No Alternative to Socialism

[Mike Morin]

We need some perspective.

Fossil fuel use is about 150 years old and automotive use about 100 years old. Look how absurdly, the personal automobile dominates our life and is destroying any hope for a future.

We need to deal with more than incremental adjustments from the modern automotive age. If we want to continue the many benefits of precious fossil fuels, the many opportunity costs of those fuels, to personal autoumobile usage, then we need to set as a goal (here in the USA) and realize it, to reduce the use of the personal automobile by 80% in the next 20 to 40 years.

It is not encouraging, because Obama explicitly stated the other day that the automobile is such an important part of American history and culture and needs to remain so. This is a statement of a myopic politician beholden to special interests.

If you've never lived in the Northeast (USA)where much of the city, town, and village centers were built before the automobile, it may be hard to imagine a future with the greatly reduced automobile use, but it is very possible and absolutely desirable.

The key is the walkable neighborhood. That is, neighborhoods for everybuddy where everyone can get what they need within walking distance of their residence. This will take a major shift in the way that resources are allocated and products distributed to communitites. The major over-supply side mall outlets (for those products and services that have utility) could become regional warehouses and older town and village centers, where they exist could be explicitly brought back as outlets for these products. Where the town and village centers do not exist, such as here out West (I'm in Eugene, Oregon), where the mindless assumption of the automobile has led to the mindless, endless residential districts with their equally alienating and squandering (strip) malls, communities could be rebuilt (think of all the jobs) to provide community centers and outlets.

Of course, this will not happen in the absence of a complete commitment to neighborhood/inter-community/inter-regional/worldwide ecological economic resource planning and allocation and redevelopment.

This Plan is too bold for American Politicians. This Plan is Socialism. With advances in communications technology, much progress, in the development of community centers, could help greatly increase the amount of tele-commuting that could help people work from and/or near their homes.

The resource allocation issue could be handled with a reformed economic system, an equity union, with a "plan and implement" modus operandi for economic operations. Reforming the financial system to take the fundamentally inflationary Capitalist aspect of "discounting the future" (i.e. assuming that money in the future will be worth less)could lead to a system of ecological economical redevelopment where only true growth in wealth would occur and be shared and could occur under the aegis of a mission emphasizing peace, equity, humanity, quality of life, and sustainability.

Removing the gluttonous oil resource use by the USA and Capitalist automotive oriented allies would slowly rescind the need for the hegemonic occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and a world acting in concert would stand much better prospects for peace.

I'm a Work kin for peace and cooperation.


With much love and care,

Mike Morin
www.peoplesequityunion.blogspot.com

[Lana Sutton]

walkable neighborhoods and buildign according to the village concept, and building community gardens, should be part of every city's planning department. Fortunately Chattanooga Green has a citizens taskforce that could catalyze that kind of thinking here, just sign up through city forrester Gene Hyde or intern Brad McAllister. Also, the city master gardeners, through UT extension agent Tom Stebbins, are installing community food gardens, if you'd like to be part of that.

[Mike Morin]

I hope that you will have better luck working with the City and other Governments than I have.

They are totally self-serbing and corrupt here in Eugene and beyond.

Politicians are whores and the pimps keep themselves well hidden.

The pimps pull the strings in City Hall as not so well within the "elected" government at City Council and all the other clueless chambers and administrative offices throughout this greed-soaked land.

On a more positive note, I will post a follow-up essay to the one(s) that you are responding to... It is called, "The Ecology of Redevelopment". You will NOT find it on the New York Times Beat Seller List.

While community gardens are a good thing, this is about MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH...MUCH MORE than community gardens.

[Mike Morin]

The Ecology of Redevelopment


A big part of my redevelopment plan (aside from the financial systems reform) is the REBUILDING of neighborhoods to make them walkable for the necessities of life (that is, assuming a goal of a much less harried pace than today, but also assuming that people will have responsibilities, obligations, and desires). Such a plan would include a massive education program in retraining workers and training in youth in the building trades. Human resource management would be utilized to try to maximize the match between where the primary contractors/instructors and student/workers lived and the neighborhood building projects.

Communities would be rebuilt to emulate mature ecological systems, in that they maximize the efficiency of energy and resource input into the community so that once resources enter a community, they stay in the community for the maximum amount of time possible. Once all communities are sufficiently rebuilt (a timeline of 20 to 40 years?) under such guidelines, they would evolve to ongoing day-to-day and maintenance communities and the amount of heavy labor required would decrease and the amount of leisure time increase greatly. Again, (day-to-day and maintenance) workers would be employed in, surrounding, and/or as close to their residency as possible and it would be a priority for real and capital assets to be owned by the workers and the community patrons who ideally would be one and the same. The Neighborhood Equity Union would replace credit unions and of course, other forms of financial institutions. Parks and gymnasiums would be an important part of the plan as leisure time increased and the healthy aspects of physical labor decreased.

Concurrent with rebuilding, and the reallocation of production and distribution resources, would be efforts to make office, communications, knowledge and intelligence based labor into primarily home and/or neighborhood based vocations. Occasional travel would be necessary and desirable, but quiet bus and train travel and car-sharing cooperatives could be employed to fill this need along with family visit and recreational needs and desires. With respect to the former, extended families would be encouraged to reunite geographically.

[Sandi Brockway]

If you live in Eugene, you should actually join the transitionoregon.ning.com site. I notice you have no entry there, yet you belong to every other transition ning. They really need pragmatic help and this would be a great chance for you to test your coaltion building skills.

Eugene and surrounding regions has HUGE potential, and always has been a hippie haven. Apprevecho Institute has been active nearby for a very long time. There is the Eugene Permaculture Guild too. Within the city proper, there are about 154 Wiser Earth listings to draw a network or coalition from:

http://www.wiserearth.org/content/proximity_map

Ideally most of us know how the system needs to be transformed, the concepts of basic local self reliance are not really rocket science. We now need enough people who are willing and capable of doing some hands-on real work, and get their hands dirty.

I have been writing about this idealism for nearly forty years. It sounds easy, in idealistic terms, but when is the last time you lifted a shovel or actually cooperated with a local socialistic-type project without it deteriorating in to petty bickering?