by John Young
http://www.westernvoices.com/audio/john_young/jy20080310.mp3
Welcome to Western Voices, I’m John Young of European Americans United.
Today I’m going to divert from our normal heavy topics to discuss something that seems a bit lighter, though still quite important. Specifically, I want to speak with you about gardening. Some folks are probably wondering what gardening has to do with politics, or with our organizational objectives related to the well-being of our Folk. Well, in a word, everything.
Food prices have soared. Every week we’re spending more at the grocery store. This is happening at a time when the price of gas and oil has already put the squeeze on family budgets and foreclosures are at an all-time high. As you know, I’ve already delved pretty deeply into macroeconomics, and if you’ve been paying attention you realize that our economy is a house of cards. You also know that over the past three decades the value of the labor of average people has dropped continuously relative to expenses. You also know that Peak Oil is on the horizon. Some have argued that Peak Oil is just an artificial constriction in the oil supply intended to transfer wealth. Whether that’s true or not doesn’t really matter, because the end result for regular folks will be the same.
For average people, our economy has been getting worse and worse since before I was born. You can go to small towns like Watertown, New York that, in 1970, were thriving communities with good-paying blue-collar jobs, manicured lawns and beautiful public fountains; and today the most basic infrastructure like roads and bridges are in need of major repair. Watertown is not alone. The American Society of Civil Engineers did a review of America’s core infrastructure in 2005. Our core infrastructure includes drinking water, waste treatment, roads and bridges, aviation and so forth. After the review, the ASCE issued a report card giving America a “D” and stating that we needed to invest $1.6 TRILLION dollars just to bring our infrastructure up to snuff.According to ASCE president William Henry, evidence of infrastructure decay was already apparent in the late 1980’s; and our decaying roads are not only causing deaths, but the failure to upgrade them as needed causes endless traffic jams that keep people away from their homes and communities.(1) Our failing and outdated infrastructure is causing, according to the ASCE, “Long commutes, dirty water, delayed flights and failing dams.” (2)
Remember the levees that failed during Hurricane Katrina? You might recall the people who were injured and killed by the collapse of the I-35 bridge a few months ago. Just this month, a sink-hole developed on I-25 in Colorado; and an irrigation levee broke last month in Nevada flooding hundreds of homes. Hundreds of dams in the Northeast are in need of urgent repair(3), and two years ago an entire lake in New Hampshire was washed downstream after a dam broke.(4)
And this is just a drop in the bucket. So what does all of this failing infrastructure have to do with gardening? Stay with me a bit longer and you’ll see.
How do you know, when looking at a home, if the owners are financially struggling or prospering? Well, you look at the roof for one thing. Does the roof have multiple patches to temporarily fix problems that really require re-shingling? Is the paint chipping? Are the fences falling down? When the owners of a home are prospering, the fences and roof are in good-repair, the garage doors seal as they should and the roof doesn’t have patches. But when the owners are struggling — and have been for quite some time — their limited resources are being diverted to immediate necessities, and simply aren’t available for infrastructure.
A society is no different. The monuments, parks, fountains and ornamental bridge abutments that were the result of a prosperous society are wearing away, and we can’t afford to replace them. Think about something. In 1900 the total tax burden at the local, state and federal level amounted to 5.9% of earnings. In 1930, that tax burden was 11.6%. Back when all that infrastructure was being created, our societal tax burden was minuscule compared to the aggregate 32.7% we pay today.(5) Yet, those funds were sufficient to build infrastructure that was not merely functional and adequate, but artistic as well. Today, with fully a third of productivity going to fund government — plus government running deficits supplied by foreign countries — we cannot repair or expand our infrastructure. All we can do is patch, then patch the patches. Many of our public works now carry the names of corporations in order to help offset the costs.
While some small segments of our society, mostly hidden away in gated communities and compounds or in guarded skyscrapers, are most certainly prospering; as a whole, our society has become less prosperous year after year for the past thirty or forty years. A basic middle-class lifestyle that could once be provided by a single hard-working blue-collar income is now completely inaccessible to even the two blue-collar workers in tandem who have now become the working poor. That basic middle-class lifestyle is now only accessible to professional couples where both work full-time or maybe even more. And even that group of people is only a paycheck or two from bankruptcy or foreclosure. Even though the S&P 500 has had a continuous long-term upward trend, the economic reality for real Americans has been a downward trend for decades.
So when I tell you that, for you and I anyway, the economy is going to get worse; I’m not looking in some sort of speculative crystal ball based on all sorts of arcane economic analysis. All I’m doing is charting a well-established trajectory that anyone can see, and whose outcome is every bit as certain as sunrise and sunset.
And this is the first point that leads me to gardening. Providing as much of your own food as possible will help to insulate you from the upcoming economic difficulties. Last year, food prices increased over 4%, and they are slated to do the same this year. USDA statistics that indicate families spend about 10% of their income on food — about half of which is eaten out — are skewed by high-rollers drinking expensive wines in restaurants at $2,000/bottle. In truth, the average American is spending $3,764/year on food.(6) For a family of three, that’s $11,293. The median family income for a 3-person family in the United States is around $55,000.(7) When you consider the taxes paid by that family, the food budget works out to be around a quarter of their disposable income. That’s pretty substantial.
Approaching a garden seriously can help put YOU in control of about 25% of your household expenditures. And every year as food prices increase relative to income, it will help you even more. In third-world countries an even higher-percentage of household income goes to buy food. As our country becomes more and more like the third world, this trend will affect us too. Raising your own food is not a trivial or automatic activity. It may require some practice or trial-and-error. Obviously, the time to get started on this is not after you have already sold off assets to get money to buy food — because, believe me, that IS coming. The time to get started is NOW.
There is another reason to adopt gardening, and I think you will find the idea astonishing at first: more gardens means more white children.
I first understood this after reading some http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3465 of Steve Sailer’s that was reported on the Western Voices World News website. In this analysis, Steve Sailer demonstrated that cost-of-living was the determining factor regarding white couples choosing to marry and have children. While a lot of the cost of living is outside our individual control, by having a garden and taking it seriously you can effectively boost your available disposable income by as much as 20%. That’s not dramatic, but it’s enough in many cases to make a difference between the “pitter-patter of tiny feet” and dying without descendants.
Certainly, Steve Sailer wasn’t writing about gardening in his election analysis. Rather, he was elucidating the connection between being married with children and the way Americans vote; and he found that the strongest correlation to that status is the cost of living — especially for European-Americans. In fact, Mr. Sailer uncovered a fact that is well-established among our people: that we tend to delay marriage until we can provide the basics of a middle-class existence. Naturally, in most cases, delaying marriage means delaying children; and once the cost of living gets high enough that people can’t get established until their mid-thirties or early-forties, we run into the fact that fertility declines steeply after age thirty. This problem has been exacerbated by a number of factors, including indebtedness, consumerist mindsets and other issues that artificially increase the cost of living beyond what it should be. But even without these complicating factors, with the value of labor declining for decades while the cost of housing has increased … it should be no surprise that our birthrates have declined as well.
A couple of months back, I described half a dozen things you should be doing to get ready for Peak Oil. Peak Oil represents an economic calamity, but it is important to understand that even without Peak Oil our downward economic trajectory is going to continue and we will ultimately end up in the same place either way.
I’ve talked a lot about the Federal Reserve and our monetary system in the past; but I’d like to take another approach to this issue so you can see why the downward trend we’ve been in for the past 40 years has no alternative but to continue.
As you know, the Federal Reserve controls the American money supply. As you also know, the rate of growth of the money supply is largely determined by the interest rates that the Federal Reserve charges. The reason why the Federal Reserve interest rates are able to control the growth of the money supply is because ALL money issued into circulation — whether in cash form or via a ledger entry — is issued in exchange for DEBT. Of course, when this debt-backed money is issued into circulation, the funds required to pay the interest on that debt are not issued. Where does that money come from? Ultimately, as all money is issued in exchange for debts, that money comes from yet more debt in an endless cycle that feeds upon itself. Many economists project that this system must ultimately end in collapse; but that’s only for folks like us. Because at the end of that cycle, all tangible assets in the country will be owned by a relative handful of people and corporate entities. For them, it won’t be a collapse because even though what money folks like you and I have will be worth little or nothing, they will hold title to real wealth: the land and all that it produces. Everything that sustains us ultimately comes from the application of human ingenuity and labor to land. It wasn’t very long ago that folks provided practically all of their own needs for fuel, transportation, food, medicine and more from the land they owned. It also wasn’t very long ago in Europe that most people were working on land they didn’t own — for the benefit of a relatively small group of nobles.
The ability to own land, and the accessibility of owning that land, is what drove a large part of the European diaspora to the North American continent. That is because land is food, fuel, security, independence and the wellspring of all real wealth. In that respect it can be legitimately seen as a pre-condition for freedom.
150 years ago, most people who owned land in this country, owned it free and clear. Today, most residential property is mortgaged to the hilt. First, it was mortgaged to purchase it at all, and then it was further mortgaged to pay off higher interest rate debts. As mortgage terms stretched from 15 to 30 and now to even 40 or 50 years — often beyond the life expectancy of the borrower — the scam of mortgages is coming home to roost. You see, the very availability of a mortgage for the purchase of property pushes the cost of property ever-higher. As mortgage companies dropped down-payment requirements from 50% to 20% to 10% to 0%, the price of property pushed higher. As mortgage companies relaxed requirements to make more and more people eligible, especially through the use of short-term artificially low rates and balloon payments, the price pushed higher and higher again.
But, you see, there is a ceiling to the price of property even with 0% down, 6% interest and a 50-year term. That ceiling is ultimately the cost of a mortgage payment exceeds 1/3rd of the income of a sufficiently high proportion of the population that the property simply cannot be sold. There is another ceiling as well, and that ceiling is imposed by the simple fact that nobody’s income is likely to remain uninterrupted for even 15 years, much less for 30 or 50; so foreclosures occur regularly, and recently they have been setting records. In effect, for all practical purposes, then, most American so-called “home owners” are really tenants who are allowed to remain so long as the payments are made monthly without fail; except that in most cases they have fewer legal protections than renters. This is where we have ended up after 150 years. The descendants of the European diaspora who came to North America for land have been reduced to the status of tenants.
What does this have to do with gardening and babies? Quite a lot.
Think of your property — whether rented, mortgaged or actually owned — as a business asset. That land can produce wealth for you in a variety of ways. It can produce nearly all of the food for your family. It can bring forth herbs, organic produce and specialty products that can be sold. You can do all of that on 1/4th of an acre, and in less than an hour per day when figured over the course of a year when using the right methods. If you have more land than that, you can even produce the fuel to heat your house sustainably. This, in aggregate, lowers the threshold for maintaining a middle-class existence; and thus lowers the threshold for marriage and, ultimately, having children.
Moreover, by using your land productively rather than as a showcase for grass, you can own that land outright much sooner.
Assume, for a moment, the following scenario.
You own a home on a half-acre of land. You have the average $200,000 mortgage at 7% interest on a 30-year note. That comes to a mortgage payment of $1,331/month. Pretend you also spend roughly $800/month on groceries, but through thoughtful gardening you are able to offset $500 of that. That’s $500 tax-free dollars — the equivalent of getting a $700/month raise. But let’s take it another step further and pretend that you apply $200 of your savings to pay off your mortgage sooner. How much sooner will you pay it off? Ten years sooner. Instead of paying $279,000 in interest to the bankers, you’d only spend $178,000.
Of course, you CAN sell excess produce; and if you know what you are doing, you can sell a fair amount of it even while keeping your current job. Even if you only manage to sell $100/month. That’s still a raise, still an increase in your standard of living.
And this is the whole point. As times get tougher, the value of the food you can produce yourself will increase. And that value is tax-free. Today, it can add hundreds of dollars a month to your equivalent income — and as the economy continues to get worse while food prices rise — you will be adding thousands to your income. That equivalent income can be used to raise your standard of living, pay off debt, and make you more secure. For some folks, this won’t make enough of a difference to spell the difference between marriage or bachelorhood; but for others, it will make the marginal difference needed to put food in the pantry and buns in the oven.
If you are already a family, most certainly start a garden because it will take off financial pressure and help you to afford existing children and perhaps even one more. If you are just a single swinging bachelor, trade in your latest status-symbol toy for some gardening tools and get busy so that you’ll have something better to offer a prospective wife and kids. If you are an unmarried mother, start a garden so you can use the money you are saving to put yourself through school and improve your life. No matter who you are, start a garden. It will make us more self-sufficient, more capable of weathering the storms ahead, and put more babies in our cribs.
I realize that some of you live in college dorms, hermetically-sealed apartments and the like. Obviously, your circumstances just won’t permit a gardening enterprise. But, that’s not the end of the subject. Go to the website of the American Community Gardening Association at www.communitygarden.org, and find a community garden near you. Community gardens are located near population centers where most people are either renters or have no land. Participants are usually assigned a small plot that they can use to grow their own food. This plot is often free of charge, but sometimes requires a very small fee to secure for a season.
Then there are some folks living on small suburban lots who remember their parents’ or grandparents’ huge gardens, have images of gardens bigger than their houses dancing in their heads and just can’t imagine having the room. Some folks listening to me have long commutes or tough jobs and very little free time. And some of our listeners are elderly and not as physically robust as they used to be. They just can’t imagine wrestling a roto-tiller.
For these latter groups, I have good news for you. There are now a number of books that contain methods of small-space or intensive gardening practices that take less time, cost less money, take less physical effort and produce more food than you can imagine. All of these books cover organic methods as well, and none of the methods require major investments in equipment like traditional roto-tillers. Just go to either Amazon or Google and type in “square foot gardening,” “mini-farming” or “biointensive” and you’ll find everything you need to get started.
Speaking of organic methods, if you’ve paid much attention to the news, you realize that our food supply is full of sick animals, genetically modified grains, pesticide residues and permitted levels of bugs, dirt and debris just for starters. A lot of our foods are considered so dangerous or disgusting that foreign countries won’t even accept them for pet food, much less for people-food. Think about that.
It is unlikely that you’ll be able to shed our corporate food supply completely, but whatever you grow yourself using organic methods you will KNOW to be safe and pure. It will be bursting with the finest nutrition and the highest levels of antioxidants. It will be healthier for you and your family. Buying organic foods at the organic food stores is incredibly expensive. But growing them yourself saves money.
Now I want to give you one more good reason why you should be growing a garden.
Every year corporate agribusiness brings hundreds of thousands of non-European “temporary” immigrants into the United States to pick vegetables. This is entirely legal through special agricultural provisions that allow field workers to be paid less than minimum wage for their effort. Because conditions in their home countries are so appalling, they are happy to accept these low wages while living under conditions in the field that would be illegal for a slum-lord to provide a welfare recipient. Sanitation facilities are often sub-par at best.
This creates three problems. The first is that it legitimizes the large-scale mis-treatment of human beings by corporate America. No institution in this country should be allowed — through legislation or any other means — to treat people the way the agribusiness cartels treat temporary immigrant labor. If immigrants are to be used, they should be paid the same wages and be accorded all of the same benefits and protections of any other worker. Otherwise, corporate America is given an incentive to maximize its use of Third World labor and artificially lowers the value of our domestic workers. As it is, temporary agricultural workers often live under material conditions worse than those provided to African slaves. The fact that it is technically “voluntary” on the part of the worker — who has been forced into that circumstance by economic necessity — doesn’t make it right.
The second is that this pernicious practice serves as a safety valve for the Third World governments that have brought conditions of poverty and squalor to their people by the millions. In Mexico, huge swathes of territory are controlled by criminal cartels rather than by government; and law enforcement officials are endemically corrupt. No matter how they dress it up for public consumption, there are only two classes of people in Mexico: the wealthy and the destitute. There are a lot of reasons for this that stray too far from our primary topic to delve into today; but suffice it to say that temporary immigrant labor serves to keep a portion of the Mexican population sufficiently sated that they don’t agitate and organize to change their government. As a result, by allowing this safety valve we are dooming generation after generation to the same impoverishment.
Finally, many so-called temporary workers turn out to be not-so-temporary. Whether they just fade into the background or have an “anchor” baby, many Third World immigrants who come here temporarily … remain. They are crowding our emergency rooms and raising the cost of health care through the stratosphere. Too many of them are criminally inclined, and they now constitute a substantial portion of our prison populations at taxpayer expense. Of course, the genetic damage they do to the continuity of our own people is tremendous whether through changes in carrying capacity, the twelve Americans they murder every day, or through inter-racial mating.
Most of the Third-World immigrants that enter this country work, at least initially, in agricultural fields. The more self-sufficient we become in terms of food, the fewer will come into this country.
Let me paint this in starkly quantifiable terms. According to Dr. Frank Salter’s most recent book(8), the genetic damage from admitting Third World immigrants can be best described in terms of European-American children who are never born. Every Third World immigrant we allow into this country to pick our lettuce, process our chickens or whatnot does the equivalent genetic damage of a European-American child who never gets to be born. There are reasons for this related to both carrying capacity and genetic distance, but the bottom line is that every non-European immigrant we keep out of this country is the equivalent of having one or more children.
This tells us the the single most important aspect of the defense of our genetic continuity needs to be focused on immigration. Providing your own food attacks that problem at its source. So even if you are beyond child-rearing age, growing a garden still helps us have babies by keeping Third-World immigrants out of the United States in the first place.
So let me summarize why you should be growing a garden.
Growing a garden reduces the demand for immigrant labor, thereby reducing healthcare costs and crime. Every Third World immigrant excluded from our country in this fashion has the same genetic impact as having one or more white babies. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
Growing a garden provides the healthiest available food. Let’s leave the processed, mutilated, poisoned CRAP they sell at the supermarket for other people, and grow GOOD food for ourselves.
Growing a garden can yield the equivalent of hundreds of dollars (or more) tax-free income that increases our quality of life, keeps us out of debt and brings us closer to the threshold of middle-class capability. In practice, this means more of our people getting married, and more of us having babies.
No, growing a garden isn’t glamorous. It’s much more viscerally satisfying to tell-off a politician. But growing gardens again, like our grandparents did, can be the sort of slow, steady and inexorable change that gives our people a crucial edge of independence that makes other activism possible. Growing a garden takes money away from middle-men who hate us, and puts it in our own pockets. Every step we take toward self-sufficiency is a step we take away from dependency on a soft-totalitarian system that would punish us economically for our opinions. It makes us more independent, and therefore gives us greater freedom of action and greater freedom of opinion.
I know the web statistics for these podcasts, so I know that over 100,000 people are going to hear me podcast. Certainly, a handful of listeners are hate-filled maniacs with the Southern Poverty Law Center and other neo-Marxist groups looking for something to whine about. But most of our listeners are European-Americans who are concerned about the future. If we all started a garden this year, within three years it would result, according to my analysis, in the following:
-> an aggregate $960 MILLION dollars of annual improvement in living standards
-> 8,500 European-American babies who otherwise would never have been born
-> 3,000 Third-World immigrants who never cross our border
And that is EVERY year from the third year onward!
Just think about it: better standards of living, more children, fewer Third-World immigrants, better nutrition and more care-free activism. And it all comes from some packets of seeds and our willingness to put a spade in the dirt. Resources are listed below. Don’t put this off. It isn’t glamorous, but you’ll thank me later. The immigration invasion that threatens to displace our people started in the garden. WE can end it there. I’m under no illusion that everyone listening today is going to start a garden this year, but if even 10% of us do, the impact will be HUGE.
This has been John Young with European Americans United. Thank you for joining me again today.
Footnotes
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(1) Taraska, Julie (2005), “How to fix America’s crumbling infrastructure,” Metropolis Magazine, August 9, 2005
(2) ASCE 2005 Report Card, http://www.asce.org/reportcard/2005/index.cfm
(3) Darman, David (2006), New Hampshire Public Radio Feb 23, 2006, http://www.nhpr.org/node/10341
(4) WMUR TV, May 15, 2006 http://www.wmur.com/news/9220304/detail.html
(5) http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxfreedomday/
(6) Calculated by applying food inflation to 2006 data from here: http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/cpifoodandexpenditures/data/table15.htm
(7) http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/medincsizeandstate.html
(8) Salter, F. (2006) On Genetic Interests: Family Ethnicity and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration