Author: Natasha Chart

Oh, Facebook:

… I was also sucked into Facebook last week by my cousins and siblings. I initially felt too old but then a bunch of people in my class in grade school and high school contacted me immediately so I already feel like I belong a little. We were making fun of Facebook at work recently. One jibe was that it’s a classic force multiplier: it allows you to form cliques and shun people at great efficiency! Before you could only shun people in sight, while out socially — but now you can shun people anywhere, anytime!

When did you sign up on Facebook, and how long did it take for people you hadn’t been in touch with in ages to start contacting you? If you haven’t signed up, why not? There’s like, a Booman Tribune group now and everything. ;D

So, if you didn’t know, I sold my car before moving to DC. The last time I drove was to the U-Haul place to drop off the truck. Parking is a nightmare here and it’s expensive, too. I figured, hey, my new place is three blocks from a Metro station and most of the places I need to go are right on the Metro, it’ll be great. That’s mostly the case. Mostly.

Here’s where it falls down: groceries. The full implications of that part sort of slipped my mind, it’s been years and years since I needed groceries and had no car. And I was way less picky about what I ate then; lots of fast food, lots of Top Ramen. It must be granted that there is a sizable grocery store only two blocks from here, and it was a selling point, so it isn’t like I didn’t take this into consideration at all. But it isn’t a co-op, or a Whole Foods, and their selection of organic foods on top of all my allergies leaves me with slim pickings. For fruit, sometimes there are non-skeezy grapes or maybe strawberries, never very good.

Not that I’m complaining, no, really, just musing. Sometimes I do that here. It’s either that, or they’d have to search me for pens before letting me use the bathroom at the local sushi bar. And I don’t approve of vandalism at all, at all.

It’s just that I really don’t want to have all my cells tainted with pesticides and the toxic waste that gets added to regular fertilizer as an ‘inactive’ ingredient. Still, it’s been very, very hard to walk past the cherries (okay, one bag, but I went shopping while hungry, and you know what a bad idea that is), apples, plums, melons, berries and other delightful summer produce towards the disreputable looking basket where the organic grapes are kept.

It isn’t like there’s no Whole Foods, it’s just that whether I wanted to go to the one nearish to me or the one down the Red line, it’s about half an hour by public transportation at least. It’s actually a little longer on Metro, but less crowded and uncomfortable with groceries in tow. And it’s been like, lords, a half million degrees during the day and as humid as it can get without actually raining. Add carrying much of anything and you might as well just be swimming.

Oh right, and then there’s the time thing. Metro closes at midnight on weekdays and the grocery stores all close by 11pm. If I go for a few days leaving in a hurry in the morning and not getting home until late, I pretty quickly run out of as much food as I would have been able to carry home last time I made a grocery run.

I could, indeed, go to a farmer’s market. It isn’t like there are any of those. But early on the weekends just hasn’t seemed to be working out well for me as a time slot for going out to be steam roasted during what would also be a round trip ranging at minimum from half an hour to an hour. Which feels like an eternity. I’m sure I’ll get into the swing of things, though I’m going out of town again this weekend, so no farm fresh produce for me next week.

I’m living in an organic food desert. Which isn’t nearly as bad as living in one of the regular kind, but I know way, way too much about where food comes from to eat most of it without a fight. If you see me eating a fast food meal or anything with processed cheese food in it, that should be a big, red flag to you that I’m literally about to pass out from hunger.

Now if I had a kid or two to take care of on my own, particularly if they were very young, getting healthy, fresh and organic food for my household without a car would add orders of magnitude worth of difficulty. They’d either have to come with me, cutting down how much I could carry even though I’d need to buy more, or I’d have to arrange somewhere to leave them for an hour or two. And babysitting, not generally free unless you have a lot of relatives nearby or have deep roots in the community, though not even always then.

At this point, if someone (like, oh, say, some weasely food company executive or Republican politician) told me that I should just change my grocery shopping habits a little so that I could eat more healthfully, I’d tell them to sod right off. So I can only imagine what I would think if I were in a more difficult situation and someone told me that. Told me, ‘It’s your own fault you don’t make wiser choices when you feed your family, don’t blame us for the fast food-induced health problems you’re dealing with.’ I’d be incandescent.

(Some of you who know me are aware that at times, I can very nearly approach literal incandescence under the proper circumstances.)

Grocery shopping used to practically be an afterthought to me. It wouldn’t have been a big deal to come home after work or school and go back out shopping, because 1) the weather is *so* much milder on the West Coast, 2) the longest part of the trip was always the actual shopping, 3) at least some healthy food was rarely more than ten minutes away from the places I lived, 4) when my day/week was very packed, there was usually a 24-hour grocery store to go to if I was out of everything.

Let me add that I know most people don’t keep my sort of schedule. But it isn’t actually that odd to work late into the evening at an office job if you’re a professional, study late at school if you’re a student, or have inconveniently scheduled shift work. Then add having no car. Walking is great, after all, but it is in fact slow. And again, there’s the carrying. It’s not the same to go A bicycle would help, but not if you had small kids, and they’re also not known for their large carrying capacities.

So you eat more at restaurants, that’s often the way it shakes out. But when was the last time you were at even a good restaurant that had local or organic food on the menu? When was the last time you ate something at a mainstream restaurant where the sauce wasn’t the best flavor in the entire dish, without which the rest of it would have been bland and unappetizing? Too often, you get leathery meat, mealy fruit, flavorless vegetables, and a big helping of bleached starch that may once have been a plant.

Somehow, I’m actually supposed to be the elitist. Because I think food should be, um, appetizing. And healthy. And uncontaminated. And fresh. And the kicker, easy to get.

Because it’s food. We eat that stuff. I have to eat that stuff. I don’t just have to look at it, wear it, have it keep the weather off me, ride in it, or walk on it. I have to put it in my mouth, chew it up, and swallow it, so that it can get turned into me and fuel for me. I can’t decide to just skip it for a few days and pick some up next week when it’s more convenient.

I don’t have a farm, or access to one. I can’t garden where I’m at, and when would I have time, anyway? I live in a society that produces vast quantities of food, and demands that the majority of the public live in a constant state of perpetual motion, with the former enabling the latter. Nothing but systemic change can reverse what we see happening now, with people getting more sick, more often, with malnourished overweight people, with children condemned to a lifetime of ill health because their parents didn’t have regular access to fresh produce, high quality grains, and lean protein foods.

How big a change?

Let’s take cars. Our cars are among the factors killing our planet’s ability to feed us, and we’re going to need to make life easy and productive without them for far larger numbers of people. My situation right now, the inconvenience of it, the time sink, the energy drain, is why so many people fear to be without a car. They fear having to deal with the problems of people who can’t buy their way out of their problems. The public can’t be expected to give up their cars in nearly large enough numbers if it means having a harder time accessing food. Many US cities either no longer have, or never did have, the accessible, mixed use neighborhoods that people in European cities or much of New York can take for granted.

Not having a car in a place that’s designed for cars significantly decreases quality of life. Though even being without a car somewhere that was designed for walking, but where the food distribution infrastructure is uneven, can decrease quality of life. So the public transportation question needs to be far broader than whether or not people can get themselves to and from work.

Then there’s food itself. At the YearlyKos food issues panel last week, Dr. Marion Nestle told us that our food system makes 3900 calories technically available to each of us, every day. In talking with me afterwards, she said that regulating calorie intake was the most crucial factor in healthier eating. Yet loads of processed foods, junk food labeled as health food, and food being sold in almost every public place makes it easy to overeat.

Then most of that food sits somewhere on a scale of nutritionally inadequate to terrible. It will keep you alive. It won’t necessarily keep you out of the doctor’s office or hospital. Which you want to avoid, because the food there is really terrible.

It’s really great that we’re able to produce so much, in its way. But we won’t be able to keep this up. Because no matter what happens, oil and natural gas are going to stop being cheap. That means our food is going to stop being cheap. It’s also going to stop being plentiful. Because we have a long, complicated food chain that depends on a lot of centralized shipping and processing.

Our food chain’s exorbitant use of energy is another thing that’s ultimately decreasing our ability to feed ourselves. And when I say energy, I mean a lot of different things. Our food system is wasting a lot of fossil fuel energy; in terms of both oil and natural gas, when used directly as fuel or in the manufacture of agricultural chemicals. It’s wasting a lot of nutritive energy; in terms of overapplication of fertilizers that wash away from the land to become poisonous to the fresh and salt water ecosystems that give us our fish. It favors large factory farms that produce a lot of just one thing, but that produce significantly less living material from their annual budget of solar energy as compared to a more diverse community of plants and animals. In this system, animal manure becomes ‘waste’; both lost carbon and lost soil fertility.

There is no way to make our current food distribution infrastructure sustainable, both because of the energy and nutrient problems it inherently creates. A thousand straight acres of corn is never going to be good for the environment, even if it can be made less polluting and less harmful to the soil. A confinement animal feeding operation could sequester all its waste and minimize all its emissions, and that doesn’t change the fact that it required wasteful excesses of grain, wasteful uses of antibiotics, and throws away many tons of material that should be added back to the soil so that more food can be grown from it.

There is, moreover, no way to guarantee a secure food supply to the people of this country under our current system. If the price of fuel goes up sharply, people could go hungry. If something happened to a major port clear across the country, people could go hungry. If we were to become a net importer of food from other countries, as we’re on track to being, a war in a far off place could mean people going hungry here.

It’s come to light recently that there are times when buying food from farther away can be less wasteful of carbon and I’m always going to want my coffee, but we have to be more sensible. All our food, all year round, can’t continue to come from hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away.

In case the economists haven’t noticed yet, about this globalization thing, it’s very unstable. Countries go to war. They get attacked by terrorists. Markets crash. Natural disasters hit. We in the industrialized world are also doing our part to significantly increase the rate at which natural disasters caused by extreme weather, from drought to more intense hurricanes, will threaten transportation and crop yields. Hello, climate change.

That’s the world we’re living in, it doesn’t run like a clockwork. And when it goes wrong, people in communities where food isn’t being grown locally, or where there’s no way to distribute it easily if it is, will suffer. More, anyway. Because people are already suffering food deserts. They’re already suffering the ill health caused by misdirected resources and a system that produces too much of what no one needs, but blames these failures on the people who are least able to alter their circumstances, instead of those who set up the rules.

So I say, change the rules. Because the truth is that the real elitists are the ones who want the majority of people to be satisfied with low quality food today, in exchange for a future in which there won’t even be enough of that left to feed everyone. The current system can’t be sustained, can’t be made to last and continue producing in such abundance.

Yet the options that would give us more readily available, high quality food now, are the same options that best allow us to continue growing readily available, high quality food far into the future. Those options are increasing small scale farming, increasing intensive organic farming, increasing mixed crop farming and rebuilding local processing and distribution infrastructure. That could feed us all in style for a very long time to come.

What’s with all the frivolity? Criminy 😉 But do you remember those childhood grossout jokes where you were presented with a choice between an option that was truly disgusting, and another that was merely deadly, and asked which one you’d rather do? Well, here’s that joke for adults:

Would you rather see a pre-emptive strike on Iran,

… or the not too distant disappearance of the incredible, shrinking arctic ice cap.

As a friend of mine used to say, more or less, “And lo, the seventh seal was opened, and there was a great sucking sound.”

Is there anything more dignified to be said about our horrible Farm and Energy Bills? Granted, I gave it a shot, but that was really a statement about the seriousness required of our activism. The policies, well, suck. In spite of minor redeeming features. Then there’s the FISA bypass. Saying that it sucks to have a Democratic Congress cowardly chumps support our president’s warrantless wiretapping straddles the line between being civilized and being credible. If you speak of it in very civilized terms you clearly missed the “warrantless wiretapping” part of the previous sentence, and to be deemed a merely adequate possessor of reading comprehension, some outrage is called for. But not too much, that would be unserious.

And you know how important it is to me to take myself seriously. Also, you. You had better take me very, very seriously. Which is why, when I discuss something important and lofty like the laws that govern our country, I use a more respectable word like suck. See, if I were all rabble-like, I might use a word like blow.

As in, “These policies blow goats.” Just as an example, you see. I’m not a Republican, I might get impeached for talking too much about blow. As in, “How many Republicans have to get caught with hookers and blow and cash they shouldn’t have before Democrats stop trying to imitate their selfish, shortsighted, cokehead agenda, anyway?” Not that I would say anything like that, I’m just illustrating.
Now, as you may know, I’m currently living in Washington D.C. Not the suburbs, oh no, right in the city. Good grief. Now I’ve been told that this place can give you Beltway-itis, surgically remove your good sense and leave one talking in a secret code that sounds mysteriously like English but is in fact just garden variety stupidity clothed in one-buttocked omphaloskepsis. As you can see, I still retain the ability to engage in full-buttocked pondering, so I’d like to address you before the Beltway takes me. One never knows when it might be the last time I speak to you as a normal, if very geeky, human being …

So: There are precious few leaders in the world who give a damn about anything but their own gain. Few of those make it into office or any position of power.

I sense that you’re about to tell me you already know this. May have known it for some time. To which I say, so what, and more to the point, how are you acting on that knowledge?

I know that many otherwise sensible people are looking at the Democratic candidate field and trying to determine which one of the frontrunners will screw the country up the least. Except that unless you’re one of about 100,000 Iowans, no one has to care what you think about that. Yeah, yeah, whatever, they moved the primary schedule up in other states. I doubt it will make a hill of beans worth of difference. I remember 2004, when Democratic primary voters boldly decided to pick the guy they thought everybody else would like, as based on media reports that projected the gripes of individual reporters onto the public they were supposed to be talking about.

I’ve made my peace with Clinton, Edwards and Obama. Whichever of them ends up at the top of the ticket. Whichever of the others successfully runs for vice president. They aren’t Republicans, amen. Do they support policies that suck? And the seventh seal was opened …

But you, on the other hand, could support policies that didn’t suck. You could pick one or a couple things you cared about and you could call your representative regularly to tell them what you thought of recent developments related to it. You could encourage your neighbors to do the same. You could join an advocacy group and agree to make calls to your legislators in tandem with others when they tell you there are important votes coming up. And sometimes, you might keep an eye on state laws related to these topics, because they’re bound to come up.

In short, you could lead your ‘leaders.’ They need the good example. Too many of them sit around waiting for their staff to tell them what their constituents, donors and lobbying contacts think it’s a good idea for them to do. If you as a constituent sit around waiting for them to tell you what to do, then it’s all donors and lobbyists, who tell your representative, who tells you. See the problem?

Now that we’ve elected more Democrats, we also need better Democrats. They’re not going to magically appear and do the right thing, without prompting, having been wafted into office on sunshine and good wishes. You can see already that too few of them see the logic of impeaching the attorney general for lying repeatedly to Congress and thoroughly corrupting the apparatus of federal law enforcement.

I don’t know why they can’t see good sense, but it doesn’t matter. Intentions come to naught and all we’re left with is what we do, and what they’ve done. Which is practically nothing, and that would be even more of a tragedy if the alternatve weren’t Republicans perpetually doing even more terrible things.

Still, there just aren’t that many people organized to pressure the government to do the things that would make society just and sustainable. And that’s definitely a failure of leadership. On our parts.

Sen. Wellstone won’t rise from the dead, as per a conversation I had with some non-profit staffers just last night. Sen. Boxer can’t save us all. Rep. Rangel does his best, but as they say, he’s just this guy, you know? Rep. Inslee can’t be all things to all people, and he isn’t even in leadership. It’s really too much to expect that the small handful who get the gravity of the situation can do everything by themselves, without an army at their backs, pushing them forward and sweeping their colleagues into form.

As armies go, progressives are pretty undisciplined. Not that I’m anyone to point a finger. Not that a lot of people I admire in progressive politics aren’t doing great work and turning out the motivated voters. But we don’t take orders, which is fine and in many ways admirable. Though we too often fail then to collaborate, to replace orders and discipline with engaged contact and unprompted concern for each others’ interests.

I’m not the first person to make this argument, but the more I learn about the disaster facing our planetary habitat, the more it makes me despair. Howard Dean related again the other day his father’s reminder that he had the advantage of being able to look back as well as forward, and to see that it was always going to be a long struggle. Or something like that. It’s just that we don’t have time for that anymore. Because if we keep doing what we’re doing, the arctic ice cap will be gone in 15 years, and that, you had better believe, is deathly, finally, terminally serious.

But no, the serious thing today is to play footsie over whether or not Gonzales, the liar, should be allowed to continue abusing the power of the federal government. Whether Bush’s veto threat and Rep. Dingell’s intransigence should prevent Democrats from making a statement about fuel efficiency. Whether we want to bet the whole farm or just half of it on the ecological disaster of corn ethanol. And our leaders won’t take a stand, won’t prove on matters great and small that they can stand up to the biggest challenges we face: the challenges of making sure that we can continue to thrive on what Al Gore aptly called the only home we will ever know.

Meanwhile, the Democrats at large have been keeping their powder dry, and President Bush has kept us safe from Lily Allen. If that seems at all outrageous to you, maybe it’s time to do something about it. Maybe it’s time for you to lead your government.

Dave Johnson over at Seeing The Forest (blogging for five years now, if you can believe it,) keeps this question at the top of his site: “Who is our economy FOR, anyway?”

I think it’s well understood by everyone, at least at some level, that when job cuts, decreased quality health care, longer working hours, pollution, gutting worker safety laws, destroying unions and keeping down wages are good for ‘the economy’, it doesn’t refer to our personal economies. Those personal economies require work, health, time with loved ones, rest, water and decent food.

The economy is talked about as if it has a right of personhood, and a person whose advancement according to certain measures is an inherent good. Yet what it really means as generally used in media discourse is the right of a very specific set of people to continue making a lot of money at the expense of everything and everyone else. Then when individuals talk about the economy, what they generally want to know is ‘am I going to have a job/healthcare/food for my family next year,’ and this gets mixed up with the resource hoarding of a very few people.

Since “the economy” is used interchangeably for both these micro and macro issues, pronouncements by environmentalists often run into trouble. For example, it’s reasonable to say that a lot of large scale economic activities have to fundamentally change in order for society to sustain itself. We must stop, for example, emitting so much carbon dioxide, and after we cut emissions drastically, we’re going to have to keep on cutting. That has a lot of serious, possibly terminal, consequences for certain large scale economic activities, which sounds like a world of doom and gloom. Though it doesn’t mean that no one will have a job, or that people won’t get to travel or have enough food; certainly, it doesn’t have to mean those things. Yet as the interests of the few who benefit from our current system have conflated their financial impunity with you getting your paycheck next month, people can be made afraid of the necessary next steps to take in our global crisis.

What people need to realize is this: Destroying the environment destroys economic productivity.

It’s that simple. Most of this, many of you probably know already. Yet discussions keep coming up about the need to balance the economy with the environment, as though there were some non-fictional separation possible between the two. I’m thinking there’s a missing connection somewhere. Read on to see what it took to finally make the Brazilian government wake up to the economic urgency of climate change:

… A number of recent events have led political leaders and ordinary Brazilians to conclude that they are not immune to climate change. First and foremost was a disastrous 2005 drought in the Amazon that killed crops, kindled forest fires, dried up transportation routes, caused disease and wreaked economic havoc.

Brazil sees itself as an emerging agricultural and industrial power, and global warming could have a disastrous impact on those aspirations. Scientists note that Brazil’s southern breadbasket flourishes largely because of rainfall patterns in the Amazon that are likely to be altered if droughts recur or climate change accelerates.

… Brazil also envisions constructing a large network of dams throughout the Amazon over the next several decades to supply electricity to its industrial heartland in São Paulo, 2,000 miles south of here. But those plans depend on water flows in the region’s vast rivers not drying up. …

Less water leads directly to having less power, less food, and poorer ecosystems.

Less predictable weather leads directly to having less food and fiber.

Poorer ecosystems, or less diverse communities of other living things, leads directly to disease and starvation, which means fewer, sicker human beings.

The truth is that our current economic system is destroying the basis of its own productivity, and everyone’s future livelihoods. It’s killing off the climate that supports our food production, the animal species we eat, the living communities that provide the air we breathe and our bulwark against disease. Consider that you can’t speak of having an economy on the moon. Nothing lives there. Yet the natural consequences of unrestrained machine industrialism are to make the earth progressively more and more like the moon. All clean, all bare, all dead. It would be very orderly, tidy, and efficient, but dead things don’t have economies, so who cares?

This is the bill of goods you’ve been sold: That things, mere objects, have inherent value. Things like money, and stock, and rocks and the things we make out of them. That things like ‘economies,’ abstract word games that we just invented in order to think more clearly about our activities, have value of themselves. They do not.

Value isn’t a property of things, it’s a creation of humanity or other resource-consuming critters, and at base, it’s only living things that have value or can assign it.

What is the value of the DNA sequence that converts sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into sugar? Effectively infinite, because without that DNA sequence, we wouldn’t exist. Free oxygen wouldn’t be present in our atmosphere, a gas that another set of DNA sequences can turn into eighteen times the cellular energy it’s possible to produce from phosphorus compounds without oxygen present. Without that 18-fold jump in efficiency, it wouldn’t be possible for multicellular lifeforms to have developed.

But back up, don’t miss this part: The atmosphere we have isn’t just affected by living things, it was originally created and is currently maintained by them. Remember that next time someone tells you that it’s arrogant to think humans can affect the climate.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. But also, what does this prospective decrease in resources really mean for all of us? How do we picture it? Let’s try a story.  

Matt Stoller was very on point the other day when he described what we’re being pushed towards as a state of nuclear feudalism. A state of technical modernism, but widespread poverty and functional slavery; because there would no longer, by any reasonable estimation, be enough to go around for everyone to have a decent life. This month’s Discover had an article in it about the collapse of healthcare in Iraq, but also an interview with scifi author William Gibson, the originator (as many of you may know, but just in case) of dystopian cyberpunk. He said, entirely apropos of this conversation:

… In Neuromancer – although it’s never dated in the book, I always assumed it was happening around 2035 – you glimpse the United States, and it’s not that great a place. There doesn’t seem to be any middle class. There’s nothing between these post-human superrich people and the Street, with a capital S. Nobody’s ever more than one door away from the Street. It’s quite grim and maybe it’s become a kind of cliche, but on the other hand, it’s exactly like Mexico City. It’s really similar to a lot of the Third World. And so I think that the cyberpunk future, if you want to generalize it, is a future in which globalization really does work both ways, and everybody – unless they’re very, very, very rich – winds up getting to be part of the Third World. …

And there, in much fewer words than I’d take to say so, is what will likely happen if we stay on the economically ‘productive’ path we’re on right now. Not quite the moon, but headed that way.

Dirtier air, less clean water, less that’s refreshingly green and productive of oxygen, less to eat, less varieties of things to eat. That’s what we’d face. A wholesale loss of the conditions that support life in all its richness, a marked decrease in the value of everything, because there won’t be as many living things to value it.

So. That’s my take. But then, I thought that the story of how cyanobacteria made life possible by creating the atmosphere was very exciting. I’m kind of funny that way.

Patent Office smacks Monsanto down:

The Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected four key Monsanto patents related to genetically modified crops that PUBPAT challenged last year because the agricultural giant is using them to harass, intimidate, sue – and in some cases literally bankrupt – American farmers. In its Office Actions rejecting each of the patents, the USPTO held that evidence submitted by PUBPAT, in addition to other prior art located by the Patent Office’s Examiners, showed that Monsanto was not entitled to any of the patents.

Monsanto has filed dozens of patent infringement lawsuits asserting the four challenged patents against American farmers, many of whom are unable to hire adequate representation to defend themselves in court. The crime these farmers are accused of is nothing more than saving seed from one year’s crop to replant the following year, something farmers have done since the beginning of time. …

So say we all.

“Were moving from an era of cheap, abundant energy, to an era of scarce, hard to get, expensive energy.” – From A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash.

There isn’t any alternative source of energy developed up to now that can replace oil and natural gas as energy sources. The assumption that we have well and enough coal to last many decades rests on the premise that it will be used at current rates, and not used as a replacement for oil.

It doesn’t have to go dry, to be used up completely, to wreak havoc on the world economy and drop living standards precipitously. It just needs to get very, very expensive.

Because it won’t mean only the end of cheap gasoline for the car, cheap plastic, and cheap heating. It will mean the end of cheap, imported food. It will probably even mean the end of cheap food from out of state. The end of year round lettuce and apples for all, of fresh mangoes in winter in the northern temperate zone.

We’ve been living as if there were no tomorrow. I hope that doesn’t end up being the epitaph of this society.

Rep. David Dreier (R-CA) was just a bit ago lamenting “an end to bipartisanship” during the Farm Bill debate on the House floor, in reference to the terrible tax loophole shutdown on corporations headquartered in tropical file drawers. It’s been included in the Farm Bill as an offset for nutrition programs. Dreier said that Democrats were “demonizing” good corporations like Toyota and “the Bayer Corporation that makes the baby Aspirin!”

Oh, my. I guess if Republicans can’t find actual babies to use as a shield for their policies, a mass market pharmaceutical product sold for babies will have to do.

Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-CA) asked, “If these people are complying with the law, why are they sending their receipts through the Carribbean?” He’d said earlier that four years ago, the Bush administration’s own Treasury Department had called the loophole “tax abuse.”

Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) said he thought it would be hard for his colleagues to explain to their constituents that “they’d rather protect the tax cheaters in Bermuda than help the farmers” here in America.

Bush has threatened to veto the Farm Bill over this issue.

Update: Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) says this change won’t affect companies headquartered in countries the US has tax treaties with. He said the Republicans hadn’t named a single company that would be affected, including Ben & Jerry’s, as mentioned by Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA).

Doggett said that when the Republicans say that the proposal will jeopardize 5 million jobs, they’re including all the jobs of all the foreign subsidiaries operating in the United States. He said most would not be affected.

Both of the following statements can’t be true. Here’s the first one, the new neocon line on Iran. Emphasis mine:

… Speaking in London this week, Frederick Kagan, a West Point military historian and noted US neoconservative who helped inspire Mr Bush’s surge plan, said there was no “smoking gun” proving direct, continuous, high-level collaboration between al-Qaida and other Sunni extremists and Iran’s top leaders.

… The evidence was often circumstantial, he said, but included Iranian-manufactured and Iranian-purchased arms caches found in al-Qaida and Sunni-dominated areas, … “The Iranians and al-Qaida both want the Iraqi state to fail. If Iran wanted a stable Iraq, they would be supporting the Shia government of the [prime minister Nuri] al-Maliki,” Dr Kagan said.

… “Iran is supplying everybody who is engaged in violence, every faction, every accelerant of violence, including [the Shia militia] Jaish al-Mahdi and al-Qaida. This is all too well organised to be happening without regime knowledge.” …

Here’s the second view. Again, emphasis mine:

… That [“97-0 vote in the Senate last week for a resolution drafted by its leading proponent of war against Iran, Sen. Joe Lieberman”] followed several months of intensive administration propaganda charging that Iran is arming Shiite militias in Iraq, and characterising Iranian financial support and training for Shiite militias as an aggressive effort to target U.S. troops and to destabilise Iraq.

But this administration line ignores the fact that Iran’s primary ties in Iraq have always been with those groups who have supported the Nouri al Maliki government, including the SCIRI and Dawa parties and their paramilitary arm, the Badr Corps, rather than with anti-government militias. That indicates that Iran’s fundamental interest is to see the government stabilise the situation in the country, according to Prof. Mohsen Milani of Florida International University, a specialist on Iran’s national security policies. …

So, which is it? Do they support al Maliki’s government or not? Are we supposed to believe that Iran’s allies in Iraq would continue to perceive them as friends if they were systematically and deliberately arming the people who are conducting retaliatory ethnic cleansing against the Shia population of Iraq? And that doesn’t begin to unpack the problems with Kagan’s “circumstantial” evidence.

For one thing, Iran has a very established, very sophisticated, homegrown munitions industry. Like many other countries with military industrial infrastructure, they export a lot of weaponry, or they certainly did until a 2007 UN ban. They even have brochures, like businesses do.

Wikipedia says of their arms exports that, “As of 2006, Iran had exported weapons to 57 countries, including NATO members, and sold $100 million worth of military equipment.”

It occurs to me to wonder, considering that no one has ever claimed that all the weaponry found in Iraq comes from Iran, why the US government doesn’t list the origins of all the munitions they find and call out the countries so implicated for their support of Iraq’s warring factions. Or consider that Iran supported factions inside Afghanistan all through the years of US neglect of that country. If Taliban members, who are outright enemies of Iran, captured Iranian-made weapons from Dari supported by Iran, would that suddenly transform Iran into a supporter of the Taliban?

Weapons are commodities. The US weapons industry sells them abroad with impunity, as do Britain, Israel, China, Russia, and many, many other countries. Therefore, accusations of support need to be backed up by more than the very circumstantial evidence that weapons were manufactured in a particular country. Especially when that country has sold $100 million worth of weapons abroad, and their borders are notoriously porous.

You need hard evidence, or it’s no more sensible a claim than finding insurgents wearing Chinese boots and claiming that their wearers are being supported by China. (I admit, I’m lazy, I don’t want to look it up. But I swear to you that I did look it up once, in 2005 I think, and discovered that around 90% of the world’s shoe supply comes from China. Granted, Iran doesn’t make 90% of the world’s arms. But it seems far more likely that Muslim insurgents in the Middle East would be able to get hold of Iranian weapons than, say, Israeli weapons.)

Further, Kagan says that, “This is all too well organised to be happening without regime knowledge.” Well, how does he know that? Did all the former Iraqi military personnel forget how to coordinate attacks when they went home and took off their uniforms after the US disbanded Hussein’s army? Are the al Qaida operatives in Iraq a less competent breed than their counterparts elsewhere? Is there no possibility that the Sunni militias are receiving Saudi help? Perhaps not in Kagan’s universe, but out in the real world:

… About 45% of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians and security forces are from Saudi Arabia; 15% are from Syria and Lebanon; and 10% are from North Africa, according to official U.S. military figures made available to The Times by the senior officer. Nearly half of the 135 foreigners in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq are Saudis, he said.

Fighters from Saudi Arabia are thought to have carried out more suicide bombings than those of any other nationality, said the senior U.S. officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity. It is apparently the first time a U.S. official has given such a breakdown on the role played by Saudi nationals in Iraq’s Sunni Arab insurgency.

He said 50% of all Saudi fighters in Iraq come here as suicide bombers. In the last six months, such bombings have killed or injured 4,000 Iraqis. …

While it could possibly still be the case that all those Saudi suicide bombers are entering Iraq entirely without their government’s knowledge, that seems improbable. Even more improbable is the suggestion that they’re all going to Iraq in order to take orders from the Iranian Shiite government. I can’t be the only person left gaping at the extreme unlikelihood of Iran recruiting Saudis from inside Saudi Arabia to fight for militia factions in Iraq who are targeting their Shia allies right alongside our troops.

That’s just crazy talk. It wouldn’t make it as a pitch for a new spy thriller. But it’s the logical implication of Kagan’s assertion that all the fighting in Iraq is being coordinated by Iran.

Starting in May, the US and Iran entered into their “first direct talks in 27 years”, on the subject of Iraq. Juan Cole notes that what’s emerged from these highly contentious talks is an agreement between Iran and the US to take on the Sunni insurgents. And I’ll leave you with his comments on why taking on the Sunni in Iraq is such a big deal:

… If the US is allying with Iran against the Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda, this is a very major development and much more important than some carping over Shiite militias. (My guess is that 98% of American troops killed in Iraq have been killed by Sunni Arab guerrillas). If the report is true and has legs, it will send Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal ballistic. The Sunni Arab states do not like “al-Qaeda” in Iraq, but they are much more afraid of Iran than of the Iraqi Sunni Arabs who are fighting against US military occupation.

And in spite of knowing how many Saudis are sitting in our own camps or have blown themselves up in suicide bombings, and that the former Baathists who ran Hussein’s military have no love for Iran, and that neighboring Sunni states fear the Iranians, the neocons continue to peddle the ridiculous propaganda that the Iranians are coordinating most of the attacks in Iraq on the Shia government and US forces.

If our government really believed this line of bull, they wouldn’t be negotiating with the Iranians. They continue to let these lies trickle out and poison the public well because, apparently, it just wasn’t drumming up the war fever enough to tell people that the Iranians were (shocking!) supporting their Shia allies who ran the government of a neighboring state and the Badr brigade.

And Sen. Lieberman, of course, their tool as ever. There are times, some, when guilt by association is the only reasonable tack to take. In general, Lieberman has definitely earned the distinction of being someone whose support is a taint unto itself. Picking apart the arguments of the neocons he’s in bed with just confirms me in that opinion.

Keep an eye out for these arguments as they continue banging the drums on the sidelines for another stupid land war in Asia.

Kind, Blumenauer hope netroots deliver support for new farm bill

Ahem. Let me first say, as unlikely as you may be to believe me by the time you finish reading this, that I like Rep. Ron Kind (D-WI) and Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR). I think they mean well, but a political party cannot survive on good intentions alone. If their version of the Farm Bill, FARM 21 (HR 2720) were to be passed, we’re talking Springtime for Hastert in Illinois, winter for New York and Maine.

Therefore, it’s time for farm policy without pity.

Remember when Clinton cut the welfare programs, and how cool that was, because it really showed that Democrats could decide to save money on the backs of poor people, too? That was great because impoverished single mothers are some of the least likely voters in the country. So they didn’t really do anything about it. And who else were they going to vote for? The Republicans? Please.

Farmers, on the other hand, they vote. Trust me on this. And lots of them live in states with barely the population of Los Angeles, but have two Senators anyway. Why do you think the Republican members of the House Agriculture Committee mentioned preserving the “safety net” for American family farmers so many times during their opening statements on the Farm Bill (HR 2419) markup that I thought I was listening to Democrats talk about food stamps? (Which the Republicans wanted to cut, as will surprise no one.) Why do you think they didn’t try to cut farm subsidies when they controlled all three branches of government? There’s no law against altering farm policy more often than every five years.

Because for all that they’re venal, corrupt and utterly lacking in compassion, congressional Republicans aren’t actually complete sodding morons.

Republicans don’t need to be told that placating the WTO, Brazilian cane growers and West African cotton farmers will win them not one, single, solitary vote in farm country come election time. They don’t need to be told that American workers, cane and sugar beet growers, and cotton farmers, don’t care about placating those people, either. I think, really, we can pretty much agree on the fact that Republicans are deeply in touch with their own self interests.

The Democrats considering whether or not to support FARM 21 might want to allow themselves to be instructed by that example.

With Friends Like These

They should also, just maybe, look at who some of their eager little friends are. First and worst up, the National Taxpayers Union, Grover Norquist‘s old organization and a beneficiary of Olin and Scaife money. Do you really and truly believe that they’re signing on to this out of the depths of their conviction? Frak, no. If they were, they’d have won this fight when George Bush said that he wanted to end all farm subsidies in 2005, when their bestest buddies held the gavels of both chambers of Congress. Why did the people that we all came to know and love as the Rubberstamp Republican Congress not jump to do his bidding? Why were their good friends at the National Taxpayers Union not able to make them see the light. Again, I would argue, because they’re not sodding morons.

What the National Taxpayers Union is doing right now is encouraging the Democrats to commit the kind of generational, rural electability suicide that they could never convince their Republican colleagues to sign on to. There couldn’t be a better chance for them to gain a policy win and strike back at their enemies from their current position as beggars at the table.

Then there’s cosponsor Rep. Dave Reichert (R-WA). He’s one of the most reliable sheeple votes the Republicans have, a nice smile atop an empty suit, though he occasionally pretends to give a damn about conservation so that his pro-choice constituency has one less gripe at the voting booth. He’s from an urban district whose main industries are software, Nordstrom’s and rail shipping, and the Republicans there trend towards libertarianism. This is a state, I kid you not, where they have libertarian candidates for insurance commissioner. Let that, as Chris Rock might say, swirl around your head. He couldn’t be more insulated from the effects of leaving a trail of devastation all up and down the middle of the country.

Next, we have those cheerful food safety enthusiasts, the Grocery Manufacturers Association. They were sponsors of the National Uniformity for Food Act, which would have put an end to the ability of state and local governments to write stricter food safety laws than the federal government, overturning somewhere around 200 food safety laws around the country. Or hey, like chocolate? They don’t. They were also behind a proposed law that would have allowed products containing no cocoa butter to be labeled as chocolate. And their Democratic (!) president and CEO wrote a letter just last week denouncing card check union organizing rules for farmworkers.

Considering that Kind and Blumenauer are all about food safety, or that the Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee unanimously held the line last week to insist that prevailing wage requirements be included in federal loan guarantee contracts for biofuel refineries, I don’t know how this Grocery Manufacturers Association is anything but a political albatross.

What then of the socially responsible groups listed? All right, let’s go.

Oxfam America really does believe that Congress is going to vote based on African interests. They’re not going to, and that’s kind of sad, but that hasn’t stopped OxFam from tilting at this windmill for years. It’s a blindspot that makes the eyes of one former employee of the well-meaning organization just roll heavenwards in despair. Nothing, apparently, can be done to mitigate their intractable political out-of-the-loopness.

What about Environmental Defense? Mmmm, defense. Feel the warm fuzzies. And they’ve done so much work to try to mitigate hog waste in North Carolina, which is great! Yeah. Except that they’re campaigning for more state subsidized production grants for hog farming, a battle they at least partially won, and are now arguing that market-based strategies can work after years of the national chapter lobbying for federally subsidized hog farming.

How subsidized? Through a conservation program, that’s how. Environmental Defense is the leading champion for porking up the budget of a program called the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), which was a great program when it mostly helped small, family farms. It still achieves good results, but because of high payment limitations, it’s also been used as an unreformed factory farm slush fund. The folks at Environmental Defense haven’t complained too much about that. And now that the Farm Bill is out of committee, they don’t seem to be railing against the fact that the former $450,000 five year cap has been raised to $625,000 over five years, nearly all of which could be used to subsidize factory farm manure lagoons, if a producer takes the slight dodge of enrolling part of their land in a second conservation program.

Environmental Defense is a good organization that gets a lot done, and they’ve contributed a lot to the Farm Bill debate. But they just seem a little too willing to overlook the extension of big payouts to big polluters.

A payout of $450,000 over five years, or $625,000 over five years, isn’t a conservation grant. It’s a production subsidy, of exactly the sort these alleged reformers are trying to eliminate. But somehow, production subsidies for livestock confinement and sewage treatment are less reprehensible to them than production subsidies for corn and barley.

A Plan To Fail

So, fine, I don’t approve of their choice of partners. What about the bill? Well.

Let’s take the repeal of sugar tariffs. This costs the federal government pretty much nothing. But it’s terrible, right, because it increases the costs we have to pay for sugar? Let me ask you something, right after reminding you again that American sugar farmers certainly do vote, and think about it carefully:

Do you see cheaper sugar as being the United States’ chief need, just now? With the diabetes, and the heart disease, and the obesity, and the glucose so saturating our food supply that you can give yourself a hypoglycemic fit by inhaling too deeply at the grocery store?

Right! Bring me my even cheaper sugar, pronto!

Next, planting restrictions on subsidized acreage are repealed. Hallelujah. It’s not really the best idea to plant only a few types of crops, or especially just one type, on a piece of land. That’s Ecology 101. Unfortunately, someone neglected to take certain other basic classes when planning this bill.

Farmers on subsidized acreage may now only grow subsidized commodities for resale, an arrangement that prevents them from competing with growers of unsubsidized fruits and vegetables, also known as specialty crops. For the few years of transition out of subsidies, specialty crop growers would be in constant peril of losing their livelihoods. And you could probably kiss Rep. Sam Farr’s, Rep. Joe Baca’s, Rep. Dennis Cardoza’s and Rep. Jim Costa’s Democratic seats in California farming districts a long, sour goodbye.

They also leave the Conservation Security Program unfunded, just like in the latest version of the Farm Bill. This means that a program that already has small payout caps and is targeted towards rewarding sustainable production, instead of helping polluters reform or mitigate bad behavior, is just cancelled for the foreseeable future.

The bill also switches all farmers’ marketing loans to recourse loans. During last week’s House Agriculture Committee markup of their version of the Farm Bill, Congress members from both parties discussing the listening tours they held throughout the country said that farmers liked three things about the 2002 Farm Bill: direct payments, counter cyclical payments (just, gods, don’t ask), and marketing loans.

So, the government used to give farmers non-recourse loans against their crops. That meant that if a farmer couldn’t find a buyer for the loan price or higher, they could leave the crop in government storage and wash their hands of it. But then the government is stuck with, say, a few tons of corn. What are they going to do with that? Then someone came up with the idea of marketing loans, where even if the farmer can’t find a buyer for the loan price or higher, they sell it for what they can and keep the difference. The government pays out some money, but they didn’t have to find a buyer for the corn, continue to pay storage costs, or arrange the transaction. They’re done, everybody’s happy.

Now suppose you’re a member of Congress and you have to go back to the farmers in your district and tell them that, instead of these marketing loans, they’ll only have access to loans they have to pay back in full. A recourse loan, which means that their property can be seized against the amount. No one in their right mind takes that trade down without a fight. Particularly not if they’re a producer in an industry where, as Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO) noted last week, they have to buy everything at retail and sell everything at wholesale, to accept prices at both ends.

And what about the other payments? Just about everything besides conservation and recourse loans gets replaced with a Risk Management Account, which is the farm policy version of healthcare savings accounts. From FARM 21 ally group, Taxpayers for Common Sense:

… A Risk Management Account or RMA allows farmers to weather the ups and downs of agriculture, purchase crop and revenue insurance, invest in rural enterprises that boost farm income, and plan for the future. In particular, account funds could be used in years when a farmer’s income drops below 95% of their average income for the past 5 years. Some subsidized farmers would receive an annual government contribution to their accounts to build up balances and ease the transition away from traditional subsidies. …

The Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (pdf) has a different take:

… The proposed alternative to commodity programs, a risk management tax-preferred savings account, would provide tax benefits in proportion to funds invested in the accounts, benefiting the well-off far more than the average farm taxpayer. Like most tax subsidies, the more disposable income one has available to invest in the tax preference, the larger the benefit. If a farm family does not have disposable income to invest in any given year, then there is no tax sheltering to be gained. Unlike commodity payments that at least have the framework for targeting to moderate-sized farms through payment limits, the proposed tax accounts are untargeted. Most of the tax subsidies will flow to mega-farms. Moreover, the accounts are tax free in the good years when money is available to the farmer, but taxable in the bad years when the farmer may be making withdrawals, the opposite of what one would think of as a traditional safety net feature. …

How … special.

The Opportunity Cost

FARM 21 is likely to have a hard time passing, or even getting close. And thank goodness. Though unfortunately, too many Democrats are probably going to bite the bullet on this one and take a vote that, at the very least, won’t endear them to rural America. And instead of discussing truly innovative solutions, they’ll be pushing some misguided Libertarian People’s Front ideas about why government works better when it’s dismantled immediately. Or, alternately, insidious neoconservative schemes that would rather add $350 million dollars to a potential corporate slush fund than spend more on efforts with a lot of leverage.

The thing is, I don’t especially like farm subsidies. I don’t really want to be put in the position of arguing for them. But there isn’t a full range of choice here. There’s electoral suicide and renewed waves of farm country bankruptcies, or there’s the status quo with some moderate but perhaps effective improvements. As I said above, there’s no law against reforming farm policy before one Farm Bill is up. Further, appropriators shuffle money around every year, allowing leeway to make the implementation of a bill significantly different than its original framework.

Instead of using up valuable floor time and lobbying effort, here are some proposals that the FARM 21 crowd could have helped out with, instead. They’re modest, help small and medium family farms that could suffer under a hard end to subsidies, and provide positive incentives for stable food chain development. Consider:

From the Community Food Security Coalition:

Many of you know about and have benefited from the Community Food Projects (CFP), a program that was started 10 years ago and has been incredibly successful at empowering low-income communities to identify problems related to food security and take action to permanently solve them with an investment from the federal government. In the past, the program has received $5 million annually in mandatory funding, meaning that groups like CFSC didn’t have to fight every year in order to receive money.

… While the House Agriculture Committee increased funds for CFP to $30 million, the money is discretionary, meaning that it’s possible this vital program gets nothing at all when it comes time to dole out the money each year. There is no money in the appropriations bill for FY ’08, so if the change to discretionary stands, there will be no money for CFP in 2008. …

From the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (doc)

• $3 billion be restored to the Conservation Security Program
• Real payment limits be applied to commodity programs, including a $40,000 direct payment cap and the closing of all loopholes.

Note that introducing a hard cap of $40,000 on these payments would represent an immediate and sizeable reduction in subsidy payments, without jeopardizing farms teetering on the edge of disaster.

From the Center For Rural Affairs:

The Competitive and Fair Agricultural Markets Act (H.R. 2135) will help restore competition and fairness to livestock markets and address the unchecked market power of packers and poultry processors that has allowed them to manipulative livestock markets and discriminate against small and mid-sized family farms and ranches. Livestock Subcommittee Chair Leonard Boswell will offer the bill as an amendment to the livestock sections of the farm bill on Thursday, May 24th.

… Rep. Boswell’s amendment prohibits mandatory binding arbitration clauses, requires clear disclosure of risk, and prohibits confidentiality clauses in contracts with packers and processors; closes poultry loopholes in Packers and Stockyards Act to provide full authority over all poultry cases; and requires that USDA define the legal term “undue preference” to strengthen the law and stop price discrimination against small and mid-sized farmers and ranchers. …

[or, from email] … [T]he House Agriculture Committee struck a major blow against family farms. The Committee approved a big increase in subsidies for mega-farms to drive smaller operations out of business.

If it stands, the government will spend more to destroy family farming. The real limit on direct payments, made regardless of crop prices, is raised from $80,000 to $120,000. All existing limits on loan deficiency payments are simply removed, and other loopholes exploited by mega-farms are left open.

… Those that support this [payment limitation] increase are touting a provision that denies payments to couples with income greater than $2 million. But that will have little impact in Iowa, other than causing rich landlords to switch to cash rents. And any mega-farm with decent tax advice will keep taxable income below $2 million by investing in expansion. …

All the foregoing proposals are in jeopardy. All of them could have used the support and effort that was thrown into an unwise frontal assault on subsidies, without consultation from groups who make it their business to represent small, sustainable farms and urban populations facing food insecurity.

Time is short. The Farm Bill and all proposed amendments, including the FARM 21 offerings, are going to the floor this week. Every member of Congress is going to get the chance to vote on the issues, so please contact your congressperson by phone today and ask them for reform that won’t destroy either their political capital or family farming. If you already know who your representative is, you can call the United States Capitol switchboard directly at (202) 224-3121, and ask for their office.

You can ask them for lower payment caps, mandatory funding for community food security, rewards for good conservation practices, and fair markets for growers. They pay attention to phone calls, they notice. Be specific, and don’t hesitate to call across party lines or to a member of Congress whose mind you suspect is made up. Farm issues get very little notice as a general rule, so your voice can really make a difference.