"Past government-funded GM crops have been a colossal failure in all but one regard - they have opened up markets to GM crops abroad. Agricultural development funding under Lugar-Casey is simply more corporate welfare. These funds will pry open markets for U.S. biotech firms, but will do little to help curb hunger."
"The IAASTD found that reliance on resource-extractive industrial agriculture is unsustainable, particularly in the face of worsening climate, energy, and water crises. And it concluded that expensive, short-term technical fixes -- including GM crops -- don't adequately address the complex challenges of the agricultural sector and often exacerbate social and environmental harm. The IAASTD called for land reform, agro-ecological techniques (proven to enhance farmers' adaptive capacity and resilience to environmental stresses such as climate change and water scarcity), building local economies, local control of seeds, and farmer-led participatory breeding programs."
Buying that Jersey Cow or that new John Deere to feed the world instead of just their families... Sound familiar? To American farmers and ranchers, it should sound familiar. We have been down this road before and so has the third world. Shattuck again:"Here's the way it works in India. In the central region of Vidarbha, for example, Monsanto salesmen travel from village to village touting the tremendous, game-changing benefits of Bt cotton, Monsanto's genetically modified seed sold in India under the Bollgard® label. The salesmen tell farmers of the amazing yields other Vidarbha growers have enjoyed while using their products, plastering villages with posters detailing "True Stories of Farmers Who Have Sown Bt Cotton." Old-fashioned cotton seeds pale in comparison to Monsanto's patented wonder seeds, say the salesmen, as much as an average old steer is humbled by a fine Jersey cow."
"The Lugar-Casey Act represents the biggest project in agriculture since the original Green Revolution industrialized farming in the 1950s and 1960s. The first Green Revolution increased global food production by 11% in a very short time, but per capita hunger also increased equally as much. How could this be? Green Revolution technologies are expensive. The fertilizers, seeds, pesticides, and machinery needed to cash in on productive gains put the technology out of reach of most small farmers, increasing the divide between rich and poor in the developing world. Poor farmers were driven out of business and into poverty-stricken urban slums."For a time, the "green revolution" worked here in the U.S., but fewer than 2 million small farms and ranches (like ours here in Montana) are left. Rural males here in the U.S. are twice as likely to commit suicide as urban and suburban males. Studies indicate that pesticides may reduce Serotonin levels and cause mood disorders and suicides (agriwellness.org). So it looks like big agribusiness has worked its magic of the marketplace here as well.
"I don't think we need to talk about free trade and fair trade. We need to talk about honest trade. Today's trade system, especially in agriculture, is dishonest, and dishonesty has become a war against farmers. It's become a genocide."Last week on our radio show we had on Gary Cozette to talk about the largest amount of displaced people in the world now overtaking Darfur. That is the 4.4 million displaced small farmers in Colombia. 80% of our "aid" goes to the military instead of helping small farmers get perishable food to market. Cozette said that Colombia sprays the coca plants (sacred to indigenous people) with super duper Roundup (made by...surprise...Monsanto) but coca production keeps increasing. (Another whole diary). The war between the military and the guerillas traps these farmers forcing them into the cities and big agriculture farms. The largest number of trade union organizers killed also occurs in Colombia.
"One chunk of the nation has avoided much of the current economic misery: the region from North Dakota to Texas, most of it sparsely populated. This area includes five of the six states that analysts at Economy.com have classified as not yet in recession. And other states in the Rocky Mountain West -- from New Mexico to Idaho -- are facing relatively mild downturns...
For decades, Sioux Falls was a modest agricultural outpost, a place for farmers to pick up new equipment or have a fancy dinner. Its main employer was a hog-butchering plant. But in the early '80s, Citibank and other financial companies began to open branch offices here to escape New York usury laws that hampered their efforts to expand into the credit card market.
"People were very proud," [Mayor] Munson recalled. "It lifted the whole being of Sioux Falls to say we can get a corporation like Citi to come here."
"As long as everybody can make a fair living and put food on the table, it's good," [Greg]Harder, 43, said. "The economy is pretty good if you just don't read the newspaper or watch the news."Yes, Greg, as long as everybody can make a fair living and put food on the table, it would be good." But that's not what Greg means by "everybody" is it? He's not really talking about the millions who are out of work and starving because of crooks in the Emerald City. He's talking about himself. As long as he's got his, it's good.
As for President Obama, "I understand his political dilemma. And I sympathize with it. But he's trying to govern by convincing people that we will be able to get the old good times back. And my view is that the good times ain't comin' back.Greider has been a great investigative reporter for over 40 years at publications like The Washington Post and Rolling Stone. He wrote the definite book on the Federal Reserve "The Secrets of the Temple". In other word, he knows what he's talking about.
"People at large, I don't care whether they're middle class or upper class or working poor or union, non-union, have to find ways to come together themselves, perhaps in very small groups at first, and talk about their own stuff. Their experiences, their ideas their convictions, their aspirations for the country, themselves, their families, and then broaden out a bit, laterally. And have more people in the discussion. They don't have to become a giant organization, but they have to convince themselves that they're citizens...
That's kind of the mystery of democracy. People get power if they believe they're entitled to power."
On our narrow street of once-modestly-priced, 1950s cottage homes, there are 23 kids, 16 of them between the ages of 5 and 9. After-school wars are waged in the street on tiny little bikes filled with light-saber-wielding, Nerf-gun-toting speed demons. In the setting sunlight, mothers in their 30s and 40s, home from work, stand guard on the corner, drinking coffee and sometimes $4 wine from Trader Joe's, yelling "Car!" when an unwary commuter approaches. Where I grew up, the moms watched from the front stoops and wine was reserved for the racier sacraments, but otherwise it's a lifestyle familiar to our mothers--albeit a little nicer around the edges.
Most passersby will only see the idyllic scene that is our street. They won't hear that the conversations, more and more, are about how we'll make next month's mortgage payments and, if we can't, whether we could afford to rent somewhere in the neighborhood so the kids could keep going to their good public school.
Gone are the days of planning vacations, plotting tiny additions to our tiny homes, weighing whether tumbled marble in the shower really does raise resale values.]]>
Francie is right. If the middle class goes, will democracy survive? The elites of Wall Street and Washington still seem increasingly out of touch with what is going on on Santa Lucia Drive. But maybe it's also time for Hollywood to get back to portraying the Santa Lucia life rather than the life on "Wisteria Lane" or the sordid goings on of "Dirty Sexy Money." Maybe it's time to bring back "The Honeymooners" who lived in a fifth floor walk up or The Bunkers who lived in Queens. Maybe it's time to portray the lives of non- white suburbanites. There have been stunning exceptions to this like HBO's "The Wire", but there's a whole lot more reality out there that needs attention. Bring back the bus drivers, New York City sewer workers, and junk yard dealers.Such losses, many of them, are petty things. But we recognize them for what they are: canaries in our coal mine. As Santa Lucia goes, so goes the country. In the gathering twilight, we, the downwardly mobile, nurse our cheap wine, watch our precious children, set our shoulders and pray that the things we do hold dear are not leaving us for a lifetime.
"...we do not measure a culture by its ourput of undisguised trivialites, but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations."Also read Sheldon Wolin's "Democracy Inc: Managed Democracy and Inverted Totalitarianism and John Perkins "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" (And if you haven't read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine", shame on you). Mythmaking is ever present and appears in seemingly simple stories. Perkins says
"we bought the myth that economic growth benefts all humankind and those people who excel at stoking the fires of economic growth should be exalted and rewarded, while those born on the fringes are available for exploitation."But as Perkins points out, guys like him used pseudo science with fancy graphs to rig the system. Some knowingly do it and others just buy the idea that everybody else is doing it, so they just have no choice other than go along to get along.
Arjun Makhijani is President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research]]>
U.S. Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus from Montana is now drafting legislation that would end the uncertainty over the future of the federal estate tax -- and lock in place the current George W. Bush bargain-basement tax rate on the fortunes America's super rich leave to their heirs. A generation ago, the top estate tax rate on grand fortunes stood at 77 percent. The Bush 2001 tax cut has lowered this year's top rate to 45 percent. Senator Baucus wants that 45 percent made permanent. After deductions, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted last week, the actual tax rate on large estates amounts to far less than 45 percent. If the Baucus freeze becomes law, the Center calculates, estates over $20 million would face taxes that average "less than one-quarter" of estate value. Senator John Kyl from Arizona wants to see estate taxes even lower. His proposal would drop the estate tax to 15 percent. Under current law, estate taxes will revert back to pre-George W. levels -- a 55 percent top rate -- in 2011. The Baucus approach would, over the next decade, cost the federal Treasury $609 billion. The cost of the Kyl plan: nearly $1 trillion. The only beneficiaries: the three out of every 1,000 Americans who die with fortunes large enough to trigger estate tax liability.This is the opposite of what we should be doing right now. ]]>
BadThis is a turn on the famous Galbraith quote "Under capitalism "man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."
As the Obama administration apparently prepares to launch Hankie Pankie II -- buying troubled assets from banks at prices higher than they will fetch on the open market -- it occurred to me that an updated version of an old Communist-era joke may be appropriate: under Bush, financial policy consisted of Wall Street types cutting sweet deals, at taxpayer expense, for Wall Street types. Under Obama, it's precisely the reverse.
A bad bank filled with bad ideas from very bad butthole actors posing as "masters of the universe" should be junked.
We need new ideas and good ones. And they abound in books like Kuttner's, Jamie Galbraith's "The Predator State", Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly's new "Unjust Deserts", Dean Baker's new "Plunder and Blunder". We need to create jobs through small businesses anchored in our communities. We need to establish a health care system that will keep the workforce healthy. And we need to fund our school system to keep expanding our accumulation and communication of knowledge that will strengthen us to fight the undertow of ideas whose time has come to go far far out to sea and never return to these shores.
"One of the things lost in this discussion is the fact of where this crisis started. It started in the banks. The banks are the heart of our system. They pump blood to the industrial muscles."He then went on to give us the conventional wisdom that money has to begin to flow to America's entrepreneurs in order to unclog those arteries. But in James Galbraith's "The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too", Galbraith argues that the heart of our system lies elsewhere. It is the social contracts that government made with its people in social institutions created by the New Deal and The Great Society and even some institutions created by Richard Nixon. But these were attacked by the Free Market fundamentalists starting in 1981. And what happened is that the social contract is coming undone to the point where our system is now on life support.
"...a financial countercoup: the return of banks--investment banks and commercial banks--to the apex of decision making, from which they had been displaced decades earlier by the crash of 1929."In Galbraith's father's book ""The New Industrial State", the banks were
"considered secondary to the large corporation...the banker too remote from the details of corporate operations ot control them effectively; the technostructure was fundamentally in charge..."But high interest rates caused these firms to need money and so they had to go cap in hand to Manhattan and in came the terrible "short- termism" of pumping up your stock price. If a company failed to reach its targeted price, it was punished by a falling stock prices and probably a hostile takeover. As more and more industrial firms fell, their technicians were dispersed as people were "laid off" to improve the stock price. And so rose the technology sector. At the same time, in the industrial firms weakened states, the new predator CEOs came in and plundered them.
"...the decision to link that pay [CEO] to the stock market rather than to corporate cash flow, the top brass gained an entirely different class orientation. Instead of being company men, top executives became, first and foremost, members of a tiny circle of their own."What followed was fhe idea that these members of this new class of CEOs were interchangeable and they moved around like "a game of musical chairs". The game then became how much higher they could rise in salary above the other guy. How much could they give in philanthropy and how many buildings and stadiums could be named after them. And then it became every man for himself. And the looting began. And the financial markets were incapable of policing all this. They had too much power and not enough insight.
"What would be the impact on the dollar of a major change in American policy, away from predation and towards international security, toward domestic full employment and infrastructure renewal, and toward renewed technological leadership in the areas most needed by the world, such as climate change? "In other words what would be the impact of a U.S. "ruling" the world not through military power i.e. fear, but because of shared possibilities i.e. hope?