Happy New Year to all!
2011 was a year of stability in our house. I am hoping 2012 is at least the same.
Wishing you all peace, health and prosperity in the coming year! We all deserve nothing less than that.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Travel!
Well, if this isn't on a global scale, then I don't know what is. I think this is a great way to inspire people to just get out there and travel the world. See the sights. Meet the people. I know many do not have the means, but if you do then get out there and do it!
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Amazing thing in South Korea!
Now commuters can grocery shop while waiting on the subway platform for their ride! Tesco is testing this out and so far has had a good response. What next!!??
CLICK HERE to read the story and watch the demo video.
CLICK HERE to read the story and watch the demo video.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Global Small Farming.
Small Farm Canada, a national magazine in Canada to promote small farming as a viable endeavour, has gone digital!! Subscriptions are available through Zinio and can be read on PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone and Android powered devices. Even though it is based in Canada many of the articles can be applied to small farming around the planet. And with a digital subscription you can get instant access no matter where you are!
Click here to subscribe or order the current issue to see what it's all about.
Click here to subscribe or order the current issue to see what it's all about.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Which Corporations Are The Biggest Freeloaders?
Which Corporations Are The Biggest Freeloaders?
REALLY??!! They have these kinds of profits yet aspects of the US are looking like a third world country.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Too funny to not share!
Is Randy Hopper The Worst Wisconsin State Senator Ever?
Wow, the drama in WI just keeps building and building. Sounds more like some Hollywood movie or a really bad soap opera.
Wow, the drama in WI just keeps building and building. Sounds more like some Hollywood movie or a really bad soap opera.
Monday, February 21, 2011
WI, OH, who is next...?
Fighting the 5 fascisms in Wisconsin & Ohio
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
February 21, 2011
The escalating confrontations in Wisconsin and Ohio are ultimately about preventing the United States from becoming a full-on fascist state.
The stakes could not be higher---or more clear.
As defined by its inventor, Benito Mussolini, fascism is "corporate control of the state." There are ways to beat around the Bush---Paul Krugman has recently written about "oligarchy"---but it's time to end all illusions and call what we now confront by its true name.
The fights in Wisconsin, Ohio, and in numerous other states are about saving the last shreds of American democracy. They burn down to five basic realities:
1) The bulwark of modern democracy is the trade union. This has been true since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. All social programs can trace their roots to union activism, as can the protection of our civil liberties.
The first Germans Hitler put in concentration camps were neither Jews nor gypsies---they were trade unionists.
The attacks on state workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere have nothing to do with balancing budgets. That could easily be done without destroying collective bargaining.
For the hard-right, this is about busting unions, the last organized force standing in the way of total corporate control of the United States by the rich and richer.
2) The material essence of fascism is the extreme separation of rich and poor, a massive transfer of wealth from those on the bottom to those on the top.
The unbalanced budgets in Ohio and Wisconsin are rooted in huge tax cuts given to the rich at the expense of the middle and lower classes. Widespread poverty among those who might otherwise rebel is essential to fascist control of a government.
A largely ignored aspect of this fight is the hundreds of billions of dollars currently locked up in union, government and Social Security pension funds. With unions destroyed, this huge cache of dollars will fall quickly into corporate hands. The additional "benefit" for the financial elite will be tens of millions of impoverished elders desperate for low-wage jobs in virtual slave labor situations.
3) The crisis crippling states everywhere is directly related to the massive destruction of social resources by war. Since the end of the New Deal and World War II, the American elite have engineered the biggest dump of material wealth by military means in human history.
The trillions of dollars of pure martial waste poured into the Cold War and those in Southeast Asia, central America, the Middle East, Southwest Asia and elsewhere could easily have clothed, housed, fed, educated, and provided otherwise decent lives for all human beings the world over.
Instead, poverty, desperation and stratification have been guaranteed.
The entire economic crisis now gripping the United States can be directly traced to the military budget, which exceeds the sum of what's being spent by all other nations combined. In a brilliant recent column, Robert Greenwald points out that the entire alleged shortfall in Wisconsin could be covered by bringing just 180 troops home from Afghanistan.
But the purpose of that deployment is to undermine national security, not to protect it. A frightened, impoverished, insecure nation is one dependent on its fascist elite.
Democracy demands and protects true material security among the people as a whole. That's what's really at stake in the battle to cut the military budget. The fights in Ohio and Wisconsin are surface manifestations of that bigger battle.
4) Mussolini also made it clear that corporate control of the media is essential to fascist rule. Whoever would seize power first took the radio stations, then the television stations. Now the internet is under attack. The free flow of information is fascism's ultimate enemy.
So the relentless Foxist portrayal of the battles in Wisconsin and Ohio as pitting "responsible, austerity-minded" governors versus "lazy, irresponsible state workers" is utterly predictable.
So is the appearance of the media-created Tea Party "movement" on the side of the corporations. It's standard corporate procedure to invent a faux "grassroots" to fight unions and working people. So finding phony corporate "populists" like Sarah Palin and New Jersey's Chris Christie in the right-wing media limelight is utterly predictable.
5) It is no accident that the "job loving" union-hating governors of Wisconsin and Ohio (along with Florida) have rejected billions in federal funds for re-building passenger rail service that would create thousands of jobs.
A corporate state relies on central control of energy. Rail service threatens the power of the oil and auto lobbies. Renewable energy would replace centralized "King Cong" (coal, oil, nukes & gas) sources with decentralized Solartopia photovoltaic panels, bio-fuels, windmills, increased efficiency and the like. The push for federal nuclear loan guarantees is central to the corporate state.
The anti-union governor of Ohio is strongly focused on killing not only train service but all incentives for renewable energy. His energy plan is for extreme right-wing nuke-based monopolies like FirstEnergy to run the show. Atomic power is the ultimate weapon against community control.
For decades the term "fascist" has been dismissed from use in this country, and perhaps rightly so. Corporations have been dominant in the US since the 1880s, but we have managed to maintain a modicum of democracy.
It's hard to see that happening if the remnants of the organized labor movement are crushed in Wisconsin and Ohio. Both states have long, important traditions of union activism.
In the wake of Citizens United, with the courts, media, Congress and presidency firmly in corporate control, we see no easy road to victory for working people.
"Vote the bastards out" has become a pipedream in the age of electronic voting machines. Especially in Ohio, a reliable electoral vote count is a thing of the past.
We also have a president who was elected with strong labor support and who is now genuflecting toward the unions. But US history is filled with Democrats who have betrayed their working-class backers, and this one may prove no exception.
So in the long run, we have only ourselves to rely on. The way to survival is not clear.
Ultimately, as Martin Luther King said, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."
But from time to time, it does break. If these uprisings in Wisconsin and Ohio fail, there will---literally---be hell to pay.
Somehow, we must find a way to make sure they don't.
--
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, which are at www.freepress.org, where Bob's FITRAKIS FILES also appear. HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE US is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH. Originally published by http://freepress.org.
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
February 21, 2011
The escalating confrontations in Wisconsin and Ohio are ultimately about preventing the United States from becoming a full-on fascist state.
The stakes could not be higher---or more clear.
As defined by its inventor, Benito Mussolini, fascism is "corporate control of the state." There are ways to beat around the Bush---Paul Krugman has recently written about "oligarchy"---but it's time to end all illusions and call what we now confront by its true name.
The fights in Wisconsin, Ohio, and in numerous other states are about saving the last shreds of American democracy. They burn down to five basic realities:
1) The bulwark of modern democracy is the trade union. This has been true since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. All social programs can trace their roots to union activism, as can the protection of our civil liberties.
The first Germans Hitler put in concentration camps were neither Jews nor gypsies---they were trade unionists.
The attacks on state workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere have nothing to do with balancing budgets. That could easily be done without destroying collective bargaining.
For the hard-right, this is about busting unions, the last organized force standing in the way of total corporate control of the United States by the rich and richer.
2) The material essence of fascism is the extreme separation of rich and poor, a massive transfer of wealth from those on the bottom to those on the top.
The unbalanced budgets in Ohio and Wisconsin are rooted in huge tax cuts given to the rich at the expense of the middle and lower classes. Widespread poverty among those who might otherwise rebel is essential to fascist control of a government.
A largely ignored aspect of this fight is the hundreds of billions of dollars currently locked up in union, government and Social Security pension funds. With unions destroyed, this huge cache of dollars will fall quickly into corporate hands. The additional "benefit" for the financial elite will be tens of millions of impoverished elders desperate for low-wage jobs in virtual slave labor situations.
3) The crisis crippling states everywhere is directly related to the massive destruction of social resources by war. Since the end of the New Deal and World War II, the American elite have engineered the biggest dump of material wealth by military means in human history.
The trillions of dollars of pure martial waste poured into the Cold War and those in Southeast Asia, central America, the Middle East, Southwest Asia and elsewhere could easily have clothed, housed, fed, educated, and provided otherwise decent lives for all human beings the world over.
Instead, poverty, desperation and stratification have been guaranteed.
The entire economic crisis now gripping the United States can be directly traced to the military budget, which exceeds the sum of what's being spent by all other nations combined. In a brilliant recent column, Robert Greenwald points out that the entire alleged shortfall in Wisconsin could be covered by bringing just 180 troops home from Afghanistan.
But the purpose of that deployment is to undermine national security, not to protect it. A frightened, impoverished, insecure nation is one dependent on its fascist elite.
Democracy demands and protects true material security among the people as a whole. That's what's really at stake in the battle to cut the military budget. The fights in Ohio and Wisconsin are surface manifestations of that bigger battle.
4) Mussolini also made it clear that corporate control of the media is essential to fascist rule. Whoever would seize power first took the radio stations, then the television stations. Now the internet is under attack. The free flow of information is fascism's ultimate enemy.
So the relentless Foxist portrayal of the battles in Wisconsin and Ohio as pitting "responsible, austerity-minded" governors versus "lazy, irresponsible state workers" is utterly predictable.
So is the appearance of the media-created Tea Party "movement" on the side of the corporations. It's standard corporate procedure to invent a faux "grassroots" to fight unions and working people. So finding phony corporate "populists" like Sarah Palin and New Jersey's Chris Christie in the right-wing media limelight is utterly predictable.
5) It is no accident that the "job loving" union-hating governors of Wisconsin and Ohio (along with Florida) have rejected billions in federal funds for re-building passenger rail service that would create thousands of jobs.
A corporate state relies on central control of energy. Rail service threatens the power of the oil and auto lobbies. Renewable energy would replace centralized "King Cong" (coal, oil, nukes & gas) sources with decentralized Solartopia photovoltaic panels, bio-fuels, windmills, increased efficiency and the like. The push for federal nuclear loan guarantees is central to the corporate state.
The anti-union governor of Ohio is strongly focused on killing not only train service but all incentives for renewable energy. His energy plan is for extreme right-wing nuke-based monopolies like FirstEnergy to run the show. Atomic power is the ultimate weapon against community control.
For decades the term "fascist" has been dismissed from use in this country, and perhaps rightly so. Corporations have been dominant in the US since the 1880s, but we have managed to maintain a modicum of democracy.
It's hard to see that happening if the remnants of the organized labor movement are crushed in Wisconsin and Ohio. Both states have long, important traditions of union activism.
In the wake of Citizens United, with the courts, media, Congress and presidency firmly in corporate control, we see no easy road to victory for working people.
"Vote the bastards out" has become a pipedream in the age of electronic voting machines. Especially in Ohio, a reliable electoral vote count is a thing of the past.
We also have a president who was elected with strong labor support and who is now genuflecting toward the unions. But US history is filled with Democrats who have betrayed their working-class backers, and this one may prove no exception.
So in the long run, we have only ourselves to rely on. The way to survival is not clear.
Ultimately, as Martin Luther King said, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."
But from time to time, it does break. If these uprisings in Wisconsin and Ohio fail, there will---literally---be hell to pay.
Somehow, we must find a way to make sure they don't.
--
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, which are at www.freepress.org, where Bob's FITRAKIS FILES also appear. HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE US is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH. Originally published by http://freepress.org.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Born This Way blog.
In some of my recent travels around the internet I have stumbled on a rather interesting blog. At least I think so. Perhaps it is due to my sense of commonality to it, a kindred spirit if you'd like. Regardless of the reason I think it is one of the more interesting blogs I have come across. It speaks of struggle, acceptance, don't f--k with me attitude and happiness. Check it out and let me know what you think. If you like please pass the word - it's fabulous!
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
New Ricky Martin video.
See Ricky getting a bit personal and perhaps introspective now. I definitely like this one.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
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