DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

Last month I reported on the dynamic state of organic agriculture in Vermont, and wondered about the state of our local food supply. I have investigated, and the good news is that it’s better than I thought. The bad news is, it’s still got a long way to go—but the good news is, plenty of people are aware of this and are doing all they can to improve the situation.

Back in the eighties, when I went broke trying to grow organic apples here in middle Tennessee, I was involved with TAGA, the Tennessee Alternative Growers Association. We called it “alternative” because we wanted to be an umbrella group for anyone who wanted to produce food for their area rather than for the national/international food distribution system, whether they were growing organically or not. We were a small group, with a lot of people moving through the organization as they tried, and failed, to make a living growing vegetables, herding cows, goats, and /or chickens, or, in my case, breaking into the apple business. There’s an old saw about a farmer who won a million dollars and was asked what he intended to do with it. “Farm ’till the money runs out” was his reply. Been there, done that.

At the time, I was up against a limited market. If I had ever produced enough apples to, on paper, make a profit, I could tell from my sales that I would have a hard time moving them all in middle Tennessee. Back then, it was big news when Sunshine Grocery, Nashville’s premier hippie organic food store, went from a hole in the wall on Division Street to what seemed like amazingly spacious digs on Belmont Ave., but I couldn’t sell them enough apples to stay in business. I was cut out of selling to major chain groceries by their requirement that I carry a million dollars in product liability insurance. Besides, Tennessee-grown organic apples look funny next to waxed fruit. I went to ”food fairs” at various church parking lots, where, over the course of a few years, I went from selling apples by the bushel to selling apples by the pound as people quit canning, and I occasionally sold at what was then an outer circle of Dante’s Inferno, the Nashville Farmers’ Market, where the main question seemed to be how cheaply I could be persuaded to sell my fruit, and the attitude around organics recalled an orchardist friend of mine who put a sign out on his road advertising ”ORGANIC APPLES” and was deluged with people stopping to buy oranges.

But that was the seventies and the eighties, and now it’s another century, and the organic food sector is the only growing part of the grocery business. Here in Nashville, Wild Oats bought out Sunshine Grocery, opened a store six or seven times the size of Sunshine, and did a land office business. Whole Foods swallowed up Wild Oats and traffic to the organic superstore has exceeded their wildest expectations, while across town the Turnip Truck thrives with a more basic selection of foods and a lower-pressure environment, and Plumgood Foods offers delivery for those who haven’t got time to shop. The Nashville Farmers’ Market has been reinvented, and, though some of the old miasma remains, it is a much more inviting place for farmers and retail customers alike. A new publication called ‘‘Local Table” lists about a hundred local producers of vegetables, fruits, milk, eggs, meat, and grains. A quarter of them are organic. An outfit called Greener Nashville offers networking among all phases of the sustainability movement, from food to Green politics to green building. At another local level, the City of Nashville sponsors community gardens. Eight are up and running, and two more are in the works. There need to be dozens or maybe hundreds more, in my opinion. .

Meanwhile, the word ”organic” has fallen prey to government regulations. Due to the human tendency to cheat, these rules are pretty fussy. An organic grower is supposed to record every time he enters a field and what he does there. Organic certification costs big enough bucks that between that and the record keeping involved, it is sometimes easier for a small grower with an established customer base to forego certification and work with his trusted customers; unfortunately, this lack of certification works against anyone who is trying to sell to a store or processor who wants to be able to advertise its wares as “certified organic.”

I spent an hour and half talking with local food activists Scott Weiss and Laura Button to refresh my overview of the middle Tennessee food situation. The market for local and organic food has expanded, but it is a long way from mature. In Vermont, we see a statewide organic growers association affiliated with a regional organic association. This regional-state partnership helps its members co-ordinate their production, do bulk fertilizer buys, organize a sellers’ co-op (Deep Root Organics) to deal with large wholesalers, create processing facilities, route usable but unsalable produce to charites, and successfully lobby the state government to create incentives for bringing local, organic food into schools and other governmental institutitons. There is nothing like that in Tennessee. TAGA has been replaced by TOGA, the Tennessee Organic Growers’ Association, which is run by and for the farmers, but they are too busy farming to tackle the wider organizational issues. They haven’t even updated their website since before last spring’s conference! Well, maybe by the time you check it out, they will have…..they’ve been busy, like I said, because….

For the most part, demand is far outstripping supply here in middle Tennessee. There are seventeen CSA farms in the area, and all report being overwhelmed. A CSA, in case you didn’t know, is a farm operation that is supported by pre-season payments from its customers. In return for money up front, these customers receive a guaranteed quantity of produce every week, with the variety dependent on what is in season and how abundant it is.

Laura Button, of Journey to Bliss Raw Foods, tells me she can get more local broccoli than she can handle for a few weeks, and then has to bring it in from California or do without. As a gardener, I know you can grow broccoli through a wider season than that, but it takes careful planning. Nobody in this area is quite enough of a broccoli specialist to meet her needs—yet.

On the other end, there are crops going begging. Jeff Poppen, of Long Hungry Creek Farm, a pioneer organic grower in middle Tennessee, can easily grow more winter squash and kale than he can sell. These former staple foods are out of fashion, but some of what is needed is processing—people may not know what to do with a raw squash, but cook it, mash it up with some local butter and honey and serve it like mashed potatoes or bake it in a pie shell, and I’m willing to bet it will be eaten. Kale and other leafy greens may take a major public education program—but getting more people to eat more of them will reduce the cost of health care and the need for Viagra.

There is a new organization in middle Tennessee that aims to provide overview and co-ordination, although it has not fully stepped into those shoes yet. Founded in August of 2006 by a broad coaliton that starts with the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies and the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhoods and runs through the spectrum to Eaton’s Creek Organics and Earth Matters Tennessee, Food Security Partners of Middle Tennessee, according to its website, aims to ”bring people together to create and sustain a secure and healthy food system for their region, from production to consumption. We envision a Middle Tennessee in which all community residents obtain a safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes community self-reliance and social justice.

”For years, many individuals, community organizations, and businesses worked steadily, yet often in isolation, to address the problem of food insecurity in Middle Tennessee. The Food Security Partners connect these dots through networking and professional development opportunities, a focus on catalyzing collaborative projects, a food security awareness campaign, and a yearly summit to cultivate a shared agenda for changing the food system. We have over 100 partners and members who are committed to sharing information and resources to promote a food system that benefits everyone. ”

Wow. I’ve been nervous about the long supply line we’re on and wondering why somebody wasn’t doing something, and I come to find quite a few somebodies are concerned and working on the problem. I wish them success. I’m going to do what I can to make local food sustainability work. It’s going to take a lot of inspiring, educating, and organizing, but having an organizational framework and solid backers is the way to begin. To build on this foundation, they’re going to need all the help they can get. Got some time?

music: adrienne young, plow to the end of the row

The Democratic front runners have prostituted the language again. “Univeral health care,” according to all three of them, now means subsidizing the insurance companies rather than actually providing health care for everyone. They’ve dropped the phrase “single-payer” from their vocabulary, largely at the behest of the insurance companies that support them. Hillary Clinton, for example, had taken over a million dollars in camaign contributions from the insurance industry back last summer, before the campaign had even heated up.

Ironically, this approach—mandating that people buy private insurance and subsidizing the purchase with government money—is the same program Republican candidate Mitt Romney pushed through in Massachusetts. This has not prevented Romney from attacking these copy-cat Democratic proposals as “European-style socialized medicine.”

We should be so lucky. None of the plans that Clinton, Obama, and Edwards are proposing will do anything to curb the profit-driven excesses of America’s unique, Byzantine private insurance/medical complex. They don’t even talk about doing that. They want to feed the vampire, not drive a stake through his heart. They ‘re not going to limit what insurers can charge their government-mandated captive audience. They’re not going to regulate the insurance companies’ ability to restrict choice of doctors, hospitals, and treatments, or rein in their profit-driven tendency to deny claims. The limited expansion of Medicare that some of them propose will become an expensive catch-all for seriously ill people that the private insurance companies don’t want to risk their profits on, and the fat subsidies to private insurance companies that would be generated under the Democrats’ plans would only feed their high overhead and do nothing to bring down the cost of medical care.

These plans are not European socialism. They are corporate welfare, another example of what happens when government is run for the benefit of big business, aka “fascism.” And it’s the Democrats that are proposing it. Magic! Presto chango! They will invoke the warm feeling of “healthcare for all” and thereby funnel billions into their corporate sponsors’ pockets! More of your blood goes to the vampires! Wow! What a trick!

Of course, the Republicans aren’t even that faux-compassionate. Their proposed solution is limited to tax breaks to help people buy health insurance, and if you don’t pay enough taxes for that to make a difference to you, tough beans, you don’t deserve to live. If that makes you want to vote for a Democrat, ”’cause they’re a little better, anyway,” please be informed: you have been hypnotized!

Let’s look at what these proposals really mean. The typical cost of full health insurance for a family of four in the US is $12,000 a year, which is about the gross take-home pay of somebody who makes minimum wage. Median family income in the US is about $43,000 a year, which is not really that much more than minimum wage, because if, as is usually the case, both partners work, that means the average is about $21,000 per person, which works out to about ten bucks an hour—like I said, not that much more than minimum wage, and clearly not enough to afford 12k a year for health coverage.

Under the typical Democratic candidate plan, how much would a median-income family be expected to pay for health insurance? We have two models to work from. One is Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts program, which, he boasts, brought the per person cost of health insurance down from $350 a month to $180 a month. So, for a family of four, that would be an insurance bill cut from $1400 a month—above the national average I just quoted—to $720 a month, about 20% of their pre-tax income. Still not very affordable.

Or we can go from the claim that the average Democratic proposal will pay $2400 per year per person, which is estimated to be half the typical cost of insurance by some reckonings. It’s also about what countries such as France, Canada, and England pay for health care per person per year. (That’s a 2001 link…I had a more recent reference, but lost it…sorry!) Here, it’s less than half what people pay. Well, we all know how poverty-stricken and uncivilized they are in Canada and Europe. Backwaters of medical technology, y’know? But, I digress….So, if the subsidy pays a family about ten thousand dollars a year, does that leave them two, four, or ten thousand dollars to make up out of their own pockets for government-mandated private insurance? You must pay the corporations money or be penalized!? Yow, I’m still digressing….on the lower end, an additional payment of $160-$320 dollars a month might be affordable, except that the reality of most families’ budgets is that they are already going into debt just to survive, and don’t have room for another $160 dollar a month payment.

And, speaking of going into debt, these dim Dems are living in la-la land to think that the government is going to have money to give the insurance companies. When Cheney and Bush started the Iraq war, and the Democrats bought it, they started a fire that was guaranteed to burn up any possibility of increased spending on social needs in this country. I think the Junta did that on purpose, but I’m sorry, Hillary, there ain’t no $110 billion to spend on that. We’ve about maxxed out our Chinese and Saudi credit cards on that war you voted for, dontcha know?

Well, if we can’t afford to spend any more money on healthcare, then how in the world can we afford universal single-payer healthcare?

We can afford universal single-payer healthcare because we’re already paying too much for healthcare. If we cut out the corpulent corporate middlemen, there’s plenty of money already in the system to take care of everybody. According to Physicians for a National Health Program, ”private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume one-third (31 percent) of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $350 billion per year, enough to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans.” Health insurance would be covered by prorated taxes instead of flat-rate insurance premiums, and everyone except the extremely wealthy would end up paying less for health coverage.

Single-payer health coverage is part of the Green Party platform, but the only Democratic candidate who endorses it is Dennis Kucinich—and the party bosses are trying to figure out how to take his seat away from him. Most Americans support single payer healthcare, but our current major political parties are too in thrall to their corporate masters to listen to the people they claim to represent. Time to ring some changes.

music: Rumors of the Big Wave, Echo of a Scream

HR 1955 recently passed the House of Representatives by a pretty emphatic 404-6 vote. This overwhelmingly approved act, entitled ” the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007,” was introduced by Jane Harman, a California Democrat who, like her more famous counterpart Nancy Pelosi, is not the kind of radical new-ager that you might think of when you think California Democrat. Jane is a big fan of the Rand Corporation, which calls itself ”a non-profit institution that addresses the challenges facing the public and private sectors around the world.”

That sounds innocuous, or even positive, enough, right? Umm….guess who calls the shots at Rand….Don Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, and Condi Rice have been involved, and Reagan’s former Secretary of Defense, Frank Carlucci, is currently on the board. Most other board members are people you probably haven’t heard of, because they find it easier to operate out of the limelight, but they are generals and bank presidents and the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal. These are the people who are running the world and intend to keep on doing so, come hell or high water—and, come to think of it, “hell and high water” is a pretty good four-word description of global warming. So, that’s who Jane Harman is flacking for. There’s speculation that HR 1955 was flat-out written by Rand. It wouldn’t be the first time, I’m sure.

This act, according to its preamble, is designed ”To prevent homegrown terrorism, and for other purposes.” The bill establishes a ”National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism. This comission is enjoined to travel around the country, holding hearings and deposing witnesses, for six months to a year, and then propose legislation to address the threat of possible “radicalization” of people legally residing in the US. Democrat Harman has set up the ten-member comission so that its makeup will be predominantly Republican, with four Republican congressmembers, four Democrats, one member appointed by the homeland security Reichsfuhrer, and one by the Uberfuhrer himself.

Just what is “violent radicalization,” you might ask…well, Ms. Harman, or the Rand gang, define it thus: “the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence . . ..” And the bill is aimed at “homegrown terrorism,” which it defines as “the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born [or] raised . . . within the United States . . . to intimidate or coerce the United States, the civilian population . . . or any segment thereof . . . .” Well gee, that sounds like a good thing to do, and certainly Ms. Harman sounds noble enough when she talks about it, saying ”Our plan must be to intervene before a person crosses that line separating radical views from violent behavior, to understand the forces at work on the individual and the community, to create an environment that discourages disillusionment and alienation, that instills in young people a sense of belonging and faith in the future.”

You may have noticed a pattern starting to emerge: “the planned or threatened use of force”…hmm, could they have gone after the Repugs who disrupted the Flordia recount with this? Not likely….Gandhi called his tactics ”truth force,” which is a literal tranlation of ‘’satyagraha.” Putting several thousand people on the Capitol steps and refusing to move could very easily be defined as “force or intimidation” in today’s hyper-paranoid legal climate. On a different tack, most of the Muslims who have been persecuted for ”terrorism” in America since 9-11 were led on by government agents who introduced the idea of employing violence into the groups they formed or joined.

Next piece of pattern: Jane wants ” to intervene before a person crosses that line separating radical views from violent behavior.” In other words, the government is going to suss out peoples’ intentions and prosecute them for that. If I want to waterboard everybody from Mr. Bush on down who says that waterboarding isn’t torture, and then ask them if they’ve changed their minds, am I going to be the subject of a government ”intervention”?

Well, as usual, I’m digressing, but going after people for what the government thinks they’re about to do, especially a government as divorced from reality as this one, sounds pretty repressive to me, especially in light of some of Rand’s other, recent work, in which they said that anti-globalist, anti-corporatist activists (like me and the Green Party and, I hope, you) “challenge the intrinsic qualities of capitalism, charging that in the insatiable quest for growth and profit, the philosophy is serving to destroy the world’s ecology, indigenous cultures, and individual welfare.” Well, they got that right. That’s what we say, and that’s what they’re doing. In this particular study, Rand goes on to claim that we “exist in much the same operational environment as al Qaida.” What the bleep does that mean? Ain’t no Green Party of Waziristan that I ever heard of! Well, they’re crazy. Just because they’re right about some things doesn’t mean they’re right about others.

And I think the next thing they say in their report either proves that they’re paranoid, or that we’re doing a better job than we think. They say that we pose “a clear threat to private-sector corporate interests, especially large multinational business.” Well, gee, I guess that’s a compliment. Sometimes I despair over how ineffective me and my small band of friends seem to be on a daily basis, but the Rand Corporation is taking us seriously! And so, apparently, are the Feds.

It starts to look like no coincidence that the Republican co-sponsor of this bill, Dave Reichert, was Sheriff of King’s County, Washington—that’s Seattle—during the 1999 World Trade Organization demnstrations there.

Just as the ”war on drugs” has used cocaine, heroin, and, more recently, amphetamines as stalking horses for its real purpose—to suppress and demonize the use of marijuana and the stronger psychedelics, so this bill uses the threat of Islamic terrorists to go after anti-corporatist, anti-globalization activists, who are pretty universally opposed to harming other human beings, even rich and obnoxious ones. When we talk about ‘’shocking the bourgeoisie,” we mean psychologically, not with tasers! And really, we’re more interested in seducing people away from their self-destructive ideas, which is more productive than putting them on the defensive, anyway.

It should come as no surprise that the real danger of violence in the US comes from the far right. William Krar was arrested and imprisoned for possession of nearly half a million rounds of ammunition, more than 60 pipe bombs, machine guns, silencers and remote-controlled bombs disguised as briefcases. He also had two pounds of cyanide and pamphlets on how to make chemical weapons, as well as anti-Semitic, anti-black and anti-government books. He was discovered only when a package of forged ID papers and gun permits that he also produced was delivered to the wrong address. For this, he is serving 11 years in prison. Mr. Krar’s case has received almost no publicity.

By contrast, let’s look at Tre Arrow, an environmental activist in Oregon, who was implicated in the arson of $200,000 worth of dump trucks. First, we need to note that there is no direct evidence linking him to this arson. The three individuals who were convicted for the arson gave his name in order to avoid 30-year prison sentences, and Arrow is currently imprisoned in Canada, fighting extradition. As “mastermind” of the plot, the government will likely want to put him away for at least 30 years. Moreover, this case was widely publicized by the Justice Department and the media, unlike Mr. Krar’s.

Now, you could argue that mere possession of illegal firearms and bombs is not the same as actually using them, but to me there’s a big difference between blowing up three dump trucks in the middle of the night when nobody’s around and being caught with lethal weapons and literature that indicates you’re not averse to using them, and that big difference is inversely represented in the sentences handed down or threatened in these two “domestic terrorism” cases. I think this tells us exactly what the government has in mind, and I don’t like it, because it seems like it’s aimed at me and my friends, and aimed at suppressing our vision of a better world—non-corporate, non-hierarchical, and locally self-sufficient.

And sure, this bill has to go through the Senate, which sometimes acts as a brake on the crazier ideas of the House, but it’s going to Joe Lieberman’s Homeland Security Committee, and we all know where Joe stands. And it’s probably unconstitutional, but our current Supreme Court is so expedient about enforcing the fascist agenda that I’m sure they would give it a pass. So look out, people, here comes something big, stupid, red, white, blue, and Democratic all over.

Jackson Browne, Lives in the Balance

Wow, so much going on in the world, so little time to talk about it.

Our “Truth in Strange Places” award this month goes to the CIA for joining the reality-based community and going public with its assesment that Iran has not had a nuclear weapons program for several years. Mr. Bush has denied that he knew this until recently, but his denials have the ring of a man attempting to convince his wife that he has no idea how those lipstick stains got on his collar, or a petulant three-year old declaring that there is too a monster under his bed. We may never know all the arm-twisting that went into this turn of events, but apparently we have US CENTCOM commander Admiral William Fallon to thank for preventing this particular apocalypse. Fallon made it clear during his Senate confirmation hearings that there would be no attack on Iran on his watch, and he appears to have kept his promise. Making this “no risk” risk assesment public has made the neocons’ war drum beat sound pretty hollow, although there is still some chance that Cheney and Bush may find other excuses to whomp the Iranian tar baby a good one.

Meanwhile, the US economy is being managed in such a way that it’s slowly spiralling downwards, rather than vanishing in a puff of smoke. There was a lot of anxiety at the end of November when the Dow approached the 12,500 mark, which is the point when computer-generated selloffs would have kicked in and precipitated a crash, but Abu Dhabai bought a chunk of Citicorp for 7.5 billion and the market’s been happy ever since. The Cheney-Bush administration came up with a window-dressing scheme that sounds good but will only help a small minority of those who are burdened with sub-prime loans. You can bet the troubled banks that made or bought the loans will get better treatment. All the while, the credit freeze set in motion by the collapse of the subprime pyramid scheme continues to spread. New construction and big business deals are grinding to a halt.

Nobody wants the dollar to die, because they’ve all got so many of them; but at the same time, they’re getting to the point where they don’t want any more of them. China had to put the brakes on its banks by telling them not to lend any more money. Sooner or later the hot air that’s keeping the dollar afloat is going to cool. The smart money is leaving the country, folks.

And the smart lungs are going to want to leave the planet in a few decades, if oil- and coal-burning executives and their allies in the US, Chinese, and Indian governments have their way. The Chinese shrug and say it’s our fault they’re building over 50 new coal-fired plants every year, and in the US there’s pie-in-the-sky talk of carbon capture. From Kansas to Shanghai, the CO2 emitting crowd is doing everything they can to keep doing things the way they always have. And if they do, says the IPCC, planetary CO2 levels will go off the charts, and the oceans will absorb so much carbon dioxide that they will become seriously acidic, killing off the plankton, diatoms, and seaweed that contribute about 70% of the planet’s oxygen. That would, duh, make it hard to breathe. Now, that’s the panel’s worst-case scenario, but the plain truth is that the IPCC’s report has been chided as too conservative by many scientists, because much of the data that has come in since the International Comission started writing its report indicates that the meltdown is speeding up. We can continue to live as we have, as long as we don’t mind starving, drowning, or possibly just plain smothering our great-grandchildren. Or, we can make radical changes in the way we live and give them a fighting chance. In this season, when so many people venerate a new-born baby, it’s something to think about.

music: Jackson Browne, Before the Deluge

The Dharma Bums The Writing On the Wall

Terry Allen, Xmas on the Isthmus