From Maine and Vermont to New York and Pennsylvania, a growing number of farmers, bakers, brewers, distillers, and food educators are working to create a regional grain network throughout the Northeast.
When rhetoric on the oil issue is laced with elitism, it can be so over-the-top that it seems comical, or sometimes just plain offensive. But the angst over drilling is very real in the Northeast, as is sensitivity for the environment. The situation in the Gulf Coast is truly tragic, but you wouldn’t likely be seeing it if the wealthy Northeastern population lived there. The rich are able to protect themselves, while others are left undefended.
The recent coverups illustrate how our republic is becoming an Attention Deficit Democracy. The government remains nominally democratic - elections continue to be boisterous events with mass rallies and tidal waves of dubious ads. But after the polling booths close, most citizens remain clueless about what their rulers do in their name.
A lawyer for the detainees, Tina Foster, said that if the precedent stood, Mr. Obama and future presidents would have a free hand to “kidnap people from other parts of the world and lock them away for the rest of their lives” without having to prove in court that their suspicions about such prisoners were accurate.
“It is an untested technology, and there needs to be extensive debate about the ethics and environmental consequences of generating these new organisms,” said Alison Smith, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cambridge in England.Because of the hyper-pursuit of profits under the capitalist system, what do you think are the chances that there will be a lot of testing and debate about the environmental consequences of this new technology? In my opinion, it will be just like deep water oil drilling--a lot of warnings by scientists, but corporations will inevitably be given the green light to go ahead by the capitalist ruling classes without any or few safeguards. See this article from which the following quote is taken:
While scientists and philosophers have already begun to debate the potential consequences and moral implications of the work, the motivating force for Venter is commercial. His team has an even more ambitious dream: to create organisms that are not only new, but also lucrative. Venter has secured a deal with the oil giant ExxonMobil to create algae that can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into fuel — an innovation he believes could be worth more than a trillion dollars.
While they insist workers in the US and around the world do without, the financial masters of the universe on Wall Street are amassing unprecedented levels of personal wealth. In fact the bankruptcy of nations, states and cities has been another lucrative source of income for wealthy speculators.
The crisis that has led to the “rescue” of Greece by the European banks and the International Monetary Fund is the product of a grotesque financial system which itself is in crisis. Greece is a microcosm of a modern class war that is rarely reported as such and is waged with all the urgency of panic among the imperial rich.
Adding humans as an endangered species might be a timely move. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) produced a document on April 28 indicating the leak could reach over two million gallons of oil a day. In addition to ravaging the Gulf of Mexico, the damage caused by oil may extend to the Florida straits and the Atlantic coast of the United States.
While BP estimates that it can contain the gusher within a week, Admiral Thad Allen of the U.S. Coast Guard is planning for the event to become a full scale catastrophe. His candid admission that half a million gallons of the toxic oil dispersant have been released above and below the gulf indicates the current level of desperation to contain the accumulating mess.
The Senate passed a financial "reform" bill today by a 59-39 vote which won't fix any of the core problems in the financial system, and won't prevent the next financial crisis.
The bill doesn't include the Volcker Rule (it wasn't even debated), doesn't break up or even substantially rein in the too big to fails, and doesn't force transparency in the derivatives market.
So we have come to a situation whereby a real, Iran-approved nuclear fuel swap is on the table at the International Atomic Energy Agency while an offensive towards sanctions on Iran is ongoing at the UN. Who is the real "international community" going to trust? Erdogan could not have put it better; "This is the time to discuss whether we believe in the supremacy of law or the law of the supremes and superiors ..."
Most of all, what the developing world sees is the past - US, France, Britain, Germany - fighting against the advance of the future - China, India, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia. The global security architecture - policed by a bunch of fearful, self-appointed Western guardians - is in a coma. The "Atlanticist" West is sinking Titanic-style.
Biodiversity in agriculture is about culture. Traditional knowledge and culture are as important as research and investments aver farmers, researchers and academicians who are gathered in Rome to celebrate International Day for Biodiversity on Saturday.
You can't beat doubt as a corporate strategy - especially if your product is life-threatening when used as directed. These days we don't have to speculate as to whether industries have manufactured doubt. They have admitted it too many times.
The report is a typical NAS product, which means it is uber-conservative from a scientific perspective, much like the IPCC. So that means whenever it actual makes a strong assertion, like the ones above, it is doubly impressive. Those who continue to attack what are essentially ’settled facts’ deserve the label that I and others have been using — ‘anti-scientific’.
To get a measure of what's truly going on, scientists look to the oceans — slow to heat up, slow to cool down, and thus less prone to short-term variations.
The result of a recent study suggests that "the oceans have been warming inexorably since at least 1993, at a rate broadly consistent with what you'd expect from the buildup of greenhouse gases."
The most important legacy of heirloom foods, however, is one you can’t see or taste. Inside their DNA is an incalculably precious gene bank from which we can make vital withdrawals when disease and worse strike today’s mass-produced crops. When heirloom varieties disappear, they take these defenses with them. Lose too many of them and it’s our food supply itself that will ultimately be threatened.
When corporations rule the world, they do so to ensure their own self-preservation through the accumulation and exploitation of natural resources. People get hurt and ecosystems are destroyed, but this is just the collateral damage.
It makes perfect sense that the country loathes the political establishment. Just look at its rancid fruits over the past decade: a devastating war justified by weapons that did not exist; a financial crisis that our Nation's Genuises failed to detect and which its elites caused with lawless and piggish greed; elections that seem increasingly irrelevant in terms of how the Government functions; grotesquely lavish rewards for the worst culprits juxtaposed with miserable unemployment and serious risks of having basic entitlements (Social Security) cut for ordinary Americans; and a Congress that continues to be owned, right out in the open, by the very interests that have caused so much damage.
According to the conventional wisdom, the US is a center-Right country. But a new poll by Pew casts doubt on that idea. It shows widespread skepticism about capitalism and hints that support for socialist alternatives is emerging as a majoritarian force in America’s new generation.If valid, the results suggest a rather huge disconnect between US government policies, mainstream media views and public opinion, especially among younger people.
On nearly every major issue, from support minimum wage and unions, preference for diplomacy over force, deep concern for the environment, belief that big business is corrupting democracy, and support for many major social programs including Social Security and Medicare, the progressive position has been strong and relatively stable. If “socialism” means support for these issues, the interpretation of the Pew poll is a Center-Left country.
If socialism means a search for a genuine systemic alternative, then America, particularly its youth, is emerging as a majoritarian social democracy, or in a majoritarian search for a more cooperativist, green, and more peaceful and socially just order.
The U.S. government often overthrows “unfriendly governments” by bribing sections of their military, a fact discussed at length in Tim Weiner’s history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes. When a U.S.-backed coup happens, the U.S. government and corporate media give tacit approval; whereas a howl of fury erupts when a coup happens against a U.S. puppet government.
The gods of this religion are the financial markets. Its temples are known as stock exchanges. Only the high priests and their acolytes can tread their holy ground. The faithful are called upon to commune with their market-god on television, on their computer screen, in the daily papers, on the radio or at the bank.Excellent article, but one might get the idea that religion is only a metaphor for the widespread faith in capitalism. I would argue that the latter constitutes a real religion, and far more powerful than what are regarded as formal religions. This religion, like the formal ones, is purely based on faith not rationality. Our educational systems function as Sunday schools that teach its scriptures to our children. If one dares to criticize it, one often experiences something like excommunication, that is to say, shunned by one's peers, punished by poor job prospects, etc.
Thanks to television, radio and the Internet, even in the most remote parts of the planet, hundreds of millions of people who are deprived of the right to meet their basic needs, are also urged to celebrate the market-god. In the North, in newspapers read by workers, housewives and unemployed, an "investment" section is published every day, even though the overwhelming majority of readers do not own a single share. Journalists are paid to help the faithful understand signals sent by the gods.
While drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was, in the end, blocked by Congress, an oil rush to exploit the other areas proceeded with little governmental opposition. In fact, as has now become evident, the government’s deeply corrupted regulatory arm, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), has for years facilitated the awarding of leases for exploration and drilling in the Gulf of Mexico while systematically ignoring environmental regulations and concerns. Common practice during the Bush years, this was not altered when Barack Obama took over the presidency. Indeed, he gave his own stamp of approval to a potentially massive increase in offshore drilling when on March 30th -- three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon disaster -- he announced that vast areas of the Atlantic, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and Alaskan waters would be opened to oil and gas drilling for the first time.The emphasized statement illustrates once again how the candidate President Obama promised change, but as President is delivering the same old policies. This is true of nearly every policy implemented by the US government under his administration. Such differences that do exist are more in the nature of style and not substance.
...the lack of the crime of torture in the Italian criminal code has prevented judges from punishing perpetrators in a manner proportionate to the gravity of the conduct attributed to them.I believe that this is another indication that capitalist ruling classes across the Western world are headed toward more overt police state methods of controlling descent. This incident also exemplifies how ruling classes suppress information until it no longer poses much of a threat to their governments.
The lesser crimes are by now subject to statute of limitations, which means that no one will serve any time in prison.
Furthermore, systemic failures which contributed to the violations in Bolzaneto have not been addressed by the Italian authorities. Amnesty International said it is concerned that the Italian authorities have failed in the past nine years to take any measure to prevent police brutality of the scale occurred in Genoa in 2001 from happening again.
It was most of all a victory for the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) - the de facto, emerging, global counter-power to US hegemony.
Now, so pushed up against each other, there's no way we can fight among ourselves without fighting against ourselves. What got us here is not what will get us out, and beyond, this point. Now if there is to be enough to permit most to eat and live, we'll have to intentionally cooperate with "the other” like never before. We'll have to move the term “my brother’s keeper” from a religious tenet and a philosophical nicety to an economic imperative and a practical wisdom. Maximum consumption is no longer a practical option. But most of us haven't heard that, or we are not ready to really hear it.
...all three main parties had let it be known that public spending cuts would be unavoidable. The Conservatives in particular showed marginally more zeal in doing the dirty business ahead and hence they received the backing of the corporate media, especially those titles owned by super-rich Rupert Murdoch.
So now we have the spectacle of two parties, neither of which received a mandate from the majority of voters, moving to herd the public into a budget slaughter. This is far from democracy and more rationally fits the description of a coup d’Ă©tat on behalf of the financial oligarchy.
The world's biggest producers of fossil fuels are carefully crafting strategies to convince the public that carbon capture and storage is a promising technology, even as that dream of a solution to global warming is battered by mounting expert opinion that it won't work.
Like the Indo-Aryan God Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, marine ecologist Jeremy Jackson is here to turn your comfortable, complacent Mental World upside-down. He's able to do that because we are destroying the Physical World—in this case, the Earth's Oceans.
Before I continue, I want you to watch How We Wrecked The Oceans (18:19). What do you say? Too busy, maybe later? Maybe never? If you have any interest, however small, in the future of Life on this planet, including Human Life, I suggest you watch it now.
The Volcano God of Economics is all-powerful. If he rains hot lava and ash upon us in the form of job losses and depression it is because we have angered him with our welfare, child labor laws, environmental regulations, and worker safety laws. We must make sacrifices to appease him.
The Volcano God of Economics says nothing can stop globalization. There is no alternative. Besides, globalization is good for you, in the same way that suffering develops character.
If you doubt the words of the Volcano God of Economics then not only are you damned forever, but it only shows that you don't know economics. How could you know economics, because economics is unknowable to mere mortals.
At least that is way that economics is presented to us by its High Priests of Economics. The place that the High Priests worship is at The Temple, also known as the Federal Reserve. It would be dangerous for us to look inside The Temple because we would not understand what we are seeing.
...this is “control without ownership,” or fascism, rather than socialism.
The curriculum has alarmed liberals across the country in part because Texas buys millions of text books every year, giving it considerable sway over what publishers print. By some estimates, all but a handful of American states rely on text books written to meet the Texas curriculum. The California legislature is considering a bill that would bar them from being used in the state's schools.
A decisive battle has been going on within the PSUV in Venezuela, a battle over who are to be the parliamentary candidates for the party in the elections later this year. The left have been fighting an unequal battle, where more right-wing candidates have had much more resources and official backing locally than candidates who genuinely represent the workers and poor. It is a key battle in the Venezuelan revolution.I think, and fear, that he is probably right--that the elections later this year will be crucial for the development of an alternative social system in Venezuela. The growing infiltration by careerists into the bureaucracy is forming a class of people who, as in the former Soviet Union, differ only marginally from regular capitalists.
If you believed the corporate media, you might think that the greatest threats to parliamentary democracy in a country like Britain have come from Kaiser Wilhelm’s armies in World War I or — today — from Al Qaeda and Islamic jihadists. In fact, the greatest enemies of representative democracy in Britain over the centuries have been the British ruling classes themselves.The moral suggested by this book review is that "those who do not understand their history, are condemned to repeat it."
Journalists must gather, interpret and select information, making judgements that reflect their beliefs and values every step of the way. What they then present is not an “objective” representation of the news, but a reflection of their beliefs and values.Of course, the managers of mainstream media organizations make sure that the beliefs and values of their journalists parallel their own. Those journalists who demonstrate otherwise, get weeded out in short order.
This gearing of Third World nations’ economies to providing cheap raw materials for export, at the mercy of market prices often manipulated by speculators, rather than seeking a rounded internal development, helps keep these countries in a state of permanent dependency and poverty.
Perhaps no country demonstrates this system better than Bolivia.
