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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Can language be recycled?

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  • From: "Robert Waldrop" <rmwj@soonernet.com>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>, <john@eco-living.net>
  • Cc:
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Can language be recycled?
  • Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 10:29:35 -0500

----Original Message-----
From: Michael Murphy <mmurphy@ctsl.com>

>Superficially? This is capitalism at its finest, voting with your
dollars to buy the food >you want the way your want. Multiply your
efforts by 1000 other buying clubs and the >production system starts
to change to meet your needs. Bravo!

Like I said, there is a superficial resemblance but our system is
fundamentally different. we are creating a sustainable, free, and
fair market place, capitalism as practiced in the US is about
coercively centralizing wealth, imposing and maintaining control
through structured violence, and polluting the biosphere. What we are
doing has nothing to do with Ayn Rand et al.

For 50 years the official capitalist philosophy of US agriculture has
been to "get big or get out". Thus, there have been three major waves
of bankruptcies in rural America since the 1950s. during each one,
capitalist economists stood up and applauded. "See, we are
eliminating the inefficient producers and reallocating their resources
to more productive uses." thus, when I visit my home town, every time
there are more vacant houses and buildings, and out in the farm area
there is a chemical stink and a feeling of deadness.

there was a woman who as an advisor to the 4 H club I participated in
when I was young. She was truly the salt of the earth. if you had a
covered dish supper, you wanted her there because she was a wondrous
cook. But her husband I guess was not one of those efficient
producers, and in the early 1980s they lost their family farm to
foreclosure, having done everything the experts told them todo.
distraught by what had happened to their ancestral land, she poured
gasoline over herself and set herself on fire and burned herself to
death. That loss is not accounted for anywhere on the balance sheets
of the capitalist economists, but it was and is still today a very
real loss. Capitalist accountants basically have primitive accounting
systems as they are not able to deal with such a loss.

You get what you pay for, this much is true. and that's what you pay
for when you buy agribidness groceries in a supermarket. Prices paid
to farmers have declined 36% in the last few years, we've seen all
time low prices for pork for example, but prices in grocery stores
continue to increase. That's monopoly capitalism at its best,
bleeding off productive wealth to support hordes of parasitic
stockholders and absentee managers, not to mention the politicians.
there is nothing free, nor fair, nor just about it. it is rooted in
structural violence. the government might as well have simply saved
time back in the 50s and sent the army on a series of pogroms through
farm country to drive people out with fire and violence.

Robert Waldrop, okc






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