Here are a few strategic planning bullet points we expect to base our plans upon over the next couple few years.

1.  Macroeconomic crisis. There is no basis for optimism about the macroeconomic environment. I said this in January, 2007 at a public forum and look, it still seems to be true today. Our macro economic outlook is for a deflationary double-dip recession (3-D recession).

This means that supplying local organically grown food from a small-scale urban ag. operation is going to be very challenging.  The high end “foodie” market will continue to shrink, we believe. The low-income market is extremely cost conscious and this gives people marketing to this segment of the market very little pricing power. Everything must be done on a low-cost basis. Whether delivering organic food can be made affordable on a mass scale is an open question at this point.  Few people seem interested in this question.

2.  Peak oil problem. The global peak of oil production is probably already underway, or at best, within a half-decade. You can always follow the development of this on The Energy Bulletin yourself. Beyond the year 2015, just five years off, global oil production will be falling, and outside the OPEC countries, falling fairly fast.

Small local food producers should expect, as we do, the beginning of overt shortage of motor fuels around that time. We can’t predict what government will do in response, but given recent experience, we can expect that response to be a) too little, badly organized and b) too late, as shown for example in BP oil spill response. Small local food producers should expect themselves to be shoved aside by large corporate farms in their regions when it comes to the rationing of fuel supplies. Expect as we do a chaotic business environment.

3.  Man-made global climate change. Most of our season’s production this summer has been ruined by too much rainfall in too short a time, falling on ground not well suited to excess rainfall in a veggie crop production scheme.  We expect the man-made global warming to continue ramping up, leading to weather chaos which makes planning for crop production exceptionally tough.

We expect, as small-scale local food producers, to have to plan and spend excessively for both irrigation needs (for hot, dry summers brought by global warming’s regional effects) as well as drainage (for hot, wet summers brought by global warming’s regional effects).  The land we have looked at for purchase was viewed with an eye on both these problems. Investment will be needed in both areas we’re sure.

4.  Continued credit crisis.  We expect the credit crunch or crisis to continue.  Despite the massive bi-partisan bank bailouts endorsed by both G.W. Bush and Pres. Obama, banks are not lending out their cash, but instead are profiting from borrowing cheaply from the Fed and investing it in their proprietary trading schemes, bound to once again implode in the near future, exacerbating this crisis once again. We expect small-scale farmers and community needs including small-business job creation to be completely starved for credit going forward.

This means for us, we can never expect conventional bank loans nor small business loans via govt. as a source for capital. Everything will have to be paid out of current earnings.  As small-scale producers we expect not to be alone in facing this challenge.

5. Continued unbelievable levels of unemployment. Not only are the Baby Boomers facing their suddenly becoming irrelevant in the labor market, but the 20-Something generation faces systemic, structural, persistent unemployment unlike anything previous generations of Americans have faced.

This means again that the high-end foodie market for boutique-style food offerings from small local food producers will remain constrained and not a high-growth area. This may mean, for small food producers, a need to try offering food at affordable prices. Given the chronic cash shortage many people are facing, various forms of barter — barter for food, barter for services needed by the food producers, and so on — may become increasingly important.

6.  Class struggle intensifies.  Since 1974 we’ve been studying and teaching the perpetual class struggle in America. In times of economic crisis, such as we expect chronically over the next decade, this struggle does not ease nor diminish, but intensifies.

For small-scale food producers, this means you should expect concerted effort by large agribusiness to continue driving you completely off the scene, out of business, and for government to generally take the side of large agribusiness.  Small-scale producers who must depend on off-farm wage labor to support their farms should expect intensified workplace struggle, the driving down of your wages, the loss of pension benefits, loss of health-care benefits, and so on.

7. Crash and chaos scenarios increase in probability.  Given America’s recent experience with large-scale crises, and the ongoing #fail mode we have seen with situations such as Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Oil spill, and other situations, we expect incidents such as these to increase. Since Central Wisconsin is not highly urbanized, large-scale incidents are not expected. However, chronic, ongoing crises such as hunger and chronic underemployment will remain in our forecast.

We will remain open to participating in various crisis-mitigation and mutual self-help type groups as time goes on. This participation will depend upon our assessment that participation is grass-roots democratic and not driven by or dominated by local ruling elite interests.

Principle #2: We drop the dogma/mantra that “cheap food isn’t good; good food isn’t cheap.” That’s like saying to your prospective market, “if you’re cheap (and by necessity we need to be cheap), you’re not good.” The first rule of Community Organizing Club is, Don’t Insult Your Community.

#3 principle: The struggle for nutritive, quality non-toxic non-lethal food is a class struggle. The organic movement stops being a petit-bourgeois (”little ruling class”) movement. Black activists have long pointed out that the poorest communities are like labs to test how much toxic… exposure poor people can take before higher mortality ensues. So it is with food.

4th principle: Solidarity, 4a. As long as I’ve been involved with small-scale farmers, most have been workers off the farm too. The Man doesn’t want small farmers succeeding; so, you have to work off-farm. Your status as a worker doesn’t end when you drive in that long driveway. Are there any purely “rural” or purely “urban” worker issues? I doubt it.
Principle 4: Solidarity, 4b. So, wearing your off-farm Teacher Hat, consider bringing a Teacher Union sign in support of MalWart workers trying to organize. Or wearing your Steelworkers’ hat from the paper mill that supports your farm, go support those teachers trying to hold their jobs. The Man is the only one who benefits from the false urban-rural/farmer-vs.-worker divides.

Principle #5: Co-operation, not competition. If the only way to thrive is cannibalizing someone else’s customer base, that takes fierce competitiveness, undermining the “solidarity” principle mentioned above.  On the other hand, if you look the Rochdale co-op principles, these have stood the test of time. We think a working-class local food movement needs to be governed by these, not by the Univ. of Wisc.-Extension’s petit-bourgeois tiny ag-entrepreneur eating-his-neighbor’s lunch model. “Get big or get out,” still the model of ag schools and extension everywhere, must be rejected. Get appropriately-sized and stay in ag, by co-operating.

Principle #6: Job creation starts with ag. Your town likely has a “Community Development Agency” which is busy pursuing outmoded models of “creating jobs.” You need to remind them of the National Farmers’ Org. principle, all wealth starts from the earth: from farming, mining, logging, or fishing. Get your CDA to start a “value-added” producers’ co-op to start generating jobs & wealth.

Principle #7: Public institutions impacting agriculture belong to YOU, not the corporations. Institutions like public land-grant universities and University Extensions (or “co-op extension”) are still largely publicly-funded despite the stealth privatization going on as corporate money corrupts these systems. Form a watchdog group, call Bullshit on the corporate bullshit, get nasty if you see Monsanto and the genuine fascist corp. Bayer (remember Bayer/IG Farben of the Third Reich) start pushing their agendas in these public institutions.

Principle #8: Corporate foundation money belongs to YOU, the workers, NOT to the bourgeoisie (ruling class) who carefully dole it out to groups who will walk their corporate walk. I know this is a tough one for people to get their mind around, but corporations extract ALL of their wealth by exploiting it from the working class, as well as by selling products/services to workers wearing their “consumer” hats, usually at a great profit. This is the source of all foundation wealth. Don’t beg for it: demand it. It’s to feed people, not the bourgeois ego and craving for a legacy.

Principle #9: All agriculture is “urban agriculture.” Can you think of any aspect of agriculture that is NOT controlled by, governed by, steered by, very wealthy men in corporations and corporate/government, operating from urban centers? I can’t. Once you, the small “local” farmer, can identify your interests with a starving farmworker in a former rainforest village now turned to monoculture biomass energy production (e.g. Brasil), you’re well on your way to forging alliances that will return the power where it belongs: to workers.

#10 Grassroots democracy. Participate, don’t be a spectator. Anyone involved in small-scale organics, local food, urban agriculture, is up against a class of powerful people running powerful corporations who wish for the small-scale farmer to disappear, lose their assets, and become one of the working poor who keep these corporations going. It’s going to be a fight to regain democratic control over institutions long ago corrupted. It’s not going to be easy, it will be nasty at times, but really, what choice is there but to fight for grassroots democracy and local control over your world?

Bobby G

August 2010

I was there and it was awesome! As usual, because of a strong showing of consumers and small farmers supporting the direct sale of fresh raw milk legislation, the count estimate was way under. There were over 600 signed in to observe the hearing plus over 180 signed onto to speak for a total close to 800. They traveled and registered from all areas of the state to make this a broad grassroots coalition now in place.

The only opposition came from government regulators and big ag organizations like the Farm Bureau, veterinaries etc.

Consumers and small family farms uniting for healthy food,
socal justice and consumer rights is a new paradigm that big ag has not had to deal with, so it will be interesting to watch the spin they use to maintain control of food production. Family Farm Defenders and WI Farmers Union supported the rights of consumers and farmers to do business together without government regulation.

Please thank these two grassroots farm organizations if you get a chance. There is much more work to be done but this a good sign for local sustainable food.

Let’s keep moving forward sticking together.

Fred Depies
Chilton WI

“(Melvin) Pittman, who chairs the Farm Bureau’s Dairy Committee and milks 75 cows near Plum City with his wife, Pat (said) ‘If a person becomes ill from drinking raw milk, it is not only unpasteurized milk that gets a bad image, but all milk and dairy products. Dairy farmers have invested millions of dollars promoting milk and dairy products, and we can’t afford to have an incident adversely affect consumption.’”

If only the Farm Bureau would show such great vigilance in protecting consumers, and those beef farmers who are trying to do the right thing, when not one or two people, but hundreds, are sickened by feedlot-evolved E. Coli 0157 h7  contamination or Salmonella contamination of tens of thousands of pounds of beef or pork in these enormous packing houses run by the new meat trust.

The film “Food Inc.” tried to expose some of these problems of widespread systemic contamination of our industrial food system. Yet the Farm Bureau leaders go out of their way to disparage this movie. Frankly, they seem to hate it, and the filmmakers, and the people who watched the film and were moved by it. Why is that, do you think? Is it because the Farm Bureau is reluctant to criticize the meat trust, while eagerly going after small-scale dairy farmers who are trying to earn a parity price for their product by offering raw milk (which is enjoying growing consumer demand) direct to consumers?

Certainly the Farm Bureau has always been on the side of large-scale agriculture and large-scale monopolistic food processing corporations. It appears that in the Wisconsin Raw Milk Bill debate, they are once again intent on preserving this legacy of diehard defense of Big Food Processing.

I for one am strongly urging our Wisc. representatives to pass this Raw Milk bill. As a tiny-scale organic grower, I certainly know that the Farm Bureau has never represented, nor will ever represent, people at the small end of farming. We need our own farmer-labor (consumer) united organizations to represent the little guys and gals in small-scale ag.

Bobby G
Middle Wisconsin,
USA Sector of The Global Corporate Economy

• Plot Section: Lullaby; North of Centerpoint Mall, Main St.
• (Potential) Plot Subsidiaries: Eagle Plumbing and Heating, Portage Street; Adjacent vacant house and lot south of Eagle Plumbing and Heating, 3^rd St; Sorenson’s Green House, Main St.
• Plot Owner: City of Stevens Point (WI)
• Price of plot for sale (vacant lot excluding buildings only): No set price (as identified by Mike Morisee, Zoning Commission, City of Stevens Point (WI)
• Means of Obtaining Plot/Plot Deed: Deeded over for $0.00 to “Focus Group Collection” (TBA), Down with Caps Kollective, and/or ownership to remain under city as “Humanitarian Project: Public Urban Farm Land (Project)

• Proposal: The Lullaby plot’s intention for use upon obtaining the deed to the land would serve as a public space allotted for communal urban farming and composting. Access for all and freedom from user fees, the Lullaby plot is intended to accommodate at least 150 people with seasonal vegetables, ad year round compost, as well as serve as an educational center for local peoples of all ages; as a working CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm, or similar entity, produce would first be offered to volunteers and ‘workers’, and ¼ of the land’s production would be allotted for dispersal amongst food banks, farmers markets, and other charitable causes and/or events/programs.

• Structure to organize workers: Non-hierarchal
• Approximate Growing Season (outdoors; excludes potential subsidiary of Sorenson’s Green Hose): Late April- early November
• Seed and seedling source of origin: Local-organic farm donations/purchases, as well as “Seed Savers”.
• Staff: There are potentials for paid full time staff; if owned by the city, funding allotted for primary caregivers (2)/farm hands to be negotiated through the proper city channels.
• City Involvement: Partnership and Expansion from the City of Stevens Point’s “Neighborhood Gardens” Project.
• Other Potentials: To work in cooperation or partnership with the university via Director of Dining Services Mark Hayes, and the Shared Governance Entity that governs dining, to provide a substantial amount of local and organic produce to the food system, depending on produce availability, existing and to-be-determined contracts/agreements, as well as an adequate budget for UWSP’s Dining Services is to be provided.

Here in Portage County, what have local leaders at the County Board level been doing to make our county communities resilient with respect to energy? If you’re scratching your head, searching for something in your memory on this topic, you’re right. Not that much is being done to prepare for the coming decline in petroleum motor fuel product availability (gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil, kerosene, jet fuel) which is part of the global peak of oil production problem. This problem is so far, not on the radar screen for the Board.

The problem of peak oil has not, in my memory, been publicly admitted by any of the County Board supervisors, nor by the current County Executive.

One hopes that candidate Patty Dreier, with her extensive connections into the sustainability movement in our region, will have some plan, some political programme, to deal with this problem.

One County Extension fact sheet notes this about County governments in Wisconsin:

“(Sec. 59.03(2) Wisconsin Statutes)…This home rule authority has allowed county government to gradually expand as a regional government in areas such as recycling, water quality management, transportation planning, and zoning review, but only in cases where a municipality or group of municipalities have requested the county to do so on their behalf through voluntary agreements.” (From this Extension fact sheet).

Note that there is one major area–planning for re-zoning–where our County Board and Executive could be preparing us for the disruption promised by the arrival of a) even higher price spikes in oil prices than we saw in 2008, along with b) frank shortages of many products. Peak oil will impact us far more than in the prices we pay for these refined products, once we reach the stage where there is no gasoline (or diesel or anything else) available at any price at your local filling station.

The County Board could be hard at work in completely overhauling the zoning codes in this county, by taking a leadership role in convincing municipalities–cities, villages, townships–that it is in their interests to abolish the old pattern of city centers and “bedroom towns.”

The “bedroom town” is going to have to quickly become a distant memory if we are to have any “resiliency.” This material was already well-covered in the film End of Suburbia. Portage County has its share of bedroom towns, many of which fit the definition of “food deserts.” A town like Rosholt fits several categories of desert: food desert, hardware & home improvement desert, drug/pharmacy desert, auto parts desert, etc. A family has to pile into the car (more likely, 2 or 3 cars) and head off to Point to get many of their needs met. How is this going to play out when petroleum depletion starts to hit home?

You can use your imagination. You can also use it to imagine a much different pattern, one that might work better in peak oil conditions. Higher-density housing patterns, housing co-operatives that perhaps share 20, 40, 80 or more acres useful in food production, for woodlots and wildlife habitat, but with housing sited densely on just a few of those acres, perhaps owned by many unrelated people, held in common. That would be one alternative, not currently in zoning Sharia law.

After putting the current zoning code through the shredder and using the shreddings for mulch or compost, next the zoning committees could take a look at the restrictions on ag land. Perhaps owners of smaller parcels could be allowed to pursue agriculture, from 5 acres on down to less than an acre. Perhaps family farmers could be allowed to site several family members’ houses on their property, without having to carve it up subdivision-style. Already-denser areas such as Merryland Drive between Rosholt and Polonia could be encouraged to develop in unincorporated municipality style, bustling with new start-up taxi and ride-share services, particularly those catering to seniors lacking mobility. If fuel is going to be scarce, we’ll have to learn to share.

In cities, villages and townships, the restriction against conducting a business from one’s home is a throwback to the heyday of the suburbs and the bedroom town, not at all adaptive to the coming era of declining fuel supplies. The zoning codes need to be rewritten so as to allow people to combine business pursuits with their living quarters, so as to provide stability and resilience in both the housing patterns, and the small-business sectors.

From the end of World War II, this bedroom town pattern has been okay with planners at local levels of government. It seemed to work well. Real estate salespeople and developers prospered. The landscape took on a kind of fairy tale look, with houses perched nicely atop kettle moraine landscapes, with gigantic lawns spread out before them. This was the era when employment was provided by giant corporations–many of which have completely pulled out of much of the United States and have relocated production entirely out of the country.

In the depths of the current recession, with 400,000+ people filing new unemployment claims each week, the outmoded dependency on large corporations to save our local economy stands out starkly. It is as if local governments were living in a fog of wishful thinking, magical thinking, eternal optimism based on “the way we were” back in the 1950s.

It is often said (way too often, in fact) that small business is the engine of economic growth, growth in the number of new livelihoods as people take risks and provide themselves their own job by starting up a new business. Yet zoning laws prohibit many people from starting up these businesses using their homefront as storefront. Perhaps the idea was that mixing business with bedroom town would lower the property values. The deflation of the housing bubble seems to have done much to lower property values, all on its own momentum.

In Stevens Point–and many other Portage County municipalities–you aren’t allowed to put a greenhouse in your yard, at your home. Anyone who might want to start a small-scale eco-agriculture business can’t do the startup from home.  The zoning ordinances may have been written to protect larger-scale businesses against the threat of small-timers getting a foothold and perhaps contending on the basis of better quality or service or lower cost. Or, it would seem that would be one motivation for such zoning restrictions.

But if growing local food on a serious scale is considered, such restrictions have got to go. Green Giant is not going to be spearheading the local foods movement, I hope our business/govt. leaders realize.

As we approach an era when motor fuel is going to be absurdly expensive, and oftentimes, downright unavailable at any price (even absurdly expensive), it would seem prudent for our local government officials to start to get a handle on this peak oil issue. I attend any number of “sustainability”-oriented talks, film showings, forums, informal meetings, and whatnot, yet I never see Stevens Point City Council members, nor County Board members, at these sorts of events.

I take that to mean that these leaders don’t regard sustainability as an issue even deserving of their thoughtful attention, nor for engaging with other citizens in meaningful discussion about them. Perhaps it is because there’s been no executive leader guiding the overall direction?

Except, of course, for Patty Dreier, candidate for County Executive. That’s one more reason I’ll urge you to vote for her for County Exec. in the April elections.

Bobby G

Stevens Point WI

“The United States has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. Criminologists have found that when too many people are incarcerated the crime rate actually increases. Imagine if we spent some of the $60 billion a year prisons cost on education, job training and healthcare. Paul Butler, a law professor, former federal prosecutor and author of “Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice” (click) suggests ways to undo the damage caused by overincarceration.”

Could our County opt-out of the War on Drugs just a little bit? Instead emphasize Harm Reduction and Alternatives to Incarceration? Is the Get-Tough-On-Crime (especially victimless crime like drug use) really sustainable? Is the Incarceration Nation sustainable, along with the rest of our macho national profile? Is a macho militarized empire really sustainable? (Especially when funded by borrowed $$ and borrowed fuel?)

“Major responsibilities required of the county include the provision of most social service programs (child welfare, juvenile justice, senior citizen services, public health, mental health, jail, developmental disabilities, etc.) and responsibilities for local and state road maintenance. Counties also provide the majority of cultural and recreational amenities (e.g. parks, libraries, and snowmobile trails), law enforcement, health services, zoning and road maintenance for citizens in rural, unincorporated areas within their borders.” from this County Govt. in Wisc. fact-sheet from UW Extension.

In other words, the County can choose to some degree how to prioritize whether to emphasize law enforcement, prosecution, and jailing, or a social services approach to the problems I mention.

Ask many a voter “do you favor getting tough on crime, and locking up a lot of bad guys?” and you’d probably get a “yes.” Then ask, “do you favor an unsustainable, never-ending, ever-growing incarceration system paid for by ever-increasing taxes on you, the taxpayer, to accomplish this?” and you’ll probably get a Sarah Palin Tea-Party resounding “HELL NO!”

See, we Americans are capable of holding two completely mutually-exclusive contradictory ideas in our minds at the same time, and attempting to act on them simultaneously. That’s where real leaders distinguish themselves from people who are just going along to get along in the status quo. Good leaders cut through the cognitive dissonance and suggest a clear path out of a quagmire such as our current “criminal justice” system.

And that’s another reason why I’m endorsing Patty Dreier for our County Executive here in Portage Co., Wisc. While she doesn’t yet have available a fleshed-out position on county government’s role in the larger prison-industrial complex, I believe she would look at these issues with a far more open mind than Jim Gifford, the long-time county board member who has NOT been raising the issues of excessive incarceration, de-criminalization, alternatives to incarceration, and other notions of reform. His pitch has been: “I’ve been in County Govt. a long time, I have the experience.”

Perhaps, but it’s the kind of experience that keeps us trudging down the same old, dead-end road. As soon as the voters had defeated a $72 million referendum on a new Justice Center, the County Exec. and Board began trying to find a way to build the thing anyway, deciding to pursue a $29 million Courthouse expansion first (with the $43 million jail expansion to follow soon thereafter, no doubt). Perhaps this decision to thwart the voters played some role in the defeat of the sitting County Exec?

Perhaps if the Board and Exec. will take some time and allow the economy to recover (as everyone expects), then pursue a big new building project several years from now under a new economic boom (which everyone expects), this will sit better with voters. What will have been lost in taking more time, getting more real input from citizens, and studying alternatives to the prosecutorial, jail-prone methods now in use? Could we lessen the pressure on the criminal justice system, along with the need to proceed toward that expensive new set of buildings?

Major props and thanks to Charles Shaw for keeping this issue in the front of my mind, too.

Bobby G
Stevens Point WI

Suddenly, the people who have been invisible all this time–the working poor–are made visible by virtue of their diminishing tax payments. Why isn’t the money flowing in to the public coffers so quickly any more?

Something is clearly missing. Missing not only from tax revenue totals, but from the whole “sustainability” movement, I would boldly assert. And I wonder, am I the only one noticing what’s clearly missing?

If you go and review your Natural Step conditions for a sustainable society–and Natural Step is said to be the gold standard–you’ll find this system condition, #4:

“people are not subject to conditions that systemically undermine their capacity to meet their needs.”

Yet, with this deep recession steadily eroding the living standards of working class people everywhere, it’s clear that people most assuredly ARE being subject to conditions systematically undermining our capacity to meet our needs.

You don’t hear much mention of this deepening crash of living standards of working people in the torrent of good news about “sustainability”–locally, nationally or globally for that matter. The prospect for millions upon millions of Americans returning to some sort of right livelihood in which they would like to be engaged is steadily slipping away from millions of us, but the literature is silent on this.

I’d number those millions of us now marginalized to a clearly unsustainable mode of life in the neighborhood of 60 million. Maybe add ten million more to that, I don’t have exact numbers, just a sense of what’s going on. I call this group of us the OtherAmerica: working poor, people without health coverage, children, many youth under 25.

Doesn’t some discussion of what’s happening over here in the OtherAmerica belong in Rountables, seminars, webinars, lectures, and planning meetings on “sustainability?” Who will raise these questions?

This capitalist system no longer has a need for OtherAmerica, neither as producers-workers, nor as consumers. They’re trying to stage-manage this “recovery” with only 80% of the population needing to participate to make it credible. For us in the working poor, sustainability is further away than it was a decade ago, when the esoteric sustainability discussions began among the professional class in academia, in urban design firms, in select sub-committees in city and county governments, and in big non-profit NGO think tanks.

Neither neoliberal nor conservative politicians have any plan to restore to us any measure of dignity, but instead I believe we’re in for a long period of a kind of warehousing, like the Prawns in District 9, a systematic undermining of our capacity to meet our needs. I dread to learn what sort of fate they have planned for us, but I’m sure it will be dreadful.

Neither the Administration’s neoliberal friends-of-bankers, nor the overtly fascist Tea Partiers, have the welfare and well-being of working-class Americans (or workers anywhere) at heart. In fact, during deep recessions, working poor people become a big target market for overt fascists masquerading as right-wing “populists.” You already see an upwelling of this tendency in full effect in the USA, in Europe, and globally.

Yet in this kind of environment, we’re being told by the professional classes that we’re moving full speed ahead toward “sustainability.” A kind of American-exceptionalism Natural Step where only the first three conditions matter. Will the meeting of those conditions be accomplished by a Green Technocracy, guided and led by the leaders of the local plutocracy, whoever these may be in each locality? William Domhoff explained the methodology needed to get at who your local plutocracy may be, in his classic of sociology, Who Rules America?

One important point seems to have been missed, in this headlong rush into a technocratic sustainable geekdom filled with LEED buildings and renewable gadgets all smart-gridded together into a seamless wonderland: The corporations are still behaving as corporations. That is, they are working full-time to slow down or prevent any meaningful progress toward real “sustainability.” Yes, despite the fact that National Public Radio now gladly advertises Monsanto’s commitment to “sustainble agriculture,” in fact, Monsanto is still part of the problem, the crisis of sustainability, not part of the solution.

“Corporations” are not just some kind of hard-working communities of dedicated people fulfilling a mission statement to the benefit of society. They’re a legal creation of the state, aimed at maintaining the power status of their largest shareholder-owners, the wealthiest members of society, affectionately known to Marxists as “the ruling class.” A class understanding of corporations and their peculiar power over us is missing from the sustainability literature.

Threats/Obstacles to Sustainability

As people settle in to the rountables, planning meetings, seminars, and sub-committee meetings, I would urge folks to keep these questions in mind:

Has the mortgage crisis really been solved? How could that be, when Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, quasi-public corporations, now carry the vast majority of mortgages as assets on their balance sheets as banks are bailing on holding them?

How much further will house prices continue to fall, in the face of steady, ongoing erosion of the employment base in this nation? If house prices do continue falling, perhaps as much as 30-40% as the editors of The Automatic Earth blog have suggested, how can we possibly avert an even deeper mortgage crisis?

What is to be done about the steady erosion of real wages–actual purchasing power–of increasingly large segments of the working class who remain employed? Won’t this erode the tax base for all levels of government, whether township, village, city, county, state or federal?

In our local food groups, why is the expression “cheap food isn’t good; good food isn’t cheap” still in use? What does this even say to working poor families whose spending habits have to be “cheap” out of necessity? What can be done to make fresh, healthy, organic food affordable to working poor people?

Why are things being done FOR the working poor–food pantry distributions and the like–rather than BY the working poor, on their own behalf? Why is there so little mutual aid, self-help, co-operative self-organization by the workers for the workers?

Are the neoliberal governors of troubled states such as Wisconsin’s Gov. Doyle really being honest about the depth of the budget crises that still lie ahead? If the bulk of the state budget crises are still on the future segment of the timeline, what will this do to the remainder of the economy? Until now, state employees and to some extent, municipal and county employees, could be counted on as stably employed citizens who could drive a consumer economy, since production stopped being “our thing” in the USA. What will happen to these top-tier workers and their way of life?

“Green jobs” are expected to replace only about 25% of the massive losses in employment since 12/07. What about the rest?

What impact will the peak of global oil production have upon a struggling economy barely able to stave off even worse losses in employment? Why have sustainability groups completely stopped talking about the question of peak oil?

Are we supposed to believe that the problem has gone away, that the predictions were all wrong of peak oil production having already occurred 2005-2006 (Laherre, Simmons, Pickens, Heinberg); to occur in 2010 (Petrobras); to occur in 2012 (Colin Campbell’s original estimate) or even, to occur in 2030 as the ever-optimistic IEA says?

Why is climate change denial politically incorrect, while peak oil denial is the new coolness?

And, finally, when is this problem going to be addressed in the sustainability movement: Tens of millions of us in the USA being “subject to conditions that systemically undermine our capacity to meet their needs.”

At the upcoming meeting, don’t put any your laptop or any heavy objects on that end of the table with the missing leg ,the 4th system condition. And be aware: the building where the meeting is being held is a four-pillar edifice, one pillar missing.

Bobby G.
Central Wisc. USA