"Ronnie Cummins" - Beyond Frankenfoods and Toxics: OCA’s Ten Reasons to Buy Organic

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/20-5

Published on Saturday, August 20, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

by Ronnie Cummins

 

Organic foods and products are the fastest growing items in America's grocery carts. Thirty million households, comprising 75 million people, are now buying organic foods, clothing, body care, supplements, pet food, and other products on a regular basis. Fifty-six percent of U.S. consumers say they prefer organic foods.

Here are 10 reasons why you should buy organic foods and products:

1. Organic foods are produced without the use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). Consumers worry about untested and unlabeled genetically modified food ingredients in common supermarket items. Genetically engineered ingredients are now found in 75% of all non-organic U.S. processed foods, even in many products labeled or advertised as “natural.” In addition the overwhelming majority of non-organic meat, dairy, and eggs are derived from animals reared on a steady diet of GM animal feed. Although polls indicate that 90% of Americans want labels on gene-altered foods, government and industry adamantly refuse to respect consumers’ right to know, understanding quite well that health and environmental-minded shoppers will avoid foods with a GMO label.

2. Organic foods are safe and pure. Organic farming prohibits the use of toxic pesticides, antibiotics, growth hormones, nano-particles, and climate-destabilizing chemical fertilizers. Consumers worry about pesticide and drug residues routinely found in non-organic produce, processed foods, and animal products. Consumer Reports has found that 77% of non-organic produce items in the average supermarket contain pesticide residues. The beef industry has acknowledged that 94% of all U.S. beef cattle have hormone implants, which are banned in Europe as a cancer hazard. Approximately 10% of all U.S. dairy cows are injected with Monsanto and Elanco’s controversial genetically engineered Bovine Growth Hormone, banned in most industrialized nations. Recent studies indicate that an alarming percentage of non-organic U.S. meat contains dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

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"Saeed Kamali Dehghan" - Iran jails American hikers Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal for eight years

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/20/iran-shane-bauer-josh-fattal

Both men were arrested in July 2009 after they crossed into Iran from Iraq

Saeed Kamali Dehghan

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 20 August 2011

An Iranian court has sentenced two Americans accused of espionage and illegally crossing the border to eight years in jail, Iran's state-run television reported on Saturday.

Sources from Iran's judiciary told the news channel Irinn that Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, both 29, described as "US hikers", have each been imprisoned for three years for illegally entering Iran, and a further five years each for spying on behalf of the US intelligence services. The channel said the men, who had already been held for two years, have 20 days to appeal against the verdict, which was issued by the a branch of the revolutionary court.

Their lawyer, Masoud Shafii, said he had not yet been informed of the court's verdict, an Iranian news website, Khabaronline, reported.

In July 2009, Bauer and Fattal along with their friend, Sarah Shourd, 33, were arrested by Iranian security forces after walking across an unmarked border between Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan. Shourd was released last September on health grounds, on bail of $500,000 (£324,000). While in prison, Shourd became engaged to Bauer.

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"Tom Engelhardt" - An Obituary for Change in Washington

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/20-1

Published on Saturday, August 20, 2011 by TomDispatch.com

by Tom Engelhardt

Those first acts of that first shining full day in the Oval Office are now so forgotten, but on January 21, 2009, among other things, Barack Obama promised to return America to “the high moral ground,” and then signed a straightforward executive order “requiring that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility be closed within a year.”  It was an open-and-shut case, so to speak, part of what CNN called “a clean break from the Bush administration.”  On that same day, as part of that same break, the president signed an executive order and two presidential memoranda hailing a “new era of openness,” of sunshine and transparency in government.  As the president put it, "Every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known."

Of course, nothing could have been more Bushian, if you were thinking about “clean breaks,” than America’s wars in the Greater Middle East. When it came to the Iraq War, at least, President Obama arrived in office with another goal and another promise that couldn’t have been more open and shut (or so his supporters thought), not just drawing down Bush’s disastrous war in Iraq, but “ending” it “responsibly.”  (Admittedly, he was also muttering quietly about “residual forces” there, but who noticed?)

Two and a half years later, Guantanamo remains thrivingly open, while all discussion of ever closing it has long since ended; the administration has, in those same years, gained a fierce reputation as an enforcer of government secrecy and, while it has prosecuted neither torturers, nor financial titans, it has gone after government whistleblowers with a passion.  In the meantime, the Iraq War was indeed wound down “responsibly” (which turned out to mean incredibly slowly), but in recent months, as U.S. casualties again rose, the Obama administration and the U.S. military have visibly been in a desperate search for ways to keep sizeable numbers of American forces there as “trainers,” while also militarizing a vast State Department mission in Baghdad and outfitting it for the long haul with more than 5,000 armed mercenaries as well as a mini-air force.

Promises? As Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman used to say: What? Me worry? As it happens, David Bromwich, essayist for the Huffington Post and the New York Review of Books, does worry. In “George W. Obama?” he offers a new yardstick for measuring the promises of, and the nature of, the Obama administration, as well as the nature of its “break” with the Bush era ; or rather think of his post as an obituary for the possibility of change in Washington.

Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His most recent book is The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Haymarket Books.) His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), will be published in November.

"Dave Murphy" - Politics, Farmers and Change: The End of Rural America

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/19-6

Published on Friday, August 19, 2011 by The Huffington Post

by Dave Murphy

This week President Obama returned to Iowa, where he launched his successful bid to the White House, to speak about "jobs and economic security" in rural America. According to the White House, his bus tour is not a campaign trip, but veteran political observers would disagree. For farmers and rural advocates this tour is really about something much larger than electioneering or a new jobs program, it's about the survival of rural America.

While the plight of urban decay has been widely publicized in the mainstream press, similar issues facing our country cousins (myself included), lack of well paying jobs, rural brain drain, food deserts, poverty and lack of access to quality health care, have either been ignored or largely misunderstood by policy makers and the press. Today, more rural Americans are on food stamps and face bleaker economic prospects than their urban counterparts, despite the romantic image of small town life often portrayed by the media.

For the past 50 years, rural America has seen it's best, brightest and most mobile flee the countryside in search of jobs as federal farm, economic and trade policies have slowly bled family farmers off the land. Since 1960, when John F. Kennedy was elected, America has lost over 1.7 million family farms, the backbone of rural economies, with the number of farmers in the U.S. today being outnumbered by prisoners.

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"Martin Chulov and Chris Stephen" - Libyan rebels push into Tripoli as Gaddafi appeals for help

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/22/libyan-rebels-push-into-tripoli

National Transitional Council confirms capture of ruler's son and rebel convoy enters Green Square, the capital's symbolic heart

Martin Chulov, and Chris Stephen in Zlitan

guardian.co.uk, Monday 22 August 2011 01.12

Hundreds of rebel fighters pushed into the centre of the Libyan capital, Tripoli, late on Sunday as their battle to overthrow the 42-year rule of Muammar Gaddafi moved closer to ending in victory.

Rebels waved opposition flags and fired guns into the air in jubilation after reaching Tripoli's central Green Square, the symbolic heart of the city, in the early hours of Monday morning.

Delighted residents were seen pouring into the streets to celebrate and greet the rebel fighters as they advanced through the suburbs towards the centre.

The prosecutor of the international criminal court said one of Gaddafi's sons, Saif al-Islam, who has been indicted along with his father on crimes against humanity charges had been detained.

The head of the rebel National Transitional Council, Mustafa Abd el-Jalil said that his fighters who had detained Saif al-Islam had been given instructions to "treat him well".

There were also reports that Gaddafi's eldest son, Mohammed, and the presidential guard had surrendered but Gaddafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound was still under the control of the regime.

As crowds gathered in Tripoli and the rebel-held city of Misrata, Gaddafi staged a dramatic late-night appeal for help.

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"Joshau Holland" - Why 'Constitutional Conservatives' Like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry Have No Respect for the Constitution

http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/152097/why_%27constitutional_conservatives%27_like_michele_bachmann_and_rick_perry_have_no_respect_for_the_constitution/

By Joshau Holland   08/19/11

It's ironic that those claiming fealty to the constitution habitually thumb their noses at its most sacred principle.

 

A great irony of our political discourse is that those who describe themselves as “constitutional conservatives” display not only habitual ignorance of what our founding documents proscribe, but also show blatant scorn for the most important principle they enshrine: the separation of powers.

For much of our history, people across the political spectrum laid competing claims to being the true champions of the United States constitution, but in recent years that ground has largely been ceded to the far-right. When the Tea Partiers stormed into Congress, one of their first acts was a bit of political theater arranged by Tea Party caucus leader Michele Bachmann, R-Minnesota: reading the Constitution (with the embarrassing bits edited out) aloud on the floor of the House.

In her book, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History, historian Jill Lepore writes that the problem with the Tea Partiers’ claimed fealty to the Constitution is that it's a form of religion rather than analysis. “Originalism,” Lepore writes, “looks like history, but it is not; it’s historical fundamentalism, which is to history what astrology is to astronomy, what alchemy is to chemistry, what creationism is to evolution.”

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"Michael Winship" - How Washington Could Create Jobs Right Now

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/20-4

Published on Saturday, August 20, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

by Michael Winship

I like to ask friends about the oddest summer job they ever had. One talks about how he used to don a rubber suit every morning at a Sylvania electronics plant in Syracuse, NY, and climb into a tank, where he dipped television tubes into some sort of mercury solution. He now moonlights as a thermometer.

Another spent a summer walking from floor to floor of a Manhattan skyscraper. His job was to take a long stick and un-jam the mail chute that ran alongside the elevator banks from the highest floor of the building to the bottom. When he reached the basement, he took the elevator back to the top and started all over again, a Sisyphean postman.

A third worked in a factory that canned orange juice concentrate. In the process of filtering for impurities, the pulp was removed from the juice. But lots of people insisted on the authentic taste and texture of pulp in their o.j., so my friend's job was to sit with an ice pick and an enormous frozen block of pulp. As cans of concentrate came by on a conveyor belt, he'd chip off a bit and throw it in.

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"Aaron Ross" - America's War on Mosquitoes

http://motherjones.com/photoessays/2011/08/racist-propaganda/malaria-japan-war

Patriotic, racist, and goofy anti-malaria propaganda from World War II—featuring a guest appearance by the young Dr. Seuss. —Aaron Ross

Of all the enemies American soldiers confronted during World War II, malaria proved to be among the most stubborn. The mosquito-borne disease was a constant scourge for GIs stationed in the Pacific and Mediterranean theaters. General MacArthur's retreat to the malarial Philippine peninsula of Bataan in early 1942 led directly to his sickly army's surrender to the Japanese a few months later. The illness continued to cripple American forces during the ensuing campaigns in Papua New Guinea and Guadalcanal, where it was so rampant that a division commander ordered that no Marine be excused from duty without a temperature of at least 103°F.

Troops in Southern Europe faced similar problems. During the Seventh Army's Sicilian campaign from July to September 1943, 21,482 soldiers were admitted to the hospital for malaria; 17,535 were admitted for battle casualties. All in all, malaria accounted for almost a half-million hospital admissions and more than 300 American deaths during the war.

After some fits and starts, the military responded to the malaria outbreak with a full-out assault. The Army's Medical Department dispatched malaria control units to war zones to clear and clean standing water and bombard malarial areas with recently developed insecticides like DDT and "bug bombs." With access to quinine cut off by the Japanese conquest of Java, the government sped up trials of the anti-malarial medicine atabrine. Despite side effects such as turning the skin yellow, millions of tablets of the drug were distributed to troops toward the end of the war.

The military also warned soldiers about the dangers of the disease with an aggressive propaganda campaign that tried a variety of approaches, including patriotic appeals, racist caricatures, scare tactics, and goofy cartoons (including one drawn by the young Dr. Seuss). The campaign worked: Infection rates fell dramatically, and a healthier fighting force went on to claim victory in Europe and Asia.

"Malcolm Harris" - The Get Lost Generation

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/21

Published on Sunday, August 21, 2011 by Shareable

by Malcolm Harris

Ask a headline writer at any paper of record and they’ll tell you that today’s young people are “The Lost Generation.” They tend to use this label as if Hemingway and Fitzgerald hadn’t stumbled their way through half the bars in Paris under the same flag. Unfortunately, the youths of today aren’t lost in a morass of sex, art, booze, and politics (not necessarily in that order), but rather can’t find a path through the haze of economic insecurity and impending ecological catastrophe. The current use of the term draws less from those charmed ex-pats than from “The Lost Decade”, the name given to Japan’s period of economic stagnation during the 90′s. But the two uses point towards different aspects of sociohistorical lostness: one is about a generation not knowing what to do with its capacity within society, the other about a society that doesn’t know what to do with its capacity for generation, a world that seems to have already made too much of everything. It is unclear in which way my generation is lost, whether it refers to the seemingly misdirected lives of 20-somethings or our potential that may go unrealized due to the employment crisis and over-production - unless we open new paths. Having read the essays that follow, I think it’s a bit of both.

Of course the absent jobs that could make us “productive” members of society go a long way toward answering the question of direction. Young people are semi-autonomous when it comes to our life choices, but we are subject as a population to economic and environmental conditions; one could say we are lost because we have been lost. Even so, we don’t seem to be going anywhere. The new phase of “emerging adulthood” described in the now infamous New York Times Magazine article on 20-somethings involves a return to the parents’ home, (as in Lauren Westerfield’s “Flexible Lives, Flexible Relationships.”) Nothing could be more found. There is also some irony in calling the most connected generation in the history of mankind “lost.” The phone in my pocket can not only tell me where I am, but where I might want to go next and how to get there. There are ways in which we could not get lost if we tried.

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"Beth Wellington" - The Myth of Mountaintop Removal Mining

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/21-2

Published on Sunday, August 21, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

 

Big Coal says it's a tough choice: we can have prosperity and jobs or a pristine environment, but not both. That's a Big Lie

by Beth Wellington

CNN correspondent Soledad O'Brien's recent piece on mountaintop removal (MTR) in the Appalachian mountains has the troubling title, "Steady job or healthy environment: what [sic] would you choose?"

How about we choose both?

In any case, MTR does not, despite industry claims, deliver employment to offset its environmental damage. It's simply a win-win for Big Coal and its political supporters, and a lose-lose for ordinary people who live in mining areas. Whatever the industry would have you believe, basing an economy on coal is not a sustainable development plan. A study by the Appalachian Regional Commission noted the effects of mining on employment in Central Appalachia:

"As employment in Central Appalachia's mining sector has declined over time...many counties that were already typically experiencing relatively poor and tenuous economic circumstances...have been unable to successfully adapt to changing economic conditions."

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