Dirk VanSustern’s column in today’s SUNDAY T/A was a nice profile of Peter Diamondstone who is currently a hospital patient in Brattleboro.  I’ve always appreciated Peter’s participation in Vermont elections and the perspective he brings to the discussion.

But I think this year may have been the first time I have voted for Peter (my husband did too).  In addition to not being able to stomach voting for Shumlin and finding Milne not up to the task – we felt Peter Diamondstone’s elemental assessment of where we’re at and why…and who we should be — was more accurate than the trendy-chic political nonsense that passes for political speech these days.  The man has solid convictions that he lives, as opposed to the charlatan we’re subjected at present.  

If you haven’t read this, give it a look.  Some of you may find his life’s stories refreshing even if you had thought you knew him.  And let’s give the man credit for participating rather than what too often is smug sniping from the sidelines .. which too often appears here and elswehere.  As for me, I’m grateful for Peter Diamondstone’s determined voice, and the authenticity that informs it.  

http://timesargus.com/apps/pbc…

Have you noticed Keurig Green Mountain’s new logo?  It looks to me like a green mountain with a black cloud hanging over it.  But alas, they’ve put together a video to illustrate how they arrived at the black-cloud-over-green-mountain logo:

http://www.keuriggreenmountain…

(under two minutes long)

Cheery music bounces along while they talk about “personal beverage systems” and

“technological disruption”  

BTW, there is more chatter this week about a possible big gulp:  CocaCola swallowing the rest of the company…Burp!

( – promoted by Jack McCullough)

While I believe coffee pods/Kcups are anathema to coffee, to the environment and to our pocketbooks, it does my heart good to read this post at CBC yesterday morning:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/busines…

When Keurig’s CEO announced last fall that its next model would feature digital rights management that would render unlicensed pods useless, Pigott took note. He obtained a Keurig 2.0 model even before it was on store shelves and assembled a small team to examine the device and its K-cups to understand the technology.

“We figured it out in an afternoon,” he crows, noting that it took another two months for Club Coffee to develop its own workaround.  

This same battle hasn’t worked for Nespresso in France:

Meantime, Keurig has surely taken note of what happened to Nespresso in France. The government launched a probe into anti-competitive behaviour, and in April Nespresso agreed to stop trying to prevent rivals from making knockoff pods for its machines.

Over 700 comments on this article the first day…and I don’t think more than a couple were pro-Keurig. Methinks the goose that laid the golden egg that was (read ‘has been’) Green Mt Coffee Roasters has chosen that path that wonderboy CEO O’Neill brought with him to Vermont from CocaCola, which is:

more plastic crap,

less taste,

more burgeoning landfills.  

Thanks a lot, Brian.

See previously:

http://www.greenmountaindaily…. and previously,

http://www.greenmountaindaily….

I keep getting directed to “The Contributor” instead of GMD…has it been hacked,

or is this a sign of things to come?

Not my words but this says it better than I could.

“Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine?  We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.  The Machine develops – but not on our lives.  The Machine proceeds – but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.”  ~ E.M. Forster, “THE MACHINE STOPS”

“Insects, birds, mammals, and fish have all been migrating to cooler zones for the past four decades in response to the cataclysmic climate disruption ignited by industrial civilization, but humans are the only organisms inhabiting this blue orb we call Earth who are not altering their behavior.  They live within an energy cocoon that keeps them cool in the summer, warm in the winter, stuffed with massed produced food from mechanized factory farms, and entertained by a virtual world of digital imagery.  As cracks and holes in the Earth’s biosphere grow ever larger, the natural response of capitalist carbon man ensconced within his protective energy shell is to try to put a price tag on what is being burned, i.e. fossil fuels, rather than deal with the deeper root cause of an unsustainable economic system and way of life which demands such exorbitant consumption of resources.”  This comes from Xray Mike79 at http://collapseofindustrialciv…

___

As I don’t know how to insert one, I invite you to view an accompanying graphic:

https://collapseofindustrialci…

I find this website (depending on the day) can be a realistic look at the tawdry mess our civilization finds itself in, and it offers none of the false solutions or techno-saviors we see in mainstream environmental thought today.  The technology will never save us if we can’t be bothered to save ourselves.  Like Xray Mike says…  ” humans are the only organisms inhabiting this blue orb we call Earth who are not altering their behavior.”

While this offers a dark view of the future, I find some peace in these cold, harsh truths.  I continually shrink my footprint and become more resourceful and self-reliant, but I don’t believe there’s any stopping the habits that my fellow Americans have become accustomed to.  We’ve become addicted to the idea that growth is good, big is better, and by all means, purchase the latest toys and keep the (air conditioning, wine, designer shoes, trip to a favorite vacation spot) coming…  

The Freeps gets it right in today’s story about the bundle of rapid-fire lawsuits coming at Green Mountain Keurig.  They currently number 14, a dozen class action suits charging uncompetitive practices plus the original lawsuits filed by Treehouse and Rogers – who both prevailed in their previous lawsuits against Keurig.  http://www.burlingtonfreepress…

If you buy the Keurig 2.0 (coming this fall) you can continue to fork over $50/pound for their Keurig pods, but you’ll no longer be able to use discount pods or your own coffee:

Lisa Smits of Fredericksburg, Va. is one of the hundreds of people complaining in various forums online, saying of the Keurig 2.0 in an email sent to the Burlington Free Press,

“This is like selling a toaster and in small print saying, ‘requires using our exclusive patented Wonder Bread.'”

Keurig’s sparkly new CEO from CocaCola Brian Kelley said not to worry, Keurig would be offering manufacturers of unlicensed pods the opportunity to “come into the system so they can be perfectly brewed too.”  But

Jim Rogers, whose family-held company does about $100 million in sales annually, said he wasn’t interested in joining the ranks of licensed manufacturers.

“We want to compete,” he said.

“We think we can kick their butt.”

A pretrial conference in the TreeHouse lawsuit is scheduled for May 1.

Also today, Motley Fool dumps a big bucket of ice on Keurig’s OTHER new product coming this fall, Keurig Cold.  http://www.fool.com/investing/…

The great little coffee company looks like it got too big and greedy.  Its too bad they didn’t remove “Green Mountain” from their name when they added Keurig – so it didn’t have to get smeared far and wide.

Previously..

http://www.greenmountaindaily….

Censored… What a bunch of wimps!

Threatened by someone expressing a simple opinion.

Big men..Maybe I should promote guns…then I’d get all the space I’d ever want.

( – promoted by Sue Prent)

I’ve held a small bit of Green Mt Coffee Roasters stock for about 10 years, purchased because it was a local startup that bubbled up and because it had socially conscious policies for employees and coffee growers.   It may still be a good deal for coffee growers and employees, but the company has morphed into an unrecognizable corporate entity that I find repugnant.

GMCR should no longer be thought of as a coffee company (as is reflected in its new name “Keurig Green Mountain Inc.”)  Rather it is a plastic-and-profit-delivery-pipeline. The coffee is okay but lift the curtain on that green mountain image and you’ll find the very Wolf of Wall Street presiding with his pack of banking/industry execs who have come on board as directors.  [Hinda-what the hell happened?]

I attended the GMCR stockholders’ meeting in Burlington this week out of curiosity.  The contrast from 8 years ago was staggering.  At that time their green-guy told me they were near to solving their recycling problem (see below).  In the meantime, the new regime has arrived.  Meet the new boss, Brian Kelley, golden boy newly from Coca-Cola and Jack Welch’s General Electric.  This guy drips humble and nice until he begins his presentation at which time his voice changes and he seemingly salivates describing the brave new (stranglehold) world of beverage delivery.  His pitch would have been hysterically funny as farce had it not been dead serious.

What’s the big deal?   I had a glimmer of  hope that they might’ve made progress on their plastic K-cup-as-trash problem.  K-Cups, those small and growing bigger plastic cups which are cranked out at over 6 billion/year and which hopefully (according to CEO Kelley’s view) would be growing exponentially thereafter.   They are unrecyclable.  One sweet old lady from NH piped up with “well we pull out the contents and recycle OURS, so you CAN do it!”  She did pull contents out of her K-cups and put them in her “recycling bin” but her husband admitted to me that they can’t actually be recycled, among other reasons because they are unworkable at materials recycling facilities.  Rather they go to landfills and assuredly find their way to dead seabird bellies and Pacific Ocean plastic gyres.  Some office-sized pods are incinerated, those in their “Grounds to Grow On” scheme where  you can pay $50 to buy a carton for your office and then ship it to Findlay Ohio, where it’s emptied of coffee (composted) and on to the incinerator.  

The at-or-near-cost price of Keurig machines is the vehicle used to get you hooked on the pods, which IS GMCR’s product; Keurig comprises 90% of their business now and is growing.  A pound of GMCR goes for around $12 in a bag, but in pod form that pound of coffee might cost you around $50. Today’s enlightened citizen can flip a K-cup of his or her choice into the shiny machine, press a button and poof, coffee.  Imagine if they should succeed in invading Italy…

50 K-Cups go to the landfill for every pound of ground coffee consumed!  Are ya listening Moretown and  Coventry?

There’s more.  Near the end of the presentation Mr. Kelly mentioned that GMCR’s coming “2.0” model Keurig will be able to harvest your habits.  NSA-like, they will collect information on what you brew, when you brew it, what time of day, and more.  When asked to elaborate he got a little hesitant and said something about your cell phone lying on the kitchen counter…  

Coffee will become less important in the future;  Keurigs already make tea, cocoa, and hot cider pods but will soon be delivering Campbell’s soup, Coca Cola and whatever other beverage – cold or hot – you desire.   All heated or cooled in plastic.

Some of you might be sensible enough to have one of those re-fillable filter-thingies that you can fill with your own coffee and use in your Keurig.  My advice to you is to hang onto these models, because going forward  (due to DRM protocols and RFID technology) it appears that you will not be allowed you to use them or any pod other than GMCR’s (oops–Keurig Green Mountain Inc’s). In mid-February a company known as Treehouse Foods brought a lawsuit against GMCR for this and other abuses of law, monopoly, etc.  GMCR  Keurig Green Mountain, Inc. – had already pre-emptively sued competitors because they just can’t have other coffee in their machines.  [It’s a 141-page lawsuit].  

I wish that on Monday they had removed “Green Mountain” from their new corporate name, as this company’s values bear little resemblance to Robert Stiller’s proud, progressive little company in Waterbury.  Perhaps someone should create an online cemetery for those once-green-mountain-ish companies like this and Ben and Jerry’s who went down the rabbit hole.  

Vermont has been known for going its own way, for following a tradition which includes notions such as

-small is good,

-local is good,

-community based solutions

Small, local community solutions when spread town by town can become regional and eventually statewide solutions.  Thrift, recycling, reuse, CSAs, farmers’ markets are easily embraced in Vermont because that’s how we do things here.  “Doing without” is a guiding principle for many of us today.  

Yet in a few short years,

-big

-international  

-corporate solutions

seem to be replacing our Vermont tradition of scale and self-reliance.   Instead of leading the fight against climate change by example of what we do best – small, local, community – we appear ready to throw in our lot with big, global and top-down, just like those ‘less enlightened’ states we like to criticize.  Seemingly ‘easy fixes’ such as industrial wind farms have replaced what our Vermont ancestors would have chosen if facing this issue today – smaller, community-generated and distributed energy solutions and reductions that would encourage buy-in from most if not all Vermonters.  

If we want to lead the fight against climate change, I propose we do it by following our traditional scale and behaviors – with diverse, ingenuitive solutions that not only bring us together but provide a REAL EXAMPLE for others to follow.  Solutions where each of us is asked to be part of the answer rather than sacrifice some of us to an “easy” solution.  We’ve done that many times… why not do it now?  

GO SMALL, VERMONT.