Passionate Letter to a Maine Newspaper on the Introduction of a Maine State Bank

Editor,

Brunswick Maine Times Record

Sir,

I spent a year in Brunswick two years ago. At the time you published my letter about a young lady at a giant home improvement store in Topsham who could make her own decisions on the floor without waiting for a supervisor.

I counted that as part of this ‘happiness’ we all have the right to pursue, since it made me happy and I’m sure it did her a power of good, too - we’ve been letting ‘supervisors’ make our decisions for far too long.

What with the rippling effects of the 2008 crash and the empty hole where the Naval Air Station used to be, I did not find many happy people in Brunswick – she was one of a very few, with a couple of others at the Salvation Army Store and a small diner – so I put a shoulder to Rosa Scarlettli’s campaign for governor in the hope that a Maine State Bank might happen.

She lost in a one third majority split vote but Portland’s Diane Russell heard the call: Urge everyone you know to support her Bill LD 1452 if it isn’t law yet!

If you’re on the Internet, just look up Bank of North Dakota and discover why a state with 600 000 people ended 2010 with a billion-dollar surplus while Maine and every other state in the US ended up with a deficit and ‘austerity’ for the vulnerable – school children and the elderly.

The Pursuit of Happiness isn’t easy – just to get on that road you have to look hard at what unhappiness is so you know it when you find the right stuff.

The “Preppers” found it, by the way.

Start growing your own food NOW, and get into natural health remedies – the pharmaceuticals you buy here cost 90% less in the rest of the world and they are not really very good for you, because to make money, the health insurance industry needs you to be continually sick.
Often called “Divide and Rule”, the politics of economics also demands never-ending wars to fuel the world’s most lucrative business, so dump any shares you have in the defence industry – the Military Industrial Complex Ike warned us about – because to make money, it destroys its planes, tanks and guns in order to make and sell more of them. People are also disposable ‘collateral’.

You won’t become happy right away, but  the road to that famous Constitutional Right to Pursue Happiness begins by just taking the first step.

Makes you think, don’t it?

Tom Dennen

Durban, South Africa

Born in Boston, Tom Dennen is a former marketing and media consultant to corporations in South Africa including Unilever, the South African Port Authority, the Durban City Council Tourism Board, the Durban International Convention Center, the University of KwaZulu Natal, and ad agency TBWA Worldwide.

Current academic qualifications include an economic case study on Predatory Banking in South Africa (Chapter Six of the Konrad Adenauer Manual on Investigative Journalism, published in 2010, available on line and in most southern African University book stores).

Currently studying alternatives (like Iceland and North Dakota) to debt-based fractional reserve economies, writes about “War as a profitable Economic Policy” in relation to global Food Insecurity and investigates related Permaculture solutions.

Grand Theft, Planet” is available free:  whatreallyhappened.com/grandtheft)