Thursday, October 29, 2015

Power For The Oppressed

We live in what has become known as the victim culture. I originally thought that the title of this post needed to be something about bullying, or being the person who absorbs the blows of a bully. Why we can't take the bats and balls and just go home is a function of us not actually owning anything of value. The bats and balls all belong to the bullies. The "American Dream" has always been to own a house, have a spot you could call your own and time to enjoy them. Like a car repair shop that says, on a prominently displayed placard, "YOU CAN HAVE IT DONE WELL, FAST OR CHEAP...PICK TWO!" In America, these days, you are lucky to get one! those houses we all tried owning had their value cut nearly in half, while rich white guys walked off with our lost value. That land you thought you owned, well, they want to build a school, hotel or bypass and it happens to be in the way. And, that retirement you were counting on is being revoked or put into the stock market where it could be lost...didn't you read the fine print? at least the mechanic is going to try to give you the best of all three, the oligarchs have proven that on all three aspects we get the dirty end of the stick.

I'm here to tell you that if you abide by a few simple rules, reclaiming your life from the oligarchs is not only possible, but bears a cornucopia of adventure, possibility and promise. I would like to stand on the shoulders of giants, as usual, and rely on the work of others to define BDS society, or culture if you will, this culture stands for human beings and against oligarchs. Truth over lies. Commitment to and investment in what lasts, not merely expedient whims of the wealthy. Boycott, Divest, Sanction are what the acronym stands for. It is tough love for the oligarchs.

Boycotting materials, products and attitudes that are supported either by Wall Street investment firms, trust babies or bastions of industry has a double benefit all by itself. It does not put money into their hands directly and it handicaps their ability to stay flush. To make the punishment appropriate, the costs of their ceaseless advertising should be taxed, rather than exempted from taxable income. After all, it is a tax on our time to have to sit through their commercials. Anything with your name emblazoned on it can come directly off the top of income for tax purposes, even if these things are your NASCAR diversions. The commercials propping up the market for their often dangerous, useless, overpriced or frivolous products cause exploitation and damage over large areas for nothing more than a tiny bauble. Companies are actually lined up to sell pens with your company name on them because they know that even the little guys can be enticed to "invest" in pens with their names on them. "You can write that off." means someone else will carry you.

Divestment is something that seems a bit harder to accomplish, but this route has even greater impacts, on some levels, than mere boycotts (which are essential) This is where the hollowing out of a corporation takes place. Like aborting a fetus, divestment hollows out the womb of deceit that spawned the corporation in the first place. Confidence. The elixir of life for a corporation, is confidence in the scams that they are running. Investment is a resource without which corporados cannot thrive. This confidence game is how many not for profit organizations can pay their CEOs millions and actually serve with a teaspoon what their mission implies, whilst gobbling up wealth like gluttons in the board room. Demanding enough control over retirement funds, workplace giving and investments to avoid contributing to actions that you are opposed to are crucial to our success. If you belong to a union, cooperative or investment group, demand a say in where your funds flow.

Sanctioning corporations requires us to be swift and diligent about holding corporate outlaws to at least the same unreasonable standards set for black men under the war on drugs. Cultural genocide does need to occur, but it is the sub-culture of oppression, the current systems that relegate individuals to the whims of the very few. We can calculate what will be required to re-build the soils that have been lost or poisoned by the few corporate giants who produce the tractors, seed and chemicals, then let them split the bill in whatever way they deem fair. It is harder to put a price on terrorizing innocent citizens and pushing prohibition so hard that it creates generations of fatherless households. The true costs of the actions taken by a tiny few should no longer have to be paid by those who can least afford it.

Regenerative agriculture is a process of building soils, rather than poisoning them. Friends who run an organic lawn care service said that they took grass clippings form clients that had used toxic lawn care chemicals and composted them separately from their organic clippings. It took seven years to get that compost down to a no detect level for the poisons. After the third year of annual testing, when they were still finding toxic residue, they told clients that if they did not avoid using chemicals. Their company would require them to dispose of their own clippings. When composting, nearly 90% of the weight of the compost is water. A minuscule fraction are minerals, more on these later, and about 10% remains in the soil after four years, mostly as carbon, but in a degradable form, so it continues to lessen over time. Unless...If that carbon gets super-heated, to a glow, in the absence of oxygen, it bakes much like clay particles do at a much higher temperature. this resulting char, is pyrolized carbon and thus treated, can stay in soils for thousands of years providing microscopic structure upon which soil microorganisms can make their living. Even fungal hyphae, the predominant organism in humus, thrive when even small amounts of char are added to soil. Char was known in virtually every "primitive" culture. It is substantially different than wood ash, because the white ash from burned char is white and is the source for lye, that is so harsh that it can saponify oils. black char is created when there is not enough oxygen for the carbon to burn. The resulting material is Ph neutral, adsorbs six times it's own weight in water and provides fourteen acres of surface area per handful (approximately half a cup (100cc) has fourteen acres (5ha) of surface area! Routinely blow your mind abut this from time to time.

I heard an interesting way of thinking about microorganisms in the soil. If you could weigh all the microbes upon one acre of what we call "healthy soil" (Remember, the standard for that has been drastically changed on our continent in just the last hundred years) it would be about the mass of a cow and her calf.  Now, if there were to be habitat for fourteen more cows and fourteen more calves...you see where I'm going with this? Not only can the char itself hold six times it's weight in water, but when it becomes alive with organisms whose waste products feed the roots of plants can increase exponentially and each and every one of their cells is filled with water! This is the natural state that we eliminated with mechanized agriculture just when we were on the cusp of understanding it. Agricultural research was in full blossom just before WWII, but as soon as giant corporations got in the game, they steered us away from science and good sense approaches to growing healthier crops to avoid the use of chemicals. Even in entomology, there was good evidence to believe that insects are almost like nature's clean up crew, feasting on ill or sickly plants, drawn by vibrations, not aromas of stressed plants. The means of production has been wrested from our control and so too the limits of our understanding and imagination have been constrained by the oligarchs. What is the approprite fine that could be levied for sterilizing soils and the annual waste of petroleum used to unhinge our soils, allowing them to literally blow away?

We can feed more people and do it with less harmful effects by learning what the ancients knew about building soils. Science tells me that in my climate, soils "grow" at the rate of about one inch per thousand years. I have proven that the rate can be increased by more than tenfold with proper husbandry of soil organisms, and by using resources that are easily available if you are just willing to rake your neighbor's yard to get his leaves in the fall, composting lawn clip[pings and utilizing your uncooked and grease free food scraps. Innovative programs are sprouting up everywhere you look, nearly any town of any size has thriving farmer's markets and opportunities to facilitate regeneration, I have devoted the rest of my life tot he task of teaching about bio-char, regenerative agriculture and feeding people, the planet and our own pocketbooks, but the oligarchs will not make a cent on this direction. perhaps we need to have a bit of compassion. They were probably abused and/or neglected as children. Those who have chosen to believe the lies must not be allowed to degrade the planet for the rest of us!


Rest assured, without massive public support for a just, and livable future, those who hold the aces will never relent. Our power must be taken, regardless of the gyrations of those criminals who sacrificed our planet for their enrichment. Nothing short of these three things in combination, along with restorative agriculture, can stop our planet from being turned into a cinder. Ask the hard questions, ask for each and every decision you make each day, how will this help people? how will this help the planet? and, who will it profit? If you like your answers, go ahead and do it. some helpful apps exist like "Buycott" and for personal care products, you can find the most ecologically benign ones at Environmental Working Group's website. Investigate your foodshed, you might be surprised.


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