Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Zogby: 96% Do NOT Support Further Bank Bailouts

Support for Bank Bailouts at 6%

March 31st, 2009

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A new Zogby Interactive poll shows support scraping bottom for giving federal money to shore up big banks. The survey of 4,112 adults completed last week found only 6% believe we should “continue providing government money to banks, as well as buying their troubled assets, with the hope that banks will increase lending” as the best option to take regarding failing big banks.

Slightly more than one-half (51%) oppose providing any more federal money to banks, “even if that means some of the banks would go out of business.” The third option we gave respondents was a temporary takeover of the most troubled banks, with the government eventually selling the banks back to private investors. Nearly one-third (32%) like that idea.

The survey also tested whether adults believed President Obama was forcing change too quickly, with 32% agreeing. That was less than the 38% of said Obama’s actions have been “just about right.” The third option was that Obama “has been too timid and should take more bold and immediate action,” which was the choice 10%. The remaining 20% didn’t like any of those options, or were not sure.

There was considerable partisan difference on this question, with 62% of Republicans saying Obama is bring too bold and 66% of Democrats saying he is “just about right.”

If you are one of those who oppose the current bailout program, would you be just as opposed to a temporary government takeover of some banks? Do you have any other ideas about how to free up capital for lending?

Just 6% Prefer Giving Federal Money to Banks And 51% Say No Funding Even If Banks Fail
http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.cfm?ID=1687

Minority Believes That Obama Forcing Change Too Quickly

UTICA, NY - Only 6% of adults believe having the federal government provide money to large banks and buy their troubled assets is the best action to take in resolving the banking crisis. One-half do not want the government providing more money to banks, even if that means some would go out of business. One-third wants the government to take over failing banks and sell them back to private investors if and when they recover.

The same Zogby Interactive poll of 4,112 adults found that 38% believe President Barack Obama's actions to improve the national economy have been "just about right," and 31% say he has been "too bold and should not force too much change too quickly." Another 10% say Obama has been "too timid, and should take more bold and immediate action."

The poll was conducted March 25-27, and has a margin of error of +/-1.6%.

Participants were offered three solutions (not including "none of these" and "not sure") "regarding very large banks that are in trouble." Here are the options, followed by total responses for each and by party enrollment:

Continue providing government money to banks, as well as buying their troubled assets, with the hope that banks will increase lending.

All	Democrats	Republicans	Independents
6%	10%	3%	4%

Do not continue providing government money, even if that means some of the banks would soon go out of business.

All	Democrats	Republicans	Independents
51%	20%	81%	60%

The federal government should temporarily take over those banks that would fail without help, with the government selling the banks back to private investors if and when the banks recover.

All	Democrats	Republicans	Independents
32%	55%	9%	26%

Another 11% chose none of these or were not sure.

The question that assessed President Obama's actions to improve the economy also offered three statements, and asked which came closest to the respondent's attitude. Here are the statements, followed by total responses for each and by party affiliation:

He has been too timid, and should take more bold and immediate action.

All	Democrats	Republicans	Independents
10%	17%	2%	10%

He has been too bold, and should not try to force too much change too quickly.

All	Democrats	Republicans	Independents
32%	6%	62%	34%

His actions have been just about right.

All	Democrats	Republicans	Independents
38%	66%	6%	32%

Respondents could also choose "none of these," and 16% did so. Another 5% were not sure.

There were differences based on both age and income. First Globals^TM (ages 18-29) were most likely to believe Obama's actions were "just about right" (41%) or "too timid" (14%.) The numbers saying Obama "has been too bold" increased with age, culminating with 39% of those 65 and older choosing that. Lower income adults were more likely to say Obama's action have been "just about right" (52% of those with annual family incomes below $25,000.) Those in the highest annual family income group measured, $100,000 and more, were most likely to say Obama has been too bold (36%).

Pollster John Zogby: "Bailing out banks could hardly be any more unpopular. One-half of adults oppose giving any more money to banks, even though they know some may fold without the money. It is notable that one-third prefers nationalizing some banks, showing a base of support for the idea should the Obama Administration choose that route and try to sell it to the public. Just under 50% believe Obama is trying to move too quickly, and this is similar to other polls conducted on similar issues."

For a methodology statement on this poll, please visit:

http://www.zogby.com/methodology/readmeth.cfm?ID=1395

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Irradiated Foods Cause Severe Neurological Damage

Wednesday, April 01, 2009 by: Sherry Baker, Health Sciences Editor
See all articles by this author
Email this author

Key concepts: Food, Foods and Irradiated foods
http://www.naturalnews.com/025971.html

(NaturalNews) In a study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) report on cats developing severe neurological symptoms due to a degradation of myelin, the fatty insulator of nerve fibers called axons. Because myelin facilitates the conduction of nerve signals, when it is lost or damaged there can be impairment of sensation, movement, thinking and other functions, depending on what particular nerves are affected. This loss of myelin is found in several disorders of the central nervous system in humans -- the best known being multiple sclerosis (MS).

So what caused the cats to develop neurological problems? Although the researchers' statement to the media practically buries the fact, a close read shows the animals were fine until fed irradiated food. What's more, when they were taken off the irradiated diet, the animals' nervous systems began healing.

The new study took place when the researchers were faced with reports of a mysterious illness in pregnant cats. A commercial company had been testing various diets on the animals to see how the food impacted growth and development in the felines. The food used, it turns out, had been irradiated. Irradiation, which is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for many human as well as animal foods, involves exposing foods briefly to a radiant energy source such as gamma rays or electron beams in order to kill bacteria.

Some of the cats eating the irradiated cat food exhibited very severe neurological symptoms, including movement disorders, vision loss and even paralysis. "After being on the diet for three to four months, the pregnant cats started to develop progressive neurological disease," said Ian Duncan, a professor of medical sciences at the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine and an authority on demyelinating diseases, in a statement to the media.

The sick cats were shown to have widely distributed the very severe demyelization of the central nervous system. Their neurological symptoms were very much like those seen in people with MS and other demyelization disorders. When the felines were taken off the irradiated foods, they began to recover slowly. However, according to Dr. Duncan, the restored myelin sheaths were no longer as thick as normal myelin sheaths.

The finding is important, the scientists concluded in their study, because it shows the central nervous system retains the ability to reestablish myelin -- so strategies that could be developed to spur the growth of new myelin sheaths anywhere nerves themselves are preserved could be a possible therapy for treating a host of severe neurological diseases in humans. "The key thing is that it absolutely confirms the notion that remyelinating strategies are clinically important," Duncan stated.

Curiously, although the scientists' related their findings to possible human applications, they were quick to dismiss a possible connection between people, irradiated food and health risk. "We think it is extremely unlikely that (irradiated food) could become a human health problem," Duncan explained in the media statement. "We think it is species specific."

However, not everyone agrees irradiated food is fine for humans or animals. According to the Center for Food Safety, studies have shown irradiation produces volatile toxic chemicals such as benzene and toluene, which are known or suspected to cause cancer and birth defects. A 2001 study found an association between colon tumors and 2-alkylcyclobutanones (2-ACB's), a new chemical compound detected only in foods that have been irradiated.

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Sunday, March 29, 2009

Grieder: Trust Your Guts - Euthanasia for insolvent banks.

Our first political challenge is to disturb business as usual in Washington and prevent Congress from taking hasty action to adopt Wall Street's "reform" agenda. Congress is rattled by the exploding popular anger and listening nervously. The people need to speak louder--loud enough for the president to hear.

deconcentrate power, liberate people and smaller enterprises, workers and middle managers and investors, to help shape the country's future from many different perspectives. This is how democracy was supposed to work. It can again.

Euthanasia for insolvent banks.

The Federal Reserve must be democratized
The federal law against usury can be restored

imagine alternatives to the bankers-first bailouts
demonstrations around the country for April 11.
A New Way Forward

The White House executed a nifty two-step this week to re-educate the public and deflect anger.

assess the Obama plan for reform is ask: who likes it?
Wall Street likes it.
the animal appetites of financiers smelling gorgeous opportunity for returns.

the core goal of reform is to create a banking and financial system that serves the society and the economy, not the other way around.

the financial titans are trying to foreclose just solutions by stampeding Congress and the president to adopt ill-considered ideas.

If Wall Street gets its way, the "reforms" may further consolidate power and ratify a corporate state--a grotesque hybrid that combines the worst aspects of socialism and capitalism.
+++

Trust Your Guts

by William Greider
Published on Sunday, March 29, 2009 by The Nation
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/29-1

A reassuring new story line is emanating from our leaders. I heard Representative Barney Frank, chair of the House Banking Committee, explain it. Then I read the same line in a Washington Post news story. That tells me people in high places are selling it. Dynamic capitalism, they explain, invents ways to create greater wealth, but sometimes it goes a little too far. Then government has to step in to correct things. This need typically occurs every generation or so, all in a day's work. The Obama administration is proposing "sweeping" new regulatory laws so that capitalism can continue its good works.

The story makes disturbing current events sound practically normal. But what are the storytellers leaving out? They aren't saying that this financial catastrophe was not merely an inevitable development of history but a man-made disaster. Greedheads on Wall Street did their part, but so did Washington. The reason we need new rules is that a generation of Democrats and Republicans systematically repealed or gutted the old ones--the regulatory controls enacted eighty years ago to remedy the last breakdown of capitalism (better known as the Great Depression).

The White House executed a nifty two-step this week to re-educate the public and deflect anger. On Tuesday Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner relaunched the massive bailout of banking and finance. Knowing how unpopular this is with the people at large, Geithner followed on Thursday with his "sweeping" plans to re-regulate the bankers and financiers. Whenever official plans are called "sweeping," it indicates that they really, really mean it this time.

Most Americans are not financial experts. It's very difficult, nearly impossible, for normal mortals to sort through the dense policy talk and conflicting opinions to figure out if the rhetoric of reform is real. Confusion is widespread in the land. Most Americans want to believe this president is leading us out of the swamp, but how can they know? I say, trust your gut feelings. They are as reliable as the learned experts.

Many Americans want to believe because they think that returning to "normal" means their decimated 401(k) accounts might somehow recover the 30-40 percent that disappeared during the past year. If it takes monster bank bailouts to restore stock-market prices, let's have bailouts. Good luck with that. The Dow has regained 21 percent in two weeks of rallies, but I remind friends that steep, short bursts in the stock market do not foretell the future of the economy. Banks may be relieved of their losses without changing the general economic outlook. After the crash of 1929, there were occasional stock rallies, followed by fierce bears. It took twenty-five years (until 1954) for the Dow to regain its old peak. Another way to assess the Obama plan for reform is ask: who likes it? The verdict was swift and sure after Geithner's twin announcements. Wall Street likes it. The blueprint for regulatory reforms was applauded by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association; the American Insurance Association; and the Private Equity Council, the trade group for the major private funds that will get public money and backup insurance to buy the banking system's rotten assets. This could be born-again patriotism. Or it could be the animal appetites of financiers smelling gorgeous opportunity for returns.

This may be one of those moments where people can find some guidance from their moral convictions. They do not need to know all the details to ask simple questions. Does the outline of what's happening to rescue major financial institutions seem morally wrong? Or is it justified by the larger necessities of the national predicament? Is the government insufficiently tough in demanding reciprocal commitments from the beneficiaries? Should Washington pursue larger structural changes in the banking system?

Trying to imagine alternatives to the bankers-first bailouts is a good place to start. What follows are suggestions I produced at the request of young people organizing demonstrations around the country for April 11. They call themselves A New Way Forward. I hope they light lots of bonfires.

This rough outline leaves out lots of particular regulatory issues, but the core goal of reform is to create a banking and financial system that serves the society and the economy, not the other way around. Everything being done to rescue and restore the old order gets in the way of creating something truly new and valuable for the future. Those of us throwing logs in the path of the bailouts are dismissed as naysayers or worse, but the financial titans are trying to foreclose just solutions by stampeding Congress and the president to adopt ill-considered ideas.

If Wall Street gets its way, the "reforms" may further consolidate power and ratify a corporate state--a grotesque hybrid that combines the worst aspects of socialism and capitalism. The reform ideas announced by Geithner would plant the seeds by creating a "systemic risk" regulator, presumably the Federal Reserve, to oversee the largest, most politically adept banks and financial firms that qualify as "too big to fail." Capitalism, with its inherent tendency toward monopoly, would have the means to monopolize democracy (see my recent Washington Post article.)

My new book, Come Home, America, asks people to enunciate their versions of "patriotic realism." That is the essence of an alternative vision: deconcentrate power, liberate people and smaller enterprises, workers and middle managers and investors, to help shape the country's future from many different perspectives. This is how democracy was supposed to work. It can again.

Some points I recommend people consider:

1. Euthanasia for insolvent banks. Transferring their losses to the public will not restore the trillions in capital the bankers helped destroy. It would merely relieve the banks, their creditors and shareholders of the pain. Government must take control of the system to supervise a just unwinding of the mess--whether we call it nationalization or something else. Handing out money and leaving bankers in control of how it's spent is nutty and morally wrong. People everywhere understand this. Only Washington seems oblivious to the irrationality of what it is attempting.

2. The Federal Reserve must be democratized and effectively stripped of its peculiar antidemocratic status as an unaccountable island of power within the government. A new federal agency--accountable to Congress and the president--can be refashioned from the working parts of the Fed. Call it a central bank or something else, but its governing power must not rest with heavyweight bankers on the board of directors at the twelve regional banks. (To understand why, consider that the New York Federal Reserve Bank was headed until recently by Geithner.)

3. The reformed Fed would be confined to conducting monetary policy and stripped of its regulatory functions. A different section of the Treasury or a new free-standing regulatory agency can assume responsibility for regulation and be armed with strong antitrust laws and other rules to ensure that "too big to fail" institutions are redefined as "too big to save."

4. The federal law against usury can be restored to halt predatory lending. Persistent violators would not be fined with trivial penalties, as they are now, but stripped of their government protections and subsidies--that is, doomed.

5. A new banking system--smaller and more diverse and responsible to the public interest--can fill the hole left by the demise of major banks like Citigroup. Vast public resources should be devoted to creating this system, not to saving the mastodons. Public banks (like the North Dakota State Bank) and nonprofit savings and lending cooperatives can also serve as an important cross-check on private commercial banking--a competitive model that offers credit on nonusurious terms and keeps the big boys honest.

6. Once the Federal Reserve is domesticated in a democratic fashion, then it can be reformed to assume broad supervision of the nonbank financial firms in the "shadow banking system"--hedge funds, private equity firms, pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies. (For more on this, see my recent Nation article, "Fixing the Fed.")

7. Our first political challenge is to disturb business as usual in Washington and prevent Congress from taking hasty action to adopt Wall Street's "reform" agenda. Congress is rattled by the exploding popular anger and listening nervously. The people need to speak louder--loud enough for the president to hear.

Top Bush Officials of Accused Torture Refered To Chief Prosecutor Of Spain

The 1984 UN Convention against Torture, signed and ratified by the US, requires states to investigate allegations of torture committed on their territory or by their nationals, or extradite them to stand trial elsewhere.
+++

Spanish Judge Accuses Six Top Bush Officials of Torture

Legal moves may force Obama's government into starting a new inquiry into abuses at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib

by Julian Borger and Dale Fuchs
Published on Saturday, March 28, 2009 by the Guardian/UK

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/03/28-6

MADRID - Criminal proceedings have begun in Spain against six senior officials in the Bush administration for the use of torture against detainees in Guantánamo Bay. Baltasar Garzón, the counter-terrorism judge whose prosecution of General Augusto Pinochet led to his arrest in Britain in 1998, has referred the case to the chief prosecutor before deciding whether to proceed.

A Spanish court has agreed to consider opening a criminal case against six former Bush administration officials, including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, seen in this photo from Aug. 28, 2007, over allegations they gave legal cover for torture at Guantanamo Bay, a lawyer in the case said. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

The case is bound to threaten Spain's relations with the new administration in Washington, but Gonzalo Boyé, one of the four lawyers who wrote the lawsuit, said the prosecutor would have little choice under Spanish law but to approve the prosecution.

"The only route of escape the prosecutor might have is to ask whether there is ongoing process in the US against these people," Boyé told the Observer. "This case will go ahead. It will be against the law not to go ahead."

The officials named in the case include the most senior legal minds in the Bush administration. They are: Alberto Gonzales, a former White House counsel and attorney general; David Addington, former vice-president Dick Cheney's chief of staff; Douglas Feith, who was under-secretary of defence; William Haynes, formerly the Pentagon's general counsel; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who were both senior justice department legal advisers.

Court documents say that, without their legal advice in a series of internal administration memos, "it would have been impossible to structure a legal framework that supported what happened [in Guantánamo]".

Boyé predicted that Garzón would issue subpoenas in the next two weeks, summoning the six former officials to present evidence: "If I were them, I would search for a good lawyer."

If Garzón decided to go further and issued arrest warrants against the six, it would mean they would risk detention and extradition if they travelled outside the US. It would also present President Barack Obama with a serious dilemma. He would have either to open proceedings against the accused or tackle an extradition request from Spain.

Obama administration officials have confirmed that they believe torture was committed by American interrogators. The president has not ruled out a criminal inquiry, but has signalled he is reluctant to do so for political reasons.

"Obviously we're going to be looking at past practices, and I don't believe that anybody is above the law," Obama said in January. "But my orientation's going to be to move forward."

Philippe Sands, whose book Torture Team first made the case against the Bush lawyers and which Boyé said was instrumental in formulating the Spanish case, said yesterday: "What this does is force the Obama administration to come to terms with the fact that torture has happened and to decide, sooner rather than later, whether it is going to criminally investigate. If it decides not to investigate, then inevitably the Garzón investigation, and no doubt many others, will be given the green light."

Germany's federal prosecutor was asked in November 2006 to pursue a case against Donald Rumsfeld, the former defence secretary, Gonzales and other officials for abuses committed in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But the prosecutor declined on the grounds that the issue should be investigated in the US.

Legal observers say the Spanish lawsuit has a better chance of ending in charges. The high court, on which Garzón sits, has more leeway than the German prosecutor to seek "universal jurisdiction".

The lawsuit also points to a direct link with Spain, as six Spaniards were held at Guantánamo and are argued to have suffered directly from the Bush administration's departure from international law. Unlike the German lawsuit, the Spanish case is aimed at second-tier figures, advisers to Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, with the aim of being less politically explosive.

The lawsuit claimed the six former aides "participated actively and decisively in the creation, approval and execution of a judicial framework that allowed for the deprivation of fundamental rights of a large number of prisoners, the implementation of new interrogation techniques including torture, the legal cover for the treatment of those prisoners, the protection of the people who participated in illegal tortures and, above all, the establishment of impunity for all the government workers, military personnel, doctors and others who participated in the detention centre at Guantánamo".

"All the accused are members of what they themselves called the 'war council'," court documents allege. "This group met almost weekly either in Gonzales's or Haynes's offices."

In a now notorious legal opinion signed in August 2002, Yoo and Bybee argued that torture occurred only when pain was inflicted "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death".

Another key document cited in the Spanish case is a November 2002 "action memo" written by Haynes, in which he recommends that Rumsfeld give "blanket approval" to 15 forms of aggressive interrogation, including stress positions, isolation, hooding, 20-hour interrogations and nudity. Rumsfeld approved the document.

Last week, Britain's attorney general, Lady Scotland, launched a criminal investigation into MI5 complicity in the torture of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident held in Guantánamo.

The Obama administration has so far avoided taking similar steps. But the possibility of US prosecutions was brought closer by a report by the Senate armed services committee at the end of last year, which found: "The abuse of detainees in US custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorised their use against detainees."

None of the six former officials could be reached for comment yesterday. Meanwhile, Vijay Padmanabhan, a former state department lawyer, said the creation of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp was "one of the worst over-reactions of the Bush administration".

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Just Look at the Statute - Indict, Arrest, and Prosecute Cheney For War Crimes

indict, arrest, and prosecute Cheney

"The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."
+++

Cheney War Crimes: Just Look at the Statute

by Matthew Rothschild
Published on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 by The Progressive

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/25-8

President Obama needs to tell Attorney General Eric Holder to indict Dick Cheney, right now, for war crimes.

Just look at the statute, Title 18 of the U.S. Criminal Code, Section 2441. It says that someone is guilty of a war crime if he or she commits a "grave breach of common Article 3" of the Geneva Conventions. And then it defines what a grave breach would be.

One such breach is torture, or the conspiracy to commit torture, which Cheney was clearly in on, as when he repeatedly defended waterboarding and talked about the need to go to the "dark side" Here's the language from the statute: "The act of a person who commits, or conspires to commit, an act specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering . . . upon another person within his custody or physical control for the purpose of obtaining information or a confession, punishment, intimidation, coercion, or any reason based on discrimination of any kind."

Another grave breach is "cruel or inhuman treatment," or the conspiracy to inflict such treatment. Again, Cheney was supervising such treatment in the White House, which would qualify as committing this crime. One time, it got so ghoulish that Attorney General John Ashcroft asked the other principals, "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

Here's the language on "cruel or inhuman treatment": "The act of a person who commits, or conspires or attempts to commit, an act intended to inflict severe or serious physical or mental pain or suffering . . . including serious physical abuse, upon another within his custody or control."

An additional breach is "mutilation or maiming." Since some detainees say they no longer have the complete functioning of arms or limbs, Cheney may be on the hook here, too. "The act of a person who intentionally injures, or conspires or attempts to injure, or injures whether intentionally or unintentionally in the course of committing any other offense under this subsection, one or more persons . . . by disfiguring the person or persons by any mutilation thereof or by permanently disabling any member, limb or organ of his body, without any legitimate medical or dental purpose."

"Intentionally causing serious bodily harm" is yet another grave breach. The statute defines this as: "The act of a person who intentionally causes, or conspires or attempts to cause, serious bodily injury to one or more persons, including lawful combatants, in violation of the law of war."

For each of these offenses, Cheney could receive life in prison, according to the statute.

That is where he belongs.

And it's time for Obama to stop pussyfooting around. He should indict, arrest, and prosecute Cheney.

"There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," said Major General Antonio Taguba, USA (Ret.), in the preface to the Physicians for Human Rights report, "Broken Laws, Broken Lives". "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

That question is now firmly on Obama's desk.

And if he continues to dodge it, he'll make a sick joke of the pious claim that we are a nation of laws, not men.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Stiglitz: Fiscal Plan Fails both Markets and Taxpayers

Fiscal Plan Fails both Markets and Taxpayers

by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published on Tuesday, March 24, 2009 by Project Syndicate

Let's be clear: President Barack Obama inherited an economy in freefall and could not possibly have turned things around in the short time since his election. Unfortunately, what he is doing is not enough.

The real failings in the Obama recovery program lie not in the stimulus package -- though it is too heavily weighted toward tax cuts, and much of it merely offsets cutbacks by states -- but in its efforts to revive financial markets. America's failures provide important lessons to countries around the world that are or will be facing increasing problems with their banks:

Delaying bank restructuring is costly, in terms of both the eventual bailout costs and the damage to the overall economy in the interim.
Governments do not like to admit the full costs of the problem, so they give the banking system just enough to survive, but not enough to return it to health.

Confidence is important, but it must rest on sound fundamentals. Policies must not be based on the fiction that good loans were made, and that the business acumen of financial-market leaders and regulators will be validated once confidence is restored.
Bankers can be expected to act in their self-interest on the basis of incentives. Perverse incentives fueled excessive risk-taking, and banks that are near collapse but are too big to fail will engage in even more of it. Knowing that the government will pick up the pieces if necessary, they will postpone resolving mortgages and pay out billions in bonuses and dividends.
Socializing losses while privatizing gains is more worrisome than the consequences of nationalizing banks. American taxpayers are getting an increasingly bad deal. In the first round of cash infusions, they got about 67 cents in assets for every dollar they gave (though the assets were almost surely overvalued, and quickly fell in value). But in the recent cash infusions, it is estimated that Americans are getting 25 cents, or less, for every dollar. Bad terms mean a large national debt in the future.
Don't confuse saving bankers and shareholders with saving banks. America could have saved its banks, but let the shareholders go, for far less than it has spent.
Trickle-down economics almost never works. Throwing money at the banks hasn't helped homeowners: foreclosures continue to increase. Letting AIG fail might have hurt some systemically important institutions, but dealing with that would have been better than to gamble upwards of $150 billion and hope that some of it might stick where it is important. One of the reasons we may be getting bad terms is that if we got fair value for our money, we would by now be the dominant shareholder in at least one of the major banks.
Lack of transparency got America's financial system into this trouble. Lack of transparency will not get it out. The Obama administration is promising to pick up losses to persuade hedge funds and other private investors to buy out banks' bad assets. But this will not establish ''market prices,'' as the administration claims. Banks' losses have already occurred, and their gains must now come at taxpayers' expense. Bringing in hedge funds as third parties will simply increase the cost.
Better to be forward looking than backward looking, focusing on reducing the risk of new loans and ensuring that funds create new lending capacity.

There is no ''mystique'' in finance: The era of believing that something can be created out of nothing should be over. Short-sighted responses by politicians -- who hope to get by with a deal that is small enough to please taxpayers and large enough to please the banks -- will merely prolong the problem.

An impasse is looming. More money will be needed, but Americans are in no mood to provide it -- certainly not on the terms that we have seen The well of money may be running dry, and so, too, may be America's legendary optimism and hope.

Hedges: America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout

America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout

The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation.

trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding.

The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions,

moral corruption that made the Holocaust possible - “

teach values
the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds” must be made visible.

devotes itself openly, without fear of offending any authorities, to this most important of problems. To do this, education must transform itself into sociology, that is, it must teach about the societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms.”

a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society and instead wields power through naked repression.

Universities, in general, especially following the events of 9/11, were under assault by Christian nationalists, reactionary neoconservatives and market fundamentalists for allegedly representing the weak link in the war on terrorism.

Imagination, creativity, moral balance, knowledge, common sense, a social view

political and economic forces fuelling such crimes against humanity—whether they are unlawful wars, systemic torture, practiced indifference to chronic starvation and disease or genocidal acts—are always mediated by educational forces,” Giroux said. “Resistance to such acts cannot take place without a degree of knowledge and self-reflection. We have to name these acts and transform moral outrage into concrete attempts to prevent such human violations from taking place in the first place.”

The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy.

Moral autonomy... is possible only through reflection, self-determination and the courage not to cooperate.

Moral autonomy is what the corporate state, with all its attacks on liberal institutions and “leftist” professors, has really set out to destroy.

The corporate state holds up as our ideal ... “the manipulative character.”
The manipulative character has superb organizational skills and the inability to have authentic human experiences. He or she is an emotional cripple and driven by an overvalued realism. The manipulative character is a systems manager.

He or she exclusively trained to sustain the corporate structure, which is why our elites are wasting mind-blowing amounts of our money on corporations like Goldman Sachs and AIG. “He makes a cult of action, activity, of so-called efficiency as such which reappears in the advertising image of the active person,”

These manipulative characters, people like Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, AIG’s Edward Liddy and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, along with most of our ruling class,

have used corporate money and power to determine the narrow parameters of the debate in our classrooms, on the airwaves and in the halls of Congress while they looted the country.

fight against it ...

those manipulative people, who actually are incapable of true experience, for that very reason manifest an unresponsiveness that associates them with certain mentally ill or psychotic characters, namely schizoids.”
+++

America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout

By Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges' Columns

In decaying societies, politics become theater. The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation. They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled. Once the spotlights go on they read their lines with appropriate emotion. Once the lights go off, they make sure Goldman Sachs and a host of other large corporations have the hundreds of billions of dollars in losses they incurred playing casino capitalism repaid with taxpayer money.

We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. Our press, which should promote such intellectual and moral questioning, confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice to critics who challenge not this bonus payment or that bailout but the pernicious superstructure of the corporate state itself. We kneel before a cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. The capacity for manipulation is what is most highly prized. And our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.

Theodor Adorno in 1967 wrote an essay called “Education After Auschwitz.” He argued that the moral corruption that made the Holocaust possible remained “largely unchanged.” He wrote that “the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds” must be made visible. Schools had to teach more than skills. They had to teach values. If they did not, another Auschwitz was always possible.

“All political instruction finally should be centered upon the idea that Auschwitz should never happen again,” he wrote. “This would be possible only when it devotes itself openly, without fear of offending any authorities, to this most important of problems. To do this, education must transform itself into sociology, that is, it must teach about the societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms.”

Our elites are imploding. Their fraud and corruption are slowly being exposed as the disparity between their words and our reality becomes wider and more apparent. The rage that is bubbling up across the country will have to be countered by the elite with less subtle forms of control. But unless we grasp the “societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms” we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society and instead wields power through naked repression.

I had lunch a few days ago in Toronto with Henry Giroux, professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University in Canada and who for many years was the Waterbury Chair Professor at Penn State. Giroux, who has been one of the most prescient and vocal critics of the corporate state and the systematic destruction of American education, was driven to the margins of academia because he kept asking the uncomfortable questions Adorno knew should be asked by university professors. He left the United States in 2004 for Canada.

“The emergence of what Eisenhower had called the military-industrial-academic complex had secured a grip on higher education that may have exceeded even what he had anticipated and most feared,” Giroux, who wrote “The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex,” told me. “Universities, in general, especially following the events of 9/11, were under assault by Christian nationalists, reactionary neoconservatives and market fundamentalists for allegedly representing the weak link in the war on terrorism. Right-wing students were encouraged to spy on the classes of progressive professors, the corporate grip on the university was tightening as made clear not only in the emergence of business models of governance, but also in the money being pumped into research and programs that blatantly favored corporate interests. And at Penn State, where I was located at the time, the university had joined itself at the hip with corporate and military power. Put differently, corporate and Pentagon money was now funding research projects and increasingly knowledge was being militarized in the service of developing weapons of destruction, surveillance and death. Couple this assault with the fact that faculty were becoming irrelevant as an oppositional force. Many disappeared into discourses that threatened no one, some simply were too scared to raise critical issues in their classrooms for fear of being fired, and many simply no longer had the conviction to uphold the university as a democratic public sphere.”

Frank Donoghue, the author of “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” details how liberal arts education has been dismantled. Any form of learning that is not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools has been abolished. Students are steered away from asking the broad, disturbing questions that challenge the assumptions of the power elite or an economic system that serves the corporate state. This has led many bright graduates into the arms of corporate entities they do not examine morally or ethically. They accept the assumptions of corporate culture because they have never been taught to think.

Only 8 percent of U.S. college graduates now receive degrees in the humanities, about 110,000 students. Between 1970 and 2001, bachelor’s degrees in English declined from 7.6 percent to 4 percent, as did degrees in foreign languages (2.4 percent to 1 percent), mathematics (3 percent to 1 percent), social science and history (18.4 percent to 10 percent). Bachelor’s degrees in business, which promise the accumulation of wealth, have skyrocketed. Business majors since 1970-1971 have risen from 13.6 percent of the graduation population to 21.7 percent. Business has now replaced education, which has fallen from 21 percent to 8.2 percent, as the most popular major.

The values that sustain an open society have been crushed. A university, as John Ralston Saul writes, now “actively seeks students who suffer from the appropriate imbalance and then sets out to exaggerate it. Imagination, creativity, moral balance, knowledge, common sense, a social view—all these things wither. Competitiveness, having an ever-ready answer, a talent for manipulating situations—all these things are encouraged to grow. As a result amorality also grows; as does extreme aggressivity when they are questioned by outsiders; as does a confusion between the nature of good versus having a ready answer to all questions. Above all, what is encouraged is the growth of an undisciplined form of self-interest, in which winning is what counts.”

This moral nihilism would have terrified Adorno. He knew that radical evil was possible only with the collaboration of a timid, cowed and confused population, a system of propaganda and a press that offered little more than spectacle and entertainment and an educational system that did not transmit transcendent values or nurture the capacity for individual conscience. He feared a culture that banished the anxieties and complexities of moral choice and embraced a childish hyper-masculinity, one championed by ruthless capitalists (think of the brutal backstabbing and deception cheered by TV shows like “Survivor”) and Hollywood action heroes like the governor of California.

“This educational ideal of hardness, in which many may believe without reflecting about it, is utterly wrong,” Adorno wrote. “The idea that virility consists in the maximum degree of endurance long ago became a screen-image for masochism that, as psychology has demonstrated, aligns itself all too easily with sadism.”

Sadism is as much a part of popular culture as it is of corporate culture. It dominates pornography, runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs and is at the core of the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed and the sick.

“The political and economic forces fuelling such crimes against humanity—whether they are unlawful wars, systemic torture, practiced indifference to chronic starvation and disease or genocidal acts—are always mediated by educational forces,” Giroux said. “Resistance to such acts cannot take place without a degree of knowledge and self-reflection. We have to name these acts and transform moral outrage into concrete attempts to prevent such human violations from taking place in the first place.”

The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy. Moral autonomy, as Immanuel Kant wrote, is possible only through reflection, self-determination and the courage not to cooperate.

Moral autonomy is what the corporate state, with all its attacks on liberal institutions and “leftist” professors, has really set out to destroy. The corporate state holds up as our ideal what Adorno called “the manipulative character.” The manipulative character has superb organizational skills and the inability to have authentic human experiences. He or she is an emotional cripple and driven by an overvalued realism. The manipulative character is a systems manager. He or she exclusively trained to sustain the corporate structure, which is why our elites are wasting mind-blowing amounts of our money on corporations like Goldman Sachs and AIG. “He makes a cult of action, activity, of so-called efficiency as such which reappears in the advertising image of the active person,” Adorno wrote of this personality type. These manipulative characters, people like Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, AIG’s Edward Liddy and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, along with most of our ruling class, have used corporate money and power to determine the narrow parameters of the debate in our classrooms, on the airwaves and in the halls of Congress while they looted the country.

“It is especially difficult to fight against it,” warned Adorno, “because those manipulative people, who actually are incapable of true experience, for that very reason manifest an unresponsiveness that associates them with certain mentally ill or psychotic characters, namely schizoids.”

HR 875: The Criminalization of Organic Farming and the Take over of the US Food Supply

The Criminalization of Organic Farming and the Take over of the US Food Supply

!! CALL TO ACTION !!
http://www.gnhealth.com/calltoaction.html

To find your local House of Representative Member Click Here:
http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW_by_State.shtml

To Find your local Senator click here:
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/
senators_cfm.cfm?State=IN

A solemn walk through HR 875

By Sue Diederich and Linn Cohen-Cole

http://www.gnhealth.com/calltoaction.html
Last updated March 16, 2009 at 1AM Eastern to correct formatting issues, and to add a related YouTube video by Free Speech TV.

The Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA) sent out information about HR 875, which lists 'facts' to counter 'myths' and 'rumors' on the internet. It gives no specifics to back up its 'facts,' so the following close up view of the bill and accompanying commentary offers readers a chance to decide for themselves what is myth and what is fact.

Sue Diederich heads the Illinois Independent Consumers and Farmers Association, an organization formed to protect the rights of farmers and consumers to deal directly with each other without government interference. Neither of us are lawyers, but we both can read. We invite progressive headliners to read the bills themselves and provide their own analysis. The Left needs to understand what their conservative brothers and sisters in farming view as an alarming attempt to seize absolute control of all attempts at private (non-corporate), healthy, organic food growing and sharing. ~LCC

People seem to expect HR 875 to be titled "The Criminalization of Organic Farming and the Take over of the US Food Supply." When they don't see any words to that effect anywhere in the bill, they declare "this bill is fine" and those seeing dangers are "alarmists." Do they think the industrial side is composed of fools? These are the same people who make cheery cereals with cartoon characters on the box when, inside, high fructose corn syrup is all over the cereal which comes from Bt-corn associated with diabetes. HFCS is, too, and there is an epidemic of diabetes here even among children. They know how to package. Why do people understand that industrial food inside a box can be a problem and yet are so innocent about looking at the bills, not realizing there is packaging there, too, or how much is at stake that the public and even legislators not see since this is about taking control. The industrial side isn't stupid.

Understanding parts of the bill at times depends on smelling smoke as you read it. Here in the US, we still have only smoke ... an Ohio state ag department SWAT team raid on an organic coop, Pennsylvania ag department raids on horse and buggy Mennonites, California setting coliform levels so low fresh milk dairy farmers would need cows that produced pasteurized milk right out the udder, arrest and handcuffing of a single mother in front of her children for selling goat milk, the USDA paying its agents bonuses for foreclosing on farms, ... But in the EU where 60% of the Polish farmers are now gone because of identical bills enacted into law there, and 60 UK farmers have committed suicide, there is fire. And in Iraq, where they have been rendered helpless serfs by the theft of their country's seeds and criminalization of farmers' collection of their own seed, it is roaring. And in India where 182,000 farmers have committed suicide since the WTO and IMF got hold of agriculture and our Big Ag firms went in there, and 8 million farmers have left the land, it is out of control.

The World Trade Organization (WTO), run by the multinational meat packers and genetic engineering corporations, want HR 875, here. The bills are "harmonized" rules for globalization of food and lower food safety standards to allow for it. Those corporations are members of NIAA, a corporate consortium that brought NAIS, created by Anne Veneman, to the USDA to be made into law.

We begin with PASA offering Food & Water Watch's take on the bills to its members. PASA's assertions are in Times New Roman.

Myths and Facts H.R. 875 –The Food Safety Modernization Act

PASA members: The following information about a bill now before Congress, HR 875, was developed by our friends at Food and Water Watch, and forwarded to us by the National Sustainable Ag Coalition (NSAC), of which PASA is a member.

This Myth/Fact sheet was developed to help answer some of the rumors that are fairly rampant on the Internet right now. We will keep a close eye on the situation, and share further updates from NSAC as they become available.

MYTH: H.R. 875 "makes it illegal to grow your own garden" and would result in the "criminalization of the backyard gardener."

FACT: There is no language in the bill that would regulate, penalize, or shut down backyard gardens. This bill is focused on ensuring the safety of foods sold in supermarkets.

Though private residences are not specifically included, nor are they specifically excluded. While this does not immediately affect homeowners growing tomatoes in the backyard, entered testimony leaves the door open for just that in the future. Referring back to the Bio-Terrorism Act, in a discussion on this very topic and entered in the official record of debate on the interim rule, the same argument exists here and no new definitions or exclusions have been provided in HR 875 - and "reasonable" is a subjective term in theory as well as practice...

(13) FOOD ESTABLISHMENT-

(A) IN GENERAL- The term 'food establishment' means a slaughterhouse (except those regulated under the Federal Meat Inspection Act or the Poultry Products Inspection Act), factory, warehouse, or facility owned or operated by a person located in any State that processes food or a facility that holds, stores, or transports food or food ingredients.

Now, every home in the country holds food after buying it from the grocery store. Will they be included too? Heck, no. They're going to be magnanimous and say that, while they could, they won't right now.

Response excerpted from the same Interim Rule:

"FDA has concluded that private individual residences are not ''facilities'' for purposes of the registration provision of the Bioterrorism Act. Under the Bioterrorism Act, the term ''facility'' includes ''any factory, warehouse, or establishment.''

Congress did not specify any definition for these terms. Under their common meanings, the terms can include private residences. For example, accordingtoWebster's II New Riverside University Dictionary (1994), the most relevant definition of ''establishment'' is ''a business firm, club, institution, or residence, including its possessions and employees.''

However, ''[I]n determining whether Congress has specifically addressed the question at issue, the court should not confine itself to examining a particular statutory provision in isolation.... It is a fundamental canon of statutory construction that the words of a statute must be read in their context and with a view to their place in the overall statutory scheme." FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., 529 U.S. 120, 121 (2000).

READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE HERE >

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The multiple ways Monsanto is putting normal seeds out of reach

by Linn Cohen-Cole

People say if farmers don't want problems from Monsanto, just don't buy their GMO seeds.

Not so simple. Where are farmers supposed to get normal seed these days? How are they supposed to avoid contamination of their fields from GM-crops? How are they supposed to stop Monsanto detectives from trespassing or Monsanto from using helicopters to fly over spying on them?

Monsanto contaminates the fields, trespasses onto the land taking samples and if they find any GMO plants growing there (or say they have), they then sue, saying they own the crop. It's a way to make money since farmers can't fight back and court and they settle because they have no choice.

And they have done and are doing a bucket load of things to keep farmers and everyone else from having any access at all to buying, collecting, and saving of NORMAL seeds.

1. They've bought up the seed companies across the midwest.

2. They've written Monsanto seed laws and gotten legislators to put them through, that make cleaning, collecting and storing of seeds so onerous in terms of fees and paperwork and testing and tracking every variety and being subject to fines, that having normal seed becomes almost impossible (an NAIS approach to wiping out normal seeds). Does your state have such a seed law? Before they existed, farmers just collected the seeds and put them in sacks in the shed and used them the next year, sharing whatever they wished with friends and neighbors, selling some if they wanted. That's been killed.

In Illinois which has such a seed law, Madigan, the Speaker of the House, his staff is Monsanto lobbyists.

3. Monsanto is pushing anti-democracy laws (Vilsack's brainchild, actually) that remove community' control over their own counties so farmers and citizens can't block the planting of GMO crops even if they can contaminate other crops. So if you don't want a GM-crop that grows industrial chemicals or drugs or a rice growing with human DNA in it, in your area and mixing with your crops, tough luck.

Check the map of just where the Monsanto/Vilsack laws are and see if your state is still a democracy or is Monsanto's. A farmer in Illinois told me he heard that Bush had pushed through some regulation that made this true in every state. People need to check on that.

4. For sure there are Monsanto regulations buried in the FDA right now that make a farmer's seed cleaning equipment illegal (another way to leave nothing but GM-seeds) because it's now considered a "source of seed contamination." Farmer can still seed clean but the equipment now has to be certified and a farmer said it would require a million to a million and half dollar building and equipment ... for EACH line of seed. Seed storage facilities are also listed (another million?) and harvesting and transport equipment. And manure. Something that can contaminate seed. Notice that chemical fertilizers and pesticides are not mentioned.

You could eat manure and be okay (a little grossed out but okay). Try that with pesticides and fertilizers. Indian farmers have. Their top choice for how to commit suicide to escape the debt they have been left in is to drink Monsanto pesticides.

5. Monsanto is picking off seed cleaners across the Midwest. In Pilot Grove, Missouri , in Indiana (Maurice Parr ), and now in southern Illinois (Steve Hixon). And they are using US marshals and state troopers and county police to show up in three cars to serve the poor farmers who had used Hixon as their seed cleaner, telling them that he or their neighbors turned them in, so across that 6 county areas, no one talking to neighbors and people are living in fear and those farming communities are falling apart from the suspicion Monsanto sowed. Hixon's office got broken into and he thinks someone put a GPS tracking device on his equipment and that's how Monsanto found between 200-400 customers in very scattered and remote areas, and threatened them all and destroyed his business within 2 days.

So, after demanding that seed cleaners somehow be able to tell one seed from another (or be sued to kingdom come) or corrupting legislatures to put in laws about labeling of seeds that are so onerous no one can cope with them, what is Monsanto's attitude about labeling their own stuff? You guessed it - they're out there pushing laws against ANY labeling of their own GM-food and animals and of any exports to other countries. Why?

We know and they know why.

As Norman Braksick, the president of Asgrow Seed Co. (now owned by Monsanto) predicted in the Kansas City Star (3/7/94) seven years ago, "If you put a label on a genetically engineered food, you might as well put a skull and crossbones on it."

And they've sued dairy farmers for telling the truth about their milk being rBGH-free, though rBGH is associated with an increased risk of breast, colon and prostate cancers.

I just heard that some seed dealers urge farmers to buy the seed under the seed dealer's name, telling the farmers it helps the dealer get a discount on seed to buy a lot under their own name. Then Monsanto sues the poor farmer for buying their seed without a contract and extorts huge sums from them.

Here's a youtube video that is worth your time. Vandana Shiva is one of the leading anti-Monsanto people in the world. In this video, she says (and this video is old), Monsanto had sued 1500 farmers whose fields had simply been contaminated by GM-crops. Listen to all the ways Monsanto goes after farmers.

Do you know the story of Gandhi in India and how the British had salt laws that taxed salt? The British claimed it as theirs. Gandhi had what was called a Salt Satyagraha, in which people were asked to break the laws and march to the sea and collect the salt without paying the British. A kind of Boston tea party, I guess.

Thousands of people marched 240 miles to the ocean where the British were waiting. As people moved forward to collect the salt, the British soldiers clubbed them but the people kept coming. The non-violent protest exposed the British behavior which was so revolting to the world that it helped end British control in India.

Vandana Shiva has started a Seed Satyagraha - nonviolent non-cooperation around seed laws - has gotten millions of farmers to sign a pledge to break those laws.

American farmers and cattlemen might appreciate what Gandhi fought for and what Shiva is bringing back and how much it is about what we are all so angry about - loss of basic freedoms. [The highlighting is mine.]

The Seed Satyagraha is the name for the nonviolent, noncooperative movement that Dr. Shiva has organized to stand against seed monopolies. According to Dr. Shiva, the name was inspired by Gandhi’s famous walk to the Dandi Beach, where he picked up salt and said, “You can’t monopolize this which we need for life.” But it’s not just the noncooperation aspect of the movement that is influenced by Gandhi. The creative side saving seeds, trading seeds, farming without corporate dependence-–without their chemicals, without their seed.

“All this is talked about in the language that Gandhi left us as a legacy. We work with three key concepts."

"(One) Swadeshi...which means the capacity to do your own thing--produce your own food, produce your own goods...."

“(Two) Swaraj--to govern yourself. And we fight on three fronts-–water, food, and seed. JalSwaraj is water independence--water freedom and water sovereignty. Anna Swaraj is food freedom, food sovereignty. And Bija Swaraj is seed freedom and seed sovereignty. Swa means self--that which rises from the self and is very, very much a deep notion of freedom.

"I believe that these concepts, which are deep, deep, deep in Indian civilization, Gandhi resurrected them to fight for freedom. They are very important for today’s world because so far what we’ve had is centralized state rule, giving way now to centralized corporate control, and we need a third alternate. That third alternate is, in part, citizens being able to tell their state, 'This is what your function is. This is what your obligations are,' and being able to have their states act on corporations to say, 'This is something you cannot do.'"

“(Three) Satyagraha, non-cooperation, basically saying, 'We will do our thing and any law that tries to say that (our freedom) is illegal… we will have to not cooperate with it. We will defend our freedoms to have access to water, access to seed, access to food, access to medicine.'"

Take action -- click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:
Demand anti-trust investigations into Monsanto activities at the state and federal level.

Click here to see the most recent messages sent to congressional reps and local newspapers

Got lucky in meeting libertarian and conservative farmers and becoming friends, learning an incredible amount about farming and nature and science, as well as about government violations against them and against us all. They are nothing like what (more...)

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MORE...

"Food safety" bills now in Congress were written by Anne Venemann, former Monsanto counsel, and by the WTO (composed of Monsanto, Cargill, Tysons, the biotech companies, the big pharmaceuticals, etc.). They were introduced by Rosa DeLauro, whose husband works for Monsanto, and Food Democracy Now says that Michael Taylor, former Monsanto lawyer who approved rBGH, may get a job inside the White House running "food safety." The bills would industrialize all farms, eliminate most of our farmers (as similar legislation is doing in the EU now), and threatens biodiverstity and organic seeds - our means to avoid GMOs. The bills are immense in reach (gardens and homes are not excluded), vague in detail, draconian in penalties (applied by "the Administrator," with no judicial review.)

Let your legislators and local paper know what you think and want: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum942.php

Capitol Switchboard: (202) 224-3121
Capital switchboard toll free numbers: 800-965-4701 800-828-0498.

Speaker: nancy.pelosi@mail.house.gov, Introduced the bill: rosa.delauro@mail.house.gov,

Co-signers: jerrold.nadler@mail.house.gov, eleanor.norton@mail.house.gov, linda.sanchez@mail.house.gov, diana.degette@mail.house.gov, peter.defazio@mail.house.gov, shelley.berkley@mail.house.gov, sanford.bishop@mail.house.gov, timothy.bishop@mail.house.gov, andre.carson@mail.house.gov, eliot.engel@mail.house.gov, anna.eshoo@mail.house.gov, sam.farr@mail.house.gov, bob.filner@mail.house.gov, gabrielle.giffords@mail.house.gov, raul.grijalva@mail.house.gov, john.hall@mail.house.gov, maurice.hinchey@mail.house.gov, mazie.hirono@mail.house.gov, eddie.johnson@mail.house.gov, marcy.kaptur@mail.house.gov, barbara.lee@mail.house.gov, nita.lowey@mail.house.gov, betty.mccollum@mail.house.gov, james.mcdermott@mail.house.gov, james.mcgovern@mail.house.gov, gwen.moore@mail.house.gov, christopher.murphy@mail.house.gov, chellie.pingree@mail.house.gov, timothy.ryan@mail.house.gov, janice.schakowsky@mail.house.gov, mark.schauer@mail.house.gov, louise.slaughter@mail.house.gov, fortney.stark@mail.house.gov, betty.sutton@mail.house.gov, debbie.wasserman.schultz@mail.house.gov

MORE DETAILS...

Some cannot believe that the HR 875 in Congress for a vote will criminalize seed banking. This bill will allow for Monsanto to take control of all seeds in the US.

Here's the bill, broken down: http://www.opednews.com/articles/A-solemn-walk-through-HR-8-by-Linn-Cohen-Cole-090314-67.html

Another article about the ways Monsanto is putting seeds out of reach.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-multiple-ways-Monsanto-by-Linn-Cohen-Cole-090203-854.html

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-759
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h759/show

H.R. 759 (FDA overhaul), 111th Congress
Food and Drug Administration Globalization Act of 2009

* HR 759 overhauls the entire structure of the FDA.
* It's more likely to move through congress than HR 875.
* It contains provisions that could cause problems for small farms and food processors.

H.R. 814 ("NAIS on steroids"), 111th Congress Tracing and Recalling Agricultural Contamination Everywhere Act of 2009

* a mandatory animal identification system

H.R. 875 (creation of FSA), 111th Congress Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009

To establish the Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services.

http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/

Food & Water Watch's Statement on H.R. 875 and other food safety bills (like H.R. 759)

The dilemma of how to regulate food safety in a way that prevents problems caused by industrialized agriculture but doesn't wipe out small diversified farms is not new and is not easily solved. And as almost constant food safety problems reveal the dirty truth about the way much of our food is produced, processed and distributed, it's a dilemma we need to have serious discussion about.

Most consumers never thought they had to worry about peanut butter and this latest food safety scandal has captured public attention for good reason - a CEO who knowingly shipped contaminated food, a plant with holes in the roof and serious pest problems, and years of state and federal regulators failing to intervene.

It's no surprise that Congress is under pressure to act and multiple food safety bills have been introduced.

Two of the bills are about traceability for food (S.425 and H.R. 814).
These present real issues for small producers who could be forced to bear the cost of expensive tracking technology and recordkeeping.

The other bills address what FDA can do to regulate food.

A lot of attention has been focused on a bill introduced by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (H.R. 875), the Food Safety Modernization Act. And a lot of what is being said about the bill is misleading.

Here are a few things that H.R. 875 DOES do:

-It addresses the most critical flaw in the structure of FDA by splitting it into 2 new agencies -one devoted to food safety and the other devoted to drugs and medical devices.

-It increases inspection of food processing plants, basing the frequency of inspection on the risk of the product being produced - but it does NOT make plants pay any registration fees or user fees.

-It does extend food safety agency authority to food production on farms, requiring farms to write a food safety plan and consider the critical points on that farm where food safety problems are likely to occur.

-It requires imported food to meet the same standards as food produced in the U.S.

And just as importantly, here are a few things that H.R. 875 does NOT do:

-It does not cover foods regulated by the USDA (beef, pork, poultry, lamb,
catfish.)

-It does not establish a mandatory animal identification system.

-It does not regulate backyard gardens.

-It does not regulate seed.

-It does not call for new regulations for farmers markets or direct marketing arrangements.

-It does not apply to food that does not enter interstate commerce (food that is sold across state lines).

-It does not mandate any specific type of traceability for FDA-regulated foods (the bill does instruct a new food safety agency to improve traceability of foods, but specifically says that recordkeeping can be done electronically or on paper.)

Several of the things not found in the DeLauro can be found in other bills - like H.R. 814, the Tracing and Recalling Agricultural Contamination Everywhere Act, which calls for a mandatory animal identification system, or H.R. 759, the Food And Drug Administration Globalization Act, which overhauls the entire structure of FDA. H.R. 759 is more likely to move
through Congress than H.R. 875. And H.R. 759 contains several provisions
that could cause problems for small farms and food processors:

-It extends traceability recordkeeping requirements that currently apply only to food processors to farms and restaurants - and requires that recordkeeping be done electronically.

-It calls for standard lot numbers to be used in food production.

-It requires food processing plants to pay a registration fee to FDA to fund the agency's inspection efforts.

-It instructs FDA to establish production standards for fruits and vegetables and to establish Good Agricultural Practices for produce.

There is plenty of evidence that one-size-fits-all regulation only tends to work for one size of agriculture - the largest industrialized operations.
That's why it is important to let members of Congress know how food safety proposals will impact the conservation, organic, and sustainable practices that make diversified, organic, and direct market producers different from agribusiness. And the work doesn't stop there - if Congress passes any of these bills, the FDA will have to develop rules and regulations to implement the law, a process that we can't afford to ignore.

But simply shooting down any attempt to fix our broken food safety system is not an approach that works for consumers, who are faced with a food supply that is putting them at risk and regulators who lack the authority to do much about it.

LINKS TO ARTICLES (PDFs)...

A History of Monsanto

Monsanto fined $1.5m for bribery

Monsanto Hijacks Safe Food Coalition

Monsanto's High Level Connections to the Bush Administration

US drugs giant faces lawsuit

Monsanto wins Canada seed battle

USDA Chief Tom Vilsack: Another Shill for Monsanto

Monsanto, Agent Orange and Dioxins

Monsanto: A Review of Their Criminal Acts

WANTED: Monsanto for crimes against the planet

LINKS TO ARTICLES...

Monsanto Whistleblower: Genetically Engineered Crops May Cause Disease
Jeffrey Smith, NewsWithViews.com, August 28, 2006

Monsanto vs. Farmers: The Final Battle?
Barbara Peterson, Conspiracy Planet, February 2009

HR 875: Monsanto Frankenfood Conspiracy Bill
Linn Cohen Cole, Conspiracy Planet, March 12, 2009

Monsanto Bills Set to Destroy Organic Farming
Linn Cohen-Cole, Conspiracy Planet, February 17, 2009

EPA Investigations into Monsanto and Dioxin
Rachel’s Hazardous Waste News #400, July 28, 1994

Monsanto Charged with Bribing Indonesian Environment Official January 7, 2005,
ENS Newswire, January 7, 2005

Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear: Domination of America’s Food Chain
Donald Barlett & James Steele, VANITY FAIR, May 2008

EPA Memorandum on Criminal Investigation of Monsanto Corporation on Cover Up of Dioxin Contamination in Products
United States Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response