Video: Eight years of failed policies in Afghanistan.
Interesting analysis about police role (opposed to military) in Afghanistan and Pakistan: Afghanistan/Pakistan: “Call in the Police (but Please Help them First)”
From Brazil: the city that ended hunger.

Posted by: andrew | Apr 7 2009 9:56 utc | 3

b & andrew,
thanks for the links to stories about food and hunger.
From andrew’s post about Brazil and the city that ended hunger:

“I knew we had so much hunger in the world. But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.”
The cost of these efforts?
Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget. That’s about a penny a day per Belo resident.

I’ve been in quite a few homeless shelters and Salvation Army kitchens and I don’t think I’ve seen one that compares to this story. What a neat program. I really like the part about the farmers being able to cut the middle men out of their sales and make a better profit.
This is the sort of program where socialism shines… If there were more ideas like this type being put into action on a large scale in the U.S., imagine the change in people’s lives. Society can’t always make everyone work or even contribute to society’s benefit, but it can feed everyone.
I think about what life would be like for millions of americans who go hungry, and are hungry, and all the people farming trying to scratch-out a living. This story should give us hope.
I recently published a 36 page paper about the proposed new farm bills, HR 875 being the big one of note… I normally print a 16 or 20 page paper, but I wanted my readers to get a good feel for what people were saying about these bills so I stole four articles off the web. One was for and three against, the bill and I kept the comments at the bottom intact so local residents could read lots of different opinions about this legislation.
I want to tell you I hit a nerve with this issue… lots of small organic farmers around here and I figured they’d have known about these proposed laws. Nope!
The issue has disappeared out of the racks and I had a sweet older lady stop me and tell me that she sent the issue out to a dozen ranchers and farmers she knows… and she gave me a lead on a story that might be interesting to check-out.
She said that during the depression the government, to increase the price of market livestock, paid ranchers some pittance per head of cattle (also sheep, goats, chickens, ect), then had government workers come out and shoot the livestock and bury it. No one was allowed to harvest the meat, the hides or anything.
She said it was the only time her dad cried… This program wasn’t voluntary – according to this lady, but I haven’t had more time to research further. Yesterday was the first warm, sunny day in what feels like months, (but it’s only been a couple of weeks) and I have a mess of outside chores to do – which is an excuse to suck up some vitamin D while playing hooky from computer screens.

Posted by: DavidS | Apr 7 2009 12:30 utc | 5

jlcg-
California doesn’t have a water problem… it has a cheap water problem. One entire boarder is the ocean… Maybe the Californians can ask the Middle East where they get their water from?
As for growing in Michigan… a well insulated glasshouse with some extra heat added (maybe have those hogs penned inside? ) and you could be eating avocados from October to May!
But to do this would take time and money, and more importantly desire. Farming is hard, sometimes heartbreaking work, and not everyone is suited to it. I’m glad I live in a community full of small farms and ranches so I can focus on publishing and let them focus on agriculture. I get enough farm work from helping buddies chase their escaped cattle and keeping the landlord’s property maintained… I hate cutting grass, what a waste of resources – mine, mostly 🙂
Here is an interesting interview I’ve found while searching for information on the cattle story I discussed in an earlier post.Life during the depression in Utah

Megan Wilson: How bad did the depression get before it started to get better:
Revo Young: Really bad. The government tried to help people, but some people were able to get jobs but a lot of people weren’t. Then the government, if there was a surplus of food they didn’t seem to affect us because we were on a farm. My mother was of course the head of the family and the cattle were already selling for seven cents a pound for steers and the government had us call (my note: I think she meant “cull” not call, but I’m just guessing) the cattle they had us kill them and they gave us three cents a pound for them. That would be a big steer [that] would bring about thirty five dollars. It was really bad.

Posted by: DavidS | Apr 7 2009 14:24 utc | 7

A couple of other farm related links:
Another two-faced capitalist puts his foot in mouth

During the Depression years of hunger, the New Deal ordered the slaughter of 6 million pigs. The theory (see President Roosevelt’s May 14, 1935, speech on the Agricultural Adjustment Act) was, believe it or not, that one cause of the Depression—in 1935, people were selling apples on the streets; 20.1 percent were unemployed—was a “problem of overproduction.” Government, FDR said, could keep production and consumption “in reasonable balance” so that farmers could charge “reasonable prices,” as government intuited them. Last week Congress was importuned to have the government pay for the slaughter of dairy cattle in order to raise milk prices. Cows should die in Wisconsin so that mothers in Watts will pay a higher price—one that government deems “reasonable”—for milk for their children? The dairy lobby sees opportunity in a New Deal 2.0.

And a thread discussing this:comments

Haven’t you people ever heard of the dust bowl? It was a severe drought that hit America at about the same time of the depression. Hence, the Dirty Thirties. This event prolonged and exacerbated the Great Depression, so you’re damn right the farmers suffered. They suffered just as much a everyone else.
For historical information, it is always best to seek some kind of official explanation. History books are easy to find, and many places online discuss history. Asking a question like this on a public forum will only illicit uninformed answers from uninformed people, as evidenced by the majority of the replies to this thread.
The Dust Bowl(The Dirty Thirties)
1930-1936
[link to en.wikipedia.org]
“Two-thirds of farmers in “Palliser’s Triangle”, in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, had to rely on government aid.”
The Great Depression
1929-1939
[link to en.wikipedia.org]
“Hardest hit were farm commodities such as wheat, cotton, tobacco, and lumber. According to this theory, the collapse of farm exports caused many American farmers to default on their loans, leading to the bank runs on small rural banks that characterized the early years of the Great Depression.”
So you see, the farmers did indeed suffer, and it appears that they were not only the most dramatically hit, but may also have been resposible for the majority of the damage done to the speculative markets.

History echoing through our lives.

Posted by: DavidS | Apr 7 2009 14:50 utc | 9

In case you missed it, Raj Patel’s blog about food and related problems.

Posted by: andrew | Apr 7 2009 15:39 utc | 11

Time to break the axis of sleaze.

Posted by: andrew | Apr 7 2009 16:00 utc | 13

!!!!!!!! Very Important read:
Netanyahu and threat of bombing Iran – the bluff that never stops giving?
digg Share this on Facebook Huffpost – stumble reddit del.ico.us ShareThis RSS
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/trita-parsi/netanyahu-and-threat-of-b_b_183822.html

Posted by: Anthony | Apr 7 2009 18:48 utc | 15

Joseph Halevi, G20 and inter-capitalist conflicts.
Kaveh Afrasiabi, Obama twists and turns on Iran.
Peter Lee, Cyber-skirmish at the top of the world.

Posted by: andrew | Apr 7 2009 20:58 utc | 17

his discourse is every bit as offensive as that of bush & they wonder at the hatred of a people

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Apr 7 2009 23:59 utc | 19

Why Steve Rosen is suing AIPAC http://original.antiwar.com/smith_grant/2009/04/07/the-samson-gambit/

Posted by: Anthony | Apr 8 2009 5:26 utc | 21

Extraordinary indictment of the Israeli so-called Defence Force by Lord Baltimore:

The Rotten Orchard

Posted by: Parviz | Apr 8 2009 6:59 utc | 23

BG 24) Well, that Grain.org link certainly explains the US SecState’s new Central Front in the War of Terror on Afghanistan and Pakistan [CFWTAP]. If BigAgra makes the inroads in AfPak they did in Iraq and in India, they’ll own the souls of the Muslim:Hindu world.
Our own souls were already written out of existence by HR 875, but who cares, as long as Dancing With the Stars and American Idol proves America’s triumphant exceptionalism. ‘We are the world, we are the children…’ where’s my lolly!
You’ll start to notice Ghost Dancing around the bleeding margins of oUrSoreAnus by Deepak Choprah, Tony Robbins and ‘Law of Attraction’ grifts, before CorpVampires drop their masks entirely and show their fangs, with fava beans and a nice Chianti, old-US warehoused in State-run nursings’ FrankenPharm drug protocol experiments, and the only way out left is to swallow your own tongue.
Cuban slaves would jump into the cauldrons of boiling sugar, in essence, spitting in the face of the Master Class by spoiling the end product with their suicide. We have no similar revenge. There is nothing you can do today to spoil their profits except to die, an inconsequential loss, soon erased by the birth to death ratio.
“There are two incompatible models that can’t co-exist. It’s a silent war that eliminates communities and families of small holders. In addition, it destroys the bio-diversity of the countryside. It brings death, poverty and illness, as well as the destruction of the natural resources that help us live.“
America as Chernobyl.

Posted by: Afpak Cerp | Apr 8 2009 19:31 utc | 25

DeAnander@26
Cool link… I like to imagine what the world could look like if we spent a third of our military budget on projects like this one… Growing things rather than killing things… Hmmm, what an odd idea.

Posted by: DavidS | Apr 9 2009 14:33 utc | 27