Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

Not much more can be said, or implied about fences than the classic Robert Frost Poem known to many as Mending Wall. However the use of this proverbial wisdom dates back at least a couple of centuries. Perhaps the maxim is just plain silly, but having a retreat from the world as we come to know it strikes me as not at all bad. At the writing of this post, we are midway into a project that will finally give us a retreat from crapping dogs, whose owners let them frequent our place, the curious neighbor children who, lacking guidance or oversight wander into our yard as casually as they would their own and hopefully some protection from the gawkers, thieves and predators who would otherwise prey upon our activities, property and chickens. Oddly enough, many people and countless dogs and cats have felt the need to wander into our space and in the case of the dogs, leave a little something to remember them by. I have seen the neighbor's dog stalking our chickens as close as their pen would allow the dog to get. I have seen children poking things into the coop, the chicken tractor and can't seem to fathom what they could be thinking as they harass them.

This being said, the flow of our yard out into the park which lies adjacent to our property will be forever lost. The easy carry of our canoes into the river less than 100 feet away, the primary selling point for the house when we bought it, will be complicated a bit by having to schlep the canoes through a gate and the rote they will need to be carried will be a bit more difficult and circuitous. In spite of that, the benefits will slightly outweigh the costs and the look of our place, though disjointed from the rest of the property around us will be more quaint and provincial. I never saw myself as the picket fence kind of guy. In fact, I have frequently heard that term used pejoratively for dullards and old farts. I guess, now that I'm approaching fifty, I'd rather sacrifice a little than step in dog shit while harvesting my tomatoes. The wonderful feeling of having the closest thing to the country in the city will be lost forever, you see, our yard used to open out into a river side park that guarantees that the adjacent 110 acres will never be developed. After ten years of planting trees, I had a visual screen that gave us a bit of shade and privacy, but the trunks failed to slow the onslaught of other people's incursions into our space. Now, though one problem will be solved, another arises.

One of the funniest things that I have ever done is to wrap my yard with a fence. Other than keeping my chickens or a dog, when we have owned them, in or keeping critters out, there has been little need for fences in my life. The fences I have always loved were rock walls, but that has been sufficiently covered in another entry. Even the fence that is going in now is being built atop a retaining wall of brick that, although it has only been built within the past month or so looks like it has been in place much longer. I'm sure that there are as many reasons not to have one as there are to cordon off one's own bit of space. If I could just get used to people sneaking up to me in my own yard, or the dogs, or the cats, or even the creatures of the night who seek to harry my chickens, I wouldn't have even considered putting up the barrier. Instead, I'm going ahead with the project in the hope that most folks and their critters will decide to go elsewhere. I realized in advance that in some respects, I'm making myself an island, but inevitably, no matter how far away your island may be from the rest of civilization, some of their crap will eventually wash up on your shore. I'm just hoping that the poorly trained pet owners will no longer be an issue, that the physical barrier will reduce the number of interlopers and that the "line in the sand", having been drawn will help others to respect my boundaries.

Just as in kindergarten, the tiny fraction of bad actors require everyone to be punished. This is where the simple act of building a fence gets really complicated for me. I often don't have time to catch and educate each and every offensive dog owner. I have not yet come upon a fail safe method of keeping curious children away from my "attractive nuisances", nor can I prevent adults from taking the liberty of walking into private property uninvited so I'm hoping that the fence will do what civilization has not. "Stone armed" as I may be, I will sleep better at night and hopefully harvest tomatoes without the agitation of sticky, stinky and heinous feet. Just for a moment I have to stray from this well-reasoned and mellow cadence to say, "You stupid fools! I don't shit in your yard, why would you let your dogs crap in mine?" Some might say that spending so much in an attempt to isolate ourselves from the outside world is frivolity run amok, but until you have lived with ten years of your yard being a thoroughfare, the malicious hooliganism that strangers bring to you in the night and the unwanted forays into your vegetable patch by both children and pets, you may never understand the need for a little condom between you and the rest of the world.

Most proverbial wisdom was hard won centuries ago, but was important enough top ring true through the ages. The fence may not actually make our neighbors good, but by keeping most of them at arms length, we may be able to live our own lives without being subjected to their faults. The only part of the process that I'm not excited about is feeling like I'm turning my back on all the respectful and welcome folks who I would want to have see my projects, enjoy seeing me toil in the garden, or invite to sit by the fire and have a glass of wine on a cool autumn night. In spite of all the conversations and friends that I might have made without a fence, the urge to protect myself from the unwanted strangers who would defile my property has won the day. I'm both happy and sad about the decision. Ten years from now I still won't miss the crap but I may never again feel the thrill of turkeys wandering through my yard or the exquisite feeling of my yard extending out to the river bank and beyond in an unbroken carpet of grass. The end of each and every era comes with both opportunity and loss. now, for all you folks who may feel excluded, just knock and we will invite you in!

Just Sayin'

Fortunately and unfortunately, little is said these days that has the potential to make waves. Real and lasting change seems to be even harder to inspire than just allowing things to continue to muddle along. Not that we have forgotten what is at stake, perhaps we have not yet realized our contributions to or level of complicity in the bigger picture. For that we can be forgiven. One would like to think that we have progressed beyond the 1984 mentality that the three major superpowers will continue to do the endless dance, pairing up two at a time to defeat the third, then trading alliances when victory is nigh. Have we forgotten that we are only one tribe, only one family of human beings on the planet? The outlandish claims made by many nationalists, the "family values" crowd and those preoccupied with law and order are enough to dull the senses and obscure many basic facts. The greatest proof we have that we are one people, sharing a finite planet came from the photos of Earth from space that are barely two generations old. We have yet to come to a full understanding of just what those images mean for the future of our species. The boundaries that we place on the globe are both capricious and arbitrary. The rhetoric that flooded the airwaves about the "moral majority" were as parochial and provincial as bedtime stories. Designed to give power to a marginalized faction, they did their mischievous work while many of us were asleep, hoping it was all a bad dream. finally, we find ourselves in the lowest crime period in over thirty years, but yet we are deathly afraid of crimes against the small amount of property we have left. The fleecing we have endured at the hands of the ultra wealthy is nearly unfathomable but nowhere do you hear of class action suits against the banks, white collar criminality or the wholesale propping up of sectors of the economy that have outlived their economic and social import.

Assuming we have the right to freedoms delineated in our Constitution, they must be squarely supported by responsibilities as inalienable as the rights themselves. There is nothing patriotic about greed, deception, tax avoidance schemes or receiving corporate welfare. Wielding the title "too big to fail" only assures that the public will come to the aid financially whenever stupid ideas go awry. How about the vast middle class that has lost the majority of their assets over the past five years or so? Were they not too big to fail? Who will buy anything when the lion's share of the wealth is locked up in only a few people's hands? I'm sure that many are tired of hearing these doleful laments, but the tribe of humans that need to take heed occasionally need to be led to these issues in spite of their reluctance to face the facts. big freedoms demand big responsibility, as a parent, i try to teach my own children this important fact almost daily. Who will help uys to face these truths as a nation?

Next time we look to the "market" to solve a pressing problem, investigate the track record of commercialism ion solving individual woes. If you think we could live without a "safety net", remember how ugly the dust bowl days were on the plains. Remember the fortunes lost to corporations with the subsidization of railroads, steel mills, electricity production and distribution and through interstate commerce courtesy of the interstate highway system. Rather than enhancing freedom, each of these great undertakings served to funnel more money into fewer and fewer hands. whoever the government climbs into bed with produces the same offspring. Greed, neglect, disenfranchisement and woe are the cost of ignoring one another. Through the distorting lens of our current media circus, "all sides" of the issues are never represented, just the polar opposites. If no angry professionals exist who are competent to speak on any matter, the media can still find "experts" on any subject to take the most outlandish positions, not for the sake of truth, but for the sake of the argument. When lies are necessary, fabricating them has become as easy as a few mouse clicks.
 Getting a grip in this day and age is nearly harder than survival was to our ancestors. I for one am interested in fact, not fiction, love, not hate and I want everyone to have enough, even if it means threatening the unbridled positions of the ultra wealthy. Just sayin'.

Cheaters Don't Need To Pay Attention

In our attempts to make the world more and more idiot resistant we have come up against an unintended consequence. I do believe there are ways to recover from this life out of balance, but it will require some sacrifice and diligence on our part. We have innovated our way into a sophisticated system in which capital is thoroughly divorced from things that matter most, the means of production has sucked up into too few hands and with which we can placate the masses with nothing more than streams of electrons and products that can be produced for pennies and sold for dollars. The cheaters are still in charge of the system and they assure themselves that they will always have the upper hand. Their ace in the hole is that they think that we all need them to fake their way to the top and siphon out the lion's share of the wealth that is created from the sweat of the forgotten man's brow.

I started to realize just how much trouble we were in over thirty years ago. I was tired of the two or three guys who sat behind me cheating (copying from my answers) during tests, so I purposely answered the most ridiculous way I could think of. The teacher, noticing all of our tests were identical, called me aside and asked why I had cheated. I knew her and thought she knew me, so I told her of my ruse. I asked her if I could re-take the test in private and she agreed. When I aced the test, she gave the other boys a passing grade, but let my original test score stand. She told me that had I done my best, those cheaters would have found a way to get the best grade possible, instead, I helped them to fail and that was what was wrong. We are in the same position today. Those who have not paid attention to history or economics, mathematics or science are cheating, just like they did in grade school. The problem is that we let them and the bigger lies they tell, the more insane their logic, the more responsibility we trust them with. The recent addition to the slate of "presidential candidates", from Texas, is an excellent case in point. Never mind the economic and environmental facts, just forge ahead spouting outright lies and the news will cover you as if you are their darling. Now, because their weak minds have been titillated by the digital manifestation of his lies, they will parrot back the falsehoods and claim them to be true.

There are not scientists converting daily to the belief that climate changer is a myth. There is actually no better way to reduce pollution and climate destabilization and raising much needed money than from a carbon tax. It is customary to tax things we do not want more of. Perhaps what is needed is a raving lunatic tax or a bold faced lie tax. The slate of candidates would clean itself up if the tax was high enough.

Hardly a word is said in the public sphere that relates to the fact that a large portion of Northern Japan and the ocean around it will be inhospitable for humans for centuries thanks to splitting atoms for power. Even less is said about the fact that the green light that was originally given to nuclear energy was because of the need for weapons grade material that can only be made in nuclear reactors. The facts about nuclear energy are as chilling now as they have always been, but the cheaters never wanted us to know about the truth. Similarly, those who claim that US reserves of fuel will last for centuries are just dead wrong. To "harvest" the oil shale and tar sands that are touted as our energy salvation will require billions of kiloquads of energy being wasted in the fracking and extraction processes. Making energy this way is akin to carrying water from a well miles away in a bucket with a hole in it.


The banks cheated their way into such a deep hole that we all had to bail them out. Now we can see how willing they are to help us. Car companies as well fought tooth and nail to be allowed to continue doing the wrong thing, yet my car, a 1999 model gets fifty miles to the gallon. My intuition tells me that whenever we determine a necessary path to make the future better that we find no shortage of idiots who make themselves cheerleaders for doing nothing, or worse, continuing down the wrong path at full tilt. The very word "conservative" has been twisted and eviscerated by the religious right, their tea party offspring and the gun-totin' nationalists who claim that our paternalistic government will one day limit their freedoms to bear arms. The well-organized militia part of the constitution may as well not even be there. The cheats, liars and true terrorists only pay attention to things that make their quirky claims seem real.

I have seen little good come of commissions, committees and inquiries, focus groups, advisory councils and working groups so I am usually loathe to recommend them, but in this age of stupid people wresting the tiller of public opinion from their factual underpinnings of truth, justice and The American Way, perhaps it is time to have a sort of truth commission that allows public discourse to stay on topic, reflect the best information available and to prevent the public sphere from being contaminated with hearsay and innuendo. We can make some things up as we go along but the truth is not one of them.

Covering Inane Childminds and Liars

Our great media empires seem to have lost their position as the Fourth Estate. In days of old, the efforts of newspapermen were in search of truth, justice or exposing their polar opposites. Many times, the press was used to tease out salient points hidden behind the rhetoric and deception perpetrated on the public by powerful forces who work best cloaked in secrecy. somewhere along the line, perhaps with the advent of the twenty-four hour news cycle, truth and vetting sources, doing the actual work of news gathering, has fallen out of favor. more and more often, folks are not interested in finding out the truth about any issue but rather finding the newscaster who will tell them what they already know. Instead of getting information that we can use to make sound decisions that will benefit the most people, we get only the part of stories that overwhelm our ability to make sense of the "facts".

It is difficult to piece together a coherent view of most issues because of the abysmal coverage that we receive over our traditional media sources. Fragmentary pieces of information arrive, often without context or coherent logical structure so that the viewer (we get more and more of our information from video sources) is left to place the data in whatever inappropriate context they wish. For instance, the belief that the US gives vast amounts of wealth to virtually every other country, but needs to attend to our own business more lies on the mistaken belief that benefits isolationists and nationalists at the expense of the truth. We do give, where there is need, but the real crime is a free hand given to weapons dealers who destabilize vast areas of the globe and who are literally subsidized by the humanitarian efforts that are required once populations are terrorized. In areas that fall under the power and control of whatever warlord has decided to exert dominion over them, lawlessness and tragedy are sure to follow. The majority of our giving is not in the form of relief but rather in the subsidization of corporate interests who benefit from the pain and poverty of others.

I would like to inject a few numbers to keep this in perspective but I do not want to risk the possibility of losing the point in the numbers either. Suffice it to say that when there is a desperate need, we try to help, but often the root of the problem is totally ignored. sending food to a refugee camp is like the proverbial giving a man a fish. What is needed is resolving the problems, "teaching the people to fish". In most instances, the plight which we wish to deliver recipients of aid from cannot be addressed with money, rather it will take long-term education, resolving cultural issues and tearing down the destabilizing institutions that led to the inhumanity in the first place. Natural disasters are another story entirely. Looking at our own Gulf Coast, we have living proof that our ability to respond to need, even in our own country is woefully lacking. No amount of money can account for the outpouring of love and human effort that has gone into that region, yet vast areas are still uninhabitable, basically untouched for the past six years.

Any idiot seems to be able to stand up and spout bullshit and if there is a camera in the room they usually go unchallenged. Worse, folks will let the charade stand throughout the news cycle, adding importance and validity to their claims by the infinite proliferation of the images and audio that makes their lies seem true. When Nixon said, "I am not a crook", the truth of that statement was immediately questioned and fine lines were drawn to help us gain perspective on what that meant. He may have been a bigot, a paranoid son of a bitch, a pompous lying ass, but of course, he never "stole" anything. Sadly, the positions that he believed himself to be in were of his own creation. He actually was a crook who stole from the poor to give to the rich, just like our current slate of representatives. Without investigation and clarity about issues that affect our daily lives, democracy cannot stand. Without the gatekeepers of information providing us with truthful reporting, how can the public be expected to  hold our representatives to task, suss out where the truth lies or what direction will lead us to timely resolution of our difficult position? In lieu of good information, hearsay and innuendo rule the day. Worse than mere rumors, when we broadcast lies and half-truth, it leads the average person to think that what their eyes and ears are telling them are indeed fact. nothing could be further from the truth. 

The Other Side Of Oneness

We have been led, like a bull with a ring in it's nose, to the belief that duality surrounds us. If x,then y, black and white, sciencey thinking are partly to blame, but our religions and arts have mostly failed to keep pace with the truth of the matter. Since that photo of our planet from space, the undeniable truth is that we are one. The agape love that we use to define love of creator, needs to be shared for not only our brothers and sisters, but for the other creatures we share the planet with, the Earth itself and the many diverse people inhabiting her. Human history has led us to believe in competing forces, spoils and conquest as inevitable forces in a giant complex relationship of power and control. The nature of oneness has been relegated to esoteric works of philosophy and spirituality while our mundane world is billed as dog eat dog and a lifelong struggle over scant resources.

In fact, this warped view has such a massive amount of human energy bound and gagged, tied up in struggle as to be crippling for the whole of the human race. The very fabric of cultures has been frayed, the dialogue that could lead to harmony and sustainability has been largely ignored. Instead we are spoon fed rhetoric that accentuates difference and worships the adversarial charade that those who hold humanity captive orchestrate for our diversion.  When American corporations hold 1.2 trillion dollars as security against the unknown future but the government felt desperate enough to borrow that much to float the ultra rich more loans, the last thing you want to be telling people is that we are all brothers and sisters, entitled to peace and security, hospitality in our own nation and among the nations of a shrinking planet. A smaller and smaller number of billionaires have discovered how to extract more capital from the  bamboozled public, the sleight of hand which they hide behind allows our rage to be parried, our anger to be sublimated onto the innocent and our tastes to wander in the direction of feeding them more money faster. Like the trend in weaponry, in which every major development resulted in being able to kill more people faster, in capitalism, the development of the entire system are based on extracting more wealth faster as well.

Being one with our neighbors has a frightening side. This is most apparent to those who bought into the myth of increased leisure, perpetrated by technocrats, those who are extremely nationalistic and folks who cannot grasp the immensity of the big lie. Security lies in a different direction than we have ever been allowed to look. The hippies came the closest to straying, almost unintentionally, into that turf. Peace Love and Understanding are not just trendy ideals, they are the only way to assure that we step back from the precipice of mutually assured destruction. Luckily, we have had some talk about ending the nuclear era, but much needs to be done to eliminate further forays into this desperate realm. Never will the costs of 10,000 years of "safe storage" of nuclear waste offset the benefit of running an air conditioner or refrigerator. Those who have installed solar and wind energy are being made to jump over higher and higher standards, while the nuclear industry is getting their regulations reduced and the standards and practices they are required to maintain are being slashed. It makes the people paying attention wonder why the public should take the risk for the "development" of a new series of nuclear generating stations. The billions that are being proposed to bail out this hazardous and net energy consumptive industry could liberate us from our stagnant economy if we would only spend it on renewable sources that are available on the shelf, today.

As odd as it will sound to those who buy the corporate line, there is no other side of oneness. The lies perpetrated by the duality crowd need constant propping up, at tremendous cost and which will never achieve stability. The truth needs no support, it stands alone as a testament to itself. Reaching out to one another requires nothing more than listening to our hearts, rather than our brains. Act in accord with what you feel to be true, not what you have been told, and things will turn out just fine. When we reflect on our lives, we never say, I should have destroyed more, I should have invested in more death camps, more pools of poison gas, more weapons and more subterfuge. Few, if any, ever tell themselves, I should have left my children more debt, more ill-will or more messes to clean up. Tragically, this is what duality has led to. the duplicity and deception reflected in most of our politics and virtually all of our media have done more to keep us afraid and alone than the world's religions combined. Kill your television is now possible, not the box with the cathode ray tube, but the prepackaged rhetoric that continues to cleave us apart rather than inspiring oneness. fight for your right to choose to hear the truth, educate yourself and welcome the Aquarian Age. the time has come to follow the water bearers into the new age of love, peace and understanding.

First Harvest In Full Swing

The cornucopia is overflowing, abundance surrounds us and fills the larder. Simultaneously, our news programs are full of how shaky the economy is, how dangerous it is to be alive or how terrible someone else has it. My heart tells me that the rhetoric about the dire straights the super rich are in, and how quickly that will "trickle down" to us are overblown. The same suits that have skimmed off hundreds of billions of dollars for nothing more than shuffling paper are included in "talks" about how best to save their stake in the American Dream. White collar crime has never been more robust and certainly has not been more lucrative. The garden that I tend is pumping out produce that has a definite value. I invested early and consistently over time and now the rewards are flowing in. The thieves that put our economy on the ropes were siphoning off unearned income and wealth while putting nothing of value on the table.

 Banks, investors and loan officers are fond of saying that the needy company needs to put in their "pound of flesh", but their tails are so securely swaddled with our tax dollars that when they are on the brink of falling, we will rush in and save them. Nature itself is not too big to fail. If we deem any part of our economy as too big to fail, it ignores natural systems. When things grow exponentially, at a certain point, they must stop and begin to decay. Sad fact, fact nonetheless.
We share a planet, we are engaged in the exploitation of resources that come from the planet's crust. Increasingly, but sadly, not fast enough, we are utilizing both solar and wind to meet our "need" for electricity. Sustainability will demand of us as much inventiveness and creativity as met the needs of the industrial revolution. The next revolution will not look like most revolutions. Rather than destruction and mayhem, our next big shift will be to greener pastures, more agribusiness, local cooperatives and communities that are meeting their own needs rather than relying on high paid "experts" from far away. Economic power has been wielded over rural America for more than a century. Breaking the bonds that inhibit farmers from thinking for themselves, being good stewards of the land and keep them from fostering lasting positive environmental change in the nation will be hard. It may take a generation of education and complete revision of current agricultural policy. The bounty of Earth, when she is cared for, is almost beyond comprehension. It is time to begin acting like we know it. The miracles that keep us alive on Starship Earth need to be encouraged and upheld as the best model for human behavior. Give back, make no waste, store up calories during the fat times and conserve what you have earned by real work and attunement to Nature's Cycles.

The good that surrounds us and tips the balance away from chaos is not based on any intelligence or thought, but feeling. Each and every human on the planet needs to get clear about their own hearts. If anyone still needs proof that who we think we are is not who we are as much as what we feel is. We really need not distract our attention, the heart is the only hope we have for the future. That is why the Earth religions are gaining converts so quickly. Goddess is alive in our hearts and after the bad press that the male deities took over the past couple centuries, we cannot trust any man to not be infatuated by reason. Ultimately we must either choose what a wise friend of mine called Servoglobe, the penultimate Disneyesque technocrat's dream, or rediscover Gaia, the feminine and giving nature of ecology. We currently spend more on health care and get poorer outcomes than most of the rest of the world, yet next year I assure you, we will spend even more to be sicker. Just as our food sickens more and more people each year, but we will not question what we put in our mouths. Another sure bet is that there will be more soda commercials, and even worse diabetes. With the wealth of life sustaining potential all around us, the only thing that gets in the way of recreating Eden is the greed and self centered belief that we are in a competition for scant resources. Don't forget to integrate the concept of the cornucopia into your daily life, don't worry about what will come from being moved by your heart and always remember that none of this could have been bestowed upon us without love and hope borne on wings of abundance.

Crazy Days

Government decides to float their loans a little longer and the stock market goes down. We can only guess that there is absolutely no correlation between the direction we take and the trading of the "markets". The ultra wealthy just found out that they won't have to brace for the eventual impact for a while yet. When the average homeowner goes into default, it usually signals the beginning of the end of a relationship. The crazy thing is that the youthful vigor of the "new republicans" would play out an unfeeling game of chicken with our nation's credit rating, stalwart ignorant political tom foolery and ignorant deception of the American people. As much as I have developed an awareness of economics, through all the study that I have done, the federal government never tightens it's belt in hard times. That would take the last life out of the economy. governments, by definition do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

It is amazing that there are so few who see through the shallow rhetoric of the "conservative" opposition. First off, despoiling the word conservative with Republican or Tea Party values repulses all ecologists, and many more fiscal conservatives. Holding something back for the lean times is diametrically opposed to the approach that they profess. Tax cuts have not led to economic expansion, unless it was for the short term boom and bust cycles we are all too familiar with. Long-term investments in infrastructure that support our new economy, a sustainable one needs to be constantly spoken for and put back on the front burner. The entire basis of the right wing philosophy is a massive pool of money derived in tiny increments from all of us through corporate welfare, tax breaks and government incentives. Lets turn our eyes to something better and turn the heads of our leaders in doing so that they may learn to be more sustainable in their approaches as well. Those who will not be taught need to get their walking papers ASAP.

I may never know where the unbridled sense of entitlement and greed come from, but I do recognize that they are not only counterproductive, but destructive, to our economy, our humanity and our sense of who we are as a people. Getting our priorities in order and following through on the dozens of changes that we know are effective, are cheaper than business as usual, and that benefit more people for longer periods of time would in itself reduce the number of people bearing the weight of depression significantly. We see bumper stickers now days that say, "If you are not angry, you are not paying attention." as sad as it is, if you don't get depressed now and again, you are not paying attention either. Hopefully, this post, as well as The Otherfish Wrap generally will act as a rallying cry to reassert the idealism of the sixties, tempered by five decades of learning and insight. The time is ripe for massive change over a very short period.

It is time to build alliances with things that endure. I have put myself out, in more ways than I can know, for years, for what I believe in. By expressing my own perception, gained through study and struggle to find a route to sustainability, perhaps I will foster the inevitable changes that must come to pass if we are to thrive on our planet. I appreciate your time spent thinking about the issues that I raise. making change based on hostility, anger or desperation often leads to deeper problems down the line. we stand at a portal to the future, we must jump free and grapple with a new reality to be able to meet the challenges that loom on the horizon. when we allow the top five hundred companies to hold as much cash and short term debt to offset the entire bailout package, we cannot expect the economy to come out of it's torpor. The only entities with any cash to spend are the corporations that put us in this predicament to begin with. Unless they suddenly become satisfied with less, we stand to languish at least until the next elections to be sure.