English on an American. The question they asked was so repetitive that in time it became nauseating – "When do you think China will overtake America?"

"In what?" I learned to counter. Sometimes I queried further, "In good will and civilized behavior to ethnic minorities?" They always had another agenda.

Beneath their anti-American rhetoric was the same truth. Chinese citizens know how to work with their hands, and Americans have forgotten how. However, this is nto the result of laziness. It's the result of a service-based economy and a focus on information jobs instead of growth in industrial and manufacturing positions that are more hands on.

It's true that the economy of China is rapidly overtaking that of the U.S. in practically every measure. It's been that way for almost a decade. Some measures indicate China is already ahead of America.

In September, an article in The Economist predicted China's economy would surpass America's by 2016. We have outsourced our "blue collar" jobs out of our borders. Actually, the wealthy one percent have outsourced our talented labor force. That doesn't make those of us who are out of work lazy, but it has almost fatally damaged our nation's economic engine — workers.

All this should give pause to the naysayers on talk radio defending the few skilled technical hand laborers left in this country in the face of computer driven and information technology skills. It's true, as Romney and Perry proclaim, that the working few of this nation are still the world's best. But those jobs are becoming more and more scarce.

Meanwhile, our children grow up not knowing how to use their hands.

It's not just because automotive technology has advanced to the point where tools and technical know-how are now too complex for any farmer to dig into engine overhaul or even replacing brake pads. While that's definitely part of the problem, there is also too much time spent away from learning about how "real stuff" works – that which can't be replicated on a computer.

Young people, by and large, no longer know how to move dirt with a shovel to block or open a field ditch, how to mulch potato plants, strip out the last of the milk in a back quarter, scald and pluck a chicken, let alone pound a nail or fasten a hose on a bib.

Here on the Back 40, family and friends have been joining us in building models of sustainable solar-assisted and energy efficient systems for heating, cooling, sewage treatment and farm production. Successes, mostly from borrowed technical information on the web, slightly overbalance failures.

But the greatest success has been the young people who come with zero experience working with their hands, yet end up with a strong value for learning such skills. They practiced with the stuff of vegetable, animal, metal, wood, rubber tire, soil and stone products and found they could be successful and useful with their hands. Stop in at the Back 40 and see the results.

This is a huge difference from when I was their age in 1960. Back then, I knew no one who was as ignorant about using their hands intelligently as most young people seem to be now.

No, President Obama and hopeful GOP candidates, laziness is not precisely the focal point. Greed is more the problem, and the hope of making more money with less physical and mental effort. It has been cultivated by the unfortunate collaboration of big government and big business, who do things for us we would be better off doing for ourselves, at obscene profits for the one percent.

So in this Thanksgiving season, I'm grateful for the young people who are moving out of the comfort of the corporate-government box to experience handling stuff with their own hands, in order to provide for themselves and their family. Work really does work, and it's enormously fulfilling when it connects to real stuff and builds real human relationships. The future of our nation depends on it.

Hardin, MT 59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

The Economist gets it wrong.

2011-11-10T17:41:00.001-08:00

The Economist pretends laissez faire economics is American as apple pie.

The Economist, along with the media from NPR to Fox, propagates the knee-jerk falsehood that a growing segment of world citizens are attacking American capitalism per se. I was expecting hard-nosed reality from The Economist, with Greece teetering on economic collapse and the biggest bank failure ever on Wall Street last week. Then I opened my mailbox and saw the cover caption, "Rage Against the Machine: Capitalism and its critics."

Sure, some are critical of capitalism, and a few Americans dislike apple pie too.

But it's not true for the vast majority of us who have learned capitalism can work for all of us. We've learned recently to distrust Wall Street and our government. We the people, even in Big Horn County, MT, have the savvy to see through their smoke. Our governing CEO's and elected representatives have failed to live up to the foundational principles of our capitalist economy laid down during out nation's infancy. We have been fed a dose of propaganda that laissez faire economics is the American way.

In fact, it seems no media outlet is discussing this term I learned in 8^th grade Civics class in 1957. So I checked to see if my kids learned it in the 80's in Big Horn County schools. Sure enough, they did. And they knew it meant "let go" of government regulations of our economy. They also knew it was a major factor in the Great Depression.

To recover, our elected representatives in 1933 restored old rules for banks and mortgage institutions. Some provisions restoring the kind of capitalism our founders envisioned, counter balancing laissez faire were:

Glass-Steagall Act of 1933: This act separated commercial from investment banking and created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protect small deposits.

Farm Credit Act: This act refinanced a fifth of all farm mortgages and created the Farm Credit Administration.

National Industrial Recovery Act: This act created a massive program of public works, guaranteed workers the right to bargain collectively, established codes of fair practice and trade, and created the National Recovery Administration to carry them out.

Truth-in-Securities Act: This act requires anyone offering stocks, bonds or other securities for sale to make a "full and fair disclosure" of financial and other information relating to the issues involved. It also mandated that companies disclose the securities holdings of their officers and directors. This was after years of dishonest dealings by investors seeking to cut their losses short as the Depression worsened.

These provisions and more were nullified or disempowered during the Clinton and Bush administrations, and now we continue similar steps under Obama (look up huppi-kangaroo-timeline). We must return to those principles reaffirmed and clarified during the recovery from the Great Depression, principles spelled out with the warning that failure to keep them will bring on the next Depression.

I cannot understand why the October 22 issue of The Economist, the premier weekly magazine worldwide on economics, gets it so wrong. In four lead articles, the October 22 edition fails to mention laissez faire economics, and the subsequent abdication of our national economy to financial executives rather than elected governance. The Wall Street Occupation is not to protest capitalism but to call capitalism to it's proper role: to serve the economy of our great nation, for our common good.

The danger is not that we could be leaving capitalism, going Marxist, nor is it that capitalism itself is the big bad bugaboo. But corporations must put shareholder profit above all other considerations, including the stability of our national economy. And over the past decade we've seen the results of deregulation. Only our elected representatives in congress are answerable to the American people. Whom shall we trust?

At best, the lead article leaves unquestioned this mistaken bias in order to sound the alarm that Wall Street Occupations nationwide are unfocused and leaderless. At least this issue does cite the research proving that loss of a middle class brings social disorder to a nation. At least the congressional action under Clinton's administration repealing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 is mentioned (see my blog for info). There is some consensus between Occupy Wall Street and The Economist on this. But leaving intact the phony idea that this populist movement in America is anti-capitalism is irresponsible, even if some Wall Street Occupiers think they are protesting capitalism per se.

It's difficult to find the facts from the media. Wall Street's political insiders in Washington then as now propelled the government into fewer regulations against super sizing and secret insider trading. So the elected governance of our economy again continues shrinking and the un-elected governance of corporations skyrockets in power and wealth acquisition. At the same time, our elected government gets bigger and bigger punitive authority over governance of smaller and smaller units of human relationship, now down to mother and unborn infant. Witness the new personhood laws, and its explanations covering up the huge growth of government as promoted by the tea party and Republicans.

Recovery again requires reform of our American capitalism back to the intentions of our nation's founders, and repudiation of the singular focus on ending oversight and transparency regulations by the people of this country of our economy, labeled erroneously "big government." Our governing business-owned media flails against Keynes and "Keynesian economics" as the only option to their unnamed obsession with laissez faire economics. So now we have the growth of bigger and badder businesses we cannot afford to allow to fail, businesses that abuse and cheat masses of this country's citizens, wealth concentrations that dictate to Obama who dictates to Europe and Greece what must happen to save American banks—and citizens— from the emerging Greater Depression.

These occupiers are the ones taking seriously our history, and saying we should learn to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 30's depression. Why should we have to go to the independent media to read our history? Why cannot The Economist tell us the truth and connect the real dots? Does The Economist deliberately lead our departure from free, open transparent capitalism with the common good the bottom line? Does it support the distortions leading us astray by the elite's cronies who dominate talk shows and the media, financed and censored by their owners?

A rash of letters with a perspective similar to this column is posted on line at The Economist:
http://www.economist.com/node/21536537

What happened to our nation's economy since 1970 is fortunately well documented: http://www.alternet.org/occupywallst/152811/

A timeline of events leading up to the depression of the 1930's and the recovery into the 40's: http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Timeline.htm .

Michael Hudson, at UMKC.edu, tells the truth in detail with the evidence in his latest book : Super Imperialism - New Edition: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance. See it reviewed on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Super-Imperialism-Origin-Fundamentals-Dominanc/dp/0745319890/ref=wl_it_dp_o_npd?ie=UTF8&coliid=I19B9M2MEC46GX&colid=2UL2N592BVKVD

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

The Wall Street Sandbox

2011-11-07T10:36:00.000-08:00

Who doesn’t like toys? A newly installed sandbox with bulldozers and backhoes was tantalizing for our flock of neighborhood children. Two strong-willed three-year-olds set the tone—the more I have, the more I want, and you can’t have it. The scene degenerated until sand throwing and tears turned the attention of my neighbor and me from tractor repair to our children. With a few firm words, parity in the power to acquire equity was restored.

Our nation has lost that parity. This is the second time in our history. A century ago it led to the Great Depression. We have become so accustomed to greedy children acting out in the Wall Street Sandbox that we as a nation simply roll our eyes and repeat, “That’s Wall Street.”

The year Ronald Reagan was elected, the wealthiest 1 percent collected 10 percent of the nation’s income, and the rest of us shared the remaining 90 percent. Now that 1 percent owns more than the bottom 50 percent of all American citizens. Since 1980 we all contributed to a great national success of our GNP, but the upward redistribution of wealth, because of rule changes, “translates into a trillion extra dollars a year for the richest 1 percent.” (Josh Holland in Alternet.org, October 4, 2011, “If the Top 1% hadn’t ripped off trillions…”)

We adults used to monitor the Wall Street Sandbox. Our oversight through our government stopped unregulated accumulation before it started. Back then, we knew we owned Wall Street and took responsibility for its role in our economy.

Such government intervention after the great depression led to a fairer economy, highways, airports, schools, a safe banking system, libraries, a common defense, etc. and all benefited. Even more importantly, it led to a progressive system of taxation to pay for these priorities and discourage the escalation of massive wealth accumulation that has now made our society unstable.

When Wall Street rolled in crisis as our nation’s biggest banks threatened to collapse, Obama didn’t regulate, he conceded. When the profit-driven medical insurance machine protested Obamacare, Baucus and Obama conceded again to exclude the public option. Like in the Savings & Loan Scandal of the 80’s, we now need a government take-over and jail time, not just a few weak threats, for those who grab our citizens’ earnings and put our nation at risk.

I hoped in vain to hear someone in congress or in the presidential debates speak the truth of what’s gone wrong. Instead they either attack each other, or, following the finger pointing of Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh, attack designated whipping boys like Frances Fox Piven. The really patriotic Americans are those who speak the truth our Wall Street Sandbox children need to hear, without personal attacks.

Just last Monday, a poll was released saying a majority of citizen Democrats, Republicans, and Tea Partiers would agree on Obama’s plan to restore some of the Reagan era tax rates on the 1% richest. Yet the Republican congress maintains its opposition to Obama’s jobs bill, because they can attach the label “tax raise.” They don’t want our American president working to fix that sandbox fracas causing not just a few eye scratches, but massive human deprivation and death world wild.

Some three weeks ago, for the first time in my life I heard massive numbers of grownup citizen voices speaking this truth about Wall Street. Amazingly, these are mostly college kids, or kids who dropped out because they couldn’t get jobs or afford college.

So we can take hope. Not only has the Arab Spring become the American Autumn, we are also building a new private sector on values of “Social Entrepreneurs.” Our private sector with worldwide support is leading the way to restore grownup rules to the world economy, which is similarly in shambles. There really are large international corporations bringing corporate interests of the world back into adult responsibility in our world economy. One of many credible organizations facilitating this revolution is “Bioneers.” Look them up on line, or find

greenwoodback40.blogspot.com

(the following is continued from the shorter version in Big Horn County News)

As the economic equity of our nation is increasingly concentrated among fewer of our citizens, consequences more dire than sand in the eyes threaten our nation and the world. This is hidden from our awareness in America by subtle but pervasive censorship. The institutions of a fair economy, a free press, law-abiding armed forces and police, our system of jurisprudence, and even our capitalist democracy are in trouble, and we are left in the dark as to how and why.

I have a copy on my desk of the most recent edition of Project Censored, released last week. See greenwoodback40.blogspot for a short review.

On Project Censored

Every two years a group of writers and scholars, inspired by reporters such as Walter Cronkite, have been gathering with editor Peter Philips, sociology professor at Sonoma State University, to assemble the research.

A wave of real reform in the worldwide economic institutions of finance and banking is escaping the attention of mainstream American business. Some of the biggest corporations are abandoning venture capitalism, hedge funds, and the modern wave of complex economic risk taking that has burst our American economic bubble. Well before any danger was detected in Wall Street, these reforms were burgeoning.

We are so entrenched in the profound changes in our rules, changes coordinated by the elite of Wall Street and confirmed by all three branches of our government, that we have forgotten the prosperity and freedoms we enjoyed prior to our departure from our original values of American capitalism and from the freedoms enshrined in our constitution and our form of government. The world has noticed, and reacted. Most of the reaction has been building on the writings and history of America.

On the Wall Street Occupation: If it’s like the first Wall Street Occupation of the late 1800’s, these young people will continue for decades to be routed, attacked and arrested by police, and an election will repudiate their dreams and voices until the next Great Depression decades later. I hope and pray this doesn’t happen for us. We Americans, at least 99% of us, need to act grownup about our ownership of that sandbox now. Newly grownup players like Warren Buffet and the Gates family will help us restore grownup rules to the economy now run by our Wall Street Sandbox. Unbelievably, Congress remains stubbornly opposed. Having failed to learn from our history with Wall Street and the Great Depression, we seem destined to repeat it.

On “Bioneers”

It’s not always been this way. The dramatic changes in rules facilitating greed in Walls Street are the focus of a paper by Economists Thomas Picketty and Emanuel Saez of UC Berkeley (elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/pikettyqje.pdf). Some of their recollections:

Rabobank International's Manager of Corporate Social Responsibility from Holland, which was voted World's Third Most Sustainable Bank; Meiny Prins, CEO of Priva, a leading Dutch environmental services company, who was voted "Dutch Businesswoman of the Year"; Michael Jacobson, Director of Intel's Corporate Responsibility Office; and Hugo Steensma, former director of Sustainable Asset Management and CEO of Rabobank North America.

"Business-As-Unusual: New Models of Enterprise, Ownership and Social Entrepreneurship" will survey the emerging topography of new organizational business and financial species to harness commerce and trade for the common good. Hosted by Michael Marx, Executive Director of Corporate Ethics International and Business Ethics network, the panel also features Steven Hill, leading political thinker and groundbreaking author of Europe's Promise: Why the European Way Is the Best Hope for an Insecure Age; Deborah Hirsh of B Lab, a nonprofit supporting the community of Certified "B Corporations" with comprehensive social and environmental standards; Bodhi Garrett, eco-tourism entrepreneur and founder of North Andaman Tsunami Relief in Thailand; and Jenny Kassan, Managing Director of Katovich Law Group, and board member of the Sustainable Business Alliance.

Unlike the many pessimistic scape-goating pundits on talk radio promoting their side show interests, I believe many of the options we embarked upon in Obama’s election of 2008 are right. The way forward is clear. But overwhelmed by the size of the changes needed, by scary side shows pummeling the populace, the decision itself to move in the right direction has become stymied. We have ground the Obama administration and the nation to a stop.

Christopher Ketcham's essay "The Reign of the One Percenters," was published on Orion's website, is available on Alternet Oct 7, “the_reign_of_the_one_percenters” and is forthcoming in the November/December 2011 issue of the magazine.

Wall street criminals arrested to date: 0

“Occupy Wall Street” citizens protesting Wall Street crimes arrested: over 700.

The largest mass arrest in US history took place last Saturday, October 1, when citizens demonstrating against Wall Street CEO’s who have profited enormously through bailouts from citizen taxpayers while their insider trading and deceptive wealth grabbing schemes remains uninvestigated and not one arrested. There is evidence the NYPD entrapped the Wall Street demonstrators on the Brooklyn Bridge by clearing a traffic lane, then blocking both ends of the bridge and arresting everyone.

http://www.nationofchange.org/eric-cantors-hyper-partisan-hypocrisy-he-hails-tea-party-fighting-condemns-occupy-wall-street-mo

Another dictator falls

2011-10-26T06:09:00.001-07:00

It was astounding to watch the news about Tunisia, Egypt, and now Libya as nations throw off ruthless dictatorships. Now, without dictators, how will those nations stay unified? Will the masses of citizens, with habits of conforming to coordinates coercively enforced, willingly build a consensus and find democratic coexistence?

The answer can be found in God's creation and God's Word.

Last week it occurred to me that all creation seems to wait expectantly for human beings to find their way to God's plan. That's when I stopped to watch the usual fall starling pre-migration clouds (look up "boid" or "swarm behavior" on Wikipedia or an encyclopedia).

My fencing work was interrupted by white noise emanating from of hundreds of thousands of chirping starlings in a massive cloud. They undulated in synchronized flight down from the rims across the river and over the back 40, darting in perfect synchronicity to the left and then right. Were they synchronized in response to a threat to flock security? I stood still in amazement as I saw another cloud moving with more southerly coordinates about to intersect with the first cloud over my west fence line. What would happen if they collided?

The encounter was amazingly smooth and uneventful. It looked for a while they would morph into one, maybe choosing a compromised set of coordinates. But they didn't. As the intersecting boundaries pulled back toward separate clouds again, several individuals in flight seemed confused. These few were reversing, changing directions, and occasionally stopping and fluttering in the air. This was the only stressed behavior I detected, and it was instantly gone. By the time I realized what was happening, the boundaries were clarified, those individuals previously perplexed figured it out and took off into the nearby morphing flowing cloud of leaderless synchronized flying starlings, apparently still with precise distances apart in all three dimensions.

It was obvious mass confusion was avoided by simple respect of equal access to resources of air and flying space. All individuals except these few adapted quickly to new directions with impunity. No few went off to the side to shout hostilities at one bird propped up by others as the decide. In all the massive direction changes—evident bird mind changing, I saw no policebirds, no attempt even to distrust these few deviants let alone punish them, no opposition to the immigration of one cloud into the other.

As the clouds separated again I watched as each with portions stretched out and slowed where the colliding encounter occurred. Orderliness continued. Every individual again remained properly respectful of every other's space. One of the clouds executed several instant direction changes, still in total synchronization, and still with no discernable mass fear.

Khadafy had for decades been able to keep his nation unified around his leadership through arrest, torture and disappearance. In his mind they all belonged to him, and he loved them all, unless they departed for other flock coordinates. That's when his depraved arrogance took over. It took a civil war and his violent death to end his tragic failure. Learning from Big Horn County birds was beyond his beliefs.

We in America have leaders with similar little belief in the masses of Americans nationwide. Yet that's where, by our constitution, the power of the ship of state resides. Just like the birds could be trusted to change directions and follow coordinates not owned or imposed by a few, so the new democratic movements in the Middle East like Egypt and Libra now need their powerful people to trust their masses too. Few do, and that's a problem.

We Americans are entering a new era, beginning to trust the flocks morphing now in nearly every major city, the flocks of Occupy Wall Street. They represent the best the world can get from America: our tradition of leadership empowered by the authority of the governed over the government. Even our president is and should be just one of the flocking cloud. We the people should not follow the example of the world's dictators in believing we should model our family economies or our life coordinates upon a few powerful elite. It's true we are fortunate that the power of the few in America over the many is not exerted by violent abusive force and fear, at least not much yet. But we do have massive numbers of our citizens dropping out in frustration, unable to find their space in our economic flock. Such power imbalance as ours, currently focused on Wall Street, cannot make for successful synchronicity in family economic navigation toward the freedom to find the space to breath, live, and move together in a more perfect union.

The following is not posted in the Big Horn County News:

Read the writings in the New Testament by Dr. Luke, St. Paul's personal physician, "Luke" and "Acts." Read all Bible passages surrounding words like "masses" "multitudes" "families" "Israel" "church" and "koinonia."

Our national conversation

It's a knee-jerk reaction. Whenever we see a group of people synchronized in religion, economics, politics, war, sexual mores or any life or death pursuit we look for leaders. Often, we can't really find them. People get coordinated like birds do, and for much the same, but vastly less complex, reasons.

Belief that God has a specific plan for each person's life is linked now with ending or reducing government social programs. Belief that there is no ultimate truth is linked with bigger government programs to benefit citizens, especially the poor. Whose side would Jesus have been on? It depends how you read the Bible.

http://www.baylor.edu/pr/news.php?action=story&story=100503

http://www.baylor.edu/newsclips/index.php?id=85125

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/20/unemployment-religion-baylor-survey_n_970772.html

"People who cannot state this belief clearly are only pretending belief; they really are not True Believers."

In a way, I'm glad we humans are not bird-brained. On the other hand…

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

From the Trenches of Class Warfare in America…

2011-09-28T12:22:00.001-07:00

What we fight over

Why has the nation's reservoir of wealth drained away to unprecedented disparity from those of us working for a living? How did it get concentrated at the top?

Is it class warfare?

Some people are accusing Obama of class warfare, as he suggests letting tax cuts for the wealthy expire. But evangelical leader Jim Wallis, of sojo.net, gets it right: " ...let's be clear: There really is a class war going on, and the upper class is winning." Former President Bill Clinton rightly pointed out last week that 90 percent of income gains in the last decade went to the top 10 percent, and 40 percent of the increased wealth went to the top 1 percent--those are folks who make their money on money, not on work. That has left the rest of us who do real work watching our take home pay get cut and the cost of living keep rising.

The reasons aren't palatable at the top. The nation's top plutocratic politicians and pundits stir up deceptive froth to hide the truth, like this:

"…The top 10% income pay 70% of the nation's income taxes!" Fortunately, this time it fell dead on the floor. Not included in the finding was the percent of the nation's total personal income that lands in the pockets of those 10%. Plus, with so many loopholes for dividend income, billionaires and millionaires usually end up paying taxes at a lower rate than middle class wage-earners (Chris Hayes on MSNBC Sept. 24).

We hear this daily on the media, "But we can't tax the super rich... they provide jobs!" If that's true, why have employment rates and real wages both continued to decline even with Bush's generous tax cuts in place? Furthermore, what corporation hasn't benefitted from transportation, security, infrastructure, and educated employees... all provided by the public? Shouldn't corporations invest back in the public works and services that make our nation stable?

Government Social Programs

The froth of this debate is so confusing most Americans just sip on. A 2008 poll of 1,400 Americans by the Cornell Survey Research Institute is revealing. Ninety-four percent of those Americans who said they were not beneficiaries of any government social programs actually were receiving government subsidy costing money to tax payers. Those making this false claim had in fact benefited from at least one; the average "I haven't participated!" respondent benefited from four (Susan Mettler, New York Times, Sept. 20, Cornell Survey).

Froth gets attention, unfortunately. So it was with the survey's first question: "Have you ever been a beneficiary of a government social program?" True to the emotional bias of those three words, of course they said no. Their second question was to examine a list of some 20 federal government programs, indicate if they had participated, and rate their experience. This included Social Security, unemployment insurance, the home-mortgage-interest deduction and student loans. That's when the truth became visible.

While the average American complains about big government, that same American most likely appreciates and participates in government social programs. The reality is that nearly all of us like what government does for us. Case in point: Social Security.

What a lazy way to cut the national debt: renege on the promise of Social Security. Perry's Ponzi scheme charge, and that congressmen who agree with him, is really a double entendre Ponzi scheme to reduce our benefits to satisfy economic problems brought on by Wall Street's under-cover wealth concentration. We the taxpayers have already funded wealth-concentrating bailouts.

Social Security is different. The nest egg is transparent, we the people own it, and for decades it has been lowering the poverty rate of seniors from 50% at its inception to 10% now. Unlike a Ponzi scheme, that money does not flow into the coffers of a few. That's why the program is popular, valuable and solvent. That's why the elite get bug-eyed with greed at the mention of Social Security. See on line "WPIX-is-social-security-a-ponzi-scheme."

You elite Republicans, misguided Democrats, and Tea Party naysayers, don't mess with our Social Security. If you want to be in government, stop the scheme of our earned benefits leaving our middle class and piling up in the top one percent. You will eat those dregs yet.

Our media pushes the froth of political drama, hyperbole, and outright deception across the government bar to us the public. It's so comical. How can we avoid sipping froth? It's less inebriating to imbibe the reality of how and why the nation's reservoir of wealth has been extracted from those of us working for a living.

The first tax of the first US Continental Congress was a property tax on the rich. Look up any source anywhere to find why they chose a property tax, and why they chose the rich to tax, leaving most first-generation Americans with no federal tax.

If we do swallow a few dregs of truth, would we really rather not know about it?

Look up 2011/09/21/inside-the-list-facts-and-figures Forbes Magazine.

Perry's Ponzi Schemes

Governor Perry hatched a Ponzi scheme that never really got off the ground, thanks to some fine Christian fundamentalist folk from the Texas countryside. With mandatory participation by every girl in Texas ages 12 and 13, and the profit from the scheme set to go to a big Pharma corporation that contributed heavily to his campaign, it looked like a done deal. Who funded it? The government—that is, the Texas tax-payers, all of them. Read on line how Perry's Texas government Ponzi scheme was caught before it started, look up "texas-perrys-vaccine-mandate."

To top it off, Perry has divided Republicans with his charge that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, to the delight of the talking heads in the media. This even filtered down to Big Horn County. So let's cut the froth and connect the dregs to those who work for a living, especially those whose compensation is barely enough to float a family. Look up

http://blogs.reuters.com/reuters-money/2011/09/28/heres-the-real-social-security-ponzi-scheme/

When government/business colludes to the benefit of jobs for many, as in the subsidy to retool Ford factories to build its electric "Focus," it works. So Republicans this past weekend went after that money. Why don't Republicans and Tea Partiers go after the squandered tax-payer money of the Wall Street/government collusion that's at the root of our economic doldrums? When have they criticized the Ponzi-like schemes that really have taken wealth from all of us for the benefit of a few?

The Economist Sept. 24-30 features the cover title "Hunting the Rich" and articles on class warfare in America. Very informative, for all sides:

http://www.economist.com/node/21530104

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Is our war on terrorism doing what it takes?

2011-09-15T19:25:00.001-07:00

This Sunday morning, Pentagon head General Crowley called us again to "do what it takes" to fight terrorism. His implication was that our vengeance must continue because more terrorists have vowed to wreak havoc on our nation. In his thinking, responding in kind honors not only the three thousand deaths on that terrible day, but also honors the thousands—we should acknowledge millions—of innocents who have suffered since that day.

This error in national policy is dragging us down. We have forgotten a fundamental portion of God's law from our Old and New Testaments, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord," Isaiah 63.4, Romans 12.19, and "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." We are called by our faith not to respond in kind.

The reason is the more powerful way God commands in our Bible. Many of the world's peoples look at our American response to 9/11 with concern and curiosity. To them, we have become weak, even suicidal, with our juvenile theory that we must continue paying back a bigger, badder dose of the terrorists' own medicine.

After ten years there still is no serious national discussion on alternative responses to this heinous crime we remember on this tenth anniversary; we rather assume closure depends on an exception for us to God's law on revenge and murder. We have still not asked our most qualified theologians, scientists and philosophers to lead such a discussion.

Let's be rational. It makes no more sense psychologically, scientifically, or theologically to find and delete—read ex-judicially execute or rendition—the world's terrorists than it does to set out to bully bullies into stopping their bullying. It works at first; we had and still have the power to eliminate evildoers all over the world. But it sends an unwise message: to survive in this world of multiplying evil people and suffering good people, what one needs is more power, more lethal weapons, and an improved ability to terrorize bullies and terrorists. In other words, pre-empt God's role in handling bullying terrorists like Bin Laden.

There's a better, stronger way. Part of it is training and upgrading national police forces worldwide to be responsible and accountable to their citizen's interest in democracy. This is happening already with some thousand or more special ops teaching troops deployed in several terrorism-prone nations. But there's more, much more needing change in our international policy.

Let's start with our terrible intelligence on the "Arab Spring" sweeping tyrants off their terrorist tactics against their own citizens. Our government and media community told us this happened because people living under these oppressive regimes were suddenly fed up to a breaking point.

It's not true. Millions in the Middle East have been reading for decades, taken to heart and followed the principles of the book by Gene Sharp: "From Dictatorship to Democracy," It's now available in thirty different languages and free on line through hundreds of links, to the consternation of the governments of Syria and Bahrain. Using his book as a manual for unseating tyrants, citizens have organized seminars with teachers such as Dr. Sharp and spawned opposition groups across the Middle East, rebuilding hope for democracy.

Our government was caught off guard. The people of Egypt rebelled against a tyrant we considered a friend. His American-made military should have guaranteed stability for his regime. Yet his army hardware was rendered ineffective. Instead of tens of thousands dying and the nation's infrastructure in shreds as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Tripoli, only several hundred were killed. And they were unarmed citizens, easy prey for his snipers. The discipline of the citizen movement held. Mubarak lost.

Our own politicians, media and government should stop ignoring this worldwide strategy for countering tyranny and apply it to terrorism, its twin. It is homegrown American common sense, deployed now to the Middle East. Let's be proud.

We Americans will solve our economic woes and stand more proud and secure when our government views terrorism as a world problem, rather than a unique American problem. This requires the courage to change course toward the principles of the Arab Spring, and to achieve parity among the nations rather than our current vast superiority in military strength to deal with it. Plus, we have national heroes to honor such as Gene Sharp whose contribution merits acknowledgement if not full pursuit. Our national survival must now drive us to rediscover our heritage of a better, stronger defense against terrorism than the one laid out by Bush and Obama, and supported by our current political parties.

The full column, with more on a rational approach, continues: It's amazing how totally gullible our government was to Bin Laden's strategy behind organizing the bombing of the twin towers. He said it way back then, and his words are remembered among anti-American Islamists today:

"…He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them." That's Bin Laden's script for fighting us. We need a different, much better script for fighting his ilk, not to respond in kind at Bin Laden with his own medicine, but to choose a stronger moral deterrent."
The American Conservative, quoting Bin Laden on this issue, May 20, 2011, by Eric Margolis.

We Americans will stand more proud and secure when we acquire the courage to change course and deal with world terrorism responsibly, collaboratively and collectively on parity with the world's nations, instead of as the world's bully setting out to single-handedly to defeat the ghost of Bin Laden.

http://www.aeinstein.org/ the website of the Albert Einstein Institute.

Does this mean we should change our foreign policy? If America reads this book and follows it we citizens will be changing it. See also Noam Chomsky's article http://www.truth-out.org/after-911-was-war-only-option/1315582873 : "The jihadist movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11, if the "crime against humanity," as the attacks were rightly called, had been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the suspects. That was recognized at the time, but no such idea was even considered in the rush to war. It is worth adding that bin Laden was condemned in much of the Arab world for his part in the attacks."

Our Obama administration has even denied the message of our national hero, Martin Luther King Jr., claiming he would support our government's policy of targeting our own citizens for covert executions contrary to due process language in our constitution. See my blog Jan. 26, 2011, for details, "What Would Martin Luther King Say."

Foreign aid works far better for our national interests when it helps other nations democratize their own society with schooling, access to health care, access to a fair economy, fair systems of jurisprudence, and helps them and us to see acts of terror for what they are: a crime problem. Plus, it is almost infinitely more cost effective than bombing the daylights out of three Middle East Nations (four with the coming war against Pakistan or Iran), so our biggest corporations can reap billions in profits through our obligation to rebuild what we destroy at huge taxpayer expense each time.

Also Look up Gregg Mortensen from Bozeman, his book, "Three Cups of Tea."
Check out more details of Gene Sharp's research influencing the Middle East:
http://blog.sojo.net/2011/03/21/how-to-start-a-revolution-a-new-film-about-gene-sharp/

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034

Deconstructing deadlocks

2011-09-01T20:35:00.001-07:00

A rancorous tide of deadlocked issues is rising to create a nationally historic flood. Remember when we had a more independent media which facilitated honest debate of real issues? Back then, deadlocks were deconstructed. One or both sides won because truth was employed to deconstruct the deadlocks. We had a freer press, honest investigative journalism, and much less simple regurgitation of party lines of conspiring government-big business oligarchies.

When I came home from college in the mid-sixties, I had formed a new interest in national politics. Investigative reporters with Reuters and the NY Times wrote about President Nixon's secret commitment of our nation's armed forces in the nation of Cambodia. American blood was being shed in a secret war. American bombing pilots crashed in inaccessible places. Bodies were not recovered. The official Pentagon news was that they all died in Vietnam. Nixon fought to keep the war secret, but after the Pentagon papers were released by Daniel Ellsberg and were carried by the entire media, the deadlock began to be deconstructed. Then, Watergate happened.

After my mother found out about Watergate, her faith in God and country was shaken. To her, God had placed Richard Nixon into the nation's presidency. That meant opposing him was like opposing God.

"Mom," I said, home from college on Christmas vacation in the late sixties, "If Nixon is a Christian, he's not our kind of Christian. He lies, cheats, and has blood on his hands—blood of American soldiers."

She cried. I was mortified. She had experienced the deconstruction of a deadlock which had been built by the media over Richard Nixon's integrity.

This personal deadlock with my mother was the first I had ever experienced with my family over politics. Across the country, information the media released which showed President Nixon had indulged in criminal behavior was pitted against the traditional views of people like my mother. The deadlock was deconstructed with real information. It was stressful, but keeping Nixon's secrets was far from our best interests.

We were fortunate then to have independent investigative reporters – we don't have many anymore. With the internet, we can access international sources like The Guardian, Ha'aretz or Al Jazeera. Wikileaks is piercing the wall of secrecy erected by our government-business collusion, and doing it for our ultimate national interests. Yet, Wikileaks has been soundly attacked and discredited to the max possible by our government's military-industrial complex. Some of us are familiar with this deadlock.

This brings up our central deadlock desperately needing deconstruction. Some people say our response to 9/11 was right. Others say we are wrong. It's a deadlock going way back. Deconstruction will ultimately reveal government, religious and political leaders have led us down the wrong path – leading us anywhere and doing anything to anyone we happen to momentarily hate.

What do we get from being the world's policeman? Enormous national debt, cuts of essential services and inevitable tax increases used to take over lands and send record numbers of military and private citizens to build military bases in the ludicrous quest of being the world's policeman. We invoke fear of imprisonment, torture and death in anyone who opposes the friends we have chosen to support on foreign soil. In doing so, we have ruined indigenous infrastructures far more capable of fighting against the hatred we deplore. We have failed to deconstruct the deadlocks which mistakenly diagnose our much-hyped religious and political fears as a reason to war.

As a nation, we can still build on our primary strength: our citizen's capacity to address wrongs and make them right. Neither our government nor its wealthy corporate controllers will. This is demonstrated by the immense profiteering of publicly endorsed private sectors during our recent wars.

We have an awesome history of a strength that now trumps our capacity for war. We faced down the wall of racial segregation in America and deconstructed intractable deadlocked issues with their false perceptions. We won battles in Birmingham, Atlanta, Selma, and the entire South for a fair and just society. It doesn't get nearly as much attention as bombs and bullets, but we can do it again.

Last week, the largest statue on the mall in Washington, D. C. was dedicated to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He battled the wave of deadlocked racial animosity that escalated into enormous civil unrest and shed his life-blood doing so. In deconstructing the deadlocked racial divide in America, the primary battle he won for the nation was the battle against our second civil war. That war was beginning in the early sixties and many warfare experts said then it was inevitable. It didn't happen. The American civil war of the 1960's was defeated. See Dr. Vincent Harding's recent book, Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero. It's a book founded on the true strength of America.

The end is near but the game isn’t over

2011-08-19T05:37:00.001-07:00

Monopoly is fun growing up. Our kids liked Monopoly, or at least they thought they did. It starts out with equity, endless possibilities and a colorful stash of paper money. As the dice are rolled and deals are made, the tone changes. Eventually, the accumulated wealth of one or two dooms the rest to a slow demise. Hard feelings mount, sometimes tears are shed, and once one person has it all, the game is over. That's the way the rules were written.

A visiting cousin amended the rules. Seeing a fellow player suffering disastrous losses, she willingly sold some of her assets to balance the holdings more equitably. Soon, the other players followed the example of looking out for others' interests as well as their own. They delightedly discovered that with assets and power in balance and a level playing board, the Monopoly game could go on forever.

My kids and their friends discovered in Monopoly what our nation's founders already knew. A game that coddles the rich with insider privilege, benefiting from the work of the rest of us, gradually dwindles resources for the working class and will not last. The game soon ends.

America started out with immigrants fleeing the monarchies in Europe. They uniformly opted for a land with a level playing field. Our revolution and our constitution were fought and formulated to keep it that way. Inherited wealth was anathema to our founders because they knew from Europe it kept concentrating power and corruption. Hard work, ingenuity and neighborliness were respected far above royalty or inherited privilege. It's still that way, especially here in Big Horn County. We have a tradition of insisting on transparency of our leaders and a more balanced economy, so we the people retain the right to keep it that way.

But guess what? We've lost it. We now have the greatest disparity ever in accumulated wealth between a small group of families at the top and the rest of the families of this great nation. They are accountable to themselves and their stockholders, not the people. The resultant suffering is all around us in Big Horn County; all we have to do is look at the economic game played in Washington. Yet, there is no talk about changing back to our founding principles with firm government and public oversight. Instead, we endlessly and uselessly debate the national debt ceiling.

Our game board has gone under the table. There's a broader than ever marriage between Washington and Wall Street to amass wealth in a small group. We have had corporate executives sitting down with our elected congressmen as members of the Allied Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) to secretly write new rules for our economy so our government will monitor wealth and power even less. We have a huge military industrial complex that sucks more money out of our nation's economy than the world's next 50 military powers combined. A significant part of our nation's media is owned and controlled by a single powerful corporation headed by one family – hardly "fair and balanced." Secrecy abounds.

Our Bible, the most fundamental and important document shaping our American culture, speaks of one sin more often and with more emphasis than any other: the sin of greed. It's the sin of a few acquiring more at the expense of the many. The few have more than they need and the many don't have enough. Salvation stories in scripture are swept time after time into provision for living, in plenty and without fear. Most importantly, salvation passages highlight healing and deliverance from this sin. It also confirms our teenagers' amendments to the rules of their game of Monopoly.

Which way will we follow? In our heating-up political atmosphere right now, this issue fields the most useful discussions. How we handle the horrific imbalance between the have-too-much's and the deprived-of-enough's in this nation should be the central issue of the election. In fact, if the Bible is right at all, our nation's existence rests on the outcome of this issue in our domestic and international policies. There is no more important issue and it just happens to be central to the formation of our nation's democratic tradition as well our Judeo-Christian faith.

Let's talk it up. Let's not just sit by and watch the end of the game. Let's vote for those rich folks who run for political office only if they have the courage to take on this issue. That way, the American Dream, instead of ending, will renew our families and give real hope to all of us.

Check out the nytimes.com article by billionaire Warren Buffet, August 14, 2011: "Stop Coddling the Super Rich," at nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Government by Chickens

2011-08-03T21:19:00.001-07:00

The numerous ongoing debates over the budget deficit in Washington remind me of my chickens. You see, I bought them as baby chicks six weeks ago, investing in the hope that they would do a job. Their task was to eat bugs off the potatoes and cabbage in our garden. But, unfortunately, they were spending more time sparring, flying at each other and downright scrapping instead of pursuing bugs. I had sent this fine poultry brigade to the garden to do a job, and that job was not getting done.

It's the same in Congress. We sent a fine brigade of legislators to Washington to do a job that simply is not getting done. No one there is interested in real tax and securities reform that would benefit those of us who lost our shirts in the latest national finance scandal. Remember the Tea Pot Dome scandal? Remember the the Savings & Loan scandal? How about the 30 to 50 percent of retirement most of us lost in the mortgage banking fraud? Are we still naive enough to trust Republicans or Democrats on their headline-grabbing debate over deficit spending and raising taxes and government default?

I hate the politics of politics but, unfortunately, politics has a real impact on people like me; even more so on those more vulnerable than me and my family. No legislator dares touch the real issue – that we have a shyster system of government that protects the rich and cheats those who do honest work. Any elected official that speaks of dismantling this shyster system must be prepared to face the prospect of punishment at the polls. The folks in power are plutocrats with an elaborate propaganda program in place. Bombarded with confusing economic complexity we, the people, are led like sheep to believe that life will actually be better for us if we simply stop deficit spending and never raise taxes. And so, the shyster system remains intact.

Just like when I bought my chicks, during the latest election, I was temporarily hopeful that a new administration would squash the buggers in charge of the economics of our nation. Having been in China for two years, I frequently read the Economist Magazine and was exposed to diverse international perspectives on American foreign and domestic policy. I learned the amount our nation devoted to the vulnerable and working class of our country paled in comparison to the massive government policy changes, subsidy and bailouts for the corporate rich and powerful. I became convinced of the need for people-oversight of our economy, and toward a smaller government doing more of the vital work of regulating for transparency and honesty. Sadly, though it still isn't politically feasible to change the shyster system and our reps in congress continue scrapping over misleading and irrelevant issues ad nauseam, day after day.

Several weeks ago, six prominent pastors joined together to write an open letter to President Obama regarding this issue. They highlighted something many of us in Big Horn County don't often think about. God is partial. He does take sides, but they have nothing to do with the sides of liberals or conservatives, Republicans or Democrats. Rather, God takes sides with the poor and marginalized. It's written all throughout the Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation. (See sojo.net a moral budget July 15, 2011.)

Who tore down the system in our nation that used to give the poor the opportunity to better themselves and their families through personal initiative? How did we come to the point of giving the wealthiest one percent privileged access to expanding their wealth while funding media manipulation of all of us into a side show? We watch the cockfights between congress and the president, distracted while they erect a shadow government to protect their financial cronyism, secret insider deals and the welfare of rip-off tax breaks?

Yes, I'm talking about Bush's breaks. I just read that letting Bush's temporary tax breaks expire, as originally designed, would yield more deficit reduction in ten years than any of the proposals now being foolishly debated.

I've heard it said that when we give handouts to the rich, we are ultimately helping the poor because the rich create jobs for all of us. So why is it that over the past few years, as our corporate tax rate has fallen to the lowest amount in decades, our unemployment rate is so high? After all, we've spent almost a trillion dollars on corporate bailouts. We hear that "taxes are job killers." Well, taxes haven't gone up, so where are the jobs?

This morning, Bonnie and I threw the chickens out of the garden, all of them, along with their chicken coop. They wouldn't stop their sparring foolishness, and further, they keep eating the tiny tomatoes intended for our bellies. We the people – my family – vested with the right to govern our garden, will manage our resources for the benefit of all of us.

Those feisty chickens will be confronted with an impenetrable wall of oversight: a chicken fence, to keep them from using their well-honed beak technology to mess with our crops.

If only we could say the same thing for those in Washington.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034

Chickens and Government II

2011-08-03T15:34:00.001-07:00

Finally on Monday the senseless combativeness in Washington has settled down to a new slightly more rational cooperation.

That's what I gathered while watching, with surprise and fascination, as our chickens began working together for their common good.

In my last column, Big Horn County News July 20, I explained how they were banned from our fenced garden. I didn't expect this cooperation.

They gathered into a gang and began running all together in the same direction. At first I saw no useful purpose. As I watched closer, I saw their mob-like stamping chicken feet stir up a wave of grasshoppers and bugs in front of them. Insects were eaten at the moment of landing, no time to get hopping feet folded to spring and fly again, because other chicks behind had kicked them up. As their flight range was exhausted, down they came, into a gizzard. Every chick got a fair chop at the economy of the pasture's protein. My forage got a break from the bugs and hoppers. My chickens are getting fatter.

More to the point, I'm watching an avian illustration of what now could and should be happening for the good of our nation, now that we finally have some congressional compromise to move in the same direction. And this all in spite of the snide remarks and arrogant character degradation by Fox Radio Right Wing Fair and Balanced Talk Shows, and The Sky-Is-Falling Analyses of Democrats and Liberal Pundits.

Yes, we really can move in the same direction; congress folk can compromise their promises and get elected on reality instead of simplicity. We can preserve our union, return to our basics as a nation, and value what gave us the right start back in our revolution against the conservative British Crown royalists.

Are you paying attention? I hope the words of George Lakeoff, in a recent oped, might help us see again our nation's values to which we just might be returning:

We Americans care about our fellow citizens; we act on that care and build trust and we do our best not just for ourselves, our families and our friends and neighbors, but for our country, for each other, for people we have never seen and never will see.

That's what our capitalist economy should be about, as Adam Smith wrote when he held up the common good as the basic bottom line of capitalism in America.

It's time to tear apart the modern experimental nest of pundits, politicians, media moguls and billionaires who place personal power and profit above the public good. They laugh up their sleeves to their foreign banks, and it echoes across the back 40, as they manipulate the masses of American citizenry into hysteria about government takeovers, raising taxes, the terrible Taliban in Iran, and a host of other side issues. While truly harmful, these really are symptoms to which paying too much attention has become a dangerous diversion from restoration of our real historical values. They have done an astounding job of smearing and discrediting foundational public enterprises: public schools, government agencies that support family businesses and farms where children labor, non-profit medical care, public funded elder care, and even now social security, Medicare and Medicaid.

In our nation this experimental nest wants to feed us chicks the equivalent of ground "protein" that's really horsemeat by-products unfit for human consumption. We are then told to feel happy we can sit around being lazy recipients of the largess of the elite's welfare system, and don't have to leave our fence boundaries to join in with others in pursuit of a livelihood. Most conspicuously, we chicks get addicted to the protein pellets from the outside so there is no need to tread that grass in step with others for the good of all. We are supposed to enjoy confinement, and to think life consists of being lucky not to be left outside the fence, not abandoned to survive in the low life of pursuit of protein for survival.

More than any other agenda, our founding fathers were adamant that unregulated private wealth concentration was anathema to our fledgling democracy.

It's possible the decision of the Republicans in the House to stand with Boehner and back Obama's negotiated plan will lead to some new valuing of our public enterprise system, especially government's function to open the big sky so we can see each other and get coordinated for the common sustenance of all. I saw it happening with my chicks here on the back 40. Maybe, congressmen will be booted from their fenced garden too, or learn to think beyond pushing for more government deregulation of private wealth concentration, and instead join us all supporting public enterprises for the good of all of us.

David Graber

Hardin, MT

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Turning stones into bread

2011-07-12T05:27:00.001-07:00

Sometimes when humans do wrong, we have trouble facing the music. It's never easy to admit our misdeeds, especially when 99.9 percent of us are involved. Anyway, we didn't choose this one.

It came to me in half-awake slumber one night with the coal-laden night trains' whistles wafting upstream from the Big Horn River bridge into my open bedroom window. As I drifted off to sleep, a nightmare of millions of tons of coal rained down from the sky, rose up and flooded the property around my house like the river did last month and I was frantically and foolishly filling sandbags again.

There really are consequences to the corporate sin of turning stones into bread—black stones stripped from the earth and burned by the megaton to feed our appetite for more calories. It's not just a dream; worldwide climate trends indicate there may be little time to alleviate some of the consequences of our massive burning of fossil fuel. A simple on-line search of "world people's climate change conference Bolivia," and you will find many opinions from both sides of the fence.

It took five hundred thousand years for the earth to sequester the amount of carbon that humans now, in one year, pull out of fossil rock, oxidize and inject into the paper-thin layer of air we breathe according to Fredric L. Quivik of Michigan Technological University. The Creator did not put it underground for people to extract and insert into our atmosphere.

Our human greed motivated us to dig and drill. It's all about turning stones into bread, ostensibly to feed the world's energy needs for the greedy good life.

Here on the Back 40 nature operates mostly within natural law. No plant or breathing animate life gets too far out of balance in proportion to the calories provided by photosynthesis: the essential ingredient for survival in Big Horn County winters and hot summers. Since creation, all life on planet earth had been operating within the calorie limits of the carbon life cycle, harnessing solar energy to photosynthesize carbon into food or energy.

Once the uses of fossil energy were discovered, we began consuming calories from fossil carbon at a rate astronomically beyond the calories available in the carbon life cycle of our planet. We are now injecting carbon into our planet's air at rates unprecedented in human existence. We have gone far out of balance with God's natural carbon life cycle.

In our farming practices in America, we take pride in our efficiency, but we don't look at the calories we burn to produce food calories we harvest to feed the world. In calories consumed to produce calories for food, modern farming is more inefficient than ever. The typical modern commodity agriculture farm uses up ten calories for every calorie produced. Around the world, rapidly advancing farm technology is raising, not lowering, the calorie input proportion to production.

In recent years, climate scientists in our country and abroad have reached a consensus ignored by the media and many politicians – that the burning of fossil energy sources is largely responsible for the imbalance we now face. We have driven carbon dioxide in the atmosphere worldwide up to unprecedented amounts.

Since drastically increasing the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the earth has gone out of balance and dramatic changes are becoming more apparent.

These changes have caused suffering already, and other nations accuse us of contributing to the problem. Of course, there's lots of denial and misinformation on both sides as in any argument, but the privileges we enjoy require us to listen to the outcries of the multitudes suffering because of the carbon ascending into our atmosphere. It really does take an impossible dream: lowering our calorie consumption back in step with the Creator's scientifically determinable design.

Sadly, there is a million-dollar-plus propaganda campaign now snowballed into every sector of public and religious life convincing us to believe a lie: that humans are not responsible for their climate sin against God's creation. They are smugly watching their stock numbers rise as media preachers tell us God is in charge, he has blessed our sin, and will bail us out before we suffer consequences.

Michael Pollan, the food journalist, writes, "When we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating (coal and) oil and spewing greenhouse gases." Jesus was tempted to turn stones into bread too.

He rejected that temptation to sin. It's time for us to confess, repent and start making amends along with the rest of the nations of planet earth.

Dave Graber

Hardin, MT 59034

Bullying basics: Let’s stop it where it starts

2011-06-23T05:28:00.001-07:00

The only way to stop bullying is to start looking where bullying originates. It's imbedded in our culture. Our children's media, our politicians, our business world and foreign policy teach us that we must have power to command and intimidate other humans to get what we want from them.

Now, in Montana and Big Horn County Schools, we are trying to tell children not to become what every sector of public life portrays as ideal. It's ludicrous to assume we could stop bullies in one sector, our public schools, without even acknowledging the power of teaching bullying in all the others.

From Wall Street to Congress and even down to our towns, the assumption holds that there are winners and losers and that human life ultimately follows the law of the jungle. This evolutionary ideology is prevalent in our business world today, even among adherents of creationism. The slogan – survival of the fittest – goes against the grain of being the humans our Creator intended.

Ancient tribal cultures such as Hebrews from a few thousand years ago and the Apsáalooka and Tsestsestehas of Big Horn County worked hard to teach children communal responsibility. Self-interest in power and acquisition of material things was dampened by personal validation and acceptance – worthy in family and community. Stories and games upheld the principles. It's the bottom line of the Ten Commandments. Greed, the distorted virtue of capitalist politics of the modern media mega-culture, was held in check.

I remember a story from a deceased friend of mine who used to live in Busby, Vern Buller. He started out farming in Ritchie, Montana. In the 40's, he went as a missionary heavy equipment operator to South America, in the Chaco region of Argentina. His job was building a road from Asuncion, Paraguay, through prairie timber and marshland, opening up the region for farming.

The area had already been tribal peoples' home for thousands of years. Their traditional ways of life were profoundly threatened by this intrusion. The destruction of timber and uprooting of a long ribbon of land cutting through the their homeland proved disastrous.

Soon there were casualties. Men who operated equipment were shot with poison arrows. Soon, each team of operators was assigned two or three armed guards, openly carrying weapons as a show of force. This was successful initially, but it brought on escalation. Indians somehow acquired guns and attacked a lightly armed team, capturing the men and severely damaging their equipment.

Being a Mennonite pacifist, Vern refused to work on a team carrying weapons. This created a crisis with the road building command center. However, after considerable negotiation, a cash deposit was made to secure the cost of the equipment and he and his team members who agreed with him were allowed back on the job.

They quickly moved into position to work their section of road, amidst snide comments from teams with armed guards. But the attacks stopped. All along the route it was clear the operation was still being watched. Then one day in the heat of noon, a large group of Indians surrounded Vern's team, the only one with no armed guards. They were ordered off their equipment and seated on the ground in the welcome shade.

They were searched. One of the team carried a concealed handgun. It was found. They feared the worst.

The Indians wanted to talk. They had acquired a translator. Thus began a negotiation process to alter the surveyed course of the road at particular places, meeting the needs of the Indian community to protect sacred locations.

The final months of completion saw the whole operation continue with the Indians providing each team with a security detail. Both sides won.

A few generations ago, American families had time away from TV to teach their children to get along with each other and to talk when needs were threatened. Bullies don't do this. Normal human beings do.

The only way to stop bullying is to stop teaching bullying at every level of our culture.

Somewhere there must be a scriptwriter for children's programming on TV who will write an ending where the hero accesses negotiation power as gifted to humans by the Creator. I've had enough of children's programming promoting the law of the jungle.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034

406 665-3373
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org
Bonnie's email graberbj@gmail.com

Recovering our American Childhood

2011-06-14T11:22:00.001-07:00

When it comes to childhood in America, we are facing frightening statistics. We need to return to cultural patterns, now seldom practiced, so more of our children can grow into productive responsible citizens.

Conservatism tends to resist change, to be critical and careful with the new and different. Of course this grates against modern consumer culture where we are conditioned to follow the latest fashion from clothing to raising children. Then there are the reactionary trends to restore old furniture and clothing fashions as well as other efforts to take society back to what we had generations ago. That's what we need for our American childhood. Instead of what we used to wear or sit upon in past decades, let's become fascinated with the disappearing treasure trove of resources for raising children.

Those of us living in our personal second half century remember the way things used to be, especially if we were raised in rural families. We were economic assets far beyond the imagination of families today.

In the late 1940's, my siblings and I learned the responsibility to feed, water and chase the chickens at night that laid the eggs and flavored the Sunday pot-pie after they lost their heads. Much of our work was not fun, such as forking out anaerobic manure from critter sheds after the spring thaw or scraping smelly sheep gut casing for sausage on the butcher block beside the milk house sink.

Fun was unavoidably ingrained into the work. After casings were scraped and washed, I enjoyed helping Grandpa and Uncle Willis run the sausage press. A casing was firmly tied to the spout. Screwing down the pressure pushed the ground sausage out into the casing, forming a long rope coiled by Willis's gentle hands into a tub of salt water.

He helped me hold it carefully to quickly straighten potential kinks, but eventually the resistance was too much for the paper-thin casing, a kink formed and burst, spilling the ground meat. We children, at first shocked with the accident, learned to laugh because the remedy was simple. Grandpa calmly tied it off and had us help scoop up the spilled sausage grindings to dump back into the press. Then he would tie on a new casing and resume running the press until the casing burst again. This continued until all nine of my uncles' and aunts' families had their winter sausage supply coiled in their own tin bucket.

There was plenty of work to be done in order to survive, and while work was difficult with long hours, life had purpose. Our childhood games reflected our life and the tasks of making a living.

Together, young children created imitations of the tasks and strategies for sharing life. We were not to play games against human life, including war games. I remember being punished for playing the popular "Cowboys and Indians," for example, complete with willow bows, stick guns, and falling in the grass dead.

For many years as a young adult I did not appreciate this part of my history. I looked back thankful I had overcome the hard life of my childhood. As a teacher, I didn't have to work so hard physically to make a living. I was grateful to leave the "dumb farmer" image propagated at the time, with a college education as my ticket.

Many children now grow up in an America immersed in stress. No longer an asset, they are now in the way of parents' need to make a living. This factor is ignored as government and private and public policy programs focus on symptoms of children growing into adulthood with pervasive psychological wounds from stress.

Our alarming symptoms are increasing. We have the highest youth incarceration rate in the developed world. Our children have ADD and ADHD at continually increasing levels. Drug and alcohol abuse continue to rise at alarming rates, along with spousal and child abuse.

Premature death by accident, suicide and disease related to substance abuse, childhood and adult obesity, diet and environmental hazards where children live and dismal maternal and child health care delivery, all plague our country. It's the alarming descent of childhood in America at nearly every measure.

Yet we continue to scapegoat these symptoms as if each of them were the core problem. We don't want to look at what has gone wrong with our religious and economic systems. Let's open our eyes to our past, and repel the ideologies that say our Christian faith is defective, or capitalism and democracy are failures. They're not; we have an astounding heritage in our nation's history where our faith and values were experienced in our American childhood.

We children of my parents didn't handle any but a few coins until I made clear my intention to start college. Then I was given the chance to drive Dad's car around selling fruit trees to neighbors. Before that, I remember being entrusted with a nickel that never even reached my pocket, because Dad passed them out to each of us kids when he ground the old 49 Studebaker to a stop by the sign with the curled ice cream tip on the cone. We shyly piled out of the front-opening back seat door and lined up at the window to watch the girl in white twist that tip just right and hand it to each of us kids saying "That'll be five cents please." We didn't miss having little choice with those five pennies. That was before Dairy Queen came up with the chocolate choice. Since soft ice cream had come to town, we learned the blessed experience of spending 5 cents. Our parents and our community knew this: children do not learn to handle money wisely by being entrusted with money.

Our parents did not contrive choices for us. We grew up knowing who we were and where we belonged, because our life did not consist of making money to spend money and living in anxious hope of acquiring more money to spend on more things. Dairy Queen was a ritual, replayed two or three times during that summer it came to town. Then the ritual ended.

The life I shared with my parents, two brothers and three sisters, instead was in our working relationship with the land and its fruit, and sharing those jobs like haying, butchering and processing beeves, pork and poultry we did not sell for family income we never saw, and harvesting cultivated and wild fruit and vegetables, canning and processing to be distributed to each of my Dad's siblings' families according to the number of children.

Seeing the option of college, I was determined to leave the drudgery and smell. I honestly wanted to turn my back on life close to the land. I was tired and embarrassed with the persistent smell of my hands from washing udders every morning before leaving for school. It happened often. I walked into Chemistry class at 8:30 AM. There simply was no lava soap strong enough to take the odor away. More than one girl I wanted to impress would scoot her chair as far away as possible.

Contrast that with now.

Magpies are loud and determined. They fight off competition to do things their way.

I watched a pair building a nest near our barn. The tree was nearly dead, one destined for firewood this summer. I didn't try convincing them they were off base. I can't even approximate their language.

Our nation's crescendo of attacks on families blames parents for the rise focused on two issues. One criticizes our education reforms for focusing on the cheap goal of education for success in our market culture. This criticism is legitimate.

The other criticism focuses on the lack of Christian bias in public education. It is nationally promoted with books, videos and well-funded marketing claiming our public schools are a secular socialist conspiracy to destroy our faith in God, our foundation for marriage and family, and the very essence of our national values. This criticism, while having legitimacy, obscures the real dangers undermining the beliefs and values that built this nation.

Back when public education was founded, American politicians were more interested in being civil. The crisis issue behind our first public schools was rejection of the class warfare in Europe. The citizen-controlled government our founders created said that everyone deserves an "inalienable right" to pursue a living, to succeed in life (except women and slaves, which we have more recently assessed as equally human). They were fed up with the colonial government's elitist private education providing those with inherited wealth the tools to maintain their privilege, and, in the case of the Boston tea party, to tax the poor at the benefit of the hugely wealthy East India Tea Company that ruled the British Crown. So the rich were taxed, and public schooling for all was born.

The effort created an equalizer of opportunity par excellence. For over almost two centuries, until recent decades, our public educators have instilled in our young a social responsibility to maintain a door of access for all. Whether future dirt farmers or CEO's, each was expected to learn to be a productive member of society for the good of all. Public education then recognized that government had an obligation to address the economic disparity our society inherited from England, giving new young citizens an equal right to the economic and educational tools to live as families. For generations, it has been successful.

Recent decades have seen disturbing changes. The last two administration's education secretaries—Obama's and Bush's—have looked with shock at the dismal statistics of rising poverty, a pesky generational poverty culture, and the highest imprisoned population of any so-called "advanced" nation. They see a rising tide of dysfunctional families. They see the drain on our national budget when delinquent youth enter society, bear children, and increase our culture of poverty in America.

But instead of looking carefully at what is happening to our children, they have looked for quick program solutions in the public schools. Bush's "No Child Left Behind," and Obama's "Race to the Top" have ignored the mounting of the greatest threat to our nation's public schools: the loss of civic responsibility for parents with young children. From head start through university graduate programs, personal wealth has become the measure of success. It has taken precedence over what President Kennedy said, with his roots in our heritage, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

Even magpies carefully choose the best angling forked branches for their nest. But as useful and legitimate as it is to oppose abortion, gay marriage and evolution, these obsessions obscure the loss of civic responsibility training in our education tree. Our national heritage is at stake. We must recover the story of public education itself, and even read about Jesus as written in the Christian Bible, the most important written document of our civilization.

Read the references in the New Testament on money, wealth and taxes. Jesus was clear that personal selfishness inevitably left people out. His ministry, founded by John the Baptist, was based on righting wrongs in his nation (Luke 3. 7-17). The solution was spiritual wisdom to learn motivation beyond selfishness. It was motivation for the "common good" later emphasized by the founder of our capitalist system, Adam Smith (see his book, Wealth of Nations).

Problems with evolution, gay marriage, abortion and other such issues may be real, and a motivation to pull a child out of public school. But these issues are only symptoms of the more dangerous threat to our democratic values in our nation's heritage in our drift toward marketing and personal competition for wealth in our schooling. Even though addressed with noise and politics, such discussion simply divides Christians and squelches useful discussion we should have in society over a fair, just economy, and the right to exist as human beings.

Somehow, the magpies got the message, probably with all our activity planting grass around "their" tree. They left for another tree. We need to remind our national and state education leaders up in their elitist tree that we the people know how our religious heritage, the arts, music, diversity of language and culture, all teach us respect for others and how to be responsible citizens. Let Wall Street experts return to New York with their marketing expertise. We don't need their values imposed on our schools in Big Horn County.

One honest education researcher is Dr. Mike Rose, look him up on line.

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

Diane Ravitch. 2011.

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp/0465014917/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3M5B51HC6A4L4&colid=2UL2N592BVKVD (Author)

They should end talk of the government increasing its power to demand gender bias for civil rights of life partners. They should recognize at least limited legitimacy in Biblical exegesis along with the many American Christians who see God in Creation with or without evolution. They should recognize the legitimacy of those who oppose abortion through means other than government judicial action.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

The perfect flood – is it over?

2011-05-30T07:27:00.001-07:00

The record flood of May, 2011, on the Little Horn, begs for an explanation. Why such a severe flood? I will try a simple one: almost 20 years of drought.

In the 1970's my son and I discovered fishing on the Big Horn. Our favorite place was the St. X bridge, with its wide gravel bars and sandy beaches extending into the water, and the steep place along the east side where larger rainbows lurked. We launched our homemade Cajun pirogue there, caught fish, and my children, young then, enjoyed splashing in the puddles across the wide riverbed.

Take a look next time you cross that bridge. The riverbed is constricted. Over the decades, grasses, then willow brush, and now even Russian olive and cottonwood crowd the river into half its former width.

At 10 p.m. on Saturday, my flashlight shining out my east door at Greenwood Farm revealed muddy turbulent water had risen four inches since 8 p.m., indicated by marks on the stake I planted in the yard that afternoon. I turned in and set the alarm for 1 a.m.. At midnight, I awoke in a sweat. In my dream I was swimming for life in a flood. Awake, still hearing rain, I grabbed my flashlight and went out to check the flood. Up another three inches, and muddy water was rushing in waves over the lane leading from our back door.

It was worrisome, but I was grateful for my family helping fill sandbags to protect our doors. I was even more grateful that our house had no crawl space, and our walls, made of waterproof concrete ten feet high, were plenty strong. I still had a sense of unease. When will the water stop rising? I made my way around the house, turned on lights, and saw flood waters almost encircling our house. A quick estimate said eight inches to go before water would reach the sandbags jammed against our outside doors.

At 2 a.m., the water level was exactly where it had been at midnight. At 4 a.m., it had dropped an inch. I was confident the worst was over.

At 10 a.m. Sunday morning, after dropping by four inches, I read the news on the computer. The Bureau of Land Management had shut down the flow in the Yellowtail Dam to around 3,000 cubic feet per second.

Many others in Big Horn County were not as fortunate, especially along the Little Horn.

I got out the old map of our farm and the nearby river, based on photos taken in the 70's. The back channel next to our house was once a significant part of the river. The island, now the headquarters of the Eagles Nest Lodge, was mostly a gravel bar. Now, Russian Olive has taken over everywhere, and I watched the water meandering slowly through that channel, still rushing madly across my yard and down my lane. It was obvious the river had lost much of its capacity to flow.

I began to understand. The habit of green things is to grow close to the water's edge. With the drought, the water's edge moved in on the river. The normal small floods added sediment to the green things along the shore, and those green things flourished into brush, then trees, then a strong riverbank. The broad river beds with open gravel bars we had in Big Horn County in the 70's are gone. With this pattern happening on our two major rivers in Big Horn County, the present crisis has become inevitable.

Did this record flood remove the brush blocking the river's flow? Did the snow in the high country lose most of its water content with this flood, or will there be another? Will the rains stop and warmer weather come at a gradual pace, allowing normal snow-melt and runoff? Is the water above Yellowtail Dam still rising?

At first, I thought maybe we've seen the end of the only perfect flood of 2011. Now I'm not so sure. Maybe these questions should motivate prayer, and prayer might lead to some action. This flood was enough.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Debunking Greed

2011-05-12T20:09:00.000-07:00

I'm a graduate of a Christian college where professors were strong on altruism. In economics I learned Adam Smith's philosophy based on what we understood as greed. Being a rebel, I bought the idea. I used to enjoy debunking altruism in college bull sessions.

"Even that toasted black hen," I used say to a dedicated self-giving friend, "really was preserving her own genetic code in her chicks when she sat still in the face of a fast approaching prairie fire, and died instead of flying away." I was referring to the famous story of the farmer who kicked a lump of ashes, the burned body of a mother hen, and uncovered a nest of peeping unsinged baby chicks. Her singed wings were enough protection to save her young. They were her resurrected life. She really was following a self-serving motivation to give her life, so I argued.

So in college I agreed greed is good. It's still dominant 50 years later in our culture and business practices. But now, in the last ten years, this conventional understanding from Adam Smith's 1776 book, Wealth of Nations, is no longer accepted by many research minded economists. There has been an awesome change in economic philosophy at the most scholarly levels. This debunking of greed needs to trickle down.

My son told me to search on line for a ten-minute video entitled "What Motivates Us." It's easy to find. Using researched documentation, the cute animated cartoon convincingly demonstrates we aren't motivated as much by greed or even self interest as by factors such as purposeful mission, autonomy, preservation of our human family and community, and complex challenges.

Tasks involving these factors aren't enhanced by incentive pay or exorbitant CEO compensation. Inserting the greed incentive into the mix usually lowers accomplishment. Surprising, isn't it? When tasks are cognitively challenging, requiring teamwork and a sense of mission for the benefit of others, incentive pay actually reduces work quality and output. "Whoa," I thought when I first saw this short video, "I'm catching a case of cognitive dissonance."

Well, self-interest does have a place. I see it all over this back 40, our Greenwood Farm. Weeds compete with my Garrison grass and alfalfa for germination and root room. Goose couples compete with each other for prime nesting habitat. And everyone gains with the competition, except the weeds.

But we human managers of this ground have decided greed and self-interest, while clearly credible and powerful, are not our prime motivators. If we were interested in maximizing profit per acre, we would have been much better off buying a parcel of more productive soil. The ground itself cries out for another motivation. How can we resurrect the sterile soil here to best sustain life for human benefit again after years of declining production in conventional farming? Our thinking is not just for next year's profit, but sustainable benefits for the next 10 or 100 or more years. And for this, we are in step with others in Big Horn County.

So the best question is what to do with land that cannot facilitate a greed motivation. Will altruism work here? Who would work here with this motivation?

There are lots of such folks around. For example, check out the Wellknown Buffalo Center at Garryowen. Like us, this summer they are having a group of college students volunteering to get their hands dirty working to make idealism become reality. They are doing summer school with Crow language immersion, gardening, and traditional skills of the Apsaalooke. Ours are coming to learn from our small steps toward sustainable living here on the back 40. This summer will see them working on experimental "earthship" building construction, using discarded tires and rammed earth, helping with farming, learning with folks in Big Horn County.

Like the mother hen, our motivation is preservation and life for our family, the human family. We want our farming practices to look forward to the best ways of not just feeding human beings for survival, but living productive lives in respectful coexistence with others of our kind, with the land and with all creatures great and small. Our tasks are small and not a significant challenge to our economic culture of greed. But new economic research supports our efforts. Together we can chart a better way toward a stronger and more sustainable future for our nation and humankind.

Use this link for the video "what motivates us" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&playnext_from=TL&videos=qOyhHX6kxN4

A scholarly review of research on a similar vein:

Vailancourt Rosenau, Pauline (2006) "Is Economic Theory Wrong About Human Nature?," Journal of Economic and Social Policy: Vol.10: Iss. 2, Article 4.

Available at: http://epubs.scu.edu.au/jesp/vol10/iss2/4

This website is good on down-to-earth research-based information debunking popular politically correct ideas, this one on the myth that greed is good:

http://makethemaccountable.com/myth/GreedIsGood.htm

Here's some writing from the above website:

The two books by Adam Smith upon which our modern cultural value of greed is supposedly based:

Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations, 1776

Smith, Ibid: Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1790

A scholarly book on the subject, in reality it demonstrates that Adam Smith was not definitive regarding his analysis of self interest in economics as a contributor to democracy:

Kenneth Lux, Adam Smith's Mistake: How a Moral Philosopher Invented Economics and Ended Morality (Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1990)

Scientific studies are proving that cooperation is a built-in human trait

Brain scans show why we love cooperating MakeThemAccountable.com

Last Updated: 2002-07-17 13:09:43 -0400 (Reuters Health)

By Alison McCook

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - New research reveals why people often cooperate with each other, even when it is not necessarily to their advantage to do so.

A group of researchers based at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, found that when a woman is involved in a situation where she is cooperating with someone else, she experiences activation in brain areas that are also activated by "rewards" such as food, money and drugs.

This indicates that our bodies may have been somehow programmed to "tag cooperation as rewarding," study author Dr. Gregory S. Berns told Reuters Health.

"Which is good, because it probably keeps the social fabric of society together," he added…

[The truth is, when you get past all the hate rhetoric, that millions of years of evolution have made us social beings. We lived in tribes for millions of years, and I assure you that members of a tribe didn't have a greed-is-good mentality. I'm no expert, but what I've read suggests that in a tribal environment generosity was admired and rewarded. And one didn't become a chief simply by being the strongest. An aspirant for chiefdom had to build coalitions of supporters, had to be willing to listen to the wisdom of the elders, and was most likely to become and remain chief if he was known as a brave hunter and warrior, but also as a generous person.]

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Barak Mugabe

2011-04-29T19:54:00.001-07:00

I posted below a longer version of the following as a letter to the editor of the Billings Gazette. The edited shorter version is available at the Gazette:

http://billingsgazette.com/news/opinion/mailbag/article_2075134d-72ae-516c-ab0c-acb5d9987548.html

Following this letter on line are some 60 blog comments. Anyone can join in the fracas.

Barak Mugabe

First our guns

Then our land

I read these phrases on a sign above the manager's desk at a Billings business last week, one that markets wholesale to constructions companies and farmers. The sign was easily visible to me and the public from the sales lobby. It first struck me that this must represent a perspective of the management at this otherwise reputable business establishment. This business has served me and Greenwood Farm very well, so it is disappointing.

Let me correct the manager publicly, since these surprising and offensive phrases assaulted me in public.

1. Robert Mugabe is the brutal dictator of Zimbabwe. Barack Obama is the democratically elected president of the United States of America. To combine those names is deeply anti-American and slings mud on our nation's honor and values.

2. Our president, unlike Mugabe the tinhorn dictator of Zimbabwe, has neither done nor said nor promoted anything remotely like confiscating my Remington, Savage, or Winchester. The comparison is totally ludicrous, even though the NRA is famous for pushing any paranoia that will sell more guns, even guns for criminals.

3. Our federal government funds our Montana land's productivity. Without federal government subsidy for commodity production and other land use by farmers, most Montana farmers would be driven off their land. The President is strongly dedicated to protecting the family farm, in words and actions.

4. A strong majority of citizens of this nation elected the current president. They affirmed his African descent, along with 100 million or so other citizens born in the USA. The constant barrage questioning his citizenship and legitimacy is racist to the core.

This carefully deniable inflammatory language is what I encountered first from Ku Klux Klan and John Birch Society literature in Mississippi in the 60's. What's unprecedented and shocking in America now is mainline commercial media's pundits who encourage such language. This is tantamount to insurrection, with money media giants turning a blind eye.

I would be the first to say such speech is protected by the first amendment. But that doesn't make hate speech patriotic. Such attitudes are just a step away from flag burning, which also is protected speech, but is similarly anti-American.

I'm too old to be tolerant of such inflammatory speech and veiled personal attacks against our president, regardless of the party. I spent two years beginning 2001 as an American language specialist on the faculty of the foreign language department of XiHua University, near Chengdu in China. I can guarantee Chinese citizens were arrested and worse for using much milder language against their government leaders. That doesn't happen here, thank God. But pushing the limits on our 1^st amendment rights should not be the business of an otherwise reputable firm in Billings.

I like America, and I like the company where I do business. But I don't like anti-American speech couched in inflammatory false phrases attacking our president personally in my face when I shop there.

Maybe the minority extremists there would identify better with the hate-America agitators in the Middle East. There's plenty of oil pumped there, and plenty of work for people who do pipes and inflammatory propaganda on both sides of the conflagrations there.

--
David Graber

406 665-3373
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Dawn Breaks Only in Darkness

2011-04-29T13:17:00.001-07:00

A recollection of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Easter sermon at Dexter Avenue 2nd Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, 1964

Doctor King's sermon started by retelling the story of two of Jesus' disciples and their walk to Emmaus.

Two disciples, determined not to remain holed up in fear of being arrested in Jerusalem that first Easter, left the city and the Roman crackdown on political unrest stirred up by the crucifixion of Jesus. They walked on through the night of darkness and despair toward the town of Emmaus. Dawn was barely graying when another traveler joined them and listened to their tales of woe. They recounted to the seemingly uninformed traveler Jesus' false arrest, trial, torture and execution on the Roman cross. With emotion they explained their hopes dashed for themselves, their families and the nation, their fears, and their feeling of abandonment. Their darkness was impenetrable even though the traveler quoted scripture to challenge it.

As they neared Emmaus they invited the caring stranger to join them at a friend's house. Their guest was given bread to break to share a meal. That's when dawn broke in the darkness of their despair, and they saw it was Jesus, risen from the dead. Resurrection happened for them too, after all shreds of hope were dashed, and darkness was total.

In his sermon, Dr. King spoke of being in jail in Birmingham in 1963. While there for eleven days, he read newspaper accounts of an open letter criticizing the extremism of the civil rights movement, written and signed by important Christian leaders of the nation. They asked him to stop the movement, and save the nation and the Negro race from civil war and an immanent violent reaction of citizens and governments of the South. They criticized his leadership of aggressive sit-ins, public demonstrations and law violations because permits to parade were withheld.

"Jesus is risen," said Dr. King. He went on to proclaim that God's power is evidenced, even more than by a reviving Jesus' body, by healing the despair of the darkness Jesus and his followers faced. They despaired that God's power was weak against Satan, against the might of Rome and its Jewish collaborators. After Jesus had been dead and buried for three days, there seemed no question where true power lay. The Gospels are clear: the resurrection was powerful because it was so unexpected. All had lost all hope in God, as revealed by Jesus who had been executed.

It's in such darkness that God's resurrection dawns yet today. Dr. King explained the darkness of the despair he risked sharing with his Christian White brothers who opposed him. He didn't expect much from writing this letter.

But God brought a new dawn of resurrection for the downtrodden of America within a month of his release from jail. The laws of segregation were dealt a defeat in the US Supreme Court. God worked his way, after it appeared certain His way was defeated.
This is the time of year when we think of the love of God breaking forth into eternal dawn. We come to see that the most powerful forces in the universe are not those forces of military might but those forces of spiritual might. Dr. King quoted this great hymn of our Christian church:

When I survey the wondrous cross,
On which the prince of glory died,
My richest gains I count but loss
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small.
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

I am not one to remember sermons. But this one had such a deep effect on my life I rehearsed it in my memory over the decades. I hoped to find it on line, with so many of Dr. King's sermons and speeches now posted. Instead I found there are hundreds of his speeches and sermons that, like this, were not recorded. The above is my brief recollection.

For events leading to my hearing this sermon, see "What Would MLK Say," the Big Horn County News archives on line, Spirit and Dust column, Feb 3, 2011. Also, look up "Letter from Birmingham Jail April 1963" for Dr. King's letter written at a time of despair over the failing civil rights movement. He repeatedly referred to this letter in his sermon that Easter Sunday Morning, 1964, "Dawn breaks only in darkness."

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034

406 665-3373
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

The Budget Battle, Common Sense and the Bible

2011-04-14T06:43:00.001-07:00

Farmers of Big Horn County and across America are familiar with tough choices in tough times.

When weather turns bad and crops fail, farmers must decide where to cut expenses, when to borrow and how to wisely invest available resources in order to maximize future harvest.

In the endless debate about our national budget, the same wisdom should apply. Everyone agrees spending cuts are necessary—but which ones? To answer wisely, we should look at economics, not politics. Which investments and which cuts are best for all citizens and future generations?

However dire the budget, most farmers would prioritize investing in seed. Our national obligation to invest in children's health; education is no different. And it's a good investment. Studies show a return of 400-700% for every dollar spent on early childhood education. See this link: http://developingchild.harvard.edu/library/multimedia/interactive_features/five-numbers/

Many in Congress still hold to decreasing the tax burden on the wealthy as an investment in "job creators." The theory goes that the more money wealthier people can keep for themselves, the more jobs they will create to spread the wealth to the rest of us. Does this work for our children's future?
To answer that question we need a little foray into tax history, one that politicians and media pundits avoid. Our nation prospered under Eisenhower's 90% tax bracket for the wealthiest. Under Reagan, this tax averaged 50%. G. W. Bush cut taxes for the wealthiest to 35% and funded two wars off of the budget. He took office with a $236 billion budget surplus, remember? His tenure ended with a $415 billion deficit, not counting $150 billion borrowed from social security. And Obama? Like Republicans, he's not serious about the deficit.

The nation's wealthiest 400 now own as much of the nation's wealth as half of the entire population: over 150 million of us. Said another way, for every dollar each of the less-wealthy half of us own, the average one of the wealthiest 400 in America have half a million. When they complain that the tax burden is shifted toward the wealthy--i.e., the biggest percentage of tax income comes from the wealthiest--the reason is obvious: They make more money than the rest of us put together.

And one of the biggest cash cows, the Pentagon, is funded without question-- over $500 billion and increasing. A range of groups, including Cato Institute, Taxpayers for Common Sense and the Project for Defense Alternatives have detailed nearly $1 trillion in cuts that could be made to the Pentagon budget in the next ten years, yet congressional leaders in both parties including Tea Party activists are refusing to tackle Pentagon spending.

Instead they blame the poor. They protect tax breaks for the wealthy and then make a ruckus about a tiny fraction of our budget: WIC, Headstart, and other support for low income children. This way of doing almost nothing for the deficit is deceptive. And it's unwise to create new budget crises in millions of homes across America. Here's where the national budget debate needs our nation's moral foundation.

The Bible has more to say about money and "greed, which is idolatry (St. Paul, Col 3.5)," than any other moral issue. This is the very issue by which Jesus separates the nations destined for heaven from nations destined for hell, in Matthew 25: "Depart from me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire… for I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing to drink. I was naked, and you did not clothe me. I was an alien and you did not welcome me. I was sick and in prison, and you did not visit me. … Inasmuch as you did not do it for the least of these my brethren, you did not do it for me."

The converse is promised in the book of Isaiah: "If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and …you will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail (58:10).

Last year our farm spent more than it earned. But I'm still buying seed for the west field. Now that the soil's a little healthier, its time to grow some pasture. In a few years, some sheep, goats, or cows will have something good to munch, and the grandkids can have 4H projects. I'm investing in the future, for my children's children. Do our leaders have courage to do the same?

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." - Dr. Martin Luther King. April 4 was the 43rd anniversary of his assassination.

The following is the portion cut for the Big Horn County News "Back 40" column

All over the media are the personal attack words, "Obama had to be dragged kicking and screaming to a real discussion on government spending." Personal attacks are not even appropriate in our American civilization when they are legitimate. But this language, all over the media backed funded by Murdoch, the Koch brothers, etc., reeks of hypocrisy. These Republicans, and for that matter, Democrats as well, don't want to tackle the American wealth accumulating with the wealthiest 1%. So they don't talk about the Pentagon and associated excessive profits in the military/industrial complex Eisenhower warned about. Virtually every economic sector has its hands deep in taxpayer pockets, profits deeply connected to our defense, military and national security apparatus.

Those who now say "everything is on the table" will be keeping smoke and mirrors on the table too again. The mantra of blaming the poor is totally ludicrous. They continue putting out the propaganda that all we have to do to turn around the economy is stop spending taxpayer money on the most vulnerable of socie

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, is waging radical class warfare and ideological privatization schemes and selling it as a debt reduction plan. His newly released FY12 budget proposal, The Path to Prosperity, ought to have the subtitle: "A Windfall For the Already Prosperous."

America's richest 1 percent are getting about $1.5 trillion richer each year. Representative Ryan's tea party inspired budget numbers claim debt reduction. But look what happens. From start to finish, this budget is a smoke screen. Indeed, though Ryan's central claim is that his proposal will cut government spending by $5.8 trillion over the next decade, Joel Packer of the Commitee for Education Funding points out the reality: "For the overall budget over ten years it cuts outlays by $5.8 trillion below CBO baseline but it also cuts revenues by $4.2 trillion below CBO baseline, thus reducing the deficit over ten years by $1.65 trillion." So the richest 1 percent are getting richer each year by almost the amount his budget reduces the federal deficit in ten years.

Yet under the guise of debt reduction, the chairman of the House Budget Committee's budget proposal would take from the already poor, give to the already rich and attempt to achieve debt reduction not by cutting real costs, but by privatizing entitlement programs and shifting costs from the wealthy and corporations to struggling states, seniors, disabled, sick and low-income Americans. And the additional revenues necessary for serious debt reduction is glaringly absent, with proposals that would actually decrease tax-revenue from those most able to pay.

Studies also show that the richest 5 percent hold almost 64 percent of our wealth while and the bottom 80 percent of scrape by on just 12.8 percent of the pie.

Unmentioned in Congress, looming before us all are the two biggie budget busters left off the discretionary table: big business bailouts, especially banking and energy, and the taxpayer funded profits from our wars in the Middle East. The tax system stays in place. The nation's greedy corporations and insatiable wealthy are fattening themselves on the working poor. There's no trickle down. It's the opposite; the rich have been sucking the economic lifeblood from the middle class and poor for decades.

The Bush-Obama budget continues giving millionaires huge tax breaks while seniors and hard-working families pay more for health care and get less coverage. It still helps Wall Street-run health insurance companies make record-breaking profits and pay their CEOs outrageous sums to deny people the care they paid for and need. See Bloomberg.com news April 6:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-06/ryan-s-budget-proposal-would-aid-insurers-a-top-source-of-campaign-cash.h

The GOP's budget simply goes farther than the Democrats breaking America's most basic promise: That if you work hard and play by the rules, you can care for your family and retire with peace of mind. See Huffington Post on the Republican Budget Plan: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ethan-rome/republican-budget-plan-de_b_845256.html

As a country, we face difficult financial choices, but one thing that should not be on the table is to abandon the poor and vulnerable while subsidizing Wall Street and allowing more military spending. Should such big budget items really be considered non-discretionary?

Many Democrats and most Republicans, as well as the Koch brothers' funded Tea Party have it dangerously wrong. It seems the Christian faith is a schizophrenic practice for them. They uphold the adopted principle of greed for corporate and personal profits above civic responsibility to the most vulnerable of our society. But to me, my Republican-leaning parents, and many of my friends in Big Horn County, our faith connects with all of life, including politics.

At a time when billionaires are getting massive tax cuts and Wall Street profits are sky high, balancing the budget on the backs of those most vulnerable in America is simply wrong.

The poor are — once again — under attack, this time in the House budget bill, H.R. 1. The budget proposes cuts in the WIC program (which supports women, infants and children), in international food and health aid (18 million people would be immediately cut off from a much-needed food stream, and 4 million would lose access to malaria medicine) and in programs that aid farmers in underdeveloped countries. Food stamps are also being attacked, in the twisted "Welfare Reform 2011" bill. (There are other egregious maneuvers in H.R. 1, but I'm sticking to those related to food.)

These supposedly deficit-reducing cuts — they'd barely make a dent — will quite literally cause more people to starve to death, go to bed hungry or live more miserably than are doing so now. And: The bill would increase defense spending.

For the following, see : The Bush Budget Deficit Death Spiral, by Robert Freeman, NYT

Lenders talk about a debtor's death spiral. It occurs when borrowers get so far in over their heads they begin borrowing money just to cover the interest payments on past borrowings. The borrowers have to do this to keep the lending flowing but they can no longer plausibly pay down the principal. As new debt compounds on old, bankruptcy becomes imminent. Further lending is foolhardy. Foreclosure is only a matter of time.

The U.S. is starting to look like it is entering just such a death spiral. It is foretold not simply by the large and growing deficits, nor by the fact that their carrying costs will rise quickly as interest rates rise. Rather, it is the fact that these trends are becoming irreversible, a structural part of the U.S. economy. This and information on actual deficits and surpluses quoted in the printed column is available:

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1022-26.htm

157,000 kids up to age 5, who rely on Head Start for nutrition, education and other services could be cut (1. "House Bill Means Fewer Children in Head Start, Less Help for Students to Attend College, Less Job Training, and Less Funding for Clean Water," Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, March 1, 2011 http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3405)

A big source of the problem is those who cultivate the creep of ignorance across our land. 60 minutes had a special segment last week on corporate tax rates. They cited several huge previously American corporations that have spurned US citizenship and opted out of the country. They abandoned their country. They settled down in a foreign country, where corporate profits are taxed at much lower rates. Since the wealthiest CEO's have kept their residency in America, they do not have the heavy tax rates on large personal vested wealth common in other nations. All this is legal. Is it moral?

Left out is the vital information that America, unlike virtually every other modern democracy, lacks a federal property tax on individually held vested wealth. Since paper profits are a huge portion of corporate profits, our nation has held corporations to an income tax rate not unlike that for individuals. Other nations, recognizing the declarable wealth holdings of corporations distributed to stock holders, tax the net worth of individuals.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Pennywise and pound foolish

2011-03-16T14:23:00.001-07:00

Shortcuts often lead to bigger problems. Something about the political scene from Madison to Washington these days reminds me of one of my Dad's old stories about being pennywise and pound foolish. In his case, the shortcut wasn't about easy money or political power, but a much more tantalizing goal: ice cream.

In the early 1930's pre-electricity Iowa, the only way to get to a tub of soft, cold ice cream was via a lengthy, hand-cranking workout. Wanting the ice cream without the work, Dad and his teenage brothers eyed the new Model T Ford, and wheels began to turn—literally.

Soon they had jacked up one back wheel and unbolted it from the hub. They cranked up the engine, and with Dad's little brother Willis holding down the clutch, they lashed the removable hand crank to the T's wheel hub, and then to the handle of the full ice cream bucket. Willis gently engaged the clutch and the idling engine easily turned the hub, which turned the engine crank, which turned the ice cream handle, which sent the boys into ecstatic cheers over their ingenuity.

Their cheers were premature. The carburetor began loading up and the motor chugged slower. It started missing, almost died, and Dad said to his little brother "Punch it!" They didn't want to unlash the hand crank from the hub to start it again—too much work.

The little brother dutifully punched the throttle and the hub suddenly accelerated. Sure enough, my Dad's grip on the ice cream mixer slipped and the mixer hit the ground, spilling the precious contents onto the dirt. The sisters erupted in laughter, and Grandpa watched, bemused, as Dad and his brothers slipped in the mess trying to rescue a few spoonfuls. Undaunted, the brothers coaxed their mother into making another gallon of mix, and were stubbornly about to try again when Grandpa stepped in, "Boys, you work harder to get out of work than you would have to work if you would just DO the work!"

Now that wasn't the end of the story. Other costly consequences of good technology applied to the wrong task were not foreseen. Repeated episodes of jacking up the model T rear wheel ultimately wore the spider gears in the differential. The axel broke loose inside the pumpkin and slipped out, the wheel rolled into the borrow pit, and the worn Model T smacked hard into the road giving occupants painful bruises. Saving a little work turned out to be harmful, wasteful and foolish.

We have a tradition in America of overcoming pound foolish mistakes. Fueled by a passion for justice and liberty, Americans rebelled against the British empire and won independence. Because of the courage of our most patriotic citizens, we abolished slavery, ended institutionalized racial oppression through the civil rights movement, and sent hundreds of corrupt bankers to prison after the Savings and Loans Wall Street scandal of the 80's.

The concept is enshrined in second verse of "America the Beautiful":

O beautiful for pilgrim feet, whose stern impassioned stress

A thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness!

America! America! God mend thine every flaw,

Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law!

We must also remember that these visionaries faced firm opposition, even violent oppression and intimidation, from those threatened by the vision. To "mend thine every flaw" is an uncomfortable, even painful process. It certainly was uncomfortable for Bradley Manning, who valued American justice and liberty enough to serve in Iraq. His duties were sensitive: ferreting through the mass of war data accumulated in recordings of combat missions to determine targets to round up for questioning at Abu Ghraib prison. He did his job well. When obviously innocent people were mistreated, though, he pursued the errors. As his efforts to bring injustice to light were resisted, he began documenting his findings, and eventually released them to the public sphere.

Sadly, though, despite Obama's promises to offer protection to those who shed light on injustices, this whistleblower hasn't been protected. Like the Tories in 1776, slave marketers in 1880, and powerful politicians in the 60's-era South, our politicians today foment outrage against one who uncovers truth by labeling such actions unpatriotic. Manning's subsequent imprisonment on U.S. soil and possible execution now bear an uncanny resemblance to the way many at Abu Ghraib were treated, complete with solitary confinement, deprivation of clothing, and strip-searches. What a pitiful irony.

This tragedy is far beyond broken spider gears or spilled ice cream. The soul of our nation is at stake.

Note the following added sources and information links:

David House, 23, is an IT expert who works for the Bradley Manning Support Network. This excerpt is from his interview with the German newspaper, Spiegel On Line:

House: I cannot fathom living in a country that executes whistleblowers and I hope that many Americans and people in other countries see it in the same way. Apart from that, Bradley Manning deserves access to a speedy trial.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: How realistic are the chances that those demands will be met?

House: The only way Bradley Manning is going to have a good outcome here is if there is growing international pressure on the US to take the option of executing a whistleblower off the table. We need the action of every citizen in the entire world who values the principles of government transparency.

For the full interview: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,750879,00.html

From The Guardian, of the UK, some 100 articles, this from yesterday, quoted here:

PJ Crowley, the official spokesman at the state department, has fallen on his sword after calling the treatment of Bradley Manning, the alleged source of the WikiLeaks files, "counterproductive and stupid".

The resignation followed Crowley's remarks to an MIT seminar last week about Manning's treatment in military prison.

Crowley had said: "What is being done to Bradley Manning is ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid on the part of the department of defense."

For the complete article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/13/pj-crowley-resigns-bradley-manning-remarks

The International Commission for Labor Rights (ICLR) sent a notice to the Wisconsin Legislature, explaining that its attempt to strip collective bargaining rights from public workers is illegal.

Anyone who has watched the events unfolding in Wisconsin and other states that are trying to remove collective bargaining rights from public workers has heard people protesting the loss of their "rights." (For more on the record turnout, see this story.) The ICLR explained to the legislature exactly what these rights are and why trying to take them away is illegal.

The ICLR is a New York-based nongovernmental organization that coordinates a pro bono network of labor lawyers and experts throughout the world. It investigates labor rights violations and issues reports and amicus briefs on issues of labor law.

The ICLR identified the right of "freedom of association" as a fundamental right and affirmed that the right to collective bargaining is an essential element of freedom of association. These rights, which have been recognized worldwide, provide a brake on unchecked corporate or state power.

In 1935, when Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (also known as the NLRA, or the Wagner Act), it recognized the direct relationship between the inequality of bargaining power of workers and corporations and the recurrent business depressions. That is, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners, the economy fell into depression. The law therefore recognized as policy of the United States the encouragement of collective bargaining.

While the NLRA covered US employees in private employment, the law protecting collective bargaining in both the public and private sectors has developed since 1935 to cover all workers "without distinction."

The above 6 paragraphs quoted from the complete article: http://messageboards.aol.com/aol/en_us/articles.php?boardId=38496&articleId=18599693&func=6&channel=News&filterRead=false&filterHidden=true&filterUnhidden=false

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

The Golden Rule

2011-03-03T12:09:00.001-08:00

This week I could hear the barking in the quietness of our back 40 all the way from Wisconsin, "Stop big government spending! End the deficit! Cut benefits for public employees!" But they're looking up the wrong tree. Let's stop twisting reality and do something real for those suffering in the wreck of our economy.

From my childhood Sunday School in the 40's until now, the standard memory verse Jesus said, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," has been twisted into: "Them that's got the gold make the rules." The original version has almost become a liberal conspiracy, virtually gone.

With 90 per cent of congress beholden to corporations instead of citizens, with a supreme court that gives legal privacy protection to public multinational corporations previously reserved by our Constitution to citizens, and with the escalating war against the poor in America led by Glenn Beck's Republicans and President Obama's "centrist" Democrats, we the people have been inspired by Tunisia, Egypt, and now Wisconsin. We know cutting the 15% "discretionary" spending is a drop in the bucket toward what's needed, and ignores the big problem.

The suffering on Main Street USA continues. Illegal mortgage foreclosures now made legal outstrip abortions, now in process of being made illegal. Families who worked to make end meets all their lives now find themselves laid off, unable to make health payments and house payments, and on the streets for the first time in their lives in their 60's.

Where'd the money go? Check the bailouts of Bush and Obama. Check the rising profits of the energy sector, health industry, insurance, and banking. Check a corporate ripoff and empire building system driven by war profiteering, cutthroat capitalism, and either silence or rabid distracting controversies from the media.

How'd it get taken from the people who need it, who earned it?

The Golden Rule is not all that got twisted in the last few decades. The words "tax" and "Big Government" have also been twisted, to facilitate the heist.

When we fill up at Dolly's we hardly notice the sticker on the pump, "Federal tax 20%, state tax 20 %" because it's transparent, public information, by law. It's collected and managed by the people we elect, beholden to us.

But there's another energy tax, in fact a tax all across our economy levied by a government beholden only to stockholders, along with rules and loopholes to benefit the few wealthiest. It's the government of the corporations in America, that not of the people, by the people, for the people. What part of each dollar I spend at the pump goes to them? It's not public information, and it varies from week to week, usually upward.

Remember High School Economics class? The bigger the economic sector, the more the regulations. When economic activity grows and wealth accumulates, regulations grow, too. Palen, Beck, Limbaugh and company forgot their lessons, and have fabricated a farce. It plays into the hands of the corporate governors of our government, the biggest taxers and spenders of our money.

That's why our founding fathers wrote our constitution. Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Smith etc. knew government functions best when required by law to be governed by the people. With corporations now governing our government, we have progressively concentrated wealth making the greatest disparity between rich and poor this nation, or any modern nation, has known. This is class warfare in America, waged by the rich against the poor.

Now if the citizens of this nation had enough for reasonable survival, and if they didn't it was their own fault, we could ignore the mess. But that's not the case here, nor in the Middle East. So the poor are beginning to resist. We in America have a tradition those in the Middle East are now trying to emulate: government of, by, and for the people.

For God's sake, I hope Glenn Beck, Robert Koch, Rupert Murdoch, President Obama, Republicans, Democrats, Tea Partiers, and libertarians return to our best American values for government. I hope they all remember our Bill of Rights, the primary document of protection for the poor, is part of our Constitution.

Listen to the people; they run the micro economy that matters. Start with the farmers and ranchers of Big Horn County. They know the real Golden Rule.

Following is a continuation of the column in the BHC news March 2:

So the biggest problems in America are government spending and the deficit? That's both true and false, but mostly simply laughable because of who's deciding the rules and who benefits: not those of us caught up in the controversies between the tea party of the Republicans and the radical left of the democrats.

Oh for the days of Grandpa J.D. in Kansas, 1924! We can learn from those days, even though we can't revert to them. That's when we had a functioning micro economy in the energy sector, controlled by ordinary citizens. Refineries in small towns all over Kansas bought crude directly from citizens who had oil wells on their property. He and other citizens of Elyria in the 20's were not happy with the price of gas for their new model T's. Grandpa hammered together a lid and nailed it on top of the sideboards of his model T truck, loaded his fat shoats (pigs) under the lid, and tied a 300 gal. tank on top. He drove to Wichita, sold his pigs at the livestock auction, set the tank down on the bed and drove to the Chevron refinery to fill that tank with gas bought with the pig profit. He returned with the tank full, parked it at his gas station pump with the tall lever and the glass measuring tank, and connected the hoses. Word got out. Grandpa's station had the cheapest gas from McPherson to Newton.

So where's a micro-economy that operates like this? Try Communist China, one small bright spot in a land steeped in fear and propaganda. But their bosses wisely know that a billion people depend on a free micro-economy, unlike our country. I saw it in action. There are more private entrepreneurs in China per capita by far than in America. I had to learn to bargain for everything I bought. I was amazed to find such pervasive free enterprise Communist China. The difference was the size.

The growing macro market economy of China has not yet swallowed up the people's micro economy. It's still a huge slice of the country's GNP.

Of course, both neoliberals and neoconservatives would be laughed out of Pixian County, Sichuan, PRC, if they even dared promote their ideology, just like they would have been laughed out of Elyria, Kansas, USA, in the 20's, when the market economy was micro and belonged to the people.

All of it comes down to an idea repulsive to the writers of our constitution, and standard dogma today in America: that the rules for our marketplace should be written by and for a few elite with the largest property holdings. By writing governing regulations for trade and exchange in every economic sector that gives the most power to the fewest, the conservatives then believed, the majority will prosper. Wealth trickles down, so goes the theory went.

But it hasn't. Now we have state governments and the Middle East in crisis, believing a farce.

Maybe we should pry into how we got into this mess. If the following has any truth, then those barking about the big budget deficit found the wrong tree.

Americans in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois are waking up. They know the financial crisis facing our nation is contrived. All across the country, citizens are learning that the utopian dream of an unfettered market paves the way for big industry to game the system. Corporate fat cats have regulated the market to foster the biggest wealth redistribution any society has suffered at any time, with cash being funneled from most of us to the top 1%. The ones who scream loudest against big government are often the ones who know there is no such thing as an unregulated macro economy (if they remember their high school econ class). All big markets are regulated–the bigger the sector, the more the regulations. It's only questions of who does the regulating, for whose benefit. This is exploited by the right, and seldom acknowledged by the liberal left. It's the biggest lie believed in America today.

There was no clue in Walker's pre-election position statements. Only now, after the Koch/Murdoch clan had orchestrated bankrupting Wisconsin's state coffers, does the real Walker come forth. With an electorate mandate to govern, his utopian philosophy says democracy ended that November election day. Now his big government dogma roars forth with a united Republican majority. That's why the people, including many Republicans, have risen now by over a hundred thousand to protest at the Wisconsin state house. The people see through the sham conservatism at the core of the Republican and Tea Party folks as well as the sham of liberal Democrats, with its utopianism going bankrupt in America, Egypt, and around the world.

With corporate control of our elected government still escalating, even the Supreme Court gets into the act by transferring free speech rights to corporations, reserved in our constitution for individual citizens. Our biggest tax bill is erroneously considered legitimate profit in our socialist macro economy for those whose businesses are too big to fail. It exceeds what we pay our elected government every time we go to the gas pump, visit the local pharmacy, shop at the grocery store, or check out a new car.

Almost every big government regulation opposed on talk radio and "proven" bad for our economy has a hidden agenda. That agenda is to replace those transparent regulations, set in place originally by our honest elected representatives in government, with regulations written by representatives who could only win an election with corporate backing. Some 90% of congress, and majorities in state government as well, are similarly bought off by the corporate control of our elections. Without corporate sponsorship, winning is impossible. So it's not small government at all. It's the big government the anti-big-government buffoons want, secretly, for their benefit. What hypocrisy.

Stop the petty ludicrous national pastime with controversy and talking points, and get to the substance of real people's needs for an end to wasteful spending. Start with questioning budget items beyond the 15% that's supposedly "discretionary." Does that word mean the last two wars we're still fighting are not discretionary? Why not? Does that word mean the billions of $ subsidy of most sectors of our economy are off limits? What about foreign military aid to nations that would otherwise live more at peace with their neighbors? What about manufacturing for the military?

Our national choices are not made according to cost/benefit analyses for the people, but rather for the engaged corporate interests. So the big government rules are written by the closeted few, for the secret profit of the few, at the expense of the many, with the endorsement of both political parties and even the so-called grass roots libertarian tea party. The people of America better start being heard, not only in Wisconsin.

http://www.truth-out.org/news

OPINION | February 27, 2011
Op-Ed Columnist: Why Wouldn't the Tea Party Shut It Down?
By FRANK RICH
This battle, ostensibly over the deficit, is so much larger than the sum of its line-item parts.

OPINION | February 25, 2011
Op-Ed Columnist: Shock Doctrine, U.S.A.
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Madison, Wis., is looking a lot like Baghdad in 2003, with government officials exploiting fiscal crises for fun and profit

OPINION | February 26, 2011
Op-Ed Columnist: Absorbing the Pain
By BOB HERBERT
At a gathering in Philadelphia this week, the deep pain of working Americans was readily apparent.

Bill Moyers: We must be exposed to truth even when it hurts.

http://www.alternet.org/world/149925/bill_moyers%3A_america_can%27t_deal_with_reality_--_we_must_be_exposed_to_the_truth%2C_even_if_it_hurts/

Democracy weakening in America?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/opinion/12herbert.html?emc=eta1

Danny Shechter, "Will Banksters Get Away With It?"

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/2011226131635826806.html#

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Egypt: What’s the Prognosis?

2011-02-08T15:30:00.001-08:00

The real source of unrest in Egypt is not outside agitators or inside Muslim fundamentalists. It's suppressed dissent from those starving, falsely arrested and in prison, disappeared, tortured and murdered by the regime.

In a Fox news interview last Friday, Senator McCain warned our nation that insurrection against our allied governments in the Middle East may very well spread like a virus. "This, I would argue, is probably the most dangerous period of history in…our entire involvement in the Middle East, at least in modern times."

McCain is right: This is an extremely dangerous period in history.

McCain is also wrong: It's not like a virus, something that infects us quickly, needs symptomatic relief, then leaves in a week or two. That's Mubarak's misdiagnosis too.

It's more like a cancer. Mubarak is still applying his worn out quick fix with jail, police and his thugs, and the numbers of demonstrators grow. There's no longer an easy way to stop the unrest in Egypt. Relief of symptoms by forcing the evacuation of "Freedom Square" would be catastrophic.

The cancer should have been stopped decades ago. There were easier solutions then. Such preemptive ways to heal society are known in all major religions, from thousands of years ago.

Some 2,000 years ago a famous Chinese doctor, renowned as a physician and for his skill and knowledge of medicines and his ability to heal even the most deadly disease, was asked why he was so much better than his two brothers, who were also doctors. His answer:

My first brother heals sickness before it even develops. His methods are quiet. His science is an art form of diagnosis and treatment, preventing disease. He is known only within our village. My second brother deals with illnesses while they are beginning to emerge, preventing sickness from getting worse and out of control. His methods return the body to health without risky intervention. I deal with sicknesses when they have reached the level of disease and threaten the very life of the person. This requires numerous medicines, and skill and knowledge in their use.

It's true my name has become famous throughout the kingdom and I have been asked to be physician to the king. Yet my first brother has the knowledge to deal with sicknesses before they arise and my second brother is able to treat them at an early stage and prevent them getting worse. Though my fame has spread throughout the land, their knowledge is greater, and their accomplishments as physicians more important and powerful for healing

—(Adapted from The Tao of Peace by Wang Chen).

Our children remember 1993, when we picked up a book tossed on our front lawn full of warnings of Jewish encroachment in Montana. I read it. I remember that the core venom of hatred for Jews was shrouded in layers of fervent Christian faith and deep patriotism. I quickly discovered other Hardin families found a copy on their front lawn as well. Everyone I visited with saw through the patriotic Christian layers to the anti-Semitism.

It was worse in Billings. KKK fliers were distributed, the Jewish cemetery was desecrated, the home of a Native American family was painted with swastikas, and a brick was thrown through the window of a six-year-old boy who displayed a Menorah for Hanukkah.

Remember what the Billings Gazette did then? A full-page picture of a Menorah was posted voluntarily, so citizens could display it in their front windows all over town. Some 10,000 citizens responded by displaying a Menorah, identifying themselves with the hated ones.

The hatred was beaten back. The cancer threatening our communities was stopped by people who dared confront the hatred with God's power. The ideology did not spread.

As I watched and read the extremist rhetoric today claiming "all Muslims" are bent on total annihilation of Christians, it was almost beyond belief that our national media could successfully peddle such juvenile tit-for-tat, especially to the good citizens of Big Horn County. I'm reminded of my two grandsons' tit-for-tat, absolutely convinced the other was about to rob the gold dollar gift recently available at our banks, provided by an unnamed grandparent. I was also reminded of similar rhetoric against Jews and Blacks in those books on our lawns in 1993. Inflammatory fearful rhetoric is an easy tool for politicians and pundits here too.

This is the cancer nurtured by Mubarak to infect the thugs paid to beat, stab and shoot demonstrators. We in America now need to apply a more powerful antidote to the threat Senator McCain has erroneously compared to a virus. Let's try God's words, written by the Prophet Isaiah 3000 years ago:

Thus says the Lord: Share your bread with the hungry, shelter the oppressed and the homeless, free the prisoner; then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your wound shall quickly heal.

If you remove from your midst oppression, false accusation and malicious speech, if you bestow your bread on the hungry and heal the afflicted, then light shall rise for you in the darkness, and the gloom shall become for you like midday.

—Isaiah 58:7, 9-10, adapted from The Common Lectionary for Feb 6, 2011

All over America we now share in the world's suffering. The world's cancerous epidemic of structural violence to suppress those marginalized into silence by drugs, poverty and prisons is here too. There are more people of dark skin now incarcerated, disenfranchised from voting and outside the functioning economy, than the number disenfranchised by slavery a decade before our civil war. Employment is rampant, and many more young families cannot find means to survive meaningfully in America. While arrests for illegal drug possession and sales are practically equal across racial lines, if one found guilty is a person of color, that one is ten times more likely to serve a long prison sentence.

Like in Egypt, here in America this is not a matter of political and religious prejudice. The cancer runs to the core of the human rights: access to a place of respect within the community regardless of race, economic status, or gender issues.

Associated with the cancer in America is the emotional framing label, "Big Government." Everyone says it's bad, and I agree. But note the hypocrisy of those with the loudest cries against big government: they want that government exerting it's power into our homes and close relationships, telling us who can get medical care, who we as adults can choose as our spouse for legal protection for our relationship with our significant other as adults, and lobbying for the government to restrict the reproductive rights of those outside the middle class.

These controversial problems in America occur because we still fail to address the injustices that have in the past turned into major unrest. Instead, like when Johnson's "war on poverty" died a premature death, we have become preoccupied with a war against the poor. We have economic gurus defending wealth redistribution, not from the top down, but from the rest of us up. Instead of a draft, which created a military demography of equality like in Egypt, we have a hundred thousand trapped outside the economy unless they sign up for military service. For the first time in America, almost none of our government officials placing our service people into harms way have sons or daughters sharing that risk. Inflamed by "death tax" rhetoric, we are creating a government and economy led by vested inherited wealth, totally against the economic principles clearly elucidated in the foundation of our nation (See Tom Payne).

So now in America, more people than ever before are suffering because of a big government gone awry under the auspices of big money. It's time to look at resources to help us understand this outside the media owned by government/corporate complexes.

On line, these resources are many. Haa'aretz, Al Jazeera, Alternet, Democracy Now, Consortium News, Sojourners Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, The Huffington Post, and many more. These get little corporate funding, and depend on concerned citizen contributions. They restore the function of the main commercial media before the equal time law was rescinded over a decade ago. Before then, investigative independent journalism was central to our free press tradition. Now it's virtually nonexistent, except outside the main commercial media.

Unrest, conflicting interests and resulting suppression are increasing problems worldwide, providing motivation for people driven to desperation by real or imagined fears to act upon those fears violently. That's why we may have an escalation of incidents like the recent one in Tucson. Fortunately, we have a wonderful precedent in this country of addressing potentially catastrophic conflict when confronted by major social changes, as in the civil rights era of the 60's. See my previous column, in the archives of the Big Horn County News http://www.bighorncountynews.com

or below for the complete column version of "What would MLK Say."

The best way to deal with this social pathology is to go to the root of the problem with real transparency, access to sustainable economy for families, and programs that address real problems of real families honestly and with the best appropriate technology. Dealing with our needs to grow and change as a nation when the needs affect the common citizens of our country is the time. We have done it before. Now, Egypt gives us a reason to do it again. Those who object, claiming our country is so much better than all the other nations, are following a route destructive of the values our founding fathers promoted. Let's not go backward as a nation to the values of King George and the Redcoats in 1776. Let's go forward.

So far, we have escalated building prisons and incarcerating the marginalized. Many criminologists know this is not

the best for our country. It's much better to have a fair economy, a fair health delivery program, a fair, healthy and transparent agriculture and food production enterprise, and a military under the control of the citizens of this country instead controlled by a humongous and powerful military industrial complex.

But in recent times the media has been largely stolen by interests that inflame, instill fear, and agitate us on agendas that sidetrack us to the real issues, the real cancer of oppression eating at the core of our nation and the world.

So Egyptians in Cairo, especially those with an anti-American rhetoric in the demonstrations, are a gift to us in America. Listen to them. We have in America the proven capacity to make major changes in our laws and the structure of our economy. We can see the evil, hear the evil, and set about to do what needs to be done.

How do we know which of the media pundits we should listen to? The Bible again is clear. "…For our warfare is not against flesh and blood." So wrote St. Paul, to the Ephesians caught in a similar religious/political civil conflict.

Whenever we hear a pundit or politician inciting us to hatred against a particular group of people, focusing on the identity of the group or individual as a terrible threat to our nation and worthy to be eliminated, let's forget it.

Whenever we hear of someone doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly among the world's peoples before God, let's follow that person.

It really is simple: those of us who are Christian, let's read the Gospels on what Jesus was like, what he did and said, and copy him. Or copy Paul as he told us to do, because he imitates Jesus. Those of us connected to another religion, I have a hunch this antidote against our plague of cancerous hatred is there too.

Organizations and religious groups connecting to this way of healing our nation and world are many. Search these on your browser:

Christian Peacemaker Teams

The Third Side (Harvard University)

Muslim Peacemaker Teams

American Friends Service Committee

Baptist Peace Fellowship

Sojourners Magazine

Southern Christian Leadership Council

Amity International

Over a thousand university peace studies departments worldwide

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

What would Martin Luther King say?

2011-01-26T18:49:00.001-08:00

Our government likes to revise history. Jeh C. Johnson spoke recently at a Pentagon ceremony honoring the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on his birthday, a national holiday. He tried to debunk the fierce antiwar message of King, claiming King would understand that Obama's war in Afghanistan is different, more like the mission of the Good Samaritan of Jesus' Gospel according to Luke*. I wonder about this.

In 1962 I was a freshman at Hesston College in Kansas. An African-American safe-cracking felon was converted to Jesus by a Mennonite missionary in the Chicago ghetto. He desperately needed a roommate as a condition of admission, and staying out of prison. Transformed by the power of Jesus, he had convinced the parole board to let him leave Cook County Jail, the Alcatraz of the Midwest, to enter Christian ministry training. The Dean of Students told me it was difficult finding a student willing to room with "a Negro."

An Iowa farm boy, I wasn't easily intimidated. I agreed. He moved in. I quickly got my first impression. He awoke every morning at 5:00 to a prayer and exercise regime including 50 pushups, the last 10 with handclaps. He was several years my senior, the years he had spent incarcerated. We became friends.

One late January snowbound evening he had a request. "I'm a felon. I can't even get a license to drive, and you have a car. I'll pay your gas. Take me to Tabor College to hear this lecture." I grudgingly agreed. I never heard of the lecturer, an African American with a PhD. His topic was the US constitution and the laws of segregation. He was responding to the loud extremist rhetoric in America then that racial segregation was both constitutional and within the laws of God. I questioned my roommate, "Are you sure this PhD Negro isn't a fake?"

We crept and slid my Dad's 54 Studebaker to Hillsboro. I remember little of the lecture, as my farm boy mental capacity strained at the constitutional law vocabulary. My roommate was totally awed by the speaker, and insisted I come back stage to meet this man, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and shake his hand. I grudgingly agreed, my skepticism intact. I couldn't then grasp the passion of the moment.

Spring 1964 on Easter Sunday morning I awoke drenched with dew and covered with a wet blanket on a piney woods hillside in Southern Alabama. We four white boys had not found a freedom school or civil rights group the night before that would take us in. We knew Dr. King was going to deliver the Easter Sunday sermon at his father's church in Montgomery. We had settled for the night on the ground near a closed campground in Taladega National Forest.

A Junior at Goshen College, Indiana, I had become good friends with our guide in the segregated south, Eli Hochstedler. He was a student the previous year at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. He told stories of café and bus sit-ins, police harassment, and his friendship with Medgar Evers, the civil rights activist assassinated with two others and buried in a dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. With two other guys exploring similar persuasions, we packed our primitive gear into a Ford Falcon and spent spring break visiting freedom schools in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.

We four unshaven college boys were immediately welcomed 15 minutes before starting time at the Dexter Avenue 2^nd Baptist Church in Montgomery. The church was packed, standing room only available. But the ushers marched us past rows of elegantly dressed congregants to the front row of the church where four little girls dressed in white with flowers in their hair obediently left their seats to make room for us. I was totally embarrassed. Martin Luther King, Sr., the pastor, Dr. King's father, preached hours, and finally Dr. King, Jr. was invited to the pulpit. He spoke 15 minutes; I timed it. The sermon remains etched in my memory like none other. The hand fans in the heat of that hot Easter Sunday are a distant 2nd.

Afterward my three college friends insisted on waiting in line to shake hands with Dr. King. I refused, explaining that I already shook his hand once. Exhausted, I took a nap in the back seat of our Falcon.

I still don't know why it took me so long to grasp this. Here on the back 40 I struggle to understand the interconnectedness of elements like c, h, o, p, k, n etc. with microbial funguses and bacteria, etc., to facilitate the sun's gift of life for all beings. But I should have understood more of the passion Jesus and King had that's so desperately needed in our world today for human life and security.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was one who facilitated the interconnectedness of all in the human race. He facilitated the Son's gift of life for all. But He was not Jesus. Like most of us, his personal morality fell far short of Jesus. Like St. Paul, he was striving to imitate Jesus. And imitating Jesus is the key. For centuries after Jesus died his followers were derisively called "little Christs" as they sought to imitate Jesus through acts that pundits mistakenly labeled as weakness, irrelevant to the evil they faced in their turbulent times.

Our modern times are turbulent, too. So where is Jesus now? Can we find Him among those needing food stamps because they have no living wage? Are Israeli citizens* really ministering to Him if they repair Palestinians' wells destroyed by settlers? Is He seen in those who lost access to health care because insurance discards them? Is He the alien given sanctuary illegally in our country? Is He the farmers and taxi drivers* incarcerated in Guantanamo? Does Jesus' experience with insurrection, chaos and terrorism in AD 30 have any relevance to America and its wars today?

Is the Pentagon spokesman Johnson correctly understanding what MLK would say? Can true moral strength for America come from killing evil people and breaking their access to basics of life? How sustainable is agriculture that cuts the fragile bonds in the plant roots between decaying funguses and pathogenic microbes?

It took me decades to start trying to figure this out, so I can't fault anyone for getting tired thinking about what MLK would say, let alone Jesus.

* Check out the following sources

Taayush has worked specifically on water issues between Palestinians and the Israeli occupation of Palestinians' land.

http://www.taayush.org/?p=1143

This website has links to Dr. King's speeches in the last years prior to his assassination:

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/01/13/obama_official_mlk_supports_our_wars

UK article on Guantanamo innocents:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7092435.ece

The Pentagon speech by Jeh C. Johnson and comments are here in the official defense department news release:

http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=62448

Israeli citizens have organized for peace with Palestinians, many of them joint efforts between Israelis and Palestinians. Most peace groups in Israel are allied with http://www.icahd.org

An important Christian-Jewish organization is Rabbis for Human Rights: http://www.rhr.israel.net

An organization working specifically with farm and water issues with Palestinians is http://www.taayush.org

Christian Peacemaker Teams is ministering in conflict zones all over the world, including the Middle East. http://www.cpt.org/

It's the contention of this columnist that these organizations are doing more than all the US military efforts to make us safe from terrorism, at less than 1% the cost.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Medicine and the Total Person

2011-01-17T10:47:00.001-08:00

American commercial medicine today neglects the most powerful healing tool gifted to humankind: the heart-mind connection (read The Heart Mind Connection, by Windsor Ting). Commercial medicine instead focuses on finding a specific biochemical mechanistic remedy for each separate pathological symptom. Ignoring this powerful, God-given tool seems a tragic mistake. Could it be that this is why there is so much dissatisfaction with our health care delivering industry?

A good friend of mine, who spends considerable time with terminally ill people, told me this story of how important the heart-mind connection is to the healing process:

I went to the hospital to visit my elderly friend, who was dying of terminal cancer. He was not expected to leave the hospital, with a life expectancy of a few weeks at best. I had just arrived when an older gentleman strode into his hospital room. He exuded confidence and care. I stepped aside in respect. He spoke loudly enough, so I could hear him quite clearly, to my consternation.

"I remember your pranks when we were kids," he began, "You were good-for-nothing then, and now look at you. You got yourself so sick you're about to die. Can't even hardly raise your eyes to look at me. Go ahead and die, you good-for-nothing, no one will miss you. The world is better without you."

There were a few seconds of shocked silence, and the sick one began gurgling. I didn't know what was happening. The gurgling turned into giggling, then laughter, and in seconds the sick one had lifted his arms, the visitor helped him sit up, and they were in each others arms laughing up a storm on his hospital bed. Neither could not stop laughing. There was no other conversation.

A nurse, hearing the commotion, came to investigate. Irritated, and concerned for the health of the frail cancer patient, she asked the old gentlemen to leave. He left with a smile after being with his friend for only a few minutes.

A few days later the terminally ill patient was discharged from the hospital. His cancer was in remission, and he lived years beyond his prognosis.

Health care providers have researched the heart-mind connection, and the unfortunately named "placebo" effect. It's one of the total-person wellness achievement practices gleaned from cultures other than modern European.

We have largely left the heart-mind connection, since we in America have married health delivery with commercial profiteering. Using technology to fix specific symptoms of debilitation reaps billions in profit for the owners of various drugs or devices. We call this system "fee-for-service", and it's pretty broken. Holistic care of the total person has been neglected, replaced by the practice of focusing on individual symptoms to which profit-making healing procedures are applied. Procedure-based health care is very expensive. So health insurance companies go to great lengths to limit the amount of this care it will pay for. This form of rationing further ratchets up the cost of care, as insurers pay a mint for the legal justification required to defend their denials of specific procedures. As medical inflation rates soar, across our nation, too many of our citizens can no longer afford reasonable health care. And even when we do have insurance, our doctors have less and less say in deciding how to care for us.

Sadly, this is the way the system has been designed for quite some time now. In the early '70's, government and health care promoters colluded to promote this highly profitable, procedure-based form of health care. Patient wellness took a back seat to the profit motive. Nixon's secret tapes reveal just that in his private conversations with CEO's of drug companies, hospital associations and health insurance companies. These tapes reveal that government conspired with commercial health interests to reduce health care delivery while increasing government bureaucracy and cash flows connected to compensation for procedures. Rather than paying for good health of the citizens, the government would pay for the amount of health care delivered—measured in numbers of tests, procedures, and prescriptions. Of course, this was not public information; it was a commercial secret, until the freedom-of-information act uncovered Nixon's secret tapes. Remember? It took a while before the legal hurdles of "national security interests" were overcome.

And ever since, as Americans have evolved from "citizens" to "consumers," health care delivery has moved away from compassion to profit. Price-gouging through the fee for service system increasingly reaps billions for the industry. Unfortunately, the health reforms of our politicians—Obama, honest Republicans (are there any?) and dishonest Democrats—leave untouched this greatest mistaken expense in the health care of our nation.

My friend who told me the story at the beginning of this column is not a politician. He is honest. And while he has been personally involved with the Apsáalooke teasing clan culture for decades, he did not know of its vast potential for healing. I'm not sure that anyone fully understands this healing phenomenon. But because it's free, and not subject to patent or license, it will probably never be formally studied. In the meantime, could it be that we're not getting our money's worth in this country when it comes to health care? Is it possible that when health care becomes an "industry"—particularly one that accounts for so much profit—we the people lose out? http://greenwoodback40.blogspot.com/

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David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org