A Great Transition for Humanity: Moving Away from Money
Source / YouTube
Fluxed Up World
Monday, July 29, 2013
Friday, June 21, 2013
Why Do We Ask Who's Worse? They're All Hopeless!
Is Obama Worse Than Bush? That's Beside the Point
By Gary Younge / June 21, 2013
Obama's transformation from national security dove to hawk is the norm: any president is captive to America's imperial powerNot long after the story into the National Security Administration's spying program broke, US president Barack Obama insisted the issues raised were worthy of discussion:
"I welcome this debate and I think it's healthy for our democracy. I think it's a sign of maturity because probably five years ago, six years ago we might not have been having this debate."In fairly short order, a YouTube compilation appeared, showing Obama debating with himself as he matured. Flitting back and forth between Obama the candidate and Obama the president, we see the constitutional law professor of yore engage with the commander-in-chief of today. Referring to the Bush White House, candidate Obama says:
"This administration acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security. It is not."Referring to the NSA surveillance program, President Obama says:
"My assessment and my team's assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks."Candidate Obama says of the Bush years:
"This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide."President Obama retorts:
"You can't have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices."The notion that a president's record might contradict a presidential candidate's promise is neither new nor particular to Obama. And we should hope that politicians evolve as their careers progress and new evidence and arguments come to light.
What makes these clips so compelling is that they show not evolution, but transformation. On this issue, at least, Obama has become the very thing he was against. They're not gaffes. These are brazenly ostentatious flip-flops. And regardless of how much they cost him, Obama has clearly no intention of taking them back.
Given that he is not only defending but escalating the very things he criticized the Bush administration for, the accusation that many have made that he is "worse than Bush" on this issue, and others relating to privacy, security and drone attacks, is not unreasonable. Obama's administration has denied more Freedom of Information Act requests than Bush did, and prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined.
But the charge also misses the point.
It should go without saying that Obama the individual is responsible for all that he says and does. It should also go without saying that once he ascends to the Oval office he is no longer simply talking for himself, but, as commander-in-chief, for the state of which he is the head.
Just as one head of a Chamber of Commerce may be more or less hostile than another to the labor movement, but is ultimately charged with representing the interests of the business community, so Obama's room for maneuver is constrained by the institutions in which he is now embedded.
Whereas Bush illegally invaded a nation with great fanfare, Obama has chosen to bump people off with great stealth (unless it's Bin Laden, in which case he metaphorically parades around with a head on a pike). Those are different strategies, but the discussion about which is better or worse is sterile precisely because neither is good and neither works. Whatever their declared intentions, both involve the murder of civilians and the creation of enemies, which in turn demand a clandestine security structure that seeks to pre-empt the metastasizing resistance to its policies both at home and abroad. The sprawling growth of its spying program is commensurate with the size of its military and the spread of its incursions into countries like Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan where it is not formally at war.
As I wrote the day before Obama's first inauguration:
"He has been elected to represent the interests of the most powerful country in the world. Those will not be the same interests as those of the powerless."America did not come by that power through its own innate genius. It acquired it, as do all empires, in no small part through war, invasion, subterfuge and exploitation. Spying and lying about it comes with the job description for which Obama applied and was reappointed.
None of this is inevitable. But changing it cannot be entrusted to a single person at the top. It will change because there is a demand from Americans that is both large in number, deep in commitment and active in pursuit, to enable a fundamental change in America's role in the world. That does not exist yet.
Where Obama is concerned, this excuses nothing – but explains a great deal. Given the timidity of his campaign agenda, his supporters must, to some extent, own their disappointment. He never said he was a radical, nor proposed anything radical, even if he was happy at one time to be marketed as one.
Given that he kept on Bush's defence secretary and appointed an economic team friendlier to Wall Street than the poor, we should not be too shocked about these continuities. But there are some things he did promise to do – and was twice elected with a massive mandate to do them. Protecting civil liberties was one of them.
When given the choice of representing the interests of those who voted for him and the interests of American military and economic hegemony, he chose the latter. That's not the change people believed in.
© 2013 Guardian/UK
[Gary Younge is a Guardian columnist and feature writer based in the US.]
Source / The Guardian
Fluxed Up World
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Don't Believe Monsanto's Myth-Making
Hey, Non-GMO Activist: Monsanto's CEO Thinks You're an Elitist
By Anna Lappé / June 11, 2013
On May 25, 2013, tens of thousands of people in 36 countries participated in a global "March Against Monsanto." But according to Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant, those who protest against agricultural genetic engineering -- including the farmers, students, academics, and more who turned out in March -- are "elitists," fomenting distrust of technology that could save the lives of millions of hungry people.
For years, industry leaders like Monsanto have been pushing this myth. At a biotechnology industry trade conference I attended in 2005, one participant even claimed that those fighting against GMOs "should be tried for crimes against humanity." A charge, I tend to think, usually reserved for serious attacks on human rights.
This particular mythmaking is a powerful PR tactic. Who among us wants to feel that our attitude toward a technology could be causing hunger here or abroad? Or, worse, that our opposition to Monsanto could be putting us among the ranks of Yugoslavia's Miloševi? or Guatemala's Rios Montt? Not me.
In his recent interview with Bloomberg News, Grant was hyping this myth again, claiming challengers of genetically engineered foods, "are guilty of elitism." (An interesting choice of words for someone who pulled in $12.84 million last year -- and averaged $26.3 million in annual earnings over the past six years, according to Forbes.)
Grant says critics of GMOs, "fail to consider the needs of the rest of the world."
Is he right?
We have nearly 20 years of commercialized GMO use under our belt. We can learn a lot from this global experiment. What we know is that not only do GMOs fail to address the roots of hunger, but the technology can also actually worsen hunger as it maintains and, in some cases, worsens, farmers' dependency on costly seeds, chemicals, and fertilizer -- all at volatile and rising prices.
Today nearly 870 million people on the planet suffer from extreme, long-term undernourishment, according to the United Nations, and nearly as many are overfed, consuming too many of the wrong calories. These twin crises have many root causes, including poverty, inequality, and a lack of choice over how food is grown, where it's grown, and who has access to it -- a deficit of democracy. A technology like genetic engineering, which has been developed and is controlled by a handful of companies, does nothing to transform this dynamic. Indeed, the technology serves to further concentrate power over our food system: An estimated 90 percent of U.S.-grown soybeans and 80 percent of corn and cotton crops are grown from Monsanto's seeds.
While biotech proponents love to talk about the promise of drought-resistant, nitrogen-efficient, and nutritionally enhanced varieties, to date, commercialized genetically engineered crop varieties have been mostly limited to two types: those developed to resist a proprietary herbicide, and those engineered to produce a specific insecticide. This comes as no surprise, since the technology creation is led by chemical companies, like Monsanto, Dupont, and Dow.
Genetic engineering techniques have also been commercialized for only a handful of crops: mainly corn, soy, canola, cotton, and sugar beets. These are not foods to nourish the world. They're commodities that mostly end up in the gut of a cow, the tank of a car, or the ingredients list of processed foods.
GMOs are also only being grown in a handful of countries. Ninety-one percent of GMOs worldwide are planted in just five countries: the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, and India. In most of the other 23 countries with commercialized GMOs, the crops are growing on a negligible number of acres.
Moreover, the technology does not help the lion's share of those who are hungry: small-scale farmers in the developing world. Why not? Because adopting GMOs makes cash-poor farmers dependent on buying seeds, fertilizer, and chemicals that provide uneven yields, foster weeds resistant to pesticides, undermine soil health, and reduce biodiversity. Plus, planting monocrops -- whether the seeds are heirloom varieties, hybrids, or genetically engineered -- means smallholders have all their eggs in one basket, leaving them vulnerable to catastrophic weather events or global price swings.
Research is showing that "agroecological" methods -- the ones that use on-farm soil fertility, natural methods for pest and weed control, and locally adapted crop varieties--can outperform GMOs, especially during drought years. These methods also improve the nutritional value of crops, benefit biodiversity and soil health, and reduce on-farm greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, these techniques can increase farmers' incomes (in large part because their input costs go way down), freeing them from debt and dependency. In fact, small-scale farmers around the world adopting and spreading agroecological practices are getting excellent results and, not coincidentally, are increasingly vocal critics of genetic engineering.
I wonder what the small-scale farmers I've interviewed around the world who oppose GMOs -- from the foothills of the Himalayas to the plains of Brazil -- would think of Grant's comments? They might just find it odd that they'd be considered "elitists."
[Anna is the author of Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and co-author of Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen and Hope’s Edge. She is a founding principal of the Small Planet Institute.]
Source / Common Dreams
Fluxed Up World
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Think You're Not a Racist? A Sexist? Think Again ...
Source / YouTube
Thanks to Bix Burkhart / Fluxed Up World
Saturday, April 13, 2013
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Coming Soon: 130 Degree Temperatures in NYC
How We’re making a Frankenstein’s Monster of our Climate
By Tom Giesen / March 31, 2013
The option to avoid 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) of global warming – our goal for more than 10 years – is out of reach: we have emitted too many greenhouse gases and are on a much warmer trajectory. In 2000, we had many choices regarding global warming, but instead of reducing emissions in various ways, we elected to accelerate. Global greenhouse gas emissions have increased in all but one year since 2000, and those compounding emissions increases have dramatically diminished our choices.
By exceeding 3.6 degrees F, we will have caused “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. If we allow warming to reach, say, 7.2 degrees F (4 degrees C) of warming, we will likely have created a chaotic world, i.e. a world with an unstable environment (The World Bank Report, 2012).
Without large reductions in emissions soon, we will have much more warming – 10.8 degrees F (6 degrees C) by 2100 (PriceWaterhouseCoopers 11/5/12). The CIA is a funder for a report that says “climate events will produce consequences that exceed the capacity of affected societies or (the) global system to manage…” (National Research Council 2013).
Those organizations’ and others’ warnings reflect the hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies that form the basis for current concerns.
Today, the global community faces a critical decision: reduce emissions, or accept planetary heating which is likely to make our world unrecognizable.
The critical nature and timing of this decision has been poorly communicated. As a nation, we are very poorly informed about global warming. Because of this ignorance, Americans still seem unlikely to demand and adopt policies to significantly reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, China, India and other countries say they will continue increasing emissions until about 2025 or 30. In the absence of an effective global treaty, emissions, and hence global warming, will continue to increase.
Repeated attempts to limit and reduce global emissions have become predictable failures – the recent Doha meetings postponed drafting a new emissions reduction treaty until 2015, and postponed a date for initial limits on emissions to 2020. The long history of emissions agreements failures suggests that the 2020 target date for actual global reductions in emissions will likely be missed.
Cap-and-trade to reduce carbon emissions has not worked – not in the EU, not in the Northeast US – not anywhere. Emissions have been reduced in the few cases where carbon taxes have been imposed (in some EU nations, Australia, and Costa Rica). However, in practical terms, there are no global controls on greenhouse gas emissions: neither the US nor any global body has adopted policies or treaties to effectively reduce emissions.
Globally, carbon emissions are out of control, and so is the climate. It is the tragedy of the commons writ large.
Suppose we do nothing in the near future to substantially and progressively reduce emissions. That will likely bring 7.2 degrees F of warming by 2060, and that would be a planetary average warming, but it would be much less over oceans (70% of the planet) and much more over land. Cities at high latitudes and all large cities would be a lot warmer; eastern North American urban temperatures could be 18 degrees F warmer than today’s already hot summer temperatures (100 – 110). Temperatures of 118 to 128 degrees F are literally deadly summertime temperatures for many folks.
Today’s agricultural areas could be warmed by 9 – 14 degrees F, leading to large reductions in productivity; many existing agricultural operations will need to repeatedly relocate to areas with more favorable conditions of temperature, sunlight, moisture and soils.
A 7.2 degrees F degree warmer world “is likely to be one in which communities, cities and countries would experience severe disruptions, damage and dislocation, with many of those risks spread unequally” (World Bank Report 2012). Fertile well-watered lands today may become semi-arid. Water supply for irrigation, mediated now by snow and/or ice, could diminish as ice melts and snow fails to accumulate. Climate refugees, in large numbers, would likely try to relocate, creating chaos. Valuable assets today (grazing lands, recreation areas, forests, farms, some towns and cities) could become much less valuable – or worthless. In hotter and more arid forests, widespread fires could be common, and species will change; in areas of the PNW, the climate will likely be moving northward about 3 miles a year or more.
Some global agricultural/ecological systems are likely to collapse. Permafrost melting, releasing methane (a potent greenhouse gas) in large quantities could radically accelerate warming. Changes could evolve from incremental to transformative; change could be unprecedented. There is no evidence that a 7.2 degrees F warmer world would be stable; there are no paleoclimatic precedents for such a rapid, mammoth ecological transformation as 7.2 degrees F of warming could bring.
The present atmospheric CO2 concentration (392 ppm) is higher than climatic and geologic evidence from prehistoric eras indicates has occurred at any time in the past 15 million years.
In the absence of new, significant emissions reductions, we could have 7.2 degrees F of warming by 2060, just 47 years from now.
In my view, the primary obstacles to reducing emissions are three-fold. First, vast profits are made from fossil fuels. (Some of those profits are funneled into phony position papers used to cast doubt on the science.) Second, the depictions of the future under 1) more global warming or 2) without warming but with much less energy, do not seem real to many – they seem incomprehensible; impossible; dystopian. Third, our culture supports views hostile to inquiry, science and reason – views often rooted in communal nostalgic love for an imagined idealized history. Since governments won’t act, change is likely to come, if at all, from grassroots activists.
Some such groups have convinced their towns to turn to renewable sources and to provide electricity themselves, essentially seceding from the hydrocarbon grid. Your city can do this as well, if you pressure its city council to put in solar panels and wind turbines.
Coal plants are major polluters and almost all are in violation of the Clean Air Act. The Sierra Club has been successfully suing some of the worst offenders, leading to plant closures and resort to cleaner natural gas or renewables instead. Activists should pull out all the stops to close the coal plants.
Here are some things (among many) you can do to respond to this crisis.
In many cases, it is possible to simply use less energy. Move closer to work or relocate to cities with good public transit, When you can bike to your destination, try doing so (this is also better for your health). Make sure your home is insulated.
Second, be aware that there is almost no momentum for change, and enormous momentum to continue the fossil-fuel-using status quo. Turn that awareness into action. Transform your life by investing your energy into forcing our government to really address warming. Break the taboo: get your neighbors to join you in collective action to get the US to do the right thing by adopting real emissions reductions.
Third, recent ideas about what is “sustainable” and “green” behavior are grossly inadequate. They have not worked. Emissions continue to rise. Our circumstances require radical change.
Global warming and diminished energy availability are not about a distant future – the consequences of unchecked warming and scarce energy will dramatically degrade the lives of our children and spawn a far more chaotic world.
[Tom Giesen is a summer adjunct instructor and research associate at the University of Oregon, and will teach Global Warming Preparedness (PPPM 399) this summer.]
Source / Informed Comment
Fluxed Up World
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Priorities in the US: Train Wreck in Action
Source / Americans Against the Tea Party
Thanks to Jay Jurie / Fluxed Up World
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
The Ultimate Codependent Relationship
Source / Armchair Patriots (Facebook)
Thanks to Janet Gilles / Fluxed Up World
Saturday, March 9, 2013
We Are No Longer Homo Sapiens: We're Cyborgs
Valerie Belin/Edwynn Houk Gallery/New York.
Mental Breakdown of a Nation: Panting for Breath on a Virtual Shore
By Stefanie Krasnow / February 28, 2013
We are no longer homo sapiens: we're cyborgs.
Each day, our porous skin opens less and less to fresh air, sunlight, the touch of others, the smell of pine, rain, compost, and manure . . . and instead we find ourselves hunched over machines in the standard posture of reverence, bowing our heads to the humming and warm computer-pets that rest on our laps or in our palms.
It took millions of years of evolution for life on earth to move out of the oceans onto land, where our phylogenetic ancestors gasped for their first breaths on a pebbled beach. Now, some 590,000,000 years later, we find ourselves panting for air on a virtual shore.
We're embarking on the second greatest migration in the history of life of earth, from the physical world into virtuality. In the span of just one generation, we've been completely wooed over by the entirely-cerebral and entirely-virtual adventures accessed when our fingertips apply light pressure to a plastic "mouse."
Today, teenagers in America spend seven hours on a screen each day, 11 if you include multitasking hours: this is more time than human beings spend doing anything else, including sleeping. Teenage girls send over 3,700 texts a month, even 12 year old girls have over 500 Facebook friends, 250 of which are total strangers to them. The combination of online sexual coercion in chat rooms and cyber-bullying drives a young girl, Amanda Todd, to suicide. And just think, it's only been thirty years – even less for most – since the world wide web came into our lives.
Initially, the internet was created by and for the military. For several decades after that it was used only in emergencies, and later on by computer engineers, IT professionals or for the back-end of certain businesses and institutions. But then came the commercialization of the internet in 1995, the invention of search engines in the mid-late 90s, Google in 1998, BlackBerry in 2001, Facebook in 2004, and the first iPhone in 2007. These events have all occurred in less than twenty years. The most current trend, the personal computer revolution – where everyone, everywhere, is online, nearly all the time – is very new, less than five years old. It is this latest trend which has impacted our lives most dramatically, and in a remarkably unprecedented way if you consider the vast timeline of our development on planet Earth. We are no longer homo sapiens: we're cyborgs.
Our common understanding of cyborgs are hollywood clichés: rogue robots with human skin pulled taut over sleek metal wiring, and ON/OFF buttons tucked away in thigh or knee crevasses. But we don't have to wait until we embed chips beneath our skin, nor till we get Google Goggles as contact lens glued to our eyes, to earn our status as cyborgian. As Donna Haraway famously suggests, we are entirely cyborgs just as we appear now – with smart-phones tucked snugly in our pockets for every minute of every waking hour, held as close as possible to our skin in a hard-to-access area, much like a sacred amulet was once worn around one's neck in a burlap pouch.
In her Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway collapses the boundaries between human/animal, and human/machine, suggesting that there is as much artifice as there is "nature" in human nature. Our cyborgian condition was not begot by some sinister mutation, rather, we are as vitally and ineradicably entwined with machines as we are with the bacteria in our intestines. As Marshall McLuhan said: "we create machines in our own image and they, in turn, recreate us in theirs."
Years before the techno-prolifia we live in today, McLuhan wrote an eerie forecast that has perhaps now come true: "Man would become...as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth."
The bond between man and machine indeed gleams of eroticism. Technically speaking though, this relationship is an endosymbiotic one (a reciprocal relationship where one of the beings lives within the body of the other, merging with it). But is it us who live inside the machine, as it's sex organs, or does the machine live inside us? Contrary to McLuhan, Freud believed the machine lives on us, as an appendage that has enabled us to become God-like. We're omnipotent, since we've overcome nature where we can; and thanks to Google, we feel omniscient. In 1929, Freud wrote in Civilization and its Discontents:
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs […] still give him much trouble at times. Future ages will bring with them new and possibly unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man's likeness to God still more. But in the interests of our present investigation, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his God-like character.
Generations before tamagochi, Facebook and iPads, Freud sensed that there was something primordial being forsaken as man became more and more civilized, and he warned that the prevalent disavowal of our animality would have costs – psychically, physically, socially, erotically.
Today's most popular gadgets – those palm-sized avatars of hyper-activity and hyper-connectivity – are precisely so seductive because they compensate for the physical, social and erotic loses that technological advances bring. Every ding, tweet, ring, and vibration promises a social, sexual, or professional opportunity. And in less than a decade, our brains have been reprogrammed to respond to these dings, tweets, rings and vibrates with rushes of dopamine, adrenaline and other stimulating neurotransmitters, such that our brains on smart-phones look, on an MRI scan, identical to those of an addict on drugs. The internet's effects on the brain is the subject of Nicholas Carr's bestseller, The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Price. The latest studies in neuroscience confirm Carr's suspicions that the internet is a detriment to cognition, concentration, contemplation and psychological health. These studies are finding that what's most addictive about the internet is not the technology itself, nor the content, but these jolts of energy we get from habitual use of internet applications, which foster and promote compulsive behaviour.
Peter Whybrow, the director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, explains that “the computer is like electronic cocaine,” instigating cycles of mania followed by periods of depression. “There’s just something about the medium that’s addictive,” adds Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatrist who manages the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Clinic at Stanford Medical School, “I’ve seen plenty of patients who have no history of addictive behavior – or substance abuse of any kind – become addicted to the internet and these other technologies.” Scientists at Oxford University warn that children who spend too much time on social networks sites could suffer from personality and brain disorders. Research published in China discovered links between internet addiction and “structural abnormalities in gray matter,” that is, a fifteen percent shrinkage in the area of the brain that controls speech, memory, motor control, emotion, sensory, and other information. This shrinkage is cumulative: the more time online, the more grey matter shrivels.
From follow-up studies, we learn that it doesn't take even many hours online for these changes to occur. Gary Small, head of UCLA’s Memory and Aging Research Center, documented that even just five hours of internet use, for web-virgins, substantially rewired the prefrontal cortex of the brain. So we can infer what happens as we spend more and more hours online. The amount of time one spends online is directly correlated to depression, obesity, ADD, ADHD, OCD, and anxiety. New studies are showing that internet and social media use contribute to or instigate even bigger mental breakdowns: split-personality disorder, delusional and paranoid thought, suicidal thinking, even psychosis . . . psychosis, that is defined as, a loss of what is real.
This research must not be misinterpreted to suggest that those who've become addicted to Facebook, smart-phones, gaming, chatting, or the internet in general are entirely to be blamed. Is this really their own issue, or is it society's ill? Most people don't want to be online all the time. But its a necessity of today's urban, capitalist society that employees keep their Blackberry's always-on and within-reach even during holidays and private moments. Many workplaces now require employees to spend at least eight hours a day sitting at a desk staring at a screen. After-hours, the compulsion seeded by the habits of the work day to surf the web, refresh e-mail, tweet, update your status, and feel plugged in at all times continues late into the night. How many hours of the day are we not feeding and pruning our virtual alter-egos ? How many hours of our life are we not busying ourselves, hunting around aimlessly on virtual shores? What ways of being, beliefs, and values come along with this new digi-virtual media realm we are all being sucked into?
We must never lose sight that the internet is a solipsistic universe – everything you take in is stuff made by and for humans. No animals, no trees, no lichen, no insects, no fungi, none of those beings who help us breathe, none of the creatures who help us play are here. We are just stewing in our own juices. For those who do worry over what's happening to Nature, there are online portals which exist to compensate for this feeling of lack: 360-degree landscapes, from Peru to the Arctic, all online to explore, digital animal daemons who'll accompany you on an online adventure. These online animal avatars are designed (so goes the logic of the Telus ads) to assuage your anxiety, to help you feel more "natural" and at ease as you muck around in an entirely digi-realm. The Youtube showcase of a starry sky, the pictures of dogs, the representations of a representation of the real thing out there – offline – this is all wonderful, this is all we need.
The internet is like humanity's neural network. It mirrors the brain with its networks, coding systems, information storage, and with it's highly abstract and purely conceptual language. We feel proud as we look in this mirror. As we surf the net, we feel a deep sense of awe over our human ingenuity. Browsing has become not just a vital part of contemporary lifestyle, but a new modality of human being. Accordingly, the values and meaning with which we imbue life in this world are becoming more and more narrowly anthropocentric, and more and more cerebral, abstract, detached, and disembodied.
A word of advice: don't get too attached. We're still in a honey-moon phase with this new technology. The wonders afforded by the internet are still so dazzling to us that we can't really question it, or take into account that this invention may just be the leading cause of the mental breakdown of our species. Some 400,000 years ago, Homo Erectus discovered how to control fire. Humanity's first technology. As we learned with fire, we must work to master our inventions in order to augment their potential, else they will go out of control, and we get a nuclear burn.
The internet-enthusiasts who are no doubt severely agitated by this idea, who are assuming the author is a primitivistic luddite overlooking all the good brought into the world by the world wide web, consider this: for 100 years we celebrated the automobile as the ultimate achievement of our species' invention! What extraordinary feats we were suddenly capable of in locomotion and adventure! Not til generations later did we realize that cars were a leading villain in the destruction of the planet. What will we discover in 100 years about the internet, smart-phones and other harbingers of virtual life?
Already, our enthusiasm about cyberspace is turning against us, for all the information about ourselves which we volunteer to share online, and the data-trails we leave in our wake as we navigate, are being used against us in the war that's underway against our civil liberties. The obliteration of privacy comes with the appropriation of the internet by Big Daddy as the ultimate surveillance tool. And the radical potential we've seen in social media is being stolen from us: all the insidiousness of advertising is all the more in your face on the internet, more so than it ever was on TV. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, pitched Facebook as the ultimate advertising platform to Madison Avenue businesses in late 2012. She assured the industry people that Facebook's number one prerogative is to serve $ucce$$ for those that advertise on it.
The internet, to some, is a crystallization of, and homage to, the nearly-miraculous things human beings can do. We hang on to our god-like abilities attained via technology because they make us feel invulnerable. Though, a cosmic perspective will always put our precarity back in the spotlight. Amidst these ongoing solar storms, it's possible that one of these gigantic solar flares could hit the planet, and all the electronics and gadgets would be wiped out in an instant . . .
Source / AdBusters
Thanks to Deva Wood / Fluxed Up World
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Oh, Brave Second Amendment People: Read This
The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve SlaveryRead all of the article here.
By Thom Hartmann, Truthout / January 15, 2013
The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.
In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.
In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.
Source of Graphics / Children's Defense.Org
Thanks to Kerry Johnson / Fluxed Up World
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Our History and Future in Less Than Four Minutes
Civilized man. What an extraordinary creature. He has walked on the moon and created the worldwide web that connects billions of people like us right here. But there is a darker side of civilized man and his history that tends to remain unseen. A side that gets brushed over. YOU may actually be a part of it. Do you want to be? Time to open your eyes to the history of Taker culture in this animation by Steve Cutts.
Source / Films for Action
Fluxed Up World
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
If This Doesn't Make You Wonder About Humanity
Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project's "Trinity" test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan's nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea's two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).
Source / YouTube
Fluxed Up World
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Uygur: Drone Strikes - Amorphous, Free-Reigning Policy
Source / YouTube
Thanks to Juan Cole / Fluxed Up World
Friday, November 2, 2012
Our "Unbiased" Amerikkkan Free Press
Analysis: How Washington Post strips casualties from covert drone data
By Chris Woods / November 1, 2012
Alongside the Washington Post’s latest blockbuster reports on the Obama administration’s drone kill list is a new graphic, depicting US covert strikes since 2002.
Based on studies by monitoring organisations, the graphic lists hundreds of US drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, in what the paper says will be a regularly updated project. Also detailed are ‘the names of prominent militant leaders killed in individual strikes,’ the paper says.
But there the information stops.
All other casualty information has been stripped from the Washington Post’s data. There is no reference to the numbers reported killed in each strike. No names or numbers are put to the civilians killed.
In short, the paper has removed much of the information that is most valuable for assessing the effectiveness of the US drone campaign.
As a series of emails between the Washington Post and the Bureau reveals, the decision to strip out pertinent casualty data was an editorial one, and was part of broader ‘reservations and concerns’ at the paper concerning casualty counts.
An examination of the Post’s reporting indicates the paper frequently omits credible reports of civilian deaths in US covert drone strikes.
So concerned was the Bureau at the Washington Post’s intention to strip away casualty information that it has refused permission for the paper to use its work in such a significantly amended form.
‘No casualty counts’ The graphics editor of the Washington Post first approached the Bureau directly on September 18 asking to make use of the Bureau’s full dataset, having initially tried to obtain the information indirectly via the Guardian.
The Bureau allows full and free access to its data under a Creative Commons licence. In recent weeks, both the Guardian in the UK and Al Akhbar in Lebanon have used its data to map drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen.
In a series of emails with senior Bureau staff, the Washington Post graphics editor noted that ‘TBIJ indeed does have the most accurate and comprehensive public representation of drone strikes.’
Nevertheless the Post’s plan was to aggregate data from the Bureau, the New America Foundation and the Long War Journal ‘in a way that will not highlight casualty counts’.
In response the Bureau noted that while drone casualty counts are a challenge, ‘who dies, and in what numbers, are the most critical questions that the data can address’.
The Bureau went on to ask: ‘Are you aiming to name militant leaders killed, for example, or only to map the locations of each strike/ frequencies? If the former, there is surely also a necessity to name all civilians recorded killed. If you only map events, how does a user distinguish between a strike that kills no one and an event that kills 80?’
In response, the graphics editor wrote on September 24: ‘I’ve spoken to editors and reporters on our foreign desk on Friday. Due to the same reservations and concerns about the casualty counts that I mentioned previously, we will not be showing casualty counts.’
The Bureau’s managing editor Iain Overton expressed concern about the Washington Post using Bureau data in such an altered form. The Post’s published graphic only employs New America Foundation and Long War Journal material – and all casualty counts have been removed.
Wider problem The Washington Post’s wider coverage of drone strikes shows a reluctance to address civilian deaths, with credible reports often omitted.
There are issues around the recording of casualties from US drone strikes – civilian or otherwise – given the reporting challenges they present. Critics argue there is too much incentive for individuals to exaggerate claims of civilian deaths for propaganda purposes.
That does not explain why reported civilian casualties continue to decline steeply in Pakistan and elsewhere. Nor does it explain why casualty counts by the Bureau and others appear close to the US government’s own overall estimates of the numbers killed.
Claims of civilian deaths in Pakistan are generally uncommon, and significant information is often known about the victims. Of 41 CIA drone strikes between January and October, civilian deaths were confidently reported on four occasions. There are indications of possible civilian deaths in a further nine strikes.
By stripping away the casualty data I’m not sure what’s left. They have also introduced their own bias into the recording, by selectively choosing which information to retain’ - Elizabeth Minor, Oxford Research GroupThe identities of civilian victims are known for three of the four attacks. On August 18 the wife of militant Ahsan Aziz died. Three days later a 13-year-old boy and relative of militant leader Badruddin Haqqani was reported killed. And on October 24 the wife of schoolteacher Reshmeen Khan died as she walked in a field adjacent to a drone strike Only for an incident in May in which worshippers in a mosque were reported killed are there no biographical details in any of the reporting.
While the Washington Post frequently notes the deaths of senior militants, no mention of reported civilian casualties was made by the Post for three of the four 2012 cases cited above. Only for the October 24 event did the Post run an agency report stating that a woman had probably been killed.
The deaths of 11 civilians in an alleged US drone strike in Yemen on September 2 was also not reported by the paper, it seems.
In response to a recent complaint about its coverage of non-combatant deaths, the Washington Post insisted that it is ‘committed to documenting the deaths of civilians, as our coverage broadly shows.’
‘Dangerous editorial cut-off’ Just down the road from the Washington Post’s headquarters, experts gathered in the city on October 22 for the release of the largest-ever study into the recording of casualties in conflicts.
Funded by the Swiss government and the US Institute of Peace, the Oxford Research Group report examined casualty recording by more than 40 organisations (including the Bureau) across the world. It concluded that ‘useful documentation of deaths from conflict can be done even during intense conflict, and in repressive and dangerous environments.’
Elizabeth Minor, the report’s author, expressed surprise that the Washington Post would remove what she says is the most important information being collected, no matter how incomplete.
‘By stripping away the casualty data I’m not sure what’s left. They have also introduced their own bias into the recording, by selectively choosing which information to retain,’ Minor told the Bureau.
‘A better approach might be for the Post to publish all available information, transparently sourced, and so allow the reader to make up his or her mind as to its validity.’
The decision by the Washington Post to strip away casualty figures from its data – and to downplay civilian deaths – appears at heart a political call. As the Bureau’s managing editor Iain Overton notes, ‘We would be very happy to work in collaboration with the paper on its coverage of drone warfare.
‘However, we believe that to give a full and comprehensive view of the current situation in Pakistan and beyond, it’s incumbent on journalists to include credible casualty reports. To ignore this area simply because the information is imperfect or awkward is a dangerous editorial cut-off.’
Source / Bureau of Investigative Journalism
Fluxed Up World
Friday, October 26, 2012
The 1%: As Much As They Already Have, and They Still Want More
Bernie Sanders Calls Out CEO Tax Dodgers over Deficit, Hypocrisy
'The last thing we need to do is listen to these deficit increasing CEOs'
By Common Dreams staff / October 25, 2012
Senator Bernie Sanders called out a group of the top US CEOs Thursday in a new report revealing top corporate tax dodgers in the US and urged those dodgers to 'look in the mirror' for the causes of America's ballooning deficit. The report followed a joint statement issued Thursday morning by the top 80 US CEOs, pleading to Congress for a deficit reduction plan that would include cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and a decrease in taxes "for the top 2%."
The report Top Corporate Tax Dodgers (pdf) outlines individual CEO income and tax information, exploring the vast amounts of tax avoidance from the members of the group who today urged congress to avoid the 'fiscal cliff' budget, through their telling new plan.
Sanders reveals how many of the CEOs who issued the statement have evaded at least $34.5 billion in taxes through more than 600 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands and other offshore tax havens since 2008. Roughly a dozen of their companies did not pay federal income taxes at all in recent years and some received an additional $6.4 billion in tax refunds from the IRS since 2008. Many of the companies were among those who received the $2.5 trillion from the Federal Reserve following the banking industry induced financial crisis.
In addition, many of those companies are responsible for vast amounts of unemployment, due to the practice of employment outsourcing to foreign countries.
All of these actions, Sanders argues, are direct causes of the American deficit. The hypocrisy in the CEOs' "lecture to the American people" is stifling.
Sanders elaborated today:
There really is no shame. The Wall Street leaders whose recklessness and illegal behavior caused this terrible recession are now lecturing the American people on the need for courage to deal with the nation’s finances and deficit crisis. Before telling us why we should cut Social Security, Medicare and other vitally important programs, these CEOs might want to take a hard look at their responsibility for causing the deficit and this terrible recession. Our Wall Street friends might also want to show some courage of their own by suggesting that the wealthiest people in this country, like them, start paying their fair share of taxes. They might work to end the outrageous corporate loopholes, tax havens and outsourcing provisions that their lobbyists have littered throughout the tax code – contributing greatly to our deficit.Source / Common Dreams
Fluxed Up World
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Our Problems Are a Result of Our Collective Failure to Share
By Rajesh Makwana / October 25, 2012
The following article is based on a presentation by Share The World’s Resources for the World Public Forum ‘Dialogue of Civilisations’ 10th Anniversary Conference, Rhodes, October 2012:
The earth’s ecological problems stem largely from our collective failure to share. That might seem like an overly simplistic statement, but it is now increasingly evident that only by sharing the world’s resources more equitably and sustainably will we be able to address both the ecological and social crisis we face as a global community.
The principle of sharing has always formed the basis of social relationships in societies across the world. We all know from personal experience that sharing is central to family and community life, and the importance of sharing is also a key component of many of the world’s religions.
Moreover, it is becoming apparent through a growing body of anthropological and biological evidence that human beings are naturally predisposed to cooperate and share in order to improve our collective wellbeing and maximise our chances of survival.
In fact, sharing is far more prevalent in society than people often realise. In a recent report, we identified the many emerging and existing forms of what is being popularly termed the ‘sharing economy’. This includes collaborative consumption, knowledge sharing websites like Wikipedia, and many other forms of cooperative and peer2peer enterprises. Although not commonly recognised as such, systems of social welfare can also be considered one of the most advanced forms of economic sharing ever established in the modern world.
Given the importance of the principle of sharing in human life, it is logical to assume that it should play an important role in the way we organise economies and manage the world’s resources. But this is not the case. Instead, we have created an economic system based on ideologies that are entirely opposed to the principle of sharing.
For decades, mainstream economists and policymakers have based their decision-making on a distorted understanding of what it means to be human: that people are selfish, acquisitive, individualistic and competitive by nature – the concept of homo economicus. These notions are still used to justify the exaggerated role that market forces play in organising societies.
As we know, neoliberal ideology continues to dominate policymaking across the world - characterised by the privatisation of public assets and the shared ‘commons’, the deregulation and liberalisation of markets, the endless pursuit of economic growth and the overconsumption of natural resources.
The consequences of our failure to share
As a result of failing to put the principle of sharing at the centre of policymaking, we now face a multitude of environmental crises, from climate change and pollution to deforestation and peak energy – the list is long.
Underpinning these multiple ecological crises is the failure of governments to achieve a balance between consumption levels and the Earth’s life-supporting capacity. As the WWF have painstakingly demonstrated, humanity currently consumes 50 percent more natural resources than the earth can sustainably produce, which means we already require the equivalent of one and a half planets to support our consumption levels.
This calculation doesn’t even take into account the massive growth in consumption that is widely predicted to take place over coming decades, in which the global ‘middle class’ is expected to grow from under 2 billion consumers today to nearly 5 billion by 2030. Clearly, the ecological consequences of increased consumption across the world will be severe. According to research by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, humanity has already transgressed three out of nine key planetary boundaries – climate change, biological diversity as well as nitrogen and phosphorous cycles.
But our failure to share resources has also resulted in severe social consequences which cannot be divorced from any discussion about the environment. Ecological chaos, poverty and inequality are related outcomes of an ill-managed world system, and they require simultaneous attention – a fact embodied in the contemporary dialogue on sustainable development.
There are massive differences in the consumption patterns and carbon emissions of people living in rich and poor countries. A small proportion of the world’s population – around 20 percent – consumes the vast majority of the world’s resources. According to Oxfam, excessive consumption by the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population poses the biggest threat to the environment today.
At the same time, the poorest 20 percent of the world’s population do not have access to the basic resources they need to survive. Around a billion people are officially classified as hungry, and almost half of the developing world population is trying to survive on less than $2 a day. Statistics from the World Health Organisation reveal that over 40,000 people die every single day from a lack of access to those resources that many of us take for granted. This is perhaps the starkest illustration of the human impact of our failure to share.
Overcoming the barriers to progress
Given the urgency of the ecological and social situation, why are we still failing to manage the world’s resources in a more equitable and sustainable way?
Every year, numerous international conferences and negotiations take place, but the international community has not managed to implement binding limits on CO2 emissions. We have failed to curb unsustainable patterns of resource consumption. And we have by no means succeeded in ending poverty or paving the way for more sustainable development.
In the meanwhile, endless reports are published that recommend a sensible path for reforming the global economy, but are not taken seriously by policymakers. Nothing seems to change. Humanity is at an impasse; we seem unable to overcome the vested interests and structural barriers to progress that we face.
For too long, governments have put profit and growth before the welfare of all people and the sustainability of the biosphere. Public policy under the influence of neoliberalism has created a world economy that is structurally dependent upon unsustainable levels of production and consumption for its continued success. Overcoming the vested interests that continue to block progress on restructuring the world economy has long been regarded by campaigners as the most significant challenge of the 21st century.
Given the scale of the task ahead and the extensive international negotiations these reforms would involve, it is impossible at this stage to put forward a blueprint of the specific policies and actions governments need to take.
But in order to inspire public support for transformative change, it is imperative that we outline a bold vision of how and why these reforms should be based firmly on the principle of sharing. Sharing the world’s resources equitably and sustainably is arguably the most pragmatic way of simultaneously addressing both the ecological and social crises we face.
Envisioning a global sharing economy
Two basic elements remain fundamental to the proper functioning of a ‘global sharing economy’. The first element is for the international community to recognise that natural resources form part of our shared commons, and should therefore be held in trust for the benefit of all. This important reconceptualization would enable humanity to move away from today’s private and state ownership models, and towards a new form of resource management based on non-ownership and trusteeship.
A precedent for sharing natural resources is already well established. An existing principle in international law known as the ‘common heritage of humankind’ enables certain cultural and natural resources to be protected from exploitation - from both the state and private sector - by holding them in trust for future generations. This principle is an important feature in a number of international treaties that have taken shape under the auspices of the United Nations.
There are of course many options available for how such a trust could be organised on a global level to incorporate the full range of renewable and non-renewable resources, including fossil fuels. For example, a number of proposals already exist such as those outlined by James Quilligan, Peter Barnes, or Peter Brown and Geoffrey Garver in their book ‘Right Relationship’, among others.
Essentially, a Global Commons Trust would embody the principle of sharing on a global scale, and it would enable the international community to take collective responsibility for managing the world’s resources.
With resources held in trust for all, it would be much easier to implement the second element required to establish a global sharing economy, which is to equalise global consumption levels so that all human beings can flourish within ecological limits. To achieve this, over-consuming countries need to significantly reduce their resource use, while developing countries must be able to increase theirs until a convergence in global per capita consumption levels is eventually reached.
The real challenge is reducing consumption levels in industrialised nations, and many proposals already exist for how to achieve this. For example, it is clear that resource management would need to be at the forefront of policymaking, and consumption-led economic growth can no longer be the goal of government policy. Much would also need to be done to dismantle the culture of consumerism; and investment must shift to building and sustaining a low-carbon infrastructure.
With both of these key elements in place (trusteeship of shared resources and reduced global consumption), natural resources would be accessible to people in all countries, consumed within planetary limits and preserved for future generations.
The key to change is the rise of the people
But how will these changes happen? Regardless of the specific policies employed, the world still lacks a broad-based acceptance of the need for planetary reconstruction. Without a global movement of ordinary people that share a collective vision of change, it will remain impossible to overcome the influence of neoliberal ideology and the vested interests mentioned above.
However, the historic events of 2011 provided concrete evidence of the potential power of a united ‘people’s voice’. The world witnessed millions of people in diverse countries declaring their needs and highlighting issues of social and economic inequality, greed, financial corruption and the undue influence of corporations on government.
The Arab Spring demonstrated the awesome power of a focussed and directed public opinion. And in city squares across the developed world, Occupy, the Indignados and a host of other people’s movements focused the world’s media on the plight of the ‘99%’ and gained widespread public support in the process.
The rapid spread of these mass demonstrations reflects a growing recognition of humanity’s innate unity and propensity to share, and they pay testimony to the combined power of engaged citizens. But if public opinion is to make transformative change a reality, a crucial next step is to adopt a common and inclusive platform for change on a global scale. In other words, we need a planetary Tahrir Square.
[Rajesh Makwana is the executive director of Share The World's Resources, (STWR), a London-based NGO campaigning for essential resources - such as land, energy, water and the atmosphere - to be shared internationally and sustainably in order to secure basic human needs. He can be contacted at rajesh@stwr.org.]
Source / Common Dreams
Fluxed Up World
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Paying Attention to the Things That Actually Matter
A Critical Mass for Real Food
By Anim Steel / August 24, 2012
The old logic of the slave plantation is still the logic of our industrial food system, 500 years in the making. There’s a new way of thinking taking off.
Imagine that you are in room. It’s about 30 by 30 feet. The floor is stone, and the walls and ceiling are a mix of stone and cement. They are a little damp, which you can smell but you can’t quite see. It’s pitch black except for the light that comes in from a low, arched doorway in whose frame is silhouetted an iron gate. When your eyes adjust to the darkness, you can see a narrow stretch of beach and the blue and gray of the ocean beyond.
This, a doorway in West Africa's Elmina Fort, is a Door of No Return. It is the last part of Africa you would touch if you were a slave being led from the dungeon to a waiting ship.
I stood in front of this door a few years ago while visiting my family in Ghana. It is a place of sorrow and suffering. Countless human beings passed by this spot on their way to either a wretched death at sea or a life of bondage in the New World. They had been snatched up near their villages in slave raids; ripped from their families and everything they knew; shackled to others by the neck for a long march to coast; and thrown in a crowded, reeking dungeon for what might have been months until the next ship arrived. That was just the start of the journey.
This door represents many things. As human beings, it represents our capacity for cruelty—as well as resilience. Many of the descendants of those who went through it not only survived, but went on to build the "New World" itself. They paved the way for every opportunity I have had in the United States, and I believe their story makes us all stronger.
But this door also represents a beginning—the beginning of our modern food system.
If, back in the 18th century, you could see all the way across the Atlantic, you would find an unbroken line of plantations that stretched from Buenos Aires to Baltimore. Down this entire line, slaves harvested sugar for British tea, rice for the West Indian consumption, and cotton for the textile mills of New England. These were vast monocrops that broke the body and ruined the soil—but made money for planters and big companies that traded the goods.
Here, you see the logic of the modern industrial food system in its rawest form—a logic of prioritizing profit over human and environmental welfare. A lot has changed in the 400 years since the Elmina Fort was built, but this principle has not gone away. The logic of the plantation is the logic of today’s industrial food system.
In this system, it is in the interest of the middleman—large companies that dominate the processing and distribution of food—to squeeze farmers and externalize costs. The industrial model may work for some things, but it's time to admit that it doesn’t work for food. It doesn’t work for Lucas, a tomato-picker in Florida, who toils from dawn to dusk without protection or health care and still cannot escape poverty. It’s not good for the farmers in Illinois who have nearly been bullied out of existence by Monsanto. It's not good for teenagers in Brooklyn who, when asked how many of them have diabetes or know someone with diabetes, raise every hand in the room. And it’s certainly not good for the 99 percent of us who are left holding the bag of rising health care costs.
It doesn’t work for anyone who wants—and needs—real food: food that nourishes the earth, communities, and individuals, both eaters and producers.
If the logic of the industrial system is based on profit, the logic of real food is founded on respect and balance. Real food isn't opposed to profit, but it is opposed to profits that aren't shared fairly with those who work the hardest to feed us. The Door of No Return represents what’s we’re up against: a global industrial food economy 500 years in the making that exploits both people and land.
But there is also a second door: a wooden door on a busy London street below a hand-painted sign that reads “print shop.” You’d probably miss it if you were just passing by. If you were standing outside of it in one morning in 1787, you might have seen 12 men, mostly Quakers, go inside for a meeting.
That meeting sparked the beginning of the British Anti-Slavery Society, and the very first citizens' campaign of its kind. Its members ran petitions, lobbied parliament, and staged book tours, pioneering many of the social movement tactics we still use today. When those men walked through that door, the whole world economy was built on slave labor.
In 10 years, this group of 12 swelled to hundreds of thousands. And in just a few decades, it did the unthinkable: It ended the slave trade throughout the British Empire.
To imagine a world without slavery then would be like imagining a world without oil today—and who would be crazy enough to propose that?
And yet in one generation, it came to pass. Those activists had no knowledge of the future, but they did have their conviction of what was right and what was wrong.
This second door represents something that could be cliché if it weren’t demonstrably, factually true: that a small group of committed people can, in fact, change the world.
This is the spirit that sparked the Real Food Challenge: a project that re-imagines a cafeteria tray as a tool for social change. It's just one face of a larger movement that is pressing for a just and sustainable food economy.
In 2006, I started to meet college students who were active on their campuses. They were pushing for local food and asking for fair trade coffee and organic produce. A group of us from all around the country, from Brown University to UC Santa Cruz, started talking and realized that we might accomplish more if we joined forces.
We realized that colleges and universities in this country spend over $5 billion each year to feed their students. What if we could shift how that money was being spent? Instead of lining the pockets of the biggest and worst food companies, why not support smaller farms and socially responsible business? Why not invest in a real food economy?
We thought that shift might actually be possible because students are paying customers of their schools. But it would depend on strong leadership from students themselves.
A Real Food Commitment
Alex Sligar grew up in rural Washington State. When he was a kid, his father lost his farm and ended up working in a nearby feedlot. Alex’s brothers both went into the military and served bravely in Iraq and Afghanistan. Alex was on the same track until he got inspired to serve his country in a different way—by joining the food movement. As a junior at Eastern Washington University, he started a campaign to buy more regional food for his campus so that hard-working people, like his dad, could continue to work the land with dignity.
Alex was joined by another student named Mohamud Omar. Mohamud came from Somalia and had never considered himself an activist. But now, while famine ravaged his home country and his family faced obstacles to health and food access in the United States, Mohamud came to recognize food access as "the most important issue in my life right now.”
Together, Alex and Mohamud and their teammates have called for transparency in purchasing at their university, and have gained access to the cafeteria’s records. Now they are urging the president to sign a "Real Food Commitment" that would dedicate at least 20 percent of the school's food budget to local, organic, and fair trade purchases.
In three years, the Real Food Challenge has built a network of 5,000 students like Alex and Mohamud at more than 350 schools. Students supported by the Real Food Challenge have won $45 million of real food purchasing commitments—including a commitment by the entire University of California system. We’re estimating that in 10 years, $45 million could become $1 billion of real food commitments—and that we could set a precedent for other kinds of institutions.
It’s about more than dollars. It’s about the change that is happening on the ground. It’s about Alan, an apple farmer in Rhode Island who got a contract from Brown University. He was able to stay in business and is now selling apples to elementary schools as well. It’s about Eliza, a hog farmer in North Carolina, which is ground zero for factory-farmed pigs. Unlike the factory farms around her, where the animals are confined in tight cages over lagoons of their own excrement, Eliza's pigs run free on their pasture. Students at UNC got the school to start buying her pork. She’s now selling to five other institutions in the area. Eliza and Alan and farmers like them are the backbone of the real food economy to come.
This may be one of the fastest ways to catalyze change in the food system. Using existing budgets, we can strike at multiple roots of the problem. Where demand is fragmented, we can organize it. Where there is too little clarity, we can create transparency and accountability. Where policy is stalled, we can foster new leadership.
It’s a different kind of activism. Instead of voting with one dollar, we’re voting with a billion. Instead of a boycott, we’re mounting a “pro-cott,” strategically investing in the kind of food system that will advance social, economic, and environmental justice.
If we succeed, we will see a profound transformation in the way our food is produced and consumed. Vacant lots will become vibrant gardens. Family farms and food traditions will thrive. Hard work will be fairly rewarded. Our climate and planet will sustain us. All people will have access to food that is nourishing.
I think food is an incredible thing. I can’t think of anything else that connects us more intimately to each other and the earth, not to mention our health and our heritage.
Archimedes said : Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I can move the world. Real food is that lever. Let’s take a stand.
This article was adapted from a speech delivered to the 2011 Bioneers conference.
[Anim Steel is director of national programs and co-founder of The Food Project (TFP). Prior to his work with TFP, Anim was a consultant with Economic Development Assistance Consortium. He was a 1997 Coro Fellow in Public Affairs, is 2010 Hunt Prime Movers Fellow, and was recently selected for an Echoing Green Social Entrepreneurship.]
Source / Yes! Magazine
Fluxed Up World
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
The New Company Store
By John Atcheson / July 18, 2012
Well, here we are, slouching toward another national garage sale in which corporations bid on and buy candidates the way futures traders bid on commodities – or as our founders used to call it: an election.
As we go to the polls, it might be wise to remember the song Sixteen Tons. Here’s a few lines to refresh your memory:
Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt; andThe original version of the song was written by an ex-coal miner named George Davis and recorded on his album, When Kentucky Had No Union Men.
St. Peter don’t you call me ‘cause I can’t come. I owe my soul to the Company Store.
It is a song about the truck system, and debt bondage. Under this economic model, workers lived in houses owned by the company, shopped in stores owned by the company, and got paid in scrip minted by the company. And no matter how hard they worked, they remained indebted to the company.
The truck system survived in the US until the early 20th Century. This kind of abuse existed because government allowed it to. Then as now, wealth was highly concentrated and government was in the pocket of the plutocrats.
It came to an end with the passage of The National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933.
Since then, the US government and labor moved together to level the playing field for workers. The result was a steady increase in prosperity shared by all Americans.
That is, until about thirty years ago, when Reagan launched what has been a sustained assault on government.
Thanks to thirty years of Republican policies and Democratic complicity, we’re in the process of reopening the company store, only as with all things 21st Century, it’s a national chain.
Today, we shop with credit cards owned by “the company,” live in houses financed by “the company” – often owing more than the value of the home – and get our news and information from sources controlled by "the company." In short, the company store is back in business.
This spring student loan debt passed $1 trillion, and the average student now owes $25,000 upon graduating, And Congress passed a law making it almost impossible for students to escape this debt through bankruptcy. Right now, it’s far easier for a corporation to default on hundreds of millions of dollars in retirement and health benefits than it is for a student to escape a few thousand in student loan debt.
So how did this happen? How did we once again become enslaved to a system which does not represent our interests; a system which benefits the 1% at our expense?
Well, not surprisingly, corporations and plutocrats used the tools of marketing to conduct a silent takeover of the country, imposing a tyranny far more severe than the imaginary government tyranny Tea-Partiers rail against.
They systematically “branded” the forces that were capable of constraining them while rebranding the very things that worked to enslave so many of us in times past.
Using repetition, metaphors and other figures of speech that form the basis of advertising, corporations and their conservative cronies – the real modern day Madmen – made people believe up was down and right was left. And because they were unopposed by the corporate owned media and the Democratic Party, they succeeded.
Government was branded as the problem, not the solution.
The private sector got branded as the solution, not the problem.
The same private sector that set up the company stores in the 18
“Liberal” became an epithet – something politicians ran screaming from, and something the people identified as evil, ineffective, elitist … even though, on an issue-by-issue basis, most Americans hold progressive views.
Socialism is now equivalent to Satan worship, and anything but wild, unconstrained capitalism has been branded as socialism – or gasp – even communism. Thus, regulations preventing the Company Store, or the rape of the Earth are seen as infringements on our freedom even though they apply mostly to corporate abuse. Plutocrats must get together at their secret meetings and howl with laughter at the rubes who screw themselves because they’re worried about their freedom, which -- thanks to the evisceration of government -- is now essentially the freedom to be exploited.
Exhibit A? “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Or take this gem: “Don’t steal from Medicare to Support Socialized Medicine.”
The result of this massive con? Income mobility in the United States has all but stalled, especially in States with Republican governors. Income disparity, on the other hand has exploded and the top 10% of Americans now control 75% of the wealth. The United States now ranks behind such luminary examples of shared prosperity as Cameroon and Iraq, according to the CIA.
Welcome to the New Company Store, now opening at a location near you.
[John Atcheson is author of the novel, A Being Darkly Wise, an eco-thriller and Book One of a Trilogy centered on global warming. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News and other major newspapers. Atcheson’s book reviews are featured on Climateprogess.org.]
Source / Common Dreams
Fluxed Up World
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