I’m continuing to work on the archives. The latest changes: 2005 and 2006 now have titles and appear in reverse chronological order. Also, the 1993 stuff from my Chronicle Features period is now online for the very first time.
It’s a period with interesting parallels to our own: a young conservative Democrat had just been elected with high expectations after a Bush had messed up the economy, which continued to suffer for several years before the dot-com boom caught fire.
TIME published its list of “Top 10 Editorial Cartoons of 2008” and it’s, well, fucking atrocious. So I’m sending this Letter to the Editor to TIME:
To the Editor:
Your list of the Top 10 Editorial Cartoons of 2008 is an insult to editorial cartoonists, many of whom are losing their jobs to the economic downturn in the newspaper industry. In 2008 hundreds of brilliant political cartoonists produced thousands of hard-hitting, thought-provoking and hilarious cartoons about everything from the flash in the pan that was Sarah Palin to the rise of Barack Obama, and all you could come up with was this phoned-in crap?
Never in American history have so many talented artists worked in so many diverse styles using as many approaches to produce as exciting editorial cartoonists. Yet never have the political cartoons appearing in print in mainstream print media have been so bland, inane, and just plain stupid. (The good stuff appears in alternative weeklies, family-owned dailies and, of course, online.) It’s a paradox, and it’s hurting our profession.
It’s one thing for lousy cartoons to appear in print somewhere. It’s downright appalling to anoint them the best work produced by a field in a given year. Heck, even among the artists you selected, they all did much better work than the pieces you picked. How would TIME like it if someone published a list of the Top 10 Newsmagazines of 2008—and it was just a list of blogs by 16-year-olds typing in their parents’ basements?
Do us a favor: If you can’t find a few clean and sober editors to take the time to sort through the year’s editorial cartoons, don’t bother.
Very truly yours,
Ted Rall
President
Association of American Editorial Cartoonists
Stop Speculators From Ruining Strong Companies
The Crash of ’08 offers the incoming Obama Administration a rare chance to rein in the excesses of our economic system. I can think of few better places to start than banning leveraged buyouts.
Leveraged buyouts (LBOs) are Wall Street’s solution to American capitalism’s dirtiest secret and biggest problem: no one has any money. Really. Working as an investment banker during the 1980s, I was repeatedly astonished when deals would fall apart because would-be buyers of major corporations didn’t have enough cash on hand to buy a house in the Hamptons. Many of the wealthiest people in the world, it turned out, have zero or negative net worth. According to The New York Times, for example, one of Donald Trump’s biggest sources of income was his job hosting the TV show “The Apprentice.” Those buildings with his name on them? He leased his name to developers who liked his brand.
It’s true: the rich are different than you and me. But not because they’re rich. If most “wealthy” people ever had to settle up with their creditors, they’d be worth less than the average homeless Iraq War vet. What they do have—or, until recently, had—big lines of credit.
LBOs are a way for cash-poor “rich” people and corporations to buy companies they can’t really afford. First the would-be acquirer buys enough stock to get controlling interest in the targeted company. A bank lends him the rest of the purchase price, using the purchased company’s own assets as collateral. Overnight, a profitable company with a healthy balance sheet can find itself burdened with staggering debt—its own purchase price.
Now the corporate raider owns the company. But the company owes big payments to the bank. The raider has two options. He can use his management skills to make it more efficient and profitable. Or he can sell off pieces of the company. More often than not, “turn around” experts find that they’re not much smarter than the management they replaced and end up selling assets and cutting costs. For other acquirers, turn-arounds aren’t the point. They’re out to gut the joint from the start.
The results are the same in both scenarios. Each sale of a division and each round of layoffs reduces the already cash-starved acquired company’s chances of survival. The formerly profitable company is forced to file bankruptcy. Its employees lose their jobs. Because the law inexplicably lets corporations use retirement plans as collateral for loans, they often lose their pensions too. Suppliers are stiffed. Customers suffer higher costs due to less competition.
It’s bad news for most people—but not for everyone. The corporate raider sells off his equity stake in the company before the fiscal excrement encounter the fan, then pays himself and his friends millions in golden parachutes. The bank, which collected high interest payments as the company began its post-LBO decline, seizes and sells off what remains of the company’s assets.
Here’s another way to look at it: Let’s say you want to buy a car you can’t afford, like a Rolls Royce. You “buy” the fancy hand-crafted auto using the car itself as collateral. When the payments come due, you sell the engine, tires, carburetor, CD player and other parts to a chop shop. You pocket the cash and default on your loan. This, of course, is illegal—yet in this scenario all that’s been lost is a nice car.
LBOs inflict much greater damage. They transform profitable companies into bankrupt ones, throw thousands of people out of work, stifle competition and deprive government of the tax revenues it needs in order to build schools, maintain roads, and drop bombs on Muslims. Yet LBOs are legal.
Generally speaking, LBOs succeed under two conditions: an expanding economy and a management team able to radically increase profits in a short time. These conditions are rarely present at the same time, and almost never for very long.
Signs that the LBO model was untenable began appearing 20 years ago, when two of corporate raider Robert Campeau’s victims, the Revco drugstore chain and Federated Department Stores, went bankrupt. Federated, which employed thousands of American workers before Campeau came along, had been saddled with LBO debt equal to 97 percent of its net assets.
LBO transactions have since led to scores of bankruptcies and hundreds of thousands of Americans losing their jobs—all to line the pockets of a tiny cabal of greedy speculators. The LBO goons’ latest victims, ironically enough, are the media giants lionized by their own business reporters in breathless puff pieces.
In 2007 Sam Zell, described as “a 65-year-old billionaire and president of Chicago-based Equity Group Investments,” bought the Tribune Company for $8.23 billion. Tribune was one of the largest media chains in the United States, owning The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun, 20 television stations, and other properties—as well as the Chicago Cubs baseball team. Like most “billionaires,” Zell didn’t have any money. Like most takeover artists, he didn’t know anything about the multibillion-dollar business he wanted to run.
Zell invested a mere $315 million (3.6 percent of the purchase price) and stuck Tribune with $8.4 billion in debt, promising to make early debt payments by selling the Cubs and turning around the company’s flagging newspapers.
Everyone saw trouble ahead. “The leveraged buyout is making Tribune one of the riskiest newspaper companies, according to John Puchalla, a media analyst at Moody’s Investors Service in New York,” reported the Bloomberg business wire service at the time. Now, a year later, Tribune has filed Chapter 11. Layoffs are coming fast and furious. After just 18 months under Zell’s careful stewardship, Tribune—formerly a profitable company—reports assets of $7.6 billion and debt of $13 billion.
“Factors beyond our control have created a perfect storm—a precipitous decline in revenue and a tough economy coupled with a credit crisis that makes it extremely difficult to support our debt,” Zell said, acknowledging the disaster.
Zell is right about the credit crisis. But it would have a lot easier for Tribune to weather the storm if he’d never come along.
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
Why Obama is Just Another Boomer
Barack Obama, people are saying, is the first Generation X president. Are they right? And if so–does it many any difference?
“The battle for the Democratic nomination in the U.S. presidential election,” reported Agence France Presse wire service nearly a year ago in January, “is as much about ‘Generation X’ wresting power from Baby Boomers as it is a battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton…Most significantly, analysts say, it is the first time someone from the so-called Generation X has run for the White House.”
A Gen X president is, or would be, a big deal. Xers’ major concerns–student loan debt, underemployment, age discrimination against the young, the environment–have never gotten much attention in the media or in mainstream politics. But is Obama Gen X?
Membership requirements for Gen X have long been fungible. Demographic purists say Generation X began with those born after 1964, when a sharply dropping birth rate marked the end of the postwar Baby Boom. Sociologists, who look to common cultural and economic reference points as generational signifiers, include everyone born from 1961 to 1976. If you grew up with LBJ, Nixon and Hendrix, you’re a Boomer. If your touchstones are Carter, Reagan and Molly Ringwald, you’re X.
Some analysts put Gen X as late as the 1981 birth year, but I side with Canadian author Douglas Coupland because, well, he wrote the book. When Coupland published “Generation X” in 1990, its subjects were twentysomethings. Do the math. That includes anyone born in the 1960s.
By any account, Obama’s birthdate–1961–barely admits him to Gen X. Yet Gen X won him the presidency. Sure, a higher proportion of Gen Y voters than Gen Xers supported Obama (66 to 52 percent). But twice as many Xers showed up at the polls. The One couldn’t have done it without the X factor.
Prominent Xers embraced Obama early in the process. “[Obama] attended an anti-apartheid rally in Southern California,” said “X Saves the World” author Jeff Gourdinier during the early primaries. “He writes about his doubts about the effectiveness of that form of protest…He is very honest about his skepticism. That is the Gen X sensibility.”
“Our time to lead has come,” gushed Elizabeth Blackney, a 35-year-old Republican blogger from Oregon. But she and the rest of my underemployed, underrecognized generation may have to wait. Now that Obama has our votes, he has a lot more love for Generation Y than for Generation X.
The Nation, the Bible of liberal Baby Boomers, is atypically smart on this point. “For Obama, who is 46, and his followers, Boomer politics clearly have to go,” writes Lakshmi Chaudhry of the 1980s and 1990s “culture wars,” which constantly rehashed Vietnam and other hoary so-last-century conflicts. “What is less obvious is whom Obama represents. He often speaks to the Millennials, recently telling cheering college kids in South Carolina, ‘It’s your generation’s turn.’ But rarely mentioned is Obama’s own generation, i.e., Generation X, the Lost Generation, whose name has been virtually erased from the national conversation.”
In my 1998 Generation X manifesto “Revenge of Latchkey Kids,” I called it “generational leapfrog.” Generational leapfrog is the tendency of the good things in American life–high-paying entry-level jobs, generationally directed social programs, free love–to jump from the Baby Boomers born between ’46 and ’64 to their children, Millennial/Generation Y types born after ’77.
It happened in editorial cartooning, my chosen profession. The vast majority of political cartoonists working at daily newspapers, those who get decent salaries and actual benefits, are Boomers in their 50s and 60s. If and when a new job opens up, it goes to an artist fresh out of college–a Gen Yer. Thirtysomething and fortysomething Gen Xers need not apply.
Demographers William Howe and Neil Strauss predicted this phenomenon in their 1991 book “Generations.” They argued that Xers belong to a “reactive” generation doomed to be ignored by everyone that matters–Hollywood, Madison Avenue and Washington. Like prior “reactive” generations (the last one was Hemingway’s “Lost Generation”), they will probably not see one of their own become president.
Howe and Strauss note that members of a generation can exhibit cultural signifiers and other traits more closely related to another generation. As a self-identified Gen Xer (1963/age 45), I spent my college years attending concerts by late-period Blondie, the Dead Kennedys, Flipper and the Clash. Punk rock and New Wave defined my coming of age. Like most of my peers, I later got into post-punk and grunge bands like Nirvana. But many of my classmates were more into the Doors and Bob Dylan. Born too late to enjoy the Summer of Love, they nevertheless identified as Boomers.
By this measure, Obama is a Boomer. His favorite music? According to his Facebook page: “Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Johann Sebastian Bach (cello suites), and The Fugees.” Yech. His favorite movies? “Casablanca, Godfather I & II, Lawrence of Arabia and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Great films. I love them all. But a Gen Xer would have been more likely to namecheck “Repo Man” and “Slacker.”
Generation Xers who hope that one of their own is finally in a position to address their long ignored concerns had better believe this: Obama is paying attention to the young and the old. You in-between types, still paying off your college loans and facing discrimination in the workplace because of your age, will have to keep on keeping on the best as you can.
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
Today’s news contains two positive bits of news from the Obama transition team: first, he plans to ask Congress for a massive infrastructure construction program; second, General Shinseki will come out of forced retirement to head the VA.
Shinkseki certainly deserves vindication; he was one of the few Pentagon honchos to have the guts to tell Bush the truth about Iraq, that it would require as many as half a million troops to pacify the country. Rumsfeld forced him out for being right. Being right, however, is what matters–and Obama will need more people who were right in his cabinet. (Hillary, who was wrong over and over and over, on the other hand, should not have gotten the State job.) I’m glad to see him rehabilitated.
The infrastructure program is just what the doctor ordered–well, half of it, anyway. We need to put more money in homeowners’ pockets so they can keep their homes. Best way to do that: refinance all loans to a rock-bottom 2 or 3 percent fixed rate. Still, it’s a nice start.
Obama still has a long way to go before he loses his rep as a sellout. But this was a good day.
Some of y’all have been asking why I draw Barack Obama surrounded by Hello Kitty ephemera. Well, here’s the cartoon that started it all, back on May 3, 2007:
Hope this helps.
I’m working on creating archives for this site that will include all of my syndicated editorial cartoons dating back to 1991, when I became syndicated. It’s a huge task. There are more than 3,000 cartoons, of which some 1,000 need to be scanned in because they predate my use of Photoshop. Each cartoon must be correctly formatted, of course. And–this is the cool thing–they’re all going to be keyword searchable. But that means entering the keywords.
So far I have 1991 and half of 1992 uploaded, plus the years between 2003 and the present.
Anyway, I was going through some old stuff from 1992 and was amazed at all the stuff I found that applies in some way to what’s going on today. Among them were the following two:
In my capacity as president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, I repeatedly issued invitations to President-Elect Obama to deliver the keynote address at our 2009 annual convention in Seattle. Past speakers have included heads of state and the AAEC has often been invited to meet with previous US presidents.
Barack Obama, apparently, does not think we deserve his presence. In fact, he doesn’t think editorial cartoonists even deserve a personal rejection letter. Apparently, he doesn’t even know who the fuck we are–America’s preeminent and most widely-read satirists.
Check out this form rejection letter I received after my latest inquiry through Obama’s Transition Office website, Change.gov:
Dear Ted Rall,
Thank you for inviting President-elect Obama to your event.
The President-elect values each and every invitation, but due to his time constraints, he must decline the majority of invitations he receives. We have reviewed your invitation, and unfortunately, he will be unable to participate in your event.
Nevertheless, we hope that you will remain engaged in our emerging administration as you are the key individuals pushing our movement forward. As Barack said in announcing his candidacy, “[T]his campaign can’t only be about me. It must be about us – it must be about what we can do together. This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice – to push us forward when we’re doing right, and to let us know when we’re not.”
Thank you again for your interest and your understanding.
Sincerely,
The Obama-Biden Transition Project
Scheduling TeamPlease note that replies to this email will not be answered
In this case, I’m going to with “not.”
Just to be clear: If he’s busy next Fourth of July, that’s cool. The point is, the least the Obama “team” could have done was to call me or issue a personal letter or offer a different date.
Let’s hope he doesn’t treat foreign leaders this rudely.
Obama’s Center-Right Cabinet Foreshadows Center-Right Presidency
A bunch of Clinton- and Carter-era hacks. George W. Bush’s leftover defense secretary. Of the dozens of Obama’s top appointments announced to date, there’s only one liberal: David Bonior, who ran John Edwards’ primary campaign, as secretary of labor. Maybe.
Remember the Democratic primaries? Among the top three presidential contenders, Edwards was the liberal. Hillary Clinton, she of repeated votes for war against Afghanistan and Iraq (and Iran!), was to Edwards’ right. Obama, who also voted for war but didn’t commit to Clinton’s bigger healthcare plan, was even more conservative than she. “Mr. Obama,” David Sanger writes in The New York Times, “is planning to govern from the center-right of his party.”
If nothing else, I had guessed, the U. of Chicago egghead would appoint a team of the Best and Brightest. We’re getting the Rest and the Rightest.
Asked by a reporter how his center-right coalition of Republicans, pro-war Democrats and other assorted has-beens squares with a campaign marketing hope, change, and Soviet-inspired propaganda posters, Obama pledged to “combine experience with fresh thinking.”
“Understand where the vision for change comes from, first and foremost,” Obama said. “It comes from me. That’s my job, to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure then that my team is implementing [that vision].” Pretty words.
Obama’s argument–that his center-conservative cabinet will carry out radical change if he orders them to do so–is denied by recent history. The U.S. government, as micromanager Jimmy Carter learned, is too big for the president to manage on his own. And, as George W. Bush learned after 2000, the people you hire are more likely to change you than you are to change them.
As governor, Jacob Weisberg wrote in his book “The Bush Tragedy,” Bush was fondly remembered by Texas Democrats as a moderate Republican who crossed the aisle to get things done. But campaign manager Karl Rove “used his influence to steer Bush away from being the president he originally wanted to be–the kind of center-right consensus-builder he was as governor of Texas–and into a too-close alliance” with the right wing of the GOP.
Even more fateful was Bush’s choice of Dick Cheney to head his vice presidential search committee. Cheney chose himself (!), then hijacked the would-be “compassionate conservative”‘s presidency by packing it with “neoconservative ideologues, who combined hawkish American triumphalism with an obsession with Israel,” as Juan Cole put it in a memorable 2005 essay for Salon. By February 2001 Cheney had already ensured that the Bush Administration would focus on international affairs to the exclusion of everything else. He also made sure that his aggressive, Manichean worldview would prevail in cabinet discussions. “Cheney had 15 military and political advisors on foreign affairs, at a time when the president’s own National Security Council was being downsized,” marveled Cole.
The moderate guy who ran against “nation building” in 2000 never stood a chance against his own staff.
It’s possible that Obama has stronger force of will than Bush. But, so far in the 219-year history of electoral politics, there is no example of a president successfully enacting radical changes without likeminded lieutenants to carry them out. Will Obama be the first to change his cabinet’s spots? Probably not.
“The last Democratic administration we had was the Clinton Administration,” Obama said in his attempt to calm his liberal base, which is starting to get hip to the reality that Obama is about to betray them. “So it would be surprising if I selected a treasury secretary who had had no connection with the last Democratic administration, because that would mean that the person had no experience in Washington whatsoever.” Or maybe not. What about Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist and Times columnist who won the Nobel Prize this year? He’s progressive. As a bonus, he’s been right about everything for years.
“We want ideas from everybody,” Obama continued. But not from liberals. And not from the socialists John McCain had everyone stirred up about. Speaking of McCain, the right-wing Arizona senator is tickled pink: “I certainly applaud many of the appointments that President-Elect Obama has announced,” McCain said last week. “Senator Obama has nominated some people to his economic team that we can work with, that are well-respected.”
What Obama and McCain consider respectable might not pass muster with polite company. Obama’s economic advisor Lawrence Summers thinks women aren’t good at math or science, which bodes poorly for the quality of his own thinking. Marie Curie, call your office.
Former Bush intelligence official John Brennan was, until last week, Obama’s pick to head the CIA. ABC News reported: “Brennan had been a top aide to former CIA Director George Tenet during what critics of the Bush administration refer to as that agency’s descent into darkness post 9/11, and he had spoken in favor of various controversial counterterrorism strategies, including enhanced interrogation techniques and rendition–sending terror suspects to allies where torture is legal.” After Congressional liberals threatened to block his nomination, Obama crossed Bush’s torturer off the list.
Lefties who swooned on Election Night had might as well get used to the truth: Obama isn’t one of you. Never was. Never will be.
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
posted by Susan Stark
It will not be a happy holiday for the friends and relatives of Jdimytai Damour, who was trampled to death by shoppers at a Long Island Wal-Mart on Black Friday.
Unfortunately, this is what our culture has come to. People being sacrificed for the latest gadget while others in Haiti and Afghanistan wonder where their next meal will come from.
People bought the slogan of “Change” from Barack Obama, but the word “Change” was also the slogan of a one Bill Clinton back in 1992, and we didn’t get much change from him.
Ultimately, change comes from us, and us alone.
In this post, I’m going to list numerous ways we can change our our lives for the better, starting with our immediate surroundings. I did something similar on this blog soon after Earth Day, and it looks like I need to do it again. But this time, I’m going to add more information.
Let’s start by changing what and how we buy things:
1) Buy things that are USED, rather than new, as much as possible. For instance, the computer that I’m typing these words on is used. So is my TV, my fan, my lamp, my furniture, and many other objects in my room. Most of my clothing is used. To be fair, however, it is not always possible to buy used in all cases, but it’s worth a try.
2) When you have an item (or items) that you longer want or have use for, but can still be used by someone else, don’t throw it away. Sell it or give it to someone.
3) There is a website you can go to buy and sell used items. It’s called
http://www.craigslist.org/about/sites
At this site, there is also a “Free” column.
4) There’s another website that’s extremely useful in reducing waste:
At this site, you obtain or get rid of items for free.
5) If you have electronic appliances that are no longer working, you can recycle them:
http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/conserve/materials/ecycling/index.htm
You can also do a google search on recycling e-waste in your local area.
6) If buying something used doesn’t appeal to you, try to make sure that your consumption is Fair Trade. That is, that your obtained goods are environmentally friendly, with unionized or cooperative labor. I’m a hypocrite when it comes to this, because Fair Trade items are generally more expensive then items made in exploitive conditions. Which is why I go the used-item-route as much as possible. But for those of you who can afford it, there are these websites:
http://www.coopamerica.org/pubs/greenpages/
http://www.fairtradefederation.org/
7) In regards to Christmas shopping, everything that I mentioned above applies. Buy used gifts and/or Fair Trade gifts, and wrap them in recyclable paper (the comix section of newspapers makes great gift-wrapping). Buy a plastic Christmas tree (or even better, a used plastic Christmas tree) that you can use year after year. Same with Xmas decorations. And for godsake, don’t trample anyone to death. You don’t need that latest iPod, or whatever gadget Jdimytai Damour had to lose his life over.
8) A brilliant way to cut down on waste and and have fun at the same time is to go to a Really Really Free Market. If there is no such activity in your area, you can start one yourself. This is where you and others bring items that you don’t want anymore to a common space, and then take items out of that collection that one might want or need. It’s basically a big party dedicated to the concept of mutual gift-giving. Buying, selling, or bartering are forbidden at these events. It’s all gift-giving and gift-taking.
9) For the really adventurous, there is Dumpster Diving. Dumpster diving is rescuing what ends up in the garbage. You would be amazed how much other people throw things away. I have personally found many useful items, everything from stereos to bookshelves to bathtowels, in peoples’ trash.
Now we come to the section of Change Comes From Us dedicated to Reducing Energy Consumption And Saving Money On Your Energy Bill:
1) Make it a rule in your household that the last person leaving a room must turn off the lights before leaving.
2) Install night-lights in the hallways of your home so you don’t have to turn on the overhead lights. Night-lights use less energy.
3) Unplug all electrical appliances when they are not being directly used. Appliances use energy even when they aren’t on. The difference will show up on your electric bill, and you’ll be reducing your “carbon footprint”, that is, your oil, gas, and coal consumption.
4) Find out if there are any public transportation facilities (train or bus) where you live, and use them as much as possible. Even if you live out in the country, there is sometimes a county bus system you can use.
5) Start using a bicycle, scooter, or walking to anyplace nearby. You’ll keep in shape and save on gas.
6) If you have a gas-guzzling automobile, go online to see if you can’t get your car modified to use less gas per mile.
7) It is now wintertime, when we use a great deal of energy to heat our homes. Instead of jacking that thermostat up to kingdom come, dress in layers of clothing instead. I regularly dress in two layers of clothing during winter, minimum. I use more if it’s really cold. However, if you have an infant in your household, be careful when taking this advice.
8) When summertime comes around, use a fan instead of an air conditioner. Fans use a fraction of the energy that air conditioners use. Take cool showers instead of hot ones. And if you’re really hot, run your hair under cool water, then wring it out so that it’s merely damp. This should keep you cool for a couple of hours.
One last thing: While it seems a lot of effort to reduce energy consumption, you will, I repeat, will save money.
Now we come to the last section of Change Comes From Us. Presented here are miscellaneous things we can do to change things from the bottom up:
1) Do you by any chance have a lawn? If you do, turn it into a vegetable garden instead. It’s a better use of soil than simply growing grass.
2) Health care. Universal health care is pretty much a pipe dream here in the United States. No politician will touch it for fear of incurring the wrath of the health-industrial-complex (HMOs, drug companies, etc.). But you can get together with like-minded individuals and start or join what is called a Health Care Collective. That is, seeing what you can do to start a free clinic in your community, or finding health care professionals willing to provide free, reduced, or sliding-scale health care, or starting a community health insurance program. Here are some examples of this:
http://www.ithacahealth.org/
http://www.rockdovecollective.org/
http://www.cghc.org/
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=health+collective&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq
3) Free schooling. You can get together with like-minded individuals in your community and set up a Free School, which Wikipedia defines thusly: A free school, sometimes intentionally spelled free skool, is a decentralized network in which skills, information, and knowledge are shared without hierarchy or the institutional environment of formal schooling. The open structure of a free school is intended to encourage self-reliance, critical consciousness, and personal development.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school
4) See if you can set up a time-barter system in your community:
I don’t want this post to be too long, so I’ll stop here. Cut and paste this post and pass it on. It’s better than getting trampled to death.
Susan Stark
