auntiegrav’s Recent Comments

• Click here to view comment in original post

  The only structural change that will make headway is for many people to die from industrial agriculture. As long as the government has systems in place to protect the dirty food concentrators (recalls, inspectors, liability protection from accusations), then centralized food will grow to be an even worse disaster than it is now.

  The government needs to stop 'helping' farmers by instituting systems that are designed to protect large operations. They also need to pass a 'right to food' law that gives anyone the right to grow and sell food without interference as long as it is direct to the consumer. Food safety begins with the consumer, and land husbandry takes people, not machinery.

  Additionally, the price of fuel must go up in order to reverse the last 100 years of replacing people with petroleum on farms.

  Government involvement in education needs to change, also. There is too much emphasis on the college education and the urban lifestyle in all public schools. There needs to be more emphasis on learning useful skills and working at productive labors and cooperating with nature, rather than all of the Systems of conquest which use Progress as a religion.

  Communities need to learn again about how to be communities and how to do things for themselves without being homogenized into a petroleum/transportation-based lifestyle. Farms 'get big or get out' because there is no value taught about being small and local.

   

  On Sustainable ag meets the MSM -- and wins! posted 2 months, 1 week ago 14 Responses

• Click here to view comment in original post

  Yes. After the choice, we come up with excuses.

  People ARE cows. They need instant feedback when making decisions at the cash register or the shelf. That means prices. That means we need to get rid of the income tax and put all government costs and the cost of wars and food subsidies and everything else into a sales tax to be seen at the store.

  The world is the way it is because processed food is too cheap and people don't see the actual costs when they buy things. There is a bill already written to do so, it just needs to be negotiated for the amount. Right now (It's called "The Fair Tax"), it is favored mostly by republican sponsors because it is written to be revenue neutral and just replace the income tax. That puts it at around 23% with a prebate for poverty-level spending. It needs to be doubled (at least) to reflect the costs of our debts that have been placed on future generations through environmental damage and health destruction.

  When the cost of things gets high enough, people will stop buying and start growing their own.

  With a world where the elite/management/manufacturing/wage slave model is failing, this should have been done 15 years ago when the Fair Tax was first proposed. Now it's too late to 'save' any of the luxurious life we had and think in terms of knocking down all of the marketing castles in the sky.

  What are people for? THAT's the question. As far as the planet is concerned, they should be providing some usefulness, but instead we are only thinking in terms of consuming. Everyone talks about feeding the world's people, but what the hell for if they are only going to destroy their own world?

  Stop it. Stop the marketing and the lies and the myths of a 'free' market and do it by showing how much it really costs WHEN PURCHASES ARE MADE.

  People do stuff. They make up reasons for doing stuff. In that order. Everything they do is in response to hormonal wants. Sometimes we can build fences to keep the cows in and sometimes they have to be painful fences.

  On Sustainable ag meets the MSM -- and wins! posted 2 months, 1 week ago 14 Responses

• Click here to view comment in original post

  There have been some good comments here, so once again, I'll try to incompetently make my point:

  If someone had come up with a 'carbonless' energy source in the 1940's, we would still have consumed the planet. Carbon is a problem right now because Al Gore (and others, of course) made people aware of the carbon dioxide problem, but the real issue is one of consuming more than we need to consume of everything. Some people will pop their hand up immediately and say we need population controls. Others say we need a carbon tax. Still others say we need incentives to encourage savings instead of spending.

  All of these issues can be addressed with one change: get rid of income taxes and put all externals (carbon, government, overconsumption, police protection for our 'stuff', fire protection, roads, bridges, welfare--ALL of it) onto a sales tax for everything (I humbly recommend the FairTax.org plan, but not at such a low rate).

  If someone figures out what's wrong with physics and we get cold fusion, the carbon tax becomes moot yet we would still "Expand or Die", and end up doing both.

  Something needs to be done about the oxymoron of "sustainable growth" that has permeated social thinking just like "perpetual profits" has up until now.

  We know that things cannot grow perpetually. We know that overconsumption is a problem. Currently, carbon IS part of almost everything we buy or do but that doesn't mean it always will be.

  Don't keep the argument so narrow as between "carbon tax" and "cap and trade". Look deeper at the causes of our problems and look for the simplest possible solution.

   

  On Myth: Unlike cap-and-trade, a carbon tax is simple, immune to manipulation, & politically palatable posted 7 months ago 44 Responses

• Click here to view comment in original post

  It isn't the taxes that make rich people rich, it's the money YOU spend to make the gap wider and wider. The rich get richer because we buy their stuff at exploitative prices (when you consider the cost of wars to keep the resources flowing from even poorer countries than what our 'poor' live in). The fair part about the FairTax is that it gives a rebate for the poverty level spending. That's all. The rest (carbon reduction, moderating consumption, etc. is NOT a claim of the people promoting the FairTax.) That part is up to you. How fair is the 'free' market which gives all the breaks to businesses who can game the system? Make the system ungameable: the failure mode of the FairTax is that people stop buying stuff they don't need and put their money into savings instead of giving it to the corporations that promise "always low prices". Where's the downside? We cannot keep the economy we have, regardless of what we dream. We can only fail big or fail in way that creates a sustainable system. The income tax is the cancer. The FairTax is the car crash where you get to pick how fast you are going. Take your pick. The major problems we are facing right now aren't about rich or poor: it's about overconsumption and deception and government assisting corporations and the rich to increase consumption through taxes on our children under the premise of "fixing" the 'economy'.On Myth: Unlike cap-and-trade, a carbon tax is simple, immune to manipulation, & politically palatable posted 7 months ago 44 Responses

• Click here to view comment in original post

  "There's only one party with a climate policy that's based on science, and that's the Greens." While that may be true, but the climate problem isn't a scientific one, but a psychological/government behavior one, and the Greens don't have much in the sense of government power or psychological commons with the majority. I agree that they should be mentioned, however, if only for the sake of seeing how NOT to get elected in a bully-based democratic government. You can't win if you're 'nice'. Obama did, but by default, I think, and many don't trust him because he's too nice and doesn't fit the leadership profile. The Greeks figured this out with the first democracies.On Myth: Democrats support good climate policy and Republicans oppose it posted 7 months ago 13 Responses