The Coruption of Capitalism

Dawn broke grey and terrible over Green Bay on the Day I had selected to depart for my 4,280 mile bike tour of the Great Lakes Ecosystem; April First, 1987. For a period of two years I had studied the complex interrelationship between the heavy hand of human activity and the specific, known insults that have been perpetrated upon the landscape and watershed of these critically threatened inland seas. When I was age seven, I had an epiphany that every cell of my being was hydrated by water from this ecosystem, that eventually the moisture of each breath would find it's way back into the system. The very same liquid that dripped off my toe, when dipped in the Fox River running through my backyard, could potentially make it's way back to the sea through the St. Lawrence River.
In an instant, I felt that my being extended through the whole watershed, and lapped at each and every shore of these Great bodies of water. In the moment of ecstasy that the experience engendered, I resolved to pedal my bicycle around the Great Lakes to help me to understand their full extent and complexity. At that time, the alewife invasion was reaching a climax and rafts of dead fish would wash up on the shore. Knowing that the system was out of whack, that my life would be dedicated to educating the common man about ecological benefits that accrue if we change our relationships with the earth, soils, air, fire water and spirit. Even as a child I struggled with the question of how to share a message of compassion for the planet in a culture based on wreaking ecological havoc. I knew I was setting myself up for a hard row to hoe, but my inner spirit took on the challenge anyway, fully expecting to be made a martyr for my understanding and insight. I have always seen my way through hard times and heavy weather with the same intent spirit. Recently, I heard a Scandinavian say, "There is no bad weather, only bad clothes." On that historic first day out,  I suited up and after a hearty breakfast at a locally owned breakfast place, rode out of town to the north and west into the teeth of a storm that started with sleet and massive flake snow and on through eighty miles of everything Mother Earth could throw at me. When I was coming toward my aunt's house ten hours later, in Marinette, the snow was deep enough that I could not see below my knees!
This approach to life in general is the polar opposite of the way we are running our American corporate society. Whereas I took out upon a beautiful adventure into the heart of a storm, our businesses today want to capitalize on the fact that they are victims, of a bad economy or because of a few bad decisions. Whatever their sob story, the sham way of doing business that led to this collapse cannot possibly help us to find a way forward. The shift that is coming is toward sustainability, not extraction. Supportive commitment to a dream, building strong foundations for sustainability.
My adventure began from a point of knowing with every part of my being that what I was about to see would break my heart, drive home the point that Mother Earth has been raped, poisoned and sterilized for senseless greed and with exquisite deceit. American business, the Goliath economic forces that have colluded with government to keep the rest of us in slavery need to cease and desist. corporate welfare, especially the military industrial complex simultaneously suck at the teat of workers, who are the most true patriots, carrying the weight of millions on their backs! Businesses need to suck it up and spend money that will assist in raising quality of life for all Americans and instituting services and centers for capital that allow sensitivity to the local needs, issues and skills that ultimately will be put to their highest use locally. separating sources of capital from either the workers or where they are able to purchase services only adds to the toxic load on the environment caused by transportation.
Living lightly on the planet requires buying local as much as possible and utilizing shared resources cooperatively. there are tens of thousands of co-ops in America, join one, have a say in how they operate, form your own, it it patriotic and can raise quality of lives of far more folks than corporate America ever has. 

Summer Fun

As we slide into the Fourth of July weekend, we wish everyone a safe and happy week or so. Please relax and take your time if you are traveling. Remember, the goal,when driving, is for everyone to arrive safely. Also remember that those long drives are some of the most memorable parts of many vacations. Enjoy the company of friends and family when you get to your destination, of course, but don't overlook the travel time as a source of great conversation and insight into your family's ideas, insights, hopes and dreams. Lastly, please remember that when the national speed limit was lowered to 55 miles per hour, America realized a 15% drop in fuel use for transportation. Fifteen percent better mileage may not seem like a large amount, but the extra few minutes per hour on the road has massive benefits for our pocketbooks and Mother Earth when multiplied by millions of drivers! Car companies and engineers may be able to deliver fuel savings like that over the course of decades, but we each have the power to make this change instantly by taking a bit more time to get where we are going.
Don't forget the sunscreen, sunglasses and a towel. You never know when the opportunity to swim will present itself! We at The Otherfish Wrap wish you peace and the best in all that you do, today, through the weekend and throughout the coming year! Blessings and Namaste', Tony C. Saladino

Aquisition as Ethos

Our culture, in these United States, has become one in which commercials and jingles have their own special power over our thoughts and actions. Some people go so far as to watch the Super Bowl, "...for the commercials...". If I were to say, "Where Quality is Job One!", "Have it Your Way!" or "_____ Adds Life!" I might have to explain to a few what Corporation I was hawking, but most of us know it in our cells. Even logos reach into our subconscious and have literally changed us. The filing cabinets of our brain create relationships between these audio-visual messages and the territories that they use to get our attention. Sellers know that they have to sell you on more than just product, they sell experiences. Any product not promising more than it is worth won't stand a chance in competitive markets. Even knowing this intellectually can't save one from the onslaught. Hitting the primary emotional centers, images we see, hear and think about tell us that products being advertised will make us secure, healthy, rich, happy, vital well-adjusted and well-liked. Who wouldn't want that after all, it's just good sales. Being better than someone who doesn't have the product is just a spin off from the original theme. Even when the main competitor isn't mentioned directly, the implication is that those who make that choice are "square" or at least misguided. Even writing this passage is bringing on torrents of associations, we have been inculcated with. The most peculiar catch phrase that has stayed with me and will never be far from my awareness is "Hush Puppies aren't such a fancy shoe, or a phony shoe, they're just Dumb!" It was probably the shortest-lived ad campaign ever, but the images were great! It was from the time that the Japanese were kicking us with quality the first time, Probably, early seventies. Two Japanese guys in lab coats were inspecting the shoes with calipers and scientific instruments. After deliberation, they looked at one another, and the camera, in astonishment and declared, "We can make them better, but we can't make them dumber!" I still see the Hush Puppy logo and get a charge out of it. I even look at their shoes, even when I'm not shoe shopping, not caring whether or not they are my size, I just feel good looking at them. Multiply this effect by billions of people, thousands of advertisers, and in some cases, hundreds of purchases each day, and you begin to see a pattern being established. My intent in bringing this phenomenon up is to plea for it's opposite. Making decisions on the basis of value, (which I define as life-affirming) rather than the spurious intent of some executive in a far off corporate office, whose salary is determined by his ability to sell us thin promises. As you might expect, I see this as life-denying. Let's try a concrete example: Confronted with natural thirst, we need water to live. Do not succumb to the opinion that you should have sugar-laced brown liquid to make you anything. You are, endowed by your creator with a propensity to slake your thirst, that alone is a great gift. Sanctify that by giving your body the most pure water that you can find. One caveat, I do not want anyone to drink Distilled or Reverse Osmosis water exclusively. The first because mineral supplementation is required, and the energy footprint skyrockets and the second, because it is extremely wasteful, flushing many gallons of water away for the tiny fraction used. This one decision has greater effect on your ability to be healthy, secure, rich, etc. than any sugar water you can find! The choice of fresh and pure water will profoundly change a whole series of other choices that will come along. What we call into our lives has great resonating impacts that ripple out across the landscape. Again, staying with the drinking water example. Carrying a re-use-able vessel that sates our thirst over longer periods can have it's own, often unseen effects. The energy used creating a stainless steel container is equivalent to the energy in about 2000 plastic bottles! Associated with the steel or aluminum, are impacts like mining, refining, transport, etc. The plastic on the other hand has the specter of oil in it's past, can leach chemicals into our drink, and present special disposal problems. Even when recycled, there are transport costs and energy requirements that follow from our decision. When burned, plastics release toxic compounds. We can follow the fate of each and every item that we use if we take a bit of time to think about it. Pre-cycling is probably the surest way to make an impact on lives around the world in a positive way. This is making choices on the level of where they come from, what they do, and where they go in the end. My own water container will get recycled when it is no good any more, but I can't see how it could fail in my lifetime. I suppose that I could leave it sealed and full in freezing temperatures, but I guard against those things conspiring against it, and it should last indefinitely. I'm not encouraging everyone to go back to animal bladders, just to take the time to think about yourself as deserving of the recognition that you are good and whole already, without the packaging du jours, the "swoosh" of Nike, the Lightening Bolt of sports drinks, or the red of Coke, red,white and blue of Pepsi, or any of the tools of psychological bondage that are proffered up by corporations that try to make us buy anything! There is an annual Buy Nothing Day, I urge you to make that day today! It can have an incredibly liberating feeling to not buy anything for just one day. Instead, use the time you would waste shopping researching the best choices that you can make when you put your next dollars into the marketplace.

Lowest Crime Rate in Forty Years

All "traditional" types of crime are on the wane. Things we think of when the word crime is mentioned, murder, rape, assault, theft and property crimes have not been this low since the sixties. I don't think that we can attribute this to the fact that all the criminals have been jailed. Quite the contrary, people who have perpetrated crimes against me have never even been arrested. Oddly enough, the crimes that I have been victimized by have subjected me to ridicule from police, disbelief, or at least they have given the police a good laugh. Questioning victims as if they were perpetrators makes one wonder if cops just get off on dealing with "bad guys", or if they just get so used to dealing with criminals, that it makes them treat everyone with disdain. If we look to a larger picture, it only makes sense that as people learn to survive on less, and the economic outlook for so many continues a downward slide, there would be higher levels of desperation and propensity to steal and rob. Not so, I guess, we see crime rates falling in all areas, and for all crimes according to the FBI.

The petty sorts of crimes that hurt just one victim at a time have been replaced by crimes that hurt us all. Corporate outlaws who absorb billions in tax money and continue to make bad business decisions top my list of evil deed doers, but we seem to be at a loss for what to do with these bad boys. Law enforcement has been trained to look for footprints in the snow, leading away from crime scenes, finger prints and physical evidence that ties perpetrators to crime scenes. Now, there is even the ability to "search" the net for traces of illicit activity. Even though we have sophisticated ways of finding ordinary criminals, there is a definite lag between what is actually taking place and our response to it. If a company can be classified as "too big to fail", they can lay off thousands, pay their figurehead leader millions, and take our tax money with impunity. This double standard allows the rich to undermine our democracy in a most unsettling way. In response to these heinous crimes, it seems that some police agencies have redoubled their efforts to prosecute people who have engaged in victimless crime, growing marijuana, or God forbid, smoking it. It is confusing to see the attention we pay to trivia, while letting gross abuse of power and theft on a grand scale pass unnoticed. Profiling Muslims has become "defensible", but corporate outlaws are overlooked because we all "want to be like them", rich.

Back in the seventies, there was a pay disparity between the top CEOs and the average workers of 44-1. This meant that it would take working stiffs an average of forty-four years to earn as much as the top person in their company would make in one year. This was basically a person's entire working career, to equal one person's pay for a single year! The reasoning behind this was that top earners were smarter, better educated, under more stress, and responsible for bigger decisions that would make or break their corporation. Even though forty-four times smarter sounds impossible, forty-four times as educated sounds illogical, forty-four times more stress seems improbable and forty-four times more responsible ignores the fact that "average"workers are the ones that actually make products or provide services for which the company is needed in the first place.

Today, this pay disparity has climbed to 360-1. This means that what the average wage earner makes in a year is made in less than a single day by top "wage" earners. To equal the pay of a CEO today, a "family" of workers would require eight generations of toil to "earn" the equivalent of a single year of effort by these super-humanly smart, ultra-educated, incredibly stressed out, and uniquely responsible individuals who are "top dogs" in the largest companies the world has ever seen. Even as their corporations crumble, it is said that they deserve their unreasonable compensation. At some point, will we see through this charade? How long will we allow this insanity to continue? Is screwing a billion people okay if we only steal a penny from each person? How about a dime? A dollar? What if we force them into bankruptcy? Will we ever classify wage slavery as slavery and outlaw it? Why do we continue to look the other way? How can we support a system of all men being created equal but yet reimburse some as if they are 360 people? In this age of technological advances, we must develop our awareness, our culture, and our laws to keep pace with the lightning speed of injustice.

Letting those who have led us down a path toward inequality, have a say in resolving the problems they have created, is like letting a fox into the hen house. This is commonly the way our government deals with important issues. In Wisconsin, when "public utilities" got caught stealing 64 million dollars from residential rate payers, the utilities themselves got to decide how to spend the court ordered forfeiture. Letting insurance companies, drug companies, hospitals and health care providers tell us what they want in a "health care bill" guarantees that their interests get priority while the general public continues to get fleeced. Similarly, when the banks and some insurance companies had gotten into trouble, playing the odds with borrowed money, we gave their terrible managers a get out of jail free card. Many were able to leave their crippled companies with severance packages that exceed the lifetime earnings of 90% of all Americans. I think that bad managers should be punished. Perhaps, if they had to bear responsibility for their stupidity, lack of judgment, larcenous ways, illegal gambling with money that belongs to others, or misrepresentation that only benefits themselves, their illegal and immoral actions would cease. Lying, cheating and stealing are bad, no matter who has done them. People who are worth billions should not be exempt from laws that govern the rest of us. As happy as I am that the crime rate has plummeted, I think that we need to look for injustice wherever it occurs.

When is a Bow not a Bow? Wow! wow.

The recent fabricated flap over Obama's "tell tale" bow to foreign leaders neither shocks or amazes me. Remember the blood lust that was fabricated in preparation for both Iraq invasions which had the net effect of killing over one million (some estimates are as high as three million) innocent human beings? The same infantile "logic" is at work now. Our "friend's" enemy is our enemy. How soon we forget the slant wells that first got Iraq in trouble, not that they got caught stealing Kuait's oil, quite the opposite! Kuait was stealing Iraq's oil. Kuait got our support throughout and when no action was taken to deprive them of the stolen crude, the Iraqi leader sent troops to storm the border. It has been a while, but to refresh your memory, our blood and treasure were called upon to get Kuait back on the map. Foolishly we were investing in a tinderbox. Rather than honoring the foreign leader who had a legitimate gripe, we went in with guns blazing, terrorizing innocent people, adding another layer of oppression and death in our wake. The senseless bombing of civilian targets in the hopes of getting Saddam "by chance" only served to take out sources of fresh water and electricity effectively changing a modern, secular culture back into a third world nation virtually overnight. I watched it on CNN. It was "pretty".

My point is that we have the choice to believe whoever we want. Perhaps by honoring other world leaders instead of telling them in no uncertain terms what we want to hear, we would find a way to peace that would save lives and further our interests instead of creating untold havoc that can only breed contempt. We have trouble spending a single night without power. People in much of the world have found ways to exist with just a few hours of juice (sometimes even less) per day. The unpatriotic people who said that it was unpatriotic, or at least unamerican to say the war was wrong are now eager to question our current, fairly elected commander in chief. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, we see how flimsy their paper tigers truly are. The malarkey about what nation our President was born in, questioning his faith, color, and motivation are all ruses designed to question, not the man's ideas, not even his desire to help us regain standing on the world stage, but his legitimacy. People who find fault with intellect are as dangerous as the times we find ourselves in. Putting their faces and ideas before the public with a twenty-four hour news cycle has crippled public opinion, taken focus away from real issues, and created a culture of despots willing to say anything if it will get them a shred of notoriety.

The complete fabrication of evidence for Iraq II, as well as the strengthened alliance with Saudi Arabia, who issued passports to the majority of the 9-11 conspirators, must give us pause. When we support police states, or agencies of torture, human trafficking, corruption and terrorism of their own citizens, it cheapens us. It undermines our lofty goals of self-determination for all humans on the planet. Perhaps, if we all got behind an honorable man, with an honorable message, we would regain a bit of respect in the world. Obama's bow gave him a chance to visually confirm that he respects the leader of another country. It is a good feeling to be respected. Wouldn't it be a breath of fresh air if we were to be respected back? Sabre rattling only assures that you will have to unsheathe the weapon at some future date. Offers of meeting people on an equal to equal basis is our only hope for peace and respectability in the future.

As I told many before the election, "We may get Obama on the ticket, he may even win the election, but I guarantee even after he gets in office, we will still have to fight for him." This is the part where we have to fight. Let the media folks who incite argument, even when we all agree, know that we won't take their pablum anymore. If we let all the scared, paranoid, hateful people keep spewing their lies, who will be informed enough to see through their veil of ignorance? I contend that there are things far more important than Wall Street, more important than the earnings of insurance companies, yes, even more important than auto makers. The future of our planet may hinge on decisions we must make today. I'm all for a leader who knows enough to respect our fellow travelers on Starship Earth. Now, all we need is to convince the talking heads.