With food riots taking place all over the world and food prices continuing to rise, more people are asking, ‘in a world with so many resources, why is our most basic need so hard to meet?’

In “Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System” author, Raj Patel, says he has the answer. Patel, who used to work for the World Bank, the WTO, and the United Nations, has become a harsh critic of the way those organizations set policies that he says lead to increasing hunger and food insecurity around the world.

Listen to this discussion produced by the National Radio Project program “Making Contact”

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Here’s some excellent reading by Bill McKibben on his book Deep Economy, one of the more interesting and entertaining of environmentalist writers, who also happens to help effectively link localism in media and community building into the environmental picture. Plus, one of the better aspects to his writing and his analysis is the rationally hopeful nature of it.

Read After Growth, the introductory chapter from the book.

Not the rather duplicitous Soviet Lenin, who unleashed a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (with emphasis on ‘dictatorship’), but the English musician/artist John Lennon. This is a wonderful little piece from an audio recording originally made by a 14-year old Canadian kid who snuck into John & Yoko’s hotel room during their famous 1969 Montreal Bed In For Peace (during which time the international anthem “Give Peace a Chance” was recorded). Many of the points touched on here by John are ones he would make more than once, particularly during that time period, but rarely with the radical clarity that he expresses them during this particular interview.

Listen to the interview Here (along with accompanying video graphics on YouTube)

War Is Over (If We Want It).

(A nice posting by the folks at the Center for Digital Storytelling…)

Dear Friends,

We learned today of the loss of Studs Terkel, author, radio journalist, humanitarian, and the inspiration for much of our work in life story. On behalf of the Center for Digital Storytelling, we extend our condolences to his family, his friends and his colleagues around the world.

May 16, the International Day for Sharing Life Stories was chosen, in part, because it is Studs Terkel’s Birthday. We felt it critical to honor his life, while he was still around, able to share the idea that an entire world holds a debt of gratitude for his work. Just days away from the likely election of Barack Obama as U.S. President, Studs was part of a larger progressive Chicago community that was the soil for Obama’s rise as a political leader. I am sure he would have like to have made that day, we will think of him when we celebrate.

At 96, he has left behind an enormous volume of work, scanning 8 decades of work as an interviewer, more than a dozen publications.

He has been described as a champion of underdogs, but his contribution, like many of his generation of social change activists, was his humble, but unwavering, sense of justice. He listened to thousands of interviews, from world famous celebrities to local workers, but his ear was always attuned to a sense of righting wrongs, of giving voice to the oppressed.

We will miss him, and will continue to dedicate our efforts to his memory.

“Why are we born? We’re born eventually to die, of course. But what happens between the time we’re born and we die? We’re born to live.”

“One is a realist if one hopes.”

- Studs Terkel, 1912-2008

A nice Chicago Tribune article on the life and history of Studs Terkel

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was/is one of the most important figures in the formative
development my political consciousness and humanitarian His epic documentation and
unsparingly lucid indictment of the crimes of Soviet communism, most notably with the
publication of The Gulag Archipeligo, will forever stand as both witness to the criminals who perpetrated them along with their complicit accomplices in the west who for ideological reasons enabled or ignored them. The three part ‘Gulag’ series will stand as one of the more courageous and dedicated efforts in realization of Ghandi’s maxim that what one must do is to ‘make the injustice visible.’

In recognition of Solzhenitsyn’s passing, Truthout re-published his famous and unfortunately still relevant speech to Harvard University from 1978.

This address is filled with highlights and salient points too numerous to excerpt. You can read the complete speech transcript Here.

I’ve also posted a review on the Gulag books from The New York Times dated from 1978. Some interesting stuff here, particularly the take on how no resistance movement can succeed without the harnessing of public opinion, which state power is always relentlessly trying to manipulate or suppress. Something to keep in mind as ongoing battles continue to be waged over the state of our own media and communications systems in our country.

But Solzhenitsyn harbors no illusions about what was possible in the way of resistance. He has set himself the task in “Gulag III” of setting down the history of the protests, hunger strikes, escapes and mutinies that occurred, but he knows very well how little they could achieve without the support of public opinion–something the Soviet state waged constant war on. “Without that behind us,” he writes, “we can protest and fast as much as we like and they will laugh in our faces!” And yet the protests persisted–and still persist–because human dignity required them.

Read The Review

This is an excellent conversation by Tariq Ali and David Barsamian on the ongoing situation regarding Pakistan, American relations towards it, and most importantly, some historical background as to some of the reasons why what is transpiring there today is in fact doing so.

Listen to this discussion produced by the National Radio Project program “Making Contact”

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This from Patricia Cohen writing for The New York Times touches on a sense of things that has bothered me for some time, but was not sure how much of it was simply my own limited perceptions. Unfortunately, the condition seems to have been noticed by others, as well.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she [Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason”] said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”

We’re doomed.

Read The Complete Article

Rick Shenkman follows up with his report “How Ignorant Are We?”

Looks like the answer is unfortunately pretty ignorant.

George Monbiot, one of the most intelligent and lucid writers today delivers these insightful and sobering questions and analysis of the state of the condition we are collectively in today.

Who will persuade us to act? However strong the opposition parties’ policies appear to be, they cannot be sustained unless the voters move behind them. We won’t be prompted by the media. The BBC drops Planet Relief for fear of breaching its impartiality guidelines: heaven forbid that it should come out against mass death. But it broadcasts a programme - Top Gear - that puts a match to its guidelines every week, and now looks about as pertinent as the Black and White Minstrel Show.

The schedules are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none of them are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they don’t offend the interests of business or the pampered sensibilities of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and advertising, are hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy and against the biosphere.

It seems to me that we are already pushing other people ahead of us down The Road. As the biosphere shrinks, McCarthy describes the collapse of the protagonist’s core beliefs. I sense that this might be happening already: that a hardening of interests, a shutting down of concern, is taking place among the people of the rich world. If this is true, we do not need to wait for the forests to burn or food supplies to shrivel before we decide that civilisation is in trouble.

Read The Full Report

On a related issue is Monbiot’s excellent work from 2006 on ‘The Denial Industry’, the corporate PR efforts to disseminating distracting, misleading and sometimes downright false information into the public sphere in regards to climate science.

While they have been most effective in the United States, the impacts of the climate-change deniers sponsored by Exxon and Philip Morris have been felt all over the world. I have seen their arguments endlessly repeated in Australia, Canada, India, Russia and the UK. By dominating the media debate on climate change during seven or eight critical years in which urgent international talks should have been taking place, by constantly seeding doubt about the science just as it should have been most persuasive, they have justified the money their sponsors have spent on them many times over. It is fair to say that the professional denial industry has delayed effective global action on climate change by years, just as it helped to delay action against the tobacco companies.

Read more Here

(This isn’t so much an issue of government control of agriculture as it is of business’s control of our government - USTV Media)

My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables)
By Jack Hedin
Rushford, Minn.
New York Times Contributor
March 1, 2008

If you’ve stood in line at a farmers’ market recently, you know that the local food movement is thriving, to the point that small farmers are having a tough time keeping up with the demand.

But consumers who would like to be able to buy local fruits and vegetables not just at farmers’ markets, but also in the produce aisle of their supermarket, will be dismayed to learn that the federal government works deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement from expanding. And the barriers that the United States Department of Agriculture has put in place will be extended when the farm bill that House and Senate negotiators are working on now goes into effect.

As a small organic vegetable producer in southern Minnesota, I know this because my efforts to expand production to meet regional demand have been severely hampered by the Agriculture Department’s commodity farm program. As I’ve looked into the politics behind those restrictions, I’ve come to understand that this is precisely the outcome that the program’s backers in California and Florida have in mind: they want to snuff out the local competition before it even gets started.

Last year, knowing that my own 100 acres wouldn’t be enough to meet demand, I rented 25 acres on two nearby corn farms. I plowed under the alfalfa hay that was established there, and planted watermelons, tomatoes and vegetables for natural-food stores and a community-supported agriculture program.

All went well until early July. That’s when the two landowners discovered that there was a problem with the local office of the Farm Service Administration, the Agriculture Department branch that runs the commodity farm program, and it was going to be expensive to fix.

The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.

I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables - if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.)

In my case, that meant I paid my landlords $8,771 - for one season alone! And this was in a year when the high price of grain meant that only one of the government’s three crop-support programs was in effect; the total bill might be much worse in the future.

In addition, the bureaucratic entanglements that these two farmers faced at the Farm Service office were substantial. The federal farm program is making it next to impossible for farmers to rent land to me to grow fresh organic vegetables.

Why? Because national fruit and vegetable growers based in California, Florida and Texas fear competition from regional producers like myself. Through their control of Congressional delegations from those states, they have been able to virtually monopolize the country’s fresh produce markets.

That’s unfortunate, because small producers will have to expand on a significant scale across the nation if local foods are to continue to enter the mainstream as the public demands. My problems are just the tip of the iceberg.

Last year, Midwestern lawmakers proposed an amendment to the farm bill that would provide some farmers, though only those who supply processors, with some relief from the penalties that I’ve faced - for example, a soybean farmer who wanted to grow tomatoes would give up his usual subsidy on those acres but suffer none of the other penalties. However, the Congressional delegations from the big produce states made the death of what is known as Farm Flex their highest farm bill priority, and so it appears to be going nowhere, except perhaps as a tiny pilot program.

Who pays the price for this senselessness? Certainly I do, as a Midwestern vegetable farmer. But anyone trying to do what I do on, say, wheat acreage in the Dakotas, or rice acreage in Arkansas would face the same penalties. Local and regional fruit and vegetable production will languish anywhere that the commodity program has influence.

Ultimately of course, it is the consumer who will pay the greatest price for this - whether it is in the form of higher prices I will have to charge to absorb the government’s fines, or in the form of less access to the kind of fresh, local produce that the country is crying out for.

Farmers need the choice of what to plant on their farms, and consumers need more farms like mine producing high-quality fresh fruits and vegetables to meet increasing demand from local markets - without the federal government actively discouraging them.

Jack Hedin is a farmer.

George Monbiot of the Guardian U.K. reminds us Here of a little history lesson while calling it like it is in regards to the ever-increasing dangers being posed by global climate change.

Though one can applaud Al Gore’s recent efforts on behalf of crusading for awareness regarding the necessity of confronting man-made climate change on our planet, confronting the unpleasant truth of the systemic nature of American intransigence in the face of making the necessary efforts and sacrifices towards resolving these problems also involves some serious responsibility and culpability on Mr. Gore’s part. He also identifies in one line the single most important reason why wholesale political change in the United States isn’t simply a matter of partisan political interest, but is in fact a necessary step towards the survival of life on planet Earth as we know it.

America will keep on wrecking climate talks as long as those with vested interests in oil and gas fund its political system

‘After 11 days of negotiations, governments have come up with a compromise deal that could even lead to emission increases. The highly compromised political deal is largely attributable to the position of the United States, which was heavily influenced by fossil fuel and automobile industry interests. The failure to reach agreement led to the talks spilling over into an all-night session.”

These are extracts from a press release by Friends of the Earth. So what? Well it was published on December 11 - I mean to say, December 11, 1997. The US had just put a wrecking ball through the Kyoto protocol. George Bush was innocent; he was busy executing prisoners in Texas. Its climate negotiators were led by Albert Arnold Gore.

The European Union had asked for greenhouse gas cuts of 15% by 2010. Gore’s team drove them down to 5.2% by 2012. Then the Americans did something worse: they destroyed the whole agreement.

Most of the other governments insisted that the cuts be made at home. But Gore demanded a series of loopholes big enough to drive a Hummer through. The rich nations, he said, should be allowed to buy their cuts from other countries. When he won, the protocol created an exuberant global market in fake emissions cuts. The western nations could buy “hot air” from the former Soviet Union. Because the cuts were made against emissions in 1990, and because industry in that bloc had subsequently collapsed, the former Soviet Union countries would pass well below the bar. Gore’s scam allowed them to sell the gases they weren’t producing to other nations. He also insisted that rich nations could buy nominal cuts from poor ones. Entrepreneurs in India and China have made billions by building factories whose primary purpose is to produce greenhouse gases, so that carbon traders in the rich world will pay to clean them up.

The result of this sabotage is that the market for low-carbon technologies has remained moribund. Without an assured high value for carbon cuts, without any certainty that government policies will be sustained, companies have continued to invest in the safe commercial prospects offered by fossil fuels rather than gamble on a market without an obvious floor.

This is all pretty depressing, and shameful, stuff.

Read The Full Report