Ahh, the headache, the nausea, the dry heaves of economic hangover. I hear everyone saying “why should the taxpayer bail out Wall Street?” I ask, why not the taxpayer.

Who else but the taxpayer is responsible for this mess? Back in 2003 we set the precedent by ceding Congress’ Constitutional authority to declare war. We have given Bush endless blank checks in the past- why stop now? Who else but the taxpayer gave the power of the purse to special interests- the Enrons, Haliburtons, Cargills, Monsantos, Bechtels and the like- or approved the tax cuts to rich folks, or tanked the dollar by rubber-stamping Republican irresponsibility in budgets since 2000?

It’s fun to listen to the speechifying on the House floor, as I’m doing right now. The claim that cutting Capital Gains Taxes to 0% is a responsible, free-market approach to solving the crisis that arises out of free-market approaches is, well, laughable. They also suggest an FDIC-style insurance scheme. How to fund it? The FDIC may well be massively over-leveraged, and functions on the idea that Confidence is supported by a 10% asset coverage of deposits. It’s probably no coincidence that they are called “confidence men.”

Our Constitution starts “We the People…” We authorize the state and federal governments and fund them. We bought the Reagan-Thatcher line and haven’t let go yet. Ultimate responsibility lays nowhere else but with us. You and I gave this sucker away- we should take the heat.

If its possible, lets for a moment forget that this megalomaniac of a president, his corrupt administration and the spineless Congress will soon pass a bill that shreds the Constitution.  Can we put aside the marriage of big government and big corporations exploiting and stealing from the U.S. population for a moment and talk about some REAL news?

That’s right… chickens!

There has been a lot of attention lately in this little city of ours in the past couple of weeks on the topic of backyard chicken flocks.  Starting off with an article in the local newspaper, followed by a popular radio show, followed by a few appearances at Farmers’ Markets, etc. by Rochester Chicken Club members, city chickens are in the spotlight in Rochester.  Whether propelled there on the wave of the “green living” trend, or just a genuine curiosity of the unusual, this author couldn’t be happier that folks in this city are talking chickens.

But the first question (followed by many others) that people have is simply:  Why chickens?

A short while ago, a local community activist, blogger, and fellow chicken club member wrote an articulate post on her blog HandCrafted Life which in many ways gets to the heart of the matter.  And rather than be redundant, here is Julie’s post “Why Chickens?”

I would like to add my thoughts though to this conversation, because despite the fact that its fun and crazy to talk about keeping chickens, there is something truly revolutionary about this phenomenon.  It is a fundamental, integral part of our culture’s understanding of the world that humans live above the ecological laws that govern life on this planet.  Keeping a backyard chicken flock undermines this suicidal worldview regardless of the extent that people realize it.

Yes, properly raised chickens provide us with a wholesome, nutritious and truly natural food source.  And having that food source come from one’s backyard is a beautiful enough reason to keep chickens.  But if one looks closer, there is something even deeper and more important than that fact.

Because there is not an ecosystem on the Earth that operates without animal influence.  And while having a monocrop lawn devoid of diversity, manicured to “perfection”, may be symbolic of so-called progress and the suburban ideal, it is also a symbol of our excessive waste and aversion to life.  Even conventional vegetable gardening practices, with their linear rows and chemical fertilizers, usually do not flow with the cycles of the natural world.

Enter chickens.  An early successional species that fits perfectly into their niche in a garden ecosystem, which often mimics an early successional landscape (meadow).  A simple ecological principle which triggers something as near magical as any other natural system.

All of a sudden you have an instant and constant source of fertilizer as manure recycles.  You have one more factor that greatly aids in keeping pests in balance.  They can till and keep grass short.  They’ll eat your leftovers.  By keeping the right amount of chickens for your family and land, you have stimulated a variety of cyclical, harmonious relationships that also provide a variety of lessons.

And lessons from nature are what our modern species needs right now a lot more than organic Pepsi and Palmolive Eco.

To have a backyard chicken flock is to withdraw support from an unsustainable food system.  It is taking one step closer to self-sufficiency.  It is embracing ecological diversity, productivity, and life itself.

But the most important reason to me is that when my children go to our backyard, their play space is not a dead “lawn”.  Instead it is living community where energy is recycled, food and entertainment are abundant, and a host of true and valuable lessons await.  A glimpse of hope of a new cultural paradigm that actually works as the rest of Nature does.

And if you get ahead of yourself by getting too many, and it gets too cumbersome or expensive to keep chickens, don’t worry.  I hear something about how the federal government now is in the business of bailing folks out.

Jerome a Paris has an interesting post over at The Oil Drum this morning, suggesting that the $700 Billion is not about propping up the banking sector per se, but is in fact about re-capitalizing the Fed, which is now over-extended due to previous ad hoc moves.

As horrifying as that sounds, it’s not nearly as bad as one of the comments to the story, which suggest that troops are being redeployed from Iraq to USA for duty in case of civil unrest. Is this really happening?

Greenerminds contributor Outback Brad features in this recent local article about urban chickening. I finally got to meet Brad and his family recently at the South Wedge Farmer’s Market. I saw the table for the chicken group and figured he must be nearby. Hat tip to David at Daily Planet.

My most recent trip to the Catskills revealed even more frenetic activity than was evident in June. This includes massive infrastructure, especially in the form of pipelines and right-of-way cuts over forested ridges for feeder branches. The new Millenium pipeline, which will run from Corning east then south and eventually to New Jersey is a mammoth 36″ natural gas replacement for a current 12″ line. That’s a 10-fold increase in capacity. Not one well has been drilled in New York State, yet the writing is on the wall.

© 2008 Russell Honicker

What does this sort of approaching resource extraction orgy have to do with the Third World? After all, as a spokesperson for the NYSDEC said, “this isn’t Wyoming; this is New York!” We are the new Third World. Having raped the rest of the world, time to start in earnest at home. Of course there’s a long history of this here: coal, railroads, oil, highways, farming etc.

The so-called economic growth we’ve been experiencing here in the North-and-West has been subsidized by resource extraction over the last 35 years in places like Ecuador, Zambia, Angola, Sudan, East Timor and the like. Murder, authoritarianism, theft, lies, and squalid urban poverty accompany each new “discovery.” Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calls this the “Resource Curse.” John Perkins, in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man calls it unofficial U.S. Policy. There was a recent news story about Indian farmers unceremoniously removed from their lands to make way for a new 900 acre Tata plant. This is our real economic engine.

While op-eds to the NYT place the blame for poverty on proponents of biofuels and opponents to Genetically Modified (GM) foods, and praises the efforts of our good friends at the World Bank, the reality is that our wealth has been, and is being stolen from distant parts of the world. We have been exporting poverty to the Third World for decades. While death squads are palatable or at least ignorable in some of these places, somehow the idea of mercenaries in Delaware and Broome Counties seems ridiculous. Nevertheless, residents report that Haliburton and Blackwater have arrived, along with military helicopters performing alarming seismic testing. Exporting poverty is no longer limited to other countries; we’re bringing it to the Catskills and Southern Tier.

Others have made this point before, but our agriculture is now more of a mining operation than anything else. We frack for natural gas to generate nitrogen fertilizer, applied in massive doses to sterile soil as anhydrous ammonia, most of which washes off into the Mississippi and then the Gulf of Mexico, spawning a “dead zone” (one of 150 worldwide) the size of Massachusetts. Phosphate fertilizer is mined in the Caribbean and in Canada.  Diesel and Gasoline comes from Canada, Venezuela, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, by way of Port Arthur and Beaumont. The irrigation water is thousands of years old, mined from the once-huge Ogalalla reservoir, which is being rapidly depleted. All that produces starchy corn and soy beans that then act as inputs to other industrial food production processes like livestock, vegetable oils, soft drinks, and yeah, biofuels. It’s hard to find any actual food in our food systems- that is food that comes from rain, soil and sunshine. Rather, it’s all predominantly the end product of “drill, baby, drill.”

Finally, let’s tie this all back to the current global financial crisis, which is immediately a crisis of real estate and foreclosures, a crisis of land. Naturally, it is a crisis of much more. Ultimately, it’s a crisis of dissociation of money power from reality. All the working business models involve slavery, theft, monopoly or addiction.

Okay, that’s pretty negative. In order to end on a positive, a huge Greenerminds Congratulations and Thank You to Maura Harrington, who stared down Royal Dutch Shell last week.

[UPDATE 15:30 EDT] The Guardian Weekly has another success story- native Peruvians protect the Amazon basin.

Finally, a major news outlet (sort of) is covering the environmental damage from hydraulic fracturing (”fracking”) for natural gas in shale deposits. The Christian Science Monitor covers the story at a relatively high level (hat tip TOD). Interesting how the API always says “there’s a concrete casing so the water is fine.” NYC seems to finally be waking up and have put a 1 mile buffer around the reservoirs they own in the Catskills. The rivers in the area of the Marcellus shale drain into Hudson, Delaware, and Ohio river systems and Chesapeake Bay watersheds.
I previously posted about what this means for New York here.

This is going to be a bit of a long post, so let me get quickly to the heart of my thesis. The idea I want to put forward and test is the idea that, from a resource use and allocation standpoint, every natural resource price and therefore every derived commodity price is wildly inaccurate or wrong.

This idea is supported by three arguments. First, as Karl Polanyi points out, natural resources (land) as a factor of production can only be priced as if it were a commodity, when in fact it is not a commodity. Second, costs and values associated with resource extraction are based on the idea of opportunity cost, that is the cost for the next best single use for the resource. Finally, both upstream and downstream costs are externalized and not reflected in the resource price.

Since natural resources such as fossil fuels, metals, water, timber and food drive much of the pricing in the economy, if their prices are wrong, then all prices everywhere are wrong.

The consequence of this basic error, if it is true, explains a number of phenomena, such as Matt Simmons’s assertion that even at $100 a barrel, crude oil is massively underpriced. But I will save that for a later post.

My purpose here is to float an idea and hold it up to see how resilient it is. I will admit that it is only partially formed and not well researched at this point.

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When are they going to start talking about this instead of pigs, dogs, lipstick, etc?