Willie Nelson

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It seems to be a widely held myth that World War II was the main agent for moving the United States out of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Cornell University Professor George F. Warren, an important adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt on rural development policy, figured out that it is agriculture that leads countries into and out of depressions. The Roosevelt Administration is the only administration that tried to do something about supporting the family farm.

Our recovery started in 1942, the year the Steagall Amendment to the War Stabilization Act mandated farm parity, but the war got the credit. We then had ten years of economic stability until 1952 when the Steagall Amendment was allowed to expire.

In 1952 “export-oriented pricing” replaced the New Deal policy that had put farm prices in balance, or parity, with other prices. That New Deal policy worked effectively with farmer-approved “supply management” that cost far less than today’s subsidies to Agri-business.

Farm parity laws that created a fair price floor for all raw materials was the main agent for moving the United States out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. This support of prices allowed farmers to afford to stay on the farm and rebuild the United States economy literally from the ground up.

Basically, parity is a measuring device that puts the value of raw commodities at a level that equals all the costs, including labor costs and capital costs.

Parity maintained a level for farm-product prices by governmental support and intended to give farmers adequate purchasing power. Parity, official value, or par value, maintained equality between the cost to farmers for their production and the price they received for their products.

Parity laws guaranteed equality of price, rate of exchange, wages, and buying power. Farm parity laws made sure that farm income was keeping up with farm costs.

In 1933 farmers in Nebraska, for example, received almost 43 percent less than the parity level. This is what crushed family farms, drove people off the land and extended the Great Depression.

True democracy requires an agriculture of numerous family farms, owned by farmers rooted in their communities, not by corporate landlords. Agri-business is the work of corporate landlords.

Our exporting of grain at “globally competitive” prices injures Third World farmers and results from our failure to keep commodity prices at parity (balance) with other goods and services. The U.S. farm community has seen a 50% fall in the number of farmers during a 30-year period of “export-oriented” agriculture.

The present path is such a narrow, competitive approach to the world that it misses the possibilities of cooperation and disregards the legitimate need of other nations for their own markets and their own resources. The present path is not the path to peace.

Care International, one of the world’s major aid agencies, recently refused $45,000,000.00 of United States aid money. The money the charity refused is tied to buying the grain from American farmers and shipping it in American carriers.

Which means that much of the aid ‘money’ goes back to the United States.

Some food goes to the needy, but the rest is sold cheaply in markets, undercutting local farmers and giving little incentive for them to grow more. The combination of wastage and the damage done to the local market means the aid does more harm than good.

The current system injures family farmers globally.

Our nearly 50-year-old “export-oriented, globally competitive” farm pricing policy is intended to gain markets by undercutting prices paid to farmers abroad. This amounts to Welfare For Agri-business.

The theme of “growing the economy” through exports ignores the experience of farmers. Non-farmers often confuse agriculture and agri-business.

To contend that agriculture has done well even while the number of farmers has plummeted surely misses essential facts. Those who work in agriculture speak with credibility about how our pricing policy undercuts both our farmers and the farmers of hungry nations.

The United State’s thirst for foreign markets and resources is due to overlooking needs and resources of our own people, leading to growing income dis-parities here. Fair farm parity laws will compensate for this inequity.

We can turn around our current situation and avoid a Greater Depression by raising basic storable commodities back up to 90-100 percent of parity. Supporting family farms can put the United States back on a secure economic footing.

Willie Nelson photograph and art by Monique Claus, Amsterdam, April 21st, 2008.

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“Above all, he was amazed to hear me talk of a mercenary standing Army in the midst of Peace, and among a free People. He said, if we were governed by our own Consent in the Persons of our Representatives, he could not imagine of whom we were afraid, or against whom we were to fight…” from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

The United States government is afraid of We the People of the United States of America. They are afraid because they themselves would not have stood for the long train of abuses suffered by We the People through the repeated betrayal of trust in the United States government.

The government and their police forces certainly seem to expect a significant public backlash against the Paulson bailout schemes designed so powerful interests can grow more powerful and do it with taxpayer dollars. We the People elected Mr. Obama on the basis of his campaign slogan of “Change We Can Believe In.”

I hope everyone draws up a list of items they would have to see happen for Mr. Obama to live up to his campaign slogan. Karl Denninger wrote an open letter to Mr. Obama with his list on change we can believe in regarding our current financial situation.

1. You will send up a bill that enacts a full repeal of Gramm-Leach-Bliley. This was the law that repealed the Glass-Steagall act (the majority of it, anyway).
2. You will send up a bill that reinstates the leverage limit of 12:1 that used to apply to investment banks (the dropping of which is the proximate cause of this mess, and which Henry Paulson was directly responsible for through his lobbying and requests) and apply it to all institutions doing business in The United States.
3. You will send up a bill that repeals the 2005 “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention” act - an act you voted no on originally. This one should be a no-brainer, since you didn’t support it originally.
4. You will send up a bill that repeals the TARP/EESA, and will vow to do everything in your power to stop the expenditure of any further funds under the existing law, and you will direct Treasury on January 20th to reverse the tax changes that granted $150 billion in “preferences” without a vote of Congress or even public notice.
5. You will send up a bill that requires the SEC, OTS, and OCC to compel all assets and liabilities to be consolidated upon a firm’s balance sheet and directs that all marking methods, formulas and variables along with each asset held be disclosed accurately for every firm that operates in the United States.
6. You will direct The Federal Reserve by executive order to comply with the FOIA filed by Bloomberg and disclose, immediately and forever into the future, all loans issued, to whom, the specifics of the collateral pledged, and the discount or “haircut” applied. Such information will be published via The Web at the point of issuance of Fed Credit and all actions taken by The Federal Reserve or any of its district banks shall be undertaken in the full sunshine of the public view. If The Fed should refuse, you will pledge to send up to Congress a bill to repeal The Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and replace The Federal Reserve system entirely with an entity that will under penalty of federal law operate 100% “in the sunshine.”

Unfortunately, my expectation is that Mr. Obama will do nothing to harm his core constituency, his powerful Wall Street backers. We are living in a system where survival of the most corrupt seems to be the rule instead of survival of the fittest/smartest.

At the center of the United States’ corruption, income inequity, narcotic trafficking, money laundering, warfare state, loss of civil liberties, imperial over-reach, racism, and the constant recourse to violence as a tool of domestic and international policy is an oil economy bound to militarism by the petrodollar money system.

We have to make our departure from where we are right now. A good beginning would be to shift the debt burden from debtors to creditors with lenders required to eat the losses on deceptive loans they never should have made in the first place.

Seeking a peaceful revolution does not require anyone to buy in to any specific ideology. Ultimately no ideology can contain or define the social revolutionary impulse without falsifying it.

Peace is always for all or none.

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Eric Faw and Douglas Kelvin Payne worked together to give us another “A Peaceful Solution” music video. Here two long time peace activists join forces to further the cause of peace.

This wonderful example of working together is something we can all take to heart. It is something we will all have to practice if we are to survive.

Once one accepts the simple fact that no system based upon burning oil can ever become sustainable one can sense the fog of confusion begin to lift. Industrialized civilization has never been anything more than a temporary situation.

Our challenge lies in managing the transition away from burning oil. Given the current mood I wonder if there is to be any transition at all because oil consumption seems to be picking up speed as we approach the wall.

Without a doubt if we continue in our violent and conspicuously affluent ways the end will come violently and be conspicuously expensive. Those with the least investment in the status quo will weather the transition with the fewest difficulties.

Cooperation is becoming much more useful than competition. For one thing, cooperation allows everyone to survive.

Competition only favors the winner with all the rest forced to face failure and an uncertain future. Some have even begun to question the victory in winning when the victory parade becomes a death march through a desolate broken landscape.

We now have the very clear choice of partnering up and cooperating with other people or continuing in destructive and personally winning ways. This comes down to the option of building an alternative lifestyle now in the falling detritus of a collapsing empire.

Seeking an alternative lifestyle is no longer the exclusive domain of musicians, artists and daydream believers. Soon the ranks of such seekers will swell as the status quo provides more and more proof as to its own self extinction.

Mr. Obama in many ways represents the last hope of the status quo to redeem itself. A promise of sweeping change now must stand up to the light.

Of course, this is the same Mr. Obama that helped push through the $700 billion bailout despite the opposition of 80+% of United States’ citizens. Now we can all watch as Mr. Obama brings in cronies and insiders rather than fresh faces and new ideas.

It would be difficult to find two individuals who better represent the breed of cronies and insiders than Rahm Emanuel and John Podesta as Chief of Staff and transition leader. Former Clinton Treasury Secretaries Larry Summers and Robert Rubin were both instrumental in dismantling banking and trading safeguards created during the first Great Depression.

These are the people Mr. Obama is surrounding himself with. I’m sorry but it’s hard to see any meaningful change here.

That is why we all have to get together like Eric Faw and Douglas Kelvin Payne have done. Those who stand together for peace will build a peaceful world while those who embrace the suicide pact of industrialized civilization will meet the end they seek.

In fact, the collapse of industrialized civilization may be the best chance the rest of us have. We will be left a world only fit for musicians, artists and daydream believers.

The longer it takes to collapse, as it inevitably must, the harder it will be to survive the aftermath. The trade off comes in that now even more people have time for the opportunity to meet up and embrace an alternative lifestyle.

What will you do with the time you have left? Will you continue to put your bets on the status quo or will you bet on yourself?

We did not see Mr. Obama get behind a $700 billion plan to save the Earth, mitigate against Global Warming, stop the slaughter of other species, prepare for the downside of Peak Oil or anything of a similar nature. He has made it very clear that he works for continuation of business as usual.

So be glad that Mr. Obama won out over the other guy. Perhaps we will have a more peaceful and gentler space in which to meet like minded individuals and work out our mutual transition plans.

But please do not think that Mr. Obama will save you and industrialized civilization as you have grown to know it. You and your children’s salvation will only be in an alternative lifestyle and that is as certain as the end of non-renewable oil.

Please watch these Eric Faw videos:
Apology To Iraq

Save The Earth Medley

* * * * * Artist’s Statement * * * * *

by Eric Faw
I was born and raised in the ‘60’s in a family dedicated to peace. When I was a toddler, my father worked with gangs in Chicago and L.A. in an effort to establish peace in the violent neighborhoods. I remember watching my parents get beat up by gang members, and then trying to help those same gang members soon after.

My father marched and protested along with blacks in the Civil Rights Movement, eager to see peace between all races. He later marched alongside blacks to the Chicago City Hall the night Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered.

My parents instilled a deep passion for peace from the very beginning.

Positive memories from my childhood include many protest marches, rallies, and such for peace in Washington and other places. The theme had changed more to peace versus nuclear war with the USSR, but the concepts were the same. I learned the lessons regarding the equality of all men and women, no matter their race, religion, etc. I was taught about turning the other cheek, though I didn’t always follow that lesson so well.

I am utterly convinced that the downfall of this planet, if it comes, will be due to greed, pride, and fear of people different than us. Fear that their beliefs, customs, etc. will supplant ours. Greed and pride will always be a human condition. So will prejudice and fear – but the more we seek out peace with the entire human race, the better the odds of this planet surviving this pestilence called mankind.

I’ve chosen the path of Art for Peace because peace is like a healthy marriage – it’s not simply an absence of strife, but a sense of security brought about through ongoing, conscious effort. Peace doesn’t just happen on its own accord.

Movements like Art for Peace are the nutrients for peace.

And peace has to start locally before it can go national, and then international. If there’s not peace in my own mind, I won’t relate peacefully with my neighbor. If I can’t relate peacefully with my neighbor, I won’t relate peacefully with others even more different, and I certainly won’t live in peace with the planet/environment.

I believe in the axiom:

Think globally, act locally.

When I make videos about peace or love, I’m not seeking to change the world. I’m seeking to express my beliefs and possibly encourage even one other person to consider peace and love as options. The quickest way to peace, in my experience, is a sincere desire to understand the other person, party, or country’s point of view.

Hatred breeds hate – but love also breeds love.

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J-Liddy produced a video version of “A Peaceful Solution” to go along with his earlier mp3 version. He brings an important sensibility to the project from the Hip hop style, a sensibility of contemporary newness not remixed retro, a cultural precursor to a global reality shift.

Few things in human affairs command the awe of a reality shift. A shift in reality allows inventions and events previously undreamed of to sprout wings and fly.

Once upon a time everyone knew the earth was flat and the center of the universe. These facts supported a belief system that represented reality to them.

Everyone knew these facts and from these facts any number of logical arguments descended to prove that everything was as it was because it could be no other way, given the facts. Generations of people were born, lived and died subscribing to such constructed realities.

Reality shifts because it must, because it no longer adequately describes the current situation. When a belief system no longer accounts for the events of every day life then commonly held facts are subject to examination.

A round earth orbiting around a small sun very far from the center of the universe seemed to become accepted fact with breath taking quickness. New belief systems arose that enabled everything we take for granted today.

Now we face a shift in reality capable of shaking global belief systems to their roots. Ways of life dependent upon unending unlimited growth are finished.

The fallout from global warming and the downside of peak oil join centuries of destructive farming practices and exploitative resource extraction united under a common umbrella of financial, commercial and political collapse. This is no accident of fate, no marvel of coincidence and certainly not the retribution of an angry God.

This is the collapse of something people intentionally built. It is collapsing because it was based upon profoundly flawed if not just plain wrong facts.

Now we wait to see the extent of the social and cultural collapse that inevitably follows. Our very humanity is at risk as in no time in the past.

We saw during the Katrina debacle that what collapsed was not the social and cultural fabric but the systems of authority. It was these systems of authority attempts at reestablishing themselves by threats of force that interfered the most with the good intentions of people looking after one another.

Hope can be high for humanity even as we witness the failure of human systems designed to benefit a few at the expense of many. The question remains as to what kinds of systems will be created in the future.

Without a doubt many will attempt to maintain or resurrect the old way of doing things long after their futility has been proven. Survivors will only have to stay out of their way.

The true turning point will be when people realize that living in peace with each other and in harmony with all life are necessary facts for a useful belief system. When people decide to take care of themselves instead of the privileged few playing their financial games within a militarized arena reality will shift profoundly.

This is why a peaceful resolution provides for a peaceful revolution. With a peaceful solution accepted as a required fact a compatible belief system and view of reality will follow.

Will we make this shift as intact communities transitioning from the old way of life or as isolated tribes reduced to an impoverished stone age? While it is now plain to see that things physically cannot go on as they have it is still our choice on how we deal with the collapse.

We can take back America.

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Hear “A Peaceful Solution” by Bill Hunter, Phil and Ann Pflage

Bill Hunter and Phil and Ann Pflager give us a great version of “A Peaceful Solution” in a traditional folk song style. Their style reminds us of both the long history of Americana music and the strong tradition of social protest folk songs.

The abuses of the Bush-Cheney administration provided an easy target for progressive reformers. Now the danger becomes believing the bad guys will soon be gone, the worst is over and salvation has been delivered in the person of Barack Obama.

The danger lies in allowing individuals to be a scapegoat for a destructive and unsustainable system. The system permitted the Bush-Cheney rise to power and has now produced a necessary rotation of management.

The regime change represented by a Barack Obama presidency is more a change in style than substance. Now is not the time to roll over and go back to sleep.

The system has been the engine behind social issues long before there were folk songs to bring attention to the issues. That engine has not been silenced.

Who will run Obama’s CIA, his Department of Homeland Security (which he will not dismantle), his National Security Council and his  Department of Defense? Will they be the same legendary war criminals, think tank assets and intelligence/security advisers who guided the Obama campaign?

• Zbigniew Brzezinski
• Anthony Lake, Clinton administration national security adviser
• Sarah Sewall, Clinton administration deputy secretary of defense, counter-insurgency czar
• Richard Clarke, Clinton and Bush administration counter-terrorism czar
• Susan Rice, Clinton administration Africa specialist and NSC member, Brookings
• Bruce Riedel, former CIA officer, NSC Near East and Asian affairs, Brookings

Without a doubt the system is in trouble with its own self-created crisis. Now is not the time to let it restructure itself.

We can still keep asking for peace. Obama’s murderous views on war are well documented and similar to those of Bush-Cheney.

We will not be subjected to a McCain-Palin presidency, which certainly would have ushered in horrors, violence, and insanity that likely would have dwarfed those of Bush-Cheney. At best we will see a more carefully thought out military agenda than that experienced during the Bush administration.

As Bill Hunter and Phil and Ann Pflager sing, it’s time to take back America.

If there’s peaceful solution to this peace revolution
We’ve got to take back America
There is a dream so believe it get ready to receive it
When we take back America
Now there are to many greedy steeling from the needy
We’ve got to take back America
Politicians keep on lying and good people keep on dying
We’ve got to take back America
If there’s a peaceful solution to this peace revolution
We’ve got to take back America
There was a dream so believe it get ready to receive it
When we take back America
Now if you hate things we have done and hate what we’ve become
We’ve got to take back America
Are we the brave and the free is this our democracy
If we don’t take back America
If there’s peaceful solution to this peace revolution
We’ve got to take back America
There is a war and we are in it lord knows we’ve got to win it
And take back America
So in the shadows of our steeples gather up all honest people
And take back America
Let truth and love steer the course and end these damned wars
And take back America
If there’s peaceful solution to this peace revolution
We’ve got to take back America
There is a dream so believe it get ready to receive it
When we take back America
There is a dream so believe it get ready to receive it
When we take back America

* * * * Artists’ Statements * * * * *

We believe that music is an effective way to communicate and that Bill Hunter has an exceptional ability to present his feelings in a way that resonates with an audience. We love Bill’s music and were excited to be a part of his version of Willie and Amy Nelson’s song.

Anne E. & Phil Pflager
(Annie and the Vets)

Phil and Anne do not give themselves the credit they deserve, they are an inspiring couple that are very involved with the peace movement and have been as long as I have known them. They are active members of Veterans For Peace, do a truth in recruiting program at local high schools countering the military recruiter’s misrepresentations and false promises and have a group, “Annie and the Vets”, with an endless repertoire of peace related songs both original and covers.

It is always my pleasure to share time and make music with them and their friends. They like you and Willie’s Peace Research Institute make me need to be more involved in this movement.

As I stated in October of 2007, I am passionate about creating peace because I believe peace, honesty and responsibility are the main ingredients to harmony, and I believe living in harmony with others and the earth are man’s only hope.  Over a year has passed and what was so apparent to me then has become even more so today.

I guess I have been working toward peace since the end of my high school senior year in 1970, while during a one on one conversation with my wrestling coach I was convinced the last thing I needed was to have my most proficient skill be taking of human life, he had been in special services and I was considering trying to become a green beret. Thanks to Coach Miller my life and perspective were changed forever.

Since, I have shared my thoughts with young ones that I heard were considering time in the military and tried to steer them to a more productive course. What motivates me to speak out for peace and the environment is that I believe this is a critical time. We can choose to live in harmony with the earth and others or we can bring an end to life as we know it. The choice is ours and I pray that we are up to the task.

I’m not sure if I chose music or if music chose me to help express my thoughts. Though I have been writing songs for many years only recently have I had the opportunity to share them with others and felt a need get involved and speak out against what I know is wrong. Through song I find I can most accurately convey my thoughts and emotions.

I think the key to A Peaceful Solution is for us to set an example, lead the way in sustainable consumption, economics and politics never forgetting the Golden Rule. If we are to have lasting solutions we need to teach by example, forcing others into submission is not the answer and though not all would agree I think, hope, most “Real Americans” and the brotherhood of man would.
Sincerely, Bill Hunter

Hear “A Peaceful Solution” by Bill Hunter, Phil and Ann Pflage

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