March 29, 2012

Robert Scheer: Five Hypocrites and One Bad Plan

from truthdig:



Five Hypocrites and One Bad Plan

Posted on Mar 29, 2012
By Robert Scheer


The Supreme Court is so full of it. The entire institution, as well as its sanctimonious judges themselves, reeks of a time-honored hypocrisy steeped in the arrogance that justice is served by unaccountable elitism.

My problem is not with the Republicans who dominate the court questioning the obviously flawed individual mandate for the purchasing of private-sector health insurance but rather with their zeal to limit federal power only when it threatens to help the most vulnerable. The laughter noted in the court transcription that greeted the prospect of millions of the uninsured suddenly being deprived of already extended protection under the now threatened law was unconscionable. The Republican justices seem determined to strike down not only the mandate but also the entire package of accompanying health care rights because of the likelihood that, without an individual mandate, tax revenue will be needed to extend insurance coverage to those who cannot afford it.

The conservative justices, in their eagerness to reject all of this much needed reform, offer the deeply cynical justification that a new Congress will easily come up with a better plan—despite decades of congressional failure to address what is arguably the nation’s most pressing issue. In their passion to embarrass this president, the self-proclaimed constitutional purists on the court went so far as to equate a mandate to obtain health care coverage with an unconstitutional deprivation of freedom; to make the connection they cited the spirit of a document that once condoned slavery.

These purists have no trouble finding in that same sacred text a license for the federal government to order the young to wage undeclared wars abroad, to gut due process and First Amendment protections, and embrace torture, rendition and assassination, even of U.S. citizens. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/five_hypocrites_and_one_bad_plan_20120329/

March 29, 2012

Naomi Klein, Arun Gupta, William Grieder, Frances Fox Piven, Doug Henwood on the Economic Crisis

March 29, 2012

Max Keiser: Wall St. Crooks Have Gunz That Don't Smoke

March 29, 2012

Abandominiums: Vacant Buildings and a Neighborhood’s Resentment

Abandominiums: Vacant Buildings and a Neighborhood’s Resentment
John Muller | Greater Greater Washington | Mar 22nd, 2012



[font size="1"]Probably time to remove that sign: Abandoned apartments in D.C.‘s Anacostia neighborhood. Credit: John Muller[/font]

This piece originally appeared on Greater Greater Washington.

In the heart of Anacostia, a neighborhood in southeast Washington, D.C., lies a large concentration of forgotten or unfinished housing enterprises. Instead of generating needed jobs and taxes, these “abandominiums” play home to squatters and a community’s frustration.

Sitting on the steps of an abandoned apartment complex in Historic Anacostia, underneath graffiti reading “Beneath the INFLuence =)”, William Alston-El says indignantly, “All these buildings ever do is sit. Everyone wants to talk about the commercial strip. What about the inner-part of Anacostia?”

Last year, the Washington Post called this cluster of three vacant buildings on High Street SE, “one of the oldest unfinished projects in the country.” It’s part of Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Home Investment Partnership Program, which was the subject of a scathing expose about millions of dollars going to projects that remain incomplete and vacant.

But vacant doesn’t necessarily mean deserted. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://americancity.org/buzz/entry/3477/

March 29, 2012

OK, I'll try.......

March 28, 2012

U.S. Heat Waves to Intensify From New York to Los Angeles

(Bloomberg) Heat waves are likely to intensify and last longer from California to the U.S. East Coast as global warming takes hold, according to the United Nations’s most comprehensive report on extreme weather events.

Average wind speeds of hurricanes are likely to increase, with projected sea level rises compounding the impact of surges associated with the storms, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in a 594-page report today that examines weather impacts from Alaska to Africa and Australia.

Coastal areas around the world, especially large cities and small islands, are particularly vulnerable to the impact of climate change and as much as $35 trillion, or 9 percent of projected global economic output in 2070, may be exposed to climate-related hazards in ports, the panel said. That may increase the need for migration, according to the authors.

“The decision about whether or not to move is achingly difficult and it’s one that the world community is going to have to face with increasing frequency in the future,” Chris Field, one of the report’s authors and a professor at Stanford University, said today on a conference call with reporters. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-28/u-s-heat-waves-set-to-intensify-from-new-york-to-los-angeles.html

March 28, 2012

Spring Training Anonymity

March 28, 2012

Plot by Plot: Tracie McMillan's look at Detroit's food systems

from the Detroit Metro Times:



By Tracie McMillan
Published: March 28, 2012


Most of Tracie McMillan's book is devoted to her undercover work in America's industrial food system. But this excerpt comes from her time in Detroit, where she spent several months meeting people involved with the city's urban agriculture, and chronicling its history. Though these city gardens may not be Detroit's savior, they offer an inspiring example, and alternative to the corruptible food system, providing health, produce and bringing communities together.

This passage opens with McMillan living in southwest Detroit.


In the balm of springtime evenings, I'd watch my neighbors work in the community garden, crouching low to yank out weeds or ambling up the sidewalk behind a creaking wheelbarrow in the long shadows of twilight. Our garden wasn't that big, maybe half a lot, but there were hundreds of them throughout the city in backyards, vacant lots and parks, most of them growing food not in the city soil but in raised beds atop it — a bid at doing an end-run around any industrial contamination that gets past a standard soil test. Since the early 2000s, Detroit's limited supermarkets and an overabundance of vacant land have inspired city residents to start growing their own food, in gardens ranging from tiny corner lots with collards and tomatoes to a four-acre expanse complete with a mushroom patch. They've churned out such an abundance of greens, herbs and tomatoes that the most prodigious among them have formed a cooperative, Grown in Detroit, to sell their excess at farmers' markets and restaurants around town. In all, Grown in Detroit grossed around $60,000 in produce sales in 2010. One neighborhood gardener, Greg Willerer, was so enthralled by urban farming's potential that he founded a farm in 2010, using his own yard before expanding to a couple vacant lots to grow an array of herbs and salad greens. He started selling to restaurants, got himself a stand at Eastern Market, and in 2011 he launched a community-supported agriculture project catering to city residents. In exchange for greens and vegetables all summer long, locals pay Willerer in a number of ways: in full in March, piecemeal through the season, or even by donating labor. Across town, on the city's east side, Carolyn Leadley and Jacob Vandyke founded Rising Pheasant Farms in 2009, selling produce wholesale through Grown in Detroit. In 2011, they expanded and paid for a retail stand at Eastern Market, where they sell sprouts next to Willerer on Saturdays.

In the Detroit of 2010, even people whose primary concerns were profit and jobs had begun to think pairing the city's vacant land with large-scale agriculture could make sense. In 2009, a local financier, John Hantz, announced plans to establish a 50-acre pilot project to establish large-scale commercial farming in the city, arguing that it would gobble up vacant, blighted land while generating profits. A local drug-treatment organization has begun drafting ambitious plans for Recovery Park, an agriculture, housing, and community development project designed to employ recovering addicts and other residents in living-wage jobs growing and processing food. And Majora Carter, a renowned urban advocate for green space, announced plans to recruit the city's urban farmers for a new produce label, American City Farms, conceiving of the effort primarily as one of economic development and job creation.

All of these larger players will be capitalizing on Detroit's long history of urban agriculture, which has been a part of the city's fabric for more than a century. In the 1890s, poor Detroiters were encouraged to grow food on 430 acres of vacant land by the mayor, Hazen S. Pingree. Precursors to the Victory Gardens of World War I, these early plots were dubbed Pingree Potato Patches, and by their third year, the value of food grown in the patches outstripped the cash aid distributed to the city's poor. Backyard gardening has always been strong in Detroit, a city where 79 percent of all homes are single-family, but local urban agriculture got a boost in the 1970s from a federal program that set aside money to encourage food production in urban settings. A brainchild of a liberal New York City congressman, Fred Richmond, the Urban Gardening Program gained the support of conservative Southern representatives in 1976, when Richmond made them a pitch they couldn't refuse: Help people in cities grow food and they'll start to appreciate how hard it is to grow it — and they'll be more open to the issues that matter to agricultural states. In 1977, the program launched in six cities, including Detroit.

The program revived a link between the nation's agricultural extension offices, the public venue for America's agricultural policies, and urban soil. During World War II, extension offices had helped to set up Victory Gardens in cities, but after their demise, extension's agricultural efforts became strictly rural affairs. A joint program between the country's land-grant universities and the USDA, extension offices can offer advice to anyone who wants to grow food. At the biggest universities, extension offices run massive research and resource programs; the extension at University of California-Davis, for example, helped develop the tomato harvester machine. Extension, as it's called colloquially, is where America's public agriculture gets made and shaped. Typically, it supports and expands on the conventional methods already in practice, further refining the industrial agriculture that has fueled America's food supply for generations. Techniques outside that purview do sometimes trickle up into extension's repertoire, but only when people push for them. That's how sustainable agriculture got a toehold in a handful of offices in the 1970s, a move that amounted to minor but official acceptance of the practice. Even so, extension offices have rarely led the pack on new ways of farming, focusing instead on refining existing ones and responding to farmers' current needs — which are, of course, defined by the way they already farm. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://metrotimes.com/news/plot-by-plot-1.1291135

March 28, 2012

Celebrating All We Share Three Times a Day: 5 ways that food is a commons

from OnTheCommons.org:



Celebrating All We Share Three Times a Day
5 ways that food is a commons

By Jay Walljasper


Topsoil is a Commons

We’re not talking Soviet-style collectivization of agriculture here—simply an understanding that we all depend on the soil, like air and water, for basic human survival. Together we have a stake in protecting farmland’s fertility for ourselves and future generations. This is a long established tradition in the U.S. going back to the creation of soil and water conservation measures in the 1930s, and before that to indigenous people’s agricultural practices.

Priceless topsoil floating down the Mississippi River, which creates the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, is a violation of the commons—and of common sense. So is the depletion of nutrients in the soil through intensive commodity and chemical farming. So is the recent surge of speculation in farmland—in the Midwest, in Africa and around the world—which treats bountiful soil as an investment to be bought and sold, not as a source of food to feed everyone.

Sustainable Farming Practices are a Commons

For centuries, indigenous people and peasants around the world have invented agricultural traditions that preserve land, water and communities. One example is acequias—cooperatively-run irrigation systems in the American Southwest that have sustained farming communities for more than 400 years.

The modern world needs to rediscover these commons-based solutions, not only modeling our own agriculture innovations on them, but also assisting peasant farmers and indigenous communities to stay on the land to continue these traditions. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://onthecommons.org/celebrating-all-we-share-three-times-day

March 28, 2012

The Rejection of Austerity Begins

from 24/7WallStreet:



The Rejection of Austerity Begins
Posted: March 28, 2012 at 6:23 am


With national elections in Greece only a few weeks away, the coalition that rules the nation finds itself in trouble. Politicians who supported austerity measures as a means to get a bailout of the country’s finances face challenges from candidates who say the government went too far. The reaction is only natural. Many voters have been stripped of benefits, had salaries cut or have lost some form or another of their social safety nets. The upcoming election could sweep new members into parliament, and these new members may try to repeal or modify austerity agreements.

Greece is not the only nation that faces angry voters. Similar circumstances could affect elections in Portugal, Spain and even Italy. A referendum will be held in Ireland to seek support for the nation’s treaty with the European Union, a treaty that is the basis of Ireland’s bailout.

The rounds of national elections could be a year off or more, but this may make it more difficult for current leaders to keep their positions. Austerity’s bite could be felt the most in a few more quarters as governments cut expenses, which may push some nations into recessions, increase unemployment and cut the social services to the elderly.

The Greek election probably will be a signal to voters in other austerity-burdened nations. If opponents of austerity in Greece gain power and challenge the southern European country’s pact with the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund, it likely will embolden voters in other nations to act similarly. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://247wallst.com/2012/03/28/the-rejection-of-austerity-begins/#ixzz1qPwdFTB8