The Rag Blog

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My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables)
By JACK HEDIN, Published: March 1, 2008
Rushford, Minn.

IF you’ve stood in line at a farmers’ market recently, you know that the local food movement is thriving, to the point that small farmers are having a tough time keeping up with the demand.

But consumers who would like to be able to buy local fruits and vegetables not just at farmers’ markets, but also in the produce aisle of their supermarket, will be dismayed to learn that the federal government works deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement from expanding. And the barriers that the United States Department of Agriculture has put in place will be extended when the farm bill that House and Senate negotiators are working on now goes into effect.

As a small organic vegetable producer in southern Minnesota, I know this because my efforts to expand production to meet regional demand have been severely hampered by the Agriculture Department’s commodity farm program. As I’ve looked into the politics behind those restrictions, I’ve come to understand that this is precisely the outcome that the program’s backers in California and Florida have in mind: they want to snuff out the local competition before it even gets started.

Last year, knowing that my own 100 acres wouldn’t be enough to meet demand, I rented 25 acres on two nearby corn farms. I plowed under the alfalfa hay that was established there, and planted watermelons, tomatoes and vegetables for natural-food stores and a community-supported agriculture program.

All went well until early July. That’s when the two landowners discovered that there was a problem with the local office of the Farm Service Administration, the Agriculture Department branch that runs the commodity farm program, and it was going to be expensive to fix.

The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.

I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables — if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.)

In my case, that meant I paid my landlords $8,771 — for one season alone! And this was in a year when the high price of grain meant that only one of the government’s three crop-support programs was in effect; the total bill might be much worse in the future.

Read all of it here.

From Steve Russell / The Rag Blog

Why Isn’t Iraq in the 2008 Election?
By Noam Chomsky

The following speech, transcribed by Democracy Now!, was delivered by Chomsky in Massachusetts at an event sponsored by Bikes Not Bombs.

03/03/08 “Democracy Now!” — – -Not very long ago, as you all recall, it was taken for granted that the Iraq war would be the central issue in the 2008 election, as it was in the midterm election two years ago. However, it’s virtually disappeared off the radar screen, which has solicited some puzzlement among the punditry.

Actually, the reason is not very obscure. It was cogently explained forty years ago, when the US invasion of South Vietnam was in its fourth year and the surge of that day was about to add another 100,000 troops to the 175,000 already there, while South Vietnam was being bombed to shreds at triple the level of the bombing of the north and the war was expanding to the rest of Indochina. However, the war was not going very well, so the former hawks were shifting towards doubts, among them the distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger, maybe the most distinguished historian of his generation, a Kennedy adviser, who — when he and Kennedy, other Kennedy liberals were beginning to — reluctantly beginning to shift from a dedication to victory to a more dovish position.

And Schlesinger explained the reasons. He explained that — I’ll quote him now — “Of course, we all pray that the hawks are right in thinking that the surge of that day will work. And if it does, we may all be saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government in winning a victory in a land that we have turned,” he said, “to wreck and ruin. But the surge probably won’t work, at an acceptable cost to us, so perhaps strategy should be rethought.”

Well, the reasoning and the underlying attitudes carry over with almost no change to the critical commentary on the US invasion of Iraq today. And it is a land of wreck and ruin. You’ve already heard a few words; I don’t have to review the facts. The highly regarded British polling agency, Oxford Research Bureau, has just updated its estimate of deaths. Their new estimate a couple of days ago is 1.3 million. That’s excluding two of the most violent provinces, Karbala and Anbar. On the side, it’s kind of intriguing to observe the ferocity of the debate over the actual number of deaths. There’s an assumption on the part of the hawks that if we only killed a couple hundred thousand people, it would be OK, so we shouldn’t accept the higher estimates. You can go along with that if you like.

Uncontroversially, there are over two million displaced within Iraq. Thanks to the generosity of Jordan and Syria, the millions of refugees who have fled the wreckage of Iraq aren’t totally wiped out. That includes most of the professional classes. But that welcome is fading, because Jordan and Syria receive no support from the perpetrators of the crimes in Washington and London, and therefore they cannot accept that huge burden for very long. It’s going to leave those two-and-a-half million refugees who fled in even more desperate straits.

The sectarian warfare that was created by the invasion never — nothing like that had ever existed before. That has devastated the country, as you know. Much of the country has been subjected to quite brutal ethnic cleansing and left in the hands of warlords and militias. That’s the primary thrust of the current counterinsurgency strategy that’s developed by the revered “Lord Petraeus,” I guess we should describe him, considering the way he’s treated. He won his fame by pacifying Mosul a couple of years ago. It’s now the scene of some of the most extreme violence in the country.

One of the most dedicated and informed journalists who has been immersed in the ongoing tragedy, Nir Rosen, has just written an epitaph entitled “The Death of Iraq” in the very mainstream and quite important journal Current History. He writes that “Iraq has been killed, never to rise again. The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols, who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century,” which has been the perception of many Iraqis, as well. “Only fools talk of ‘solutions’ now,” he went on. “There is no solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained.”

But Iraq is, in fact, the marginal issue, and the reasons are the traditional ones, the traditional reasoning and attitudes of the liberal doves who all pray now, as they did forty years ago, that the hawks will be right and that the US will win a victory in this land of wreck and ruin. And they’re either encouraged or silenced by the good news about Iraq.

And there is good news. The US occupying army in Iraq — euphemistically it’s called the Multi-National Force-Iraq, because they have, I think, three polls there somewhere — that the occupying army carries out extensive studies of popular attitudes. It’s an important part of counterinsurgency or any form of domination. You want to know what your subjects are thinking. And it released a report last December. It was a study of focus groups, and it was uncharacteristically upbeat. The report concluded — I’ll quote it — that the survey of focus groups “provides very strong evidence” that national reconciliation is possible and anticipated, contrary to what’s being claimed. The survey found that a sense of “optimistic possibility permeated all focus groups and far more commonalities than differences are found among these seemingly diverse groups of Iraqis” from all over the country and all walks of life. This discovery of “shared beliefs” among Iraqis throughout the country is “good news, according to a military analysis of the results,” Karen de Young reported in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago.

Well, the “shared beliefs” are identified in the report. I’ll quote de Young: “Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the US military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of [what they call] ‘occupying forces’ as the key to national reconciliation.” So those are the “shared beliefs.” According to the Iraqis then, there’s hope of national reconciliation if the invaders, who are responsible for the internal violence and the other atrocities, if they withdraw and leave Iraq to Iraqis. That’s pretty much the same as what’s been found in earlier polls, so it’s not all that surprising. Well, that’s the good news: “shared beliefs.”

Read the rest here.

Uribe’s Illegal Cross-Border Raid: Colombian Deaths in Ecuador
By Richard Gott

03/03/08 “The Guardian” — — The deaths of Raúl Reyes and Julián Conrado, two senior figures in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), are clearly a serious blow to the guerrilla organisation. It will now call a halt to the release of hostages held by the Farc in the jungle over many years, a process that had been proceeding slowly under the auspices of the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. Freedom in the short term for the former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, in which the French president Nicolas Sarkozy has taken a personal interest, now seems unlikely, and many people believe that she is dying. Hopes of the imminent release of three US defence contractors have also been dashed.

By all accounts, the midnight attack on the camp of the Farc leaders, a mile inside Ecuadorean territory in the jungle region south of the Putumayo river, was a political decision taken by the Colombian president, Alvaro Uribe, to end the peace process orchestrated by Chávez. Four Colombian politicians, held as hostages by the Farc for the past six years, were released last week and given a royal welcome in Caracas. Reyes had been among those who organised their freedom. Killed at the age of 59, Reyes had long been more of a diplomat than a guerrilla commander, though he was often photographed in military fatigues and carrying a gun.

According to the Ecuadorean president, Rafael Correa, the bodies of the Farc commanders and 13 guerrillas were recovered in their pyjamas after being bombed while sleeping in a tent on the Ecuadorean side of the frontier. The Colombian air force, Correa claimed, had used advanced technology “with the collaboration of foreign powers” to locate the camp and “to massacre” its occupants. Uribe’s government is a close ally of the United States and of Israel, whereas Correa belongs to the radical camp led by Chávez. Subsequent to the bombing, Colombian troops crossed the frontier into Ecuador to recover the bodies.

Ever since 9/11, the United States has requested the Colombian government to refer to the Farc as a “terrorist” organisation, a word also now used by the European Union. Yet the Colombian guerrillas are the most long-lasting of all such movements in Latin America, long pre-dating the current obsession with “terrorism”. Their leader, Manuel Marulanda, first led the Farc in the early 1960s and has survived into the 21st century, while Raúl Reyes had run the organisation’s political wing for many years. A well-known negotiator and promoter of the Farc’s cause in meetings in Europe and Latin America, Reyes was a crucial collaborator in the recent efforts by the Venezuelan president and the Colombian senator, Piedad Córdoba, to release some of the Colombian hostages.

Read all of it here.

UT/Austin law professor Barbara Hines and students from her immigration law clinic, outside the Hutto Immigrant Detention Center at Taylor, Texas.

Bomb Making at Oak Ridge: Inside the Secret City
By RON JACOBS

On February 26, 2008 a public hearing was held at the city that bills itself as “the Secret City”–Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This meeting was but one of eight held around the country at the nation’s nuclear weapons labs. The purpose of the hearings was to discuss what the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) calls “Complex Transformation.” Established by Congress in 2000, the NNSA is an agency within the U.S. Department of Energy that is responsible for maintaining and expanding the military application of nuclear energy. Behind its terminology are four proposals regarding the development of nuclear weapons. In a perfect example of governmental doublespeak, even the proposal labeled the “No Action Alternative” calls for the continued construction of nuclear bombs. The primary difference between this proposal and the other three proposals is simple. The so-called “No Action Alternative” lists the number of new bombs to be built annually as classified. The other proposals, with the names “Distributed Centers of Excellence,” “Consolidated centers of Excellence,” and “Capability Based Alternative” call for anywhere from fifty to one hundred fifty new bombs to be built each year. I haven’t done the math, but that is one hell of a lot of Hiroshimas.

The hearings themselves are being held under the auspices of the various plans and their environmental impact. Of course, the impact this is referring to is not the impact of the weapons should they be used, but the impact that their storage and manufacture would have on the environment and its inhabitants in the areas around the eight sites. Either way, the outcome is wracked with implicit danger and death. When one reads the draft Environmental Statement, they discover that it looks at two possible actions. The first would restructure facilities that use plutonium and highly enriched uranium to produce components for the nuclear weapons stockpile (SNM facilities). The second would restructure research and development (R&D) and testing facilities. The two actions differ in their magnitude and timing. The restructuring of SNM facilities would take 10 years or more and address issues such as where to locate these facilities and whether to construct new facilities or renovate existing ones for these functions. As regards the R&D facilities, NNSA wants to restructure these facilities in the near-term, independent of decisions it may make as to restructuring of SNM facilities. Furthermore, the proposals offer the following choices that would be incorporated into the two overall actions mentioned above. The first, called Distributed Centers of Excellence, which would continue the uranium mission at Y-12 with the new Uranium Processing Facility; the second. titled Consolidated Centers of Excellence, would consolidate uranium and plutonium missions at a single site; the third, labeled Capability Based Alternative, would involve reduced capability and limited new facilities. The fourth would leave things as they are.

All of the proposals would build a new plant in Oak Ridge for the development and construction of new nuclear weapons. The current plant, known as Y-12, employs around 4000 individuals. Consequently, the future of the plant is important to the locals, especially given the otherwise lackluster employment opportunities in the region. This unfortunate dynamic creates a situation where folks defend that very same thing they oppose in other nations like Iran-the development of nuclear weapons. One could go even further and draw a parallel between the nature of communities whose continued existence depends on nuclear weapons and those communities in other warmongering nations of the past whose citizens were employed in the development of weaponry and other instruments designed to destroy whole peoples.

One element of the proposals discussed February 26th is something the NNSA calls the “Life Extension Program.” Now, this program has nothing to do with extending the life of any human. It does however have plenty to do with extending the life of the NNSA bureaucracy and, even more ominously, the “lives” of existing nuclear weapons. According to a November 2004 press release from NNSA, the purpose of the program is to extend the warhead’s life by 30 years and to provide structural enhancements. In other words, to maintain and expand the weapon’s lethal capabilities. Other elements of the various proposals besides those mentioned include consolidating plutonium and other nuclear weapons materials stockpiles and the designing of new bombs. All of this is proposed in spite of the 1970 US signature on the non-proliferation treaty.

Read it here.

Apparently, one of the writers for The Onion has read Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse; otherwise, how do we explain that the video gets the result exactly right for a future 9 months from now? Thanks to Janet Gilles for finding this gem.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

While we’re at it, here’s the Onion’s definition of debate: A contest to see which candidate can answer the fewest questions.

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Bush’s Censored Library May Have Secret Foreign Donors
By Think Progress / February 29, 2008

Southern Methodist University in Dallas announced last week that the university will be home to President Bush’s $200 million presidential library. Bush’s library, however, will be shrouded in secrecy.

An executive order Bush signed in 2001 “gives presidents and their families more control over presidential papers” and “could result in material being censored” from the library. The order also gives Bush “the right to veto requests to open any presidential records.”

The secrecy efforts are already beginning. In a press conference yesterday, President Bush admitted that his library would likely take foreign donations but said he would consider keeping the donors’ names confidential:

BUSH: We’ll look at the disclosure requirements and make a decision. There’s some people who like to give and don’t particularly want their names disclosed. […]

Q Any restrictions on who can give? Will you take foreign money for this?

BUSH: Yeah, probably take some foreign money, but don’t know yet, Ken. We just haven’t — we just announced the deal and I, frankly, have been focused elsewhere.

So, who are the likely candidates? In Nov. 2006, the New York Daily News reported that Bush hoped to get roughly $250 million in “megadonations” from some key allies:

Bush loyalists have already identified wealthy heiresses, Arab nations and captains of industry as potential “mega” donors.

Based on history, there may already be some specifics. Bush 41’s presidential library received donations from a sheik from the UAE, who contributed at least $1 million, the “state of Kuwait, the Bandar bin Sultan family, the Sultanate of Oman, King Hassan II of Morocco and the amir of Qatar. The former Korean prime minister and China also gave tens of thousands of dollars to the library.”

When asked if the public has “right to know,” Bush replied, “We’re weighing, taking a look, taking consideration, giving it a serious consideration. Nice try, though.”

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Great – I just start buying CFBs to increase my energy efficiency and reduce my carbon footprint, and now we discover that CFBs are serious sources of mercury pollution.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Loaded with Mercury: Casual Threats
By RICHARD RHAMES

“The public awareness has been raised by the sequential wave of experiences … Including mercury exposure from additives, fish, contaminated air, bird deaths from eating mercury-contaminated seed grains, dental amalgam leakage, mercury allergy, etc … .” Dr. Maurice Hilleman, 1991

Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection led the nation in its recent study of mercury loosed by compact florescent light bulb (CFL) breakage. The DEP is very clear that the overall environmental impacts of reducing carbon emissions through more energy efficient lighting is positive and substantial. Still, since CFLs contain a potent neurotoxin, mercury, staffers in the Bureau of Remediation and Waste Management wanted to offer Maine citizens good advice just in case they dropped a bulb and had an unexpected “release” in their homes.

So they studied the matter. Their February 2008 report explains, “Forty five (45) experimental trials where … CFLs were broken in a small/ moderate sized room were conducted in May through September of 2007.” Various cleanup procedures were followed. Importantly, “[t]he mercury concentrations at the five foot height (adult breathing zone) and one foot height (infant/ toddler breathing zone) above the study room floor were continuously monitored.”

Though the amount of mercury in a CFL is small —-5 milligrams (“enough to fit on the tip of a ball-point pen”), much of that may be in vapor form. But when a bulb is broken there is a “burst” of neurotoxin often driving mercury levels in room air well above the Maine standard of 300 nanograms per cubic meter. Spikes of 25,000 nanograms, 50,000 to perhaps over 100,000 nanograms were measured. Spikes sometimes recurred after ventilation ceased and after vacuuming.

“Consumers,” the report advised, ” … may consider not utilizing florescent lamps in … bedrooms or over carpeted areas frequented by infants, small children or pregnant women … .”

The DEP is to be congratulated for their ground breaking (bulb breaking) work. It’s a real contribution to better understanding the casual threats to life in our times. Exposing the next generation or their pregnant moms to mercury just isn’t a good idea. The metal’s catastrophic impact on the brain and central nervous system is well understood.

Read the rest here.

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