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inheritingthetrade.com
highboldtage.wordpress.com
fooddemocracy.wordpress.com
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The War on Bugs
Why We Need to Rise up Against Industrial Agriculture (Again)
by Will Allen 5/3/8
alternet.org/healthwellness/83310
chelseagreen.com/2007/items/waronbugs
...impact that commercialization has had. In the early nineteenth century as the American population grew rapidly, demands on crop output increased. Seeing an opportunity to play upon fears from market demand, chemical companies declared war on...bugs. With precision, pesticide manufacturers delivered a “shock and awe” media campaign, that can only be paralleled to the current blitzkrieg from today’s pharmaceutical companies. Bugs were the threat to the American dream – and there was a cure available to every farmer available in spray, granule, dust, or systemic form that could be applied to your crops...advertisers, editors, scientists, large scale farmers, government agencies, and even Dr. Seuss, colluded to convince farmers to use deadly chemicals, hormones, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in an effort to pad their wallets and control the American farm enterprise...consumers and activists have struggled against toxic food...the time to stop poisoning our food, water, air, and ourselves is now!
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farmsnotarms.org
homelessgardenproject.org
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"routine emissions" "from nuclear power plants"
mothballmillstone.org
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peaceblaster.com/?p=202
...Behind the hunger, behind the riots, are so-called free-trade agreements, and the brutal emergency-loan agreements imposed on poor countries by financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund...
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Judy Wicks, founder of the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia; founder of The White Dog Café whitedogcafe.com
...her notion that the strength of her business relied upon the quality and sustainability of its locally grown ingredients. Envisioning how strengthening relationships among independent, community-rooted enterprises could inspire broad and profound cultural change, Wicks joined the Social Venture Network and co-founded the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) in 2001. She is currently writing a book about The White Dog Café and local living economies called “Good Morning, Beautiful Business.” (See www.livingeconomies.org.)
...three community-based events that have happened recently: the Green Forum on Vacant Land Revitalization (held at the Pittsburgh Project in November 2006), the first Urban Farming Lecture Series in Spring 2006 (hosted at Carnegie Mellon University and organized by the Urban Farming Initiative) and the Cooperate Pittsburgh Grassroots Forum (held at the Friends Meeting House in Shadyside in May 2007. Look for Grassroots Forum’s Link on www.holisticpittsburgh.com). The co-organizers and co-sponsors of this latest lecture series and workshop include Carnegie Mellon University, Office of the Vice Provost and the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, the Urban Ecology Collaborative, the Urban Redevelopment Authority, Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, the Penn State Cooperative Ext., Allegheny County, Grow Pittsburgh, the Urban Farming Initiative, the
Green Block Farm Project
theGreenBough.com
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The Myth of America's "booming economy"
by Bill Blum 1999-2000
(Written 1999-2000, but can be applied to any other period in which we're assured that the US economy is booming. Indeed, most of what follows can serve as a descriptive list of America's huge underclass at any time.)members.aol.com/bblum6/booming
...the world's richest country ...
But ... but what about ... what about ...
* the working poor, the millions who toil at full-time jobs, yet remain below the official poverty level (an unrealistically low figure to begin with), their real purchasing power below 1979 levels
* the husbands and wives each having to work full time so that together they manage to rise a little above the poverty level
* the millions forced to surrender 30 to 70 percent of their paycheck for rent
* those living in severely substandard housing
* the more than a million families who do not have indoor bathrooms or hot-and-cold running water
* the unemployed (the real amount, not the fudged figures announced to the public)
* those who want and need a full-time job, but can only get a part-time job, minus benefits
* those who want and need a permanent job, but can only get a temporary job, minus benefits
* the underemployed -- college graduates and those with advanced degrees working at relatively menial jobs with no
connection to their studies
* the more than 43 million without any health insurance
* the even greater number without dental insurance
* the further millions with inadequate health insurance, including those with Medicare and Medicaid
* the elderly who spend half their income for health care and prescriptions
* the elderly who have to choose between prescriptions and food; (about half the prescriptions written go unfilled because
many elderly people literally have to make this choice)
* the elderly who purchase cat and dog food, but don't own any pets
* the millions with inadequate sick leave or maternity leave, or none at all
* those -- the great majority of employees -- who are lucky to get two weeks vacation, compared to the European norm of five weeks
* those forced to choose between heat and sufficient food in the winter
* those literally dying on sweltering summer days because
they can't afford an air conditioner or are concerned
about their electricity bill
* those whose phone, gas or electricity has been turned off for
non-payment
* the more than a million people who don't even own a phone
* the homeless
* those one paycheck or one illness or one divorce away from homelessness
* those living five to ten people in a one-bedroom apartment
* the millions who go to bed hungry at least part of every month; (A January 2000 report from the Center on Hunger and
Poverty at Tufts University stated that 30 million Americans
worry about where they will get their next meals.)
* those frightened by the welfare reform law of 1996 into not applying for food stamps, welfare or Medicaid
* the 1.8 million souls in prisons and jails
* those who have enlisted in the military to escape dead-end poverty
* those who want to go to college but can't afford to
* those who go to college at the cost of a huge debt hanging round their neck for years
* the illegal aliens working as semi-slaves in sweatshops
* the almost 20 percent of American households who are broke, with
a net worth of zero or less, more than double the number of 30
years ago
* those living on their credit cards, making only the minimum payments each month, as the exorbitant interest piles up year after year
* the more than 50,000 businesses which filed for bankruptcy last year
* the million five hundred thousand individuals who filed for
bankruptcy last year
* the numerous cleaning women and maids who spend four hours on a
bus each day to and from their minimum-wage job
* the middle-class people who maintain their standard of living by working 50, 60, 70 hours per week, by their choice or their employer's dictate, plus a daily two- or three-hour commute, returning home totally wiped out and overstressed
* those hanging on to jobs they hate -- jobs making them sick -- only because of the health insurance and pension
* those forced by their employers to pay more and more of their insurance and pension costs
* those living only on social security
* those living only on welfare
* the more than a million Native Americans living on
reservations, for whom much of the above has to be multiplied
What's booming are soup kitchens and homeless shelters. And a
growing majority of those waiting in line for a meal or a bed
are actually employed.
Written by William Blum,
author of
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II
and
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (http://members.aol.com/superogue/homepage.htm)
A companion piece to the above
Dancing on the electric grid
By Per Fagereng
Picture this standard experiment in psychology: A group
of rats is placed on an electric grid and the voltage is slowly
increased. After a while the rats feel a burning tingle in
their feet. The experimenters up the voltage some more, and watch
the rats dance and bite each other.
The experimenters are seeking knowledge, and the rats'
pain is presumably worth it. The experimenters don't blame the
rats for fighting each other, or punish the more aggressive ones.
They know that individuals react to pain in different ways.
Now picture the economic terrain as a different kind of
pain grid. Instead of electric shocks, the inhabitants experience
job loss, higher prices, less pay, overwork, polluted
neighborhoods and so on. Controlling the grid are not
psychologists, but CEOs and bankers. Instead of knowledge,
they are seeking profit. And so they up the pain, but not
because they want to hurt people. They are really trying to up
their profits, and the pain is a side effect.
After a while people on the grid do nasty things to
each other, everything from domestic violence to immigrant-bashing
to crime. Unlike the rats, the people get blamed for their
misbehavior...
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hydrogennow.org
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new energy environment extraterrestrial "Stephen Bassett" "Alfred Webre"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Webre
...we are on an isolated planet in the midst of a populated, evolving, highly organized inter-planetary, inter-galactic, multi-dimensional Universe society...on a planet that has been quarantined...now being given an opportunity to join the rest of the spiritually evolved Universe Society in peace, thus an opportunity to avoid environmental global self-destruction or global self-destruction through war...
...we must become "galactic citizens"...
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http://exopolitics.blogs.com/exopolitics/2007/10/kucinich-sees-u.html
...spiritual adviser Chris Griscom, whom MacLaine featured in her then-best-selling book, "Dancing in the Light," describing how Griscom helped her communicate with trees...
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From:
Why You Shouldn't Spend that 'Stimulus' Check
by Max Keiser, Huffington Post. Posted May 1, 2008.
alternet.org/workplace/84019
...America does not have a hard-money economy, it's a debt-based fiat currency economy. All the money in circulation in America has been borrowed and then re-lent. So borrowing more money ($168 billion for the stimulus package) and then re-lending it to Americans, as Bush is doing, only increases the debt load and debases the value of the currency outstanding (against a backdrop of stagnant wages and minuscule interest rates for savers)...
...America's debt problems won't go away. Every dollar spent adds debt and spawns more fiat currency issuance which has the effect of decreasing the purchasing power of the U.S. dollars in your pocket. Bush tries to make up the difference by borrowing even more; borrowing 340 million a day to fund the war and close to 3 billion a day to cover U.S. operating expenses, not to mention Wall Street borrowing over $30 billion a day...
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informationclearinghouse.info
News You Won't Find On CNN
30/04/08
"Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce...and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not be told how periods of inflation and depression originate."
~James Abram Garfield (19 November 1831 - 19 September 1881) was the 20th President of the United States (1881), and the second U.S. President to be assassinated. Within weeks of releasing this statement President Garfield was assassinated, after only six months and fifteen days in office.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_A._Garfield
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"The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable".
~James Garfield 1831-1881, 20th U.S. President
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"The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones."
~William Faulkner
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"We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid".
~William Faulkner
