Thor's Day

Louis C. K. on racism.

Why walking through doorways makes you forget.

Stolen lives.

Ag-Gag Laws Help Agribusiness Hide Health Risks in Your Food

Monkey massage.

How many dead since the Newtown massacre?  This many and counting.

Monsanto owns the Supreme Court?

Medieval kitty prints.

7,000 year old cemetery found.. in a pond...

Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child

Sorta like this kitty:

 

Making the rounds on Facebook: Charlie Chaplin's final speech in the 'The Great Dictator':

 

 Banks actually just a bit concerned about Occupy Wall Street protesters. As they should be. Also, the squidding of Goldman Sachs.

 I KNEW my fascination with bees had something to do with brains.

 Cool new idea to sterilize hospital rooms.

 Monsanto's genetic food being rushed to market: Under Industry Pressure, USDA Works to Speed Approval of Monsanto's Genetically Engineered Crops.  And childhood obesity be damned, food giants fight proposed nutrition guidelines.

 Looks like Beijing is copying the pea-soup fogs of Jack the Ripper's era: Beijing air goes from 'hazardous' to off the charts, literally

 The Republicans' radical embrace of nullification.

 The trial of Bradley Manning.

 Keeping an eye on the radiation levels in Japan.

 Incoming water wars.

 How doctors choose to die when they know the options available.

 All this might not matter. The melting of the permafrost in the Arctic is releasing huge quantities of methane:

Food Monopolies

A Credo petition:

For years, the Department of Justice has blindly looked the other way while merger after merger has consolidated market share and power in the food and agricultural markets into the hands of only a few giant multinational corporations.

Today only a handful of companies control our food supply:

• 1 company (Monsanto) controls the seeds of 93% of soybeans and 80% of the corn grown in the U.S.2
• 4 companies (Tyson, Cargill, Swift & National Beef Packing Co.) control 83% of the beef packing industry
• 4 companies (Smithfield, Tyson, Swift & Cargill) control 66% of the pork packing industry

It's time to send a message to Washington and Wall Street, that the rights of farmers, citizens and consumers matter more than maintaining the already bloated bottom line of vertically integrated companies.

Sign here today to encourage the DOJ and USDA to enforce antitrust legislation, restore competition in agriculture and give farmers a chance.

Yeah.... just why DO we have lawns in California?

Especially when front yards themselves are usually for show, rarely used, and high maintenance. OrangeClouds at Calitics, a really good site for California politics:

Over at Change.org Natasha Chart asks if a recovery is even possible on a planet headed for environmental collapse? That's an answer I wish I knew. Natasha's been covering the water story regularly with a post about Colorado's fights between Big Oil and Big Water, a post about agribusiness and water use, and a post I highly recommend reading (even though it scares the shit out of me) called "We don't have to choose a dustbowl"

My own environmentalist hippie foodie answers to the water problem begin as follows:

1. Why is it still legal to have lawns in California? Seriously. Somebody should outlaw watering your lawn. If we weren't in such a budget crisis I'd add that the city should provide native drought resistant plants to residents who want to make their yard beautiful and able to survive without water.
2. California growers need to go organic ASAP. It's not a fix that will help them this year, and it will reduce their productivity in the next few years but in the long run, it will make all of their crops more drought resistant because the soil will store more water.
3. We've gotta do something about animal agriculture. It uses a TON of water. If factory farms are something we have to have, then they shouldn't be located in California. Period.
4. We need to expand fruit, nut, and vegetable (so-called "specialty crop") production in the other 49 states to plan for decreased production in California and to reduce energy needs for shipping food across the country. Right now there are actually laws preventing farmers who grow commodities to switching over to grow specialty crops instead. You can't even buy land from a farmer who used to grow commodities there and grow specialty crops on that land! The USDA is dabbling in changing that policy but only in a very small pilot program.

These things are expensive - either for the farmers or for the state that mandates it and compensates the farmers (or offers financial incentives to make it happen without mandating it). But we bailed out the banks even after they screwed up and got us into this mess. Why can't we bail out our farmers? After all, we need to eat.

I've noticed several houseowners in our tract ripping out their grass and planting native groundcover through a heavy mulch. I've even noticed a few houses in town that have very realistic-looking fake grass. You need to get right up on top of it to see it's plastic. But as water becomes more important, and the wars between farmer and suburbia, state and state, nation and nation become more pronounced and anxious, could we please address the feckless and heedless building of the Southern California sprawl right up into the mountains?


Click to get a larger view.

Where the hell are we going to get the water for these new homes? The gasoline to run food to the stores and to support the lengthy commutes these bedroom communities assume? Where will the garbage go? We are literally running out of space in the 'valley' and are flowing up and over the mountains into the deserts where the need for air conditioning becomes a life or death issue and the commutes for everything and everyone is hours longer. Meanwhile the death rot of neglect in the inner cities leaves empty warehouses and hard used apartment buildings and no services. Why can't we rebuild in these areas?

And lastly, when, not if, gasoline goes to 5, 8, 10 dollars a gallon, Southern California sprawl is going to die unless we get the HSR (high speed rail) in place.

Robert in Monterey at Calitics:

One of my lingering concerns about the Obama Administration has been that they might be tempted to claim victory with the $8 billion in HSR funding added to the stimulus and not follow up on that money, which as we know merely pays for some initial costs. But Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood made clear last week that in fact, the $8 billion in HSR stimulus really is intended as a signal to America that Obama is truly serious about building HSR:

LaHood said that for Obama building high-speed rail networks is, "if not his No. 1 priority, certainly at the top of his list. What the president is saying with the $8 billion is this is the start to help begin high-speed rail projects." He added that the administration "is committed to finding the dollars to not only get them started but to finishing them in at least five parts of the country," although he declined to elaborate on where these projects might ultimately be built.

And don't worry about the right-wing freakout over the Vegas HSR project - California is in better position than any other HSR project in America to use that stimulus funding. We can begin construction in late 2010 or early 2011; no other project is anywhere close to that point.

Plant those gardens and turn your fricking hose off!

What the hell are they asking us to eat?

Our food products are being poisoned.

The USDA wants to cut pesticide reporting:

A coalition of U.S. public interest groups including Pesticide Action Network, Center for Food Safety, Natural Resources Defense Committee (NRDC), Union of Concerned Scientists, and The Organic Center are protesting budget cuts that will kill the collection and public reporting of pesticide use by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), according to the Associated Press. In a letter to USDA Secretary Ed Schafer, 45 public interest groups argued that the NASS’s Agricultural Chemical Usage reports are the only reliable, publicly available source of data on pesticide and fertilizer use outside of California. According to NRDC's Jennifer Sass, "eliminating the program will severely hamper efforts of the USDA, the EPA, and state officials to perform risk assessments and make informed decisions on pesticide use." PAN's Science Department Director Brian Hill commented: "Allowing growers and applicators to use highly toxic pesticides without a comprehensive, national reporting structure is as dumb as flying in a storm without instruments." NASS, a program that has published pesticide use data since 1991, has been dramatically scaled back by the Bush administration. First, the agency’s annual surveys were cut to biennial reviews. In 2007, data collection was reduced to just three crops—cotton, apples and organic apples. Now, NASS has announced it will not collect agrichemical use data on any crops during the 2008 growing season.

Monsanto wants to patent living genetic material that you are going to eat.

And hidden away in a report about rising food prices is this stunner of a sentence: (my bold)

Record prices for farm crops should gradually come down, but they will remain substantially higher than average over the next decade because of fundamental changes in demand, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

[snip]

The report also encouraged countries that have balked at allowing genetically modified crops to reconsider their use as a way to improve yields.

Um... has anyone been reading the news? Genetically modified crops do not give you more yield. In fact, the crops produce LESS.

Buy locally. Grow your own.

Money money money

Getting rich while people starve.

Lahore, Pakistan (AHN) - Soaring profits for giant agribusinesses, their executives and stockholders are coming at the expense of the world's poor who increasingly can't afford to pay the soaring prices of food to buy enough to eat to avoid malnourishment or starvation.

Those increasing prices might undo a decade of gains in Asia and could throw millions of people back into poverty, regional leaders meeting at the annual Asian Development Bank's meeting on Sunday said, according to Pakistan's Dawn news reports. The leaders called for an increase in agricultural production to try to meet the soaring demand.

Escalating prices have come from several sources, including an increased demand for food and fertilizer generally. That increased demand comes from increased demand for meat in China and India, that in turn requires more grain go to feed animals to produce that meat, along with a growing population and tighter supplies because some food crops have been diverted to produce biofuels.

But, there is also another factor that is fueling huge increases in the prices of food and the record profits those price increases are providing to the world's richest food companies.

A growing number of investors are turning away from the stock market and playing in the food futures market, driving prices up as food is now increasingly viewed as an investment to earn passive income from for the rich, instead of a basic necessity to sustain health and life.

And:

The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared over the past year driving the world's poor – who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food – into hunger and destitution.

The World Bank says that 100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world's richest food companies are making record profits. Monsanto last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007, from $543m (£275m) to $1.12bn. Its profits increased from $1.44bn to $2.22bn.

Cargill's net earnings soared by 86 per cent from $553m to $1.030bn over the same three months. And Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world's largest agricultural processors of soy, corn and wheat, increased its net earnings by 42 per cent in the first three months of this year from $363m to $517m. The operating profit of its grains merchandising and handling operations jumped 16-fold from $21m to $341m.

Similarly, the Mosaic Company, one of the world's largest fertiliser companies, saw its income for the three months ending 29 February rise more than 12-fold, from $42.2m to $520.8m, on the back of a shortage of fertiliser. The prices of some kinds of fertiliser have more than tripled over the past year as demand has outstripped supply. As a result, plans to increase harvests in developing countries have been hit hard.

And:

BASEL, Switzerland (Reuters) - Soaring food prices are helping to push up inflation all around the world, central bankers said on Monday, urging more market competition and free trade to even out prices.

Strange. People really mind not eating:

MOGADISHU, Somalia—Troops fired into tens of thousands of rioting Somalis on Monday, killing two people in the latest eruption of violence over soaring food prices around the world.

Wielding thick sticks and hurling stones that smashed the windshields of several cars and buses, the rioters jammed the narrow streets of the Somali capital, screaming, "Down with those suffocating us!"

In Mogadishu, protesters including women and children marched against the refusal of traders to accept old 1,000-shilling notes, blaming them and a growing number of counterfeiters for rising food costs.

Within an hour, a reporter for The Associated Press watched their ranks swell to tens of thousands, and the riot spread to all 13 districts of the capital. Some threw rocks at shops and chaos erupted at the capital's main Bakara market.

But hey, the speculators are making money! Clearly that is more important!



crossposted at SteveAudio