By Tom on 8/24/2009 1:04 PM

Greetings to Dan in Spokane. It's nice to hear from you and fortunate I caught your post, because I gave up looking for comment about a year ago. Peak and shrink, huh? Haven't studied as much on that as you clearly have. The best job on Peak Oil I've read is the one in the Transition Handbook.  By the way. I don't know properly how to respond to a response. That's howcome the use of this blog space.

Tom

By Tom on 8/23/2009 7:43 PM

Whereas the insurance industry will put paid to single payer, the climate will change willy nilly, the fifty-first state will be a state of war, and Wall Street will steal the very paving from Main Street, there shall be established a Society which is dedicated to the idea that Vashon can, and should, become self-sufficient in all matters of physical well-being. The attempt to get there could lead to Vashon finding a concerted voice that will cry out in outrage over US disregard for humanity. And so the heart of the dedication is that in survival we may find redemption. There will be no dues nor officers, no agenda nor schedule of meetings. The only by-law is prohibition of saying it won’t work. The Society will meet at the Café Luna. (Sent to the Beachcomber in August 2009. Unlikely to be published as sent too close to my last submission.)

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By Tom on 8/18/2009 9:20 AM

To The Loop. Health care in the year 2009 is about to get worse. The reason is that funding for existing government health care, Medicare and Medicaid, will be threatened by what ever bill gets passed: there’s zero possibility of any good coming out of the posturing and deception in congress. Another bad harbinger is that health industry lobbyists outnumber congress six to one. Maybe you differ, but maybe you will agree that Vashon should do something. One possibility I’m hearing is that we look into a self-contained single payer plan. The grail is that by eliminating paperwork we can save so much as to fund not only basic care but actually build up a reserve for corrective surgery. The national hope is dead, state hope is very slim, but Vashon hope for single payer is viable. For those having trouble sorting out the posturing and deception, the crux of the health care situation is easy to describe: it is not health care at all but instead is a commodity in which to invest for profit. Look at it this way, do...

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By Tom on 8/16/2009 2:07 PM

The Beachcomber's report August 5th on cooperation between five Island human services organizations speaks well of many people. It also is a harbinger of Vashon sharing California’s current economic fate. That disaster and dozens of lesser ones around the country are a painful re-learning of the downside of having a central bank: a downward pressure from bad loans in just one sector can spread through the network of national and private banks to the whole country like a hypodermic shot in an artery. But Vashon could defy the harbinger if it were to put in place an alternate dual currency of the proper sort. The details of such a currency are for the most part available but it has not caught hold with more than a handful of very worried islanders. The reason is that using a non-central dollar currency is like re-arranging life from the comfortable norm to one so new as to be deeply disturbing. There are some tough knots to untie in creating the dual alternate but none nearly as tough as the change in style of living....

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By Tom on 8/16/2009 1:56 PM

Whereas the insurance industry will "put paid" to single payer, the climate will change willy nilly, the fifty-first state will be a state of war, and Wall Street will steal the very paving from Main Street, there shall be established a Society dedicated to the idea that Vashon can, and should, become self-sufficient in all matters of physical well-being. The attempt to get there could lead to Vashon finding a concerted voice that will cry out in outrage over US disregard for humanity. And so the heart of the dedication is that in survival we may find redemption. There will be no dues nor officers, no agenda nor schedule of meetings. The only by-law is prohibition of saying it won’t work. The Society will meet at the Café Luna.

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By Tom on 7/15/2009 8:22 AM

Interest in the scope of the Community Council’s deliberations got a boost this week as new board members have pitched in to fill vacancies. The matter of scope would seem to be of particular interest at this time of war, recession, and too much carbon dioxide because it turns on our judgment of what constitutes “local interest”. Take war, while few of us have lost a loved one are the rest of us okay with the senseless mayhem? How about the recession, do we watch idly as Detroit’s skilled labor gets shoved into the gutter? And climate, should not our commuters be among the first to back a long range plan to bring work nearer to homes, to make Vashon a resilient haven? Leading questions to be sure, but if Council keeps to a narrow interpretation of “local interest” then Vashon will not be prepared for the inevitable ramifications of national change. An important aspect of preparation for such profound stress is emotional health. Heads up, Vashon, times are about to change. (Sent to the Beachcomber in hope).

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By Tom on 6/28/2009 6:41 AM

To the Beachcomber:  Vashon is now well on its way to readiness for a natural disaster thanks to the long-time work of Be Prepared and now the publication of its well-done brochure. And what about economic disaster? Ask which is the more likely to occur within say the next two years, the Big One or collapse of the US economy? Think about that. The earthquake operates on probability, but the US economy is a serial cliff-hanger. How do you like the latest episode in which the Government propped up the General Motors corporate logo and kicked the auto workers into the gutter? Right, and has Vashon taken a single step toward self-sufficiency? Right. We could have retrofit K2 for making self-sustaining products but we blew it. But we love our commute. With many well–deserved cheers for our hard working Transportation Committee, what we really need is a Transition Committee.

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By Tom on 6/27/2009 5:46 AM

(This is the Agenda for a committee meeting. June 25, 2009. Reprinted here for those who didn't make the meeting.) Translation: Sensible, humane, health care will be dead on arrival at President Obama’s desk. The death sentence is coded into the phrase “Public Option” which doesn’t take the brains of an eleven-year old to decipher. It means a “free lunch” which is impossible. Without imposing a new tax it will not be possible for the Government to pay the cost of care for everybody including those already sick while at the same time continuing existing subsidies to the HMOs. That’s the free lunch analysis of what’s going on now in Congress. There’s another analysis that ignores the Public Option scam in preference to wiring shut the gaping maw of the health insurance industry. It’s having a “free lunch” on us and we are fed up. The agenda for tonight, June 25, addresses the single payer movement now underway on Vashon under the auspices of others with more sense than this ad hoc chairperson. Whereas national...

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By Tom on 6/2/2009 1:34 PM

This past Monday evening the Council Board discussed my motion for a new committee to be called the Transition Committee. The title came from the book Transition Handbook, and the text also except that I replaced Rob Hopkins' words with my own and threw in some local names, like Vashon, and like "commute". The reaction was two-fold, bury it in an existing committee, or forget the idea. There's merit in each.  As to creating another committee there's no way a committee could accomplish much and the reason for that is given in Hopkins' book: progress comes from the root up, never from the council.  As to burying it in an existing committee of similar charter, the board might have gone along with that but I think that Hopkins' point applies there as well. So, then, why did I try? As you might guess it was a way of finding out how the Board felt about the coming perfect economic storm. Gathering together the comments, I'd say most of the board are just as worried as I am, but have their hands full doing what needs...

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By Tom on 5/26/2009 7:13 AM

How long will Vashon remain unaffected by shocks in high finance? How many more days before we take off the daily mask of business as usual? How soon will the fifteen minute boat ride no longer insulate us? Try five months. The following analysis is hasty and frantic but probably valid. In 1987 William Greider described the rickety US financial system when he wrote “Secrets of the Temple”. A few years later when the Glass Steagel act was repealed commercial banks were allowed to enter the investment market and rickety became an understatement. Bad loans here and abroad increased. The Fed tut-tutted but did not discipline the banks. A feeding frenzy erupted in Wall Street in the late nineties when a few key members in the revolving door known as the Wall Street-Washington money axis devised a means whereby a ponzi scheme could utilize investment paper called “derivatives” to make a few insiders a lot of money and do so in a way that the Securities and Exchange Commission could willingly overlook. Fact: trading...

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