Joel Salatin: Will You Have Food to Eat Next Year?

The Spiritual Politician on Off the Grids

Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

Friday, December 21, 2007, 5 pm PST

This Week's Show

Guest: Joel Salatin

Food that costs less and solves your health problems AND builds a new world for all of us.

With the economy tanking and the weight of fear hanging over us, the future looks bleak. Right now many Americans are facing the reality of becoming homeless and hunger and malnutrition will most likely become a reality to Americans who thought that impossible for even the poorest among us.

You need to take action now.

Americans depend on the food they get from the grocery store more than ever before. The unpalatable fact is that food from the local, corporate grocery store is going up in price so rapidly that people who have not shopped for a while are having sticker shock. The price you pay is only one issue, however. That food, and how it is produced, is also causing many of your health problems.

The grocery store food has changed since it came from local farms. The advent of factory farming converted the food we eat into the profits of corporations. Looked at from the viewpoint of a corporation, who have only one goal, to make money for themselves, each aspect of production becomes an issue of minimizing their costs and maximizing their profits. That hits you in ways you cannot imagine. Until now. You need to know so you can make an informed decision about what is best for your family and yourself.

We are going to look at what you are buying and what it is really costing you and show you ways to rebuild the economy while you rebuild your health.

Factory farms produce food that is designed to keep for long periods. Therefore factory growers identified varieties of plants that can be harvested green and ripen later. Monsanto has genetically engineered many of the foods used by factory growers to augment their profits and allow them to own what was once viewed as the property of God. Monsanto wants to own the DNA of the food you eat, making the seeds you buy sterile. They have taken steps in court and law to give them ownership through the twisted ideas of privatization, which is really an ongoing corporatization of everything we need to live.

Monsanto leaves no leaf unmolested in its quest for profits as this writer shows. “Monsanto scouts out farmers who it feels have unlawfully planted patented seeds, or who have saved seeds from one generation to the next, and collects damages by threatening legal action (through either infringement or breach of contract charges). The company claims to pursue as many as 500 infringement cases every year. But no farmer can control the wind, which indiscriminately cross-pollinates crops without regard for their genetic makeup. And some farmers, like Schmeiser, claim that Monsanto strong-arms innocent farmers who never wanted to grow GM crops to begin with.”

The seeds sold by Monsanto are not designed for your health. Corporations are not held accountable for the long range impact of what they sell. Factory food has been described as actually growing hydroponically, in soil that has none of the microminerals or organic content that the plants can use to ensure their own health – and yours. Pesticides used to diminish the impact of insects that are drawn to unhealthy plants like wolves are drawn to the diseased deer in a herd and killed through the use of pesticides that remains on the plant and becomes part of your dinner.

What is not healthy cannot nourish you.

Today the residue of such pesticides are everywhere and accumulating in the milk suckled by babies from their mother's breast. Such pollutants are killing us, starting before we are born.

Factory farming, plants and animals, are inherently unhealthy because of these kinds of practices designed to burnish that corporate bottom line.

So you need to know that a revolution is going on in America today. All across the country people who have taken a hard look at the world corporations are creating have said no and are changing how they, and those around them, eat.

You can join that revolution by learning how to grow your own and eat locally. On our show this Friday we will hear from one of the people who are leading the revolution back to locally produced food, Joel Salatin of the three generation Polyface Farm.

“IN 1961, William and Lucille Salatin moved their young family to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, purchasing the most worn-out, eroded, abused farm in the area near Staunton. Using nature as a pattern, they and their children began the healing and innovation that now supports three generations.

Disregarding conventional wisdom, the Salatins planted trees, built huge compost piles, dug ponds, moved cows daily with portable electric fencing, and invented portable sheltering systems to produce all their animals on perennial prairie polycultures.

Today the farm arguably represents America’s premier non-industrial food production oasis. Believing that the Creator’s design is still the best pattern for the biological world, the Salatin family invites like-minded folks to join in the farm’s mission: to develop emotionally, economically, environmentally enhancing agricultural enterprises and facilitate their duplication throughout the world.

The Salatins continue to refine their models to push environmentally-friendly farming practices toward new levels of expertise.”

The Food Revolt is happening across the country. People who life in large, metropolitan areas are also finding the means to eat local contracting for food with farms not so far away. Local Harvesting, decent respect for the animals we eat, knowing where your meals originate, are becoming part of the direction for Americans who will survive the meltdown just starting.
And the food will be better than any meal you can remember because your body does know what is good for it. We need to remember that while the change over is scary and difficult that challenge is insignificant when compared to the benefits we will all of us enjoy.

You can hear from Joel Salatin, the author of “Everything I want to do it illegal,” this Friday at 5pm on Off the Grids, formerly The Spiritual Politician, the radio show that shows you how to climb out of the meat grinder the Corporations designed to eat you alive. The show is hosted by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster.

Get off the Grids

Get off all the grids. This is not the vision our founders had for America. What we see today is a fascist state biggest than anyone could have imagined possible.

There are solutions, and those solutions take us back to the foundational values that forged the vision that is America. Because America is not our government and not land or even the people. It is a destination on the horizon that beckons us to find connection with each other through myriad acts of good will.

There are solutions to each of these problems because while they were busy picking our pockets the world was changing. The promise of connection is being fulfilled; transparency in all things is a precondition to the connections now becoming obvious. America will not only survive, it will become the model that will remake the world.

Get started.

Off the Grids

Most of us are scared. We know that the economy is out of control, the dollar is on a downward spiral that will take with it our pensions and hopes for prosperity and security. America is facing real problems – but there are solutions and those solutions can take us to a place that is much better than you imagine.

The problems above all originate in Grid Points that we have been forced onto through strategies carefully orchestrated by corporations, such as petroleum companies and power companies working with and through government. In effect, we have paid to forge our own shackles and then lock them in place. Do not think for a moment that those who are profiting did not understand where the policies we were sold over the last many years would take us.

It was power companies and government that decided that your electric company was a quasi-governmental agency without liability for anything they do. That is why when the electric company causes fires, burns out motors, or leaves you without power, it is not liable. But they are quick to turn off your power. Today most Americans live only months, or days from disaster. That must change and those changes hinge on understanding how we got here and how to move forward into a better world. It can happen and it will.

You can get off the grids and back to real security and a freedom that is true and not illusion. Endless indulgence was always an illusion. No matter what those in power said the free ride had to end, and it has.

America was seduced into believing that consumption and emotional disconnection is freedom. It isn't and it never was. Real freedom starts with responsibility and community, helping others and standing tall in the knowledge that your honor is intact because you have done right by others and yourself. That is something people like George Bush can never feel because their sense of power comes from deceit and generations of violence visited on all of us. George Bush would be funny if he weren't so dangerous. This year consider buying a Christmas card that sends a message that makes you laugh and speaks real real peace. Doing so supports our work. Also, please think about sponsoring our work or becoming an advertiser.

On Off the Grids, the radio program every week hosted by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, the Spiritual Politician, we talk about the grids that bind us for the profit of corporations and how to step off to freedom.

Join us to begin the journey to freedom and community as we find out how others across the country are solving the problems. Live Locally and in Community with others.

About being a Spiritual Politician

Bringing government into alignment with the Lessons of Jesus:

The focus of our show is how to bring government into alignment with truth of our spiritual nature. So America started with the idea we are all, inherently free. We are free to choose, free to live, to breath, and to live our lives as we see fit. Government does not own us; government is just a contractor, providing service.

That framework is in alignment with the spiritual truth that each of us connects to God directly, needing no agency as an intermediary. To be free is to be free in the spirit and so in the flesh that temporarily holds the spirit.

When Thomas Jefferson said we were all possessed of inherent rights, existing before government he was extending a spiritual truth into a civic form. It is that Mission Statement from the Declaration of Independence we need to keep in mind.

Because we are free and reject, as did Christ, the use of deceit, manipulation or violence we need to be conscious about our relationships with others and find ways to grow into the sense of connection and community that makes us One in Him.

This is especially true for Christians but it is true for everyone else as well.

Nearly every major spiritual viewpoint enunciates the idea that we are connected to each other and should be good to each other. Christians just have an even more exacting mission. Christians are to love every one, treating them as they would Jesus.

Jesus was very clear about how we were to treat others. He did not say that it was alright to be abusive, deceitful, and violent if we used government as our tool and agent. There was no exception, He wanted all of our hearts, minds and souls. Christ did not lay out any plan of government, but left it to the conscience of the individual, the same way He connects to each of us.

We are Americans but we are also members of a human family that connects us to something truly wonderful and immense.

So our job here at the Spiritual Politician is to look at Government as a human tool we use every day. We need to consider if government is working in a way that speaks that common understanding about our connections to each other and, if it is not, we need to change it.

Americans have had many successes over the last 231 years since our founding and, learning from both mistakes and successes we can consider that question. So here at the Spiritual Politician we look at the truth behind of rhetoric.

Given what is going on today in Government what we may decide to do it reboot the whole system.

To provide the examples of what has gone right and what has gone very wrong we here at the Spiritual Politician have put together several different kinds of segments you will hear on our show from time to time.

To Contact us e-mail: the.melinda@yahoo.com

Founder and president of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation

Books by Melinda: Links to Melinda's sites:

How the NeoCons Stole Freedom

Shards of Verse Melinda's Poetry

Seventh Voice

Greed: The NeoConning of America

William Reynolds - The Mortgage Mafia

The Spiritual Politician on Off the Grids

Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

Friday, December 7, 2007, 5 pm PST

This Week's Show

Guest: William Reynolds

“ I spent 33 years in the Marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for Capitalism.”

• from War is a Racket by Brig. Gen. Smedley Butler

“All of them are racketeers, but the corporate kinds are nastier.”

William B. Reynolds, Investigator

Guido sold the best pizza in Brooklyn. He had learned how from his Mama, a woman who understood why fresh matters in the Old Country. Guido's Pizza was therefore the busiest pizza parlor in Brooklyn, with customers standing in line for a seat. But Guido was ambitious; he wanted to expand into the now vacant shop next door so he could serve not only pizza but his Mama's special Marinara Sauce on their home-made pastas along with those knife thin slices of her special sausage and the roasted Mozzarella cheese dish that they reserved for special holidays.

Then, Guido imagined, he would open up franchises. Guido fancied the business model of McDonald's, Guido had hopes of becoming an International businessman with several shops in Manhattan. He sometimes gazed across the water to New York City, promising himself and his Mama, now deceased, that it would be so. He would even build a shop in their village back in Italy.

His Mama would be proud.

So Guido went down to the see the Capo, Mr. Clametto for a loan. Mr. Clametto sometimes came by to have a pizza, Clametto was always dressed well, in an expensive suit and bright tie.

Mr. Clametto slapped him on the back and shook his hand.

“What! You need money, God forbid you should have to ask when you make the best pizza I had in my life, even home in Sicily. Vinny will set you up. Say no more.”

Vinny had counted out 50,000.00 clams in hundreds on the way out, backed by the full faith and enforcement of Mr. Clametto's organization, Costa Nostra. Guido had never seen so much money in his life.

Today, Guido's Pizza has a different kind of clientèle and Guido understands that there was a hook in the cash.

Too much cash always has a hook, embedded deep enough so you do not see it. There would be no chain of shops serving wonderful food for Guido, only barriers to dreams.

Some racketeers come in flashy ties. Others wear quieter apparel but the hook is always ready and waiting.

Today Americans are finding the hook in the mortgage they took out on their home. Some of the mortgages written in the last seven years promised – and gave the borrower – 125% of the value of the house. Borrowers could hardly believe that it could be so easy to realize their dreams. Vacations, desperately needed medical treatments for those they loved, making their home into the vision they had hungered to have when they were still young enough to enjoy it. There were lots of reasons for borrowing. But those loans were made when the dollar was solid and real estate seen as an investment that could be expected to be better than gold. Those dreams are also dying. You see, your government has found a way to convert your home into a form of currency and you into a serf.

Vinny and Mr. Clametto wanted their money. So do those better dressed racketeers.

Sometimes when Mr. Clametto wanted to distract attention from what was really happening he would focus attention elsewhere. That is what has been going on with banks and mortgages today. According to the FBI, “ Mortgage fraud is a significant and growing concern in the United States. Mortgage fraud schemes are perpetrated by individuals acting alone or in collusion with borrowers, loan originators, or real estate professionals. All mortgage fraud schemes contain a material misstatement, misrepresentation or omission relied upon by an underwriter or lender to fund, purchase, or insure a loan. Given the significant role of mortgages in our economy, mortgage fraud has been recognized as a significant criminal problem by the FBI and has been treated accordingly.”

Individuals, like Mr. Guido, get a few thousand dollars more than necessary, still on the hook for the whole amount, and the bank writes a 'mortgage' using money that suddenly comes into existence like the Genie in the Bottle, having existed no place else but on a line entered into an account.

Notice that the FBI will not be investigating the banks. The chatter about 'mortgage fraud by individuals or your local broker,' is laid out by such as the FBI to distract you from the larger con, which is now reaching fruition.

We have a word for that, we call it collusion to commit fraud, massive fraud on a scale that threatens the International monetary system. This is racketeering that would have numbed the mind of Mr. Clametto with awe and envy. He might even buy a more subdued tie.

The conspirators, in this case, are those in charge of our government and their friends in banking. Proof of this lies in the fact they are now suspending foreclosure on homes. This fraud runs from your neighborhood to the White House in a trail of broken hearts and dreams of ordinary Americans. If that were not bad enough, we have also been victimized by political doublespeak where phrases like 'home ownership' are better understood as slavery.

There is an answer.

The first step on that path is to let the truth sink in. Then we, the people, need to come together and take action. The predatory nastiness of recent years has its roots in the same ugliness cited by Brigadier General Smedley Butler in his book, “War is a Racket,” published in 1935.

War is one kind of racket; real estate, the stock market, and nearly every part of your life, has sprouted with other rackets run by the same kinds of people. These con games, rackets all, are run by people very much like Mr. Clametto, though more conservatively dressed, who graduated from schools like Yale and live pampered lives. They expect wealth; they expect that they will never be held accountable for their own actions.

Smedley Butler was the most decorated general in America and had been the recipient of two Medals of Honor. Lowell Thomas, famous himself, said of Butler in the introduction written for the Reader's Digest version of, “War is a Racket,” “Even his opponents concede that in his stand on public questions, General Butler has been motivated by the same fiery integrity and loyal patriotism which has distinguished his service in countless Marine campaigns.”

Butler was personally responsible for stopping the attempted military take over of America's government in 1934. Among those who plotted that take-over was Senator Prescott Bush, the grandfather of George W. Bush. Clearly, W. is obsessed with finishing the job his grandfather started.

Then, as today, the media was owned by the corporations. The investigation in Congress, arising from the disclosure by General Butler, was quashed. General Butler died in 1940.

The job of wresting our lives back from the clutching grasp of the CorporaState remains to be accomplished. The book, “War is a Racket,” is not easy to find today but is one you should find and read. When you understand change will happen.

Hear more about what you can do and what you need to know on our radio show, Off the Grids from our guest, William Reynolds, who has spent a life time investigating those in power and finding the flaws in their plans. This show will air on BBSRadio.com, Friday, December 7^th at 5pm Pacific Time, hosted by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster.

Get off the Grids

Get off all the grids. This is not the vision our founders had for America. What we see today is a fascist state biggest than anyone could have imagined possible.

There are solutions, and those solutions take us back to the foundational values that forged the vision that is America. Because America is not our government and not land or even the people. It is a destination on the horizon that beckons us to find connection with each other through myriad acts of good will.

There are solutions to each of these problems because while they were busy picking our pockets the world was changing. The promise of connection is being fulfilled; transparency in all things is a precondition to the connections now becoming obvious. America will not only survive, it will become the model that will remake the world.

Get started.

Off the Grids

Most of us are scared. We know that the economy is out of control, the dollar is on a downward spiral that will take with it our pensions and hopes for prosperity and security. America is facing real problems – but there are solutions and those solutions can take us to a place that is much better than you imagine.

The problems above all originate in Grid Points that we have been forced onto through strategies carefully orchestrated by corporations, such as petroleum companies and power companies working with and through government. In effect, we have paid to forge our own shackles and then lock them in place. Do not think for a moment that those who are profiting did not understand where the policies we were sold over the last many years would take us.

It was power companies and government that decided that your electric company was a quasi-governmental agency without liability for anything they do. That is why when the electric company causes fires, burns out motors, or leaves you without power, it is not liable. But they are quick to turn off your power. Today most Americans live only months, or days from disaster. That must change and those changes hinge on understanding how we got here and how to move forward into a better world. It can happen and it will.

You can get off the grids and back to real security and a freedom that is true and not illusion. Endless indulgence was always an illusion. No matter what those in power said the free ride had to end, and it has.

America was seduced into believing that consumption and emotional disconnection is freedom. It isn't and it never was. Real freedom starts with responsibility and community, helping others and standing tall in the knowledge that your honor is intact because you have done right by others and yourself. That is something people like George Bush can never feel because their sense of power comes from deceit and generations of violence visited on all of us. George Bush would be funny if he weren't so dangerous. This year consider buying a Christmas card that sends a message that makes you laugh and speaks real real peace. Doing so supports our work. Also, please think about sponsoring our work or becoming an advertiser.

On Off the Grids, the radio program every week hosted by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, the Spiritual Politician, we talk about the grids that bind us for the profit of corporations and how to step off to freedom.

Join us to begin the journey to freedom and community as we find out how others across the country are solving the problems. Live Locally and in Community with others.

About being a Spiritual Politician

Bringing government into alignment with the Lessons of Jesus:

The focus of our show is how to bring government into alignment with truth of our spiritual nature. So America started with the idea we are all, inherently free. We are free to choose, free to live, to breath, and to live our lives as we see fit. Government does not own us; government is just a contractor, providing service.

That framework is in alignment with the spiritual truth that each of us connects to God directly, needing no agency as an intermediary. To be free is to be free in the spirit and so in the flesh that temporarily holds the spirit.

When Thomas Jefferson said we were all possessed of inherent rights, existing before government he was extending a spiritual truth into a civic form. It is that Mission Statement from the Declaration of Independence we need to keep in mind.

Because we are free and reject, as did Christ, the use of deceit, manipulation or violence we need to be conscious about our relationships with others and find ways to grow into the sense of connection and community that makes us One in Him.

This is especially true for Christians but it is true for everyone else as well.

Nearly every major spiritual viewpoint enunciates the idea that we are connected to each other and should be good to each other. Christians just have an even more exacting mission. Christians are to love every one, treating them as they would Jesus.

Jesus was very clear about how we were to treat others. He did not say that it was alright to be abusive, deceitful, and violent if we used government as our tool and agent. There was no exception, He wanted all of our hearts, minds and souls. Christ did not lay out any plan of government, but left it to the conscience of the individual, the same way He connects to each of us.

We are Americans but we are also members of a human family that connects us to something truly wonderful and immense.

So our job here at the Spiritual Politician is to look at Government as a human tool we use every day. We need to consider if government is working in a way that speaks that common understanding about our connections to each other and, if it is not, we need to change it.

Americans have had many successes over the last 231 years since our founding and, learning from both mistakes and successes we can consider that question. So here at the Spiritual Politician we look at the truth behind of rhetoric.

Given what is going on today in Government what we may decide to do it reboot the whole system.

To provide the examples of what has gone right and what has gone very wrong we here at the Spiritual Politician have put together several different kinds of segments you will hear on our show from time to time.

To Contact us e-mail: the.melinda@yahoo.com

Founder and president of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation

Books by Melinda: Links to Melinda's sites:

How the NeoCons Stole Freedom

Shards of Verse Melinda's Poetry

Seventh Voice

Greed: The NeoConning of America

Paula T.'s Story - Declaration of War: Take Back America

The Spiritual Politician on Off the Grids

Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

Friday,November 29, 2007, 5 pm PST

This Week's Show

Guest: Paula T.

Wednesday morning early the power company came out and turned off her electricity. She was not expecting it; the bill was a little late but she had called. She had decided that the money that had come in would have to be used to pay the mortgage this time.

She is Paula T., a mortgage broker and the owner of three businesses in South Florida. Two months ago the IRS hit her with an audit; her bookkeeper told her that there has been an unrelenting wave of such 'audits,' all seem to be aimed at sucking out even more money. Paula does not know how to deal with that. Yet. But Paula is no quitter.

Three years ago Paula was planning trips to Italy; today she has to tell her three high school aged kids that none of the things she hoped to provide for them are probably going to be possible. They are now out looking for jobs that will bring in money that will be used to put food on the table. Forward thinking, Paula is now putting in a home garden so at least there will be food in a couple of months – if she can keep the house. At least, she said, the plants will have the sun. That will not drive up her electric bill.

This is the reality today across the country. The middle class is vanishing into the abyss of immediate need that once marked those in poverty. The upper class is also tightening their belts – unless they are in that most exclusive of clubs, the Club Greed.

Your mortgage and the home it pays to keep the rain off your head is one of the grids that the CorporaState has designed to pump your wealth into its own pockets. If you understand the reality of fractional reserve banking and how the banks really operate you know that while Americans were forced by the Act of Congress to accept responsibility for the currency issued by a private corporation, the Federal Reserve Bank of Club Greed, our elected representatives have no control over what takes place.

While it was possible most of us assumed that the banks were honest and that they were doing their job. Now every day more people have stopped believing that comfortable fiction and the question of what we can do as individuals to hold on to our lives and hard earned money – and our homes – is becoming more compelling and frightening.

What are you going to do when they come to turn off your electricity?

What do you do when you lost your phone service?

What do you tell your kids when you can't afford to put food on the table?

What do you say when you get the notice they are foreclosing on your home?

These are the real problems that will be confronting middle class Americans because the giant sucking sound you hear, if you listen to the ads for refinancing, easy credit, and quick money. are really done to distract you from the crooks who snuck in the back door to steal you blind. Those are the Grid Corporations, your auto company, your electric company, the Oil Companies, Big Med and Big Pharma, and Big Food. They and Big Government, so closely associated they have merged into one identity, are the problem we face today. Last night there was a debate on CNN for the Republican candidates.

Here is what happened.

“Although this was a camera filled exchange for Paul, it clearly seemed that questions were steered away from Paul during the entire debate and that both video questions which were directed to Paul from YouTube users both contained spoon-fed derogatory questions about conspiracy theories and whether he would run as a independent, because he clearly wasn’t going to win the primary.

According to the New York Times, two planes were circling overhead, one flying a Ron Paul banner, another with lights spelling out his name. A ship to support Ron Paul circled in the bay just outside the hall and just beyond the security fences erected around The Mahaffey Theater, Mr. Paul’s loyal supporters waited and cheered with shirts and stickers and other assorted Paul gear.

CNN treating Ron Paul as a minor candidate, moving the camera from his as much as possible, and limiting his role at the debate easily comes into question.

Paul pointed out that he had 5,000 people of all races turned out for his rally outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

Noticeably agitated Paul stated “Did you know that our campaign raised over 4 million dollars – in one day”?

Ron Paul also said “We are taxed to blow up the bridges overseas, taxed to rebuild those bridges and our bridges are falling down. This country is sick and tired of what they are getting. We are in the middle of a revolution and I’m happy to be part of it.”

The Paul Campaign is awakening Americans, not to him as a savior, but to their own power and to what is happening today. That is why the Corporate Media cannot afford to let him be heard.

Awakened, Americans will enact change and realize the truth.

China is a Communist country. 98% of Chinese live without mortgages. They own their homes.

In most of the world no one comes in and turns off your electricity when you cannot afford to pay. The electric company will not care if you freeze to death; if your aged grandfather, a hero who won honors during WWII will die because you cannot keep his insulin cold and his oxygen machine on. They will shrug.

Americans are coming to realize that war is being made on them. It is a quiet war waged on each of us economically in our own homes and through out jobs, through the educational system, and through every institution we thought we could trust.

In war it becomes you duty to strike back. This war demands we cut off the grid corporations, rebuilding America from the individual and community into a network sustained by cooperation, consent, and transparency for all.

Therefore what you do about your electricity matters. Getting off the grid strikes a blow for freedom. Today you are being contacted by companies that offer you lower rates – if you stay on the power grid. Instead, get off the grid.

The technique used here will sound similar to the way the phone companies have been enticing you to stay on their comm grid even as Kevin Martin, the head of the FCC holds secret meetings to sell off the airways that were to be held in trust for for us? You can mesh yourself off that grid, too.

Do you know they are at the same time, using parallel rationalizations, selling off the air you breath, the water you drink and the DNA that makes up your body?

Get off all the grids. This is not the vision our founders had for America. What we see today is a fascist state biggest than anyone could have imagined possible.

There are solutions, and those solutions take us back to the foundational values that forged the vision that is America. Because America is not our government and not land or even the people. It is a destination on the horizon that beckons us to find connection with each other through myriad acts of good will.

There are solutions to each of these problems because while they were busy picking our pockets the world was changing. The promise of connection is being fulfilled; transparency in all things is a precondition to the connections now becoming obvious. America will not only survive, it will become the model that will remake the world.

Get started.

Off the Grids

Most of us are scared. We know that the economy is out of control, the dollar is on a downward spiral that will take with it our pensions and hopes for prosperity and security. America is facing real problems – but there are solutions and those solutions can take us to a place that is much better than you imagine.

The problems above all originate in Grid Points that we have been forced onto through strategies carefully orchestrated by corporations, such as petroleum companies and power companies working with and through government. In effect, we have paid to forge our own shackles and then lock them in place. Do not think for a moment that those who are profiting did not understand where the policies we were sold over the last many years would take us.

It was power companies and government that decided that your electric company was a quasi-governmental agency without liability for anything they do. That is why when the electric company causes fires, burns out motors, or leaves you without power, it is not liable. But they are quick to turn off your power. Today most Americans live only months, or days from disaster. That must change and those changes hinge on understanding how we got here and how to move forward into a better world. It can happen and it will.

You can get off the grids and back to real security and a freedom that is true and not illusion. Endless indulgence was always an illusion. No matter what those in power said the free ride had to end, and it has.

America was seduced into believing that consumption and emotional disconnection is freedom. It isn't and it never was. Real freedom starts with responsibility and community, helping others and standing tall in the knowledge that your honor is intact because you have done right by others and yourself. That is something people like George Bush can never feel because their sense of power comes from deceit and generations of violence visited on all of us. George Bush would be funny if he weren't so dangerous. This year consider buying a Christmas card that sends a message that makes you laugh and speaks real real peace. Doing so supports our work. Also, please think about sponsoring our work or becoming an advertiser.

On Off the Grids, the radio program every week hosted by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, the Spiritual Politician, we talk about the grids that bind us for the profit of corporations and how to step off to freedom.

Join us to begin the journey to freedom and community as we find out how others across the country are solving the problems. Live Locally and in Community with others.

About being a Spiritual Politician

Bringing government into alignment with the Lessons of Jesus:

The focus of our show is how to bring government into alignment with truth of our spiritual nature. So America started with the idea we are all, inherently free. We are free to choose, free to live, to breath, and to live our lives as we see fit. Government does not own us; government is just a contractor, providing service.

That framework is in alignment with the spiritual truth that each of us connects to God directly, needing no agency as an intermediary. To be free is to be free in the spirit and so in the flesh that temporarily holds the spirit.

When Thomas Jefferson said we were all possessed of inherent rights, existing before government he was extending a spiritual truth into a civic form. It is that Mission Statement from the Declaration of Independence we need to keep in mind.

Because we are free and reject, as did Christ, the use of deceit, manipulation or violence we need to be conscious about our relationships with others and find ways to grow into the sense of connection and community that makes us One in Him.

This is especially true for Christians but it is true for everyone else as well.

Nearly every major spiritual viewpoint enunciates the idea that we are connected to each other and should be good to each other. Christians just have an even more exacting mission. Christians are to love every one, treating them as they would Jesus.

Jesus was very clear about how we were to treat others. He did not say that it was alright to be abusive, deceitful, and violent if we used government as our tool and agent. There was no exception, He wanted all of our hearts, minds and souls. Christ did not lay out any plan of government, but left it to the conscience of the individual, the same way He connects to each of us.

We are Americans but we are also members of a human family that connects us to something truly wonderful and immense.

So our job here at the Spiritual Politician is to look at Government as a human tool we use every day. We need to consider if government is working in a way that speaks that common understanding about our connections to each other and, if it is not, we need to change it.

Americans have had many successes over the last 231 years since our founding and, learning from both mistakes and successes we can consider that question. So here at the Spiritual Politician we look at the truth behind of rhetoric.

Given what is going on today in Government what we may decide to do it reboot the whole system.

To provide the examples of what has gone right and what has gone very wrong we here at the Spiritual Politician have put together several different kinds of segments you will hear on our show from time to time.

To Contact us e-mail: the.melinda@yahoo.com

Founder and president of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation

Books by Melinda: Links to Melinda's sites:

How the NeoCons Stole Freedom

Shards of Verse Melinda's Poetry

Seventh Voice

Greed: The NeoConning of America

August Franklin-Dunning on restoring the Earth

The Spiritual Politician on Off the Grids

Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

Friday,November 23, 2007, 4 pm PST

This Week's Show

Guest: August Franklin-Dunning

Off The Grids: Why the Earth has Stopped Nourishing Life and Appropriate Christmas Cards.

Lesson One – Spend less on food, start making money at home, and get healthier in one easy lesson. This is part of an ongoing series that will show you how the Grid Gets you and how to step off.

Scene One – What you Eat

Jonathan Daunt went to the grocery store, ambling through the produce section. His appetite for something that satisfied a sense of unquenched need kept him doing the grocery shopping even though he never found anything that worked. Mildred, his wife was happy to have him do the job. His experience had taught him that the tomatoes would always taste like cardboard. He ascribed that to the fact that they are picked still green for transport. Jonathan, now retirement age, was aware that the varieties grown by the big farm factories are chosen for their ability to withstand transport, not for their taste. They also come to you with pesticides, something he tried not to think about as he washed them before putting them away.

He sighed, remembering how the tomatoes tasted, fresh from the garden, on his grandparent's farm. Jonathan could almost taste the succulent, vibrant flavor that lingered on his tongue; he could see their ripe, red surfaces almost bursting with juice in the hot afternoon sun. Sometimes he was sure he could smell them. The tomatoes in the store did not smell at all.

Sometimes he had visited the local farmer's market and that was better – but it was hard to get there when you are working and the vegetables are not much cheaper.......and money was becoming a bigger issue every day, despite his salary.

After dinner, feeling curiously hungry – Jonathan sat back. He had again eaten too much because he was somehow not satisfied. That morning he had taken his vitamins and supplements, wondering briefly how people ever survived without them.

Remember when food nourished you?

Scene Two – Outsourced

Jonathan could not believe it could happen to him. They had cut his last check and closed the office the same day; when he drove over the next morning to pick up some books he had forgotten a FOR RENT sign was already up. He called Sam; the two had worked together for twenty years. Sam said he had heard that that there are questions about the 401Ks now, too. Jonathan had been looking forward to his retirement. He and his wife, Mildred, thought they were secure. Now, Marianne, their youngest daughter was moving home with her two kids; her husband just up and left, taking their savings with him. That included the money they had lent them for the down payment on the cute little starter house.

Scene Three – The Electric Bill

Two months later Jonathan had to tell Mildred and Marianne they could no longer use the heater, although it was now 15 degrees outside. “Bundle up,” he told them, trying not to cry. He and Mildred had bought the house when, “All Electric, the home of the future,” was gleaming with the promise that life could be as simple as flicking a switch and so clean you would never have to scrub. Every month Jonathan thanked God that the house was at least paid for. Their neighbors who had refinanced for vacations and improvements were slowly being squeezed out.

If they used the electric heater their bill every month was around $600.00; more than the mortgage had been. But now there was no income. So through that winter they bundled up, burning some wood in the fireplace; At least they had hot baths once a week.

Scene Four - Springtime

Jonathan had never been much interested in gardening but over the winter thinking about those tomatoes from his childhood, as their money slipped away, he started surfing the web. He found heritage seeds and shelled out the money for those and other kinds of seed that made his mouth water. All three of them were working at odd jobs to bring in cash. They had emptied the bank account and closed it just before the bank failed. They would need money to pay the Property Tax Bill this April and for that damned electricity.

The whole family got involved. Mildred and Marianne decided on more heritage seeds when he showed them those. It became their project, really. He got to do the heavy lifting as they all dug up the ratty grass lawn and the sad looking rose bushes to be transplanted. Nothing seems to have any life in it any more, the thought flashed through his mind.

By June the kids were working on making sure that the garden was kept busy. Seeds replaced plants harvested immediately. Mildred and Marianne found a nursery with half dead fruit trees and had gotten them free; that was just at the time they found the plant food from a friend in Indiana. They had managed to keep the phone connected. Now there are ten fruit trees and plans to turn the fruit into lots of things, jam, jelly, preserves, dried fruit. Marianne was determined to start selling them and had designed her own label.

The food was better than they had ever gotten in the store. Dinner had changed, with everyone interested and excited about how the food they raised was used. The heritage seeds made a difference and so did the suggestions Marianne found on line that got rid of the insect problems. They had tried pesticides but the nuisance just came back. The plant food had revived the fruit trees and they always used it now. Mildred had become the distributor for the whole area and loved seeing people and hearing about their families. Their community had changed in so many ways sometimes Johnathan had to think about how it had been. Families were working together now and, amazingly, there are fewer problems with things like gangs.

Over that winter the whole neighborhood had begun talking about the problems they faced. There was no money for welfare and the churches were also strapped with so many to help. In January the family across the street had started raising chickens and trading. Jonathan had built a hot house with scrounged glass so they had vegetables through that second winter. It had been the neighbor's son, Gordon, who organized the trading for several blocks around. Jonathan's family have a couple of hens themselves. Every day they all thank God they don't live in one of those fascist housing tracts with a Homeowners Association. Those people can't grow anything themselves.

There are a lot more problems but the Daunt family is ready to meet the challenges. They have survived and now they know that there is hope for the future.

Off the Grids

Most of us are scared. We know that the economy is out of control, the dollar is on a downward spiral that will take with it our pensions and hopes for prosperity and security. America is facing real problems – but there are solutions and those solutions can take us to a place that is much better than you imagine.

The problems above all originate in Grid Points that we have been forced onto through strategies carefully orchestrated by corporations, such as petroleum companies and power companies working with and through government. In effect, we have paid to forge our own shackles and then lock them in place. Do not think for a moment that those who are profiting did not understand where the policies we were sold over the last many years would take us.

It was power companies and government that decided that your electric company was a quasi-governmental agency without liability for anything they do. That is why when the electric company causes fires, burns out motors, or leaves you without power, it is not liable. But they are quick to turn off your power. Today most Americans live only months, or days from disaster. That must change and those changes hinge on understanding how we got here and how to move forward into a better world. It can happen and it will.

You can get off the grids and back to real security and a freedom that is true and not illusion. Endless indulgence was always an illusion. No matter what those in power said the free ride had to end, and it has.

America was seduced into believing that consumption and emotional disconnection is freedom. It isn't and it never was. Real freedom starts with responsibility and community, helping others and standing tall in the knowledge that your honor is intact because you have done right by others and yourself. That is something people like George Bush can never feel because their sense of power comes from deceit and generations of violence visited on all of us. George Bush would be funny if he weren't so dangerous. This year consider buying a Christmas card that sends a message that makes you laugh and speaks real real peace. Doing so supports our work. Also, please think about sponsoring our work or becoming an advertiser.

On Off the Grids, the radio program every week hosted by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, the Spiritual Politician, we talk about the grids that bind us for the profit of corporations and how to step off to freedom.

This week we will be talking to August Franklin-Dunning, an astrophysicist who discovered a formula for plants that makes the garden above effectively twice as large because the plants produce more and for longer every year. That is WOW!, the plant food that made taking those supplements unnecessary. The guy who found the solution to the problem of insects without pesticides is Steve Tvedten and his book is available free of charge on line.

Off the Grids, formerly The Spiritual Politician, will air this week on BBSRadio.com at 4pm Pacific time. Next week we will have a new time at 5pm Pacific Time.

Join us to begin the journey to freedom and community as we find out how others across the country are solving the problems. Live Locally and in Community with others.

What the Show is about and being a Spiritual Politician

Bringing government into alignment with the Lessons of Jesus:

The focus of our show is how to bring government into alignment with truth of our spiritual nature. So America started with the idea we are all, inherently free. We are free to choose, free to live, to breath, and to live our lives as we see fit. Government does not own us; government is just a contractor, providing service.

That framework is in alignment with the spiritual truth that each of us connects to God directly, needing no agency as an intermediary. To be free is to be free in the spirit and so in the flesh that temporarily holds the spirit.

When Thomas Jefferson said we were all possessed of inherent rights, existing before government he was extending a spiritual truth into a civic form. It is that Mission Statement from the Declaration of Independence we need to keep in mind.

Because we are free and reject, as did Christ, the use of deceit, manipulation or violence we need to be conscious about our relationships with others and find ways to grow into the sense of connection and community that makes us One in Him.

This is especially true for Christians but it is true for everyone else as well.

Nearly every major spiritual viewpoint enunciates the idea that we are connected to each other and should be good to each other. Christians just have an even more exacting mission. Christians are to love every one, treating them as they would Jesus.

Jesus was very clear about how we were to treat others. He did not say that it was alright to be abusive, deceitful, and violent if we used government as our tool and agent. There was no exception, He wanted all of our hearts, minds and souls. Christ did not lay out any plan of government, but left it to the conscience of the individual, the same way He connects to each of us.

We are Americans but we are also members of a human family that connects us to something truly wonderful and immense.

So our job here at the Spiritual Politician is to look at Government as a human tool we use every day. We need to consider if government is working in a way that speaks that common understanding about our connections to each other and, if it is not, we need to change it.

Americans have had many successes over the last 231 years since our founding and, learning from both mistakes and successes we can consider that question. So here at the Spiritual Politician we look at the truth behind of rhetoric.

Given what is going on today in Government what we may decide to do it reboot the whole system.

To provide the examples of what has gone right and what has gone very wrong we here at the Spiritual Politician have put together several different kinds of segments you will hear on our show from time to time.

To Contact us e-mail: the.melinda@yahoo.com

Founder and president of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation

Books by Melinda: Links to Melinda's sites:

How the NeoCons Stole Freedom

Shards of Verse Melinda's Poetry

Seventh Voice

Greed: The NeoConning of America

Dennis Klein on solutions to failing schools and fear

With the Host of the Spiritual Politician

Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

Friday,November 16, 2007, 4 pm PST

This Week's Show

Guest: Dennis Klein

In Florida last week children were traumatized by protocols that for two days in a row kept them locked down in schools away from their parents. The reason given? A crime had taken place that is normally handled by the police. In these cases the two separate crimes, a robbery and an escaped convict, were used to justify a complete lock down of the area around Ft. Lauderdale.

Government schools are unsafe, frightening, and also fail to teach. Students graduate without understanding elementary book keeping, the principles of electricity, much less physics, how our courts work and many other subjects that two generations ago were assumed as basic parts of becoming a literate, functioning adult.

In Maryland today parents who entrusted their children to government schools are facing jail time for refusing to do what many experts now say is hazardous to their health, immunizations.

The events were reported in News Target, an online magazine that keeps Americans apprized of health alternatives. That article stated,

“State Attorney General Glenn F. Ivey has announced he is willing to criminalize parents if they don't bring them to the courthouse to have them injected, on the spot, with vaccines that contain methyl mercury -- a highly toxic nerve chemical that causes brain damage and is linked to autism. The action is backed by Circuit Judge William D. Missouri, Circuit Judge C. Philip Nichols Jr., and the chairman of the Prince George school board, R. Owen Johnson Jr.

Together, these judges and officials have conspired to turn Maryland into a medical police state, invoking the threat of imprisonment in order to achieve a vaccination goal that has more to do with politics than children's actual health or safety.”

Children have become targets of opportunity for the State, and every day more parents withdraw their children from government schools, determined to home school. But how to do that? If your children are at risk in the government school new your house what can you do to protect them?

One of the answers if provided by Dennis Klein, President, Karmel Games Inc.

The games produced by Mr. Klein provide invaluable skills for children in a form that makes learning fun and gives parents and children a space to come together where that happens.

Mr. Klein founded Karmel Games in late 2003 – a rather different venture than his preceding career in the telecommunications industry! However, he brought extensive experience in product development, engineering management, marketing, and business development to his new company.

He quickly established his credentials in the field by designing, developing and managing the production of his first game, Anagramania, in less than 4 months.

Rethinking school holds unsuspected opportunities for kids and parents to explore the world and we will try out these new worlds, including Great New Games, on the Spiritual Politician this Friday at 4pm Pacific time on the BBSradio.com.

Coming home to learning through play and innovation may well remake the world in a form that is safer for all of us.

What the Show is about and being a Spiritual Politician

Bringing government into alignment with the Lessons of Jesus:

The focus of our show is how to bring government into alignment with truth of our spiritual nature. So America started with the idea we are all, inherently free. We are free to choose, free to live, to breath, and to live our lives as we see fit. Government does not own us; government is just a contractor, providing service.

That framework is in alignment with the spiritual truth that each of us connects to God directly, needing no agency as an intermediary. To be free is to be free in the spirit and so in the flesh that temporarily holds the spirit.

When Thomas Jefferson said we were all possessed of inherent rights, existing before government he was extending a spiritual truth into a civic form. It is that Mission Statement from the Declaration of Independence we need to keep in mind.

Because we are free and reject, as did Christ, the use of deceit, manipulation or violence we need to be conscious about our relationships with others and find ways to grow into the sense of connection and community that makes us One in Him.

This is especially true for Christians but it is true for everyone else as well.

Nearly every major spiritual viewpoint enunciates the idea that we are connected to each other and should be good to each other. Christians just have an even more exacting mission. Christians are to love every one, treating them as they would Jesus.

Jesus was very clear about how we were to treat others. He did not say that it was alright to be abusive, deceitful, and violent if we used government as our tool and agent. There was no exception, He wanted all of our hearts, minds and souls. Christ did not lay out any plan of government, but left it to the conscience of the individual, the same way He connects to each of us.

We are Americans but we are also members of a human family that connects us to something truly wonderful and immense.

So our job here at the Spiritual Politician is to look at Government as a human tool we use every day. We need to consider if government is working in a way that speaks that common understanding about our connections to each other and, if it is not, we need to change it.

Americans have had many successes over the last 231 years since our founding and, learning from both mistakes and successes we can consider that question. So here at the Spiritual Politician we look at the truth behind of rhetoric.

Given what is going on today in Government what we may decide to do it reboot the whole system.

To provide the examples of what has gone right and what has gone very wrong we here at the Spiritual Politician have put together several different kinds of segments you will hear on our show from time to time.

To Contact us e-mail: the.melinda@yahoo.com

Founder and president of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation

Books by Melinda: Links to Melinda's sites:

How the NeoCons Stole Freedom

Shards of Verse Melinda's Poetry

Seventh Voice

Greed: The NeoConning of America

Steve Tvedten on ending pesticides and saving Earth

With the Host of the Spiritual Politician

Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

Friday,November 7, 2007, 4 pm PST

This Week's Show

Guest: Steve Tvedten

Stop polluting the planet with Pesticides NOW. The answers are easy and available.

What happens when an ordinary guy realized that the business that puts food on the table is killing people? Some people just stay the course; change is difficult for all of us. We have all seen that happen, especially today.

Sometimes the individual confronts the truth and walks away, ignoring the past, to restart their life. We have seen that, too.

Sometimes the individual becomes a whistle blower, making a living by exposing what they and others have done. That also happens and we have seen careers start in just that way.

And sometimes, even more rarely, an individual will confront that truth and decide that they need to take responsibility for changing things.

That is Steve Tvedten. Steve was a prosperous producer of pesticides when he realized that what he was selling was killing people. Those people included his uncle and unborn son.

Steve looked into his own heart and sold the company. He also changed the mission and focus of his entire life.

Tvedten worked tirelessly to ban Chlordane and wrote several books including The Bug Stops Here, The Best Control and the Best Control II and has developed (self-help) Professionally Guided Pest Control programs to safely and permanently control and/or eliminate pests: roaches, fleas, all wood destroying organisms (decay fungi and insects), rodent and miscellaneous pests.

For Steve it is not about blame but about solving the problem. Steve also helps people who contact him who need other solutions to the problems of pests.

Steve now is the President of PEST (Prevent Environmental Suicide Today), which is an environmental group. Steve also heads of the Institute of Pest Management, which has notable toxicologists, doctors, lawyers and professional people on its Board of Directors.

Pesticides are one component of the ongoing attempt by petroleum companies to find ever more ways to dispose of their stock in trade, so the idea of a free alternative opens Steve up to their unkind attentions and manipulations, something of which he is very aware. But he does not let that stop him.

Steve, like so many other Americans, believed that what he thought was Earth Day, the event in April each year, is actually Oil Day, still supported by petroleum companies who hijacked the original Earth Day, which still takes place on the Spring Equinox every year, the moment falling around March 21 – 22. The real Earth Day is still celebrated by ringing the Peace Bell at the United Nations every year. The faux Earth Day, also called Oil Day by those who understand, is still funded and used for continued misdirection by the oil companies.

The entire environmental movement has been redirected into irrelevancies in the past. Now Steve and others, who are moving towards a new, focused and accessible movement, are getting serious about solutions for ordinary people that work.

Mr. Tvedten provided to the world, an 86-page book on the use of safe alternatives to pesticides titled The Bug Stops Here that can be downloaded free at www.thebestcontrol.com. Doing what needs to be done takes all of his time.

What the Show is about and being a Spiritual Politician

Bringing government into alignment with the Lessons of Jesus:

The focus of our show is how to bring government into alignment with truth of our spiritual nature. So America started with the idea we are all, inherently free. We are free to choose, free to live, to breath, and to live our lives as we see fit. Government does not own us; government is just a contractor, providing service.

That framework is in alignment with the spiritual truth that each of us connects to God directly, needing no agency as an intermediary. To be free is to be free in the spirit and so in the flesh that temporarily holds the spirit.

When Thomas Jefferson said we were all possessed of inherent rights, existing before government he was extending a spiritual truth into a civic form. It is that Mission Statement from the Declaration of Independence we need to keep in mind.

Because we are free and reject, as did Christ, the use of deceit, manipulation or violence we need to be conscious about our relationships with others and find ways to grow into the sense of connection and community that makes us One in Him.

This is especially true for Christians but it is true for everyone else as well.

Nearly every major spiritual viewpoint enunciates the idea that we are connected to each other and should be good to each other. Christians just have an even more exacting mission. Christians are to love every one, treating them as they would Jesus.

Jesus was very clear about how we were to treat others. He did not say that it was alright to be abusive, deceitful, and violent if we used government as our tool and agent. There was no exception, He wanted all of our hearts, minds and souls. Christ did not lay out any plan of government, but left it to the conscience of the individual, the same way He connects to each of us.

We are Americans but we are also members of a human family that connects us to something truly wonderful and immense.

So our job here at the Spiritual Politician is to look at Government as a human tool we use every day. We need to consider if government is working in a way that speaks that common understanding about our connections to each other and, if it is not, we need to change it.

Americans have had many successes over the last 231 years since our founding and, learning from both mistakes and successes we can consider that question. So here at the Spiritual Politician we look at the truth behind of rhetoric.

Given what is going on today in Government what we may decide to do it reboot the whole system.

To provide the examples of what has gone right and what has gone very wrong we here at the Spiritual Politician have put together several different kinds of segments you will hear on our show from time to time.

To Contact us e-mail: the.melinda@yahoo.com

Founder and president of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation

Books by Melinda: Links to Melinda's sites:

How the NeoCons Stole Freedom

Shards of Verse Melinda's Poetry

Seventh Voice

Greed: The NeoConning of America