I recently received this sad “humor” forwarded by a very old friend from our high school and young-adult days.  (In spite of it, she’s actually a very nice lady – a retired nurse – normally caring, gentle, compassionate.  But she lives in Florida, and I can’t help but think she’s just fallen-in with a bad [...]

Normally, one can use a candidate’s position and policy statements to predict – at least somewhat – their probable performance if they win their election. However, on almost every significant position and policy he had taken, Willard [Mitt] Romney and his official spokespeople have issued totally contradictory statements. (Except about his ignoring his father’s well-justified [...]

First published by the Pittsburg Post Gazette April 8, 2012 5:47 pm By Michael Cudahy and Jock Gill If ever there was a moment for Americans to pay attention to the state of their democracy — or what is left of it — that time is now. As this country staggers out of the worst [...]

I have some reservations about the notion that everything must be monetized for profit.  I am confident that both Benjamin Franklin and Adam Smith would have soundly rejected this monotonic focus on “profit”.  My limited experience in working with in development at the bottom of the pyramid is that for profit efforts create a situation [...]

In order to support and strengthen the recent American and Chinese commitments to the concept of Low Carbon Economies, perhaps these policy guide lines and goals could be incorporated into the Waxman Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 [H.R. 2454]. 1. Sequester additional carbon in the soils and forests in a sustainable [...]

Posted by: Jock Gill Robert David Steele has posted a free book: Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig. Author’s Preface The financial fraud now capturing the attention of all who focus on the pathologies of both Wall Street and Washington is NOT our Nation’s greatest threat. While the proposed bail‐out is both unconstitutional (seeking to [...]

Over the past few days, I’ve been getting into discussions with various conservatives comparing their concern about big government with liberals about their concern about big business. My primary concern is that centralized power, whether it be with big government or big businesses is not the best way of addressing the issues we face. Some [...]

Could a President Obama set us free? What is the “The Trap“? It is a three part film by Adam Curtis, broadcast by the BBC in March 2007. Curtis’s narration concludes with the observation that the game theory/free market model is now undergoing interrogation by economists who suspect a more irrational model of behaviour is [...]

Wall Street and Washington Are Failing Spectacularly — Where Do We Go? By Joe Costello, AlterNet. Posted April 15, 2008. The U.S. political and economic systems are not equipped to deal with the looming problems of the 21st century. I was 19 in October 1979, when I first stepped into a campaign office. It was [...]

In this weeks Green Grapevine, published weekly in the Times Argus, Rutland Herald, and Brattleboro Reformer, Daniel Hecht writes a review of James Howard Kunstler’s 2004 – 2005 book The Long Emergency. The Long Emergency Predicts a Dire Future James Kunstler’s The Long Emergency is something like required reading among peak oil activists, and it’s [...]