Michael Moore On “Goodbye GM”

Michael Moore wrote an essay/letter on Monday, the day that General Motors officially declared bankruptcy and the American public became 60% owners of what could possibly be an obsolete car company.

Moore lives in Flint, Michigan, the heart of GM country and has a few really good ideas of what to do with it now. I couldn’t have written a better letter. I hope the President and the public reads it and takes it to heart.

Since we are 60% owners of the company, we do have some say in what the company produces now, correct?

So here we are at the deathbed of General Motors. The company’s body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with — dare I say it — joy. It is not the joy of revenge against a corporation that ruined my hometown and brought misery, divorce, alcoholism, homelessness, physical and mental debilitation, and drug addiction to the people I grew up with. Nor do I, obviously, claim any joy in knowing that 21,000 more GM workers will be told that they, too, are without a job.

But you and I and the rest of America now own a car company! I know, I know — who on earth wants to run a car company? Who among us wants $50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM? Let’s be clear about this: The only way to save GM is to kill GM. Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we’ve allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?

Thus, as GM is “reorganized” by the federal government and the bankruptcy court, here is the plan I am asking President Obama to implement for the good of the workers, the GM communities, and the nation as a whole. … read the whole letter and nine ideas moore has for GM on michaelmoore.com

Seed Bombs

The house people can’t agree on what to do with the front yard. Their tastes in what a yard or garden looks like are completely different from each other. One wants a field of ever-blooming flowers and the other wants hardscaping and plants that don’t need to be taken care of.

Last fall the yard had been taken over by Bermuda grass from the neighbor’s yard and it was getting ugly. I decided to take it upon myself (and earn my keep) by diggining up the yard, putting down a layer of cardboard, and bringing in new compost/soil to lay over top of it. I figured it would be six months until the house people could figure out what to actually do with it, and that would be about the time the yard would be ready to be planted.

It’s been a little more than six months and the talks have stalled. So I decided to do a little bit of guerilla gardening and have been throwing random seeds into the yard. Granted, a lot of these will get carried away by critters and birds, but I thought if I threw enough of them in the yard, then in a few weeks, or a couple of months, there would be some pretty posies growing out there.

Then as I was walking around the neighborhood, I thought about all the people who don’t seem to care about their yards. Hmmm.Then I thought about the story of Johnny Appleseed ….

This morning I was perusing Huffington Post and found this link to a TreeHugger post on SeedBombs.  Which then led me to google to see if I could find a press release on SeedBombs. Which I didn’t find. But then I found a post over on How Stuff Works that included this vid from YouTube on how to make a seed bomb:

Which actually seems like a better idea than to just throw the seeds around like I’ve been doing.

I think gardening should become the national pastime. I think if people got into the beauty of it, they would see as more of a part of life, like cooking, or cleaning house, than a chore. Don’t you?

Certainly Not For People

Pollution is certainly not for people, another Keep America Beautiful PSA.

Keep America Beautiful