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This article is somewhat complex, covering many interrelated issues: transportation, automobiles, racketeering, corruption, industrialization, urban design, sustainability, peak oil, climate change, exploitation, government, ecology and more.

I rode my bike today to get my business mail in my post office box. it was mostly filled with junk mail flyers for groceries and other domestic consumer goods from the local corporate supermarket and others. Since I shop mainly at the local Farmer's Market for healthy organic vegetables and fruits, I put all that consumeristic supermarket junk mail into the huge recycling bin in the post office, which was largely filled with the junk mail that other people had rejected. It's awful to see so much paper wasted on that kind of advertising by businesses such as Safeway. I feel bad for the post office workers that have to handle the millions of pieces of junk mail that never get read.

After I got out of the post office I held up 4-foot wide paper signs to the traffic that was going by. One of my signs said "transportation racket". Another said "impeach". Another said "USA: War Criminals" and another "pollution bomb".

The Transportation Racket

The transportation racket is the cartel of industries (automobiles/oil/asphalt/insurance/parking/etc.) involved in profiting off of people on a massive scale, using mass media and exploitative urban design to enslave people to a particular lifestyle.

Impeach and Prosecute War Criminals

Our government representatives must impeach "Vice President" Dick Cheney and George W. Bush for the very significant crimes they have committed against the people of the United States. We must end the corruption of government by corporate special interests. The Bush administration has tried to excuse themselves from the International Criminal Court, but of course this is like a mass murderer trying to excuse themself from prosecution and incarceration. The Bush administration abuses their 'power' and has billions of dollars available to corrupt others to support them in that. The Republican party is almost totally corrupted by the party-based allegiance to this corruption. See below for web links.

The War Criminals of the USA

Parts of the US government and related private corporations have been involved in war crimes in Iraq, destroying innocent civilian families, destroying civilian infrastructure, restricting journalists, looting oil, destabilizing communities, wasting huge amounts of human and energy resources on military 'solutions'. The corruption of values by the military 'solutions' is based partly on the corrupt use of money by the government and the greedy special interests that manipulate government. See http://usaspending.gov for an overview of the huge amounts of money wasted on this military-industrial complex.

The Slavery of the Automobile/Oil/Asphalt/Sprawl Lifestyle

There is a lot of traffic near the post office. Most cars have only one person and three empty seats -- this is a 75% waste of transportation capacity, fuel waste, and unnecessary pollution. No wonder industrialized society has an energy crisis, an environmental crisis, global warming, automobile air pollution, automobile noise pollution, and resource looting wars operated by criminal military organizations, both by government and private corporations. People have been brainwashed by the system into the private automobile lifestyle. Subsequently, everyone is left holding their own steering wheel, finding their own parking space, filling up their own gas tank, paying for their own automobile insurance, paying for their own automobile repairs, etc. This massive redundancy is high profitable for the automobile/oil/asphalt/sprawl industrial complex. Among other things, I see it as a form of automobile slavery. Because we are born into the automobile-dependent infrastructure, we take many things for granted. If you study other cultures from other times and places, and you study the massive environmental problems we have today, and you study the general social malaise and economic disparities and lack of deep support for the arts and education and health, you might want to find a way out of this robotic industrialized lifestyle.

Interactions on the Street

One woman came up to me and asked if I felt like I had courage to hold up the sign that said "transportation racket". I asked her if it was really that dangerous to hold up such a sign. If it was dangerous, then perhaps that is an indication of the corrupt state of the automobile/oil/asphalt industrial cartel that enslaves people to this lifestyle. Not only people in cars are puppets of this system. Pedestrians, auto repairmen, and soldiers and huge numbers of innocent civilians dying during oil looting operations in Iraq, and other places.

I was holding up the sign "transportation racket" and an elderly woman came up and said it felt it was unfair of "you people" to tell everyone to get out of their cars. She said it was easy for "you young bikers to say that." I am 48 years old and got rid of my car eight years ago. I told her that in no way did I want anyone to suffer. She drove away alone in her car after her trip to the post office, with three empty seats beside her in her station wagon. She was carrying no more than a pound of packages with her. Her car probably weighs about two tons. It's clear that there's a significant waste of our energy resources in trips like that. Perhaps the post office and it's customers could come up with more ways to eliminate more of these trips nationwide and help solve our energy/pollution crisis.

A group of three young musicians was walking down the street, a guitarist, a tambourine player and another person. They stopped in a cafe across the street and were looking at me with my sign "transportation racket". One of them came across and said "your home town is that way", implying that I should go home and leave their home town. I didn't say anything. A few moments later one of them was pointing a laser pointer at me and I yelled across the street that I would have them arrested and that they had no business using a laser pointer, especially pointing it at people. It's dangerous to point laser pointers at the eyes of people, causing temporary and/or permanent damage. They said they were not pointing it at me, but seriously folks, what business does a high-school kid have with a laser pointer on the street, pointing at people? This happened in Albany, California January 2, 2008, late afternoon, in front of the Albany Post Office.

A car of three or four young hoodlum-types in their visor caps rolled by and called out some unintelligible epithets. It's sad to see people wasting their lives in cars. I am an accomplished musician and would love to play music or work in an organic community garden with you, but if you don't have the time to learn music or garden or any other healthy, creative activity because you are still brainwashed or controlled by the automobile industry and bad urban design, it's your loss.

An older guy drove up in a sports car with his girlfriend said the whole system is corrupt and that one should vote for Ron Paul. I think sports cars are pseudo-status symbols, they still pollute, and that the election process has been corrupted in many ways. I much prefer global relocalization as a way out of our slavery to the industrial system.

Redesign Your City and Your Lifestyle

There is a new movement to redesign cities to eliminate the need for automobiles. The new edition of Ecocities by Richard Register outlines urban designs and actual projects worldwide that are moving in this direction. The web site is http://www.ecocitybuilders.org

Take the Bus, Ride a Bike

Several buses passed by on this main thoroughfare, largely empty. There's many easy opportunities to ride a bus. You don't have to hold the steering wheel, don't have to look for parking, don't have to add air and noise pollution. Riding a bike is wonderful: take the back streets for some clean air, get some exercise, enjoy the trees and flowers, you get a great view, it's quiet. Parking a bike is easy, although it would be even easier if there were more bike racks. Electric bikes would be a great way for the non-athletic to get around town, but it's still much to hard to get one. We should invest deeply in making clean transportation and better urban design available for everyone. Then we will have more time for the really good things in life: healthy food and arts and more.

Web links:

News:

http://www.commondreams.org/
http://www.truthout.org/
Understand the biased nature of advertising-based news web sites.

Government spending, military waste:

http://usaspending.gov

Information:

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
http://www.ipcc.ch/

Wikipedia : a VERY popular global community encyclopedia
http://wikipedia.org/
Wikipedia is so popular because it has no advertising. There is a lack of good information on many mainstream advertising-based news, business and government web sites.

The mission of Post Carbon Institute is to assist communities in the effort to Relocalize and adapt to an energy constrained world.
http://postcarbon.org

Impeachment for Government Crimes:

Supporting Documents for H Res 333 to Impeach Cheney
http://kucinich.house.gov/SpotlightIssues/documents.htm

Congressman Wexler: Call for Cheney Impeachment Hearings
http://www.wexlerwantshearings.com
The charges are too serious to ignore. There is credible evidence that the Vice President abused the power of his office, and not only brought us into an unneccesary war but violated the civil liberties and privacy of American citizens. It is the constitutional duty of Congress to hold impeachment hearings.

Congressman Jim McDermott: The Vice President Should Resign or Face Impeachment
http://www.house.gov/mcdermott/sp070628.shtml

Impeach Cheney Now!
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/cheney

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