Palin receives top honors

Not to be shorted on her accomplishments while Governor, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists have chosen Gov. Palin as the winner of its annual Sitting Duck Award.  Congratulations to Palin for edging out Rod Blagojevich as the most ridiculed newsmaker in the US.  Apparently there is no physical award presented to the recipient, but as we all hear her recent resignation speech, there can be no doubt that she deserves the award.  Let’s also hope that she runs back to that hockey mom title and mold that she truly should have never left…

A great day for Alaska

Sarah Palin will resign as governor in the next few weeks, it was announced today.  A great weight is lifted from Alaska’s environments and peoples today.  Does this clown really think she can be elected president?  The state rejoices and the nation cringes…

‘There Is No Way I Will Deploy to Afghanistan’ — Seeds of Dissent in the U.S. Military Are Growing

By Dahr Jamail, Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

Editor’s Note: The following is an introduction by Tom Engelhardt.

The All-Volunteer Force (AVF) exists for a reason captured in a study by Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., author of the “definitive history of the Marine Corps,” published in Armed Forces Journal in 1971. The U.S. military in Vietnam was at that moment at the edge of chaos. As Colonel Heinl put it, it was experiencing “widespread conditions… that have only been exceeded in this century by the French Army’s Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Tsarist armies [of Russia] in 1916 and 1917.”

In fact, statistics flowing back to Washington about the American war machine in Vietnam then pointed toward an unimaginable nightmare. Drug use was rampant; desertions stood at 70 per thousand, a modern high; small-scale mutinies or “combat refusals” were at critical, if untabulated, levels; incidents of racial conflict had soared; and strife between “lifers” and draftees was at unprecedented levels. Reported “fraggings” — assassination attempts — against unpopular officers or NCOs had risen from 126 in 1969 to 333 in 1971, despite declining troop strength in Vietnam. According to Colonel Heinl’s figures, as many as 144 antiwar underground newspapers were being published by, or for, soldiers. And most threatening of all, active duty soldiers in relatively small numbers (as well as a swelling number of Vietnam veterans) were beginning to actively organize against the war.

When, in January 1973, before the war was even over, President Richard Nixon announced that an American draft army was at an end and an all-volunteer force would be created, this was why. The U.S. military was in the wilderness without a compass, having discovered one crucial thing: you couldn’t fight an endless, unpopular counterinsurgency war with the kind of conscript army a democracy had to offer. What resulted, of course, was the AVF, a moniker that, as Andrew Bacevich has written in his book The New American Militarism, was but “a euphemism for what is, in fact, a professional army… [that] does not even remotely ‘look like’ democratic America.” Citizenship and the obligation to serve were now officially severed and, from the 1980s on, most Americans would ever more vigorously cheer on the AVF from the sidelines, while it would be a force theoretically purged of possible Vietnam-style dissent and refusal.

In that sense, it could be considered a success. We’ve now been at war seven and a half years in Afghanistan and more than five in Iraq, two catastrophic counterinsurgency struggles, and yet a Vietnam-style movement has neither arisen in the military, nor for that matter in the streets of what’s now called “the homeland.” But as Dahr Jamail indicates below and in his new book, The Will To Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, dissent has proved irrepressible. With the generous support of the Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund, Jamail has produced a report on the seeds of refusal and dissent in the military that may — in a quagmire future in Afghanistan and possibly Iraq — grow into something far larger. — Tom Engelhardt

On May 1st at Fort Hood in central Texas, Specialist Victor Agosto wrote on a counseling statement, which is actually a punitive U.S. Army memo:

“There is no way I will deploy to Afghanistan. The occupation is immoral and unjust. It does not make the American people any safer. It has the opposite effect.”
Ten days later, he refused to obey a direct order from his company commander to prepare to deploy and was issued a second counseling statement. On that one he wrote, “I will not obey any orders I deem to be immoral or illegal.” Shortly thereafter, he told a reporter, “I’m not willing to participate in this occupation, knowing it is completely wrong. It’s a matter of what I’m willing to live with.”

Agosto had already served in Iraq for 13 months with the 57th Expeditionary Signal Battalion. Currently on active duty at Fort Hood, he admits, “It was in Iraq that I turned against the occupations. I started to feel very guilty. I watched contractors making obscene amounts of money. I found no evidence that the occupation was in any way helping the people of Iraq. I know I contributed to death and human suffering. It’s hard to quantify how much I caused, but I know I contributed to it.”

Even though he was approaching the end of his military service, Agosto was ordered to deploy to Afghanistan under the stop-loss program that the Department of Defense uses to retain soldiers beyond the term of their contracts. At least 185,000 troops have been stop-lossed since September 11, 2001.

Agosto betrays no ambivalence about his willingness to face the consequences of his actions:

“Yes, I’m fully prepared for this. I have concluded that the wars [in Iraq and Afghanistan] are not going to be ended by politicians or people at the top. They’re not responsive to people, they’re responsive to corporate America. The only way to make them responsive to the needs of the people is for soldiers to not fight their wars. If soldiers won’t fight their wars, the wars won’t happen. I hope I’m setting an example for other soldiers.”
Today, Agosto’s remains a relatively isolated act in an all-volunteer military built to avoid the dissent that, in the Vietnam era, came to be associated with an army of draftees. However, it’s an example that may, soon enough, have far greater meaning for an increasingly overstretched military plunging into an expanding Afghan War seemingly without end, even as its war in Iraq continues.

Avoiding Battle

Writing on his blog from Baquba, Iraq, in September 2004, Specialist Jeff Englehart commented: “Three soldiers in our unit have been hurt in the last four days and the true amount of army-wide casualties leaving Iraq are unknown. The figures are much higher than what is reported. We get awards and medals that are supposed to make us feel proud about our wicked assignment…”

Over the years, in response to such feelings, some American soldiers have come up with ingenious ways to express defiance or dissent on our distant battlegrounds. These have been little noted in the mainstream media, and when they do surface, officials in the Pentagon or in Washington just brush them aside as “bad apple” incidents (the same explanation they tend to use when a war crime is exposed).

But in the stories of men and women who served in the occupation of Iraq, they often play a different role. In October 2007, for instance, I interviewed Corporal Phil Aliff, an Iraq War veteran, then based at Fort Drum in upstate New York. He recalled:

“During my stints in Iraq between August 2005 and July 2006, we probably ran 300 patrols. Most of the men in my platoon were just in from combat tours in Afghanistan and morale was incredibly low. Recurring hits by roadside bombs had demoralized us and we realized the only way we could avoid being blown up was to stop driving around all the time. So every other day we would find an open field and park, and call our base every hour to tell them we were searching for weapon caches in the fields and everything was going fine. All our enlisted people had grown disenchanted with the chain of command.”
Aliff referred to this tactic as engaging in “search and avoid” missions, a sardonic expression recycled from the Vietnam War when soldiers were sent out on official “search and destroy” missions.

Sergeant Eli Wright, who served as a medic with the 1st Infantry Division in Ramadi from September 2003 through September 2004, had a similar story to tell me. “Oh yeah, we did search and avoid missions all the time. It was common for us to go set camp atop a bridge and use it as an over-watch position. We would use our binoculars to observe rather than sweep, but call in radio checks every hour to report on our sweeps.”

According to Private First Class Clifton Hicks, who served in Iraq with the First Cavalry from October 2003, only six months after Baghdad was occupied by American troops, until July 2004, search and avoid missions began early and always had the backing of a senior non-commissioned officer or a staff sergeant. “Our platoon sergeant was with us and he knew our patrols were bullshit, just riding around to get blown up,” he explained. “We were at Camp Victory at Baghdad International Airport. A lot of the time we’d leave the main gate and come right back in another gate to the base where there’s a big PX with a nice mess hall and a Burger King. We’d leave one guy at the Humvee to call in every hour, while the others stayed at the PX. We were just sick and tired of going out on these stupid patrols.”

These understated acts of refusal were often survival strategies as well as gestures of dissent, as the troops were invariably undertrained and ill-equipped for the job of putting down an insurgency. Specialist Nathan Lewis, who was deployed to Iraq with the 214th Artillery Brigade from March 2002 through June 2003, experienced this firsthand. “We never received any training for much of what we were expected to do,” he said when telling me of certain munitions catching fire while he and other soldiers were loading them onto trucks, “We were never trained on how to handle [them] the right way.”

Sergeant Geoff Millard of the New York Army National Guard served at a Rear Operations Center with the 42nd Infantry Division from October 2004 through October 2005. Part of his duty entailed reporting “significant actions,” or SIGACTS — that is, attacks on U.S. forces. In an interview in 2007 he told me, “When I was there at least five companies never reported SIGACTS. I think ’search and avoids’ have been going on for a long time. One of my buddies in Baghdad emails that nearly each day they pull into a parking lot, drink soda, and shoot at the cans.” Millard told me of soldiers he still knows in Iraq who were still performing “search and avoid” missions in December 2008. Several other friends deploying or redeploying to Iraq soon assured him that they, too, planned to operate in search and avoid mode.

Corporal Bryan Casler was first deployed to Iraq with the Marines in 2003, at the time of the invasion. Posted to Afghanistan in 2004, he returned to Iraq for another tour of duty in 2005. He tells of other low-level versions of the tactic of avoidance: “There were times we would go to fix a radio that had been down for hours. It was purposeful so we did not have to deal with the bullshit from higher [ups]. In reality, we would go so we could just chill out, let the rest of the squad catch up on some rest as one stood guard. It’s mutual and people start covering for each other. Everyone knows what the hell’s going on.”

Staff Sergeant Ronn Cantu, an infantryman who was deployed to Iraq from March 2004 to February 2005, and again from December 2006 to January 2008, said of some of the patrols he observed while there: “[They] wouldn’t go up and down the streets like they were supposed to. They would just go to a friendly compound with the Iraqi police or the Kurdish Peshmerga [militia] and stay at their compound and drink tea until it was time to go back to the base.”

As a Stryker armored combat vehicle commander in Iraq from September 2004 to September 2005, Sergeant Seth Manzel had figured out a way to fabricate on screen the movement of their patrol and so could run computerized versions of a search and avoid mission. As he explained:

“Sometimes if they called us up to go and do something, we would swiftly send computer reports that we were headed in that direction. On the map we would manually place our icon to the target location and then move it back and forth to make it appear as though we were actually on the ground and patrolling. This was not an isolated case. Everyone did it. Everyone would go and hide somewhere from time to time.”
Former Sergeant Josh Simpson, who served as a counter-intelligence agent in Iraq from October 2004 to October 2005, said he witnessed instances of faked movement. “I knew soldiers who learned to simulate vehicular movement on the computer screen, to create the impression of being on patrol,” said Simpson. “There’s no doubt that people did it.”

Saying “No” One at a Time

“There was nothing to be done,” Corporal Casler says of his time in Iraq, “no progress to be made there. Dissent starts as simple as saying this is bullshit. Why am I risking my life?”

Sometimes such feelings have permeated entire units and soldiers in them have refused to follow orders en masse. One of the more dramatic of these incidents occurred in July 2007. The 2nd Platoon of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, in Baghdad had lost many men in its 11 months of deployment. After a roadside bomb killed five more, its members held a meeting and agreed that it was no longer possible for them to function professionally. Concerned that their anger might actually touch off a massacre of Iraqi civilians, they staged a quiet revolt against their commanders instead.

Kelly Kennedy, a reporter with the Military Times embedded with Charlie Company prior to the revolt, described the shape the platoon members were in by that time: “[T]hey went right to mental health and they got sleeping medications, and they basically couldn’t sleep and reacted poorly. And then, they were supposed to go out on patrol again that day. And they, as a platoon, the whole platoon — it was about 40 people — said, ‘We’re not going to do it. We can’t. We’re not mentally there right now.’”

In response, the military broke up the platoon. Each individual involved was also “flagged” so he would not get a promotion or receive any award due.

To this day, troops in Iraq continue to be plagued by equipment and manpower shortages, and work long hours in an extreme climate. In addition, their stress levels are regularly raised by news from home of veterans returning to separations and divorces, and of a Veteran’s Administration often ill-equipped and unwilling to provide appropriate physical and psychological care to veterans.

While no broad poll of troops has been conducted recently, a Zogby poll in February 2006 found that 72% of soldiers in Iraq felt the occupation should be ended within a year. My interviews with those recently back from Iraq indicate that levels of despair and disappointment are once again on the rise among troops who are beginning to realize, months after the Obama administration was ushered in, that hopes of an early withdrawal have evaporated.

With the Afghan War heating up and the Iraq War still far from over, even if fighting there is at far lower levels than at its sectarian heights in 2006 and 2007, with stress and strain on the military still on the rise, dissent and resistance are unlikely to abate. In addition to small numbers of outright public refusals to deploy or redeploy, troops are going absent without official leave (AWOL) between deployments, and actual desertions may once again be on the rise. Certainly, there’s one strong indication that despair is indeed growing: the unprecedented numbers of soldiers who are committing suicide; the Army’s official suicide count rose to 133 in 2008, up from 115 in 2007, itself a record since the Pentagon began keeping suicide statistics in 1980. At least 82 confirmed or suspected suicides have been reported thus far in 2009, a pace that indicates another grim record will be set; and suicide, though seldom thought of in that context, is also a form of refusal, an extreme, individual way of saying no, or simply no more.

According to Sergeant Simpson, here’s how a feeling of discontent and opposition creeps up on you while you’re on duty: The part of the war you’re involved in, interrogating Iraqis in his case, “doesn’t make any sense. You realize that the whole system is flawed and if that is flawed, then obviously the whole war is flawed. If the basic premise of the war is flawed, definitely the intelligence system that is supposed to lead us to victory is flawed. What that implies is that victory is not even a possibility.”

After finishing his tour in Iraq, Simpson joined the Reserves because he believed it would grant him a two-year deferment from being called up, but he was called up anyway. In his own case, he says, “I thought to myself, I can’t do this anymore. First of all, it’s bad for me mentally because I’m doing something I loathe. Second, I’m participating in an organization that I wish to resist in every way I can.

“So,” he says, “I just stopped showing up for drill, didn’t call my unit, didn’t give them any reason for it. I changed my telephone number and they did not have my address.” Eventually, he reached the end date of his contract and managed to graduate from Evergreen State University in Washington. “I don’t know if technically I’m still in the reserves,” he told me. “I don’t know what my situation is, but I don’t really care either. If I go to jail, I go to jail. I’d rather go to jail than go to Iraq.”

Unready and Unwilling Reserves

Sergeant Travis Bishop, who served 14 months in Baghdad with the 57th Expeditionary Signal Battalion – the same battalion as Agosto, who served north of the Iraqi capital — recently went AWOL from his station at Fort Hood, Texas, when his unit deployed to Afghanistan. He insists that it would be unethical for him to deploy to support an occupation he opposes on moral grounds.

On his blog, he puts his position this way:

“I love my country, but I believe that this particular war is unjust, unconstitutional and a total abuse of our nation’s power and influence. And so, in the next few days, I will be speaking with my lawyer, and taking actions that will more than likely result in my discharge from the military, and possible jail time… and I am prepared to live with that…. My father said, ‘Do only what you can live with, because every morning you have to look at your face in the mirror when you shave. Ten years from now, you’ll still be shaving the same face.’ If I had deployed to Afghanistan, I don’t think I would have been able to look into another mirror again.”
I spoke with him briefly after he turned himself in at his base in early June. He said he’d chosen to follow Specialist Agosto’s example of refusal, which had inspired him, and wanted to be present at his post to accept the consequences of his actions. He, too, hoped others might follow his lead. (He and Agosto, now in similar situations, have become friends.)

Agosto, whose hope has been to set an example of resistance for other soldiers, sees Bishop’s refusal to deploy to Afghanistan as a personal success and says, “I already feel vindicated for what I’m doing by his actions. It’s nice to see some immediate results.”

His actions, he’s convinced, have affected the way his fellow soldiers are now looking at the war in Afghanistan. “The topic has come up a lot in conversation, with soldiers on base now asking, ‘What are we doing in Afghanistan? Why are we there?’ People feel compelled to bring this up when I’m around. Even the ones that disagree with me say it’s great what I’m doing, and that I’m doing what a lot of them don’t have the courage to do. If anything, the people I work with have now been treating me better than ever.”

On May 27th, rejecting an Article 15 — a nonjudicial punishment imposed by a commanding officer who believes a member of his command has committed an offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice — Agosto demanded to be court-martialed.

According to Agosto, the Army has now begun the court martial process, but has not yet set a trial date. Bishop, too, awaits a possible court martial.

On June 1st, a day when four U.S. soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, Agosto told me in a phone call from Fort Hood, “I haven’t had to disobey any orders lately. A sergeant asked me if it’d be okay if I had to follow orders, and I said no, and they didn’t force it.”

Agosto and Bishop are hardly alone. In November 2007, the Pentagon revealed that between 2003 and 2007 there had been an 80% increase in overall desertion rates in the Army (desertion refers to soldiers who go AWOL and never intend to return to service), and Army AWOL rates from 2003 to 2006 were the highest since 1980. Between 2000 and 2006, more than 40,000 troops from all branches of the military deserted, more than half from the Army. Army desertion rates jumped by 42% from 2006 to 2007 alone.

U.S. Army Specialist André Shepherd joined the Army on January 27, 2004. He was trained in Apache helicopter repair and sent first to Germany, then was stationed in Iraq from November 2004 to February 2005, before being based again in Germany. Shepherd went AWOL in southern Germany in April 2007 and lived underground until applying for asylum there in November 2008, making him the first Iraq veteran to apply for refugee status in Europe.

He, too, has refused further military service because he feels morally opposed to the occupation of Iraq. While he awaits word from the German government and is still technically AWOL, Shepherd is being supported by Courage to Resist, a group based in Oakland, California, which actively assists soldiers who refuse to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan.

A counselor and administrative associate at that organization, Adam Szyper-Seibert, points out that “in recent months there has been a dramatic rise of nearly 200% in the number of soldiers that have contacted Courage to Resist.” Szyper-Seibert suspects this may reflect the decision of the Obama administration to dramatically increase efforts, troop strength, and resources in Afghanistan. “We are actively supporting over 50 military resisters like Victor Agosto,” Szyper-Seibert says. “They are all over the world, including André Shepherd in Germany and several people in Canada. We are getting five or six calls a week just about the IRR [Individual Ready Reserve] recall alone.”

The IRR is composed of troops who have finished their active duty service but still have time remaining on their contracts. The typical military contract mandates four years of active duty followed by four years in the IRR, though variations on this pattern exist. Ready Reserve members live civilian lives and are not paid by the military, but they are required to show up for periodic musters. Many have moved on from military life and are enrolled in college, working civilian jobs, and building families.

At any point, however, a member of the Ready Reserve can be recalled to active duty. This policy has led to the involuntary reactivation of tens of thousands of troops to fight the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lieutenant General Jack C. Stultz, the Chief of the U.S. Army Reserve and Commanding General of the U.S. Army Reserve Command, told Congress on March 3rd that, since September 11, 2001, the Army has mobilized about 28,000 from the Reserves. There have been 3,724 Marines involuntarily recalled and mobilized during that same period, according to Major Steven O’Connor, a Marine Corps spokesman. (According to Major O’Connor, as of May 2009, the Marines are no longer recalling individuals from the IRR.)

Ironically, under a new commander-in-chief whom many voters believed to be anti-war, the Army is continuing its Individual Ready Reserve recalls. “The IRR recall has not seen any change since Obama became president,” Sarah Lazare, the project coordinator for Courage to Resist, says. “It’s difficult to predict what the Obama administration’s policy will be in the future regarding the IRR, but definitely they haven’t made any moves to stop this practice.”

Needing boots on the ground, according to Lazare, the military continues to fall back on the Ready Reserve system to fill the gaps: “Since these are experienced troops, many of them have already served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Lazare adds, “When Obama announced his Afghanistan surge, we got a huge wave of calls from soldiers saying they didn’t want to be reactivated and to please help them not go.”

The Future of Military Dissent

Right now, acts of dissent, refusal, and resistance in the all-volunteer military remain small-scale and scattered. Ranging from the extreme private act of suicide to avoidance of duty to actual refusal of duty, they continue to consist largely of individual acts. Present-day G.I. resistance to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan cannot begin to be compared with the extensive resistance movement that helped end the Vietnam War and brought an army of draftees to the point of near mutiny in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, the ongoing dissent that does exist in the U.S. military, however fragmented and overlooked at the moment, should not be discounted.

The Iraq War boils on at still dangerous levels of violence, while the war in Afghanistan (and across the border in Pakistan) only grows, as does the U.S. commitment to both. It’s already clear that even an all-volunteer military isn’t immune to dissent. If violence in either or both occupations escalates, if the Pentagon struggles to add more boots on the ground, if the stresses and strains on the military, involving endless redeployments to combat zones, increase rather than lessen, then the acts of Agosto, Bishop, and Shepherd may turn out to be pathbreaking ones in a world of dissent yet to be experienced and explored. Add in dissatisfaction and discontent at home if, in the coming years, American treasure continues to be poured into an Afghan quagmire, and real support for a G.I. resistance movement may surface. If so, then the early pioneers in methods of dissent within the military will have laid the groundwork for a movement.

“If we want soldiers to choose the right but difficult path, they must know beyond any shadow of a doubt that they will be supported by Americans.” So said First Lieutenant Ehren Watada of the U.S. Army, the highest ranking enlisted soldier to refuse orders to deploy to Iraq. (He finally had the military charges against him dropped by the Justice Department.) The future of any such movement in the military is now unknowable, but keep your eyes open. History, even military history, holds its own surprises.

[Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.]

              

Dahr Jamail, has reported from Iraq and writes for Inter Press Service, Le Monde Diplomatique, and other outlets. He is the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq and the forthcoming book The Will To Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

No news ain’t necessarily good news

That is, I haven’t been here in a while, but the economy is still screwed and we’re still blasting the bejesus (or beAllah) out of the middle east (Bush or Obama bedamned…).  On a more local note, the Pebble Mine ‘Syndicate’ continues to spend and spend on exploration and regional brainwashing while still not presenting their plan…….and…..Palin is still in power in the Great North…..

There’s just no damn time to do this site justice these days.  May I remind you there are a wealth of great links to click-worthy news sources to the right.  Alternet is still a great one to visit.  Also remember to use your click wisely (see an earlier story on this page here).  Too much media is pathetic and criminal.  Contributions and comments to the this page are always welcome.  Until I get some more breathing room, -M

Be glad you’re in the land of seakittens

While the economic vise grips continue to wreak havoc on the world, we, especially the young, should take some solace in being in perhaps the wealthiest state.  The wealthiest state in terms of everything that matters except the dollar, that is.  If like me, you have very little money and, thus, you have little or no money lost or being lost in the crumbling Wall Street world…Yet being stuck here, in Alaska, at this time ain’t so bad.  Even if unemployed, you have resources to feed yourself that you just don’t have as a luxury in the 48.  Until the anadromous seakittens (thanks to another ridiculous anti-fishing campaign by PETA for this great new fish nickname: “Most parents would never dream of spending a family weekend torturing kittens….But hooking a fish through the mouth and dragging him through the water is really the same as hooking a cat through the mouth and dragging him behind your car.” -this is no joke (but a laughing matter…), check out their website…) return, there’s plenty of ice fishing around the state that can put food on your table.  Hunting is another option that can, with a single day’s effort, put thousands of dollars of food in your pantry and freezer, with a minimal oil or carbon footprint if you’re keeping score (of the horrible things you do…)…

Investing in the traditionally most popular investments, stock, is essentially a bad idea across the board in this unprecedented and uncertain national (and global) economic tailspin.  My advice if you happen to have a job and money to invest: invest in land, metals, or follow the spending of alternative energy stimulus funds carefully and try to get on board with an early investment in a wind or solar farm company.  Otherwise, you might want to (or eventually have no choice but to…) invest in a fishing rod and reel or a rifle.

In many ways it’s an exciting time.  The end of peak oil coupled with ecomonic catastrophe appears to be reducing automobile emissions, granted that financial oppression is happening at the same time.  Yet the American ‘way of life’, or the ‘American Dream’, is completely out of balance with it’s environment- completely unsustainable, and needs to be reinvented.  The carbon footprint of the textbook American Dream is grotesque and nauseating…somewhere near the birth of the American Dream, near the birth of our nation’s Industrial Revolution, the corporation quickly had it’s way with the heavily marketed image that is the American Dream.  That was the acceleration of the race for more, the establishment of the go for the Full Meal Deal or go for broke economic, and hence life, agenda.

Anyway, it could be worse for your unemployed, bankrupted ass.  At least you’re in Alaska- it’s a good time to remember you don’t have to eat that New Jersey-made hamburger bun full of cattle (so engineered and transported that that 1/4 pound burger might as well be 5 gallons of oil).  Also, go out and enjoy your backyard that you neglected when you were prisoner in your office- your renewed passion for your land might get contagious and you might not advocate for the wholesale whoring of the state like it’s government….

Israel’s Actions Are Irrational, No Matter How Much U.S. Politicians Try to Cast Them As Normal

by Wallace Shawn, The Nation

It is not rational to think that the Palestinians will be terrorized by force, starvation or slaughter into a docile acceptance of the occupation.

Jews, historically, have been irrationally feared, hated and killed. Given that background, it’s not surprising that the irrationality which surrounded them for so long, the fire of irrationality in which they were almost extinguished, has jumped across and taken hold of the soul of many Jews and indeed dominates the thinking of today’s Israeli leaders and their American supporters.

Recent history shows that the Jews, as a people, have found few friends who are honest and true. During World War II, when Hitler’s anti-Semitism was responsible for the murdering of the millions of Jews, the world and the United States expressed their own anti-Semitism by refusing to house and welcome the tortured race, preferring instead to let it be exterminated if need be. After the war, the world felt it owed the Jews something — but then showed its lack of true regard for the tormented group by “giving” them a piece of land populated and surrounded by another people — an act of European imperialism carried out exactly at the moment when non-European peoples all over the world were finally concluding that European imperialism was completely unacceptable and had to be resisted. And now we have the spectacle of American politicians encouraging and financing Israeli policies which will ultimately lead to more disaster and destruction for Jews.

It is not rational to believe that the Palestinians in the occupied territories will be terrorized by force and violence, by cruelty, by starvation or by slaughter into a docile acceptance of the Israeli occupation. There is no evidence that that could possibly happen and mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Many right-wing Israelis and American Jews clearly believe that Jews have always had enemies and always will have enemies — and who can be shocked that certain Jews might think that? To these individuals, a Palestinian throwing stones at an Israeli soldier, even if his life has perhaps been destroyed by the Israeli occupation, is simply part of an eternal mob of anti-Semites, a mob made up principally of people to whom the Jews have done no harm at all, as they did no harm to Hitler. The logical consequence of this view of the world is that in the face of such massive and eternal opposition, Jews are morally justified in taking any measures they can think of to protect themselves. They are involved in one long eternal war, and a few hundred Palestinians killed today must be measured against many millions of Jews who were killed in the past. The agony the Israelis might inflict on a Palestinian family today must be seen in the perspective of Jewish families in agony all over the world in the past.

It is irrational for the Israeli leaders to imagine that the Palestinians will understand this particular point of view — will understand why Jews might find it appropriate, let us say, to retaliate for the death of one Jew by killing a hundred Palestinians. If a Palestinian killed a hundred Jews to retaliate for the killing of one Palestinian — for that matter, if a Thai killed a hundred Cambodians to retaliate for the killing of one Thai — which, from the point of view of the Israeli leaders, would of course be unjust, that would be racist, as if one Palestinian or one Thai were worth a hundred Israelis or a hundred Cambodians. But if a Jew does it, it’s not unjust and it’s not racist, because it’s part of an eternal struggle in which the Jews have lost and lost and lost — they’ve already lost more people than there are Palestinians. Well, it’s not surprising that certain Jews would feel this way, but no Palestinian will ever share that feeling or be willing to accept it. What the Palestinians see is an implacable and heartless enemy, one that considers itself un-bound by any rules or principles, an enemy that can’t be reasoned with but can only be feared, hated and, if possible, killed.

As poor and oppressed people around the world are very well aware of the events in the occupied territories, and as they strongly identify with the Palestinian struggle and point of view, the future of the Jews looks increasingly dim.

Consequently it is disgraceful and vile and no favor to the Jews for American politicians — for narrow, short-term political advantage, for narrow, short-term global-strategic reasons and, yes, also in expiation of the residual guilt they feel over what happened to the Jews in the past — to pander to the irrationality of the most irrational Jews.

Actions based on irrational premises inevitably fail in their purposes — they fail, and if the premises don’t change, then the actions are inevitably repeated, in forms which are more and more grotesque. It is unbearable to think that the new American administration would begin with more American dollars being poured into what is unjustifiable. It is also unbearable to think that among the first words we would hear from our new, clearly rational president would be preposterous sentences trying to persuade us that Israeli policies which seem to be appalling are actually quite normal and acceptable. Certainly nothing our new president could do would be of greater value to the world — and greater value to the Jews — than to abruptly end the sickeningly patronizing habit of supporting an irrationality which was born in tragedy and will end in more tragedy.

Living the Good Life on $5,000 a Year

 

By Kevin O’Connor, Rutland Herald.

Today’s global financial cloud got you feeling gray? Vermonter Jim Merkel sees a silver lining.

Back in 1989, the Long Island native was a weapons engineer who helped design a cutting-edge computer that could transmit military secrets, survive a nuclear blast and, a decade before the dawn of the BlackBerry, fit in the palm of his hand. Sitting at a hotel bar in Stockholm, Sweden, he was drinking in his accomplishment when a bulletin flashed on television.

An oil tanker had hit a reef half a world away in Alaska, spilling 11 million gallons of crude oil, contaminating 1,300 miles of coastline and killing more than 250,000 seabirds, otters, seals, bald eagles and whales. Video showed the culprit to be the Exxon Valdez. But peering into a mirror behind the bar, Merkel saw only himself.

He drove. He flew. He consumed goods produced with or propelled by fossil fuels.

“Of course, the entire industrialized world stood indicted beside me,” he recalls. “Our ‘need’ for ever-more mobility, ever-more progress, ever-more growth had led us straight to this disaster. But in that moment, all I knew was that I, personally, needed to step forward and own up to the damage.”

Returning home to the states, Merkel decided to simplify. He not only cleared away stuff (enough for 13 yard sales) but also tapped his engineering degree from New York’s Stony Brook University to calculate the economic and environmental savings. By doing so, he figured out how to live comfortably — and income-tax-free — on $5,000 a year.

To share his findings, Merkel penned a 2003 book, “Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth.” That begat his Web site, www.radicalsimplicity.org. And those begat his continuing string of more than 1,000 speeches, workshops and classes, including this fall’s “Moving Toward Sustainability” course at the Wilder campus of Community College of Vermont.

Most people monitoring the current fiscal crisis are fixated on what they could lose. Merkel is focused on what everyone could gain.

“This belt-tightening is good for us,” he says. “We’re swimming in a society that’s super consumptive. Right now is such a beautiful opportunity for us to become sustainable.”

He’s ready to show people how.

Oil and water

Growing up, Merkel was the sixth of nine children of a politically conservative, meat-and-potatoes trucker. Now 50, he lives by himself in a 14-by-16-foot cabin on a dirt road in Norwich, where he grows much of his mostly organic vegan diet.

Merkel didn’t make that leap in a day. Instead, he started with small steps.

Settling in California after the 1989 oil spill, he began by biking to work. Cutting his fuel consumption, he then joined the Sierra Club and gave money to other environmental nonprofits. But his biggest move came after he read an Amnesty International report about human-rights abuses in countries where he was marketing his military computer.

“There I was,” Merkel recalls in his book, “a jet-set military salesman who voted for Reagan by day, and a bleeding-heart pacifist, eco-veggie-head-hooligan by night.”

His two selves felt as separate as oil and water. One, seeking frugality and freedom, asked, “How much do I need?” The other, seeking long-term financial security, asked, “How much can I get?”

Merkel decided not only to quit the business of war but also to stop paying federal tax dollars that could fund government weapons. To do so, he aimed to live on an annual income less than the U.S. taxable level of $5,000.

For most Americans, that figure seems miniscule. But back when Merkel made his decision, it topped the worldwide average income of $4,500. (Today that sum has risen to almost $8,000, according to the United Nations. Even so, 3.6 billion people, or 60 percent of humanity, live on less than $520 a year.)

Seeking ways to cut costs, Merkel turned to the best-selling book “Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence” by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. It asks readers to add up their cash assets, estimate the value of their possessions and then keep track of every penny they spend to see whether their purchases equate with their personal ideals.

“I knew how to run numbers on big business deals,” Merkel says. “I started to run the numbers on my life.”

‘I had a lot of toys’

Two decades ago, Merkel was living in a four-bedroom house spilling with stuff. To simplify, he sold almost everything. Out went his motorcycle, his pickup truck, his antique car, his speedboat.

“I had a lot of toys. And other things — you need a leather jacket to ride the motorcycle. And tools — when I felt empty, I would buy more tools.”

Merkel cleared enough space to rent out three spare rooms, helping him cut his monthly bills from more than $1,000 to about $200. Four years later, he sold the house, banked the money and toured North America, Europe and Asia — he has traveled more than 17,000 miles by bike — to study how different communities and cultures are working toward economic and environmental sustainability.

In 1990, for example, Merkel visited Arizona to help distribute humanitarian aid to 300 Navajo families. He listened as an elder woman told how the government wanted to relocate her tribe so it could mine for an estimated $100 billion in coal.

“What can I do to help?” he asked.

“Go back to your people and tell them to live simply,” he recalls her saying. “Then they wouldn’t be out here digging up Mother Earth for coal and uranium.”

Three years later, Merkel went to Kerala, India, a state of 30 million people who are educated and healthy though they earn 60 times less than the average American income. He saw how citizens harvested coconuts for meat and milk, used husks to fuel fires and wove fronds into hut walls, roofs and twine.

“There are no clear-cuts, no factories, no fossil fuels, no insurance and no marketing,” he recalls. “Fuel, food, shelter, fishing nets, ropes — and they never killed the tree!”

In comparison, Merkel read the book “Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth” by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees and discovered that the average American’s material consumption, calculated by the amount of land required for harvesting and waste disposal, equals 24 acres.

Can this change? Merkel founded the nonprofit Global Living Project in 1995 and figured out ways to reduce his ecological footprint to as low as 3 acres (below a person from China and above a person from India). He then shared his solutions in “Radical Simplicity,” a 288-page book from New Society Publishers now in its third printing.

Merkel considers himself a better mathematician than a writer. But his book has garnered praise (and its foreword) from “Your Money or Your Life” coauthor Vicki Robin. Progressive historian Howard Zinn, for his part, calls it “the most persuasive argument I have yet seen for all of us to radically change the way we live day-to-day.”

‘It’s not a hardship’

So what’s Merkel’s solution?

“The easiest is simply to take less.”

He also suggests “sharing” housing and transportation (”Share with another person and halve your impact; with four people, quarter the impact”) and “caring” for what you have, be it properly maintaining household items or supporting communities by producing and purchasing goods locally.

Farm stands and mom-and-pop stores are close, but aren’t supermarket prices cheaper?

“What you don’t pay over the counter you pay in taxes, dirty air, dead animals, polluted water, clear-cut forests, sweatshops and strip-mined lands,” Merkel writes in his book. “Small-scale bioregional producers, although their products might use less energy and materials and create less waste, don’t get big tax breaks and bailouts or discounted access to resources because they wield less political influence.”

In 2001, Merkel moved to East Corinth to help maintain 27 acres owned by The Good Life Center, curators of former Vermont homesteaders Scott and Helen Nearing’s property in Harborside, Maine. Four years later, he became Dartmouth College’s first sustainability director and moved to his fixer-upper cabin in Norwich so he could bike seven miles to the New Hampshire campus.

Pedaling aside, Merkel was paid to walk his talk. But the paycheck unexpectedly tripped him up. Earning more money than he had since leaving the military, Merkel almost doubled his annual spending to as much as $10,000. And so after two years on the job, he quit. He’s working his way back to living on $5,000, which he reaps from part-time teaching, speeches and investment interest.

Merkel may sound pay-as-you-go old-fashioned, but he plugs into modern conveniences like the Internet.

“I have bills like everyone else. I’m just very conservative with things.”

His monthly electric bill, for example, is “$9 and change” because he limits his use of lights and appliances. He fuels his 1992 Honda Civic (averaging 45 miles per gallon) only when he can’t bike. He can’t control his property taxes, but he can plant an eighth of an acre with summer fruit and salad fixings and winter root-cellar and canning staples including beets, cabbage, carrots, onions, potatoes and squash.

And, if necessary, he’s willing to throw in the kitchen sink.

“You might wash dishes with wood ash as I did at Gandhi’s ashram in India.”

Seems like work? It doesn’t have to.

“It’s not a hardship — it’s the frame of consciousness I put myself into.” One example: “Say you are growing tired of weeding the garden. Many of the common garden weeds are edible and nutritious.”

Coffee with that?

Most of Merkel’s choices are calculated. Consider whether he should eat meat. He tapped a mathematical formula to determine that, because gardening consumes less land and resources than raising animals, a soybean-based tofu burger impacts the environment four times less than a chicken burger and 14 times less than a beef burger.

Merkel has enjoyed boiling maple sap into sugar. Then he discovered he had to burn nearly three cords of wood to make 16 gallons of syrup, “so I got a beehive.”

Sending an e-mail requires a few seconds of electricity, while mailing a letter consumes a tree and truck fuel. But when the engineer weighed all the metal and plastic in his computer, he discovered an electronic message is three times as ecologically damaging as a letter.

That said, simplicity doesn’t have to be complicated. Merkel has a shortlist of synonyms for “Earth-efficient”: simple, safe, local, low cost, readily available, recycled. He has followed them for almost two decades, even as most Americans sought shelter in mortgages and credit cards.

Then the world’s economy tanked this fall on a reef of bad debt.

“Every year this gets more pertinent,” he says, “especially with this current economic adjustment.”

Virginia’s Longwood University has begun to assign Merkel’s book annually to its more than 1,000 incoming freshmen. The author, speaking there recently, brought his own coffee mug to save a disposable cup. Then a student asked how the man who wrote about the dangers of coffee-plantation deforestation and “all the fuels needed to harvest, process, ship, roast, deliver, grind and brew the beans” could swallow the end product?

“My take is not to micromanage everyone, to say ‘good’ or ‘bad,’” Merkel says.

Instead, he hopes people will think about each individual choice that, in combination with others, best balance what one wants with what one needs.

“For one person, the motivation may be saved money; for another, saved Earth; for another, more free time; for still another, creating conditions for world peace.”

And for all, Merkel hopes simplicity will bring the same payoff: peace of mind.

2008 The Rutland Herald

Root for the economy to fail….if you care about the environment

As a friend recently reminded me, a prospering American economy means that our environment is suffering.  Although this truth doesn’t seem to be a global one, the US has spent a long time making this the case here.  At the heart of the problem is our complete reliance on an oil infrastructure.  When our economy is thriving, consumer spending is high and people are filling our roads with their horribly inefficient vehicles.  The recent plunge in the ‘economy’ and the subsequent high prices of gasoline at the pump reduced consumer spending and reduced the country’s inefficient transportation circus.  Thus, a reduction in emmisions and a slight breath of relief from our natural world.

No, I’m far from a geriatric CEO on the receiving end of this downpour of money falling from the sky.  I’m a middle-aged American with little investments, like the vast majority of the country, and so none of this money giveaway (i.e. The Greatest Theft in the History of the World) is helping me and most of you.

As a friend of the environment foremost, I’m very much rooting for the American economy to keep tanking, thereby slowing down our oil-centric machine.  For embracing and bathing in oil only for so very long, Detroit is largely responsible for this oil-centric economy and now, to add another insult to our injury, our federal government will undoubtedly eventually spread money all over the desks of American auto manufacturer CEOs.

Just say no to the whole nation’s media telling you there is a crisis that has to be dealt with by handing out another trillion to another of the nation’s wealthiest sector.  Root for Green Street to thrive, for the rules to be rewritten, for $10 gas, and for real change that can only happen when a ecologically hostile economy fails.

Anti-Palin Rally Draws Massive Crowd

Unfortunately, I found out about this Alaska Women Reject Palin rally in midtown Anchorage after the fact.  Here is an account of what happened, complete with some great pictures:

******************************************

[The] Alaska Women  Reject Palin rally was to be held
outside on the lawn in front of the Loussac Library in
midtown Anchorage.  Home made signs were encouraged, and
the idea was to make a statement that Sarah Palin does not
speak for all Alaska women, or men.  I had no idea what to
expect.

 

             The rally was organized by a small group of women, talking
over coffee.  It made me wonder what other things have
started with small groups of women talking over coffee.
It’s probably an impressive list.  These women hatched the
plan, printed up flyers, posted them around town, and sent
notices to local media outlets.  One of those media outlets
was KBYR radio, home of Eddie Burke, a long-time
uber-conservative Anchorage talk show host.  Turns out that
Eddie Burke not only announced the rally, but called the
people who planned to attend the rally “a bunch of socialist
baby-killing maggots,” and read the home phone numbers of
the organizers aloud over the air, urging listeners to call
and tell them what they thought.  The women, of course,
received some nasty, harassing and threatening messages.

 

             I felt a bit apprehensive.  I’d been disappointed before by
the turnout at other rallies.  Basically, in Anchorage, if
you can get 25 people to show up at an event, it’s a
success. So, I thought to myself, if we can actually get 100
people there that aren’t sent by Eddie Burke, we’ll be doing
good. A real statement will have been made.  I confess, I
still had a mental image of 15 demonstrators surrounded by
hundreds of menacing “socialist baby-killing maggot” haters.

 

             It’s a good thing I wasn’t tailgating when I saw the crowd
in front of the library or I would have ended up in
somebody’s trunk.  When I got there, about 20 minutes early,
the line of sign wavers stretched the full length of the
library grounds, along the edge of the road, 6 or 7 people
deep!  I could hardly find a place to park.  I nabbed one of
the last spots in the library lot, and as I got out of the
car and started walking, people seemed to join in from every
direction, carrying signs.

 

             Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half
years living in Anchorage.  The organizers had someone walk
the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over
1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators).
This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of
the state.  I was absolutely stunned.  The second most
amazing thing is how many people honked and gave the thumbs
up as they drove by.  And even those that didn’t honk looked
wide-eyed and awe-struck at the huge crowd that was growing
by the minute. This just doesn’t happen here.

 

             Then, the infamous Eddie Burke showed up.  He tried to talk
to the media, and was instantly surrounded by a group of 20
people who started shouting O-BA-MA so loud he couldn’t be
heard. Then passing cars started honking in a rhythmic
pattern of 3, like the Obama chant, while the crowd cheered,
hooted and waved their signs high.

 

             So, if you’ve been doing the math…  Yes.  The Alaska Women
Reject Palin rally was significantly bigger than Palin’s
rally that got all the national media coverage!  So take
heart, sit back, and enjoy the photo gallery.  Feel free to
spread the pictures around to anyone who needs to know that
Sarah Palin most definitely does not speak for all Alaskans.
The citizens of Alaska, who know her best, have things to
say.

 

              A bunch of pictures of that rally:

What to do with all that evil money?

Come September 12th, most Alaskans will have received their whopping $3,2xx payoff from the state, myself included.  This big PFD plus $1200 is coming earlier than the typical PFD.  This payday, the genius brainstorm of the Palin Administration, is apparently a part of the Alaska state energy policy.  The question is, when will the Alaska state government make the economic viability of Alaskans a bigger priority than the economic gains of the Alaska state governement oil-profiteering money machine?

This is supposed to deal with the ‘crisis’ of ‘high’ gas prices.  Yet this will do nothing to help solve the problem:  oil is endangered and will continue to go through the roof (in step, and highstepping, with Big Oil stock).  Let’s consider what other parts of the world pay for gas today: http://www.portfolio.com/interactive-features/2008/08/Gas-Prices-Around-the-World

Yes, gasoline is more expensive in most of the world, yet most of the world has socialized medicine.  Where is the outrage over our medical system (from someone other than Michael Moore)?  Alaska has much potential for solar and wind power, yet our sweetheart governor (and the most embarrassing VP candidate in the history of the galaxy [look for the Palin rant coming soon]) and administration might as well be the freaking board of directors of Exxon or BP because all state legislative moves point to what will raise more money for BIG OIL and mining industries.   

Here’s another look at gas prices from Wikipedia:

Average gasoline prices around the world

 

Country/Territory	US$/L	US$/gal	Local units	Date of price	Sources
Australia	1.37	5.19	AU$1.47/L	2008-08-04	[1]
Bahrain (Manama)	0.27	1.02	BHD 0.100/L (95 Octane) BHD 0.080/L (90 Octane)	2008-04-29	[2]
Belgium (Brussels)	2.48	9.39	€1.60/L	2008-06-20	[21][22][23]
Brazil (São Paulo)	1.59	6.02	R$2,59/L	2008-04-29	[citation needed]
Brunei	0.39	1.48	BR$0.53/L	2008-06-05	Brunei Press Sdn Bhd [3]
Canada	1.3070	4.95	CA$1.30700/L	2008-08-12	GasBuddy.com [4]
Chile	1.27	4.81	CLP 605/L	2008-05-29	[5]
China	0.806	3.05	RMB 6.05/L	2008-06-20	[6]
Colombia	1.07	4.05	$7400/G	2008-05-24
Croatia	1.95	7.38	HRK 9.35/L	2008-06-24	INA Unleaded 95 [7]
Cyprus	1.87	7.08	€1.16/L	2008-06-07	[8]
Denmark (Copenhagen)	2.46	9.31	DKK11.50/L	2008-05-28	[22]
Dominican Republic	1.51	5.72	RD$194.80	2008-05-27	[9]/diariolibre.com
Egypt (Cairo)	0.32	1.21		2008-05-05	[24][25]
Eritrea	2.53	9.58		2008-05-06	[26]
Estonia	1.79	6.78	EEK 18.10/L (95 Octane)	2008-06-20	[10]
Finland	2.36	8.93	€1.517/L	2008-05-28	[11]
France	2.13	8.06		2008-05-06	[26]
Germany	2.08	7.87	€1.46/L (Super unleaded 95 RON), €1.35/L (Diesel)	2008-09-05	[12]
Greece	1.95	7.38	€1.267/L	2008-06-30
Guatemala	1.95	7.38	$4.76/L	2008-05-12
Honduras	1.07	4.05	Lps. 81.00/G	2008-05-26
Hong Kong	2.20	8.33	HK$17.26/L (RON97 / V Power), HK$16.41/L (RON92 / Unleaded) HK$11.23 (Diesel)	2008-08-09	Shell Hong Kong/[13]
Hungary	1.985	7.51	HUF 315/L	2008-05-15
Iceland	2.25	8.52	ISK 171.20/L	2008-05-27	Olís/[14]
India (NOIDA)	1.36	5.15	INR 52.50/L	2008-06-18
Indonesia	0.65	2.46	IDR 6,000/L	2008-06-19	Pertamina/[15]
Iran	0.11	0.42	1000 rials/L up to 120L/month, 4000 rials/L for more	2008-06-27	Fars News Agency/[16]
Ireland	2.02	7.65	€1.30/L	2008-08-03	Pumps.ie -Ireland’s fuel price website
Israel	1.9	7.19	NIS 6.67/L	2008-08-01	Israel Min. of National Infrastructures (Hebrew)[17]
Italy	2.32	8.78	€1.49/L	2008-05-18	[22]
Japan	1.60	6.06	¥171.7/L	2008-06-16	The Oil Information Center Japan[18]
Kuwait (Kuwait City)	0.21	0.79	KWD 0.060/L (91 RON) KWD 0.065/L (95 RON) KWD 0.090/L (98 RON)	2006-09-06	[19]/Kuwait National Petroleum Company
Latvia	1.57	5.94	€1.07/L	2008-08-21	Lukoil
Luxembourg	2.02	7.65	€1.263/L	2008-08-04	[20]
Malaysia	0.73	2.76	MYR2.55/L (RON97), MYR2.40/L (RON92)	2008-08-23	New petrol prices in Malaysia
Mexico (Mexico City)	0.62	2.35	MX$6.80/L	2007-05-05	Banco de Información Económica/[21]
Moldova (Chisinau)	1.24	4.69	MDL 13.85/L	2008-06-20	[22]
Monaco	2.20	8.33		2008-05-06	[26]
Netherlands	2.67	10.11	€1.69/L (Euro 95) €1.76/L (Super 98)	2008-06-10	United Consumers [23]
New Zealand	1.62	6.13	NZ$2.069/L	2008-07-31	Pricewatch/fx.com on 2006-09-29
Nigeria (Lagos)	0.595	2.25	N70/l	2008-06-07	[24]
North Korea	1.19	4.50	267.96 KPW/l	(retrieved 2008-07-20)	[25], estimated
Norway (Oslo)	2.73	10.33	NOK 13.78/L	2008-06-25	Shell/[26]
Pakistan	1.22	4.62	Rs 86.66/L	2008-07-26	PSO/[27]
Peru (Lima)	1.609	6.09	PEN S/. 4.59/L (95 Octane) S/. 4.76/L (Super 98)	2008-05-27	PSO/[28]
Philippines (Cebu)	1.22	4.62	P 61.40/L	2008-06-02	Shell Philippines
Poland (Krakow)	2.06	7.80	PLN 4.45/L	2008-06-06	[29]
Portugal	2.42	9.16	€1.537/L (95 Octane) €1.677/L (98 Octane) €1.438 (Diesel)	2008-07-01	Galp official price MaisGasolina
Qatar (Doha)	0.22	0.83	QAR 0.75/L (97 Octane) QAR 0.67/L (90 Octane)	2007-09-17	[30] / The General Secretariat for Development Planning – State of Qatar
Romania (Bucharest)	1.78	6.74	RON 3.98/L	2008-07-31	[31]
Russia (Moscow)	1.033	3.91	RUR 27.80/L (98 Octane) RUR 25.47/L (95 Octane) RUR 24.44/L (92 Octane) RUR 21.38/L (80 Octane) RUR 25.23/L (Summer diesel)	2008-09-01	[27]
Saudi Arabia (Riyadh)	0.12	0.45	SAR 0.45/L (91 Octane) SAR 0.60/L (95 Octane)	2008-07-31	[28][24][29]
Sierra Leone	4.87	18.43	14400 Leones/L	2008-05-01	[32]
Singapore	1.82	6.89	S$2.479(VPower) S$2.360/L(98UL) S$2.286(95UL) S$2.253(92UL)	2008-07-04	Shell
Slovenia	1.92	7.27	€1.212/L	2008-07-19	Petrol
Sri Lanka	1.46	5.53	LKR157/L (90 Octane) and LKR170 (95 Octane)	2008-06-08	[30][31]
South Africa	1.47	5.56	R10.47/L	2008-05-27	SASOL [33]
South Korea	1.95	7.38	1,960 KRW/L	2008-06	2007 GTZ[34]
Spain (Madrid)	2.14	8.10	€1.36/L	2008-06-20	[35]
Sweden	2.30	8.71	SEK 13.74/L	2008-05-22	JET/
Switzerland (Zurich)	1.88	7.12	CHF 1.95/L	2008-05-28
Thailand	1.21	4.58	40.09 Baht/L	2008-06-08	[36]
Taiwan	1.05	3.97	34.6 TWD/L, 95 unleaded	2008-06-08	[37]
Trinidad and Tobago	0.48	1.82	$3TTD/L	2008-05-26
Turkey	2.68	10.14	YTL 3.44/L	2008-04-22	NTV/[38]
Turkmenistan	0.08	0.30	TMM 400/L	2006-11-25	Turkmenistan.ru/[39]
UAE	0.37	1.40	AED 6.25/Imperial gal (95 Octane) AED 6.75/Imperial gal (98 Octane)	2008-05-27	[40]/Bahrain Tribune
Ukraine	1.3833	5.24	UAH 6.7/L	2008-07-29
United Kingdom	2.29	8.67	£1.16/L	2008-08-03	petrolprices.com
United States	0.976	3.69	$3.69/gal	2008-08-22	[32]
Uruguay (Montevideo)	1.6	6.06	U$ 32/L	2008-01-12
Venezuela (Caracas)	0.03	0.11	Bs. 97; BsF. 0.097	2008-04-06	[41]
Vietnam	1.13	4.28	VND17,000/L	2008-08-27

 

So what should we do with all that money?  Take a road trip in the RV?  Buy a new snow machine?  My recommendations: 

-buy solar and/or wind generators for your home: the prices of such ‘home-sized’ generators continue to come down, while efficiency goes up (see Home Power magazine and other links on this page).  You’ll be the coolest one in your neighborhood and you may even be able to put power into your grid and make money in your locale…

-buy a bicycle and/or running shoes to commute to work:  If you don’t think this is practical? carpool, carpool, carpool.  Also explore the possibility of working 4 long days instead of 5 ‘typical’ work days, thereby eliminating one commuting day.

-move closer to where you work: the long commute makes as much sense as the city planning that didn’t happen in Anchorage and many other places.

-write our sweetheart governor and demand more funds be budgeted for the creation of alternative power generation in you area.

-sell your SUV or equivalent gas-guzzler and replace it with a bicycle, public transportation, or transportation that gets at least 30+ miles a gallon (see fueleconomy.gov link on the right).  when renting a car, rent a Toyota Prius or other hybrid vehicle – call the dealer, you can rent them!

-do any number of projects to upgrade  your home’s efficiency: improve insulation, insulation, insulation, reduce phantom power useage by buying more power strips (that you turn off…) or keeping appliances unplugged, lower your heat temperature and put on a sweater, etc., etc. (see some of the links to right for more ideas)