Pizza and beer now cost an arm and a leg
Sure sign we're heading for a recession: Even cheap eats are hard to find
By Al Olson
If you’re looking for a sure sign the U.S. economy is headed for a recession, all you need to do is look at the skyrocketing price of “recession-proof” foods: pizza, hot dogs, bagels and beer.

For many Americans, the credit crunch and the mortgage mess have left their pocketbooks – and their cupboards – bare. These same consumers, many living paycheck to paycheck, have relied on these cheaper foods to keep their expenditures down. Not anymore.

In the past few months, the news has gone from bad to worse:

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Crunch Time on the Bread Line
by Michael Fox

Where will you be in the line? In a column last week, I discussed the forthcoming risk of global famine. Now the evidence is piling on, and there is every reason to expect - at the very least - astronomical inflation in food prices within the next year. Most significantly, this problem is not confined to any one region of the world, and the ripple effect is mind-boggling. Keep in mind that the dollar is falling on the world exchanges, and the food you buy is subject to the fluctuations of the currency exchanges. Why? Well, simply because it may be more lucrative for global agricultural corporations to sell to the highest bidder – no matter where they may be.

Think about the grocery products you buy that involve grains - and then think again. Naturally, the first thing that comes to mind is bread (which, by the way, keeps nicely in the freezer, but never the fridge!). In the United States and Europe, we eat bread from wheat, but in Mexico, the more common equivalent is corn tortillas, and corn is already running short due in a large part to its (mis-) use for E-85 Ethanol production. Consequently, the Mexican tortilla market is running short and prices are rising for that most basic staple – because American conglomerates are buying up too much of the corn for Ethanol. The corn shortage is also causing the rapidly increasing prices for eggs and chickens, as they are, traditionally, corn-fed.
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Congress Deaf to US Opinion on Farm Bill
by Sangamithra Iyer
For more than 15 years, the Environmental Working Group has been active protecting public health and the environment with public information. Their latest tool: an interactive map of editorials from newspapers around the country demanding reform of the Farm Bill that Congress is fixing to reauthorize without much change.

The editorials unmask the economic unfairness of the farm bill and show a nation ready for a break from record-high commodity prices, rising rates of obesity and diabetes, and growing concern about industrial agriculture’s contribution to global warming and other environmental perils.

The editorials reveal a people ready for a paradigm shift all over the U.S. and particularly in the agricultural heartland, but neither the House or Senate versions of the subsidy-laden 2007 Farm Bill come close to making the needed fixes.

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No Arms! No Transfers! No Military Aid! It's Time To Demilitarize US Policy in Africa
by BAR managing editor Bruce Dixon
Since the end of the Cold War, under Democrats and Republicans alike, the US has provided tens of billions of dollars worth of military aid, military training and arms transfers to 50 of the 54 nations in Africa. America's militarized foreign policy has transformed Africa into the poorest and most war-ravaged continent on earth, with several armed conflicts raging at any one time over the last two decades, and American arms and training a factor in at least one of each. It is the militarization of US policy toward Africa that has manufactured the "failed states" which, like the Congo are ideal for the extraction of African resources, as well as the desired excuses for further military intervention.

The only solution is the complete de-militarization of all US foreign policy on the African continent, and the withdrawal of all US bases and troops from Africa.
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God Bless Ralph Nader
by Joel S. Hirschhorn
Because he wants to salvage American democracy and help Americans, Ralph Nader is running for president again. He deserves the support of all Americans that see themselves as progressives, dissidents, independents, and patriots who want to remove the stranglehold of the two-party plutocracy on our political system.

When it comes to being an honest, proven and trustworthy change agent, Nader is the gold standard. So why are so many Democrats going ballistic and spewing hate towards Nader?
They are in denial about both Obama and Clinton. Both owe much to the corporate and business world that Nader has waged war against for decades. Like Clinton, Obama has taken huge amounts of money from several business sectors. Both refuse to advocate a single payer universal health care system that Nader champions; this protects the enormously profitable health insurance industry.

They are crazy-glued to their misplaced blame of Nader for the Bush victory in 2000, even though several other indisputable factors also explain Gore's loss, including his poor campaign that was unable to deliver his home state of Tennessee, the incompetence of the Democratic Party to stop the Supreme Court's disgraceful action, and the cowardly behavior of the Democratic Party over many decades that kept them from working to replace the Electoral College with the popular vote. And rather than blame Nader for the Iraq war, the Democrats have only themselves to blame, not only for authorizing the war but for many assaults on the Constitution that Bush has gotten away with.
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Air Force Blocks Access to Many Blogs
By Noah Shachtman
The Air Force is tightening restrictions on which blogs its troops can read, cutting off access to just about any independent site with the word "blog" in its web address. It's the latest move in a larger struggle within the military over the value -- and hazards -- of the sites. At least one senior Air Force official calls the squeeze so "utterly stupid, it makes me want to scream."

Until recently, each major command of the Air Force had some control over what sites their troops could visit, the Air Force Times reports. Then the Air Force Network Operations Center, under the service's new "Cyber Command," took over.

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Iron and Wine 4 ya!

Wheat prices hit record high
The cost of March spring wheat hit $24 a bushel Monday, double its cost two months ago.
By Ron Scherer
New York - Dressed in his white apron and baker's hat, Jose Espinal puts the finishing touches on a chicken pot pie that will be sold to customers of Cucina & Co. later in the day. He carefully places a crust on the pie and crimps the top and bottom together.

But to make the dough for about 300 pies, Mr. Espinal, the pastry chef, used 22 pounds of flour – an item that the store knows will soon be rising in price.

"I'm expecting it this week," says Michael Salmon, director of operations of Cucina, which is in Macy's in Manhattan. "Maybe 20 or 30 percent."

Why the increase? The prime ingredient in flour is wheat, which these days is acting more like oil – rising sharply on commodities exchanges. On Monday, the price of March spring wheat on the Minneapolis Grain Exchange shot up to $24 a bushel, the highest price ever. Within the past month, the price of some types of wheat has risen over 90 percent. Already, agricultural experts say, it's getting hard to find the type of wheat used to make pasta, noodles, pizza, and bagels.

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If It's African, It's TRIBAL by Mumia Abu-Jamal
With the ignition of post-election violence in Kenya, came the traditional themes from the Western press: tribal hatreds, ethnic enmity, and almost joyous reporting of the spasms of violence wracking the country.
Joyous, because such violence was useful in convincing Western readers, viewers and listeners of the inherent wildness of foreign lands, and by implication, the peaceful and civil nature of the West. Tribal has become a kind of journalistic shorthand for Black or brown people.
As usual, the real story is a bit more complex. And Americans don't really do complex very well.
The violence, while admittedly breathtaking, is (as most mass violence is), the result of political elites directing the poor and the young to stir the cauldron of conflict, for their political ends.
Kenya, like most post-colonial states, was saddled at the dawn of independence with pressures from colonial powers to keep economic systems essentially unchanged. Thus, many independence leaders became junior partners with international capital, and therefore became individually wealthy, while the poor and working classes of their countries became more ruthlessly exploited.
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Feed The World? We Are Fighting a Losing Battle, UN Admits
by Julian Borger
The United Nations warned yesterday that it no longer has enough money to keep global malnutrition at bay this year in the face of a dramatic upward surge in world commodity prices, which have created a “new face of hunger”.

“We will have a problem in coming months,” said Josette Sheeran, the head of the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP). “We will have a significant gap if commodity prices remain this high, and we will need an extra half billion dollars just to meet existing assessed needs.”

With voluntary contributions from the world’s wealthy nations, the WFP feeds 73 million people in 78 countries, less than a 10th of the total number of the world’s undernourished. Its agreed budget for 2008 was $2.9bn (£1.5bn). But with annual food price increases around the world of up to 40% and dramatic hikes in fuel costs, that budget is no longer enough even to maintain current food deliveries.

The shortfall is all the more worrying as it comes at a time when populations, many in urban areas, who had thought themselves secure in their food supply are now unable to afford basic foodstuffs. Afghanistan has recently added an extra 2.5 million people to the number it says are at risk of malnutrition

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Arctic seed vault opens doors for 100 million seeds
LONGYEARBYEN, NORWAY (26 FEBRUARY 2008) — The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened today on a remote island in the Arctic Circle, receiving inaugural shipments of 100 million seeds that originated in over 100 countries. With the deposits ranging from unique varieties of major African and Asian food staples such as maize, rice, wheat, cowpea, and sorghum to European and South American varieties of eggplant, lettuce, barley, and potato, the first deposits into the seed vault represent the most comprehensive and diverse collection of food crop seeds being held anywhere in the world.

At the opening ceremony, the Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg, unlocked the vault and, together with the African Nobel Peace Prize-winning environmentalist Wangari Maathai, he placed the first seeds in the vault. The President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, and a host of dignitaries and agriculture experts from around the globe deposited seeds during the ceremony. A variety of Norwegian musicians and choirs also performed in the opening ceremony held 130 metres deep inside the frozen mountain.

Built near the village of Longyearbyen on the island of Spitsbergen, the vault at its inception contains 268,000 distinct samples of seeds—each one originating from a different farm or field in the world. Each sample may contain hundreds of seeds or more. In all, the shipments of seeds secured in the vault today weighed approximately 10 tonnes, filling 676 boxes.
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Human Shadows on the Seas
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, NY TIMES
In 1980, after college, I joined the crew of a sailboat partway through a circumnavigation of the globe. Becalmed and roasting one day during a 21-day crossing of the western Indian Ocean, several of us dived over the side. Within a few swimming strokes, the bobbing hull seemed a toy over my shoulder as I glanced back through my diving mask. Below me, my shadow and the boat’s dwindled to the vanishing point in the two-mile-deep water. Human activity seemed nothing when set against the sea itself.
Just a few weeks later, on an uninhabited island in a remote part of the Red Sea, I was proved wrong. The shore above the tide line was covered with old light bulbs, apparently tossed from the endless parade of ships over the years.
Now scientists are building the first worldwide portrait of such dispersed human impacts on the oceans, revealing a planet-spanning mix of depleted resources, degraded ecosystems and disruptive biological blending as species are moved around the globe by accident and intent.

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The Calm Before the Conflagration
By Chris Hedges
The United States is funding and in many cases arming the three ethnic factions in Iraq—the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunni Arabs. These factions rule over partitioned patches of Iraqi territory and brutally purge rival ethnic groups from their midst. Iraq no longer exists as a unified state. It is a series of heavily armed fiefdoms run by thugs, gangs, militias, radical Islamists and warlords who are often paid wages of $300 a month by the U.S. military. Iraq is Yugoslavia before the storm. It is a caldron of weapons, lawlessness, hate and criminality that is destined to implode. And the current U.S. policy, born of desperation and defeat, means that when Iraq goes up, the U.S. military will have to scurry like rats for cover.

The supporters of the war, from the Bush White House to Sen. John McCain, tout the surge as the magic solution. But the surge, which primarily deployed 30,000 troops in and around Baghdad, did little to thwart the sectarian violence. The decline in attacks began only when we bought off the Sunni Arabs. U.S. commanders in the bleak fall of 2006 had little choice. It was that or defeat. The steady rise in U.S. casualties, the massive car bombs that tore apart city squares in Baghdad and left hundreds dead, the brutal ethnic cleansing that was creating independent ethnic enclaves beyond our control throughout Iraq, the death squads that carried out mass executions and a central government that was as corrupt as it was impotent signaled catastrophic failure.

The United States cut a deal with its Sunni Arab enemies. It would pay the former insurgents. It would allow them to arm and form military units and give them control of their ethnic enclaves. The Sunni Arabs, in exchange, would halt attacks on U.S. troops. The Sunni Arabs agreed.
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The Myth of the Surge
Hoping to turn enemies into allies, U.S. forces are arming Iraqis who fought with the insurgents. But it's already starting to backfire. A report from the front lines of the new Iraq
NIR ROSEN, Rolling Stone
It's a cold, gray day in December, and I'm walking down Sixtieth Street in the Dora district of Baghdad, one of the most violent and fearsome of the city's no-go zones. Devastated by five years of clashes between American forces, Shiite militias, Sunni resistance groups and Al Qaeda, much of Dora is now a ghost town. This is what "victory" looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily. House after house is deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open and unguarded, many emptied of furniture. What few furnishings remain are covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush's much-heralded "surge," Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence.

My guide, a thirty-one-year-old named Osama who grew up in Dora, points to shops he used to go to, now abandoned or destroyed: a barbershop, a hardware store. Since the U.S. occupation began, Osama has watched civil war turn the streets where he grew up into an ethnic killing field. After the fall of Saddam, the Americans allowed looters and gangs to take over the streets, and Iraqi security forces were stripped of their jobs. The Mahdi Army, the powerful Shiite paramilitary force led by the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, took advantage of the power shift to retaliate in areas such as Dora, where Shiites had been driven from their homes. Shiite forces tried to cleanse the district of Sunni families like Osama's, burning or confiscating their homes and torturing or killing those who refused to leave.

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How good is carlin! not the best quality video but I think you will get the point!

143 Million Pounds of Beef Recalled -- Will the Industry Finally Change?
By Anna Lappé, Huffington Post.
Maybe you're one of the more than 200,000 people who have seen this disturbing video revealing the animal cruelty caught on tape by a Humane Society investigation at a California slaughterhouse. (I, personally, couldn't stomach to watch it).

Whether you saw the video or not, you most certainly have heard the response: Prompted by public outcry, the company that processed meat from this slaughterhouse issued the largest beef recall in U.S. history even though -- oops -- much of the 143 million pounds recalled has already been eaten, including possibly by children in school lunches.

The animal cruelty was disturbing enough, what it revealed about possible threats to human health adds even more reason to be wary of the burger. The Humane Society investigation proved --they've got it on tape -- what many have been saying for years: that a loophole in federal legislation was being used to feed slaughtered "downer" cows into the food supply. Now, downer cows -- those too old or sick to walk or produce milk --are not supposed to find their way into our food. Why not? Because the symptoms of downer cows are the same as other diseases, including mad cow disease. And those slaughtered downers in the video were destined for a processing facility that provides meat not just for average Joe, but for other customers, like the National School Lunch Program. Sloppy Joe's just got that much less appealing.
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The Last, Best Hope for the Northern Rockies
By MICHAEL GARRITY
The U.S. House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee held a hearing on October 18, 2007 on the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA) H.R. 1975, sponsored by Representatives Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Christopher Shays (R-CT) and 125 other Representatives. NREPA currently is the only wilderness bill that would affect Montana that has been introduced in Congress. NREPA will designate all of the inventoried roadless areas in the Northern Rockies as wilderness; protect some of America's most beautiful and ecologically important lands while saving taxpayers money and creating jobs.

To preserve the biological integrity of the Northern Rockies ecosystem, NREPA will designate as wilderness nearly 7 million acres of wilderness in Montana, 9.5 million acres of wilderness in Idaho, 5 million acres of wilderness in Wyoming, 750,000 acres in eastern Oregon, and 500,000 acres in eastern Washington on federal public land. Included in this total is over 3 million acres in Yellowstone, Glacier and Grand Teton National Parks.

The Northern Rockies is the only place in the lower 48 states where native species and wildlife are protected on lands that are virtually unchanged since Lewis and Clark saw them. This is public land belonging to all Americans.

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Neutering the FDA
By RALPH NADER
Like other families, the Bush family eats, uses medicines, and relies on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to assure the safety of vast amounts of both products.

Like other families, more and more of the food and medicine you consume is coming from other countries where the FDA has very little inspection authority. Nearly 80 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredients are imported from foreign countries.

Hardly a day goes by without a news story recounting or disclosing casualties or serious perils from contaminated food and medicines. Many of these and other medicines have seriously harmful side-effects or lack of efficacy.

President Bush is the leading authority in the country when it comes to making FDA an adequately funded, staffed, and empowered agency to urgently fulfill what he says repeatedly is his top priority-to protect the safety of the American people.

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Move Over, Oil, There’s Money in Texas Wind
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS, NY Times
SWEETWATER, Tex. — The wind turbines that recently went up on Louis Brooks’s ranch are twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, with blades as wide as the wingspan of a jumbo jet. More important from his point of view, he is paid $500 a month apiece to permit 78 of them on his land, with 76 more on the way.

“That’s just money you’re hearing,” he said as they hummed in a brisk breeze recently.

Texas, once the oil capital of North America, is rapidly turning into the capital of wind power. After breakneck growth the last three years, Texas has reached the point that more than 3 percent of its electricity, enough to supply power to one million homes, comes from wind turbines.

Texans are even turning tapped-out oil fields into wind farms, and no less an oilman than Boone Pickens is getting into alternative energy.

“I have the same feelings about wind,” Mr. Pickens said in an interview, “as I had about the best oil field I ever found.” He is planning to build the biggest wind farm in the world, a $10 billion behemoth that could power a small city by itself.

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Here is a trailer of a new documentary coming out that questions what NGOs are doing in Africa and wether or not it is benefical to the African poor population. Should be an interesting movie to check out: http://www.whatarewedoinghere.net/

Potential Health Hazards of Genetically Engineered Foods
by Stephen Lendman
Genetically engineered foods saturate our diet today. In the US alone, over 80% of all processed foods contain them. Others include grains like rice, corn and wheat; legumes like soybeans and soy products; vegetable oils, soft drinks; salad dressings; vegetables and fruits; dairy products including eggs; meat, chicken, pork and other animal products; and even infant formula plus a vast array of hidden additives and ingredients in processed foods (like in tomato sauce, ice cream, margarine and peanut butter). Consumers don't know what they're eating because labeling is prohibited, yet the danger is clear. Independently conducted studies show the more of these foods we eat, the greater the potential harm to our health.

Today, consumers are kept in the dark and are part of an uncontrolled, unregulated mass human experiment the results of which are unknown. Yet, the risks are enormous, it will take years to learn them, and when we finally know it'll be too late to reverse the damage if it's proved conclusively that genetically engineered foods harm human health as growing numbers of independent experts believe. Once GM seeds are introduced to an area, the genie is out of the bottle for keeps. There is nothing known to science today to reverse the contamination already spread over two-thirds of arable US farmland and heading everywhere unless checked.

This is happening in spite of the risk because of what F. William Engdahl revealed in his powerfully important, well documented book titled "Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation." It's the diabolical story of how Washington and four Anglo-American agribusiness giants plan world domination by patenting animal and vegetable life forms to gain worldwide control of our food supply, make it all genetically engineered, and use it as a weapon to reward friends and punish enemies....LINK TO CON>

Kucinich says he faces "swiftboat" attack
Posted by Molly Kavanaugh
U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich said he is facing a "swiftboat" attack in the March 4
Democratic primary and if he is reelected to the 10th Congressional district
he will continue to govern as he has for 12 years.

"I'm going to keep on working for the people," he said during an interview on this morning's "Sound of Ideas" on WCPN 90.3. "You have to build consensus.
That's what I do."

Swiftboating refers to an attack that is unfair or untrue. The term comes from the Swift Vets and POWs for Truth (formerly "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth") and their widely-publicized campaign against 2004 Presidential candidate John Kerry.

While not calling him by name, Kucinich was referring to candidate Joe
Cimperman, who has been hammering away at his failed presidential bid and
his record, which includes passage of one bill..

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Delusional Hope: The Obama Rapture
By Joel Hirschhorn

.....pulsating platitudes. A tsunami of hope has plunged America into electoral euphoria. In its path is the wreckage of critical thinking about what ails the US and what bold, revolutionary actions are needed. Barry Obama has accomplished semantic alchemy, turning justified but grim distrust and outrage with government and politics into hallelujah hope. But most hope never materializes and is a terrible predictor of reality.

Think about the prevalence of hope: sports teams heading into a championship game, research scientists envisioning a Nobel Prize, people in the criminal justice system awaiting trial, entrepreneurs starting a new business, people starting off on a long-awaited vacation, American Idol contestants, college seniors dreaming of becoming superrich, and all those supporters of Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and other presidential candidates that will not reach the White House.

Hope produces far more losers than winners. Hope is enjoyable until failure hits. But most people do not give up on hope, just move on to the next hope.

Obama hoped that he could tap into the national desire for change from the awful conditions produced by the Bush administration by selling hope to voters rather than his experience and accomplishments. Like a political medicine-man he has succeeded as a compelling seller of hope, better than the best infomercial charlatan....
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Tanzania: Dar Bank And Agra Unveil $6.1 Million Credit Scheme for Poor Farmers
Christine Afandi
Dar es Salaam
The Tanzania National Microfinance Bank (NMB) in partnership with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra) has unveiled a $6.1 million farm input credit scheme to benefit poor Tanzanian farmers and improve the country's network of rural agro-dealers.
A memorandum of understanding signed in Dodoma between the two institutions spells out that the financial scheme will boost subsistence farmers in five pilot districts to access farm inputs.
NMB will provide a total of $5 million for loans to be made available to agro-dealers in five pilot districts while Agra and the Financial Sector Deepening Trust (FSDT), a Tanzanian government finance initiative, will provide $1.1 million in a guarantee fund to help reduce the risk of lending by NMB to agro-dealers.

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Welcome to Christian Rural America!

Carton vs. Canister
Is frozen orange juice concentrate better for the environment?
By Brendan I. Koerner
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let's address the inevitable objection to questions of this sort: No, changing your mode of orange juice intake isn't going to save the planet, especially since—as we'll soon see—concentrate-filled canisters are hardly an environmental boon. But your OJ quandary provides an excellent opportunity to peek behind the food industry curtain and better grasp the vast amounts of energy that go into everyday luxuries.

The fact that orange juice is so prevalent on America's breakfast tables is something of a modern marvel. Virtually all of the OJ consumed in the United States contains oranges produced in Florida and Brazil; these two industry players produce half of the world's oranges, and 95 percent of that fruit ends up as juice. Environmentalists have long decried the recent proliferation of orange groves in Brazil, citing the crop's insatiable thirst (up to 129,000 cubic feet of water per acre annually) and the heavy use of pesticides (though juice oranges require less spraying than those intended for direct consumption).

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Michael Pollan Debunks Food Myths
By Onnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet.
The human digestive tract has about the same number of neurons as the spinal column. What are they there for? The final word isn't in yet, but Michael Pollan thinks their existence suggests that digestion may be more than the rather mundane process of breaking down food into chemicals. And, keeping those numerous digestive neurons in mind, Pollan's new book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto entreaties us to follow our knowledgeable guts when it comes to figuring out what to eat.

Nutrition science and the food industry have been changing their minds about what Americans should eat for years. Low fat, no fat, low carb, high protein. In In Defense of Food, Pollan argues that all of these fixations amount to a uniquely American disease: orthorexia -- an unhealthy obsession with eating. And as statistics on diabetes and obesity can attest, obsessing doesn't seem to be getting us anywhere. Pollan takes the reader on a journey through the science of food and reveals how it is that we've ignored our guts and followed the ever-changing tune of food science. At once a scathing indictment of the food industry, and a call for a return to real food, Pollan's latest book reveals how Americans have been dangerously misled into adopting "low fat" as a fundamental food mantra, and how most of the products on our supermarket shelves should be called "imitation."

Pollan recently sat down with AlterNet to explain why cooking from scratch has become a subversive act, and to tell us things our guts probably already knew.
LINK TO INTERVIEW..

(I do not know of anyone that can write this good and say things so right!...Read and think about it...Part 2 is also posted but I will wait till tomorrow)
Crusade of Surge and Siege: Part One of Three
By Manuel Valenzuela
Homeland Born and Bred
Sojourn into the outer recesses of a nation bordering on madness, into a land deeply disturbed and emotionally bewildered, a world of anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism, of fanaticism and fundamentalism, entering a case study into fantasyland and escapism, taking a pilgrimage into realms both of purposeful ignorance and blindness, , of electing lifelong incompetents based on wanting to have a beer with them, walking through the dark valley of indifference, climbing the monolithic mountain of hubris, finally reaching the hallowed halls of smoke and mirrors, a place where only the blind lead the blind and where the deafening roars of death and destruction are easily suppressed in delusion and denial. Journey, if you will, into a nation that lost its moral compass inside the dungeons of fear and hatred.

Enter what fascists call the Homeland, what patriots used to call the United States of America, now named, simply, and appropriately, Amerika, a place where corporations enjoy more rights and protections than the People, where corporations – through their products and policies – help kill hundreds of thousands of human beings every year in the name of profit over people, making them mass murderers on a scale reserved only for humanity’s worst; a land controlled by the military-energy-industrial complex, with war the engine for unimaginable profits; a nation now without a Constitution, nor a moral standing; a country that has developed a thirst for human blood and an appetite for destruction; a land of Manifest Destiny leaving death, suffering and destruction in its wake; a sadist entity that develops and refines its crimes against humanity it inflicts upon the people of the world by first practicing them on its own citizenry.

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Huge meat recall prods further reforms
From fast-food chains to Congress, moves are afoot to reduce animal suffering and ensure food safety
By Brad Knickerbocker | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Ashland, Ore. - This week's recall of 143 million pounds of beef represents the confluence of two important trends in US agriculture: the push for more humane treatment of farm animals, and efforts to prevent the spread of disease.

Under pressure from consumers and animal rights groups, major restaurant and grocery chains from Burger King to Wolfgang Puck to Safeway are requiring that eggs and meat come from producers that reduce animal suffering.

A new bill in the US House of Representatives would require the federal government to do the same for food it buys for schools, prisons, and the armed forces.

"Just as they set standards for fuel efficiency or hiring practices [in government contracts], they can set standards for animal welfare," says Michael Markarian, executive vice president of the Humane Society of the United States [HSUS], which provided the secret video of animal abuse that led to the beef recall.

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(Sorry people if you disagree with this article, but it has my feelings about this whole election perfectly. Yes I agree that Obama (or Clinton) is a better canidate then Bush....no question! But, what will really change? I do not know, but I dont think much. At least give it a read and make up your own mind!!)
Beggars Collide: Thus I Refute Critics
by Ben Tripp
If there was a nickel for every leftie I've pissed off with the expression of my views, I would not be rifling pay phones for change. This suits me fine, as do dimes and half-dollars. I didn't start writing in hope that everyone would agree with me all the time; anybody that did agree with me all the time would have to be some kind of crank. Back in 1992 when precious few people were making even the littlest peep against the slimes and arrows of outrageous fortunates, ninety-nine out of a hundred of my irate readers were right-wingers; now they're all liberals. I guess this is because, what with Obamarama and all that, folks on the Left think their day is finally coming. On that, we agree. I just happen to think it's a different day. Maybe (certainly) I'm just a big party pooper, but in the name of Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all, knock off acting like 'hope' is something that has energy and can perform work. It doesn't and it can't. It's just an emotion. We're talking about an abstract noun. Hope is just an affective meaning we apply to future events, of no more substance than amusement, irritation, or tridecaphobia: a feeling, an idea, nothing more. The first thing the Left in this country has to do is abandon hope. Then maybe we can get something done.

Here's a sample of a typical correspondence from an irritated reader whose hope my prick deflated:....

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(This is a really good article about reasons for the shooting, read the whole thing!)
Illinois Shooting: Society in a State of Decay
by max blunt
A Culture of Desperation

On Thursday afternoon, a mass shooting took place at Northern Illinois University (NIU), in DeKalb, a small city located about one hour’s drive west of Chicago. At the time of writing, six have died, including the killer, and another fifteen remain wounded, some in critical condition.

At about 3 p.m. a gunman, later identified as Steven Kazmierczak, age 27, emerged dressed in black from behind a projection screen on the stage of a small lecture hall and opened fire in a seemingly random manner, before shooting himself.

He carried a pump-action shotgun, which he had smuggled onto campus in a guitar case, as well as three handguns.
A Sick Society
The usual explanations will go only so far. We can expect the media to sift through the details of Kazmierczak’s life.....
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The subsidy tease, part III
A solar grand plan
Posted by Joseph Romm
A recent issue of Scientific American featured a "Solar Grand Plan." Its authors described a way for the United States to obtain nearly 100 percent of its electricity and 90 percent of its total energy, including transportation, from solar, wind, biomass, and geothermal resources by end-of-century. Electricity would cost a comfortable 5 cents per kilowatt hour.

U.S. carbon emissions would be reduced 62 percent from their 2005 levels. Some 600 coal and gas-fired power plants would be displaced. The federal investment would be $400 billion over the next 40 years ($10 billion a year) to deploy renewable technologies and suitable transmission infrastructure.

If that future seems too good to be true, then look at two other studies during the past 13 months that have reached similar conclusions: one sponsored by the American Solar Energy Society (PDF), the other by the Nuclear Policy Research Institute and the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. All three concur that energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies can satisfy the nation's demand for power without additional nuclear or fossil-fueled power plants.

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By Inviting Bush We Are Dishonouring Ourselves
Hamza Mustafa Njozi (2008-02-12)
“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men” – Abraham Lincoln

It would seem to me that there are certain moral limits beyond which no one can cross without forfeiting one’s honour and human dignity. Our seemingly voluntary decision to invite and to entertain a hated war criminal for four days in our beautiful land will probably go down in history as marking the darkest moment in our political history so far. I recall, not without pride, that in 2003 as members of the University of Dar es Salaam Academic Assembly [UDASA], we prevented the then U.S. Ambassador to Tanzania from visiting the Mlimani main campus. The university’s long-standing intellectual tradition was too noble to be soiled by a representative of a war criminal who was, and still is, butchering innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is as it should be. Intellectuals should keep the beacon of freedom and justice burning even during the darkest night of unbridled tyranny.

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USDA Orders Nation's Largest Beef Recall
GREG RISLING
LOS ANGELES — The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Sunday ordered the recall of 143 million pounds of frozen beef from a California slaughterhouse, the subject of an animal-abuse investigation, that provided meat to school lunch programs.

Officials said it was the largest beef recall in the United States, surpassing a 1999 ban of 35 million pounds of ready-to-eat meats. No illnesses have been linked to the newly recalled meat, and officials said the health threat was likely small.

The recall will affect beef products dating to Feb. 1, 2006, that came from Chino-based Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., the federal agency said.

Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer said his department has evidence that Westland did not routinely contact its veterinarian when cattle became non-ambulatory after passing inspection, violating health regulations.

"Because the cattle did not receive complete and proper inspection, Food Safety and Inspection Service has determined them to be unfit for human food and the company is conducting a recall," Schafer said in a statement.

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To all that read this!

I am off to Teton Pass for a little backcountry ski break over Presidents weekend...so, not post until at least Monday night if not Tuesday! Have a great weekend and keep on keepin on!

Peace
Ty

Monsanto U: Agribusiness's Takeover of Public Schools
By Nancy Scola, AlterNet.
I've startled a bug scientist. "Yeah, now I'm nervous," said Mike Hoffmann, a Cornell University entomologist and crop specialist who spends his days with cucumber beetles and small wasps. But he's also in charge of keeping the research funding flowing at Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. What have I done to alarm him? I've drawn his attention to the newly released FY 2009 Presidential Budget.

Like more than a hundred public institutions of higher learning, Cornell is what's known as a "land grant." Dotting the United States from Ithaca, N.Y., to Pullman, Wash., such schools were established by a Civil War-era act of Congress to provide universities centered around, "the agriculture and mechanic arts." Congress handed each U.S. state a chunk of federal land to be sold for start-up monies, and for the last 150 years, it has funded ground-breaking research on all things agriculture, from dirt to crops to cattle.

The land-grant system has been, in short, a high-yield investment. The scientific research that has come out of land-grant labs and fields have aided millions of farmers and fed millions of Americans. And the land-grant reach doesn't stop at ocean's edge. Oklahoma State, the Sooner State's land grant, says that the public funding of land-grant research "has benefited every man, woman and child in the United States and much of the world."

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Great stuff even if he is just a trend, at least its out to the greater brainwashed tv viewers!

The Rising Mercenary Industry and AFRICOM
While African states are trying to put the culture of military rule behind them, the United States appears determined to demonstrate that most civilian activities in Africa should be undertaken by armed forces. -
Samuel Makinda
Under Bush/Cheney there has been unprecedented growth in the private military and intelligence corporations. Their purpose is to extract resources and control political behavior. You’ve heard the names, Blackwater, MPRI, DynCorp, Total Intel, Triple Canopy. The mercenaries are already in Africa, and are looking to Africa for their future contracts and future paychecks.

The US use of mercenaries has a long and ugly history in Africa:

[I]n 1978, former CIA agent John Stockwell provided for many their first peek into a deadly, ruthless U.S. foreign policy that destroyed what could have been a far more promising political and economic future for the continent.

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Obama Hope Beating Clinton Help By Joel Hirschhorn
As befits American culture, politics is all about slick selling to the masses. Hillary Clinton is selling Day-1 help to victims and sufferers. Barack Obama is selling effervescent hope to yes-we-can dreamers. This media hyped horse race is like a fight between diet Coke and diet Pepsi, artificially sweetened candidates devoid of real nourishment.

The least educated, least sophisticated and least wealthy along with Hispanics are sipping Clinton's fizzled-out drink. The most educated, most privileged, and most financially successful along with African-Americans are gulping down Obama's charismatic pick-me-up.

As to who is buying what, consider these data: Clinton won the non-college-educated voters by 22 points in California, 32 points in Massachusetts, 54 points in Arkansas, and 11 points in New Jersey. In a Pew Research national survey, Obama led among people with college degrees by 22 points. In Connecticut, Obama beat Clinton among college graduates by 17 points and in New Jersey by 11 points. And note this: 39 percent of Virginia and 41 percent of Maryland Democratic primary voters reported incomes of $100,000 or more - clearly well educated people that would favor Obama.
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Aint this the damn truth....damn it!



VIA

Symbols of Self-Restraint
Celebrating Wilderness
By RODERICK NASH

Wilderness preservation is an American invention -- a unique contribution of our nation to world civilization. The 40th anniversary of the Wilderness Act (September 3, l964) has come and gone, and Americans should renew their pride in and commitment to the National Wilderness Preservation System. It is one of the best ideas our country ever had.

One place to start the celebration is with the recognition that wilderness is the basic component of American culture. From the its raw materials we built a civilization. With the idea of wilderness we sought to give that civilization identity and meaning. Our early environmental history is inextricably tied to wild country. Hate it or love it, if you want to understand American history there is no escaping the need to come to terms with our wilderness past. From this perspective, designated Wilderness Areas are historical documents; destroying them is comparable to tearing pages from our books and laws. We can not teach our children what is special about our history on freeways or in shopping malls. As a professional historian I deeply believe that the present owes the future a chance to know its wilderness past. Protecting the remnants of wild country left today is an action that defines our nation. Take away wilderness and you diminish the opportunity to be American.
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(I hope he is right because, Dennis is about the only person with balls enough (a few others) in Congrss to stand up to this corporate machine)
Dick Feagler: We need to keep Dennis in our Congress, and we will
Dick FeaglerPlain Dealer Columnist
Im going to vote to send Den nis Kucinich back to Con gress. Lord knows we need somebody there who speaks his mind and doesn't suck up to the establishment. Dennis says what Dennis thinks. And a lot of what Dennis thinks is what I think. So he's got my vote.

I think this war is terrible. And so does Dennis. He told me that's why he ran.

"After the last election, the Democrats were elected to stop the war," he said. "After attending some Democratic meetings, I learned that the party wasn't going to stop it. They were going to keep funding it. That's why I decided to run."

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Asia-Pacific News (a bit of news I had heard nothing about.....for your information)
Report: East Timor President Ramos-Horta wounded in attack
Sydney - East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta was wounded Monday in a pre-dawn attack on his home in the capital Dili, media reports from Dili said.

The extent of the injuries to the Nobel peace laureate and former prime minister of the world's newest nation were not known.

A guard was killed in the attack. Also reportedly dead in return fire was rebel leader Major Alfredo Reinado, who has been on the run since escaping from jail in 2006.....

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London tripling daily ‘gas guzzler’ fee to $49
Mayor cites CO2 emissions; move will affect 33,000 luxury cars
LONDON - Drivers of gas-guzzling cars will have to pay nearly $50 a day to enter central London, triple the current charge, while the most fuel-efficient vehicles will get a free ride, the mayor said Tuesday.

Mayor Ken Livingstone, who introduced the daily congestion charge on trucks and cars entering central London in 2003 to cut traffic and pollution, said the change is primarily aimed at the big cars owned by people in wealthy parts of the capital.

The mayor, who has the power to make the change without legislative approval, said it will go into effect Oct. 27.

The CO2 emissions from the most high-powered 4x4s and sports cars can be up to four times as great as the least polluting cars," he said, referring to carbon dioxide emissions, which are tied to global warming.

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Word From Above [The Media Message]: Keep the People Passive
by max blunt
US Military: Enforcers of Capitalism Around the World
America has always been united-in-captivity; a nation kept docile and truth- suppressed, as if the clear divide did not exist.
So the elite needs to put the lid on the simmering, at times boiling, pot and hypocritically give the salute: "God bless America."
So there is a chasm between whites and blacks, Hispanics and non-Hispanics, women and men, young and old; but we don't like to spread the "horrible" truth of un-American disunity.
Give me a break! Ours is a "United States" not a "United People"… and just as some have experienced that "American dream," many others have had to endure that well-hidden "American nightmare."
Problems need to surface, be confronted, tackled and, hopefully, solved; we are still many years away from becoming a "United People."
Our capitalist elite have always wanted to keep us non-rebellious, under the chimera that we are a united people.
That implanted idea is likely to receive, and soon, a major jolt as the economic recession proves to be not just a two-quarter adjustment in the economy, but a true consumption lifetime adjustment that will bare social, economic and political flaws in our predatory capitalist system.
Meantime the US military will continue to be kept as the overworked, underpaid police force of the US capitalist elite..... LINK to con.

Bush Calls on France for Help
War Without End
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

"We support the troops!" That's the excuse the Democrats have given for continuing to fund Bush's aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan. But, of course, war funding doesn't support the troops. War funding supports an evil machine that chews up and spits out the lives and well being of the troops, along with that of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan, men, women, and children. War funding supports Bush's aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan and his continuing efforts to occupy both countries in order to turn them into puppet states.

Polls show that a majority of the troops and their families do not support Bush's aggression. The fact that Ron Paul's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination received the lion's share of contributions from military families also underlines the great divide between the troops and those who would "support" them by keeping them in Iraq and Afghanistan. What all those ribbon decals on the back of SUVs, which proclaim "support the troops," really mean is support Bush's wars of aggression against Muslims.

According to the Washington Post (Feb. 9, 2008), Bush's $3.1 trillion federal budget provides no funding for his proposal in his State of the Union address to permit military members to transfer their unused education benefits to family members. Bush got applause for his nationally televised words, but the troops and their families got no money in his budget.

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Every Year Brings Us Closer to 1984
By Leonard Pitts Jr., Miami Herald.
In the beginning was the fingerprint.

It was in the 19th century that scientists realized the ridged whorls on the tip of the finger constituted a unique marker that could be used to tell one person from another. And eventually, the FBI built a massive database of fingerprints.

Then came DNA. In the 20th century, scientists learned to use the double helix nucleic acid molecule as a means of identification even more definitive than the fingerprint. And the FBI built a DNA database as well.

Now the feds are building yet another database. And it has some folks worried.

Maybe you missed it in the run-up to Super Duper Tuesday, but CNN and the Associated Press reported last week that the FBI will soon award a $1 billion, 10-year contract for construction of an electronic file that would store not just fingerprints and DNA, but a vast compendium of other physical characteristics. We're talking eye scans, facial shape, palm prints, scars, tattoos and other biometrics, all for the purpose of identifying and capturing bad guys.

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In Oil-Rich Mideast, Shades of the Ivy League By TAMAR LEWIN, NY Times
DOHA, Qatar — On a hot October evening, hundreds of families flocked to the sumptuous Ritz Carlton here in this Persian Gulf capital for an unusual college fair, the Education City roadshow.

Qataris, Bangladeshis, Syrians, Indians, Egyptians — in saris, in suits, in dishdashis, in jeans — came to hear what it takes to win admission to one of the five American universities that offer degrees at Education City, a 2,500-acre campus on the outskirts of Doha where oil and gas money pays for everything from adventurous architecture to professors’ salaries.

Education City, the largest enclave of American universities overseas, has fast become the elite of Qatari education, a sort of local Ivy League. But the five American schools have started small, with only about 300 slots among them for next year’s entering classes. So there is a slight buzz of anxiety at the fair, which starts with a nonalcoholic cocktail hour, with fruit juices passed on silver trays as families circulate among the booths.

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How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free
By MARIA ASPAN, NY Times
Are you a member of Facebook.com? You may have a lifetime contract.
Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data.

While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.

“It’s like the Hotel California,” said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

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Suchitoto 13: El Salvador’s “American-made” Terrorism Act in Corporate Play
by Robert Weitzel and Meredith DeFrancesco
“Because we were struggling against the privatization of water. Now we have to struggle against the anti-terrorism law.”
- Vincente Vasquez-

In 2001 El Salvador replaced the colon with the U.S. dollar as its national currency. In 2006 its right-wing government replaced lawful dissent with U.S. inspired anti-terrorism legislation as its national policy. In return, the Salvadoran people are offering Americans an object lesson in the value of our Bill of Rights when dollar meets dissent.

On the morning of July 2, 2007, an estimated 400 Salvadorans who were waiting for buses to take them to the small town of Suchitoto to attend a public forum on the privatization of water utilities were accused of blocking the road and were attacked by riot police firing rubber bullets and tear gas. Two women and one man were arrested.

In Suchitoto’s central square, word of the attack and arrests spread through the crowds waiting for the motorcade and press caravan of President Antonio Saca, who was coming to Suchitoto to announce his administration’s new “"National Decentralization Policy,” a plan viewed by many Salvadorans as the first step in privatizing the country’s publicly-owned water resources.

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How Capitalism and Technology Created (a) NAFTA
By: Biodun
In the late-20th century and especially in this first decade of the 21st century, there have been impassioned and highly controversial debates about the merits and demerits of trade agreements like the World Trade Organization (WTO), North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), and the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA)--which was simply called CAFTA before January 2004 and renamed after. Recent discussions about globalization and the asymmetries of these agreements can be found here, here, and here. And yet, as I'll show, these agreements simply formalized (or attempted to formalize) a sub-rosa globalization and a new international division of capital and labor that began to operate defacto since the mid-1970s. Capitalism and technology played a huge role in these developments, with both equally contributing to this enterprise.

Before the mid-1970s, there was a pact between capital and labor in general, and in particular, among labor, management, and the state: that is, with the cooperation of labor and management, the state regulated and arbitrated productivity, wages, and profits. The production of consumer products developed mass consumption--in other words, supply worked to create demand. Americans became consumers of their own products--pace Henry Ford: "Our workers shall also be our customers," a capitalist model commonly known as Fordism.

However, by the mid-1970s, the saturation of domestic markets for consumer products led to the expansion of capital into third-world countries for the production and increasing consumption of these products by a robust and cheap third-world urban labor force ready for work but disorganized. Capital then became extremely fluid, eroding to a certain extent the boundaries and functions of traditional nation-states: no restrictions on first-world investment and transfers of capital, as third-world governments lusted after first-world revenues, and as first-world global (transnational) corporations lusted after cheap and robust third-world labor. This was a truly symbiotic relationship indeed, which eventually led to two condominiums.

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Proposal in Texas for a Public-Private Toll Road System Raises an Outcry By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
ROBSTOWN, Tex. — Leon Little’s farm here near Corpus Christi would not be seized for Texas’s proposed $184-billion-plus superhighway project for 5 or 10 years, if ever.
But Mr. Little was alarmed enough to show up Wednesday night with hundreds of his South Texas coastal neighbors to do what the Texas Department of Transportation has been urging: “Go ahead, don’t hold back.”
Don’t worry. Texans have gotten the message, swamping hearings and town meetings across the state to grill and often excoriate agency officials about a colossal traffic makeover known as the Trans-Texas Corridor, a public-private partnership unrivaled in the state’s — or probably any state’s — history, that would stretch well into the century and, if completed in full, end up costing around $200 billion.
“Is your road more important than the foodstuffs we put together for you?” asked Mr. Little, glaring at transportation officials at the town meeting.

The plan envisions a 4,000-mile network of new toll roads, with car and truck lanes, rail lines, and pipeline and utilities zones, to bypass congested cities and speed freight to and from Mexico.

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My latest ski video from this weekend 2/8 and 2/9 2008

FBI Deputizes Private Contractors With Extraordinary Powers, Including 'Shoot to Kill'
By Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive.
Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does -- and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to "shoot to kill" in the event of martial law. InfraGard is "a child of the FBI," says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm.

InfraGard started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats.

"Then the FBI cloned it," says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years.

InfraGard itself is still an FBI operation, with FBI agents in each state overseeing the local InfraGard chapters. (There are now eighty-six of them.) The alliance is a nonprofit organization of private sector InfraGard members.

"We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility," says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing.

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Look how many cops show up to arrest this protester....great way to use those tax $$$! Great Idea, and good job Greenpeace, keep it up!

"Tribal Conflict" in Kenya by Alex Thurston
Among the many things that infuriate me about the lack of adequate international news coverage in America, the bullshit trope of "tribal conflict" in Africa ranks pretty high.
In the fantasy world of many journalists, as well as many Americans, foreign peoples - especially Africans and Middle Easterners - fight because they "always have." The only tragedy, in the eyes of these self-proclaimed experts, is that now tribal conflicts are played out with modern technologies of warfare.
But the tragedies that grip Kenya, Darfur, and Somalia, to name a few, aren't tribal conflicts transplanted into modern times, the only difference being that spears have been exchanged for AK-47s and machetes. Rather, the direct intervention of foreign governments in these countries, from the time of colonialism to the present, plays a major role in creating and exacerbating ethnic conflict, as do concrete economic and political conditions of poverty, inequality, and disenfranchisement.

Take this story about Somalia, published a year ago, which asserts that "clannism" is the major problem.....
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U.S. budget boosts coal and nuclear power
Bush's budget request Monday cut funding for renewable energy, but increased spending for science. By Brad Knickerbocker
A president's priorities become clearer at budget time, even if Congress eventually rearranges things entirely. And that's true about the place of energy and climate change in President Bush's spending plan for next year.

Coal and nuclear power see big boosts in the 2009 Energy Department budget request sent to Congress Monday, and Mr. Bush is again calling for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The budget favors nuclear and "clean coal" options over renewable power sources, McClatchy Newspapers noted.

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NATO’s Afghan Quagmire by Patrick Seale
NATO — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — is the world’s most powerful military alliance. It has two million men under its command, a thousand helicopters and countless other military resources. Yet it is facing failure, if not actual defeat, in Afghanistan. Why?

The answer is simple. The Afghan war was misconceived from the very start. It was decided in rage and haste by Washington, without proper thought or planning, in response to al-Qaida’s 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States.

Instead of patiently tracking down al-Qaida’s leaders by police and counter-terrorist methods, the United Sates launched an all-out war against Afghanistan with the declared goal not only of smashing Al-Qaida, but also the Taliban regime which, willingly or unwillingly, was giving it sanctuary....

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Election theft 2008, the perfect crime: 300 million witnesses and nobody saw nuttin'
by Warren Pease
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, former CIA director, at his first staff meeting in 1981.
The great election theft of 2008 began months ago as the "unelectable" candidates were identified, branded, demonized, ridiculed and eventually weeded out one by one. It ended on January 30 when John Edwards, resurgent neo-populist and the last remaining bane of status quo oligarchs, dropped out of the Democratic presidential race.
Only six states had a chance to make their selections known before Edwards ended his campaign; residents in the other 44 have no progressive alternative on the ballot. With "super Tuesday" coming up, millions of voters will be asked to choose among candidates from the moderate right, the corporate right, the religiously insane right or the Curtis LeMay right.
So, through deft manipulation of voter attitudes by mass media, status quo corporatists and oligarchs can't really lose. This outcome may not meet the standard for election theft, but the results speak for themselves. Our ruling aristocracy has hijacked another critical election cycle, and they didn't even need electronic vote switching, voter caging, voter roll purging, deceptive mailers, stolen or destroyed ballots, access to proprietary source code, hacking for the GOP or simple understaffing in progressive precincts. At least not yet.
Nope. This variation on election theft just required that people turn their televisions to any of the conventional mass media news outlets -- notably Fox, CNN or MSNBC -- find a political talk show or panel discussion or rant fest, and internalize the labels attached to some of this year's presidential candidates: "controversial," "unelectable," "unconventional," "goofy," "loser," "weird," "outside the American mainstream," "radical." The candidates not so labeled are, by definition, the serious contenders and therefore the only ones we need to watch.
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The Disturbing GreenScare Case of Briana Waters
By BEN ROSENFELD

Tacoma, Washington.

On February 11, trial begins in the federal government's case against Briana Waters. Ms. Waters is accused of conspiring to set fire to the University of Washington's Center for Urban Horticulture in 2001. Specifically, the government accuses Ms. Waters of acting as a lookout. The Earth Liberation Front claimed responsibility for the fire, along with another one the same day, at the Jefferson Poplar Farms in Clatskanie, Oregon, saying that the poplar research posed "an ecological nightmare" for the diversity of native forests. Ms. Waters, a violin teacher and 32-year-old mother of a little girl, steadfastly maintains her innocence. Federal sentences for arson, including those motivated by greed, insurance fraud, and even racial hatred, typically fall within the 5-7 year range. But if convicted of both counts, Ms. Waters faces a mandatory minimum 35 years behind bars (five on the arson charge, and 30 for conspiring to use a destructive device).

The government has no physical or even direct evidence against Ms. Waters. It's "case" rests entirely on the testimony of two informants, Jennifer Kolar and Lacey Phillabaum, who confessed to participating in the University of Washington arson, and who will receive leniency (most likely, 3-7 year sentences) in exchange for their testimony.

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If you do not know this guy, you should....great music!

The Year of Living Dangerously: Part Two of Two
by Manuel Valenzuela
Under constant manipulations, lies and propaganda, a nation of courage has become a nation of cowards. A nation that once questioned its leaders now falls lockstep behind them, blindly following criminality and corruption. A nation that once stood for protests, strikes, marches, sit-ins, challenging the government and seeking accountability now prefers sitting comfortably on couches or chairs, watching the world pass by through television sets or laptops, some becoming arm-chair activists, most simply rotting away their lives, preferring the life of a couch potato, passively ignoring the destruction of rights and freedoms, silently acquiescing to myriad number of crimes against humanity, and obediently shopping, purchasing and consuming according to the dictates of the corporatist world, their new god the Almighty Dollar commanding them to congregate at the Cathedrals of Consumerism, the Malls of Materialism, told to do their job and be good consumers, spending what little they have, even consuming with money that they do not have, and must therefore borrow.

What dreaded dark skinned bogeymen could never achieve Bush, the Congress and the mainstream media have succeeded marvelously at implementing. Under the constant threat of terror, we have failed to see the fusion of government and corporations, now more than ever, as well as the mutation of government into the instrument of profit, revenue and the bottom line. We have failed to see who, in fact, the true terrorist entities are, what the true threat to our way of life, our liberties and our rights is. We have become blinded to the political duopoly, the two-headed hydra, working in synergy and collusion, not in the interests of the people, but for the corporate world.

We fail to see that there is no choice, that elections are predetermined, and oftentimes orchestrated by the Ministry of Truth, that an opposition party is but a façade, that only the Corporatist Party exists, its two hands simply performing a juggling act, each taking its turn running the three ring circus we know as government. In our delusions of grandeur and exceptionalism we have become blinded to the reality that democracy is a sham, that real democracy is a threat to the corporatist element, that America has done more to destroy real democracy around the world than any nation on Earth.....
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High Treason And Felonie
By Ted Lang
The elephant that has been swept under the carpet to protect the Cheney-Bush regime could not go forever unnoticed by the American people. The unending laundry list of so-called “high crimes and misdemeanors” described in Section 4 of Article II, powers of the President, enumerates such treason that even the Founders and writers of the Constitution, in all likelihood, never had the capacity to either imagine or foresee. Section 4 states: “The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” And Bush has gone on record as to what he thinks of the Constitution he swore to protect and uphold.

As former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill pointed out, Bush was obsessed with invading Iraq and going after Saddam Hussein. We will probably never learn of the real reason behind his planned vendetta, but it seems that his need to do so can be summarized thus: Who will rid me of this meddlesome competitor?..... LINK

A Grim Outlook for Afghanistan by Alex Thurston
Years of misguided strategy in Afghanistan may soon put us back at square one. As our NATO allies balk at the idea of increasing - or even maintaining - their current troop numbers, the Taliban are stepping up their attacks and inching closer to Kabul.

The US is pushing for greater troop commitments from European nations, but failing to obtain them. When Gates sent a "strongly worded letter" to Germany asking for more men, he received a "blunt response": no. At the same time, Canada has stated that unless other NATO members come through with more troops, they will withdraw their forces by the end of 2008. Given that Germany has 3,200 troops in Afghanistan, and Canada 2,500, the US' recent "mini-surge" of 3,200 marines looks like it isn't a surge at all, but rather a half-hearted attempt to reassure skeptical allies - and perhaps a way just to maintain, not increase, troop levels when our allies pull out.

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The Year of Living Dangerously: Part One of Two
by Manuel Valenzuela
Manifestations of Intent

Can you smell the smoked fumes of a discombobulated economic engine that has ceased to function, its synergy spitting and sputtering, its many parts thrashed by the claws, and vices, of neoliberal capitalism? Can you feel the dismantling of the economic spark plug, the American consumer, as our livelihoods are sacrificed to the greed, and incompetence, of the establishment and as the value of our lives is further enslaved to the Almighty Dollar and its puppet masters?

Can you hear the roar of authoritarian Machiavelli-types, of which many exist, cheering as the Constitution is discarded like yesterday’s trash, its principles and foundations burned inside the incinerator of fascism? Can you hear the searing of one of the greatest documents of governance ever created by man as it goes up in flames thanks to the kerosene thrown at it by American corporatists in power, its ashes slowly scattering into the realm of nothingness?

Can you see, if not blinded by tele-trash and infotainment, by the propaganda we call news, by the lies and deceit and censorship of the corporate media, by the comforting glow of television, by the charade that is American democracy and by the myriad distractions of bread and circus, the approaching finality of American liberty and freedom, soon to be replaced by Big Brother, a surveillance society, a police state and full-fledged corporatism?

Can you sense the growing momentum of militarism and imperialism rampaging across the nation, and the globe, leaving nothing but hatred and animosity in its wake? Can you sense that imperialism and empire abroad and freedom and democracy at home are mutually exclusive, that to attain the former the latter must be sacrificed, and that inevitably the people must, for imperialism to function, be immersed in tyranny? Do you realize that we are one major shock, one major event away from catapulting our lives into the headwaters of an altogether different America?......
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Move-On Has Gone Mainstream by Supporting Obama
It seems with each passing day my Progressive world keeps getting smaller and smaller. We watched John Edwards drop out of the race days before “Super Tuesday” (and I’m suspicious about that), and today I asked Move-On to unsubscribe me from their mailing list which actually pained me because I was very involved with Move-On here in Greenville. I am going to miss working with some of the people I have met here, but I’m sure that we will see each other during other Progressive projects here.

The reason I can no longer support Move-On is for the endorsement that they handed to Senator Obama. I have a problem with Obama because of his campaign financing. I find it very difficult to believe that he is an “agent of change” when he openly takes money from the very industries and corporations that have been at the heart of this country’s change from a representative Republic to a corporate oligarchy. In Senator Obama’s list of donors is a line-up of the majority of corporations that make up the “military industrial complex”. This may not be an issue for many, but for me, it is a tragedy of great consequence. I don’t support and will not support another politician that is obligated to the same corporate boards that are supporting free trade alliances that promote outsourcing of American jobs overseas, fighting regulation by the Federal Government, and accepting subsidies from the Federal Government on each gallon of gas sold in America.
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Christian Right Gets Its Way: "In God We Trust" Will Have Prominence on New Coin
Church and State.
Responding to complaints from the Religious Right, Congress has passed legislation mandating that the phrase "In God We Trust" be moved from the edge to the back or front of the new presidential dollar coins.

President George W. Bush signed the measure into law Dec. 26. It was tucked into a $555 billion domestic spending bill after having been pushed by U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). Brownback and other Religious Right conservatives have been complaining about the new coins since the series started last year.

The U.S. Mint has been releasing gold-colored dollars honoring each non-living U.S. president. Four coins are released per year. The first four coins, honoring George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were issued in 2007.

Under a mandate from Congress, the Mint was required to place the national mottos "In God We Trust" and "E Pluribus Unum" along the edge of the coins. The idea was to allow for more dramatic portraits on the obverses of the coins and better art elements on the reverses.

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Population growth is a threat. But it pales against the greed of the rich
by George Monbiot
It’s easy to blame the poor for growing pressure on the world’s resources. But still the wealthy west takes the lion’s share. I cannot avoid the subject any longer. Almost every day I receive a clutch of emails about it, asking the same question. A frightening new report has just pushed it up the political agenda: for the first time the World Food Programme is struggling to find the supplies it needs for emergency famine relief. So why, like most environmentalists, won’t I mention the p-word? According to its most vociferous proponents (Paul and Anne Ehrlich), population is “our number one environmental problem”. But most greens will not discuss it.

Is this sensitivity or is it cowardice? Perhaps a bit of both. Population growth has always been politically charged, and always the fault of someone else. Seldom has the complaint been heard that “people like us are breeding too fast”. For the prosperous clergyman Thomas Malthus, writing in 1798, the problem arose from the fecklessness of the labouring classes. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, eugenicists warned that white people would be outbred. In rich nations in the 1970s the issue was over-emphasised, as it is the one environmental problem for which poor nations are largely to blame. But the question still needs to be answered. Is population really our number one environmental problem?

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(Very good but go to any African country and it is very differnt situation)
Motivated by a Tax, Irish Spurn Plastic Bags
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
DUBLIN — There is something missing from this otherwise typical bustling cityscape. There are taxis and buses. There are hip bars and pollution. Every other person is talking into a cellphone. But there are no plastic shopping bags, the ubiquitous symbol of urban life.

In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.

Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.

“When my roommate brings one in the flat it annoys the hell out of me,” said Edel Egan, a photographer, carrying groceries last week in a red backpack.

Drowning in a sea of plastic bags, countries from China to Australia, cities from San Francisco to New York have in the past year adopted a flurry of laws and regulations to address the problem, so far with mixed success. The New York City Council, for example, in the face of stiff resistance from business interests, passed a measure requiring only that stores that hand out plastic bags take them back for recycling.
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Flamenco show in Granada Spain right before I left!

The Evolution of Evil
Plutocracy Controls Politics By Joel Hirschhorn
Activists and dissidents should understand that evil forces and tyrannical governments have evolved. Just as human knowledge and science expand, so do the strategies and instruments used by rulers, elites and plutocrats. By learning from history and using new technology they have smarter tools of tyranny. The best ones prevent uprisings, revolutions and political reforms. Rather than violently destroy rebellious movements, they let them survive as marginalized and ineffective efforts that divert and sap the energy of nonconformist and rebellious thinkers. Real revolution remains an energy-draining dream, as evil forces thrive.

Most corrupt and legally sanctioned forms of tyranny hide in plain sight as democracies with free elections. The toughest lesson is that ALL elections are distractions. Nothing conceals tyranny better than elections. Few Americans accept that their government has become a two-party plutocracy run by a rich and powerful ruling class. The steady erosion of the rule of law is masked by everyday consumer freedoms. Because people want to be happy and hopeful, we have an epidemic of denial, especially in the present presidential campaign. But to believe that any change-selling politician or shift in party control will overturn the ruling class is the epitome of self-delusion and false hope. In the end, such wishful thinking perpetuates plutocracy. Proof is that plutocracy has flourished despite repeated change agents, promises of reform and partisan shifts.

The tools of real rebellion are weak. Activists and dissidents look back and see successful rebellions and revolutions and think that when today's victims of tyranny experience enough pain and see enough political stink they too will revolt. This is wrong. They think that the Internet spreads information and inspiration to the masses, motivating them to revolt. This is wrong. They await catastrophic economic or environmental collapse to spur rebellion. This too is wrong........
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Is DDT Making a Comeback?
By Kim Larsen, OnEarth Magazine.
Only three of the 20-odd beds at Mbita District Hospital are occupied. This surprises me. After all, we are in the heart of an impoverished, malaria-ravaged region, on the shores of Lake Victoria along Kenya's remote western border. When I ask a medical assistant if it's unusual for the ward to be so sparsely populated, he laughs grimly. "In two or three weeks we will have several patients to a bed, with more on the floor," he explains. "We'll be turning people away." Here's why: malaria infections can occur any day of the year, but surge outbreaks are cyclical, the disease blooming lushly in the wake of a rainy season. It's late June now, and the winter rains are just about spent. Roads, fields, and footpaths are strewn with puddles large and small, ideal breeding sites for the Anopheles gambiae mosquito, malaria's endlessly regenerating delivery system.

Just beyond the hospital walls, battalions of Anopheles gambiae larvae were incubating in their warm, clear, sun-drenched baths. Upon maturity each mosquito, weighing in at a strapping 2.25 millionths of a pound, would fly off in search of sugar, the metabolic fuel provided by certain plants; and then, thus fortified, the female would move on to extract her blood meal, the protein feast that primes her to reproduce. In a matter of days, new malaria patients would begin streaming into the hospital, by foot or in wheelbarrows or splayed across the backs of donkeys, but mostly cradled in their mothers' arms. The immature immune systems of babies and toddlers are particularly vulnerable to the disease, and in this region cerebral malaria -- the deadliest variant, marked by seizures and coma -- is endemic.

Silver bullet, anyone? Vaccine, larvicide, insecticide, bed net, hex? Why should this disease, eradicated in the lucky zones of the world, continue to flourish elsewhere, in unlucky places like Mbita?

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