For Brooklyn real-estate agent Maria Mackin, the obsession started five years ago, on a trip to Pennsylvania Amish country. She, her husband and three children - now 17, 13 and 11 - sat down for brunch at a local bed-and-breakfast, and suddenly the chef realized she'd run out of eggs. "She said, 'Oh goodness! I'll have to go out to the garden and get some more'," Mackin recalls. "She cooked them up and they were delicious." Mackin and her husband, Declan Walsh, looked at each other, and it didn't take long for the idea to register: Could we have chickens too? They finished their brunch and
Read moreWhile Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson performs a mysterious magic act in which he shows us what a deregulated bailout looks like, some of us are trying to imagine what President-elect Barack Obama can do to turn our country away from the disastrous and corrupt ways that have gotten us in this nice big mess.
This bailout is so lacking in oversight that almost half of the $700 billion disappeared with no explanation. The rest? Well, there's a new plan for that money, it seems. It also seems that what must be figured out are ways in which fresh directions can be profitable and
Read morePresident-elect Obama has promised to grow the economy from the bottom up. That would be a substantial improvement over growing the top at the expense of the Read more
Suppose you give me a million dollars with the instructions, "Invest this profitably, and I'll pay you well." I'm a sharp dresser -- why not? So I go out onto the street and hand out stacks of bills to random passers-by. Ten thousand dollars each. In return, each scribbles out an IOU for $20,000, payable in five years. I come back to you and say, "Look at these IOUs! I have generated a 20% annual return on your investment." You are very pleased, and pay me an enormous commission.
Now I've got a big stack of IOUs, so I use these "assets" as collateral to borrow even more money,
Read morePeople need to lose their jobs. It sounds crazy, but what if it's true?
In this time of mounting tensions and rude awakenings, it is fortunate we can stress compassion and positive ideas. Yet, foremost we must be warned about our present course as an unsustainable society. Sudden, disruptive change is generally good to avoid, but sometimes we need to make an abrupt and wrenching move to save ourselves.
Not being able to eat money is perhaps the best reason to prepare for the future hardening of economic and ecological reality. Whether we call our fate petrocollapse or
Read more(NaturalNews) We know that fatty processed foods aren't good for our schoolchildren, but getting more locally grown foods on the cafeteria menu can be difficult. The economic crisis may change that. Schools now have less money to spend while at the same time farmers find it increasingly expensive to transport their crops to distant markets. Connecting school lunch programs directly to local farms is good for everyone. Schools save money, farmers find nearby buyers and student health improves.
According to the "2008 School Lunch Report Card" developed by the Physicians
Bail out General Motors? The people who murdered our mass transit system?
First let them remake what they destroyed.
GM responded to the 1970s gas crisis by handing over the American market to energy-efficient Toyota and Honda.
GM met the rise of the hybrids with "light trucks."
GM built a small electric car, leased a pilot fleet to consumers who loved it, and then forcibly confiscated and trashed them all.
GM now wants to market a $40,000 electric Volt that looks like a cross between a Hummer and a Cadillac and will do nothing to meet the
Read moreThen again, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, "The future ain't what it used to be."
We also stand at the brink of worldwide ecological and civilizational collapse. We face a reckoning from the treacherous breach in our relationship with nature. We've been acting like a rock star Read more
BARCELONA, Spain - In increasingly green-conscious Europe, there are said to be only two kinds of mayors: those who have a bicycle-sharing program and those who want one.
Over the last several years, the programs have sprung up and taken off in dozens of cities, on a scale no one had thought possible and in places where bicycling had never been popular.
The sharing plans include not just Paris's Vélib', with its 20,000 bicycles, but also wildly popular programs with thousands of bicycles in major cities like Barcelona and Lyon, France. There are also programs in Pamplona,
Read moreFormer US vice president Al Gore said an Internet revolution carrying Barack Obama to the White House should now focus its power on stopping Earth's climate crisis.
The one-time presidential contender turned environmental champion told Web 2.0 Summit goers in San Francisco Friday that technology has provided tools to save the planet while creating jobs and stimulating the crippled economy.
"The young people who have been inspired by Barack Obama's campaign and the movement that powered Barack Obama's campaign want a purpose," Gore said.
"One of the reasons we were
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