Costs killing Maine farmers

By Sharon Kiley Mack
Friday, April 25, 2008 - Bangor Daily News

LEVANT, Maine - Dairy farmer Brian Call doesn’t have a fancy milking parlor. He hand-carries the portable milking machine to each of his 30 cows, wiping their teats with pages ripped from an old telephone book. “Another way to save money,” he comments.

****

In her letter to the congressional delegation and Maine’s dairy industry members, Gibson wrote, “People need to be concerned that small farms and small businesses are closing their doors, as they are the backbone of our economy and they fuel rural communities. We are becoming ghost farms and ghost towns, the end of an era and the start of a vacuum to be filled by monopolies, a form of economic totalitarianism.”

By telling her family’s personal financial story, Gibson hopes solutions will be found to save Maine’s small, family farms.

“I will tell you that we realize no profit from our dairy farm, nothing,” she said.

more

Peak Farmers: A Guest Post by Elaine Solowey

****

Joel Stein, the Angelino columnist said just last fall. “Agribusiness feeds us. Farmers are obsolete. They are one step above fire starters and cave painters”.

Now with food prices rising, food riots in 35 countries as of this writing and the concerns about peak oil, peak food, peak phosphorus, peak fertilizer finally crashing into mainstream consciousness it is surprising to me that no one connects the current crisis with a peak that was passed long ago.

Peak farmers.

But that peak should not be a surprise to anyone.

For the last 100 years there has been a world-wide effort to get rid of farmers…
Some were eliminated for political reasons the way that Stalin starved the Ukrainians to death and shipped the kulaks off to Siberia.

Some were driven off their land by the vast illegal enclosure actions of wealthy landowners in South American nations.

The Nazis in WWII swept up the farming inhabitants of Russian and Polish and Jewish villages and worked them to death in the factories that fed their war machine.

Millions of farmers were displaced by dams financed by the World Bank

Millions more were removed from agriculture by the policies of the WTO.

Some had their farms were taxed out from under them and the land tuned over to developers who built cheap houses and strips malls on it.

And more were eliminated by agricultural globalization, the belief that every farmer should specialize and produce as much of their single product as possible (to the neglect of everything else) - then we would all merrily cross- ship these things to each other for ever.

Still others were “sanitized” out of business. The small dairies and animal husbandry operations could not afford the large and expensive machines needed to raise animals and process milk and meat under the rules of “modern” hygiene.

These small operations were declared to be inefficient and dirty, never mind the fact that modern “hygienic” production units for meat and milk are nightmarishly cruel, filthy, and squalid. (Indeed, a backyard pigpen or chicken coop is a relative paradise compared the confining “crush” pens of the modern pig farm or the cage batteries of the modern poultry house.)

So farmers were eliminated, one after another, by murder, displacement, bankruptcy, by taxes that would not let land be passed from generation, by on- farm prices that left farmers unable to feed their own families, by subsidies that favored farms beyond human scale.

more

Independence Days: My First Challenge

It is so desperately needed that we do declare our independence from the globalizing, totalitarian, destructive, toxic, dangerous agriculture that destroys our future and our power and pays to destroy democracy.  And so, when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for people to divorce themselves from a system that has become destructive, and thus:

We the people, in order to form a more perfect union of human and nature, establish justice and ensure food sovreignty, provide for the common nutrition, promote the general welfare and ensure the blessings of liberty, for ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this constitution for the United Food Sovereign People of the World.

***

I challenge myself and all of you to work on creating food Independence Days this year - that all of us try to do one thing every day  to create Food Independence.  That means in each day or week, we would try to:

1. Plant something.  Obviously, those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere and having spring are doing this anyway.  But the idea that you should plant all week and all year is a good reminder to those of us who sometimes don’t get our fall gardens or our succession plantings done regularly.  Remember, that beet you harvested left a space - maybe for the next one to get bigger, but maybe for a bit of arugula or a fall crop of peas, or a cover crop to enrich the soil.  Independence is the bounty of a single seed that creates an abundance of zucchini, and enough seeds to plant your own garden and your neighbor’s.

****

3. Preserve something.  Sometimes this will be a big project, but it doesn’t have to be.  It doesn’t take long to slice a couple of tomatoes and set them on a screen in the sun, or to hang up a bunch of sage for winter.  And it adds up fast.  The time you spend now is time you don’t have to spend hauling to the store and cooking later.  Independence is eating our own, and cutting the ties we have to agribusiness.

4. Prep something.  Hit a yard sale and pick up an extra blanket.  Purchase some extra legumes and oatmeal.  Sort out and inventory your pantry.  Make a list of tools you need.  Find a way to give what you don’t need to someone who does.  Fix your bike.  Fill that old soda bottle with water with a couple of drops of bleach in it.  Plan for next year’s edible landscaping.  Make back-road directions to your place and send it to family in case they ever need to come to you - or make ‘em for yourself for where you might have to go. Clean, mend, declutter, learn a new skill.  Independence is being ready for whatever comes.

more

The Politics of Food is Politics

By DE CLARKE and STAN GOFF

In recent days, we have seen the rising price of oil and the devaluation of the dollar create two quantum shifts in the economy: the beginning of the collapse of the air travel industry and a global crisis of food-price inflation. These are related in ways that are crucial to understand — because we are seeing the outlines of an historic opportunity to change the terms of theory and practice for a politics of resistance. As air carriers have gone bankrupt, the knock-on effects on travel agents, airports, airport-colocated hotels, “package” vacation resorts, etc. are considerable.

This is how one cascade pours into another, as the manifold contradictions of our global system merge and co-amplify. Tourism, which was supposed to be a relatively benign, non-extractive industry for colonized nations — an alternative to brutal extraction and cash cropping — turns out to have been just as extractive all along due to the climate (and cultural) damage done by commodified air travel.

****

My own…anecdotal evidence….using simply composting mulch on organic compost over non-compacted soil, is that in 12 square surface-feet, one can grow three species of food, with six plants each… producing okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, peas, bush beans, etc. Mixing them, and adding a couple of marigolds and aromatics (like mint or parilla) seems to keep the little critters from taking more than their share. Last summer I had one cucumber vine that produced around 50 mature cucumbers, totalling well over 20 pounds of food, for around three months. By rotating seasonals, it is easily conceivable to take a 12 square-foot plot in a temperate zone and raise 100 pounds of food a year… being very conservative. Neither Syngenta, nor Cargill, nor Archer-Daniels-Midland want you to know this.

****

We are not accustomed, especially on the political left, to thinking about such practical activities as “political.” We are still trapped in a strategic-theoretical model that equates power with policy, and policy is then undertaken as a purely ideological struggle. The persuasion of the word and the concept is given primacy over the persuasion of actual conditions and deeds. Metaphorically, we have constructed a line, running from left to right, and we use a constellation of policy-issues to place both people and discourse along that line.

The system, however, reproduces itself most earnestly through “facts-on-the-ground.” Fighting a system with nothing more than ideas is the most Quixotic, and ineffectual, form of struggle. Before we can suggest ideas, we must first have some facts-on-the-ground of our own to point to. Fortunately, we do. Some of them have just been recited above. We just need to point to them with more urgency now. Because the facts-on-the-ground of the present capitalist system, as we can see, have slammed into something like the end of an unexpected cul-de-sac. The epidemic of dollar hegemony has torn through the world like a plague; but plagues burn themselves out when all who are susceptible have been wiped out.

The airlines have run into the deep impasse of tooling and organization… and so has our food system. Our system has arrived decisively at what Ivan Illich called its second watershed: all our “cures” have become the disease. We are in a state of accelerating iatrogensis. The capitalist/extractive/technomanagerial system can only prescribe more of the same medicine that is killing us… or new medicines to treat the symptoms of the last medicine. This is not a metaphorical treadmill, but a downward spiral… and there is a bottom.

****

Capitalism began by kicking people off their land and forbidding them to grow their own food; the end of capitalism may come when people who grow their own food and share it with neighbors are able to say a resounding No to capitalism’s end-phase exterminism.

more

Canada’s C-51 Law May Outlaw 60% of Natural Health Products; Big Pharma Pushing to Criminalize Supplements

(NaturalNews) A new law being pushed in Canada by Big Pharma seeks to outlaw up to 60 percent of natural health products currently sold in Canada, even while criminalizing parents who give herbs or supplements to their children. The law, known as C-51, was introduced by the Canadian Minister of Health on April 8th, 2008, and it proposes sweeping changes to Canada’s Food and Drugs Act that could have devastating consequences on the health products industry.

The Act also changes the definition of the word “sell” to include anyone who gives such therapeutic products to someone else. So a mother giving an herb to her child, under the proposed new language, could be arrested for engaging in the sale of unregulated, unapproved “therapeutic substances.” Learn about more of these freedom-squashing changes to the law at the Stop51.com website: http://www.stopc51.com

more

“Food rationing”?  No, not really…just limited supply…no cards yet…you can go back as many times as you want and buy one bag of rice at a time…but it’s freakin’ people out in the land of the fed–er, free….

Food Rationing Confronts Breadbasket of the World

By JOSH GERSTEIN
Staff Reporter of the Sun
April 21, 2008

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Many parts of America, long considered the breadbasket of the world, are now confronting a once unthinkable phenomenon: food rationing. Major retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand outstrips supply. There are also anecdotal reports that some consumers are hoarding grain stocks.

At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.

“Where’s the rice?” an engineer from Palo Alto, Calif., Yajun Liu, said. “You should be able to buy something like rice. This is ridiculous.”

The bustling store in the heart of Silicon Valley usually sells four or five varieties of rice to a clientele largely of Asian immigrants, but only about half a pallet of Indian-grown Basmati rice was left in stock. A 20-pound bag was selling for $15.99

more

Well, I was going to give the “Truth In Strange Places” award to George Bush for calling on the Chinese to negotiate with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, but incurious George gets enough attention, so instead this month’s award goes to CNN China reporter Jack Cafferty, who, when Wolf Blitzer asked him to compare China thirty years ago with China now, said,

“I don’t know if China is any different, but our relationship with China is certainly different. We’re in hock to the Chinese up to our eyeballs because of the war in Iraq, for one thing. They’re holding hundreds of billions of dollars worth of our paper.

“We are also running hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of trade deficits with them, as we continue to import their junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food and export, you know, jobs to places where you can pay workers a dollar a month to turn out the stuff that we’re buying from Wal-Mart.

“So I think our relationship with China has certainly changed. I think they’re basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years.”

The next day, he clarified his remarks, specifying that by “goons and thugs” he meant the Chinese government, not the Chinese people. It’s rare to have such candid reporting from CNN, and they are definitely this month’s winners. Sorry, George, you’re gonna have to confess your own crimes to win this contest.

Well, that’s about a wrap on this month’s show. I could have talked about how we’re in the opening rounds of a drought- and biofuel-sparked world food shortage, but I didn’t. I could have talked about how much harder the gummint is working to create problems than to solve them, or the utter triviality of most of the content of the US presidential race, lots of things, but I only get so much airtime and nobody’s paying me to do this. You can read about all these things and more on my blog, brothermartin.wordpress.com. (I had to say that on the air…and this is the script, after all…)

Last month, my wife and I went to the very first Nashville Food Security Summit, where we heard a number of local and imported speakers and activists talk about their own particular piece of the puzzle, and joined with other conferrees to brainstorm on what to do next. There were aspects of the one-day conference that were very encouraging, and there were aspects that left me scratching my head. I’ll start with the good news.

First of all, I was very happy to see 250 people come together to talk about the issue. Some of them were old friends, but many were people I hadn’t met before, and if there’s anything the local food question needs, it’s to escape from the activist ghetto and run wild in the general population.

The conference addressed two semi-separate questions, and this broadened its appeal. One is the lack of availability of healthy food choices for people in urban situations–that is, mostly lower-class blacks and other ethnicities. The complaint was made that in many parts of Nashville it’s easier to buy cigarettes and soda than fresh fruit and vegetables. The other issue, the one that brought me in, was concern over the long distances travelled by much of what we eat, which dovetails with the lack of locally-grown food.

In the morning, I attended a panel discussion whose primary speakers were a couple of small-scale commercial vegetable gardeners. They were both making a modest living by cultivating 5-10 acres and feeding a couple of hundred people, marketing their produce directly to households. Both said there was far more demand than they could supply, and welcomed the idea of more small farmers. Both had learned their craft through the intern system, which amounts to apprenticing with an organic grower to learn the trade, and both met a fair amount of their labor needs by taking on interns, but they also both managed to acquire their farmland by dint of a spouse with a 40-hour job.

At this point in the seminar, I did a little math and offered up the resulting statistics: if one farmer with 5 acres provides vegetables for 200 people, then it would take 5,000 small farmers gardening on 25,000 acres of land to meet Nashville’s vegetable needs. Currently there are 15-20 vegetable growers in the Nashville area, cultivating no more than a couple of hundred acres. How do we get there from here, I asked; not surprisingly, nobody could really say,except to encourage people who aleady own farmable land to either work it themselves or lease it long-term to somebody who will. Leasing land for organic farming is a touchy subject; so much of what one does to create fertility is long-term investment and hard to justify doing to a piece of land that one may lose at the whim of the owner. One of the farmers pointed out that, with the spread between food prices and real estate prices being what it is today, it is impossible to pay for land by farming it. This is an impasse that will need to be addressed.

Twenty-five thousand acres of vegetables sounds like a tall order, but according to the latest agricultural census, there are still more than 50,000 acres of cropland in both Davidson and Cheatham Counties and over 200,000 each in Williamson, Wilson, and Robertson Counties. That’s good news–even including acreage for grain, bean, oilseed, egg, meat, and dairy production, there’s still enough open land in the metro Nashville area to support the population if it’s all intensively farmed and if the infrastructure can be put into place to distribute it.

Local distribution infrastructure was the subject of the afternoon workshop I attended, a presentation by Anthony Flaccavento, who works with an outfit called Appalachian Sustainable Development, based over on the Tennessee-Virginia border. ASD has “helped former tobacco farmers and other ‘traditional’ growers transition to growing organic produce, free range eggs, and other farm products that are sold to more than 600 supermarkets in the region,” including Whole Foods. Flaccavento filled us in on the nuts and bolts of creating agricultual infrastructure from scratch. It was inspiring just to know that it can be done, even if it’s not making a profit yet and only involves about 70 acres of cropland. Through the whole day at the conference, this question of how to upscale our efforts quickly enough to forestall famine kept coming up for me, although most conference participants seemed blithely oblivious of such a dire possibility.

Flaccavento was not oblivious to the wider political implications of his work, however, citing Wendell Berry and James Howard Kunstler as his inspirations and talking about framing (not houses but questions), pointing out that the strongest argument in favor of the status quo is its ability to provide cheap, plentiful food, (or at least “food-like substances“) that fills the needs of most Americans. We who believe we’re onto a better way of doing things will have to beat the mainstream at the food game in order to prevail, he predicted, saying, “Only about ten percent of people will actually change their mind due to a logical argument. For the other ninety percent, you just have to give them something that works better for them than what they’re used to, and then they’ll adopt the philosophy after they adopt the technology.”

At the final session of the conference, we were teamed up with other attendees and asked to brainstorm our three best ideas for what to do next, present them to our team, and have the team vote for the three best ideas. My table approved my advocacy of an Appalachian Sustainable Development-type outfit for the Nashville area, but didn’t see so much merit in pushing for a legal framework that would better enable small-scale, local production and distribution of dairy products and meat. (I don’t eat ‘em, but for most people, that’s what’s for dinner!)

In case you didn’t know, the laws around meat and dairy are strongly slanted towards large dairies and slaughterhouses, supposedly for quality reasons–so we get milk that may or may not have high doses of Bovine Growth Hormone in it, downer cows in our hamburgers, and a couple of nationwide “organic” dairy producers that may or may not be engaging in organic practices. But, although it’s still legal to keep your own cow and milk her, it’s illegal to share her milk with anyone for a commercial consideration of any kind, and if you try to open a small slaughterhouse, you will have to follow the same regulations that guide the big boys–like maintaining a separate restroom for the use of the USDA inspectors. And when you factor in the way USDA regulations are designed to keep big row-crop producers from branching out into vegetables, and how firmly both the Democrats and Republicans agree on these issues, it starts to look like a more local food production and distribution system will be happening in spite of, and not because of, the federal government.

Back to the conference–what my tablemates (and a great many people at the conference, I discovered as the tables reported their results) wanted to do was give school children more hands-on experience with growing and cooking garden vegetables. That is probably a very good idea, because the way the economy is tanking, soon a lot of people won’t have anything better to do than swing a hoe to try and feed themselves, and community gardening is going to get very popular. I think we will need to teach the kids blacksmithing, as well, because if you can’t work iron to make tools, or afford to buy them from China any more, you’re back to scratching up dirt with a pointed stick, and that’s a very long way to fall from our current affluence.

But I avoided that kind of extremist talk at the conference for the most part, overcome by the ambience of shared hope for the future. This year, the main concern was a bountiful supply of local fruit and vegetables. Next year or the year after, maybe we’ll hear hungry people crying for bread.

music:  Grateful Dead, “Uncle John’s Band”

Last month, I reported to you about Bell’s Bend, a part of metro Nashville that had seemingly succeeded in insulating itself from the rampant sprawl that has overtaken most of Davidson County. Oops. I was wrong. Now another developer has set his sights on the Bend, and may just have the cojones to do what he wants.

When Jeff Zeitlin lost his bid to build 1400 homes in the Bend, he sold the land he had purchased to the Mays family, longtime Nashville movers and shakers, who made a fortune running a hosiery mill here in Nashville in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and then invested that fortune in enough different directions, mostly real estate, to turn it into several more fortunes. They own big chunks of the city of Nashville, and that’s a lot of rent money, honey. One non-real-estate venture that they struck gold on was Transcor, a private company that specializes in prisoner transportation, which they sold to Corrections Corporation of America in 1995.

So, the Mays family has very deep pockets. The rest of us are dealing with a credit freeze. They don’t have to talk a bank into financing their plans. They are the bank. They have their own money to play with, and they are playing smart with it. You don’t get that rich being foolish. What they have done is pitch a proposal to where the money is–they would like to create a five-hundred acre, high-rise corporate headquarters “new town” there at the tip of Bell’s Bend, serviced by a new bridge across the Cumberland and a new interchange on I-40.

Very smart. The reason the rest of us are getting poor is because the big corporations are succeeding in their aim of sucking up all the money. But, I digress….

This new town will be pedestrian-friendly, small enough to walk from home to work and shopping. There could even be market gardens in the floodplain bottomlands between the development and the river. How much more local could it get? The buildings will all be designed with the latest “green” technology and the streetlights will be built to “dark skies” specifications so that they don’t dim the night sky. Wish they’d do that at the prisons across the river!

Oh, yes, and the highrises will be designed and positioned so that they will be shielded from the view of the rest of Bell’s Bend by a low range of hills. And, to cap it off, the developers propose to have no public access between their development and the rest of the Bend.

That’s the pitch. Now, let’s look at some aspects of the plan that developer Tony Giarratana doesn’t mention. First of all, is it really practical to have a projected 5,000+ residents plus tens of thousands of commuting day workers access this development via one bridge over the Cumberland that feeds into one interchange on an already overcrowded highway?

Second, nobody believes for a minute that the disconnect with the rest of Bell’s Bend will last for long. One person I spoke with who is familiar with the area commented that, while some big land owners in the Bend are staunchly anti-development, others “are just waiting for the right offer.” My friend thinks the Mays family is well enough connected to make the project happen, and that it will lead to the development of the rest of Bell’s Bend. He said “By cutting themselves off from any compromise, they (opponents of development) will get just that–no compromise–and no preservation.”

Now, in a way, I think my friend is being optimistic to think that Nashville is going to continue sprawling out into the countryside as if gasoline and money were still cheap and plentiful. On the other hand, if long-distance commuting becomes financially unsustainable but the wealthy corporate headquarters at May Town Center succeed, there will be plenty of pressure to build homes close to work for the thirty thousand projected commuters that this project could generate.

Two other potential problems for May Town Center involve airspace. The first is that a pair of Whooping Cranes seem to be considering the Bend as a nesting spot, and development would not be healthy for this fragile species. The other airspace question relates to Tune Airport, just east of the Bend. The proposed development is right in its flight path. At best there would be frequent loud jet noise; at worst we could have an airplane crashing into a densely populated area.

There’s also a kind of almost sinister aspect to the May Town Center proposal. When you see the video on their website, the first thing that strikes many people is that May Town Center looks like a castle, and the Cumberland River looks like its moat. Is this why they’re only proposing one bridge into the place? Is it going to be a drawbridge? Is this why they want to surround it with a thousand acres of open land–to make it easier to create a security perimeter? Do I sound nuts here? Look, there’s a lot of buzz about government contracts to create internment camps in this country. The Pentagon is predicting that climate change will create widespread “civil unrest.” Putting your corporate headquarters and its bedrooms in a small, easily securable area could be a good way to protect your assets from mob violence, kidnappings, or just plain petty thievery. Furthermore, “May Town” will be on private property, which means that it will be completely legal to restrict access and Constitutional rights in general. Hmm…..(Update:  when I talked to a member of the Metro Planning Commission at the March 25th meeting, she assured me that the streets and sidewalks of Maytown Center would be public streets and sidewalks, where we citizens would be free to exercise our Constitutional rights–”not that you’d necessarily get a good reception,” she quipped.)

The May Town folks have not done well at reaching out to the Bell’s Bend community, either. I went to a neighborhood meeting to discuss the plan, and just before it started, Tony Giarratana and his assistants (the only people in the room wearing suits) had to leave briefly to move their cars. They had parked in a way that blocked everybody else in. That’s not a good sign. On a broader scale, they could have made offers to the community to help the Tennessee Land Trust buy development rights, or to help establish the infrastructure needed to promote vegetable farming in the Bend, but they haven’t. What they have said is that if their plan is rejected, they will subdivide the property and put in tract homes. In today’s housing market, that seems like an empty threat.

The plan’s opponents are playing their cards close to their chest. They are up against a well-financed, well-connected, strong-willed opponent. If they are going to stop Nashville’s sprawl from breaching the Cumberland, they are going to need every break they can get.

music: Exene Cervenka, “Real Estate”

Like another prophet from the eastern Mediterranian, Ralph Nader has arisen. Unlike Jesus, Nader probably wishes he didn’t have to. At his age he would probably rather be mentoring somebody young, energetic, and charismatic, and not be subjecting himself to the slings and arrows of outrageous liberals. But, with his favorite Democrat, John Edwards, out of the race, the Clintons having shown him the cold shoulder since 1996, and Barak Obama choosing to watch TV rather than find time to meet with him, what else could an unreasonable man of principle do? It’s not just Ford Pintos that are “unsafe at any speed,” it’s the American electoral process.

You know, it really burns me up that Barak Obama takes time to watch “The Wire,” a TV show about the drug war, but won’t make time to meet Ralph Nader. That’s your mind on television, Barak, and frankly I think it displays remarkably poor judgement–not that Hillary’s is any better.

Both remaining Democratic Party candidates are from la-la land, dedicated to perpetuating the American Dream–which is called “The American Dream” because you have to be asleep to believe it. Neither Barak nor Hillary is speaking to the real issues–the unrestrained imperialism that has made America the pariah of the world, the unquestioned lifestyle that takes enough food to feed a person for a year and turns it into one tank of so-called “biofuel” for an SUV, the collapsed economy that is diminishing possibilities for reform faster than you can say “economic stimulus,” the criminal administration that, judged by the standards that were set by a previous US government at Nuremburg in 1946, should be sent to the gallows by the dozens.

Now, I need to point out here that I don’t think the death penalty is appropriate for anyone. I have spent enough time in jail to know that a lifetime behind bars is a far crueller punishment that the release of death. And by the way, I got that from less than a week in the slammer. But, I digress….

Ralph may or may not run as the Green Party candidate this time. Not everyone in the GP was impressed by our fling with him in 2000, and I can understand why. The simplest way to put it is that he is used to being in charge, and the GP likes to run by consensus. He also has a much higher profile than anybody else the Greens could run, which annoys some Greens and appeals to others.

My own opinion about third-party presidential runs is that they are an expensive exercise in futility unless the party in question is already dominant in several states and has representatives and senators at the national level, but that they are also necessary for the integrity of the third parties involved. So, from my view, the Greens ought to run Ralph Nader while we can. At 74, we’re not gonna have him to kick around much longer. Sorry, Cynthia McKinney–you’re black, you’re female, you’re outspoken, but you got time to wait.

At the state level, former Green Party US Senate candidate Chris Lugo, who has spent two months as the only person seeking the Democratic nomination to run against slick, popular fascist Lamar Alexander this year, has been written out of the Dims’ script.  Mike Padgett, a Clinton/Democratic Leadership Council hack, and Bob Tuke, an Obammoid, are staging a Tweedledee/Tweedledumber battle for the right to (probably) lose to Alexander, who has been endorsed by numerous so-called Democrats. Gov. Bredesen has even gone so far as to discourage people from running against Lamar. Ain’t democracy wonderful?

Lugo has been frozen out of candidate forums and media exposure, and even told to “go to Hell” by some DP members. That’s what you get in this country when your slogan is “Vote for Peace,” apparently. Chris is still considering his options. I think he should do his best to stay in the Democratic race, but that’s an expensive row to hoe and I’m in no position to help him. Padgett and Tuke have hired bigtime PR firms and are in the process of raising millions, which you can bet ain’t coming in $25 chunks from Joe Voter. It’s about the money, folks, not about who’s right. But you knew that.

music: Aretha Franklin, “Respect”

sometimes displays “video no longer available” when it’s available–check link below….

Since I can’t find it on a webpage anywhere, I’m posting a letter that was forwarded to me because it describes “change from the bottom up” which I think is the only thing that will avert or at least blunt catastrophe.  I have linked the references to Non-Violent Communication and some other modalities that Kornfield mentions, but for those of you who would rather have a summary than chase down a link, I would call them “listening disciplines”–ways to remind ourselves that the best way to be heard is to listen well and ask good questions.

A SHINING WEB OF GOOD HEARTS AND GOODWILL

IN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE

Jack Kornfield Ph.D.

                   Woodacre, Ca 94973   415-488-9780

An article written by Larisa Alexandrovna and published online at RAW STORY discloses that two of the 9-11 hijackers stayed for several weeks immediately after their arrival in the US with an employee of a Saudi Arabian defense contractor.  The employee’s name was “redacted” in the public report here in the US but inadvertently released overseas.  The man was allowed to return to Saudi Arabia without being interrogated; when the FBI talked to him abroad, he insisted that he had “just happened” to find the two a couple of weeks after they arrived in southern California, although the timeline that the FBI put together on their movements made it obvious that they had been in contact from the time they arrived.

The article also makes much of one of the hijacker’s having purchased tickets that involved travel after 9-11, but it seems to me like a reasonable thing to do to cover your tracks.  You don’t want to be like that nudge  who told his flight instructors that he was only interested in flying airplanes, not landing them!

”But from the FBI’s timeline, we now know the hijackers started staying at Bayoumi’s place on Jan. 15 – the very same day they arrived,” Thompson says. “So obviously they must have been met at the airport and taken care of from their very first hours in the US. That’s huge because the FBI maintains to this day that the hijackers never had any accomplices in the US.”

It’s all over but the shouting in the New Hampshire recount, and the results, I would have to say, are mixed at best. On one hand, Hillary Clinton won fair and square, and there were not major inaccuracies in the count. On the other hand, the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s office reportedly treated the recount request, and the ballots themselves, in such an offhand manner that it was hard for observers (biased ones, admittedly) to believe they weren’t trying to hide something.

Electronic memory cards were missing. Ballots were kept in open boxes. Gee, I always thought of New Englanders as neat by nature, but according to the accounts I’m reading, New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, a very prim-looking guy, was treating the cornerstones of democracy the way a distracted teenager treats his homework. I’m surprised we didn’t hear the line, “the dog ate my ballot.”

Meanwhile, we have Brad Friedman of Bradblog and Bev Harris of BlackboxVoting.org straining hard to find voting machine problems, but ultimately having to admit that “Most of the big reports are election administration failures. Administration failures are those failures that cannot be blamed on voting machines or the voters or poll workers. They are those failures that fall directly in the laps of clerks or registrars or boards of elections. Not enough paper ballots at the precinct is an administrative failure.”

One of the administrative failures was ballots in California that seemed rigged to cause independents to disqualify themselves from voting in the Democratic primary by failure to mark the right box on the ballot. Also in California, many people who intended to register as “Independent” were instead registered by the Board of Elections as “American Independent,” which is George Wallace’s old party, and were thus barred from voting in the Democratic primary. Another was that, in Green Party primaries, conducted by Republican and Democratic officials, there were (somewhat predictably) major glitches that may have been negligence and may have been malice–like ballots not being sent to rural counties in Arkansas, or Illinois’ decision to print a green stripe on Democratic ballots and a brown stripe on Green Party ballots, and fail to inform polling officials of the Green Party ballots’ existence, so that many Green Party voters were given green ballots instead of Green Party ballots.

Hey, guys, everybody knows the Dems are the ones with the brown stripe! But seriously, until we have a Green Party hefty enough to have representatives in the Board of Elections, we are not going to get any respect from the big guys. They are so insecure, and with such good reason…By the way, in case you hadn’t heard, the Greens are splitting between Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader like the Dems are splitting over Hillary and Barak.
But there have been no reports of weird results from the voting machines, no complaints of voter intimidation. Of course, it is just a primary, but would Diebold really skew their machines for Hillary? Considering the amount of attention that’s on this issue right now, the odds and consequences for getting caught probably look unacceptably high.

Here in Tennessee, we had faith-based voting, which is what you have to call voting on touch-screen machines. This may be our last video poker election, though! More on that in a minute.

Faith-based voting brought a big win for the faith-based candidate, Mike Huckabee, who wants to put Jesus in the Constitution, just like they did in The Handmaid’s Tale. He hasn’t said if he wants to change the name of the country to The Republic of Gilead. Tennessee also went for Hillary Clinton, in a pattern that I find very disturbing.

Obama won big in all the urban counties, including Williamson, which is usually considered a conservative hotbed–I guess what Dems there are around Franklin are liberal ones. In rural, redneck Tennessee, however he rarely polled more than 20% of the vote, and there were counties in which John Edwards did better than Obama.

Couldn’t have been because he’s white, now, could it?

What I infer from this is that racism is not dead in Tennessee, and I don’t think that bodes well for Obama’s chances should he win the nomination. If he doesn’t get the nomination, I’m not sure Hillary will be able to win the election, because she’s going to have to squash a lot of people’s hopes to prevail.
Here’s a couple of numbers for you: so far, approximately 17 million people have voted for Democratic candidates in the primaries, and only 11 million have voted for Republicans. I’m sure that if the Dems try hard enough, they can blow that lead.

And of course, John McCain is now the Republican front-runner, and the buzz on him is that a lot of conservatives and evangelicals won’t vote for him, so he can’t win, either. This is kind of a backwards way of arriving at the conclusion that the 2008 Presidential election is a no-win situation, but really it is. Whoever wins the election is inheriting a bankrupt, spendthrift country that can’t get out of a war it has no moral justification in pursuing and no money to pay for, a country that almost singlehandedly (through our prostitution of China and widespread promotion of “the American way of life” is pushing the planet into a heatwave the likes of which have not been felt since there were crocodiles in Greenland.

Phew….let’s not talk about that now…it’s almost too horrendous to contemplate…can we have a little good news? Even if it’s just a little?

OK, how’s this…as I said earlier, it looks like Tennessee is going to be able to dump its touchscreen voting machines, hopefully by next fall’s election, if the feds co-operate. (Downside: more toxic high-tech junk!) In spite of tremendous, almost inexplicable resistance by Tennessee Election Commissioner Riley Darnell, who acts like his salary gets paid by Diebold rather than Tennessee taxpayers–and hey, maybe it is, how would we know? In spite of resistance from the state’s election officials, and the same goes for them, a small group of committed citizens talked to enough legislators and got enough other citizens to talk to their legislators to get a bipartisan bill to the floor of the Tennessee House that calls for Tennessee to switch over to optical scan voting machines by 2010 at the latest, and this year if the feds come up with the funds. New Jersey Representative Rush Holt is pushing a bill through that will make funds available to states to switch back from the touchscreen machines mandated by Bush’s Helping America Vote Republican Act of a few years past. It’s not perfect, but it’s an improvement that, hopefully, can be improved upon.

Speaking of improving on the improvements, the next step after verifiable voting in Tennessee is getting somebody on the ballot who’s worth voting for. Current ballot laws in the state map out a tortuous and unlikely pathway for third parties to get a named ballot line–that is, for candidates to be identified on the ballot as being members of the Green Party, just for example, rather than as “independent.” A recent court case in Ohio ended with the Federal Sixth Circuit Court declaring that Ohio’s law, which is quite similar to Tennessee’s, is in violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. The Green Party of Tennessee has joined with the Libertarian Party and the Constitution Party to initiate a lawsuit to overturn Tennessee’s ballot roadblock, and we have every reason to believe that the decision will be handed down in time for the November election.

It’s a little step, but it’s the first one we can take, and whatever we do, we can only do it one step, one day at a time. I hardly even see how it connects with changing the big picture, considering the resistance even a relative lightweight like Barak Obama met out in the hustings of Tennessee.

Perhaps all that’s left for us at this point is to meet the coming catastrophe as gracefully as we can, because it’s becoming obvious that politics-as-usual is going to prevail in the short run, and politics as usual is as capable of dealing with what’s headed our way as the Polish cavalary was capable of stopping the blitzkreig. And we, with our scattered little Green Party here in Tennessee, are metaphorically even more powerless than the Polish Cavalry. But we have a vision, and a call to live that vision–so what else can we do?

music: Eliza Gilkyson, “Milk and Honey”