The Corporate Grip on Food Tightens
They’ve Got the World by the Belly
By P. SAINATH
When you’re down to distributing fertilizer from a police station, you have a problem. It’s what they did in Hingoli, here in the Indian state of in Maharashtra. That was a week ago, but the police are still, in a sense, […]

Two good posts on food [hat tip to Jim Wallis and Audrey Mantey]
a food praxis cross-post from Jim Wallis’ blog
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Arrested for Feeding the Poor (by Alan Clapsaddle)
Unconscionable: adjective
1. not guided by conscience; unscrupulous.
2. not in accordance with what is just or reasonable: unconscionable behavior.
3. excessive; extortionate: an unconscionable profit.
I have had […]

[Posted at Huffingtonpost this morning… comments welcome there too]
When I joined the army and when I reenlisted five times, I did something that every member of Congress does. I took an oath to defend the Constitution as the core commitment of my service. Then the army sent me to eight different conflict areas […]

Today I’m getting a short haircut. It’s been near or at 100 every day for a week, and working in that heat (with a Code Orange ozone alert every day) has been beating me down some. I’ll be 57 in November; and on the hot days I feel like I’m financially bunkered down […]

By Chris Hedges
Troops, when they battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in “atrocity producing situations”. Being surrounded by a hostile population makes simple acts, such as going to a store to buy a can of soda, dangerous. The fear and stress push troops to view everyone around them as […]

I will venture a guess that, contrary to what many believe, Hillary Clinton’s biological status as a woman was as much an asset as a liability in the Democratic primaries. One can only speculate, but there was an understandable and fervent belief on the part of many highly mobilized (white) women voters that her […]

Stan Cox is on a roll over at CommonDreams.org; in a percipient and timely essay he reminds us that simply cultivating our back (or front, in defiance of the HOA) yard is not enough to fix the corporate version of agriculture. Our dependence on staple “commodity” crops like grain and oil-seeds (hard to […]

MONKEYWRENCHING IS NONVIOLENT
Monkeywrenching is nonviolent resistance to the destruction of natural di­versity and wilderness. It is never directed against human beings or other forms of life. It is aimed at inanimate machines and tools that are destroying life. Care is always taken to minimize any possible threat to people, including the monkeywrenchers themselves.
MONKEYWRENCHING IS NOT […]

“It’s technically possible that the traditional older suburbs could actually produce all of the food needed to sustain the people living there. The amount of open space - both public and private space in backyards - means that you’ve got a population density not that much greater than some of the densest traditional agricultural […]

Calvin Tucker, writing for The Guardian, decided to do a bit of background checking on an outfit called “Transparency International,” one of a plethora of innocent-sounding non-governmental organizations that love to talk about “civil society” and “the international community.”
Check it out:
The credibility of Transparency International, a global “non-partisan” organisation which “promotes transparency in elections, in […]