National atheist association shouldn’t resort to cheap rhetorical tricks

By Marc Jampole

The full-page ad by the Freedom from Religion Foundation in the July 4th edition of many national news media, including The New York Times (where I saw it) does a great job of reminding us that our founding fathers were not religious men; and that to the extent that they did have religious beliefs, they tended towards deism, which rejects revelation and faith as the essence of religion in favor of reason and empiricism. 

With so many right-wing politicians falsely claiming that Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Paine, Franklin and the others were devoted bible-thumping Christians, it’s good to see what they actually said in print. The FFRF ad demonstrates that, in fact, the founding parents questioned the existence of god, disdained organized religion and believed neither in miracles nor in the truth of the Bible.  FFRF chose an auspicious day—July 4th, a favourite time for wrapping the American flag tightly around the Bible. 

The headline of the ad says it all, “Celebrate Our Godless Constitution.”

The call to action in virtually all issues advertising is to send viewers to the website. Here FFRF disappoints by telling us an extended fib in its mission statement:

The history of Western civilization shows us that most social and moral progress has been brought about by persons free from religion.  In modern times the first to speak out for prison reform, for humane treatment of the mentally ill, for abolition of capital punishment, for women's right to vote, for death with dignity for the terminally ill, and for the right to choose contraception, sterilization and abortion have been freethinkers just as they were the first to call for an end to slavery.”

What? Most social and moral progress brought about by atheists?

Was Gandhi free of religion? Was Martin Luther King free of religion? St. Thomas Aquinas? The Quakers in the abolition movement? Erasmus? Epictetus?

Believe me, I’m no fan of organized religion, which has been used to inflict a lot of harm on people and countries.  But that does not mean that people with religious beliefs have not made major contributions to ending slavery, having a secular government, giving women and minorities the vote, curtailing discrimination, enfranchising LGBTs and all the other steps we humans have made towards moral and ethical perfection.

Both atheists and the religious have contributed to our moral progress, and in implying otherwise, FFRF overplays its hand.

The second and more disturbing overplay is to use the term “free-thinking” in opposition to “religious.” FFRF wants us to be free-thinking, by which they imply that only people free of religion can be “free-thinking.”

But free thinking refers to a mode of thinking that atheists, agnostics and the religious can all have. To my mind, the free thinker can see into the minds of others; take the point of view of others; look for new ways to solve a problem when old ways aren’t working; appreciate new music, cuisine and other entertainments; and have opinions that continually evolve as opposed to being set in stone at the age of 21.

A free-thinker often thinks situationally, as do the many Catholics who condone abortion if a woman is raped or if it’s a 13-year-old girl with mental disabilities.

While it may be more likely for a religious person to have a rigid thought process, I have known more than a few atheists who have been such rigid thinkers that they could not see the value that ritual plays in organizing the lives of people simply because rituals usually reflect a religious context. 

Don’t get me wrong. I applaud the efforts of FFRF to make sure that our government spends no money promoting any religion. But while protecting the separation between church and state, FFRF does not have resort to distorting the role of atheists or the religious in pursuing social change.

Instead, FFRF should tell us what it does best.  The website features an impressive list of accomplishments in defending the public and public spaces from the intrusion of religion. Listed among FFRF wins are:

• Winning the first federal case challenging “faith-based funding” of a pervasively sectarian social agency
• Winning the first court order to a U.S. Cabinet revoking federal funds to a pervasively sectarian agency
• Halting federal funds to a bible school offering no academic classes
• Ending “parish nursing” faith/health entanglements at two state universities
• Halting a government chaplaincy to minister to state workers
• Winning a legal challenge ending 51 years of illegal bible instruction in Rhea County (Dayton, Tennessee) public schools
• Winning a federal court decision overturning a law declaring Good Friday a state holiday
• Barring direct subsidy to religious schools, in a federal lawsuit upheld by an appeals court
• Declaring unconstitutional the creation of a state post to “assist clergy” to save marriages
• Stopping public financing of an annual nativity pageant at a state capitol
• Ending commencement prayers at a Top Ten University
• Halting religious postal cancellations

Note that in all these cases, the organization did not promote atheism or agnosticism, but rather defended all of us against those who would use public funds and public venues to proselytize their beliefs.  It promoted free-thinking by removing the official stamp of approval from one type of thought.

Our best move in Egypt is to back no one until there is a stable government

By Marc Jampole

It’s hard to know what to wish for in Egypt.

Morsi and the Muslim brotherhood have reneged on their promises to steer the country towards a middle course in social matters, such as women’s rights. What’s worse, the economy is a mess. On the other hand, Morsi is the legally elected head of state, thanks mostly to the fracturing of the large secular humanist population into several parties in national elections.  

No one wants a military takeover—and yet, if the military pushed Morsi out, installed a technocratic government of the Egyptian meritocracy headed by the highly competent and apparently honest Mohamed ElBaradei, wouldn’t that give Egypt some stability? Couldn’t the land of pyramids then engage in Democracy 2.0, another chance to get it right?  Hasn’t a similar process of military-induced governmental reset taken place in Turkey and a few South American countries?

National Public Radio intimated this morning that the new generation of Egyptian generals is not blood-thirsty, suggesting that if the military took over, there would not be a lot violence. It sounds like the kind of wishful speculation in which the American major media love to engage when it comes to foreign countries. Through the years, the major media has been ready to swallow “the light at the end of the tunnel,” “the people will rise up in democracy” and “the war will be over in a few months.” We heard that last claim about both the Civil War and Afghanistan…and it’s what the British generals told King George. 

Violence can come from many sources. Thus, even if the Egyptian military managed to enforce constraint, that leaves a small but blood thirsty fragment of extreme right-wing Islamists who could inflict a lot of damage with a few bombs.

One group we all should admire are the protesters. Imagine, they are risking their lives to gather and make their voices heard. They are sick and tired of the economy floundering, sick and tired of bread lines and gas lines, sick and tired of unemployment and underemployment, sick and tired of government corruption and corporate-government cronyism.

Sounds just like the Occupy Movement protesters on Wall Street and all over the world. While I would be delighted to have the protesters play a major role in the Egyptian government, it is therefore highly unlikely that our leaders agree with me. The history of American statecraft is to prefer to do business with authoritarian governments—they’re stable, they’re hard to vote out of office and their leaders tend to want to enrich their own pockets, making them open to business deals with large American corporations.  Whatever they say, be it Bush or Obama, our leaders care more about Egyptian cotton and Egyptian markets than they do about Egyptian civil liberties and Egyptian democracy.

The United States and Egypt have been economically entwined for decades. Whoever ends up leading Egypt will quickly see the folly of trying to change that.  To protect the economic interests of its large corporations, the U.S. government will be inclined to deal with any Egyptian government.  Even if Egypt took a wide swing to the right as Iran did, there is just too much money on the table not to come to some sort of an agreement.

That is, unless either the United States or the Egyptian government does something real stupid. 

We can’t control extremists of any stripe, but we can control our own actions. That’s why the best thing the United States can do right now is to stay completely out of Egyptian affairs. And when things settle down, let’s make sure that whichever faction ends up on top—military authoritarians, secular humanist democrats or Islamists—understands the very minimum in civil rights, environmental regulation and workplace safety that we demand from our trading partners.

Food sovereignty vs. GMO crops

Interestingly, the World Food Prize, which will  honor Monsanto scientists that developed GMO crops, isn’t getting much buzz in the media, while the discovery of GMO wheat in Oregon, which points out the dangers to our food system, is. Both involve Monsanto, but maybe the media is catching on and not giving the seed corrupters the positive attention they crave.  There’s even a little comic strip following the GMO wheat story. In one strip, a wheat plant is sobbing out its sad story to a field of other wheat plants. He says he doesn’t know where he came from, who his parents are, and the other wheat plants are sobbing along with him.

Meanwhile, a few organizations are following the Food Sovereignty Alliance, a group that gives out an alternative food prize to draw attention to the problems our food system is causing. Last week, WhyHunger and Food First issued a joint statement that says, “Honoring executives of biotechnology giants Monsanto and Syngenta with this year's World Food Prize sends precisely the wrong message about sustainable solutions to hunger and poverty.”

Their press release continues: The World Food Prize has disregarded well-documented evidence from the United Nations and other sources that small-scale diversified farming is the most effective way to end hunger, the Alliance. Reliance on genetically modified crops and industrial agriculture creates crippling debt for farmers, produces herbicide-resistant ‘superweeds,’ and keeps control of our food system in the hands of large corporations.

Last year, the Food Sovereignty Alliance honored a group of women peasants from Korea who are keeping the traditional seeds and recipes alive in food for their children in schools. Next month, the alliance will announce their winners for 2013. This group, a bunch of faith organizations and farm organizations, network with labor groups and other social justice thinkers. They say:

Unlike the World Food Prize, which promotes increased industrial food production through technologies such as genetically engineered seeds, the Food Sovereignty Prize champions proven solutions to hunger that empower those most impacted by the injustices of the global food system. While the World Food Prize recognizes individuals, the grassroots organizations honored by the Food Sovereignty Prize are led by their members, and most organizations count over 20,000 families as members and leaders.

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (ICCI) has also released a statement: "GMO crops have led to the loss of food security worldwide and for small farmers, they have led to the development of factory farms and have destroyed biodiversity in food we do produce and consume," said David Goodner, a community organizer for Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, an environmental and human rights activist group that opposes corporate farming. "The World Food Prize by selecting these people to honor shows that it cares more about corporate profits than it cares about truly feeding the world with healthy food."

You can learn more at: http://foodsovereigntyprize.org/ and http://usfoodsovereigntyalliance.org/

Why do our elected officials want Americans to starve?

By Marc Jampole

 

As the lead story of the latest issue of The Progressive Populist by Jill Richardson reminded us this week, the House of Representatives wants to cut $2.0 billion out of the annual food stamp budget.  A bill in the Senate would limit the cut in the food stamp program to $400 million. Either set of cuts will result in some combination of fewer people receiving food stamps and those receiving food stamps getting less.  Let’s make no bones about it, people will go hungry.

 

In a recent article circulating the Internet, someone named Michael Lombardi puts two well-known numbers together to demonstrate the enormity of the problem of food insecurity in the United States: the number of Americans on food stamps (47.7 million) and the number of people living in Spain (46.2 million).  Guess what? More people get food stamps in the United States than live in the entire country of Spain.

We have a country’s worth of people so poor that they need government funds to buy food. 

Despite what race-baiting right-wingers like Rick Santorum say, the large number of people on food stamps does not reflect on the weak moral fiber of Americans or some special group of Americans. Believe me, very few if any of the nearly 48 million U.S. citizens on food stamps want to be on food stamps. Food stamp recipients must earn less than 130% of the federal poverty line, which in 2013 computes to a little over $30,500 a year for a family of four and less than $15,000 a year for an individual.  But there’s another catch. To qualify for food stamps you pretty much must have no savings, since even $100 in liquid assets (bank accounts, stocks, bonds, mutual funds and ETFs) will disqualify you, no matter how little you make.

Do you know anyone who wants to live at the poverty level with no savings?  I don’t and I never have, even during the hippy-dippy-trippy days of the 1970s.

I know people who have lost their jobs or are chronically underemployed. I know people who don’t have the skills to get a decent-paying job and I know people with skills that have grown obsolete. I know people who were never trained how to write a resume or cover letter in school and people who have trouble reading because of a disability.

I know people who have been emotionally crushed by fighting one or more of our dirty wars or who have had the energy drained out of them by extreme and persistent poverty. I know people who overextended themselves in debt because of illness in the family. I know people who bought into the American ideology of consumption and didn’t save enough money and then lost their jobs. 

I know people who lost their jobs when the CEO screwed up and then walked away with a golden parachute.

I know a lot of children in poor families, who face food insecurity through no fault of their own, merely because they were born into a poor family or one that fell from the grace of a middle class life.

All of these people—the children and the adults, those in poverty through no fault of their own and those who “got what they deserved”—all have something in common besides their impoverished conditions.

They are all human beings. They don’t deserve to go hungry in a land of plenty.

So why do so many of our elected officials want to starve their fellow Americans?

If we want to cut the food stamp budget, we should create more jobs through major public projects such as improving mass transit, retrofitting buildings to make them greener and safer, and repairing bridges, highways and dams. We should make sure the jobs are well-paying by substantially raising the minimum wage and fostering increased unionization of the workforce. We need to invest in our schools.

Starving people to cut the budget is inhumane and not worthy of a representative democracy.

The farm bill goes down, but local foods march on!

For the last week, I've been in internet purgatory. After a great art event at the farm, enjoying the solstice and the jumbo moon, amazing, and making my best picture ever, even Barb said it looked like a chicken, I left my computer in the sun. Don't ever do that. It ended up fried, unresponsive, dead. Even the experts haven't been able to get the information off the hard drive. Ah, well. Now I have an even greater appreciation for my local community. What if the internet goes down everywhere? Well, if it's summer, we'll get by. If it's winter, well, better have some summer food in the cupboard. Or learn how to hunt. A couple of new books on local foods emphasize the importance of hunting and fishing. In my neighborhood, where hunting is a common activity, we are shocked by the number of city folks in the woods with guns that shoot rat-a-tat-tat, maybe 15 shots at a time. Nobody who really knows how to shoot needs 15 shots to bring down a deer. Or a coyote, turkey, dove or even squirrel, rabbit...well, you get the picture. We're not much for gun control around here, but then comes the news from the college campus. One of our favorite basketball players, a cutie with a big grin named Tony, shot dead in Memphis on his summer break. I went to the memorial service in search of answers but nobody could talk about it yet. That's what heartbreak does to you, leaves you speechless. that's enough for today. June 27, 2013.

Bad Supreme Court decision in voting rights case won’t make difference in real world

By Marc Jampole

The best analogy I can find to characterize the 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court to strike down part of the Voting Rights Act is to imagine a patient with high cholesterol, probably because of poor nutrition. The doctor gives the patient a cholesterol-lowering drug and the cholesterol goes down to a safer level. The doctor concludes that the patient is cured and makes the patient stop taking the pills. We all know what’s going to happen next.

“The patient is cured” states the essence of the argument of the five right-wing justices who decided that nine states no longer need to get approval from the federal government before making changes to voting procedures.

But don’t the many recent attempts to limit voters’ rights in these nine plus many other states prove that the disease has not been cured?  These voting restrictions always seem to affect minorities, the poor and the young more than other groups. Keep in mind that many if not most of these new restrictions on voting were blocked by the feds, overturned by courts or repudiated by their sponsors after the election.  The Latin phrase, res ipsa loquitur—a thing that proves itself—seems to apply to recent Republican attempts to prevent people from voting. We just know those good old boys are still eating bacon and fried foods slathered in gravy, yet the good doctors of law at the Supreme Court took them off their Lipitor.

But at the end of the day, this decision is going to mean little. Whatever the decision would have been, Republicans will keep introducing legislation to make it more difficult to register to vote and to vote. And when those laws pass the many Republican controlled state legislatures, civil rights groups, Democrats and organizations representing minorities will continue to take them to court. Most but not all of the laws restricting voting rights will be overturned. The controversy will continue to energize voters on both sides—but that will help the Democrats, since theirs are the voting groups targeted by Republican efforts.

Yes, registering to vote and voting will become harder in many locations. But voters will become hardier and more assertive as they react with anger to attempts to limit their rights.  Groups will continue to do a better job of registering voters and escorting them to the polls on both sides, but there are more potential voters for the Democrats.  The Republicans are playing a losing hand.

Charter schools continue to underperform public schools.

By Marc Jampole

 

The New York Times headline this morning should have read “Charter Schools Continue to Underperform Public Schools.” Instead the Times headline writer went with “Charter Schools Are Improving, a Study Says.”

Both are true, but the first is truer because it isn’t taken out of context. Someone could infer from “Charter Schools are Improving…”  that they were better than public schools, particularly since many falsely believe that already, either because they have swallowed the “free market is always better” Kool-Aid  or because they have read so much derogatory right-wing nonsense about public schools and teachers’ union.

Here are the facts: “The National Charter School Study” by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) is the gold standard for comparing the performance of charter schools and public schools.  CREDO released its original study four years ago and released an updated version yesterday. In both studies, neighborhood public schools win over charter schools hands down. 

But charter schools are improving—from very bad to mediocre: In 2009, 37% of charter schools performed worse than the neighborhood public school and only 17% did better. Now 31% do worse than the neighborhood school while 29% do better.  As the Times underscores, charter schools range in quality from state to state: doing better in New York, Michigan and Louisiana, and worse in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Texas, among other states.

What’s so fascinating to me is that the New York Times would have a misleading headline to a story that was on the whole fairly balanced. The lead sentence, for example, stated that charter schools did poorly in the 2009 study and that the 2013 update merely showed that “in a few states, charter schools are improving in some areas.” When the headline clashes with the story content, it is often a sign that the editorial opinion of ownership or the editorial board favors the view expressed in the headline.

The continued mediocre performance of charter schools is not surprising. The business model for the charter school dooms it to failure. While parents may people a board of directors of a charter school, the school typically hires a for-profit company (or a for-profit parading as a non–profit) to run the school. Charter schools pay teachers less money than public schools do, primarily because charters are typically non-unionized. While some of the money saved by paying teachers less may or may not finance more equipment, new books or more teachers, we know that a good part of it is going to higher executive salaries and company profit. Now teachers are like attorneys, accountants, engineers and other professionals. While the highest paid may not be the very best, in general the best get paid the most. So with the best teachers taking the public school jobs, charter schools are left with the least experienced and the less competent.

Let’s face it: The sole purpose of the charter school movement is to destroy teachers’ unions and thereby lower the wage rate of all Americans. It’s part of the 30+ year campaign to transfer wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy.  This political agenda, shared by virtually all Republicans and many Democrats,  has four main tenets:

1. Lower taxes on the wealthy.
2. Reduce government spending on social welfare programs for the poor and near-poor.
3. Privatize traditional government services, leading to profit-making opportunities for the wealthy
4. Destroy unions.

There are many things wrong with the American education system. But charter schools don’t really solve any of them. The charter school movement is a failed experiment.

Let’s pull the plug. Let’s ask our elected representatives to outlaw and dismantle charter schools and instead increase aid to education that will put more teachers in the classroom, reduce the size of classes, give students everywhere access to the Internet and computers, extend gifted programs to lower grades and level the playing field between schools in rich and poor neighborhoods.

First, Jeffrey Smith. Then, Monsanto.

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: On Wednesday night, Farm and Fiddle (KOPN 89.5 fm, Columbia MO) had a great interview with Jeffrey Smith of the Center for Responsible Technology. He’s the guy that took the information on GMOs (genetically modified organisms) in our food and put them into consumer language. The first piece I got from him, a CD called, “You’re eating What??”, blew me away with the way he took the complicated issue and broke it down. I had been overwhelmed with information—from my points of view as a farmer seeing the neighborhood change, a mom wondering what kind of food system my kids would inherit, and a consumer myself—what’s this doing to my own body? This CD put it all in simple terms that I could use. He let us copy “You’re Eating What?” and pass it out to our friends and family. And now Jeffrey has come up with more projects—books, videos, a speaking tour and a speaker’s bureau. Yay, him! So, as I said, we had this great interview where he answered questions from “Isn’t the government making tests and looking out for us?” (Answer: No.) to “What is a GMO?” (Answer: a living organism with the gene from another living organism inserted. For example, a gene from a bacteria that eats the cells of corn rootworms) to “What’s wrong with eating GMOs?” (Answer: the gene that eats rootworms also eats us! Why would we want to put that in our bodies?) I was feeling really good about the interview and when I got home, I got a phone call from a good friend. Figuring she wanted to congratulate me on the excellent radio program, I tried to sound humble. But that’s not why she called. Her news? Monsanto has won the World Food Prize. Three scientists will split $250,000 for figuring out how to insert foreign genes into crops, creating GMOs. What a crock. When you mention the name, “Monsanto,” in my world, people have a range of about 3 reactions, none of them, “Well, they deserve a prize!” Instead, people say, “They’re the number one cause for suicides in farmers in India” or “After ruining a crop, they sue farmers for gene pollution” or, just, “I hate those guys.” I’ve never met a person that says, “Monsanto? They should get a prize!”

Who’s next to tell truth after org. admits it can’t turn gays straight? Global warming deniers? Creationists?

By Marc Jampole

An organization that for almost 40 years has tried to turn gays into heterosexuals with prayer and psychotherapy announced earlier this week that it is disbanding because its executives and many board members no longer believe that sexual orientation can be changed.  I suppose Exodus International and its leadership started paying more attention to facts and less attention to what they wanted the facts to be.

It’s another step forward for the gay rights movement because there is one less organization around telling people that homosexuality is abnormal or an illness. That’s a good thing, to be sure.

When I read the story, though, the first thing I did was to look into the clear summer sky for flying pigs.

Then I began to speculate about the other myths and lies that drive our national dialogue on political issues.  Could we be seeing the beginning of the secular humanist equivalent of The Rapture, one characterized by people either realizing or admitting the truth? Could I hope beyond hope that Exodus International’s disbanding is the first in a long series of similar announcements?

What will be next?

Will the Discovery Institute admit that intelligent design is folderol and repurpose the organization to support research that fills in the blanks in the scientifically proven theory of evolution?

Will the Koch Brothers and other climate change deniers suddenly make a public mea culpa about the tens of millions of dollars they have spent trying to convince the public that global warming is not occurring? Will they start supporting the environmental regulations and development of alternative energy sources that we need to address the rapid rise in Earth’s temperature?

Will the Catholic Church finally catch up to the 98% of its adherents who have used birth control and declare that it’s not a sin against the religion?

Will Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich shamefacedly cop to using racist code words when he talks against food stamps and aid to dependent children?

Will the House Republicans stop telling the lie that we have to lower taxes on the wealthy so they can create jobs and admit that the best way to create jobs is through government programs?

Will these Republicans look at the damage wrought by private prisons, mercenaries (in the army) and charter schools and finally acknowledge that sometimes a government solution is better than having the private sector do it? Will they admit that taxes have been too low on the wealthy for more than 30 years and that this low tax regime is what has caused virtually all of our economic problems?

Will right-wing economists finally admit that environmental regulations don’t hurt the economy, merely the industries they are trying to protect, and that raising air and water standards will create just about as many jobs as it will threaten?

Will those bankrolling the charter school movement finally just tell us the truth that the only reason they are in favor of charter schools is that they want to destroy teachers’ unions and thereby bring down teacher salaries?

Will gun manufacturers and their lobby finally admit that all statistics show that more guns in the street lead to more gun deaths and that far more people are killed and injured each year from friendly fire than from people using guns to protect themselves?

In short, will we finally base our public discourse on truth and science, and not on myths perpetuated to benefit one industry or one group of people?

I close my eyes and I see hundreds of pigs flying in a V formation. Dancing around them are aurochs and unicorns. Blind men and women are throwing away their canes. Lambs and lions are in bed together watching the Chicago Cubs play the Seattle Mariners in the World Series.

But when I open my eyes again, the sky is clear and my computer screen is filled with another politician hooting about how high taxes are.  The Rapture for Truth has not yet arrived.

It’s not just the federal government that wants to spy on us

By Marc Jampole

 

The Obama Administration is rightfully taking a lot of hits for government surveillance programs that track data related to every phone call of every U.S. citizen and for demanding data that the computers of Google, Apple and other information technology companies collect from everyone.

Now we’re learning that the government isn’t the only one that wants to spy on us.  

Big telecommunications companies have developed technology that embeds infrared cameras and microphones into cable boxes and digital video recorders (DVR). They want to put these devices in the homes of people, turn the cameras and microphones on, have computers watch and listen, and then broadcast TV commercials targeted to the activities and conversations that viewers have while they watch TV.  If a family is eating Mexican food in front of a baseball game, they suddenly might see the most interesting man in the world quaffing a Dos Equis.  If the viewers are talking about going to a movie, a TV ad for the latest James Bond flick might suddenly appear. Unless, of course, it’s pre-teen girls, in which case the ad could be for the latest Disney princess movie.

Last year Verizon filed a patent application for a monitoring system that would determine what commercials to broadcast viewers based on their behavior when watching the boob tube.  Verizon boasted in its patent documents that the system could even detect moods. The patent office rejected the patent application, but all that means is that if Verizon started installing it on its equipment, other telecommunication companies could copy the system without paying Verizon any royalties. Verizon could still implement the technology.

Verizon isn’t the only big data company that wants its eyes and ears to become part of your family.  Microsoft filed a patent application in 2011 for yet another consumer surveillance system.

The worst case scenario for this invasion of privacy is if a couple gets turned on by an on-screen kiss and begins to undress each other with the TV still on. Will an ad for condoms come up? Or maybe one from an anti-choice group? Will the video of your love-making be available to the National Security Administration?

To prevent this obnoxious corporate spying on our private lives, Representatives Mike Capuano (D-Mass.) and Walter Jones (R-N.C.) introduced the “We Are Watching You Act of 2013” in Congress last week. If passed, the law would allow consumers to opt out of monitoring altogether at any time. If a viewer allowed monitoring, the company would have to clearly display “We are watching you” on the TV screen.  Already an industry expert at the influential consulting firm Gartner is complaining that the “We are watching you” legend would take up too much space on the smaller screens of laptops, tablets and smart phones.

While I applaud Capuano and Jones for wanting to protect consumers, wouldn’t it be safer for our freedom if these systems were just outlawed?  We all know that companies virtually always make opt-in, opt-out protocols as confusing as possible. For example, my bank recently sent me a brochure telling me about opt-out options that would prevent it from using or selling my data. The brochure came with the regular bank statement, folded to look like one of those bill-stuffer ads that many of us throw out without looking (which is what my significant other did and then had to fish out of the trash when I told her what it was). The bank asked depositors to complete and mail a form to opt-out of some information sharing and to make a phone call to opt-out of a different set of information sharing. The way the information was presented on the page made it very easy for people to think that you could either phone or mail in a form and that you didn’t need to do both. Of course, there was no return postage for the opt-out form. 

Corporate America is selling us a lot of stuff right now, even with the old-fashioned method of analyzing the demographics of the audiences of TV shows.  I don’t think they need any more help in this area. Forget the opt. Just make it illegal.

Rep Doug LaMalfa Sticks It To Taxpayers

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: Here’s an article that should piss anyone off: “A Rice Gets a Price Premium: Farm-Bill Subsidy Sets High Floor for a Type Grown by Lawmaker Who Pushed It.” As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Rep. Doug LaMalfa, a 4th-generation Japonica rice grower, has put a federal subsidy for himself into the farm bill. If you’re not familiar with Japonica, it’s not a rice we eat much in this country. Most of it is exported, at a low price, disrupting markets in Asia. Our cheap rice comes into their cities, undercuts their subsistence farmers. The rural kids, with no prospects for the future, leave home for the cities and the land goes bare. Next step: Big Ag moves in with big tractors, big combines, big gas hogs and hey presto we’ve exported the same bad system we have here. And, back at home, never mind that Japonica (also known as sticky rice) yields more per acre and sells for more on the market, LaMalfa wants a guarantee that if the price goes below a certain level he’ll get a taxpayer-financed bonus. The name has changed—not a direct payment—but the game has stayed the same. Taxpayer payments will keep these guys in business. This creep’s farm has received “almost $4.7 million in farm subsidies since 1995,” says the Journal, including nearly $1.2 million in direct payments.” Guess they can’t get by without the handouts. At the same time, they’re cutting food assistance to poor people and ensuring that schools feed inferior, fatty meats and canned veggies to school kids. That’s in the House version of the bill. The Senate version simply promises guarantees for rice, cotton and peanuts.

Kudos to Senators Begich, Merkley, Boxer and Sanders!

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: Nice work, Senators! Four of you have introduced amendments to the Farm Bill that would rein in some of the outrageous benefits that big ag has been enjoying. The amendments are: - Senator Begich's (D-Alaska) amendment # 934 would ban the sale of genetically engineered salmon until Federal wildlife agencies give their OK. -Senator Merkley’s (D-Oregon) amendment #978 will repeal the "Monsanto Protection Act" provision in the 2013 government spending bill. That “Act” eliminated judicial oversight of genetically engineered crops. - Senator Boxer’s (D-California) Sense of the Senate amendment # 1025 supports mandatory GMO labeling.. Her amendment 1026 asks that FDA and USDA study the 64 countries around the world that already require GMO labeling. -Senator Sanders’ (I-Vermont) amendment supporting the existing rights of states to enact their own laws requiring the labeling of genetically engineered foods. Already this year 26 states have introduced labeling laws with the possibility of passage in a number of states. THANK YOU for thinking of family farmers AND consumers!

The Supreme Court Speaks Against Gene Patenting

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: I may be mistaken, but it looks like the U.S. Supreme Court has finally looked at some precedents and laws other than the ones Monsanto has so carefully placed in their venue. Monsanto, you might remember, has been paving the way to complete ownership of all plant genes on the planet. They’ve been stocking their vaults with unusual beans, grains, vegetables of all kinds, and working through the gene pools, patenting as fast as they can. At the same time, they’ve been working up case law that proves they have the right to claim patents on these genes and that farmers who grow the plants on their own are breaking the laws. But last Thursday the Supreme Court unanimously decided that human genes cannot be patented! This is huge! For starters, it means you, dear reader, have some rights to your own body and its miracles. If you are stricken with some disease and your body figures out how to fight it, you have the right to claim that cure even if some college researcher captures a little of your dna, isolates it and develops a vaccine that imitates what your body did. We have to hope that this precedent leads to some more decisions that reverse the outrages of the past. Gene descriptions have become easy to create, thanks to new gene-reading machines. But gene descriptions are not the same as gene inventions and it’s time the Supreme Court and our lawmakers accepted that fact. As Judge Clarence Thomas wrote, “separating a gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention.” And the other justices, bless them, agreed!

Editorial: Spy Business Scandal

The scandal in the revelation that the National Security Agency is scooping up data from millions of phone calls and emails daily is not so much that the surveillance program exists. There have been reports that the NSA was working on a massive data collection network ever since 9/11. The scandal is that a 29-year-old information technology consultant working for a private corporation contracting with the NSA not only was in the loop but boasted that he could snoop on anybody with an email address, including the President of the United States.

Some experts dispute whether Edward Snowden really could hack the President’s email, but there is no longer any doubt that he was telling the truth about the NSA’s widespread surveillance programs. His story sounds like he was on the express lane to the American Dream as a high-school dropout who was able to work his way up to a $122,000-a-year job as a Hawaii-based information analyst for Booz Allen Hamilton, at least until he decided to spill the beans to the Washington Post and the London Guardian.

As Tim Shorrock, author of Spies for Hire who writes about the business of national security on page 12, told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! June 11, “If Mr. Snowden had access to these kinds of documents, such as these PRISM documents about surveillance on the Internet, as well as this FISA court order, that means practically anyone in Booz Allen who is in intelligence working for the NSA has access to the same kinds of documents. And American people should really know that now we have conclusive proof that these private-sector corporations are operating at the highest levels of intelligence and the military.”

Colleen Rowley, a former FBI special agent and legal counsel in its Minneapolis office whose May 2002 memo described some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures wrote for CNN’s website on June 11, “The recent disclosures about the National Security Agency’s massive and aggressive spying on the world, including US citizens, along with other scandals showing Associated Press and Fox News reporters targeted in ‘leak’ investigations, should make us realize that John Poindexter’s plan for ‘Total Information Awareness’ never died: It merely went underground and changed its name.

“When the TIA idea was first proposed by the Bush administration after 9/11, along with a ‘Big Brother’ all-seeing eye logo, it was widely considered a crazy notion, resulting in an outcry. That data collection plan, which involved indiscriminate spying on Americans, was quickly squelched — at least publicly.

“The truth, however, was that it was reborn under dozens of massive data collection and surveillance programs within each of our 16 highly secretive intelligence agencies, under a variety of cute acronyms,” Rowley wrote.

Those agencies increasingly rely on private contractors. Of the 4.9 million people with clearance to access “confidential and secret” government information, the Associated Press reported, 1.1 million, or 21%, work for outside contractors, according to a report from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s office. Of the 1.4 million who have the higher “top secret” access, 483,000, or 34%, work for contractors. Three-fourths of Booz Allen’s 25,000 employees hold government security clearances. Half of those employees have top secret clearances.

The move to a national security state is nothing new, though it has expanded since the 9/11 attacks. Charles Pierce, writing at Esquire.com (June 11), took apart Peggy Noonan’s claim in the Wall Street Journal June 8 that “The security age began on Sept. 12, 2001.” Pierce noted, “The manifestation of ‘the security age’ that is presently under discussion began then, but ‘the security age’ as we know it began during World War II, with the Manhattan Project, and it really got rolling after the war, when the Russians ended up with the bomb and there was hell to pay here. Garry Wills is right in his book Bomb Power. It was the combination of those weapons, and the military-industrial complex that produced them and against which Dwight Eisenhower was right to warn us, that embedded ‘the security age’ in the institutions of free government, and it has operated like rot and termites within them ever since. Everything since has been just technology. The impulse toward ‘the security age’ has been present at almost every level of law enforcement, let alone the military.”

So we’ve had more than 70 years of national security fears chipping away at our personal privacy and civil liberties. A US Senate Select Committee chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), now known as the Church Committee, shook up the national security establishment in 1975 when it investigated abuses of intelligence gathering by the FBI, the CIA, military intelligence and the NSA during the Nixon administration. It went back to the 1950s and investigated attempts to assassinate foreign leaders as well as the use of intelligence agencies to track anti-war and civil rights protesters as well as critics of the administration.

The Church Committee published 14 reports on the formation of US intelligence agencies, their operations and the alleged abuses of law and of power that they had committed, together with recommendations for reform. More than 50,000 pages have been declassified. President Gerald Ford issued an executive order that banned US assassinations of foreign leaders, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 prescribed procedures for physical and electronic surveillance and collection of “foreign intelligence information” between “foreign powers” and “agents of foreign powers.” The law also set up the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to oversee requests for surveillance warrants against suspected foreign intelligence agents inside the US by federal agencies. The House and Senate created select committees on intelligence to provide oversight over intelligence activities. And Frank Church was accused by right wingers of treason for exposing the problems.

Church, who died in 1984, said of the NSA in 1975: “I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge ... I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress passed the PATRIOT Act, which expanded national security authority.

We shouldn’t expect the President to give up executive powers that arguably can be used to make the country safer. If President Obama unilaterally ordered the NSA to dismantle PRISM, and terrorists later struck the US, there would be hell to pay again, so Obama couldn’t do it for political as well as national security reasons.

It’s up to Congress to take those powers away or at least make the national security bureaucracy accountable in a way they are not now, with secret court orders and briefings that members of Congress may not share with the public.

A good start would be a bill introduced by a bipartisan group of senators that would declassify key legal opinions reached by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that make the gathering of these records possible. The bill is being introduced by Sens. Jeff Merkley, progressive Democrat from Oregon, and Mike Lee, a Tea Party Republican from Utah. It’s also supported by Democratic Sens. Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary chairman from Vermont, Ron Wyden of Oregon, Jon Tester of Montana, Mark Begich of Alaska and Al Franken of Minnesota, and Republican Sen Dean Heller of Nevada.

Above all, Congress ought to make sure that any official duties — particularly those involving sensitive data — are handled by government employees, not job-hopping private contractors.
National security reform is a more daunting task now that corporations such as Booz Allen Hamilton, Northrup Grumman, SAIC and others have billions of dollars in profits at stake in expanding the national security infrastructure.

President Obama says he welcomes the debate on the tradeoffs between security and privacy. If so, he can thank Edward Snowden for bringing that conflict of interests to our attention. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2013

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Copyright © 2013 The Progressive Populist
PO Box 819, Manchaca TX 78652

Selections from the July 1-15, 2013 issue

COVER/Jill Richardson
Feeding the economy

EDITORIAL
Spy business scandal

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Do you care how your salmon was engineered?

DISPATCHES
Massive online surveillance no one talks about;
Never mess with IT guy;
Carlyle Group profits from Booz Allen;
Most Americans support phone tracking;
Felon thanks NRA for keeping guns accessible;
Senate approves farm bill that cuts food stamps;
Ill., Delaware reject ‘Citizens United’;
Austerians fail to stop job growth;
MSNBC ratings down with Chris Hayes;
Immigration reform proceeds in Senate;
Oklahoma congressman demands apology for climate change research;
Grayson passes corporate accountabilitiy amendments;
GOP 'wunderkind' drives Wisconsin into ground;
Supreme Court enforces ex post facto ban — barely ... 

SETH SANDRONSKY
Curing California’s jobs crisis

DON ROLLINS
Occupy’s theological roots
WENONAH HAUTER
Birth of a global bacon behemoth

NORMAN SOLOMON
Bradley Manning ‘guilty’ of aiding democracy

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas 

Needed: a medical friend

SAM URETSKY
Medicine: nice care if you can get it

WAYNE O’LEARY
Fire sale in Washington

JOHN BUELL
Democratic discourse, politics of demonization

DONALD McCARTHY
When do people become products?

ROB PATTERSON
Shutting down the ‘Office’

POPULIST PICKS
3 music documentaries that are worth watching

and more ...

Farm Bill Exposes Industry's Connection to Congress

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: I don’t think the farm bill debate could be any more mysterious. Seems like somebody doesn’t want us to know what’s going on. Here’s what I understand so far: Senate version, S. 954, doesn’t contain amendments to help food stamp users (now called Snap) or family farmers. There were more than 200 amendments pending, and a filibuster threatened, so they moved to limit debate to 30 hours. The good amendments, posted on the National Family Farm Coalition website, included “Udall's amendment on Section 2501 (#1055), Tester's amendment on Seeds and Breeds (#972), and the competition amendments: Rockefeller's amendment #993) to limit retaliation for growers speaking out; the Grassley (#969), Tester (#971), and Enzi (#982) amendments on other key components of livestock competition issues; and the Brown (#1088) amendment to encourage food and agriculture market development, entrepreneurship and education.” With these amendments rejected, there are no protections for family farmers and the corporations have free rein as far as narrowing the seed and livestock businesses and stopping young farmers from getting education and starting their own businesses. On the House side, debate is supposed to begin next Monday. They haven’t decided whether to accept amendments or not. Looks like they want to cut funds to GIPSA, the organization supposed to guarantee fairness in pricing, and SNAP. NFFC says, “The bill reported from the House Agriculture Committee guts GIPSA, cuts SNAP by more than $20 billion, and retains the Dairy Security Act (which we oppose) as well as other provisions that roll back current policy. During the House Agriculture Committee markup there were several amendments discussed but not voted on including Lujan-Grisham (D-NM) amendments to restore Section 2501 Minority Outreach and Education funds, and Fudge (D-OH) amendment on receipt for service that may become part of a floor amendment.” Here’s what NFFC says about the Senate Passage of the Farm Bill: S. 954: Washington, DC – Since early 2012, the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC) has urged passage of a farm bill to extend important programs whose existence depends on a new farm bill. On October 1, 2012, more than 37 programs were stranded in the budget, farm bill, and appropriations processes; several were extended in the fiscal cliff deal but most received no funding. The floor debate on this farm bill exposed major flaws in our democratic process. Despite Senator Stabenow's (D-MI) claims to having taken up many amendments the past two years, some that were critical to family farmers and rural communities were introduced, co-sponsored, and supported widely but never heard or debated. These amendments would have protected growers speaking up about unfair contracts from retaliation; prioritized funding for traditional (non-biotech) crop research; and restored the 40 percent in cuts for critical minority outreach and education programs. S. 954 lowered these funds from $17 million to $10 million per year. The greatest concern around S. 954 is that it privatizes the supposed safety net by shifting direct payments to grain and dairy farmers to a corporate-controlled crop insurance payment program. There is no pricing system based on farmers’ cost of production or any sort of reserve policy at the farm, national, or global level. Without these mechanisms to stabilize prices and to help farmers, fishermen, and rural communities face disastrous weather and economic conditions, this bill promotes farmer uncertainty while global insurance companies reap unchecked profits. S. 954 makes a few small yet significant steps. It links conservation compliance to farmers holding crop insurance and allows organic farmers to be covered under crop insurance at their retail, not wholesale, prices. It expands support for farmers markets and EBT access to SNAP (supplemental nutrition assistance program) benefits and establishes the Healthy Farm Financing Initiative and some beginning farmer initiatives, including outreach to Veteran farmers. It also calls for an official hearing process with broad participation to consider changes to the flawed current and proposed dairy programs.

Edward Snowden is a hero who deserves our praise and thanks

By Marc Jampole

 

Maybe now we know what happened to the Snowdens of yesteryear. Or at least to one of them.

“Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?” is Joseph Heller’s wonderful pun on Francois Villon’s famous poem, “Ballade des dames du temps jadis,” with its refrain of “Ou sont les neiges d’antan,” which has been translated into English for centuries as “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” Heller delivers the pun in the middle of his great anti-war novel, Catch-22 about the character of Snowden who dies from shrapnel wounds sustained during a flight to conduct what the crew knows to be senseless bombing.

The Snowden in question these days is the great American hero, Edward Snowden, who has made himself a hunted man by revealing that the U.S. has been collecting and tabulating the metadata of every Verizon customer (and by implication every customer of every phone company).

But many, especially on the right, don’t think he’s a hero. David Brooks threw as much vitriol as is possible in print at Snowden today in his New York Times column. If it were up to Brooks, Edward Snowden would share the fate of Heller’s Snowden: dying cold and in excruciating pain in a freezing airplane, his blood and intestines oozing slowly from massive perforations of the abdomen.

Brooks says that Edward Snowden has betrayed his country, the Constitution, his friends, the cause of open government and the privacy of all of us.

Whether Snowden betrayed his country, friends and the Constitution or not is open to opinion. I tend to fall in the camp that says that sometimes you have to break the law to follow a higher law or to change an unfair law: That’s what Thoreau, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, John Lewis and Daniel Ellsberg did. And I believe that’s what Edward Snowden did.

Brooks is free to disagree, but to say that Snowden betrayed the cause of open government and the privacy of all of us is manipulative nonsense. Read Brooks’ words, and note that in the case of both open government and privacy he is making the same paltry argument: if you don’t let the government do it this way, it will do much worse (even if it’s illegal):

• OPEN GOVERNMENT: “Every time there is a leak like this, the powers that be close the circle of trust a little tighter. They limit debate a little more.”
• PRIVACY: “If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods.”

Let us do it or we will do worse! Brooks’s reasoning is as absurdly self-serving as Milo Minderbinder, Colonel Cathcart, Doctor Daneeka and all the other figures of authority in Catch-22.

The last analogy I’m going to make between Heller’s great satire of the military-industrial complex at war and the current situation is to point out that Edward Snowden’s life now resembles that of Heller’s comic hero, Yossarian, at the end of the novel: on the run, unable to trust anyone, a deserter without a country. Yossarian, of course, was only trying to save himself. Edward Snowden was trying to save all of us from a government leaning ever more closely to an authoritarian police state. Edward Snowden deserves our thanks and he deserves our adulation as an American hero. 

What's a farm? What's a farm bill?

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: Looks like the farm bill won’t have anything in it to stem the tide of bad food coming into our communities. It will provide less money for food stamp users, forcing them to live on potato chips and white bread. And, yes, I know the current program isn’t called “food stamps” but I want you to understand what I’m saying. The program name changes just confuse the issue. To continue: The farm bill will force schools to use USDA surplus stocks, even if there is plenty of good food in the community. Here in the heartland where we raise lots of cattle, schools can get free ground beef to make taco pie and chili. It’s a grade lower than the beef used by dog food companies, but, hey! The budget . . . So far, there’s nothing to suggest that the Monsanto Protection Act will be repealed. That’s the verbiage which also protects other GMO companies, like DuPont, Syngeta AG and Dow, from worrying about GMO labeling or being prosecuted for planting unapproved GMO crops. The new farm bill won’t help beginning farmers. Or do anything to keep local agriculture in our nation. Nothing but payments for big ag insurance, big ag facilities, big ag wreck-the-earth-at-taxpayer-expense. The giant machines that tear up the dirt, dump chemicals, harvest up non-nutritious grain and sick animals—those will still go on. It’s up to family farmers and consumers to keep each other going. For consumers, it’s crucial to take a weekly trip to the farmers’ market and eat what’s fresh and local. For farmers, well, we need to learn how to think and talk like mainstream Americans. We need to agree on some messages. What we're asking the public to do is to think critically, but we're not giving them the tools to do it. So we need to talk like a consumer. For example, dairy farmers talk about POUNDS of milk. Consumers think about GALLONS of milk. Farmers talk about PRICE and want FAIR PRICES. Consumers talk about what they pay at Wal-Mart and want LOW PRICES. Since I talk to consumers all the time, I edit myself constantly. I never say "sow" without explaining it's a female hog with babies. I never say "heifer," "steer," "bull," "lamb," or even "pony," or "mule," without explaining. You can't imagine how many times I've had to explain that a pony won’t grow up to be a horse. And a mule, by the way, is a cross between a donkey and a horse. People think it's just another word for donkey, like burro or ass. The other day, I had to explain to a feed store worker the difference between a hybrid and GMOs. She was too young to know the difference. So, see the problems??

American people have “Joseph Welch” moment about government snooping.

By Marc Jampole

 

Have the American people just had a Joseph Welch epiphany?  A sudden realization that this time, they have gone too far, that we have let them go too far?

Welch was the lawyer who was questioning the rabidly anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy during McCarthy’s 1954 hearings to investigate communist infiltration of the Army. McCarthy told one bold-faced lie too many, accusing a perfectly innocent man, and Welch suddenly exclaimed in shock, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

It was at that moment that America’s elected leaders and other influentials realized that the post-war witch hunt for communists and fellow travelers in American government and society had gone too far.  It was at that moment when the American people realized that we had let them take it too far.

Have we seen a “Joseph Welch” moment with the revelation that the Obama Administration has collected the metadata of phone numbers of every Verizon customer? I think everyone assumes that if the federal government has the data from Verizon, then it has it from every other telephone company. The most shocking part of the revelation of mass snooping is that everyone agrees that it’s absolutely legal, thanks to the Patriot Act, which Congress keeps renewing.

Will we as a nation now put more pressure on Congress to rescind the Patriot Act or rethink many of its provisions? Will right-wing Republicans finally recognize the inherent contradiction in their national security positions, that they call for less government interference in our personal lives and then support these assaults on personal liberty?  Will Democrats no longer cravenly cave into every demand for greater spying, warrantless searches, drone killings and invasions built on fantasy premises?

Let’s hope so, because collecting and analyzing the metadata of all of our phone calls is a monstrous invasion of privacy. Collection of metadata is ripe for abuse by both the federal government and individuals. 

Obama’s excuse is that computers are sifting through the information, not humans, and that no one is listening to the contents of the phone calls.  Note the clever rhetorical misdirection that the President employs. He wants us to focus on what they’re not doing (or say they’re not doing), so we’ll forget what they are doing.  But there is so much information that we can gain from knowing whom you called, who called you and where and when all the parties were at the time of the call.  What if some future Joe McCarthy with access to the files wants to investigate Nation or Jewish Currents? What if the president wants to gather evidence about every major donor to the campaign of a potential rival?  Couldn’t this metadata be used to help plan the assassination of a foreign leader?

This gross invasion of privacy—this pilfering of civil and human rights—predates the Obama Administration. Obama apologists say at least it’s not torture and at least he didn’t start a war (at least not yet: Syria awaits.) It’s the same type of misdirection.

Let’s not focus on what the Obama Administration isn’t doing. Let’s focus on what it is doing, and although it may be legal, it is not right and it offends the sensibilities of many, if not most Americans.

It’s time for a total repeal of the Patriot Act.

What the Old-Style Progressives Eat

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: I go to around 50 farm and food meetings a year—probably one a week. And at most of these, there’s food. You could blindfold and feed me what they’re serving and I could tell you the age of the people in charge. Young progressives are getting really picky about their food—fresh and local. When we meet, we go to independent restaurants where local food is served, which is the kind of place these kids want to work. Oldsters go for whatever the industrial truck delivers to the greasy spoon café. They’ll eat hot dogs, for god’s sake, smothered in canned chili. And they’ll complain like crazy about industry and the consolidation of the food system, but they patronize the baddies without a thought. It’s a bit of a shock to attend meetings of progressive organizations, gray heads all, and see that they don’t know what the youngsters are doing. Shocking, really, to see well-intentioned and philosophically brilliant social thinkers talking the talk but failing to walk the walk and cluelessly tucking into the products of industry. This happens time and again, and I end up realizing that I can eat healthy local foods all month long, unless I go to a meeting of yesterday’s farm progressives. Sad, when we could be building bridges, serving healthy and local food and patronizing the businesses that the next generation sees as necessary to make their issues work. One of the great joys of being a locavore is that you so often find yourself surrounded by people working to make their communities more sustainable. These are high-energy young people and they’re forcing us oldsters to choose: Will we be helpful elders? Or are we just in the way? Social movements always start at the grassroots level. Always. And they take generations to complete. It’s up to us powerful oldsters to reach to the next group and help. We can’t make progress without them, and we can’t make headway by ignoring their accomplishments. These kids don’t ask permission, they’ll do it on their own. They’re creating composting sites and recycling in their communities, forcing cities to create bike lanes, learning how to grow their own food and, of course, patronizing the restaurants founded by their friends. They’re coming up with an excellent system. Social movements always start at the grassroots level. Always. I think of the changes in my own lifetime—civil rights for blacks, workplace expansion for women, independence for African nations. None of these came from the top and trickled down.

Did Chris Christie ruin his chances for the Republican presidential nomination?

By Marc Jampole

 

Everyone is saying that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie acted in his self-interest when he scheduled a special election to replace the recently deceased Frank Lautenberg in the U.S. Senate for three weeks before the general elections this coming November. The estimates for the additional cost to hold two elections in one month have run as high as $24 million. What makes this additional expenditure by a self-proclaimed fiscal conservative particularly absurd is the fact that Christie will appoint an interim Senator who will fill the seat until January no matter when the election is held.

The pundits seem to agree that Christie decided to hold this expensive second Election Day so that he wouldn’t have to face a ballot that had the popular Newark Mayor Cory Booker on the opposite ticket. Booker announced he was running for Senate long before Senator Lautenberg passed away, and Booker’s presence on the ballot would likely compel more minorities to vote, many of whom Christie fears would vote straight Democratic party line.

It’s not that Christie is afraid to lose the governor’s race. He’s afraid that he won’t rack up the awesome totals he thinks he needs to prove to the Republican Party that he can draw enough cross-over votes to win the presidential election in 2016.

But what some are calling a deft political maneuver by Christie with only short-term costs may come back to haunt New Jersey’s BMOC because Christie committed a cardinal sin of communications: he acted against the image that people have of him.

Christie’s enormous popularity among independents both in New Jersey and nationally is based on his bipartisanship. He talks like a centrist and in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy he reached across the aisle to President Obama for the good of the people of his state.

Flimsy, inconsequential, dubious—those are the words that come to mind when I consider the possible advantage to Christie by costing New Jersey taxpayers $24 million to hold a special election.

What makes it worse is that Christie has taken such a hard line on cutting programs that actually help the citizens of New Jersey. Among others, the New York Times has pointed that Christie has cut the New Jersey budget to the bone.

Christie cut $10 million from the after-school programs for at-risk children. He cut $8.6 million in tuition subsidies for college students. He cut $12 million in charity care at hospitals. He vetoed a $24 million plan for early voting in New Jersey.  Christie’s actions say that he thinks New Jersey can’t afford this help to the poor and disenfranchised, but it can afford to have a separate election for one office three weeks before the general election.

Christie is known for putting people ahead of politics. But in the case of the special election, he chose to put politics first. He didn’t do it to advance a piece of legislation, nor to help the Republican Party. No, he did it to benefit himself and himself alone. 

And everybody knows that Christie acted in extreme self-interest as opposed to acting in the best interest of his constituents. He is living in a dream world if he thinks people are going to forget, mainly because his opponents in both major parties will keep reminding everyone.

In one Machiavellian one act, Christie has soiled his image. He has lost his big edge in the competition against other Republican presidential hopefuls and destroyed the centrist “good guy” image he created for himself in his handling of the Sandy crisis. 

Chris Christie has destroyed his brand.

Nine billion mouths to feed

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: On a conference phone call with a bunch of farmers (and one fisherwoman) yesterday, we lamented the misunderstandings surrounding the farm bill. The theme of the call might have been: We may not even get the smallest amendments on the senate floor that we need. How can we build our capacity? We never got a free market and with so much corporate power we never will. The subjects were diverse—the farm bill, a Washington Post article announcing the end of subsidies (which keep many family farms profitable and keep food cheap for consumers), a new movie that repeats the bad old messages. The movie, which I haven’t seen yet, tells about a farm family fighting over their future. The heroes, as I’ve heard it, leave the farm. The thing is that the corporate have been honing their message for decades and it’s a good one: nine billion mouths to feed. Nothing about birth control, declining population in some lands, education for women to give them more options. Just five words, repeated and repeated and repeated by the big corporate powers. So we need five words.

GMO wheat OMG

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: We had two pieces of good news on Friday—the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that land cannot be condemned for the sole reason of making money for a corporation AND several big box stores, including Target and Whole Foods—are refusing to handle GMO salmon because consumers don’t want it. Then, the good news was followed immediately by the mega bad news that GMO wheat, which is another thing that consumers absolutely don’t want, has been discovered in Oregon. Wheat, like corn, canola, soy and sugar, is an ingredient in much of what we eat, from meat with gravy to fried foods to bread to cookies and other baked goods. European culture is often called a wheat culture. For the people on the planet with anti-wheat conditions like celiac disease, eating is a real challenge. So, for those of us that don’t want any more problems with our food, the idea that an untested GMO wheat might spread into the food system is horrifying. Even before genetic engineering, wheat has been changed from the original. It has been hybridized for years. That is, varieties with a desired strain have been crossed by farmers with another strain to provide some kind of benefit. Modern wheat is shorter, more protein-laden, and has more chromosomes than original wheat. It can be harvested by big equipment more easily. It can tolerate more nitrogen without falling down and usually requires one or more blasts of nitrogen as it grows. On my farm we grow ten varieties of non-hybidized wheats that haven’t been popular since the 1920s. They vary from Fultz, which was the most popular wheat in America at one time, to Touzelle, a French variety that Louis IX thought could cure him of an unknown malady. One of our wheats is almost as tall as me, and we have to harvest with scythes. Oregon is very far from Missouri, thank goodness. If we got GMO genes in our wheat, I’d be devastated.

What’s the difference between DNA and fingerprints? Both can be used and abused

By Marc Jampole

 

My natural instincts were to disapprove of the Supreme Court decision allowing police to collect DNA evidence at every arrest. But when I thought about it more, I saw that taking DNA is no different from taking fingerprints or mug shots.

Fingerprints and photographs are routinely taken at every arrest at the discretion of the police. Many if not all end up in a national database, which can be checked when the police are investigating future crimes.  The information contained in both fingerprints and photographs could, and sometimes is abused. A police officer could plant a fingerprint or encourage a witness to select one photo in an array of suspects.  The fingerprints could be sold to private security or investigative firms. 

So what’s the difference between DNA and these more traditional forms of identification?

Maryland v. King may mark the first time that I have ever been on the same side as Clarence Thomas in any Supreme Court decision that wasn’t unanimous (and therefore devoid of controversy).

Civil rights activists are concerned that a DNA swab represents an invasion of privacy, which was outlawed by the Fourth Amendment. It seems no less an invasion of privacy than getting a scan checked at an airport or having your luggage checked. Everyone gets scanned and searched at the airport. The DNA check—like fingerprinting—only occurs to people who are arrested. And in most of the 28 states allowing DNA to be swabbed at arrest, it’s not for every arrest—it’s only in the case of crimes for which DNA can provide special knowledge, such as rape.

There is no doubt that sooner or later some authority is going to misuse DNA evidence. It’s this misuse and the general abuse of police power about which we should be concerned. Since 9/11, Congress has passed a series of laws that have eroded our civil rights and invaded our privacy, such as allowing government to search the books we checked from libraries or to place warrantless wire taps. Then there are the drone kills.

It should be against the law to snoop into our reading habits. And it should be against the law to arrest people merely for congregating at a street corner. New York City’s stop-and-frisk is a disgrace to this bastion of liberalism. Racial profiling is always wrong. Planting evidence or keeping exculpatory evidence from the defense—wrong. Beating a confession out of a prisoner—wrong. False arrest—wrong.

But once someone is in the system, under arrest and turning a grim face to the camera, I see nothing wrong with taking a swab from his or her cheek.

What’s so ironic about the objections being raised against this decision is that the same people tend to support the rights of defendants and prisoners. What DNA is mostly known for is exonerating people from crimes they did not commit.

Everything costs time and/or money. Most of the people speaking against this decision are getting paid by their respective organizations. To the degree they waste time on bemoaning what many call the 21st-century equivalent of fingerprinting, they are unable to spend time fighting the real abuses of civil liberties and personal privacy that take place every day in the United States, some sanctioned by ill-advised laws.  I’m not saying the ACLU and others aren’t fighting these real abuses. What I’m saying is they should do more of that and forget about DNA testing at arrests for violent crimes.   

Congressional Cash