Vermont Yankee Radioactive Plume

This week, Peter Shumlin, President Pro Tem of the Vermont State Senate, announced that the Senate will vote on whether Vermont Yankee should be closed on schedule.

The first vote will be this week and the final vote will be next week! After years of work by thousands of Vermonters, this is it!

Click here to send a message to your Senator.

Do you know who will deliver the keynote speech at NOFA, the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont this weekend? A Monsanto man who was put in charge of the USDA. Yet another case of the fox entrusted to guard the hen house. Remember James Watt?

This is a slap-in-the-face to every small farmer in Vermont.

Today I learned that I have been censored from asking any questions in the staged Q&A session after the Monsanto keynote speech.

Gotcha.  That's some of what I've been hearing out there, when talking to people about their concerns... if they're well off, folks are as yet unwilling to even discuss the subject of secession. They haven't been hurt yet by the general decline.  They'll even agree with my first three Senate campaign points, but are afraid of No. 4:

1. NO further Vermont support for War, Torture…or deployment of VT National
   Guard. Order the Guard home now.
2. NOT a dime more for Wall Street…Invest VT funds in VT small banks and
   credit unions for lending here at home.
3. Build a Green Vermont via serious investments in alternative energy,
   human-food-agriculture, and all local community efforts towards self reliance
   and town/village life. Clean, green, decent, peaceful & fun. 
4. Start the discussion with all Vermonters re returning our state to the
   status of a free Independent Republic [as we once were], maintaining free trade
   & good relations with all other nations of the world. 

...and there's the rub.  Nos. 1 through 3, everything that we hope to achieve in Vermont, can happily be blocked or perverted by a federal government pushing its 'standards' and increasingly desperate economic measures and civil repression onto Vermonters.

If you've still got lots of money, the last paragraph may make me sound like a nutjob, a Jeremiah. If you're like most Vermonters, trying like hell to make ends meet as Montpelier cuts essential services; if your kids, parent, spouse (in one case both spouses, leaving the children behind) have been grabbed for Afghanistan, No. 4 begins to make sense!

A day after listening to Obama's cliches, vague talk about what ails us, and his hard clasping onto our tired old misdirected values and nonsolutions, I was rather surprised to read what the French president Sarkozy said in the opening address of the G20 World Economic Forum at Davos. This is after all the gathering of the world's top capitalists and globalizers. Moreover, in the French political scene, Sarkozy is the "right winger" whose election was a sore point with leftists there, to the point of strikes and riots. And yet, he apparently has both the brains, and the political breathing room, to make statements that Obama would not dare to utter. The annotated excerpts below will demonstrate the kind of re-thinking that the Western world desperately needs, but that the American Empire is least able to contemplate. I am not bringing Sarkozy up as the best thinker and talker on these issues, but rather as an anti-hero who is drawn into, and able, to bring up these issues that are forbidden by Obama's puppetmasters. Sarkozy also threw in the obligatory nice words about capitalism, globalization, finance, and the G20 institution, and he lied about what happened in Copenhagen, but that didn't stop him from clearly stating his main points.

Yes, in the world of tomorrow, we must again reckon with citizens, with the demands of morality, the demands of responsibility, the demands of dignity for citizens. We must see this not as yet another problem, but as part of the solution; not as an additional difficulty, but as something healthy and virtuous, that may, perhaps, allow us to feel happier with what we are, happier with what we accomplish.

Why, in the midst of Collapse, is North Dakota relatively unaffected? Why are foreclosures and job losses not keeping pace with the rest of the Empire?

One good reason is that the people of North Dakota have their own Bank. Vermont desperately needs such a bank, and yesterday.

I see businesses in Vermont failing because of infrastructure failure and decay, not just due to the financial collapse. My Aunt in Richmond can't go to a local greengrocer anymore, but must drive to a  distant supermarket.  Because the banks weren't local enough to care to lend the greengrocer enough money to keep its doors open, when the town bridge was closed for maintenence.

A Bank of Vermont could've allowed the greengrocer and other area businesses to stay open.  The buildings would not be boarded up, with the absentee landowners and Wall Street the only people still making a living. The employees would still be working. Former customers would not be polluting their way to a distant supermarket. 

And now Montpelier are going to pay $200k to a demolition firm to blow up the only bridge across Lake Champlain.  Without a replacement, without an economic plan.  The problem of capital flow, the lack of a Vermont Bank, the failure of our representatives has just been expanded.  The ripple effects of this are reaching all over my homeland of Vermont, and beyond.

Do you favour the creation of a Bank of Vermont? Independent candidates in the next Vermont election do! Just ask them. And then vote for them. Watch for the public announcement of the Independents in Montpelier on January 15th!

Democratic/Republican candidates avoid this issue: whom do they really represent? You, or the big corporate banks? If you believe that Morgan Stanley and Bank of America have Vermont's own interests at heart, vote for the Donkeyphant. If you believe that the role of your representatives is to allocate borrowed stimulus money, you can stand under the Donkeyphant's hind legs and test the trickle-down theory.

The following article was written by Ellen Brown, the author of Web of Debt, and appeared in the Huffington Post.

Job Losses? Not in North Dakota. A Stimulus Plan That Really Works

Thanksgiving Day is a special day for those following the peak oil news. Geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, author of Hubbert's Peak, predicted that Thanksgiving Day 2005 would mark the peak in world oil production. After that, oil production would decline, irreversibly. And he may have been right. Crude oil production figures have been removed from the most widely influential official statistics, so it's not easy to check. Even if crude production numbers were easily available, the numbers are so uncertain that it's hard to see anything other than the biggest trends.

When Deffeyes made the prediction, almost two years before Thanksgiving 2005, his tongue was only slightly in his cheek. Oil production data are not nearly precise enough to establish a peak day.

Was Deffeyes at least right about the year of peak oil?

I looked for the answer in the official figures from the US Department of Energy and the International Energy Agency in Paris. The main tables on world oil production no longer report what's called crude oil and condensate. Condensate is a byproduct of natural gas production. What they call “oil production” now includes all manner of liquid fuels, including ethanol and synfuels, synthetic fuels. Peak oil is about, well, oil. Not how much alcohol is produced.  

Probably if I dug down into the web sites, or made some phone calls, I could find the crude oil data again. But when the two primary public energy reporting agencies in the world change the most prominent way they report oil production, and they do it in a way that could hide peak oil, I'm suspicious.

Second, even if I found the crude oil and condensate numbers, it requires a leap of faith to believe them. Matthew Simmons is an investment banker with decades of experience in the oil industry. The way he tells it, the unaudited oil production figures sound suspiciously like the finance industry's CDOs, collateralized debt obligations. The ones that played a big role in bringing down the world economy last year, when they turned out to be worth a lot less than people thought. Like CDOs, no one really knows what's in the oil production figures from each country. Incredibly enough, there's no outside auditor to check them out.

Simmons thinks that 2005 was the peak year for oil production. If so, Deffeyes might even have been right about oil production peaking on Thanksgiving that year.

Deffeyes' prediction looks pretty good even if we look at the unreliable and misleading data on total liquids, including ethanol and synfuels. There was a rapid run-up in price from 2005 to 2008, which you'd think would lead to greater production. But no, production stagnated in 2006 and 2007, and only increased slightly in 2008. Since then, economic collapse has reduced demand, so production in 2009 is down again, below 2005 levels. According to the official figures.

Regardless of the actual date of peak oil, we can give thanks for oil's blessings. As Deffeyes put it: "Thanks for the services of the first half of recoverable world oil. Thanks for the automobile, the airplane, diesel trains and ships, two-lane blacktop, warm houses, plastics, and a huge range of petrochemicals. [The Thanksgiving dinner itself] was produced with fertilizers, tractor fuel, pesticides, and transportation provided by oil and natural gas."

Of course, oil has been a mixed blessing. The age of oil has also brought the age of World Wars, poisonings from pollution on an unprecedented scale, destruction of cities for parking lots and ugly suburbs, and habitat destruction, climate change, and other pressures that threaten most species on the planet, including ours.

As we give thanks for the blessings of oil, let us keep in mind the curses of oil, and let us ask for the wisdom to use the remaining half of the world's oil reserves more for useful, durable products than throw-away plastic cutlery, more for insulating homes and constructing wind turbines than for heating drafty homes and generating electricity, and more for medicines and food production than for guns and warplanes.

Happy Thanksgiving!

[This is an updated version of a post from 2007.]

Hearing all the attacks on Obama recently for being a socialist got me thinking. I wonder if any of the attackers ever drive to work on a public road or went to public school?

He spent the weekend killing pigs. Well, not the whole weekend; after all, it’s not the killing – the soft pull of the trigger, the quick probing with blade to loose the lifeblood whilst the heart still beats – that eats time. It’s the aftermath. This year they decided to scald and scrape, a technique chosen for the preservation of the skin, allowing for the production of enormous dry-cured hams that were salted and chilled, before being hung in the basement, to be eaten a year hence.

Frank Walker of California wrote an unpublished essay in 1980, in which he spelled out a seminal reform of taxation with respect to the Commons, a reform that I hope to see actualised in a free and indpendent Vermont. 

This morning I learned that his proposition will come to the ballot in California.  This represents for California a significant departure from the 'American Way' of economics, a 'free market' that is free in name only.  A departure from the empire... could secession be close behind?

Vermont now has a precious metals-based token, the Clover !

Fifty Clovers

I've got one in my pocket now; first time since going to college that I've been financially in the black!  

Wrote a piece about Scott Nearing, Vermont's Founding Father for the Commons recently, here is a link.  The following is from the official announcement at the Second Vermont Republic website.  You can order your own Clovers from the first minting there!

What might the medium of exchange of a free and independent Vermont look like? Just like the recently minted Second Vermont Republic’s Scott Nearing 50 Clover Silver Token.