California Hits the Brakes on High-Speed Rail Fiasco

[hunter]

100. And you describe everything that is wrong with this world.

Economic "productivity" as we now define it is a direct measure of the damage we are doing to the earth's natural environment and our own human spirit.

Most of us are not lucky enough to have jobs that make the world a better place, or even enough to bother getting a passport for international travel. Most of us do not have the opportunity to wander, not even in our own imaginations. Our choices as individuals are severely limited by oppressive and ultimately unsustainable "free" market economies.

I'm a very fortunate child of this world. I was born in the U.S.A.. My parents are artists, neither especially successful in terms of selling their own art, but with skills they could apply to their day jobs. My dad's trade had a strong union. We could travel. My dad could even quit work for months, once more than a year, at and return right where he left off.

As a kid we lived in Europe for a year. We were living in Franco's Spain, but we had to leave in the middle of the night after my mom told a pompous and petty government official what she really thought of him. My dad couldn't sleep that evening, so just past midnight we stuffed our car with everything we could and left for France.

We were living as indigent Americans in a French public park because my dad's money was in Spain. This was before VISA cards and ATMs. The local French community was so disturbed by our presence they bought us gasoline for our car and ferry tickets to England. Barclay's Bank allowed my parents to open a checking account with a negative balance and Barclay's eventually recovered my dad's money from Spain.

It was a different world then. How did this story happen? My dad got some really, really, inexpensive tickets on a ship that was leaving New York for Europe to be refitted. We took the train from Los Angeles to New York, sleeping in our seats, eating mostly food we brought for the trip.

My own young adulthood was even more intense.

In this modern automated world our food, shelter, basic medicine, birth control, and electronic communications are cheap. Anything we choose to do beyond these things ought to be a matter of personal choice.

The neighbors I see picking strawberries in the fields near my home are subsidizing the very wealthy.

Fuck that shit.