Rootsie

36 dairy farms in the state of Vermont (pop. 500,000) have ceased operation since January due to the plummeting price of milk.

Dairy farmers from Maine to California have been committing suicide.

In the inner cities of this country, the fallout from the predatory lending of the big banks is that black people are moving out, white people are buying their former homes for a song, and houses are being torn down. My daughter who is a community worker for sustainability tells me it's a pretty mixed blessing when the reason there is all of a sudden a bunch of 'green space' opening up in her city is that black people are being disappeared out of their neighborhoods.

In her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Naomi Klein writes of the Friedmanite free market fundamentalists and how, whether it's a tsunami, a hurricane, or an often deliberately manufactured political or economic crisis, there is nothing like a disaster to advance corporatist interests. For them these times are like a dream come true, when they can achieve what they could only have dreamed of before.