Evolving Peace

Changing World ?

2010-04-09T11:46:00.000-07:00

As the days grow longer I find myself less interested in the politics of the world, for I have many other important things to take care of over the resistance to a world of insanity. However, the world I now live in will also will be the world of my shortly new-born son, so I still have to do my part in trying to change the world for the better.

SO, that said I am encouraging others to quit their silence and voice yourselves. Unless you are living under a rock or have buried your heads under the sand, I am sure you have heard that the US is still no closer to ending the Bush's immoral wars, despite all the rhetoric of CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN. Although, I have not been marching in the streets, or working for change, my voice is still as strong as it ever was. I will not be silenced, nor should you...

I leave you with a recent letter, I drafted questioning the US's war path and in particularly the complacency of Vermont's Senior Senator Patrick Leahy. Those in Congress have moral obligation to end these wars. Please suite and write to end war, not for me, not for you, but for your children, my son, and everybody else's children.

Dear Senator Leahy,

I am troubled at the lack of attention given to the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts (wars). Especially, now with the recent release of troubling videos and reports of improprieties by the United States military personal showing the slaughter of innocent civilians. Furthermore, the recent comments of Afghani President Karzai are especially alarming since he virtually has been the United States puppet leader up until this point. It should be clear to you that continuance of this war is severely flawed. Nonetheless I am troubled that you as a critic of President Bush’s war policy have been complacent to the current president’s war path.

As an elective Senator of Vermont, I urge you to question the policies of every U.S. President, whether it be a Republican president or a Democratic President. Vermont elected you to be their voice, not the voice of the president. Prevously, I have written you multiple times regarding the expanding quagmires and presently have not received a rational response from your office. From my viewpoint I feel as if a blind’s eye is being turned because this President is a Democrat. The same injustices that you once harshly criticized the Bush administration for following are now being followed by this presidency.

Once again, I urge you as an individual Senator to stand up and challenge the horrific direction the United States is following. Current United States foreign policy is exasperating a world of terrorism, and failing to create the world of hope and peace that many Vermonters thought the last election was about. We can create a world of hope and peace, but only be starting here at home and halting the use of American military dominance. “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding,” was expressed by the worlds greatest thinker, Albert Einstein, I suggest we follow his words over the mentality of playground bullies.

Thank you for reading my concerns and your representation in Congress.

Peace
Robert Kidd

No VT Nukes 2012- Let it SNow....

2010-02-24T13:01:00.000-08:00

In many ways, today I am glad I live in Vermont.

1. Today, the Vermont Senate voted to shut down the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in 2012 as scheduled. In any other state the big money influence of a nuclear power company would corrupt every politician in the state that the question would never be asked. One look to Oyster Creek in NJ and Indian Point in NY you will see that the NRC, the Nuclear Reactor Cheerleaders, easily relicensed those plants despite having many flaws and years of mishaps. So before I spout out at the Vermont Senate again on other issues, I just want to give them credit where it is due. (2 out of 3 of my Senators voted against the re license. (One Republican and a Democrat.)

2.The other reason I am happy today it is snowing, and may I say heavily. After a lackluster winter Central Vermont is finally getting a good snow, so my wife and dog went for a beautiful snow-shoe along the North Branch of the Winnoski. Although, we were within the “city-proper”, we were in a complete winter wonderland and just a few miles away from this historic vote.(Instead of sitting around all day waiting for the vote, we were out playing in a blanket of snow, and made it home just in time to see it streaming live.)

So, while the rest of country seems to not enjoy snow, we in Vermont are happy to have it and furthermore while Barrack Exelon-Obama is bamboozling the rest of the country, Vermont’s Senate has spoken loud and clearly-NO NUKES.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“The discovery of nuclear reactions need not bring about the destruction of mankind any more than the discovery of matches” Albert Einstein

Fox in the Hen House, Monsanto'sMan Muscles VTOrganic

2010-02-15T08:51:00.000-08:00

As each day progresses forward of the era “change we can believe in,” I am steadily becoming more nihilistic, for no matter what the political event the issue has been corrupted or is merrily a political “dog and pony show” pretending to do something. This weekend while most Americans were still giddy from last week’s Super Bowl, excited with the start of the Olympics, or exuberant over the Daytona 500, the little discussed Secretary of the US Department of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, spoke at Vermont farmers. (Please note questions were pre-selected and were not allowed by any of the general audience, as should be in a democracy.) Mr. Vilsack spoke with a panel that including Senator Bernie Sanders (the supposed “anti-big industry man”), Senator Leahy (the I speak to Vermont Farmers every Morning man) and their boy wonder Congressman Peter Welch (I love Local Food) at the Vermont Northeastern Organic Farmer’s (NOFA) Conference to trump the success of the organic food movement, however USDA policy is completely on a different path.

When I first heard that Vilsack was attending the NOFA conference I was outraged because this is similar to having Dick Cheney speak to an anti-war group on proposing methods for creating peace, or simply the fox managing the chicken coop. I am not sure, but supposedly NOFA was forced to accept Mr. Vilsack’s arrival and the pre-orchestrated format on the advice of the VT congressional delegation. Whatever the situation, this is classic example on how issues and politicians corrupt all movements to suit their own agenda, just like the “Green” agenda or the movement for “change”.

Nonetheless, for those of you who do not know, Tom Vilsack was the man designated by the Biotechnology Industry Organization as the Governor of the Year while governor of the Industrial Corn State of Iowa. Furthermore, Mr. Vilsack was a lobbyist and an attorney for Monsanto, the bioengineering giant who’s predatory behavior has destroyed America’s family farms, and now thanks to Obama’s favorable trade policies(previous presidents too), they are further expanding their outreach to the “undeveloped world.”

Along with this charade by Vermont’s congressional delegation, the Vermont media showed off their corrupted values by failing to report Mr. Vilsack’s basic history. The coverage was either purposely lacking or poor journalism because nowhere does the media cover Mr. Vilsack’s past, not even superficially when a related question was brought to table. The Burlington Free Press, (A Gannett/USA TODAY RAG), printed the following exchange:

He (Will Stevens) asked what Vilsak would do about the threat of contamination posed by generically modified seeds. Vilsak suggested new insurance products and more research on how to avoid contamination could help.

“I’m not going to take sides,” he explained later in an interview. “What is happening on the organic side is exciting.”

NOT GOING TO TAKE SIDES… and then the next line should have been VILSACK THE FORMER MONSANTO LOBBYIST…

Once again, American democracy hijacked by self serving politicians and industrial giants to feed their own egos and the corporate bottom-line. One of my favorite music quotes sums this situation up well, “You don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows.”

Peace

Robb Kidd

“The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” Malcom X…

You Can't be Neutral on a Moving Train.

2010-01-27T17:15:00.000-08:00

I am sad to read that Howard Zinn, America's foremost historian and political commentator has died.

For those who have never read his works I begin by telling you should go out and get a copy of A People's History of the United States. A history of the people of the country not the spokespeople or false figure heads. History is not the George Washington's, nor is it the Barrack Obama's.

Thank you Mr. Howard Zinn
May He Know True Peace
Robb Kidd

“I'm worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they're doing. I'm concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that's handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.” Howard Zinn

Three of a Kind--Haiti Recovery ????

2010-01-16T11:05:00.000-08:00

Seeing the damage and destruction of Haiti deeply saddens my heart. However unlike most of America I have been deeply saddened for years. It is merely criminal and immoral that so close to America one of the world’s poorest countries is allowed to exist. Nevertheless, it is not that America has stood by silent for all these years, America has been a willing participant in Haiti’s demise. America’s neo-colonialism is a direct cause of these conditions, and until America’s love of money and power are put to rest we will continue to see more catastrophes like this.

Lost amongst the train-wreck corporate run media is the questions that rational people should see with an event like this, however as you recall neither did any one do that after New Orleans was destroyed by Katrina.

Why did America rob the Haitian treasury for most of the 20^th century?
Why did America prop up brutal dictators in place of democratically elected leaders?
Why did America force horrific trade barriers that treat Haiti like a giant sweet shop?
Why has America practically been a cheerleader for a country lacking environmental regulations or simple building standers?

Nonetheless, these questions may never be asked especially while the global triumphant of Clinton-Bush-Obama are raising money for “relief.” Does anyone recall the Bush-1 and Clinton New Orleans relief effort and how much of failure that is?

I hope that the Haitian people emerge out of this a stronger people, for as population Haiti has suffered enough, in the meantime while we Americans are living a life of luxury we need to ask ourselves who is to blame. Instead of sending money to a relief effort headed but multi-millionaires and corporate monsters let us all stop supporting an economic system that takes advantages of other humans.

Peace

Robb Kidd

“You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for our own improvement and, at the same time, share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to who” Marie Curie

Which Way is the Wind Blowing ?

2009-12-20T15:49:00.000-08:00

I remember in my days in college reading the works of George Orwell and Aldus Huxley and being flabbergasted about the vivid scenes of their futurist society that were so manipulated by the political powers in order to continue their dominance of society. I was taught that not to worry about their forecast because we live in a democracy and a free and open society. Besides according to the teachers Huxley and Orwell were concerned with totalitarian like regimes such as Hitler and Stalin. However, looking at the week that just passed, I am not so sure about that for today we have a scene too reminiscent of a scene in 1984.

Beginning with the Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama declares “A Just War,” which sounds like to me “War =Peace.”

Then we have a whole slew of criticism of an insurance laden “Health Care Reform” bill, however the American Media landscape credits Obama with a win for being able to obtain 60 votes for a compromised, of a compromised, compromised bill.

Furthermore, the American media also credits Obama with orchestrating a “deal” in Copenhagen on a Global Warming Treaty, although the international media are portraying the deal as a disaster and that nothing positive came out from it.

From the London Independent,

-“The most progressive US president in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speaker-phone from a beach in Hawaii.”

and from the Friends of the Earth,

“Sham Deal Requires Nothing, Accomplishes Nothing”

The more I see of the news, the more I am tending to believe the weather man. At least he/she is right some of the times.

Peace

Robb Kidd

“You don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows.” Bob Dylan

The Harder They Come, The Harder They Fall

2009-12-13T16:33:00.001-08:00

As the campaign of Obama rose to it's historic exuberance, Americans far and wide thought that America had truly turned a page; however myself and a few others knew that President Obama was a charlatan and merely a puppet to the true forces of political power-Wall Street.

At times, I felt as if I was a lone dove, or Chicken Little screaming " the sky is falling", and as President Obama ascended to power I saw that what I though was really true and not a mere paranoia brought up in my mind.

Although, it became apparent very early there was no real criticism, unless you include the brain dead tea-baggers ralling against the non-existinent Obama Care and falsely labelled Socialism. Instead, Obama apoligists were still "giddy" over the election, or they were the ever so optimisitc who though that Obama was appointing the Wall Streeet thugs and Pentagon War-hawks as a strategy to keep his critics at bay.

Nonetheless, it has been a long year, but now after the charade of Nobel Peace Prize, we have the real Obama story in Rolling Stone. The real reason we are still asking for spare change is because of this .........................http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31234647/obamas_big_sellout

If you ever thought change was comming, speak out now and Howl...

Peace
Robb Kidd

"Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss." The Who

Create Jobs Expand War

2009-12-04T10:02:00.000-08:00

In a surprising move President Obama this week created over 30,000 thousand jobs this week. Hey, who said that this guy does nothing but give speeches. He is more than the Speechmaker in Chief for he is the CEO in Chief. In an unprecedented move President Obama instead of sending 30,000 jobs overseas, he sent 30,000 Americans with the jobs to Afghanistan, therefore creating 30,000 job openings all across America.

On top of the initial 30,000, think of all the other jobs Obama is brilliantly creating by his noble efforts for the War of Terror. The troops in Afghanistan need uniforms, armor, and other military supplies, and someone has to make them, so why not in your district. Therefore he is creating jobs in some Congressman/Senator's district making Kevlar or socks such as in Senator Leahy’s strategic earmarking gifts.

How about the Health Care industry? The industry will reap enormous benefits from casualties and other associated traumatic experiences. All the medical equipment needed for surgery, prosthesis and continued pharmaceuticals will spawn new financial opportunities. Furthermore, with all the psychological conditions brewing, we will need therapists, law enforcement officials, and divorce counselors to handle all the problems associated with returnees to civilian life. Then because of their absence, single parents will need to hire child care and purchase expensive gifts to replace the missing parent. The multiplier effect is endless, just as war is.

Also with continued hostilities we will further perpetuate a never ending fire of hatred towards the US and allies, so after Afghanistan and Pakistan we will have to go to Iran, then Syria, or just maybe Venezuela.(You know Chavez really is the Devil) Thus we will repeat this whole cycle over and over.

Here is to hope…Obama the Great- I think he should get the Goldman Sachs/Citi-Group Award for Courage by creating a strong robust sustainable economy for America’s future.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.” Kurt Vonnegut

War = Peace

2009-10-09T10:10:00.000-07:00

I really thought it was a joke today, unless the definition of peace actually means war. I guess I must have really flunked the vocabulary lessons in grade school, or we are now in a worldwide Orwellian society. In case you missed it Obama was just given the Nobel Peace Prize, but to whatever it is worth the war criminal Henry Kissinger did too.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.” George Orwekk

Floating Garbage-In the Sea and in DC.

2009-09-23T12:56:00.000-07:00

As the world spins aimlessly around the sun, I sit and wonder what man has done with the planet and if there ever is a chance to bring it back? Not to be bleak but some times I just feel as it is hopeless and to upon discovering the above picture(from the London Independent), I rest my case.

While America had been so gaga over the Obama rhetoric of change, the planet still has been lingering in turmoil. The US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are expanding while cheerleading democrats go silent in critiquing their golden child, Obama. “War is bad, expect when it’s my party.” Industry executives (aka-coal interests) have hijacked climate change legislation so that in reality there is no real promise of action in sight.

Then we have the supposed “Health Care Reform”, in which Republican outrage over death panels has stalled the Presidents luke-warm proposals. It boggles my mind that polls have shown over 50percent of Americans support moving towards a single payer health care system, but somehow the President chose to ignore single payer advocates and instead proposed his pseudo public option plan. However, right wing criticism has now defeated his plan, meanwhile he and his loyal Democratic minions try to convince us that it is all the right wing’s fault. From my view it appears Obama had no interest in reform and instead created a division to polarize the issue and therefore create a image of reform but in reality he protects the interests of the Insurance Cartels and Wall Street thugs that supported his campaign.

Oh, I wish I was not so cynical, but these days there is so very little hope for me to follow. Nonetheless it is now Fall in the Northeast and the trees are in an array of colors that are opening my eyes to the wonders of nature. Maybe after the passing season change will really begin, for I surely hope that the earth has the power to correct itself from the political nonsense and the actual garbage floating around the planet. I surely hope.

Peace
Robb

“Just as there's garbage that pollutes the Potomac River, there is garbage polluting our culture. We need an Environmental Protection Agency to clean it up.” Patrick Buchanan - I used this quote because it covers how I feel, however Pat a former Nixon Speechwriter is by far expressing something different.

Sickened Health Care Debate

2009-07-01T15:17:00.000-07:00

As the phony dog and pony show of Obama's Health Care "Reform" continues, we the people are left paying thousands of dollars to the pockets of insurance industry executives. Obama promises a "public option" as a solution, while he and his loyal flock have denied any discussion of real reform or change. Below is a letter I submitted to a VT newspaper because I am sick of hearing the bullshit reform debate.

Dear Editor, the Times Argus,

Last years elections brought the country to a state of hope and excitement for the future of government policies, however the more policy debate emerges it appears to be just like the same old rhetoric of the past. Despite the fact that most sectors of the American and Vermont economy are struggling with the enormous burden of health care cost our political leaders would rather maintain the status quo. The major factor for the high costs is the insurance industry swindle of our money, but if you ask President Obama, another flawed bureaucratic program like Catamount/Green Mountain Care (A Public Option) is the answer. To propagate the faulty notion President Obama has enlisted Governor Douglas to manipulate public opinion rather fulfill his campaign rhetoric of supporting a Single Payer Health Care System.

For those unaware of it, Catamount is a bureaucratic nightmare that has individuals continuously filling out piles of paper work and making countless phone calls to obtain coverage or just to maintain coverage. In a matter of less than a year, my wife and I have had our policy premium costs changed multiple times, removal threatened for not following bureaucratic procedures, and eventually being removed because we temporarily made more money than the months previously. Furthermore, the dental and eye care expenses that we paid thousands for were not covered. The Catamount program is a mere band-aid solution of a systematic failure and for our leaders in Washington or Montpelier to praise programs like it is just another means of delaying the solution.

While debate in Washington is going nowhere with Obama’s flawed ideas, Vermont’s legislative leaders are punting on responsibility. A single payer Health Care System is beneficial for Vermont’s schools, towns, businesses and the economy. If Washington is not going to fix the problem, Vermont must do it. The time for action is now for Vermont to create a Single Payer Health Care System for Washington is only perpetuating the failed Wall Street like insurance based system.

So, while the debate leaves out a viable solution, we Americans are going to continue paying for a system that is all about fraud and price gouging, and the Hedge Fund Democracts will gleefully applaud and pat themselves on the backs for "reform."

Peace
Robb Kidd

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi

Obamawellian World

2009-06-07T14:02:00.000-07:00

For the last few years we all heard the rhetoric rumbling on and on, on how America needed to change and that with a Democractic President things will change. Well to put it bluntly, we’re waiting…

Now, yeah some things have changed such as that instead of corporations grabbing the Treasury through lucrative subsidies and tax breaks the Hedge fund Democrats have just handed the check book directly over to them. Now that is what I call openness, instead of hiding the corruption, the politicos are now so presumptuous that they do it right in front of everybody’s face and smile while doing it and what for applause. However, the media pundits continue to pound on the idea that America must support big business, while we as individuals continue struggling making ends meat and risk loosing our jobs on a daily basis.

Of the most rhetorical of the change issues is the non-existing Health Care Reform. Most Americans knows that the reason why Health Care is so expensive is that the Health Care industry is over zealous with greed. The Insurance industry monopolizes health care and plays with peoples lives as if they were chattel enslaved on a monoculture farm. Furthermore, the Pharmaceutical Industry profits enormously from federal research and development grants to discover and market new pharmaceuticals. In return those same pharmaceuticals, at exuberant markups, are then sold to the American taxpayers.

Now charged under the guise of change, Obama has asked Congress to introduce legislation to “reform” Health Care. Earlier in the year, “Health Care” forums were on a traveling dog and pony show trumping up the illusion that someone in Washington cares. Americans were supposed to engage in a discussion on how to improve Health Care. The only problem, like the Senatorial hearings, President Obama’s forums were a sham since proponents of a “single-payer” or “Universal” system were shut out the door and left in the barn as if they had they swine flu.

In Washington, advocates protested Senator Bacchus’s Finance Committee hearings on Health Care, and when protesters chanted “we need single-payer now”, he smirked that “what we really need is more police.” The blatant audacity of politicians to ignore large factions of the populace and to then say that they are working on reform is fundamentally flawed. Americans should be outraged but instead there told by CNN and MSNBC that Obama is fulfilling campaign promises by taking Michelle on dates.

So while Americans are lulled into Hollywood like script with frivolous news, we now have a President applauding the Health Care Industry for “voluntarily” agreeing to cutting potential increases of two trillion dollars over the next few years, while simultaneous advocating for mandatory insurance purchase. Most American’s realize that the system is broke, and that the insurance profiteers are bilking the system, but somehow agents of change still want the status quo. So what we have here, is a situation where the industry is practically writing the rules, the president is the cheerleader in chief, and the media is propagating the illusion of reform. This is no difference, than the Oil and Coal Industry having secret energy meetings with Dick Cheney and then creating energy policy.

So, while in an Orwellian world War equals Peace, here in the Obamawellian world Change= The Status Quo. Folks, as I have stated time after time on this page, “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Change does not come from a man who is paid by Wall Street to run America. Change did not happen on November 7 and it aint happening anytime soon until we all express our outrage. The illusion will fall like a house cards when we chip away at the lies. Please join me before it is too late.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“"Doublethink" means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them” George Orwell

Real Voices of Change

2009-04-04T12:34:00.000-07:00

Today marks the 42nd anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., an event that occurred three years prior to my birth; nonetheless I am sitting here in my home in Vermont, the whitest state in the country, mesmerized that someone had shot him to death. Fourteen years ago, I sat at the site of the assassination (The Lorraine Motel in Memphis), and tears ran down my eyes. I knew right there that Dr. King was a rare man and that a man like him most likely would never step foot in my lifetime. Some have tried to pinpoint other personalities towards his likeliness but all comparisons fall short. So, on this damp April day in Montpelier, Vermont I reflect on the mood and atmosphere of what occurred a few blocks from my home just the other day as compared to the movement with Dr. King.

For those outside of Vermont, the Vermont House just approved legislation to equalize marriage laws for same sex couples. The Vermont Senate approved the measure a week ago with overwhelming support; however the Republican Governor Jim “Nice-Guy” Douglas has vowed to veto it.

During the past week opponents to gay rights used antiquated religious rhetoric to rationalize their opposition. Some claimed Jesus’ name, their religion, or a supposed principle of natural law. However, underlining their opposition is a world invoked by fear. As it was with the civil rights movements for blacks, women, Irish or Italians fear attacked the opposition’s minds and no rational thought could replace their disposition. Like a wild animal threatened by another, all tracks of rationality were removed for fear.

Just a day after the passage of the Marriage Equality bill, I reflect on the life of Dr. King. Passionately, Dr. King stood up and bucked an oppressive system. As much as Dr. King was credited with dismantling a racist and oppressive system, but in actuality it would have meant nothing without having those who stood up alongside him. Countless blacks marched the streets night and day, and sometimes whites joined them to tackle oppression. Supportive whites were ridiculed as being traitors, carpetbaggers, or nigger-lovers just because they stood up for what was unjust. Without the cross race support the civil rights movements may not have persevered.

Hereto in the gay marriage debate, as individuals we have a duty to stand up and support the rights of the gay community. Those in a majority must operate in a manner that is compassionate to all, even for those in a minority. I beg those who witness any forms of oppression to speak out for your voice is needed to help us all get to the mountaintop.

Forty-two years ago, a white man killed Martin Luther King. James Earl Ray they say shot him (supposedly alone). He is not to blame, for we as society are the real culprits for not taking charge ourselves. We as a society should stand up to all forms of oppression, whether it comes from foreign countries, local governments, or friends and family.

As a human, if you live in Vermont or know any individuals who do have them call or email the following Vermont Representatives ASAP.

Governor Jim Douglas
109 State Street, Pavilion
Montpelier, VT 05609-0101
Phone: 802 828-3333 or http://governor.vermont.gov/contact.html

And the ones who voted no in case the Governor does veto, as he has promised, so the Legislature can override it. Six votes are needed to overide. The contact information for legislators can be found here: http://www.leg.state.vt.us/legdir/legdir2.htm

Those Voting no:

Joe Acinapura, R-Brandon Steven Adams, R-Hartland David Ainsworth, R-Royalton Kenneth Atkins, D-Winooski Sonny Audette, D-South Burlington Joseph Baker, R-West Rutland Clem Bissonnette, D-Winooski Carolyn Branagan, R-Georgia Patrick Brennan, R-Colchester Cynthia Browning, D-Arlington Bill Canfield, R-Fair Haven Gregory Clark, R-Vergennes John Clerkin, R-Hartford, Howard Crawford, R-Burke Michel Consejo, D-Sheldon, Tim Corcoran, D-Bennington, Dennis Devereux, R-Mount Holly Eileen Dickinson, R-St. Albans Andrew Donaghy, R-Poultney Debbie Evans, D-Essex Peter Fagan, R-Rutland City Peg Flory, R-Pittsford Robert Helm, R-Castleton Mark Higley, R-Lowell Richard Howrigan, D-Fairfield Ronald Hubert, R-Milton William Johnson, R-Canaan Duncan Kilmartin, R-Newport City Thomas Koch, R-Barre Joseph Krawczyk, R-Bennington Leigh Larocque, R-Barnet Richard Lawrence, R-Lyndon Robert Lewis, R-Derby Michael Marcotte, R-Coventry Norman McAllister, R-Highgate Patricia McDonald, R-Berlin Francis McFaun, R-Barre Town James McNeil, R-Rutland Town John Morley, R-Barton Mary Morrissey, R-Bennington Linda Myers, R-Essex Chuck Pearce, R-Richford Janice Peaslee, R-Guildhall Peter Perley, R-Enosburg David Potter, D-Clarendon Gary Reis, R-St. Johnsbury Brian Savage, R-Swanton Robert South, D-St. Johnsbury Donald Turner, R-Milton Scott Wheeler, R-Derby Phillip Winters, R-Williamstown Jeff Young, D-St. Albans City

Thanks for standing up for the rights of others; in case the time comes others will be there for you.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“In Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me —
and by that time no one was left to speak up.” German anti-Nazi activist, Pastor Martin Niemöller

Rocking The G20, is Wall Street Next ?

2009-04-01T15:45:00.000-07:00

As the so called G-20 summit convenes in London, many converge to show their disgust in the economic policies of International Bankers, Corporate Hedge Funders, and the Governmental Tools of those interests. In America, instead the news dominates the further illusions of basketball furry and who will win the Final Four.

I am quite pleased that today, tens of thousands took to the streets of London. Unlike here, that is much more than what can be said about any political display in America. (There are some minor exceptions, such as in VT yesterday three hundred protested the Governors arbitrary job cuts, and tomorrow hundreds are expected to attend the Vermont House vote on Marriage Equality for Gays and Lesbians.)

However, America’s political dissent is dictated from above and as citizens we are told the ambiguous rhetoric that diffuses us into believing “Vote your Voice" as true democracy. Instead in reality, America has well financed spokespersons of Wall Street, The Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Detroit, and other heinous industries telling America what the priority is and what should be bailed-out and stimulated. Well maybe, if America was not so captivated with their #$%@ basketball game, we would not be in this dire of a predicament.

Part way around the globe today, our fellow man and woman protested the purveyors of global capital, the ones who had already royally flushed the planet down a black hole, while America sat castrated from the Wall Streeter in Chief Obama’s illusion of hope. Folks it is time we stop sitting around waiting for the false notion of hope and be in the streets speaking about revolution. People in London spoke out today, so where are they in D.C., or where are they on Wall Street? The times are a changing, but only upon your actions will they truly change.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Albert Einstein

Marriage Equality Now

2009-03-19T16:48:00.001-07:00

As a heterosexual married man, I feel there is no place for anyone’s personal beliefs infringing on the rights of others. This is why I support the Vermont Legislature in granting equal rights to same sex couples. Marriage in Vermont is a personal commitment between two people that has a number of legal repercussions.

Many religions dictate the parameters of marriage. These parameters should have no bearing on the state’s guidelines. According to my birth raised religion, I am not married because my wife is not of the same religion; however Vermont still recognizes our marriage. My choice to marry someone of a different religious background does not exempt me from my civil rights to marry. Likewise, the state of Vermont should recognize the marriage of any two consenting adult regardless of their background and lifestyle.

Furthermore, recognizing equal marriage rights will be an economic benefit to Vermont. Last year, when my wife and I got married we contributed over ten thousand dollars to the Vermont economy from our guests lodging and other wedding related expenses. Weddings are a lucrative business in Vermont. Residents of other states flock here for their special day. Does Vermont want to exclude the influx of valuable dollars because of personal discriminatory values?

Passage of the Marriage Equality Act is smart economic policy and is morally the right thing to do. During the civil rights movement the Supreme Court struck down the policy of “separate but equal”, so hereto the legislature can easily remove the barrier on equality by passing the Marriage Equality Act. I am proud that Vermont Legislators are breaking away from stereotypical fears and moving Vermonters closer to peaceful coexistence.

Peace

Robb Kidd

“They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself” Andy Warhol

ps: The above is a letter I submitted to the Times Argus. All persons need to work together to create a just and harmonious society, not just when their rights or liberties are threatened.

ASSCRACKING

2009-03-10T18:07:00.000-07:00

Hey, I want to invite all the people that I have not been in touch with to join my new anti-social network, its called Asscrack Book. If you have nothing better to do with your life but to tell me that you are crapping on the toilet, throwing up on the floor, or peeing in your neighbors BMW then AssCrack Book is the site for you.

Be forewarned that AssCrack is not a substitute for real live insults, being a jerk-off, or just being a plain fucking asshole. Instead you should go out into the real world, and leave this anti-reality cyber cesspool.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“There are only two reasons to sit in the back row of an airplane; either you have diarrhea, or you're anxious to meet people who do” Henry Kissinger

Yes We Can Recover ?

2009-02-25T17:26:00.000-08:00

Well all the analysts are still prescribing to the failed economic philosophy of corporate greed while the majority of Americans are faced with severe economic pressures.

Jobs have been disappearing for years, heath care costs went up rapidly and housing went so far past peoples pay, so it is almost insane that Congress is in a panic "stimulate" the economy now when in reality the system has been broken for years.

Sorry to burst everyone's bubble, but this not an exclusive issue to trash Bush and the Republicans for these issues have been ignored for 28plus years and before now little talk has been mentioned about fair wages, universal health care, or affordable housing. Hey, it's still really not being talked about, just bank bailouts,roads and bridges, mortgage relief, and energy development(I would say clean, but coal and nuclear is not clean). Corporate greed has been the central point, and unfortunately the federal government is trying to keep that system afloat, maybe when the system based in reality and not hope or greed, I will believe. So until that time, C'est La vie.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population.”

Bill Bryson-American writer

Band Aiding A Dying Horse

2009-02-10T15:11:00.000-08:00

I read the news today; and it seems as if the bankers and millionaires just robbed the treasury even more. The latest news shows that an economic stimulus bill has passed the Senate and now all have to do is await a compromise with the House and then the latest Chief Thief will save the country. Yeah right, and if you belief it was that simple I have a bridge to sell you in Minnesota.

While the country has been celebrating what has been paralleled to the second coming of Lincoln (to some it’s like Jesus) the economy has further spiraled downward and things still have not changed. Analysts and economists flood the airwaves telling everyone that what is needed is more money to salvage the economy, meanwhile what everyone is already forgetting that back in September we did that and all the economy did was get worse. As a reminder to those with short attention spans, Senator Obama made the call to his Democratic colleagues in the House and twisted their arms to support the failed bank bailout. Two trillion dollars later and all told the country is spiraling out of control further.

Hey, wouldn’t you suppose it would be time that the government stop trying to support a “market” system based on greed and dominance, and instead invest on creating a system based on human needs. However, the fancy Wall Streeter’s and Obamaneers insist on propping up and band-aiding a dying horse economy. Instead of moving the country forward and adopting real change, it seems as if Obama and his corporate gang want to continue the status quo. It’s about to time to get out of the old and into the new.

Nevertheless, while Congress is further bringing about the death roll, the corporate news would rather tell America that Alex Rodriguez has taken steroids than have a real discussion on what’s going. So, thanks to them I have a solution, let’s tax every professional sports player who has ever taken drugs and use the money for a stimulus. Think of it as a Sports-Sin Tax; besides professional sports have been robbing the poor just as much as the banks and Wall Street have, so why not.

As the American Corporate Global Economy further crumbles my advice to you is to move away from the failed system of greed and support business that add to the local economy. Why wait for the complete destruction to happen latter, instead support the new economy now where quality, fairness, sustainability, and practicality make sense. It might as well be now, viva la revolution.

Peace

Robb Kidd

“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein

Real Man of Honor-MLK Man of Peace

2009-01-19T13:29:00.000-08:00

While the nation is captivated with the herofication of a man who is about to become the 44th president of the United States, I beg you to read the following words and then ask your self has King's dream been achieved?

Dr. Martin Luther King was more than just a man preaching a dream; he was a man of peace, a man of wisdom and a man who realized that the American war machine needed to be stopped. America is and has been for the past 100 years a brutal imperialistic force that has prioritized the needs of corporate America by fighting wars of global dominance, while at the same time neglecting the needs of the people.

America is no different today than it was in 1967, for instead of fulfilling Martin Luther King's dream the country is adding to what Dr. Martin Luther King would have considered a NIGHTMARE. End the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East and the drive for world dominance now.

Peace

Robb Kidd

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence

Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam

by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City:

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.

Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

The Importance of Vietnam

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath-- America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

Strange Liberators

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony.

Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.

Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators -- our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change -- especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us -- not their fellow Vietnamese --the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go -- primarily women and children and the aged.

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force -- the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?

Now there is little left to build on -- save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.

Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the north" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them -- the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.

When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.

This Madness Must Cease

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:

"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.
Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.

Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We most provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary.

Protesting The War

Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove thosse conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

The People Are Important

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every moutain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:

Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.

Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out deperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world -- a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the callling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Off'ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above his own.

A DAY(Year) in the Life

2008-12-19T12:24:00.000-08:00

Well this is Christmas and what have you done?...

I saw the news today, O boy and I wished that there could be some good news to report but unfortunately it seems as if the current Liar in Chief is about to bailout the auto industry and the Liar in Chief-Elect is nominating industry shrills or persons with the views polar opposite of what he campaigned on. So, after weeks of frustration and now hearing that Tom Biotech Vilsak the Industrial CornMan from Iowa is the new Secretary of Agriculture makes me want to scream…ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

So, as a moment of reflection I went through my memory bank of the year to search for something positive to signify my thoughts of the year( I mean politically, for in my personal life there was a lot of grounds of celebration,wedding and graduation). So, as that symbol I have posted a musical treat from the 2008 Farm Aid concert, Neil Young performing A Day In the Life... In the darkest of days there is always light.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“So this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun
Ans so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
And so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong
And so happy Christmas
For black and for white
For yellow and red ones
Let's stop all the fight
A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
And so this is Christmas
And what have we done
Another year over
And a new one just begun
Ans so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young
A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
War is over over
If you want it
War is over
Now...”

John Lennon.

Bailouts Auto-Matic Failures

2008-12-13T12:27:00.000-08:00

“If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention,” so the popular bumper sticker slogan says. So, my thoughts are that nobody is paying attention then. Although, my blog title stimulates a thought of optimism in the world, I must confess in these times I hardly am able to see a positive future. We have a topsy-turvy economy that lies on the hinges of what government bureaucrats and Wall Street economists want done, and what is more surprising is that the democrats are the most vocal and adamant supporters of opening up the Federal check-book to the corporations and allowing the continued plundering of our tax dollars. But hey, that’s life in an Orwellian world, War is Peace, right?

There are so many points and issues that I could ramble on about, however for the last month, I feel as if I have been hog-tied and shackled from the collective societal delusion that Jesus Barrack Obama is America’s savior. Rhetorical speeches had broadcasted the image of change; however what is more realistic is that soon all of us are going to be saying “Brother can you spare us some change.” Change does not happen by following policies and ideas from the same mindset that created the problems. Barrack Obama bamboozled America and the progressive movement, and America needs to wake up from the coma. I challenge one person who reads my words to identify one individual nominated by Obama who is an agent of change. No wonder, McCain supporters are overwhelming supporting Obama’s administrations picks because they are either Wall Streeters, Military-Industrial Complex Hawks, Nuclear proponents, or part of the Harvard elite network.

Get of the Obama-euphoric drug high and begin to question what direction we are going in. Do you want; Stanford induced energy policy, Goldman Sachs style environmental policy, Chicago business education policy, Cold War military diplomacy, and Wall Street Economics. I don’t think you do, and neither do I.

What are the options then? According to the Demolicans in Washington, we must bail out the auto industry. The Republocracts are saying no, and instead they are blaming the unions and using it as an opportunity to crush unionism. While I fervently support workers rights, I disagree with an auto industry bailout. Propping up a destructive industry that has crippled American manufacturing is not a viable or realistic policy, and supporting an industry bailout for the sake of jobs is just plain irrational. Investment needs to move away from the car dominated economy and move into a sustainability-based economy. Recent talk of an economic stimulus centers way too much around the issue of roads and bridges and left out of the discussion is real public works programs. Public works should include railroad, schools, hospitals, solar, wind and hydro facilities, and community centers are what is needed, not more of the same infrastructure failures.

Faced with non existing public transportation, crumbling schools, under staffed hospitals, highly polluting energy sources, and lack of public spaces Americas communities and towns are fiscally pinched. As an alternative to bailing out antiquated industries of old, it is time to look forward and fund human needs. In place of the local hospital or community center begging me to donate money I want to see the government fund it and invest in those needs. Let the CEOs of GM, Ford, and Chrysler send me monthly pledge pitches because truthfully I would rather have a staffed hospital than a gas-guzzling, global warming causing SUV. In fact, if the US had a national health care plan, General Motors would have profited an extra 22 billion dollars over the last decade. Instead the talking heads pin-point all the causes and blames of the crisis on Wall Street, the Auto CEO’s, Bush, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Reagan, or Bill Clinton without producing viable solutions. By continuing to refuse real solutions and band-aiding problems, the powers are just continuing the problem.

So, despite my rants and raves, I fortunately do see hope amongst the chaos, but as you can perceive it is not under the current economic or political system. For I believe that real change will organically rise up from our local communities, and not by a well financed and hierarchical “grassroots” campaign. My wife and I pride ourselves living in Central Vermont, a region of the country which is blessed to be so connected with so many resources and people doing amazing things to stimulate change. People such as Food Works at Two Rivers, LACE-(Local Agricultural Community Exchange), Rural Vermont, Onion River Exchange(Time Bank), the localvore movements, the Montpelier Downtown Community Association, and so many countless individuals rising up for systemic change by merely living in harmony and reverence for the earth and one another. I look forward to a day, when others around the nation will join us, so we can all live as one…IMAGINE

Peace

Robb Kidd

“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.” John Lennon

Democracy's Loss

2008-11-24T17:33:00.001-08:00

As the buzz and excitement over the last election cycle passes, Vermont and America are settling back to their daily grind. To the masses enormous change has been prophesized after the eight long years of the Bush administration. To many the country had overnight metamorphosed from a war fearing nation to a peace loving utopia, and the election of Barack Obama has solved all the nation’s problems. I wished it was that simple; however like a skeptical child I too do not believe in Santa Claus.

Although on November 4, many Vermonters and Americans joyfully went to the polls and casted their vote, I have so reservations 4. Supposed record turnouts flooded town halls and school gymnasiums around the state to cast their vote. However as triumphant as the day may sound, Democracy lost that day.

Compare November 4 with the image of the purple dyed hands of Iraqi’s lined up a few years ago to vote for the first time. Exuberant Iraqi’s flooded to the polls to vote for what was marketed as open and free elections(even though we all know they too were not really given choices). People all around the world have died for the right to vote; however here at home many take it for granted the right to vote or take it loosely and only vote for President. In Vermont, election officials trump up the statistic that 71.9 % of registered voters (326,822 of 454,466) voted on Election Day. In actuality, adjusting the numbers to voting age residents it equates to approximately only 66% of the populace, not at all earth shattering numbers.

Closer to my home, in Montpelier, the numbers are expectantly higher 78.3% (4827 of 6161) registered voters; however as Montpelier is a “Capital City” it is inexcusable that over 20% of its residents did not vote. In a year that some marked as being “the most important election” it seems unfathomable many of us did not deem it important to vote. While, although I am harping at the paltry state of affairs I do applaud Vermont Secretary of State Markowitz’s excellent job promoting elections and advancing civic engagement in Vermont, nevertheless the nations statistics are much worse. The dismal national numbers demonstrates democracy’s system wide failure. On this election cycle there was virtually no escaping from it, whether it was on Saturday Night Live, Monday Night Football or by merely seeing a candidate’s face on the side of bus. Election issues flooded all spectrums of society, and somehow still too large of a percentage showed lack of concern.

Furthermore, the failure of democracy displayed itself in other ways. Numerous individuals flocked to the polls tp proudly cast their vote for Obama, some for McCain and Nader(54 total in Montpelier), however many failed to inform themselves of who are what they voted outside of the presidential race. Debate was fervent for the presidential race but when it came to local based races apathy was rampant. Just A few days before the elections, I had people ask me who was running for governor. To much of my chagrin, the lack of awareness was even present on Election Day, in which I overheard an exiting voter tell a poster “I think I voted for the woman,” for governor and had only remembered Gaye Symington’s (for those outside of Vermont she was the Democratic candidate and former VT Speaker of the house) name after the pollster prodded her to. Although, the same voter proudly stated she voted for Obama, there was a complete lack of election awareness towards the other races. To highlight the general lack of election awareness, in the 2006 election I had some one seriously ask me who “Bernie” was. (For those outside of VT, Bernie is a rock star like figure in VT, the only “Socialist” US Senator, and for years US House Rep, and prior to that Mayor of Burlington.)

When Vermonters overwhelming vote for Barrack Obama for President and then simultaneously vote Jim Douglas (Republican Governor) for governor, a problem exists. I for one do not see the “great hope” in Obama as many others, nor do I see “the niceness” of Jim Douglass, nevertheless I do see vast fundamental differences in politics between Douglass and Obama. It reminds me of the past election cycle in which many yards were decorated with Bernie for Senate and Douglass for Governor signs. Bernie talks about Bush being the worst President ever, while Douglas previously was Bush’s campaign manager in Vermont and an ardent McCain support. You can not get that much more contrarian than that.

In addition to the lack of gubernatorial awareness, people ignored many of the “down ticket” races. In neighboring Barre, a recount of the election process determined that State Representative Leo Valliere lost to challenger Paul Poirer by twenty-five votes. To make matters worse is that sixty-six ballots were left blank, more than enough to make a difference in the results. In Montpelier, Rep Warren Kitzmiller, and Mayor Mary Hopper easily beat Jim Sheridan for Montpelier’s two House seats. As an independent Sheridan did not even launch a campaign. Not to disparage Rep Kitzmiller or Mayor Hopper who did face a primary opponent (ousted-rep Jon Anderson), there was virtually no interests in this election. Furthermore, statewide, many House races were left uncontested with only one candidate running.

There appears to be a major system wide failure of the election process and unfortunately a discussion is lacking. The democratic process’s demise can be attributed to many factors; however we as individuals should take most of the responsibility. In order for a democracy to properly function its citizens need to be engaged at all levels of a Democracy. Engagement first begins with awareness, and then follows with participation or action. Democracy can not function without people. One vote for a Vermont office holder carries greater weight than a Presidential vote, by that a Vermont elected official is more inclined to take into account your individual voice, as compared to the President in which you vote is one in a 140 million, as compared to in Montpelier your vote is one in 6161. In short, our voices have a stronger impact in the local communities’ over the national political circus. While it is important to be aware of the national and global situations, democracy demands our fullest attention at home.

So while, America and Vermont congratulates themselves on the supposed victory of Democracy, I challenge everyone to look at the glass half-empty and to work to make things better. There are fundamental problems with our Democracy, and the mere election of Barrack Obama is not going to solve it, the solution rests among us. In conclusion, I quote Former US Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil, Former US Speaker of the House, “All Politics is Local” statement as a means to ask a question, are you a Political Localvore?

Peace
Robb Kidd

“The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.”
John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Question One..

2008-11-05T16:09:00.000-08:00

It is over and everyone's fascination with this years Presidential campaign has come to an end. While it is a pleasure so many people were inspired to involve themselves in this campaign, however democracy is more than just the race for president. In reality, in order for democracy to be a success everyone needs to be involved directly in their community. A vote on Nov 4, is just question one of three-hundred sixty five. Now that you started lets go to question two. November 5. You have one year to finish.

http://www.november5.org/

Peace
Robb Kidd

“In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.”Aristotle

Political Dollar Power

2008-10-23T17:19:00.000-07:00

As the election campaigns wind down to the end, I am gladly awaiting it to be over. Although, I am actively involved in the Vermont Gubernatorial race I am looking forward to the day when people can talk about issues again when it pertains to politics. I am sick of the political diarrhea about Obama, McCain, Palin or Biden and for whatever it is worth I am sick of the large sums of money wasted to tell America who should represent you.

In the news, the USA Today reported this election season has already cost 5.3 billion dollars by the candidates. Imagine if all that money was instead spent on social programs, what kind of progress we could have made stimulating the economy, educating people, housing homeless, or healing the sick. We would have had a greater possibility for real change rather the mere lip service the candidates spew repeatedly about change.

These elections are a scam on democracy and all that matters to pundits is how much a candidate can raise, or mere election frivolity. News dominates coverage based on a candidate’s ability to raise money and not on their ideas, honesty, or past leadership skills. In Vermont, we have a Governor, who has raised over a million dollars, a Democrat challenger over three hundred thousand dollars, and the Independent (Progressive) over one hundred thousand dollars. Add those numbers to the seven hundred sixty thousand dollar fund raiser last summer in Norwich, VT and you have a lot of money for a state in a deep recession and pinched to fund schools, repair bridges or pay workers.

Then once you compare those numbers to how much money was provided in the bank bailout (770 Billion) a pattern emerges. The candidates are funded by those with money, and therefore once elected they reward their donors with favorable legislation. Whether it is with missile defense contracts, paving jobs, or large scale bank bailouts, the system compromises elected officials.

So, as we see more money than ever going into the campaigns we see the policies increasingly favoring those of wealth. Unfortunately, it is not going to change until we as a populace vote based on ideas and issues, and move away from the party dominated money system. So, as the countdown to Election Day clicks away, I hope people begin to wake up to the reality that their vote is practically meaningless since it has already been co-opted by the elites and wealthy of the nation. In reality the real solution calls for everyone to be political informed 365 days year. Once political involvement reaches that level the power of democracy and reason will overcome the power of money. Come election day go out and vote, but remember democracy counts on you being involved the rest of the year.

Peace

Robb Kidd

“The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.”

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Blind Faith in Party

2008-10-16T13:34:00.000-07:00

Everyday, I keep searching for light at the other end of the tunnel or the proverbial grass is greener on the other side of the hill but unfortunately everyday I seem to get further away from finding it. Somewhere over the rainbow, I am sure there is a better way, but what now has emerged in public discourse is nothing more than slight of hand tricks by slick magicians fooling the flock with mindless rhetoric.

I would love to say that it is better somewhere else, but unfortunately the border country of Canada(for those who did not know the US borders Canada) narrowly reelected the Conservative government of Stephen Harper. Harper whose mere obedience to the corporate neo-conservative ideologue is just as scary as it is here South of the Border. It turns out Harper is a shrill for the oil industry just as much as Bush and Cheney. Nevertheless, I sit here on this rainy fall day, contemplate how to chang the world.

On my pet peeve list for today, is blind party allegiance or anti-one-party-allegiance. Over the last eight years America had seen the Republican undivided party allegiance lead America into a preemptive war and bankrupt the country. Republicans followed their leader (Bush) onto the sinking ship, and with each passing day they grew fervently more supportive. Likewise, the oppositional Democrats instead of standing up strong and offering alternatives, they capitulated and advocated for only lesser war and slightly restrained corporate power, and totally selling America short.

Now we have an election coming and once again “it is the most important election of your lifetime.” Unfortunately, once again the national media/establishment had anointed their candidates far before America was ever given a choice, so were are stuck with Obama and McCain.(Not to mention Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, or Ron Paul)

Which President Candidate supports the following?

1. Advancing usage of Nuclear power and using nuclear weapons.
2. Bailing out the failed Wall Street system of corruption
3. Expanding Missile Defense systems.
4. Continuing favoring Israel while alienating Palestine as a policy
5. Expanding the usage of “Clean” Coal while simultaneous saying they will curb global warming.
6. Continue or expanding War in Afghanistan.
7. Supports the Federal Reserve as an institution.

If you answered John McCain you are right; however if you answered Barrack Obama you are also right. So the next question is, do you have a choice?

Now that I pissed of the Obama faithful and the pragmatic party people, I ask one more question, why can’t the LEFT be LEFT?

Going to the polls next month and voting strictly on party platforms and party labels is more of the same dogmatic approach used faithfully by Republicans everyone was so vehemently against. I want to see a real change but America was bamboozled by the media into believing the “viable” choice was between Clinton and Obama (Edwards, the womanizer spoke to the supposed liberal base for a short while). Any candidate who prescribed to anything different was marginalized, ridiculed and silenced by the establishment that democracy was never given a fighting chance.

Like religious zealots and fundamentalists, the parties are underhandedly subverting the American political system. The flock is supposed to take their statements at face value and not question their judgment because they are not “Republicans” or they are not “Democrats.” On a recent exchange with a Vermont blog, I was told candidate worship was a dangerous thing, however the writer an ardent partisan and former party employee could not see past his party allegiance. Which is worse actively supporting the party system which has failed or supporting a candidate with clear differences?

We need to support candidates that have the wherewithal to speak directly on issues and not speak in convoluted tongues. Candidates that are part of the “We Know Better” establishment have failed us time after time and therefore must change. The politics in our nation and our states is not working, so why should we follow the same ground rules?

Peace
Robb Kidd

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.“
Albert Einstein

Bank Aid: Keep on Rocking on the Free Market !

2008-10-01T07:30:00.000-07:00

The buzz and hum of Bank-Aids and Bailouts are captivating America and many other nations; however to me I am more in tune with Farm Aid. Farm Aid is a more preferential route for the country to take, nevertheless the power brokers would rathere follow the desires of the Bankers and Wall Street over the proverbial Main Street or Farmer John.

Just about a week ago I posted my thoughts on the emerging financial crisis, and I concluded the “bailout” orchestration is a result that the crisis affects the wealth and privilege. The average American has been struggling for years, and all the average American has gotten is minor tax refunds. Nonetheless, America’s family farmers have been struggling for the last century. There has been no bailout, no fancy aid packages; just an industry favored Farm Bills favoring the commodity markets and factory farms. American farm policy has been following the “Get Big or Get out” mantra of Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, a mere parallel to the rest of the American economy.

After years of family farm struggles, I see a pattern emerge in the wreckage of the US economy with that of the failures of the Soviet Union. Similarly, the Soviet Union’s forced “collectivism” policy exterminated peasant farmers. By the barrel of the gun, the government forced peasants off their lands. Conversely, in America it was the stroke of the banker’s pen, instead of the barrel of the gun. A Wall Street dominated system bamboozled American farmers into poverty, and lobbied for preferential treatment benefiting the giant agro-business like Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland and Monsanto. As it was with the Soviet Union, the hens have come home to roost and the seeds of their greed have trapped them in a crumbling system and no longer can the mantra of “ it’s to big to fail” can survive.

Appropriately, during the “rich-mans” crisis, I went to the annual Farm Aid concert in Mansfield, Massachusetts. Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp(now includes Dave Mathews) organized the first Farm Aid concert in 1985 to raise awareness about the loss of family farms and to raise funds to keep farm families on their land. However, obviously since it is still going on twenty-two years later there is still more work to done. While amongst the financial “chaos” I relate the plight to a 60’s slogan, and update it for today. “It will be the day that all our farms have all the money they need, and Wall Street holds a concert to bail them out.

For the last twenty-two years Farm Aid has educated Americans about the plight of family farms and the horrors of the factory farm. The factory system is a determent to the American countryside. Factory farms weaken the rural economy, by removing control of the food supply and production to an office in Chicago. It is the ultimate irony in agriculture intensives regions that there are people suffering of starvation. Corn rich Iowa has shortages of fresh vegetables, while America is flooded with high fructose corn syrup which rots Americans teeth. Furthermore, in order to keep up farmers must produce greater quantities in order to stay afloat in the commodity foods pool. Why shouldn’t farmers get paid for what they work, rather what Wall St tells them it is worth?

Environmentally, factory farming has deleterious environmental effects. In order to feed higher demands industrial farms use excessive amounts of petroleum based fertilizers and toxic pesticides. Farm runoffs, pesticide residues, and oil usage exasperates environmental calamities whether it be with pollution or climate change. Small diversified family farmers reduce those impacts dramatically.

Moreover, the food delivery mechanisms are highly wasteful. Food on average travels in excess to 1,500 miles to reach your plate. Centralized food production cultivates the need to transport food longer distances. So instead eating local grown produce and raised meats from your neighborhood family farmer not only reduces the impact on climate change, but even better supports your local economy.

Supporting the local economy is the best thing one can do in these chaotic economic times, for who is more important to you, the farmer or Morgan Stanley. Food is essential and in reality the dollar is just pieces of paper. All the money in the word will not buy you bread when there is none, so instead of bailing out Wall Street, let us aid the farmers and feed the people. I’m sure if farmers are taken care off, then the firm of Nelson, Young, Mellencamp and Matthews can play for Wall Street. Wouldn’t it be great? I can hear the classics now…

“Keep on rocking on the Free Market”,
“Can’t wait to get on the free market again, making money with my friends,”
“Ain't that America, home of the free market,” and
“I buy too much I trade too much I want too much, too much.”

Peace/Paix

Robb Kidd

“Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to it's liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.” Thomas Jefferson

Ps. I wanted to write about Farm Aid a few weeks ago, but the not so sudden downturn in the economy had kind of changed things.
I leave you with this question:

Do you need an economists to tell you which way the economy is going?

Bailouts and Failures

2008-09-23T09:58:00.000-07:00

As the US and World Financial markets crumble deeper into oblivion there is a major portion of the country and the world who just don’t give a damn, and that is because it just really does not effect them. Baseless rhetoric is repeatedly broadcasting the need to helping those faulting on their mortgages and bailing out the financial markets by using depression like imagery; however this “crisis” is more of a crisis for the rich and those who falsely believed they were rich.

The poor and moderate income classes have been struggling for years. Most Americans have been struggling to pay for health care, fuel, and food bills before. It really did not matter to the Republicans, Democrats, and other talking heads until it affected their interests. An investment with Lehman Brothers was the last thing on most American minds, for it was an activity for the select few. The repeated economic myths either keep people struggling to maintain their lifestyle or push them into depression for feelings of inadequacies. Installed upon us are the myths of the American Dream and “middle class” which have become so prevalent that there is an illusion of a common “middle class” culture.

Politicians manipulate those myths to captivate the populace to their political persuasion. The myth of the American homeowner is so wide that it is common belief that most people own their own homes, but in actuality only one-third of the population does. Furthermore, reality dictates that most Americans do not have the money to invest in the “financial markets” because they just do not have the money. So while the media trumps the continual mantra for the economy, we the people should realize that the actual crisis is for the rich.

While yes, even though I do criticize the “trickle down” theory of economics I do realize that there are residual effects from the economic crisis, so there are needed actions to help common Americans. However great the need for government involvement the first priority is to restore regulations and consumer protections to thwart against future corporate predatory behavior. Years of Reagan/ Bush policy of deregulation (and Clintonian corporatism) have to replaced and restore protection for the American public. While we Americans struggle for the necessities of life, corporate welfare is not to be tolerated!

People are the priority; therefore before any bailouts we should reinstitute and introduced new checks on the economic system to prevent these failures from happening again. The “Free-Market” mantra has failed and it is time to rethink the ideology of greed and constant growth. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has stated it quite elegantly, “If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.” Mere bailouts of mega-corporations are just band-aid solutions, for we need a system wide fix. If you agree with me, join Senator Sanders’ petition to Treasury Secretary Paulson calling on restoration of regulation and ensuring that middle income and working families are not the ones who are paying for this bailout.

It is quite evident that “Free Market” has failed, so let us advance society to a “FAIR-MARKET” where workers are paid for what they are worth, farmers are treated with dignity, and jobs are prioritized based on the importance they are to society, such as teachers, fireman, social workers, and nurses, not a trans-hyper-conglomerate-market-analyst. Business as usual will no longer do, if the system is not fundamentally change the country will collapse further than before.

Peace/Pa

Robb Kidd

“Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.” Eugene Debbs - American Presidential Candidate who was jailed for his socialist viewpoints. - In America you are free to agree with the powers that be, otherwise if you don’t you are ridiculed, ignored, threatened or jailed.

A Real Man of Hope

2008-09-16T13:14:00.000-07:00

There are the rare occurrences in life when you know that you are in the presence of greatness, and on this particular Saturday in the Peoples Republic of Brattleboro, Vermont at the Art-Deco/Greek Revivalist Latchis Theater I and a crowd of nearly eight hundred were amongst an American treasure, Pete Seeger…

I, a man now in my late 30years have fortunately been around hundreds of musicians and political activists prior to this day, however this night was special for I was in complete awe. There upon the stage was a man who has stood up to the xenophobia of McCarthyism, the genocide of African-Americans, the countless acts of American Imperialism, the environmental pollution from the iconic American corporation General Electric, and the latest rounds of American hegemony under the Bush crime family.

Pete Seeger has stood strong throughout the ages and now at eighty-nine years old, he is still able to passionately move a crowd. I along with my wife(Sarah, for those who missed it we are married now) were moved with tears many times throughout the night by the soulful singing of his classics tunes and with new adaptations reflecting the turbulence of the modern times with his grandson Tao Rodriguez, and musical cohort Guy Davis. A classic American sing-along harmonized the blessed souls of the room with “This little light of mine, I am going let it shine” and classics like the 60’s anthem made famous by the Byrd’s filled the room.

“To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time for every purpose under heaven.”

Contrary to what some may think, the night was not an idealistic nostalgic “love-fest” of the past, but a beacon of hope for the future. I not being the most optimistic of person did leave there feeling that there is hope in the world. Although the message of the night was more about hope and light they still reminded us of the McCarthy like darkeness we are currently faced with.

Appropriately, since Brattleboro was the town that voted to instruct the Sheriff if Bush or Cheney were to be arrested if they came to town ,Tao wore a shirt broadcasting the words “Arrest Bush” along his chest like he was superman,. In addition, an improve performance from Guy Davis with a fellow Montpelierite playing a didgeridoo (I don’t know his name but I’ve seen him on the street), telling the tale of an evil green giant named Halli-Burton. Most important the performance was real and was not a theatrical performance designed to solely appease the crowd.(Please note the show was a benefit for New England Farm Relief.)

Moving forward, Pete, Tao and Guy removed the darkness by singing Pete’s lifetime of words of wisdom. At times it felt that Pete was reflecting on his own life with lines like, “But there's one thing for certain, when it comes my time, I'm gonna leave this old world with a satisfied mind.”

In all the performance was something to remember and I will always be grateful for the experience. I have seen many great performers in my life, but for this day it was more than just a performance, it was spiritual. Pete Seeger is a man, whose legacy is marked upon us all. He has done more for peace, the environment, equality, and justice than any president will or ever will do. Pete is not just an American treasure he is a treasure for the Earth.

Peace/Paix
Robb Kidd

“Nobody living can ever stop me, As I go walking my freedom highway,
Nobody living can make me turn back, This land was made for you and me.”
Woody Guthrie/However Pete Seeger has performed riveting versions of the song throughout his life.

To read another perspective of the night read my wife’s thoughts here.

Change ?

2008-09-11T16:31:00.000-07:00

I am tired of hearing politicians and there minions declare that they are the agent of change. Everywhere I go I see the words change illuminated on the political horizon; however when a candidate announces something different than the status quo or the candidate is not part of “establishment” the candidate is chastised as either being unrealistic or just “inexperienced.”

So, I ponder, what does change mean for these supposed agents of change?

Political speech in an Orwellian World:

Candidate of Change:

1. being different than the candidate who currently holds the position, but only slightly in regards to social policy, not in economic, foreign or energy policy;

2. being the candidate who may be of a different major political party, but only when that candidates is not part of the same party of the current unpopular Chief Executive;

3. being a candidate that has been a major voice in the legislative body and has willing compromised and cooperated with the current Chief Executive into orchestrating draconian or Band-Aid solutions;

4. being a candidate that either comes from wealth, a long history of being a political insider, or an executive of a company that has profited enormously from the economic system.

Whichever it is, it all is crazy. No wonder, we as a society keep going in a political merry go round of nothingness. If you want different results you can not just support empty baseless rhetoric and wash your hands of it. You as an individual must rise to the occasion and participate in the experiment called democracy, otherwise it ain’t a democracy:

1. Get yourself informed- That does not mean watching CNN (The Corporate News Network), reading the New York Times (The paper of Judith Miller the stooge and the drum majorette for Bush’s War), or the Blogs (most of them are just rehashed political diarrhea –including mine). Information- is obtained first hand be being there and hearing yourself, because by no matter who tells the story it is all biased-(Including mine- haven’t you figured out that I am a conservative Republican with Stocks in Exxon-Mobil, I really think Nuclear power is the way of the future and that Global Warming is a plot of the International Jewish Conspiracy.)

2. Speak your mind- When you find something you support go out and support it. Do not just sit there in your pink bunny slippers watching TV waiting for the second coming of Jesus. Go out there and speak your mind and speak it loud, and don’t be afraid to voice your opinion. (If you refuse to speak because of your job, realize that your job is just not that important, for you will find another one, and if your employer does not like what you said, then maybe you just should not work there if can not freely speak your mind.)

Change is something that comes from within and is not something that is dictated from above. If you want change, get out there and speak your mind, because the talking heads will continue to do it for you if you do not.

Paix-Peace

Robb Kidd

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Albert Einstein.

Oppositional Collapse....

2008-09-04T14:25:00.000-07:00

As the country and world crumbles, we can see why the Democrats can not represent a viable path towards change. After the Democrats finished their Madison Ave-Hollywood fabrication in Denver, the Republicans and John McCain come marching in and pop the Democrat’s bubble by introducing little known Sarah Palin as McCain’s Vice-Presidential Candidate.

And what do the Democratic loyalist’s, pundits, and bloggers have to say? Oh, ‘she’s not qualified,’ ‘can you believe her seventeen year old daughter is pregnant’, or ‘she is a member of the NRA’. Blah, blah, blah… That there is my friend is what is wrong with the loyal opposition. It’s all about the image and not about the issues.

You know, I can care less that her daughter is pregnant, I can care less that she likes to hunt, and I can care less that she is under qualified by being the Governor of the 48th largest state (That did not stop all those Deaniacs from supporting the former governor of Vermont, Howard Dean).

What I am concerned with is that she comes from another oil-producing state, and we all know what kind of credentials the oil industry brings to the table. Secondly, her husband is an executive with BP-British Petroleum. For the record, BP is the only major oil company to support drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), and by chance she and McCain are pro-ANWR-drilling, despite the fact every other oil company has deemed drilling in ANWR as being unfeasible. Also for the record, if drilling were to open in ANWR it would take at least ten years for that oil to reach the US market and furthermore it would not even have an effect on gasoline prices.

So, what really scares me is that while the knee-jerk-liberals react to the superficial Sarah Palin chatter, the real issues are being ignored once again. But hey why would the loyal oppositionists want to talk issues when there own Vice Presidential candidate is a war hawk and has been a stooge for the world bankers.

All that is within the conventions and the presidential elections is a front on democracy. As citizens we are better off getting involved with our local elections and acting closer to our homes, however the powers that be would rather have you engaged with the superficial chatter where your vote just doesn’t matter. Instead, as former US House Speaker Tip O’Neil had stated “All politics is local”, so get out there in the street and act locally.

Paix(Peace)
Robb Kidd

“In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.” George Orwell

Reality or DNC Illusion ?

2008-08-28T16:10:00.000-07:00

I am glad I do not have a television with reception. I am glad that it was sunny today. I am glad I am alive…

However, outside in reality the country is slipping into a deeper whole, and the lemmings are following Obama deeper into that whole. Let me first clarify before the “Blame Naderites” get on my case. John McCain is a nut, but that still does not justify me blindly supporting Obama.

I do not support candidates that propose escalating military campaigns such as in Afghanistan, candidates that “criticize” the war in Iraq while refusing to talk about immediate withdrawal or cancellation of the U.S. Embassy fortress the size of the Vatican, and a candidate that has not ruled out usage of the Nuclear Weapons on Iran. Each one of those reasons is clear indications that he is not the “peace” candidate but the mere continuance of the Republican-Democrat (chicken hawk) corporate imperialism.

But in case no one has been paying attention the proof positive that Obama is not radically different from the current administration policies is his selection of Joe Biden as Vice-Presidential candidate. Does America remember when Biden was the Democrat’s Chief Architect in given powers to George Bush to wage war in Iraq? Obama and his supporters can charge as much as they want on the illusion that Obama is the candidate of change, however he is more of the same illusory chicken hawk mentality that the Democratic Party has sold out the American People. The Democrats in succumbing to such mediocrity and complicity are responsible for the collapse of America.

As I will not vote for McCain and I will not vote for Obama, I am disgusted in the Coca-Cola-Coma America has been consumed with. Whether the War Hawk or the Chicken Hawk wins, America is still ruled by the corporate minions of ATT, Exelon, Monsanto and the World Bankers. The question is are you ready for change and can you break your dependence from the lies of political party showmanship? Or would you rather have political spectacles paid for by the corporate criminals who have sold out America. I choose freedom, and my freedom is to declare independence from the top down elitism of the political parties.

Paix(Peace)

Robb Kidd

“So is there a difference between Democrats and Republicans? Sure. The Democrats say one thing ("Save the planet!") and then do another--quietly holding hands behind the scenes with the bastards who make this world a dirtier, meaner place. The Republicans just come right out and give the bastards a corner office in the West Wing. That's the difference.” Michael Moore

“As a rule, large capitalists are Republicans and small capitalists are Democrats, but workingmen must remember that they are all capitalists, and that the many small ones, like the fewer large ones, are all politically supporting their class interests, and this is always and everywhere the capitalist class.” Eugene Debs who was jailed for expressing his viewpoints while running for President

Changing Organics

2008-08-08T12:16:00.000-07:00

A long time has come since I have last written, and since that time my world is rapidly changing. While it appears to me that the world is in a state of chaos and doom, thankfully there is a lot of joy in my world, and I hope for your world as well. Joy makes it all worth living.

For starters I finished school (now I am more than just a radical on the street, but a radical on the street with a Master’s degree), second I am getting married in a week. Anyway, so while the world is masked with so much gloom, I try to look through it and see a silver lining, and take away the many positives that come about each day. It is a hard thing I must tell you because on every passing page or corner there is creeping darkness. However, dispute the madness there are so many people out there doing so much good, and that is where I see the spark of hope in the world.

Now, it is not the hope of a Barrack Obama, for I talk about it is the real hope of people doing change right in their own backwards. Having an Obama sticker on your car or donating money to a political campaign ain’t going to get you a dime (maybe you hope you can). Real hope and change comes from what we do in our everyday world, not waiting for someone above to make things better, change and hope from comes from you and I.

We must change the way we all live. Switching from bananas grown in Chile to organic bananas grown in Ecuador is no different than switching from Pepsi Cola to R.C. Cola. Consumption of goods, 6,000 miles away is bad no matter how it is grown, conventionally or organically. Our whole way of doing business must change.

Secondly, the so called “greening up” of the economy with eco-friendly products is another falsity. The reason we as a planet are in such a dyer predicament is because we as humans have over consumed the planets resources. It is nice my tee-shirt is made from organic cotton, however do we need seventy tee-shirts or an energy efficient dishwashing microwavable toaster? We as a society can not fix the problems of the 20^th century by using the same methods that created the problems.

We as a society must move to a more locally based economy, where the majority of our food is cultivated or raised nearby. Consumption of goods needs to be limited to real necessities, and not to the latest Madison Avenue fad. Furthermore, income has to be prioritized based on the value of the job. Why does it that society condemns the salary of a teacher, while the salary of a video-game designer is praised (not to mention professional athletes or other entertainers.) Who in society has the most value, the teacher, the farmer, the nurse, or does the assistant chief marketing procurer of children’s breakfast cereal? This all has to change, not later but now…

So as my days move along and are rapidly changing, I see a world of chaos revolving around me. Instead of living hopelessly in despair I salute those kindred spirits of mine who are out there making a difference. Those growing the local foods, those promoting the local foods, those make clothes from hand, and those supporting all of them are my heroes. Let us all support them and change our way of living to a better world.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?” Mahatma Gandhi,

Real Terrorists and False Agents of Change

2008-05-13T20:36:00.000-07:00

So as the world spins out of control, and America is falling into the hands of the corporate juggernauts, all the leaders of the loyal opposition can do us distract America with false hopes of change. But still as the country falls deeper in recession, the world becomes increasing more volatile, and the world looks as America as an imperial power, these so called candidates of change are not offering anything new. Just the same old rhetoric.

So who are the real terrorists...

And why does not anyone of the candidates of change really speak about the horrible reality dictated by the corporate elite. Truth be told is that they are a part of that system and to really question the system would result in the loss of their power.

However, we as a people can change it, but only if we act out and demand a new reality. Remember to confront the politicians when they are talking about change. When they talk about alternative energy do they mean "clean coal"(if there could be such a thing), nuclear(Mr Obama), or ethanol(which continues to support the mechanisms of the giant agribusiness like Monsanto, Cargill, and ADM which have been uprooting Americas family farmer for the last century)?

Or when they talk about helping out the poor, are they wearing suits and clothing that costs the same as someones rent, or living in palatial palaces. Many of the politicians of the day, come from the same class of people who have benefited from the system the way it is so why would they really want to change it.

Look behind the curtain and see who really is the wizard, and then too maybe you will vote and speak for real change. Think outside the box and the two party system, for you can't fix the problems with the methods that created the problems.

Peace
Robb Kidd

"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows" Bob Dylan.

Spring Cleaning the State House

2008-05-06T20:20:00.000-07:00

Last week the 2007-2008 Vermont General Assembly Biennium reached its climax and adjourned. The mainstream party leaders praised their members for jobs well done despite leaving Vermonters, the environment, labor, education and health care dangling on morsels left over from years past. So much time and baseless words mouthed; nevertheless they have just conceded to the powers above and capitulated to the principles of an obstructionist governor.

For the last few months I have worked beneath the Golden Dome, and upon entering my service I had a sense of hope for the potential promise of success. Unfortunately, despite working with a few highly intelligent and dedicated individuals, I soon found out that there is no room for logic or intelligence in these halls, just baseless partisan rhetoric and politics as usual.

So Vermont is left with weakened environmental laws, dilapidated roads, costly health care, and a spiraling downward economy. But hey, at least there is one benefit from the Legislature adjourning early, and that is they can not screw anything else up. Luckily for now, Montpelier is returning to its quite small town feel. Just in time and by coincidence, Montpelierites had their cleansing ceremony on the State House lawn this past Sunday. The picture above is from “All Species Day” a celebration of the coming of spring, but how appropriate that it came the day after the legislature adjourned. Maybe, this year will bring new things, and for once the traditional party politics of obstruction and denial will give way to a progressive agenda looking out for the people’s agenda and not some egotistical power grab.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” Jimi Hendrix

Vermont Yankee Propaganda-Lies and Collapse

2008-04-29T19:30:00.000-07:00

Upon listening to the radio, I get more and more frustrated each and every day from the blatant distortion from the Vermont Yankee/Entergy propaganda campaign. Of recent, they claim that because of nuclear power, Vermont has the cleanest air in the country. That is just a plain outright lie and it is unethical to broadcast those claims. First, Vermont’s largest source of power is from hydro-electric dams which is far less environmental deleterious than nuclear; and second, if it were not from landmark environmental legislation (ACT 250) preventing gross over development, Vermont would not have the trees to counterbalance air pollutants, nor have the vast open landscape without strip housing grasping for more fuel. Only in a “humpty-dumpty world” is nuclear environmentally responsible.

Vermont does not need nuclear, and with forward thinking Vermont can move past the anachronistic thinking of the past. However, due to the vast financial resources of the Entergy Corporation the propaganda machine is off and running. Everyday I either hear their lies on WDEV or on the not so public radio of VPR, and so we as listeners, consumers and citizens must take a stand against the lies.

Below is a letter I sent to Ken Squire of WDEV expressing my concerns, I urge others to do the same.

Dear Ken Squire,

As a regular listener of WDEV I appreciate the diversity of opinions offered in its programming. Unlike most other radio stations, WDEV gives its listening audience a wide range of opinions. I feel that even the opinions I disagree with offer the community a great service. However, a recent advertisement blitz by the Vermont Yankee/Entergy Corporation (VY) is destroying that credibility. Entergy’s commercials are a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts and its continued broadcasting is unethical.

Although, WDEV does have a priority in receiving operating revenues from its advertisers, WDEV could use some discretion in accepting advertising dollars. VY’s sponsorship is costing WDEV and its other advertiser valuable resources. For upon hearing a commercial from VY, I immediately change the radio frequency, subsequently missing any of the following commercials. Although, I am just one individual I have been encouraging others to follow suit. Many others are also disgusted with the VY deliberate false rhetoric and therefore if WDEV continues to air the commercials WDEV and its advertisers are bond to loose customers.

Once again, I appreciate the diversity of opinions offered by WDEV radio, however WDEV will need to demand that VY provide non-deceptive advertising, to allow “free-“ counter advertising, or to eliminate VY advertising. Thank you for reading my concerns, and your continued broadcasting service.

The lies of the propaganda machine are no longer appropriate, however until we all stand up and confront injustices in all areas of life, the politics and practice of greed and deception will destroy us. Take a stand…

Peace
Robb Kidd

“In a time of Universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” George Orwell.

Boycotting Opening Can of China's Worms

2008-04-13T18:56:00.000-07:00

All of this controversy on whether the United States should boycott the Olympic Opening Ceremony has me perplexed. The question should not be on whether to boycott the opening ceremonies, but rather to boycott China’s economy as a whole. 1. China has a lethal track record on human rights abuse towards

Tibet

and its own citizens; 2. it’s business entities and alliances are distributing highly toxic and inferior products damaging our homes and health; and 3. China’s rapid industrialization is exponentially adding to the causes of global climate change. Nonetheless, over the last few decades, the United States has designated China with most favored trade status. Meanwhile, the US economy is crumbling fast, human rights abuse are lingering on, and global climate change is more likely becoming catastrophic. The answer therefore is not to just a boycott China for one day, but for America to divest from China and boycott all companies who do business with China until human rights are followed, distributed products are safe and non-toxic, and a path of environmental responsibility is followed; however that would call for the U.S to do the same.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“We need to exert ourselves that much more, and break out of the vicious cycle of dependence imposed on us by the financially powerful: those in command of immense market power and those who dare to fashion the world in their own image” Nelson Mandela.

Deer and Moose Herd

2008-01-10T20:26:00.000-08:00

All I have to say is that Vermont has a healthy Deer and Moose Herd, and for the time being that is all that matters. Please stand by until May and I will fill in the details then.

Peace
Robb Kidd

ps: because of other commitments I will not be able to contribute to the intergalactic debate until May, please be patient and DON'T PANIC.

“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke. But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate, so let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."Bob Dylan All Along the Watchtower

Living an Illusion--1984

2007-12-01T19:50:00.000-08:00

It has been a busy few months for me, and unfortunately I have not been able to write as much as I would wish. Unfortunately, while school has engaged my time, the world appears to still being crumbling. While the earth burns America continues with their self absorbed ritual with their yearly servitude to a holiday called Xmas. (Please note Christmas has lost its meaning because what Christ had preached has nothing to do with this materialistic holiday, and besides Christ would probably be illegally renditioned to a secret CIA prison tortured and water-boarded and forced to admit he is a member of Al-Qaeda if he were alive today, and Fox-News would brand him a traitor.

So, anyway while I am spending my time in school hopefully learning ways on how to become more effective in tearing down the broke, corrupt and fascist system the world is still going to pieces. These are my top ten reasons of proof that the world is doomed.

1. The Democrats still have not impeached the President,

2. There are more private mercenaries in Iraq than there are US soldiers- so not only are the neo-cons feeding their demand by hiring foreign nationals as mercenary soldiers, they are profiting, and they have hired mercenaries that do not have to answer to any laws.

3. Even though, Al Gore and a bunch of scientists have received a Nobel Prize, corrupt politicians like McCain and Lieberman are stripping any meaningful substance from legislation and continuing supporting the oil, coil or nuclear industry.

4. In Annapolis, Md. a faux peace conference told America that Israeli and America are committed to working for peace with the Palestinians- How can you have a peace conference without inviting the Palestinian government of Hamas, a primary victim to Israel’s apartheid like conditions.

5. The states of New Hampshire and Iowa will soon tell us which corporate stooges of Republicanism or of the Democrats will be allowed to become president, while the candidates advocating real change are ignored by the corporate media..

6. The Republicans debate about immigrants, despite the fact their corporate greed has created the demand for low wages, thus increasing illegal immigration.

7. The new attorney General does not know if water-boarding is torture, and somehow the Senate still confirmed him.

8. OJ makes headline news again and dominates CNN and Fox News-while Americans still do not who Prime Minister Maliki is.

9. Dictator Musharraf in Pakistan receives millions of dollars in aid from the US government, while he jails innocent citizens, shuts down the media, cancels elections, tortures dissenters, proliferates nuclear technology, and has killed innocent civilians. Sounds like grounds for invasion, except for he is George Bush’s friend in the War Of Terror.

10. Trent Lott resigns, sounds positive, but unfortunately he’ll soon be a lobbyist in DC, and I’m not sure which is worse having him vote once, or having him trying to influence legislation.

Anyway, the world is f…ed and if Americans don’t wake up soon we are all truly doomed.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” George Orwell

Going To A Hand Basket-

2007-11-12T18:29:00.000-08:00

While the world looks like it is definitely going to hell in a hand basket, I just want to leave people with some comedy.... Or maybe, just more evidence of how people really are clueless.

Yeah, after some recent events in my life pessimism is coming back in full force. But I guess when I actually agree with my congressman more than I do with the local anti-war activists things have really taken a turn. For those who just crossed paths with this post, I disagree with Congressman Welch and I think impeachment of the President and Vice-President is the only moral thing left to do. It is clear that Bush and Cheney will not listen to the American people, so therefore the American people should dispose of them.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.”
Norman Mailer

Step It Up !

2007-10-30T20:36:00.000-07:00

Saturday November 3 at a location near you, please use your voice and Step it UP. If the the leaders don't hear you, they will not listen.

For the past two hundred years, Americans have seen the effects of the Industrial Revolution dramatically alter the environment. Dramatic change has led to global warming and other environmental catastrophes. The planet needs leadership to take charge and respond.

There are no quick easy solutions; however time is imperative and action is called for now. Pandering to the economic forces of development and industry are what has created this mess, and we can not stand for it any longer.

The first priority is to expand Efficiency Vermont to include all forms of energy. As the current Governor has refused to work with the legislature, we must convince all Republicans and Democrats to fairly tax all current energy sources and override the policies of obstructionism. The Public Utilities are utilities of the public, and investment from profits should remain within Vermont. From our dollars we shall learn to conserve, and develop viable energy alternatives.

In addition, we must discourage gas-guzzling vehicles. Americans should have to pay the true cost of gasoline and by raising gas taxes we will encourage conservation. However, as a counterpoint to the anti-tax crowd, we must begin with an immediate tax refund to offset any additional costs to consumers. Therefore we will create an incentive for serious change in attitudes towards gasoline. Just maybe people will think twice about buying a gas-guzzler or driving excessively. It is imperative that we propel the debate forward and away from the current political obstructionism of today.

Peace
Robb Kidd

Step it Up Saturday Nov 3-2007

"I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings." Margaret Mead

Say No to Conservative and Pseudo-Left...

2007-10-14T19:59:00.000-07:00

There is a major problem in the world today, and while there is so much universal deceit coming from all corners of the White House believe it or not there are still people who support the criminals who have hijacked America. While some might say that support is only coming from uneducated country bumpkins of the south, religious fundamentals and greedy warmongers of the “industrial complex,” the reality of the matter is that real people like the Governor of Vermont whole heartedly still support the criminality of the President.

I’m still perplexed that in the state known for being a liberal sanctuary that somehow the population still is not in uproar about it. The problem is because Vermont Democrats can not align themselves and support a real “left” candidate for governor and defeat those who continually support the treachery and travesty of the White House, because there individualized egos will get in the way. It is not a fluke that Vermonters elected a “socialist” Bernie Sanders to the Senate. Nor is it that seven members of the Vermont House are from the Progressive Party. That is because people really want change. People are tired of quasi-liberal leadership that ducks around the issue and fails to challenge the real issues. What we need in Vermont and America are politicians with guts to fight for what is right, instead of the centrist compromise that in effect accomplishes nothing. When Democrats are week, we as a people get stuck with this…

While I have spent the last few lines mocking the VT Democrats, I will at least give them some credit for posting this video on line. However, if the VT Democrats fail to align with the left wing of the state, I remind people that the state will be left with a few more years of neglectful governance from Jim “I supported a winner” Douglas. So, with Halloween approaching soon what really scares me is the continued capitulation from centrist democrats. I hope I’m wrong and instead we can all move forward and work together for real change and not the status quo.

Peace
Robb Kidd

"In the long run men hit only what they aim at." Henry David Thoreau

Nuclear Hummer

2007-10-10T18:54:00.000-07:00

Pictures like this are true examples showing that the world is shit out of bricks. In a supposedly environmental conscious nation, not only are people buying these monstrosities of a vehicle, but now there are exclusive car dealerships just for the sake of selling them. The above picture is from the Hummer dealership of the town I was born in, and it behooves me to say that maybe it is just too f..ing late to stop the course we are on.

However, withstanding my pessimism, at least there has been some good news coming from the environmental front. The American Electric Power Co. agreed to a 4.6 billion dollar settlement with the North-Eastern states just yesterday. For years dirty coal-fired power plants in the Ohio region have been spewing off toxic emissions effecting the entire North-East. The pollutants have been attributed to causing acid rain and as a result killing of natural habitats. While other corporate behemoths such as Exxon-Mobil are still ducking and covering, at least one corporate entity will have to pay.

Adding a little more optimism, Vermont Senator Sanders declared that Vermonters have no faith in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Sanders recently introduced legislation that will allow neighboring states of nuclear power plants to request an independent evaluation of their safety. What a novel idea, instead of trusting the evaluation of the NRC, which incidentally is primarily composed of industry “experts,” Sanders wants to give surrounding governors the power to request having an independent verification of the nuclear plants safety. (For those outside of Vermont, the Vermont Yankee Nuclear power plant recently had two major mishaps shortly after the NRC declared its safe operation.) So instead of waiting twenty years after environmental calamities to have taken place, a neighboring state can potential put a check on dangerous operations.

While holding my breath with this optimism, one would not have to look too hard to see where the pessimism will come from. Enter stage right, but of course, Vermont Governor Douglass. The Governor stated, “it is presumptuous for (Sanders) to say that Vermonters have no faith in the NRC.” A good portion of the state is in an uproar over the status of the Vermont Yankee plant, but unfortunately the Governor lives in a George Bush induced coma of denial and answers only to the party line. Just a few months ago, the Governor vetoed a tax increase of the plant and has continuously whistled to the tune of business, while neglecting the real needs of the people.

It is well know of the oil industry’s corruption of the president, so what is the likelihood of a Republican Vermont’s governors capitulating to the nuclear industry. As the saying goes “birds of a feather flock together,” so when Governor Douglas states "I am somebody of the same political party and we get along pretty well," and "[t]he president is the leader of my party and I am a proud Republican,” one should seriously wonder about his priorities.

While it appears, the world is still going in a hand-basket there still is at least some rays of hope. For today, one industry is anteing up and paying for the environmental havoc they have caused. Let us hope we can remove the inflexible business pragmatists like Governor Douglass before the whole planet becomes radioactive from nuclear power or over-heated from the hummer driven crazed zombies.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.” From another lying Republican kook, Ronald Reagan, the Great Bullshiter

Juicy News

2007-09-19T07:50:00.000-07:00

As I have posted a short time ago, I have become removed from the rest of the world and while it dismays me that I am not able to get myself as informed as I would wish, in some ways I am glad I have been out of touch. There are many problems accentuated in the world today and to my shock and horror while awaiting repairs on my truck, I was duly informed on the world today. Despite my removal from political affairs, I do know that a landmark court decision was delivered that debunked the claims of the auto industry. In that case Judge William Sessions declared that under the Clean Air Act and along with the EPA’s approval of a California ruling on limiting carbon emissions a state can regulate mileage standards to miles per gallon of automobiles and that automobile industry can comply; however that does not seem relevant to the news of the day. So, while I awaited my repairs instead of stories of emissions or other relevant concerns, I and America were informed of the circumstances of Mr. O.J. Simpson.

My guess is that the media moguls and the powers that be would rather have Americans blinded with celebrity gossip and to keep them from being properly informed. Words have come out strongly condemning the biasness of Media empires like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and Newscorp, while the rest of the industry has been left to their own misdoings. As I embark, on my diatribe against the news media, I am reminded that other political perspectives do too criticize the media but their faulty premises are on that is a liberal bias. Whatever the faults are of the media, I can summarize is that in either case it needs a serious change. The media has been come so overly consolidated that the situation has become less fair or even unbalanced. Currently, as the years progress America is left with less and less sources of news and the powerful news empires battle on marketing the product. Fox, the news channel of the right with its over- zealous commentators O’Rielly and Hannity, CNN the news company that brought you the First Gulf War, MSNBC with its alternative Keith Olberman, or the CBS evening news with celebrity Katy Couric. The industry has become nothing but a source of revenue and if they market to a particular crowd they too can get their share of advertising dollars or control

Newspapers do not fare much different. In Vermont, the Burlington Free Press is owned by the Gannet Newspapers the publisher of the ever so popular trash paper the USA Today, which for practical purpose is only usable to line the bottom of a bird cage. In New York, Headlines fill the tabloid Daily News and New York Post with shocking celebrity gossip. The New York Times may offer an alternative with “all the news that’s fit to print” but in actuality stories are be buried in the corners of page A-17, and while they are at it the concurrently publish the Boston Globe. Alternatively, to those more interested in the business news, The Wall Street Journal pontificates the corporate line. (As a sidebar I Rupert Murdoch was trying to buy the Wall Street Journal)

The problem of today is not that people do not care; it is that they are taught not to care. The media powers have created a medium to captivate the masses in world of consumerism and bliss. Breaking News tells us that OJ is in trouble, while the real news that the world is in trouble is buried deeply beneath the headlines. The media has reached a point where although they are not a function of the government, they practically are. The news media creates the headlines, creates the celebrities and tells you who to vote for. Obama is for change and Fred Thompson is Ronald Reagan’s heir apparent they tell us. The Counterculture icon Timothy Leary passionate words declaring "Turn on, tune in, drop out" should be changed to “Turn off, Tune out, Drop Out.” Drop out from the system and begin an adventure to think for yourself.

Peace
Robb Kidd

War is Not Peace

2007-09-11T21:48:00.000-07:00

In the insane world we live in today, the Orwellian doublespeak of War Is Peace is rampant in the political culture of the day. Six years ago today, a group of individuals of Middle Eastern (Saudi Arabian mostly, our allies) decent hijacked commercial airliners and sequentially propelled them into The World Trade Center and the Pentagon. America had been hit and the consequences of American foreign policy had come full steam ahead and attacked the heart and soul of the nation.

Safely across the Hudson river and tucked away in my former suburban home in New Jersey, I saw the smoke funneling above the New York City skyline and wondered what was going to become of this tragedy. In my heart, I thought maybe this was America’s wakeup call and America would soon question its involvement in the affairs of the world. What naivety I had thinking that people would stop and question. Instead of the hopeful somber reflection I had envisioned, America became engulfed with patriotic zeal and fervor.

That evening, I vividly remember sitting in the local bar and watching the repetitive broadcast news morbidly tell the story of the day, until one striking individual came storming in with anger. His leather jacket was draped with the colors of the American flag and proudly with no remorse he shouted, “Damn towel-heads… I just punched one of them in the face at the gas station; get the fuck out of America, I told them” Too bad for this man, to be raged in so much anger to not even realize that most of the gas station attendants in that town were either Indian or Pakistani and not of Middle Eastern origin.

Shortly afterwards, CNN (Corporate News Network) aired footage of gun fire in Afghanistan, and the crowd around seemed to cheer. “Bomb them to pieces” and Fuck’n Nuke them”, were the words surrealistically floating past me. These were the words I had heard and my heart had been crushed. America was enraged, so instead I sat back and drank my pint of Guinness and perplexedly gazed at the world around me.

As the world turned, the hatred grew further; America soon entered Afghanistan in search of Osama Bin Laden and the beating of the drums pulsated louder. The President and his minions, a bunch of Democrats, the so called Liberal Media, the “extremely liberal” New York Times and practically everyone else within the power structure called for more war. “You are either with us, or against us,” the President cowardly whimpered and the frenzied masses ate it up. Nowhere in the news coverage or in mainstream culture was there any reference to the lies and misrepresentations of facts and truth became causality.

“These people hate freedom” or “they don’t like our way of life,” we were told. I am amazed that people actually believed that. Can anyone one explain it to me, that someone who does not like freedom would come to America to kill themselves along with others, just because they do not like freedom? Now, that is crazy and to anyone who really believes that simplistic way of thinking, I have a bridge to sell them.

We are stuck in a world of lies and deceit and until the countless masses of zombies wake up from their Coca-Cola Commas we are all doomed to be in perpetually state of war. The War on “Terrorism” is a lie and is just another way to blindly keep Americans captivated in a never ending quest to catch a bogeyman. Terror does not stop, by bombs and nor will it ever be stopped by dominating the entire world. France learned that lesson years ago in Southeast Asia particularly in Vietnam, Britain supposedly had in Africa and India but I guess America is just a little bit learning disabled.

War is not peace, no matter how much the government tells you. It is time to reclaim the government from the war mongers of the Republican and Democratic parties, as well as to bypass the talking heads of the media who have lied to us in the past, present and our near future. War is not the answer, no matter how you frame it.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” George Orwell

Move Vermont and People Forward

2007-09-07T15:31:00.000-07:00

Over a month ago, Vermont’s Legislative leaders, House Speaker Gaye Symington and Senate President Pro-Tem Peter Shumlin announced their formation of a commission to study the legalization of gay marriage. For those outside of Vermont, Vermont was the first state to pass a civil unions law that granted rights for the gay to join in a civil union, but feel short of passing fully equality. To Shumlin and Symington, I agree that when it an issue occurs in regarding rights there is no better time to address them but now. Here in Vermont, debate is starting to shape forward in proclaiming the rights of the gay community.

When civil unions did pass there were those who took offense to it and for that they mounted a full counter attack; however their efforts where futile because it was mixed with intolerant religious rhetoric and homophobic fear. “Take Back Vermont” was their charge and their voices rocked the political climate of Vermont. A sleeping giant of right wing conservatism was woken up but despite their protests civil unions became law. Up until just recently, the backlash had been mere echoes of the turbulent times, for you can still see some of the signs posted along the back roads broadcasting their message of fear.

Those voices had been quite but now Symington and Shumlin have decided that the time was right to reintroduce the issue of gay marriages, they are awakening again. This time the things have changed and states throughout the country are not only passing civil unions, but also gay marriage legislation. Vermont is merely alone its recourse for it is joined with the strength of the prevailing winds. These statutory rules are not being replaced by legislatures, but by the courts. Iowa’s (not a hot bed of progressive ideals) Supreme Court had just struck down Iowa’s ban on the grounds of constitutionality last week, at now gay marriages has hit the heartland of America.

The times are changing; however there is still a token of resistance and many political pundits question the congeniality of the commission. To some there is worry about bring out old wounds and a just a desire to keep the issue at bay, but I refute that claim, for “No one is free when others are oppressed” and “Separate but equal is not equal. When is it good to give some one their rights? Today is the right time and not later. There are still people who feel that it was legitimate to discriminate against African-Americans, but our laws changed because it was the right thing to do. As with racism the country did not wait for the right time, for the time is then, and therefore the time is now. We did not evolve into our system of laws because a few people did not want to insult the voices of the “intolerable, racists,” nor should we do that now for the “homophobic.”

As they introduced their plans, I applauded them for being bold and pushing the issue to the forefront. A particular legislator in VT had told me that the way he counteracts his constituents who are opposed to gay rights is to simply ask them how they have become adversely affected by a homosexual individual. Not once, has he gotten a reply and I am sure that 99.9 percent of the time that will be the case. The world had not ended when civil unions were passed nor will then gay marriage cause it as well. However, there are those who claim it based on their religion and to refute that is to remind them of the separation of church and state. We as individuals can not make our religious views applicable to the law for we do not live in a religious theocracy (at least not yet).

While, I pontificate the expansions of rights, I want to remind people of what others out there may see. The more and more the issue is brought about the mere it will be shown that those opposed to it are merely fearful and disillusion individuals that are in need of education and learning tolerance. Below is a letter that was printed in Friday’s Times Argus and it shows that point:

Lawmakers should reject gay marriage
September 5, 2007
So our legislators in Montpelier have appointed a biased and one-sided committee to study gay "marriage," and think it will look legitimate if they stick just one token opponent on it? Oh, please!

Is it any wonder the Muslim people of the world hate us Americans so? After all, their holiest book, the Koran, teaches them that homosexual behavior is one of the world's great evils (as indeed so teaches our own Christian Bible — but we tend to ignore that).

So it should not be surprising that the extremists among them plot our destruction.

9/11 will soon seem like a garden party compared to the horrors ahead of us, and we have brought it all upon ourselves. If we are all too wimpish to show any respect for the teachings of our own Bible, lets hope our Legislature can at least avoid insulting dedicated worshipers of the Muslim faith with such trash legislation.

I left this persons name out, on the mere thought that he is already going through so much pain and anger that to write his name would just add fuel to his fire. That is why, I say let them debate the issue because their spokespeople are working on fear and not on reason and the more they speak the more they discredit themselves. Take Vermont forward!!!

Peace
Robb Kidd

“Only the extremely ignorant or the extremely intelligent can resist change.” Socrates

Labor for the Now.

2007-09-03T07:36:00.000-07:00

Of all the days and holidays in the year, Labor Day has struck a fondness in my soul. Labor Day a day to celebrate every one and not just the elites of history, religious icons, or some Hallmark accentuated day. Labor is something we all do, whether we are conscious of it or not we all work. As Bob Dylan chimes in his song Serve Somebody, “it may be the devil or it may be the lord, your going have to serve somebody”.

So on a day like this, where very few of us are actually working, I take homage to the all the work that has been done in the year. The men and women who built my computer that I penned my thoughts on, the ones who served my coffee this morning at Capitol Grounds, and the men who came and took my garbage away, are all labors of their work. While many of us go unconsciously through our days there is a whole structure of people who make our days obtainable, and that is what the day is about to me.

As I basked in the morning sun, I am also reminded that the day is more than just about work, it is about life. While many people’s identity becomes their work, I am reminded that there is more to our lives than work. Life is about living and experiencing all that there is to enjoy and on this day we can all stop and smell the flowers. I for one had worked for almost ten years as a travel agent and the job had become nothing more than just a pay check. Work was something I must do and I begrudgingly returned each morning to what I paralleled to being a prison sentence.

Until one day, I realized that it was not what I wanted to do. At that time I wished I could just magical change my circumstances and hit a switch to transform myself into a different world; however that was not the case, for I needed to strive for that change.

Conversely, I have made that change but along the way I realized that my situation was not to just sit there and wait for the future, but to act then and now. The present moment is the only reality we as and individuals can control and there it was I began to enjoy the now.

Now, is the most important time in our lives, and no matter how much planning we can do for the future or how much good or bad times occurred in the past, we can only control now. That is what I did and no matter what situation I am in, I try to enjoy it for what is. Work was not my identity nor ever will it; I may do some other line of work in the future but as I exist today, that is all I can care for but today. Work is not who we are, but just mere means of serving our fellow man.

So, as I begin my day lounging in the sun, I take pride in having this day, so that we can all just enjoy who we are without having to serve. There is plenty of time to work and as tomorrow will come, I hope that my fellow man and woman will just learn to enjoy life as it is, because the sun is shinning today just like it will tomorrow.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.” Bertrand Russell, 20^th Century British Philosopher

Flooded in Time

2007-08-30T14:06:00.000-07:00

They say time flies when you are having fun, but I wonder what it does when you are not, does time then linger. Two years ago, the treasured city of New Orleans was ravaged by the powers of Hurricane Katrina and its population desperately cried for help. Left to its own, New Orleans resembled a scene from Mad Max rather than the historical congenial party atmosphere. What happened there was nothing more than a symbol of the catastrophic weakness of the United States government and therefore a populace has been awakened.

New Orleans and its people were left fending for themselves; nowhere in sight was there assistance from above, because the resolve of the nation had been to fight a “War on Terror.” Haphazardly, the United States military had been sent out in search of mythical bogeymen known as terrorists. Billions and billions of dollars have been spent on this war and it is expected to reach to two trillion dollars; however the fact still remains that “terrorism” is on the rise and the master-mind Osama Bin-Laden is nowhere to be found.

We have a federal government that is out chasing bogeymen, while the people of the nation are left to their own demise. The interest of Shell, Exxon-Mobil, Chevron and the others outweigh the needs of the people and for those who still do not know it there is oil in Iraq. The leadership of this country has sold out to the oil companies and any form of representation has been stripped away and disguised as protecting us from terrorism. How can the wealthiest nation in the world rationalize spend trillions of dollars fighting for democracy while on the other hand ignore its own needs at home.

Just as the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster of 1986 that struck the Ukraine region of the Soviet Union had demonstrated to the world the futileness of the Soviet system, the harsh realities of New Orleans show a mere disdain of reason by the United States political system. The need of the few had outweighed the needs of the many and now America is awakening to the dangerous doctrine of neo-conservatism/corporatism. The false agenda of the neo-Conservatives have been destroying the basic assumptions of America and likewise it soon too will crumble just like that of the Soviet Union. The people of the Soviet Union saw that its role in the centralized system had been replaced by the dogma of those above and they choose to disband it. Comparatively, we see more and more centralization within the corporate structure and soon the people here will stand up and so no more.

As the anniversary of the Katrina flood has just past, I hope that its memories live on with us all. The government had abandoned its duty of protecting and serving its people and when ever a government derelicts its duty it is the right of the people to disband it and start anew. The memory of Katrina is not so distant from our minds, so I ask to you all has anything changed and will FEMA and the FEDS be there to save you from the storm or that matter Osama. As time goes on, are we having fun, or are we just lingering on?

Peace
Robb Kidd

“Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.” Thomas Jefferson

Financially Modified Organisms

2007-08-27T08:48:00.000-07:00

In the world of politics, money has supplanted all given notion of ideals and justice. Principles have been left behind and too many political candidates ponder to the interests of big money. While the rule of people has been left out, democracy has been infested by the rise of FMO’s, which I call Financially Modified Organisms.

In the agriculture world, the prevalence of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO’s) has taken a hold of all our food products. Unknown to man is what the repercussions that will take place from these organism. Plants and animals are being genetically reformulated to be resistant of certain diseases and carry certain characteristics. Some may say that is good, but unbeknown is what the future will bring. Are these organisms going to alter the natural world and wreck havoc by creating super-organisms that society will be able to control or are will the mutate and form greater health risks unto humanity? That is the question, we shall see.

Like wise in the political world, politicians are no longer people but voice boxes of the powers of money. Judicial courts have ruled that series restrictions on the power of money are a violation of free-speech. Therefore the super concentration of wealth is mutating the course of politics. Candidates who are able to raise money are the one’s who are given the loudest voice and of course there are paid for the by the some people who have already profited by the system. In all likeliness, the FMO’s are going to broadcast the message of those who got them there and their messages of change are just capitulations to the masses below and as the path of GMO’s we can see a corruptness to this unnatural approach.

What we must do is remove ourselves from this pathway and push for greater public financing of campaigns. Through public financing, candidates will have to answer to people and not to the realms of corporations and the upper crusts of society. As well, a stronger focus on local governmental controls, where one individual has a greater say helps counteract the influence of money. “Thinking globally, but acting locally” has greater effects on society and whereas we have a government by the people, we can make it for the people. As the influences of our financial modified organism (politicians) begin to dissipate we will move one step closer to true representative government.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed.” Gandhi

Voices, Voices and More Now!!!

2007-08-23T21:04:00.000-07:00

All things must pass, for I have been told. This week I ventured off into a new direction in life and as I end one page in this chapter of life I am embarking towards a new personal frontier. For the last year I have been quite persistent in posting my views and opinions on what I perceive to be as a world gone mad and although I would like to continue that path I am going to have to curtail my writings just a bit. While I do appreciate those who have commented from time to time and the anonymous readers who have stopped by and partaken in my world, I would like to encourage more from you all.

We have reached a critical juncture in the status of American democracy and with the looming environmental crisis we are facing this is no time for you to sit back and play a passive role with the world around you. What is needed is for each and every citizen who has an opinion to express it and speak it loud. There are multiple ways to do that, for this blog has been one of my mediums, however the most important route is through everyday conversations. Your friends, neighbors, casual acquaintances and everyone you meet must be aware and stop hiding in fear for the current path will get us nowhere. Stand up and speak your mind and you’ll be surprised more people agree with you.

So, while I have chosen a new path for myself and for it I will not have the luxury of time to post as frequently, however I hope to see a higher frequency of debate within the world around me. The past is behind me and as I embark into my new direction I hope that the debauchery of this American President and his disregard of the natural world will pass soon too.

Peace
Robb Kidd

PS: I recommend reading my partner's words in her marvelous reflection on the peace activist, Grace Paley.

“You can't let go and you can't hold on. You can't go back and you can't stand still. If the thunder don't get you then the lightning will.” Robert Hunter, The Wheel

Money:False Change

2007-08-16T09:02:00.000-07:00

It behooves me to hear the stories about the how much money is being raised for the Presidential election. Just the other day, a stealth fundraiser was held for Barrack Obama in the Green Mountain state and he raised a paltry $250,000 from this event. While many Vermonters are struggling to pay for food, education and the upcoming winter heating season, it seems that there is plenty of money to go towards an election campaign of someone who just might be the Democratic nominee.

While, personally I have not been sold on the geniality of the Barrack Obama campaign since I still have not heard a single word of real change mouthed from his lips, except for that he’s not G.W. and that he represents hope, I am still flabbergasted at the amount of attention this man can get. What irks me the most about his campaign is that while he has been painted by his supporters as a wholesome picture he still is a man of the system and as far as I am concerned that does not make him any different.

Throughout his political career he has consistently taken campaign money from the nuclear industry and coinciding with the influence of that money he has voted without fail in support of the industry, even though as rational humans we all know of the cataclysmic dangers of nuclear power. Not stopping there he has fully supported the doctrine of nuclear armaments and has not ruled out usage of them. Any candidate that supports nuclear either directly or indirectly is living in an insane universe therefore does not have the wherewithal to be a leader of a changed America that is to lead the world towards the goal of peace.

So, while it appears a rash of persons have drunk the Obama Kool-Aid and are dishing out tons of money towards his campaign the real vehicles of change are struggling to make ends meat. Here in Vermont, there are numerous organizations and potential candidates who would salivate over just a fraction of that money, however it has now been sent off as a mere fraction of the presidential election campaign. Countless organizations throughout the country and Vermont survive on budgets that are smaller than that while they have been successfully advocating for change. To implement real change it begins within our homes. Strengthening our communities and states with actions directed towards your home is much more palatable than say contributing to a major party candidate who mouths the words of change.

While more and more money is raised to flood the nation with false messages of change, there is an absence of money going to the real vehicles of change. David Brower, passionate environmental activist had coined the phrase “Think globally, Act locally” not just as a silent cry of despair but as a mere beacon of wisdom. Successful changes occur in our own backyards and diverting our attentions to large scale proportions weakens that resolve. Instead of adding to the futile frustrations of a presidential election race, consider supporting a valiant cause or candidate at home for that is where real change begins.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives” American Philosopher, William James

Water World

2007-08-13T09:31:00.000-07:00

“Water, water everywhere nor any drop to drink”. Water one of the most precious ingredients to the life of man, its supply is dwindling down and with the talk of “Peak Oil” a more important resource has been left trickling amongst the current. In the Americas, one might see a measly sprinkler watering a precious lawn or a lush green golf course lining the deserts floor while little thought has been given to the most precious commodity of them all. Water resources are coming harder to find and tensions are brewing about a coming storm that even the CIA has listed water resources as a major tension of concerns.

Yesterday, swimming in the blue waters of Lake Champlain and looking upon the Adirondack Mountains of New York and the Green Mountains of Vermont, I pondered the vastness of this invaluable resource. My attention lured while splashing around of what toxins where floating along with me. I do know that Lake Champlain is pollute, not as much with industrial wastes as per say the Hudson River or the famed Cuyahoga River in Ohio that a few decades ago caught fire from toxic residues. The lake, although cool and refreshing has primarily been affected by farm runoff(Update: 8/14 Burlington Free Press has story attributing pollution to urban runoff). While most Vermont farmers are respectable stewards of the land they have inadvertently led to the demise of the lake. Conservation programs have led to protecting this valuable watershed, but as with most other conservation programs it has been under funded and ignored by the powers that be.

Splashing, through the lake I looked for fish, but my eyes did not see any. Whether, the fish were just too scared of my presence or that there is just a lack of them I do not know. One thing I do know that America’s lakes and rivers are heavily contaminated with mercury that wild fish are not recommended to eat. So despite being in a vast beauty of creation, many of the creatures are not healthy to consume. America’s fascination with energy, in particular coal has placed toxic chemicals into the air and given time has emerged within our water systems.

The rivers in Vermont are not so pure as well, as I have recently learned. The State of Vermont officially does not recommend that people swim in the rivers as for biological containments such as e-coli are stronger than before. Latest news has discovered invasive algae known as rock-snot that are threatening the rivers. What looks pure and clean may not be as much as once has and with the looming threats of climate change we may not know what is next.

Not to give any reasons to worry, the fine companies of Pepsi and Coca-Cola have figured out a way to save us for they have entered the business of bottling water. Enormous water resources are being drained and sold as marketable commodities known as Desani and Aquafina so you too can go pollute your environment, but rest assured American ingenuity will provide you with safe and clean water.

Within the American landscape, there are vast areas of the country without water; the famed Colorado River does not even reach the sea any longer. Water is diverted to fill swimming pools, water golf courses and subsidize the sprawling industrial sized farms of California. Pockets of the Middle East are about to erupt over the valuable resources, while we Americans lackadaisically waste away our precious resource. Two thirds of the human body is composed of water, so as a fore warning why destroy what is our life blood. We have heard the angry cries of No Blood for Oil, but as the way humanity goes we may just see Blood for Water, I hope not.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference” Rachel Carson author of Silent Spring.

Home Run Distraction

2007-08-08T10:44:00.000-07:00

“It is high it is far and it’s gone”, “Way back, back, back … and it’s out of here” are the words that strike the American pastime of baseball. Barry Bond’s just broke a record and the baseball world and the American news media has shined while many a man, woman and children are left struggling to survive. A record of mighty proportions one could say, however while their attentions have been driven to a man linked to the usage of steroids a deleterious Presidential administration has been allowed to go unscathed from their deceitful ways.

Americas are so distracted by frivolous news that one could get a quick glance and feel that all life depended on was the outcome of a baseball game. “I went to a Red Sox game on Saturday and up above home plate I couldn’t help notice the press box: five, six, seven tiers of desks, filled with print, radio, television, and who knows what other media all reporting every move and anomaly. It dawned on me that there are more reporters covering the Sox, just one baseball team, than cover the Pentagon” William M. Arkin of the Washington Post, which I copied from the Progressive.

Baseball has been acclaimed to being America’s pastime, which I too have enjoyed in my years past, until one day I realized that it was just part of the political machine. Many diehard Red Sox fans will attest to the vileness of George M. Steinbrenner, notwithstanding their furious rivalries there is much more to Mr. Steinbrenner than the baseball world. He had acclaimed his personal wealth from bilking the US Navy with his massive ship building business in Tampa, Fl. He was convicted of illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon and then pardoned by Ronal Reagan. Then as we can all attest to the 2001 World Series, some critics have compared President Bush’s ceremonially first pitch as being nothing more than a party pogrom unifying the masses for support of war. “Watching from owner George Steinbrenner’s box, Karl Rove thought, It’s like being at a Nazi rally” as stated by reporter Bob Woodward. George has more at stake seeing the war industry propelled than whether or not the Yankees win a game.

It does not stop with the Yankees, for the New York Mets organization was originally founded by a partnership that included the Walker family (Barbara Bush’s lineage.) Also for a time period, President Bush was an owner of the Texas Rangers, who while he was Governor swindled the city of Arlington, Texas in building a stadium for their team. Or with the case of the media, CNN’s and WTBS mogul Ted Tuner was owner of the Atlanta Braves. Fox and Rupert Murdoch have practically cornered the Sports market and obtained exclusives rights to MLB, the NFL and NASCAR while simultaneously corrupting political debate with their unfair and biased news empire.

Fresh in people’s minds is the horrific collapse of I-35W in Minnesota, coincidentally the next day the Minnesota Twins were supposed to have a ground breaking ceremony to commemorate the building of a new baseball stadium. While the demands and needs of baseball have out-leveraged the needs of ordinary citizens, billionaires such as Carl Pollad (majority stock holder in Pepsi and owner of the Twins) have shackled communities into subsidizing their franchises while leaving infrastructure left to collapse. Oh, yeah and before you Red Sox fans boast any further owner John Henry’s personal plane has been linked to being used in the CIA’s illegal rendition of “suspected terrorists.”

There are countless stories of how the baseball industry has collectively captivated the American public into its own form of the Roman Coliseum. While the media captivates to the entertainment of a game, Rome is still burning but you would never know for that is not news. Barry Bond’s homerun ball nestled into the seats of frenzied fans while Americans are being denied the honesty and integrity of Washington, D.C. for the media has capitulated to the powers that be.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“Baseball is not necessarily an obsessive-compulsive disorder, like washing your hands 100 times a day, but it's beginning to seem that way. We're reaching the point where you can be a truly dedicated, state-of-the-art fan or you can have a life. Take your pick.” ~Thomas Boswell, Washington Post, 13 April 1990

American Vacation

2007-08-07T13:57:00.000-07:00

When in Rome do as the Romans, are words we have heard over an over throughout our life; however too frequently when we Americans venture of to somewhere outside our home we tend to forget that. This past week I had enjoyed the pleasant company of my lovely mother to the Green Mountain state. Unfortunately, her visit was marked with the mentality when in Vermont do as all the other Americans. Must see Ben and Jerry’s, have to go to Cabot Cheese and a pleothora of other must see were the agenda of the week.

For almost ten years, I spent working in the travel industry and much to my dismay I was consistently asked by my clients on what there was to do in a particular destination. I had senior citizens asking me while I was in my twenties on what they should do. “Where should I go to in New Orleans” or “how much time do I need in Yosemite,” were frequently asked questions. Often, I would answer with a bit of sarcasm with replies such as “if I told you were to go, you would come back and get me fired,” or for the national parks “it depends on what you do, it may take you a week to hike Mt. McKinley.” The American tourist industry is so fascinated with doing and “seeing” places that I feel that too frequently no one stops to smell the flowers.

Back on the topic of my mother’s visit, she left the other day and now thinks she knows Vermont and is back home telling all her friends and family the stories of how they make cheese at Cabot and that “Tom(Ben) and Jerry’s(frequently called that by mother and eighty-something year old aunt) is a wonderful tour.

America’s roads and highways are filled with ginoarmus(of course that’s not a word) RVs, busses and SUV’s filled with tourists stopping at “the treasured sites” never having to leave the comforts of home. There are strip malls and fast food outlets just like the rest of the littered American landscape. “The comment oh look they have a Wal-Mart or Mc Donald’s” not oh, look at that majestic mountain, the exhilaration of the river, or the vibrancy of the downtown. Americans are fixated to see, but in reality they never even leave home. When I was in travel sales, all I had to say about a particular destination was that it “had good shopping and restaurants, and of course an occasional beach or golf course and that was all most people needed to know.

I do enjoy the occasional tourist activity, but it does not fill my curiosity of travel. I have traveled countless times to the San Francisco Bay area and it wasn’t until my latest trip did I venture to Alcatraz (yes, I did enjoy it), however Alcatraz and other destinations is barely breaks the surface of what the place is about. I no longer work in the travel business, for I had conflicting interests for I was tired of sending people to destinations knowing that I was adding to the destruction of the destination.

Hawaii, a favorite of mine receives millions of tourists a year; unfortunately the revenues obtained are sent out of state towards the profits of the mega hotel chains, leaving the native Hawaiian people left struggling to survive, many with two or even three jobs. Here too in Vermont, a tourist industry has evolved catering to the self contained ski-resorts, leaving Vermonters struggling to make ends meat. Tourism is a double-edge sword; whole communities are lead to believe that it is necessary for them to cater to them while on the other hand the traditions and ways of living are squeezed out to make room for the tourists demand.

I sure don’t know what the answer is to this conundrum, but I truly hope that as humanity evolves society can realize that life is not as portrayed by Disney World. A moose does not pop up on command nor is life the way it appears in a brochure. Vermont is not Shelburne Farms just as much as Hawaii is not Pearl Harbor. The world is a beautiful place but only with your eyes open.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot with a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot. Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi.

Ronald Douglas McScissorhands

2007-08-04T07:31:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, the Central Vermont Localvore’s presented Montpelier with a plethora of culinary delights all cooked with local ingredients and prepared by some of Vermont’s esteemed chefs. The State House has lawn was flooded with hundreds of Vermonters including the Governor. The Governor as it seems was the case was there for his usual photo shoot and not for a genuine support for the next day he was in Berlin, Vermont cutting the ribbon of the rebuilt Mc Donald’s. I guess you can say the proof was in the pudding.

The Governor either was meeting Ronald Mc Donald or he has decided that his respect for Vermont farmers and the health of the food supply is conditional to those he speaks with.

True to his nickname, Governor Scissorhands:
"It's an affordable place to have a meal. It provides dozens of jobs," Douglas told a crowd gathered on hot black pavement outside the building. "And the good nutrition and fitness at your amenities here will help us with that as well," the governor said before cutting a thick red ribbon with a giant pair of scissors.- From the Times Argus

The governor spoke without mentioning that the majority of the Mc Donald’s menu consists of processed foods and its super-sized image has been attributed to the expansion of obesity rates in America to the level of epidemic proportions. The Mc Donald’s s system has thrived on squeezing out all facets of our food industry. Whether it is in the large scale feed lots, subsided corn fields or the vacant desert like strip mills, MC Donald’s has a history of squashing small scale farming and family business in favor of non sustainable farming and profit driven agenda. McDonald’s is not an affordable place to have a meal because we are now facing larger health risks from the Mc Donald’s super size image, greater environmental cleanup costs and taxpayers are continuing to pay billions in subsidies to support industrial corn which is used to feed the cattle it’s unnatural diet.

As for the faulty logic of job creation, this topic is a farce for the governor to hail. The McDonald’s corporation has received millions of dollars in tax breaks or subsidies under the guise of job creation and most employees are paid on or about minimum wage. The simplistic picture coded instruction manuals do not teach future job skills and is merely a dead end job proposition. While most employees of McDonalds are shortly employed politicians continually hail their job creation while forgetting that smaller in state and family owned restaurants fail to receive their market shares.

The American landscape has now become littered by fast food chains and in many locations the mom and pop shop has become a distant memory. As with the big-box store it is not job creation when jobs and businesses are removed from an already viable source, therefore a corporate business that extracts the dollars from the local economy and exploits the landscape should not be a model to praise. The Mc Donald’s corporation spends more money marketing to children than they do to paying wages, and therefore creating a whole new generation of malnourished consumers and under paid workers. While the Governor cuts another ribbon and fails to live past one day of hailing the triumphs of healthy local foods I hope that it becomes another nail in his political coffin. I can see through Governor Douglas’s phony smile and I just wonder when others will see through his deceit.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“Eating at fast food outlets... is simply a manifestation of the commodification of time coupled with the relatively low value many Americans have placed on the food they eat.” Andrew F. Smith, ‘Encyclopedia of Junk food and Fast Food’ (2006)

Eating Locally on the Lawn

2007-08-01T12:51:00.000-07:00

Amongst, the hot noon sun the Vermont State House lawn was cooking with the joys of locally grown produce and meats. Today it was not a political demonstration neither calling for the impeachment of the President nor calling for the end of the war, but was a celebration of the abundance of locally grown foods.

Under a tent on the state house lawn Vermonters enjoyed the culinary skills of Vermont chefs in a tasty display of the meats and produce of Vermont. Today, August 1 began a week long challenge by the Central Vermont Localvore group for Vermonters to consume locally grown food (within 100miles). This time of year Vermont is blessed with a plethora of fresh fruits, vegetables and meats that such a challenge is not that difficult to achieve.

There are many amongst us who have taken up this challenge and it is not just the stereotypically crunchy, granola eating, Birkenstock wearing hippy but of all walks of life. Amongst the long lines of people were businessmen in suits, mothers with children in tow, state employees and of course being in Montpelier a mixing of political leaders who had all grazed upon the fresh servings.

I respect all those who had attend this event, even the ones I fundamentally am opposed to. Among the political leaders who attended that I did see were Governor Douglass, Secretary of Agriculture Roger Albee, Speaker Gaye Symington, Rep. Floyd Nease and Rep. Tony Klein. (I apologize for any that I missed or did not see.) I even joked with one of them that I guess there are a lot of Vermonters too broke to eat and that they wouldn’t miss the opportunity for a free meal and it was precisely followed with the response that the “soup kitchen must be closed.”

The crowd flowed through the tent which seemed like it was for hours and the line had spread throughout the state house lawn. Hundreds of people arrived, maybe just for the free meal but hopefully with the intentions of supporting local foods. There are many benefits to eating local foods, envirnomentally, economically and health.

Environmentally, eating locally helps cut down on usage of fossil fuels used in the transportation of food. A typical American’s dinner plate travels thousands of miles, so by eating locally you directly conserve energy and slow down the rate of global warming. Economically, by supporting local food sources money is retained within the local economy and therefore it builds a stronger vibrant community. For Health, eating local seasonal foods creates a balanced diet rather than that of eating foods artificially processed that humans are not genetically prone to.

Today, August 1, 2007 I am proud to live within a community that strongly support it’s naturally produced products. Each day, when one chooses to eat locally it helps support a community that has been fragmented by the industrial economy as well as preserving our working landscapes. I can not say that I will exclusive eat local foods,(for my culinary skills are not as diverse as I would like, however Sarah thinks they are) however the more that I do the better off I know that our planet will survive.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“Think Globally Act Locally,” attributed to David Brower, Friends of the Earth.

IBM: Tax Cut and Run

2007-07-31T09:28:00.000-07:00

Once again another multi national corporation puts the screws into the community they are supposedly supporting. News headlines in Vermont broadcasted that IBM is to lay off workers in some of their facilities throughout the country. Vermont’s Essex location is to bear their share with ninety employees forced out and onto the unemployment lines. What is so ironic is that Vermont politicians have been coddling IBM in order to prevent such measures. While IBM (International Business Machines) further exports American jobs to China and other countries, politicos like our own Governor Jim Douglass, Republican and “conservative” Democrats grovel over how to concede to them.

Just recently, a claim from opponents of the Global Warming Bill had used IBM as a reason why they could not support a tax on Vermont Yankee as it would send a wrong message to the business community. Well there goes that message; instead IBM has just sent its employees and the community a message that it just does not give a hoot about Vermont. Ironically, the potential savings from the Global Warming bill could have provided IBM would have offset any cost measures and would have virtually let them retain employees. Extra revenue offsets are as well about to come from reassessment of their facilities in Essex, it seems while every residential property’s values have gone up, big business’s assessments have gone down, thus lower taxes for an extremely profitable corporation.

Additionally, while our governor was out gallivanting around China to search out lucrative trade opportunities for Vermont companies, IBM seemed to have other intentions. It appears that IBM’s plans are just to process computer chips in Vermont and then ship them around the globe to be installed in one of their other facilities. I guess that is what is mean by exporting. A lot of talk has been made by the Governor of the opportunities for trade; however a simple fact that IBM is responsible for eighty percent of Vermont’s foreign trade is a scary statistic since that it is an unfinished product that quite possibly could be completed here in Vermont; however the greener pastures of lower wages and less environmental regulations have tempted IBM to displace Vermont and American jobs.

While, American and Vermont workers struggle to pay their bills, pay for healthcare or educate their children America’s glorious corporations bypass America for their needs of enriching their executives and stock holders. Neither America nor Vermont should cow toe to these mammoth international conglomerations because it is quite evident that the community they do business in is just another tool for them to exploit. And for that matter the politicians who advocate the corporate line, have to go…

Peace
Robb Kidd

“You name the large multinational corporation, many of which make substantial campaign contributions to both political parties, and they're on the Export-Import welfare line. Needless to say, many of these same companies receiving taxpayer support pay exorbitant salaries and benefits to their CEOs. IBM, for example, gave their former CEO Lou Gerstner over $260 million in stock options while they were lining up for their Export-Import handouts.” Senator Bernard Sanders while a Congressman.

Earth First, Not Later

2007-07-30T11:57:00.000-07:00

How many Environmentalists does it take to change a light bulb?

Ten: One to write the light bulb a letter requesting that it change. Four to circulate online petitions. One to file a lawsuit demanding it change. One to send the light bulb loving kindness, knowing that this is the only way real change occurs. One to accept the light bulb precisely the way it is; clear in the knowledge that not to accept another is to great harm to oneself. One to write a book about how and why the light bulb needs to change. And finally, one to smash the fucking light bulb because we all know it’s never going to change.

This joke although harsh, express quite truthfully the status of the environmentally movement today. I borrowed this joke from Derrick Jensen's book, endgame Volume 1, The Problem of Civilization. The concerns of the environment are showing a bleak future for the existence of humanity and that the ecological balance is not to be taken as lightly as displayed by modern life. It is wonderful that we have countless individuals standing up to the ways of modernity but frankly there is a prevalent need for more radical approaches.

As witnessed throughout the globe, dramatic changes in climate patterns are already happening and countless ecological calamities are becoming the norm. The world is facing food shortages, water shortages and soon to be energy shortages. While certain politicians and special interests groups (i.e. corporations) hide behind denial and economic uncertainty the fate of civilization becomes gloomier. While I ponder actions that may subvert the impending calamities I fear that too many people are lost in an oblivious world. I and countless others can write, protest, speak and alter our lives; however this may not be effective unless mass universal change consumes the human consciousness.

I consider myself an environmentalist, some may say a radical environmentalist, but to answer that charge, I am just a man with visions. Radical is not speaking out what is truth, nor is it radical to speak out what needs to be done. Point one; man has significantly altered the ecology of the planet by its incessant desires of consuming more goods. Point two, oil and water resources are finite and continuation of filling those needs is going to result in chaos. Point three, unless drastic changes are made in lifestyles in the industrial world as well as modeling it to the “developing” world the dire predicament we are facing will get worse.

So as you may attest, I am not radical for I speak my truth, what is radical is the continual denial of action. In this case it is far more dangerous to not speak and for that I call as being radical. A definition according to Merriam Websters is as follows:

a: marked by a considerable departure from the usual or traditional : extreme b: tending or disposed to make extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions c: of, relating to, or constituting a political group associated with views, practices, and policies of extreme change d: advocating extreme measures to retain or restore a political state of affairs.

While yes, I am advocating a different measure of the so called norm, however in reality what has been instituted for the last century has been a considerable departure from the “usual or traditional” and that is how we have gotten in this predicament. Man had lived in peaceful coexistence with nature for thousands of years and it was not until the “Industrial Revolution” had full scale environmental degradation began. Industrial agriculture, pollution from fossil fuels and wide scale eroding of the natural landscape are the repercussions of modern life. In the not to distant past humans practiced conservation, sustainable farming and lived a life without the needs of plastics and cable television. The manufactured reality of Madison Avenue and Wall Street is the true radicalism of today and that is what is destroying the planet.

The referenced joke stated “one to smash the fucking light bulb because we all know it’s never going to change” is the harsh reality of modern life. We are in desperate need of reverting back to the more traditional ways of living in harmony with nature. If man fails to see the looming catastrophes ahead then those who advocate extreme measures may be justified. I am not suggesting that blowing up dams, spiking of trees, or arson of animal laborites are needed, it is just that when circumstances reach a certain level there will be those who see drastic actions like those as being the only recourse to confront the insanity of modernity. (Note: those actions above are considered to be eco-terrorism and there have been more people arrested and placed under surveillance by the authorities under the guise of Homeland security than foreign born terrorists.) Man is at the pinnacle of environmental destruction and a serious return to a life of sustainability is the path that needs to be taken, else wise we are doomed.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Edward Abbey

Market of Farmers, For Health

2007-07-28T08:23:00.000-07:00

In my more recent history, I have succumbed to a fondness of obtaining fresh produce at the local farmers market. What is surprising to me is that it has only become a newer resolve into my shopping habits for basic provisions. For years I had not visited farmers markets for multiple reasons. But as my new found awakening has arrived I realize the great importance of the local farmers market to the community.

First off, as a youth I was raised with parents who extensively gardened throughout the summer season. Their affinity to gardening was not for a desire to grow fresh nutritious produce but as a weapon of economic frugality. A summer diet for me consisted of every recipe under the sun that included broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, peppers and yellow squash. Of course as a kid, I blew that off in disgust and wanted a juicy hamburger instead. Now, in my latter years, I wish I could pick up that genetic propensity to garden however I do not have a green thumb for I have even killed a chi-a-pet in my past. So, with my quest for more natural foods, the farmers market has been a great supplement to my dietary needs.

Here in Montpelier, the farmers market has been running strong for thirty years. Quite impressive for this country since we have virtually replaced a strong rooted agrarian culture with the modern day processed food industry. (The above picture is from the Halifax, Nova Scotia’s farmer market, the oldest farmers market in North America.) The majority of foods produced in the American diet are concoctions of either the highly subsidized corn or soy industry. Cheap foods have flourished with the excess production of corn. One look at food ingredients will show most times that high-fructose corn syrup or some other corn derivative is the number one ingredient. Some claim that this shows the great ingenuity of America, however if it were not for the 3 billion dollar subsidy to corn production we would not have access to that much corn. What that means is that without cheap subsidies Americans would not be able to get cheap Coca-Cola or cheap Chicken McNuggets.

American’s are waking up today and realizing that America’s food supply is faulty. We are either inundated with poly-saturated fats or corn sugars that are linked to diabetes and other food related health problems. Even worse, it seems like at least once a week were are informed of another product recall, whether it be Skippy Peanut Butter, Spinach from a factory farm or the health food Veggie Booty. The American food system is not safe and the return to small local farmers markets is the best opportunity to correct that. As a consumer, I like to know the farmer and where the produce was grow. For the farmers, they are given an opportunity to sell the products directly to consumers without being side-swiped by a commodity driven market and therefore given a fair price for their labor.

I just returned from the farmers markets and I am thrilled to know that the fresh produce I bought will help sustain the multiple farms within my community. My purchase instead of enriching the executive of the Shaw’s supermarket or the ledger sheet of Archer Daniels Midland(ADM) is helping maintain the economic viability of the surrounding landscape while at same time enhancing my quality of life. Eat healthy and support your local farmers.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“The fight to save family farms isn't just about farmers. It's about making sure that there is a safe and healthy food supply for all of us. It's about jobs, from Main Street to Wall Street. It's about a better America.” Willie Nelson

No to LNG

2007-07-26T09:34:00.000-07:00

As I settle back into my virtual and reality world of Montpelier, Vermont I contemplate the plethora of issues I can write about. Latest news in Vermont, still is brewing over the failure of the Vermont Legislature to override the governors veto of the Global Warming Bill/ Vermont Yankee tax and now the Democratic leadership’s has set forth an agenda to legalize marriage. However with those issues on the forefront I have decided to tackle another issue. In my previous post I wrote about our connections to our Canadian brethrens and therefore having spent some time visiting their land, I would like to reach out and help broadcast their message.

Along the Bay of Fundy, there is a quaint hamlet of a town called St. Andrews, not having traveled there before I am not that well informed of its history but of casual observance it is a nice vacation village that has not been disrupted from tourist commercialization. Scattered throughout the town there are signs saying no to LNG. Of course with my natural curiosity I had to look into their concerns and determine what it is all about. Well, it turns out there is plan to install Liquefied Natural Gas(LNG) terminals along the coastline and to many of the residents of the region there is deep concerns regarding the environmental impact of having supper tankers upsetting the natural environment and as well as the potentials for explosive catastrophes.

I am diametrically opposed to the large scale shipments of fossil fuel sources and to that matter I support those in opposition to development of these terminals. Alternative sources of energy are in high demand and instead of investing in alternate sources global international corporations are trying to exploit the natural environments to increase profits. As I see signs of angst against these plans I pontificate on what actions I can do to help support such a cause. While I am not a resident of St. Andrews nor do I have any plans for a future visit, I too do not want to see any future devastation to its scenic coastline.

So sitting here in my enclave within the Green Mountain State of Vermont, what can I do to help their cause? Yes, I do not use liquefied natural gas but for every effort I do to personal use an environmental sustainable fuel source maybe just by chance that will help decrease the demand for polluting energy sources. While liquefied natural gas may not be as pollutant as say coal or oil it still has a negative effect on our environment and the less I use of polluting fuels and the greater development of alternative energy sources there will not be a need to destroy harbors for the sake of shipping.

I am hundreds of miles away from St. Andrews, New Brunswick and while I sit home and contemplate my future, I await a future where each individual community/region will have safe, clean and renewable energy sources so that the natural environment no longer has to be compromised to fuel our obsessions of energy. The status of what goes on in St. Andrews may not affect you, but maybe it will affect you in Cape May, NJ or the Oregon Coast if you keep your eyes closed.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“The cause of violence is not ignorance. It is self-interest. Only reverance can restrain violence - reverance for human life and the environment.” William Sloan Coffin

Canadian Exile-Holiday

2007-07-24T17:08:00.000-07:00

I have returned from my self imposed exile to the great North Country (Canada) and have been out of touch with the political mustering of this country’s affairs. I must say it was a pleasure stepping back and removing myself from the chaotic and turbulent times of American politics; however I have gained a lot of respect for our Canadian brethrens. While we Americans ponder our ego-centric one-dimensional world view there is a whole another world pontificating just to the north of us and unlike Americans they seem to be more aware of the world around them than just their own little sphere.

I must admit I virtually do not know a thing about Canada politics, while of the Canadians I talked to in Canada many were quite astute to our happenings. One such conversation began with “I suppose your not to happy with President Bush” and then he began to inform me of their patsy Prime Minister Stephen Harper being in the pocket of Bush. Just to inform you up until today I kept referring him as being Tony Harper. I guess I relate him to being a stooge for Bush just like Tony Blair of the UK. Anyway upon further discussion and mentioning that I live in Vermont, it was even brought up that Vermont and the Atlantic Provinces all should succeed from their unions and form a whole different country, I was told that like Vermont the Atlantic Provinces were an anomaly

So anyway, although I am highly political I tended to keep my words under my hat while within my travels. Even to the point while crossing the border I removed my hat that has a button on it stating “The Patriot Act: Turning Citizens into suspects since 2001.” I did not want to see any over-zealous border agent or Canadian Royal Mounted Police crack down on me. We all now how much the Canadian government has played patsy to America’s “War of Terror.” I did make some exceptions such as signing a few guest books stating Americans for Impeachment and Earth First, and the relocation of “Support Your Troops” magnetic ribbons to their SUV’s gas tanks.) A short time ago I had joked upon moving to Vermont that at least I was one step closer to the freedom of Canada, but upon closer circumspection I realize that they are not to far off in their governments allegiance to oil as is with President Bush.

Unknown, to most Americans, Canada is the largest exporter of oil to the United States and that explains the close relationship with the President and his failed policies to Prime Minister Harper, however I have faith in the Canadian system of government and they shall soon remove the minority Conservative dogma from any position of power. So as I have learned that sometimes the grass may be greener on the other side of the hill, I too realize that we must unite with our Canadian brethren and stand up to the multinational corporate fascists and take back our planet.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“Canadians have an abiding interest in surprising those Americans who have historically made little effort to learn about their neighbour to the North.”
Peter Jennings

Impeach or Conceed

2007-07-13T22:01:00.000-07:00

In the last few days I have been receiving a lot of slack from people who feel that as if I have been hanging my Congressional Representative out to dry. Just to give some credit where it is due, I am much happier with Congressman Peter Welch’s representation than I am of my former Representative Scott Garrett (NJ’s 5^th district) where every response seemed to be mimeographed from the Republican Party playbook; however the fundamentally question is weather Congress is upholding the Constitution still has not been answered.

While it does seem to be step up from what I had previously experienced it still does not make it acceptable that Congressman Welch does not want to answer the call of duty and support articles of impeachment. Congressman Kucinich of Ohio has entered articles of impeachment against Vice-President Cheney and so far ten other Congressman have followed suit. In the State of Vermont, where numerous towns passed resolutions in support of impeachment and so has the VT Senate the lone Vermont Congressman still fails to follow suit. The claim that it would be a waste of time or that it does not matter since the US Senate or other members of the House do not support the measure sets a dangerous precedent that will allow future presidents to do as they fell fit.

So when I read statements from other elected officials declaring their dismay of the President I am dismayed that many others haven’t followed suit. The following are words from Senator Barbara Boxer of California and not of Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers or Russ Feingold.

I've always said that you need to keep it on the table, and you need to look at these things, because now people are dying because of this administration. That's the truth. And they won't change course. They are ignoring the Congress. They keep signing these signing statements which mean that he's decided not to enforce the law. This is as close as we've ever come to a dictatorship. When you have a situation where Congress is stepped on, that means the American people are stepped on. So I don't think you can take anything off the table. Because in fact the Constitution doesn't permit us to take these things off the table.

And compare that to the weak statements by Congressman Peter Welch in a recent email:

From last November's elections, to public opinion polls, to the comments I hear from Vermonters every single day, the voice of the American people is loud and it is clear: it is time to end this war. No, it is well past time to end this war. Since the President refuses to act, Congress must.

Since the President refuses, Congress must make it clear that the United States will not maintain permanent military bases in Iraq.

Since the President refuses, Congress must denounce the use of torture and must finally close the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

And since the President refuses, Congress must bring our troops home and ensure that they receive the care they deserve when they return.

What Congressman Welch and other Democratic Party hacks fail to realize is that the Constitution gives powers to Congress to redress these gripes against the Executive branch and by failing to use that prerogative he is allowing for this to become as “close as we've ever come to a dictatorship.”

So when I read statements such as “Since the President refuses to act, Congress must,” I am perplexed with the message. We the folks who feel that the President has violated laws and our constitution feel that the President refuses to act, so then therefore Congress must follow with impeachment, anything else is unacceptable and to me any Congressperson who fails to is at fault of not protecting the Constitution.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal” Richard M. Nixon, so if we want to follow that route go ahead and not support impeachment.

PS. I will be away for the next week so, I will be out of touch with this virtual reality we call the internet, enjoy and when I return I visualize a great sea of change.

Impeach Pelosi and Chicken Hawks

2007-07-10T18:08:00.000-07:00

Out along the Left Coast an earthquake is about to emerge in the city by the bay. Now I do not wish for a real earthquake to happen in San Francisco; however Cindy Sheehan is about to make some seismic fault lines upon the weak Democratic machine of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi who self appointed her dictation to the rest of the Democratic Party and claimed that “impeachment is off the table,” is now about to see the power of democracy. While Cindy Sheehan is about to throw her hat in the ring and challenge the weak impotent Nancy Pelosi for her Congressional seat I encourage others across the land to follow suit. In Vermont, I nominate Dan Dewalt for that call.

While Speaker Pelosi has dictated her will upon her faithful flock of chicken hawk Democrats the Bush/Cheney administration continues to ignore the rule of law and the will of the people. Let us remind the Democrats that we elected them to reverse course in America and as we sit on the sidelines more die in Iraq, individuals are still spied upon and secretly tortured and the detriment to our earth is further exasperated. It is nice to hear words from Democrats that they do not support the war nor the President and now we even a few token Republicans give lip service as well; however the truth of the matter is that until we remove the chief architects of this deceit America’s reputation will be permanently tarnished.

Here in Vermont, Peter Welch continually says his number one priority is to end the war, and says that impeachment would be a distraction from its resolve. I refute his claim and state that it is not his prerogative to follow Nancy Pelosi’s agenda but to follow the grassroots call of impeachment. For that reason, even though I tediously worked on his campaign and wrote numerous letters on behalf of his candidacy I am publicly declaring that I will not vote for Peter Welch unless he signs on to articles of impeachment. Likewise, since Peter appears not to listen to voice of the people I am recommending that we as a people vote for someone who truly understands Democracy and that is why I am recommending Dan Dewalt for Congress. A man who understands what freedom and democracy stands for.

Come on and take the Pledge.

I state your name so solemnly swear never to vote for a political candidate who 1. Refuses to uphold the Constitution and continues to allow an imperial President and Vice-President to do as they feel fit with our country or 2. Has supported the war directly or indirectly or. 3. Has supported other candidates who have voted for this war (including Obama, Clinton, and Edwards).

And therefore, I solemnly swear to only vote for candidates who have supported Articles of Impeachment for President Bush and Vice-President Cheney and those who clearly voted to defund the war immediately and have never once supported any measures of this illegal and immoral war.

Those who are failing to call for removal of the war’s architects are just as responsible as those who have orchestrated it. If you live in San Francisco say no to Nancy Pelosi and anywhere else in the country stand up and refuse to support the candidates of war and obstruction. Democracy calls for impeachment…

Peace
Robb Kidd

“Let's impeach the President for lyin'
And misleading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door
Who's the man who hired all the criminals?
The White House shadows who hide behind closed doors
They bend the facts to fit with their new story
Of why we had to send our men to war”- Neil Young..

Live Earth, Dead Culture...

2007-07-09T12:44:00.000-07:00

For many years of my life I would have considered myself to be a cynical pessimist, but with the evolving of recent current events I have become a cynical optimist. Over the weekend we had seen a worldwide display of interest in solving the impending climate change crisis through Al Gore’s Live Earth Concert’s. I for one do believe that the consciousness of humanity is changing towards the better; however on the other hand I do believe that humanity has royally fucked things up, that dominating forces are still dictating policies that are destroying the planet and that the majority of the populace still just does not care.

Due to a birthday celebration for my godchild’s first birthday, I had removed myself from my eco-friendly compounds of the Green Mountain State and ventured into the suburban concrete jungles of New Jersey. New Jersey is home of the Meadowlands Sports Complex and Giants Stadium the venue for one of the Live Earth Concerts. Sounds nice The Meadowlands, but if you look closer it is mere irony that this “meadow land” had been plowed over to make room for a sports complex. The surrounding Hackensack River has been so polluted that I doubt if even a fish could survive its murky waters. Nestled along its banks are massive highways to shuttle herds of people to and from their jobs. Offices and industrial warehouses have too been plotted on this once natural environment but now just a haven for consumerism at its finest. A lovely place to hold a concert for the Earth and this is what the invite should have been...

Live Earth,

If you have a hundred and eighty dollars or more that you have earned working within the confines of your cubicle in some concrete asbestos laden office building selling stuff, you have the time to enjoy a summer day in a building made of materials harshly extracted from the lovely earth, you have an expensive fossil fuel burning vehicle to drive to the asphalt parking lots of what used to be meadows, and have the desire to consume beverages in disposable cups and eat unnatural chemically and genetically modified foods come hear your favorite millionaire entertainers perform live so you can show the world that you care about the earth.

Just a note, I thought about attending the concert but passed on it upon seeing the cynical irony of the situation. Amongst my visit I heard one redeeming quality of the event and that was “well at least it is getting people to talk about the issue.” I guess that is a step forward and that shows you my optimism.

On the other hand within thirty miles of that stadium are countless shopping malls, car dealerships and fast food joints and unfortunately while the tens of thousands were at this concert these “businesses” thrived and the consumer culture flourished. As well about thirty minutes from the stage of the Live Earth concert stands a Hummer Dealership. Passing by, it appears as if it is a model Fisher Price toy garage, except in this case it is for overgrown and irresponsible adults instead of children. To me it is offensive for it is at my birthplace of Mahwah, NJ and also coincidentally the hometown of the poet Joyce Kilmer, who wrote the poem Trees. The irony of American culture where a poem about the magnificence of Trees was written now stands a symbol of environmental degradation. In the age when humanity is supposedly caring about the earth, the Hummer stands out and shows the epitome of modern American culture and how humanity just does not give a hoot.

We can talk as much as we want about the issues but until each one of us stops believing the myth that economic production and consumption is man’s destiny our planet will continually be destroyed. It is not a debate of paper or plastic for your shopping bag, but merely how much consumption is enough. I as an individual have done many things to lessen my personal impact on the planet, however my own chooses may be futile unless each one of my friends, neighbors and complete strangers do more than just attend a concert for the earth.

Peace
Robb Kidd

Trees by
Joyce Kilmer

THINK that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Virtual Independence

2007-07-03T08:53:00.000-07:00

As I embark on my journey for the Independence Day Holiday, I mark the beginning of my personal declaration of independence from the age of computers for a few days. Modern society has become so subservient to computers that our individualized relations with people have become splintered from reality. The question to be raised is that with all the advancements of modern technology has man evolved or has it digressed?

I worry about the advent of modern technology that people have lost focus on their connections to the natural world and most importantly people. One could walk the streets of New York, a city composed of millions of people and not have a single conversation with a live human being. Instead of conversing with the coffee shop attendant, door man, or neighbor one could easily immerse themselves with conversation via cell-phone with someone thousands of miles away. Society has become misplaced by a sea of strangers gasping for connection and our technology has become an enormous vacuum sucking the life away from our interactions.

As a society, we have Email, Instant Message and Text Message, where as instead of plain conversation society is ghastly consumed with the latest fast paced technological craze. Although, I will still be using my cell phone on my upcoming journey I am going to remove myself from the virtual world of computers. I am going to remove myself from writing my blog, checking my email and reading the latest travesty we call news, for the real world of living and communicating in person will be right in front of me. The news will happen, other blogs will be written and of course my inbox will be filled like my real mailbox outside my house. The world will not stop if I am not wired, so therefore I am going unplugged for the next week. Happy Independence Day, and may you have the freedom to be who you are.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” Albert Einstein.

Times Are A Changin' ?

2007-07-02T08:45:00.000-07:00

Most likely you’ll go your way and I’ll go mine was the lyric of the night for me at the Champlain Valley Expo where music icon Bob Dylan performed to an enthusiastic crowd. I have been hearing and seeing Bob Dylan perform since my early teenage years up to modern times and as always it was a pleasure to hear the master of words to music. The Times are a Changin’ echoed throughout the fair grounds and a familiar sound to many who witnessed the 1960’s cultural and almost political upheaval of America. I just hope and wonder ever time I hear that song that maybe one day the times will really be a changing.

Bob Dylan was once heralded as the voice of generation; however he never claimed that for himself and for now he can be summed up as still being a major voice in a chaotic and sometimes dark world. Dylan concerts now gather a crowd of people from all walks of life and age groups. The Montpelier senior center had operated a bus to the concert and intermixed within the crowd were not just my self in my late 30’s and my friend in his 40’s but speckles of fresh college and high school students. America has last its voice and Bob Dylan’s mastery of words carry a lot of weight to a population that is buried under the age of I-phones and news features of Paris Hilton.

The songs of Bob Dylan are stories relating to our culture, our times and our lives and if you do not fit the mold of Madison Avenue, Hollywood or Espn’ you are sometimes lost in an isolated world. There are so many problems amongst the world today whether it is the War in Iraq, Global Warming, the hypocrisy of the US Health Care System or the mere over-consummation within the American consumer culture and although Dylan never directly speaks of a particular issue you can decipher and determine what you choose from his words and act as you wish. I have visualized a world much different than what he has painted with his words, but with my power of free will I choose to go my way and most likely you’ll go your way.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,” Bob Dylan All Along the Watchtower.

Succeed from US Culture.

2007-06-27T14:43:00.000-07:00

To succeed or not to succeed is not the question. On the national news through either the Associated Press or the xenophobic Bill O’Reilly the nation has been informed of the rising secessionist movement in Vermont. Likewise the non-mainstream eco-friendly Orion magazine has followed suit and has spotlighted its growth (read here). While there are some legitimate merits for the call to succeed from the Union, this is a mere distraction from all the positive grass roots efforts in Vermont.

I recently returned to New Jersey and was distracted from many a conversations and had to adhere to statements like “So you all in Vermont are succeeding,” or “I here that you socialists,” or “I figured that all the Socialists like Bernie are for this.” While on one hand I think that the United States government has become a bunch of organized criminals and that the United States Empire has just gone too far with its indoctrination of its policy of global domination I do not think succession is a viable solution. On the other hand, I do support the secessionist movement in Hawaii, where the Hawaiian people are having their cultural identity and land stripped to make way for large scale tourism and military installations.

In Vermont, the vast movement of environmental sustainibilty is something that should be highlighted and broadcasted nationally. The “localvore” movement that is highlighting and broadcasting awareness of our nations food supply is something that should be cherished. What about the mass awareness and usage of alternative energy sources, such as wind, solar and hybrid technologies? Montpelier’s plan on becoming the first green and sustainable state capital should be highlighted. Ariel Zevon’s Local Agriculture Community Exchange in Barre and Anthony Polina’s Vermont Milk Company are fine examples of the good Vermonters are doing; however the media would rather focus on the train wreck mentality.

As for the political side of the equations many individuals within the Vermont legislature have worked continuously to create progressive measures to tackle the energy crises. The serious debate regarding H.520 shows how Vermonters want to remove our dependence on dirty fossil fuels and volatile nuclear energy and that should merit national attention. Instead due to an intellectual discussion on succession; Vermont has been castigated as outcasts.

While there are multiple qualities in the political debate of Vermont that has gone left uncovered by our national news media a frivolous theoretical debate has stripped our reputation. Vermont is a small state, but due to its small friendly communities we shall be able to overcome the negativity and shed some light on the national spectrum. As for succession, we may not be leaving the union politically, but cultural we will maintain our independence and subscribe to the homogenized culture of consumption.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead

TRAINing from History

2007-06-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

“How Vermonters get there from here,” was the theme this past weekend of the Vermont Historical Society’s annual History Expo in Tunbridge. Exhibits were structured around the theme of transportation. There were antique cars, old style bicycles, the horse and buggy and dominating the majority of exhibits were trains and street cars. Unfortunately, a lost mode of transportation within American society, however with the lingering concerns of global warming hopefully its memory is still strong amongst our consciousness.

The railways and streetcars of the past have been given away to the dominance of highways and automobiles. Roads and highways are one of the most highly subsidized elements of society today. Most states receive millions of federal tax dollars for highways, even within the Hawaiian Islands. Roads and parking lots in America cover over sixty thousand square miles which is ten percent of arable land (that could be suitable for agriculture purposes instead). Preposterously, at the same time American’s politicians deny funding for rail networks and other alternate transportation they continue to expand subsidizing oil exploration, highway construction and maintenance. Highlighting the abuses of the system was last year’s Congressional budget in which there was a proposal to build a twenty million bridge to a sparsely populated island in Alaska.

So, while there are many of individuals like myself who have invested in hybrid, bio-diesel, or fully electric vehicles the truth of the matter is that we need to further investments into public transportation systems. The public is unobliged to change on their own accord and truth be told that is why we need a shift in transportation policy. As I walk through the streets of Montpelier on any given day I will see at least three hybrid vehicles, but in contrast while on a recent trip to New Jersey I saw a three to one ratio of hummers to hybrids. Society as a whole does not want to do any effort to change and that is why a wholesale shift in governmental policy is needed.

The symbol of the automobile has become the identity of America, but it hasn’t always been that way. Humans have only lived within the last one-hundred years subservient to automobiles. I have been told stories of how my grandmother used to take public transportation from the city of Paterson, NJ to virtually anywhere in New Jersey at relative ease. Likewise, I attempted that for a few years in NJ but soon was distraught on the impracticality of it in modern society. I once attempted to travel by train and bus to William Paterson College while I was a student from my hometown of Mahwah, New Jersey. The ride by car is just under a half hour; however by using the train and bus (excluding waiting time) the trip took about four hours.

Here in Vermont, a ninety-five year old gentleman told me that from the small town of Jericho, he used to be able to take the train to Burlington, Montpelier, and St. Johnsbury with little effort. The towns of Montpelier and Barre were connected by trolley car, Waterbury and Stowe had an electric train connecting the towns and likewise many towns and cities throughout America did as well; however with the advent of automobiles the railways and streetcars were removed and transportation policies favored automobiles and oil production. Tracks were ripped up or left to decay and the development of highways began to uproot whole communities. Highway routes were established based on the decisions of who had clout. Town’s could be merely bypassed while others destroyed such as the town of Lewiston, Vermont (incorporated into Norwich). American society had been transformed into the cult of cars and as a result our environment and towns have suffered.

The debate advances further away from whether global warming is happening and towards what can be done to help prevent it. Glances at our recent history can help obtain those goals. It was not too long ago that the railroad transported us to and from our homes and with the advances of technology and government support we can become a much more environmentally society. Money towards public transportation is an investment in our future, while money towards highways and bridges is just another anachronistic subsidy of the oil companies and automobile industry. So, how did we get here?

Peace
Robb Kidd

“We are the first nation in the history of the world to go to the poorhouse in an automobile.” Will Rogers

Nuclear Grand Oil Party

2007-06-21T12:26:00.000-07:00

The more I read up on national issues and compare them to local issues; I see very little difference in the brands of Republican flawed policy. Today, Senate Republicans killed tax increases on the oil corporations which have been profiting enormously off the backs of Americans. While raking in the profits they have also peddled their influence and have blocked any substantive conservation programs or the development of clean and safe renewable energy sources. Like wise, Vermont’s Governor Douglass recently vetoed legislation that would have taxed the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant at a more equitable rate and would have set funding in place to develop greater energy efficiency and boost the development of alternative energy sources. From any vantage point, one should clearly see that the Republicanism of today has been corrupted by the corporate agenda and has neglected its duty of representing the people.

America is faced with a multi-faceted energy crisis, which needs desperate attention. Whether it is because of high costs, shortage of supply or the ramifications of environmental pollution America’s energy policies need to be changed. In 2006, President Bush admitted to America’s looming addiction to oil; however the influence of his associates is so strong that implementation of any viable policy is struck down instantaneously. Vice-President Cheney’s secret energy meetings has set forth an agenda of corporate thievery on the populace and while American’s suffer from higher gasoline, home-heating costs and electricity rates their associates have walked of like bandits.

In Vermont, aggressive legislation would have tackled these issues but unfortunately the enormous influence of the multiple high priced lobbyists of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant (Entergy Corporation based in Louisiana) have effectively peddled their influence into the Governor’s office and other Republican Legislators. “It is bad for business,” is their poorly patented cry, however lost in their cowardly cries is the question of what business. High profits and high fuel cost may benefit Exxon-Mobil and the Entergy Corporation, but in reality each individual citizen and small business is bearing the brunt of those costs. Small business, farmers and private citizens can not afford to pay the costs any longer while these enormous corporations fill the coffers of their CEOs and stockholders. The burden has been bequeathed to us the citizens and therefore our leaders should represent us.

Time in and time again, the American political spectrum ponders to the demands of the large scale global corporations. Instead of allowing all of the enormous profits to go unfettered to the corporations, our energy dollars should go to promoting efficient, clean and renewable energy sources. America needs an investment in its future and a commitment to promoting an environmental stable energy policy, otherwise all will be left with is the filthy residue of burnt fossil fuels and volatile nuclear waste while global climate change unpredictable threatens humanity. So while in Washington, like here in Vermont the Republicans have trampled on creating an affordable, efficient environmental energy source, I remind all my readers that it is our duty to reclaim our government and obtain a brighter future.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“The quicker we get about the business of reducing our reliance on oil the better.”

Condoleezza Rice, The lying Secretary of State who was a Chevron Executive and coincidently has an oil tanker named after her. So in one aspect these thieves admit the problem but block any attempt to do anything about. I guess money does talk in the land of hypocrisy.

Lost Suburbia

2007-06-19T08:20:00.000-07:00

Over the last week I left my small rural enclave of Vermont and let for an adventure into the concrete jungles of New Jersey. Having been absorbed with life in rural Vermont, it had become a shock to return to my boyhood home. The plastic suburbs of New Jersey are not my vision of a utopian dream, but a mere nightmare. While to those living in the compressed communities of Manhattan the green grass and miniature fortresses decked out in the conveniences of modern life may feel that is pleasures of life, I quickly realized that the suburban sprawl has left vast gasps of culture and community behind.

Passing the hundreds of chain stores and flooded highways of traffic is a vacant look of desperation from its inhabitants. Whole neighborhoods exist where not a single soul knows are even cares about each other. A homogenized culture captivated on what is on the television. I found out that while I was there that the Soprano’s last show was being aired that night and for the next night it was another episode of HBO’s Big Love. If you have no life, the television is where you can experience it at all without ever leaving your home. To those communities, television has replaced the real and natural world of community and experience. There is little hope given except through their expressions of consumption. It is no longer keep up with the Jones it is keep up with the “Bradys” or whatever Hollywood or Madison Ave produced image.

Fortunately, while I was out visiting I had reasons to venture into New York City. Oh, what a relief. At first though, a venture into the Big Apple maybe considered horrifying coming from the big city of Montpelier (8,000) because there is so much noise, people and big buildings and there is little room for escape. One of the days, I visited a friend who had moved back to NYC from Orlando (the happiest place on earth). She couldn’t wait to get away from who she called the “bible thumpers just ready to bang each other over the heads with shovels.” I soon realized that NYC is far from the false reality prescribed by Disney and the popular American media.

Quite the contrary, NYC is a place to be, on any given street corner there is a plethora of activity and a diversity of cultures. You can go from “Chinatown” to “Little Italy” and then stumble into an artist collective all within a few blocks. New York a collection of individuals that you can be whoever you want to be. You can have the most outrageous quirks in personality and are bound to find at least a thousand others just like yourself. Compare that to here in Vermont, while there are not millions of people congregated within our borders, here we too have the freedom of individuality. Due to the sparseness of population, you can have whatever personality quirks and interests no matter how far fetched one may think they are, because quite frankly there is no one dominating culture to tell you that you are wrong. You can be whatever you want to be and that is the freedom to the soul. No prescribed notions of what culture is, or how you are supposed to be.

So leaving the suburbs of New Jersey, I was ecstatic to return to my home nestled within the Green Mountains of Vermont. I am glad I left the one-dimensional culture of suburbia and have been allowed to flourish like the budding of the trees. The “Big Apple” or the “Green Mountains” are places I can totally be free.

Peace
Robb Kidd

“Insist on yourself; never imitate... Every great man is unique.” Ralph Waldo Emerson