Holy war

It took the U.S. secretary of defense, for God’s sake, to get a Florida preacher to cancel his plans for pyrotechnic sacrilege on Sept. 11. A few days later, CNN asked some of its blog contributors to reflect on the incident . . . “now that the crisis is over.”

We’re neck deep in two wars (excuse me, one and a half) and an imploding economy, not to mention global warming, endemic violence and hurricane season, but Terry Jones’ creepy publicity stunt has the status of a national crisis: America’s close call! We came this close to offending Muslims!

Oh, we are a sensitive nation.

And Jones was, indeed, dabbling at the margins of holy war, which media coverage managed to turn into a global phenomenon. “. . . he ignited an international conflagration of outrage,” as CNN put it, though he didn’t do it by himself.

Elections are a waste of time -- If...

A pithy idea -- now going around in some progressive circles -- is that elections are a waste of time.

The idea can be catchy. It all depends on some tacit assumptions.

For instance: elections are a waste of time if you figure the U.S. government is so far gone that it can’t get much worse.

Elections are a waste of time if you’ve given up on grassroots organizing to sway voters before they cast ballots.

Elections are a waste of time if you think there’s not much difference on the Supreme Court between Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia, or Sonia Sotomayor and Samuel Alito.

Elections are a waste of time if you’re so disgusted with Speaker Pelosi that you wouldn’t lift a finger to prevent Speaker Boehner.

Elections are a waste of time if you don’t see much value in reducing -- even slightly -- the extent of injustice and deprivation imposed on vulnerable people.

Or, if you see the organizing of protests, community groups, unions and the like as “either/or” in relation to working for the election of better candidates.

Washington Rules -- America's Path to Permanent War

Andrew Bacevich has written another authoritative and well written book examining the U.S. military and its influence on the United States. His writing -- here as with his earlier works [1] -- is provocative, challenging, well researched, informative, and logically argued. Only someone thoroughly imbued with the rhetoric of U.S. benign stewardship of global affairs and ignorant of many key events within recent and current U.S. foreign affairs might be able to ignore Bacevich's presentations and contentions about U.S. foreign policy and U.S. militarism.

Taloqan

Not crying over spilt soymilk

CORNUCOPIA, WI – It's not often that family-scale farmers can go toe-to-toe with a $12 billion agribusiness and come out victors. But organic soybean producers, and a modestly scaled but powerful ally, The Cornucopia Institute, are claiming victory over Dean Foods in the organic marketplace.

Dean Foods, the manufacturer of Silk, the top-selling soymilk drink, was first "outed" in Cornucopia's May 2009 report, Behind the Bean: The Heroes and Charlatans of the Natural and Organic Soy Foods Industry, for switching its soybean sourcing from American farms to cheaper organic beans from China. Later in 2009, Cornucopia revealed that Dean Foods had then largely abandoned organic soybeans altogether, stealthily changing the soybeans in their core Silk product line from organic to less expensive conventionally grown soybeans that the company was calling "natural."

The shift away from organic outraged many loyal consumers and alienated retailers across the country that were not informed of the change and continued to inaccurately merchandise Silk products as "organic."

Ohioans Fight to Reform Factory Farms

York Township is about 35 miles northwest of Columbus. In yards in front of modest two-story houses, signs proclaim in red and white: ‘No More Chicken Factories.’ For almost 2 years, residents have opposed a plan by Hi-Q Egg Products to set up a factory farm here.

The Iowa-based company’s plan would bring at least 6 million more chickens to a community that has 3 million of them already in a 3-mile area. Though Ohio brokered a deal with the Humane Society of the United States in June which could nix the proposal, factory farming continues to be an issue, with or without the Hi-Q 'farm'.

Residents have plenty to deal with just from the existing factory farms. They say there is so much chicken manure it damages local waterways after it runs off saturated fields. They also say the manure generates airborne pathogens and toxic gases such as hydrogen sulfide and ammonia.

"On any day you can come outside and just have this horrible reek in the air that burns and makes you squeeze your eyes shut and tears roll down your face," says local resident and activist Cheryl Johncox.

Triumph of the Money Party!!! Warren's role downgraded, reports to Geithner

The White House snatched back one of the few bones it's thrown to the people outraged at the looting of the United States Treasury by failed financial concerns - the big banks and Wall Street. The promised appointment Elizabeth Warren as head of the new agency to protect consumers from the financial services industry has been seriously downgraded. Instead of running the Consumer Finance Protection Agency, Warren's role has been diminished to that of special assistant to the president and adviser to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

"President Obama, sidestepping a possibly heated confirmation battle, will appoint Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren as a special advisor to the Treasury Department to launch the government's powerful new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to two Democratic officials familiar with the decision." LA Times, Sept 15

An interim appointment would have given the no-nonsense Warren the full authority to structure consumer bureau in the interests of the people. A special adviser role is defined in a New York Times article as follows:

Afghans in their own words

More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City book review

It has been decades since it was fashionable to talk about the poor in the United States, especially if they are black. The last political candidate who was a champion of the disadvantaged was the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He truly identified with them, and during his run for the presidency in 1968, he was often heard exhorting America about their plight and reminding us that “We can do better.” Former Senator John Edwards also spoke passionately about poverty during his run for the presidency in 2004; he even announced his presidential candidacy in 2008 from the yard of a home in New Orleans, already a desperately downtrodden area further devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Now that he has been discredited as a political candidate, who will speak for America’s poor?

Lincoln on Race and Slavery book review

Like the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln presents scholars, especially African American scholars, with quite a conundrum. On the one hand, here is the man who is given credit for freeing the slaves, the Great Emancipator. On the other, Lincoln was a man who publicly and privately professed a belief that blacks, whether slave or free were inferior to whites–clearly Lincoln must have thought of Frederick Douglass as an exception–and that colonization was a fine idea after all. Which Lincoln should we, especially those of us who are black, believe and admire?

Henry Louis Gates says that in order to answer that question, we might do well to consult a well-used notebook that Lincoln kept on his person dealing with the great issue of the day: slavery. In it were facts and figures he could call upon during a debate, while writing a letter or while wrestling with himself over the so-called Negro question.

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