n 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced him to do an interview. 38 years later, Levitan, director Josh Raskin and illustrators James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina have collaborated to create an animated short film using the original interview recording as the soundtrack. A spellbinding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit and timeless message, I Met the Walrus was nominated for the 2008 Academy Award for Animated Short and won the 2009 Emmy for ‘New Approaches’ (making it the first film to win an Emmy on behalf of the internet).
This week marks the tenth anniversary of the “Shock and Awe” US invasion of Iraq. The ravages of that invasion continue at home and in Iraq, the US is still at war in Afghanistan (troops and contractors remain in Iraq) and unofficially waging war on countries like Pakistan and Yemen, is aggravating aggression with North Korea as part of an Asian pivot encircling China, is putting more military into Africa and Obama is in Israel where he sings a duet for war with Netanyahu against Syria and Iran. Meanwhile, poverty, unemployment and homelessness continue to grow in the US with threats of austerity for everything except the national security state.
When we occupied Freedom Plaza in October, 2011, we made the connection between US Empire and the corporate control of our political process, between unlimited military spending and cuts to necessary domestic programs. We understood the misreporting in the corporate media about the Iraq War. Kathy Kelly from Voices for Creative Nonviolence was in Baghdad during Shock and Awe. On this tenth anniversary, she reminds us of the horrible price of war and warns of never ending war as the US seems to edge toward more war in the region. The need to understand those connections grows more important each day as we see the costs of war affecting people on every level.
And this report details the tremendous costs in loss of life, the US legacy of cancer in Iraq from poisons we brought there, the number of refugees, orphans, widows and people now living in poverty. Violence continues in Iraq including a series of attacks on the tenth anniversary that left 98 people dead and 240 wounded.
Iraq War veteran Tomas Young is bringing increased attention to the human costs at home as he prepares to die from his wounds. Over 130,000 Iraq vets have been diagnosed with PTSD. Over 250,000 are suffering from traumatic brain injuries. The ongoing costs of caring for veterans is expected to bring the total cost of the Iraq invasion alone to $6 trillion. And, vets fight homelessness, sometimes with the aid of Occupy activists who protest to save the homes of vets. Veterans are also experiencing unemployment and medical debt.
These are some of the costs of war, not to mention that the US Military is the greatest polluter on the planet.
As we join the national week of actions in solidarity with the Strike Debt Rolling Jubilee and the coast-to-coast actions in support of the Tar Sands Blockade, let us remember that all of these issues are connected. As our allies at Veterans For Peace have been saying lately it is time to Stop the War on Mother Earth. VFP has been joining with groups like Radical Action for Mountain People’s Survival and the Tar Sands Blockade to protect the planet.
The breadth of opposition to the extraction economy that undermines the ecology of the planet is shown by the people involved in the Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance and the “Sacred Journey for Future Generations,” a march across Canada by hundreds in support of the Idle No More Movement. The fracking movement has also shown the kind of culture of resistance needed to stop hyrdo-fracking as we saw in Watkins Glen, NY this week.
Let us remember that there is strength in solidarity and all these issues are connected by policies that put corporate greed before human needs and protection of the Earth.
Solidarity has produced some real successes recently. In the UK, 21 climate activists were being sued by the energy giant EDF for shutting down an energy plant for 8 days. But when 64,000 customers signed a petition in support for the “No Dash for Gas” activists; EDF dropped its civil suit. Criminal charges remain, so solidarity with the activists continues to be important. And in Cyprus, the EU tried to impose a tax on the population in exchange for assistance with their debt. Massive protests resulted in the Cypriot Parliament saying no to the tax.
The plague of Wall Street banking affects people across the globe. Wall Street was a key focus of Occupy. This week, activists in Philadelphia explained their protest against Wells Fargo which led to their arrest and acquittal, indeed being thanked by the judge for their actions. This was one of five recent court victories for Occupy. Now, people are standing up in New York with a class action lawsuit against the abusive stop and frisk searches which had been protested by occupiers and others.
Single payer groups are joining with Strike Debt to fight medical debt and our debt-based society. Chicago Teachers invited Occupy Wall Street to teach them protest skills. And, the Imokalee workers are walking across Florida to protest low wages. In Maryland, Fund Our Communities is holding a day long “Prosperity Not Austerity” Bus Tour that links issues such as health care, education and food security with the cost of war. The Strike Debt Resistor’s Manual provides a guide for communities to learn more about ways that debt affects them and what they can do about it. Perhaps you see opportunities for making connections around issues where you are?
It is through these connections that we can grow stronger and become more effective. And it is through these connections that we can have real conversations about the root causes of our shared situations, about the real needs that we have and how we can meet them together and build a unified movement that can say “No” to war at home and abroad. Let us not be afraid to talk about US imperialism and the effects of capitalism and a debt-based world. Let us look for the truth and not be lied into another war in Syria, Iran or North Korea. And let us all join together in the urgent need for climate justice.
We can succeed too. As we make connections and build solidarity, we are preparing for the day when we will shift power to the people. An important issue that needs your attention, particularly next week, is the hunger strike in Guantanamo. Don’t let these prisoners die in vain. Witness Against Torture is calling for a week of national solidarity actions starting March 24th. Join them.
Kevin Zeese JD and Margaret Flowers MD co-host ClearingtheFOGRadio.org on We Act Radio 1480 AM Washington, DC and on Economic Democracy Media, co-direct It’s Our Economy and were organizers of the Occupation of Washington, DC. Their twitters are @KBZeese and @MFlowers8.
This article is based on a weekly newsletter from It’s Our Economy. You can sign-up here to receive this free newsletter.
Richard Heinberg’s recent Museletter 237, “The Fight of the Century,” includes a curious point about criminalization: “. . . It will increasingly be up to households and communities to provide the basics. . . This is a strategy that will . . . in many cases be discouraged and even criminalized by national authorities.” The question is whether such localization can survive our political leadership. Yet the localized economy is probably one of the few self-evident proposals for a future that seems to have a rather slim number of options.
The illegalities of the “localized” life begin with the fact that many of the changes that need to be made to house design, in our post-nearly-all-materials world, are in fact illegal, if not strictly criminal. Here in Canada, one cannot legally build or inhabit a house that does not have conventional plumbing and electricity, for example. And the insurance companies have their say: a house will not be insured if it is heated mainly by wood. To be respectable, one must use our declining fossil fuels, it seems. In fact, insurance companies now look for all sorts of certification, most of which cannot be considered related to alternative approaches, but all of which are expensive.
The same problem of illegality applies to many other activities, even if these are just common sense. Localized agriculture, as I learned first-hand a few years ago in Ontario, is increasingly plagued by pointless rules related to processing, packaging, labeling, and similar issues, to the extent that small-scale farmers are simply forced out of business. Much of this is done in the name of “health,” but such farmers do not have the ability to set up the required laboratories and other equipment that would make their businesses compliant with these ever-expanding regulations.
‘m sure farmers’ markets are dismally inefficient at times, lacking the economy of scale that makes the supermarket chains such a delight for the average consumer. But a truck driver here in Canada once pointed out to me that the cost of sending those large vehicles back and forth from Ontario to California or Florida is just not going be feasible as time goes by: for each truck, every trip costs hundreds of dollars.
Even living off the land is largely a criminalized activity, and “protecting the wilderness” does not have a great deal to do with it. Hunting and fishing rules are so designed that, with the exception of native people, the only people who can engage in these activities are those who are rich enough not to need the food that is thereby supplied. The rules could easily be modified to suit those who are genuinely dependent on the food, but such modifications are rare. Why should a Newfoundlander be arrested for shooting an occasional caribou to feed his family, when a wealthy “sports” hunter can come from outside and take that same animal?
If there is any pattern to all these restrictions, it is that money is constantly directed away from the individual and into the faceless companies, institutions, and government departments that now dominate our lives. If Daniel Boone were alive today, he would be spending his years drifting from one form of incarceration to another.
So, yes, Heinberg is quite right in saying that the localized economy is one of the more practical alternatives to the economic problems that politicians are now stumbling through. But I still think I should get a 10-percent discount on every socially-aware book I buy, since I never read that last chapter, “What We Must Do.” The key sentence is inevitably, “We must encourage our political leaders to . . . .” Unfortunately our political leaders do not respond positively to those who do such “encouraging.” If anything, they are more inclined to lock up such people.
Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is prjgoodchild[at]gmail.com
Occupy Wall Street activists marched over the Brooklyn Bridge last April, demanding change in the healthcare industry.
Inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, a grassroots organization called Strike Debt claims it has bought and abolished over $1 million in medical debt.
The targets of Strike Debt’s Rolling Jubilee campaign were patients who owed around $900 each for emergency room visits in Kentucky and Indiana. On Thursday, the Occupy offshoot said it bought and then forgave more than 1,000 people’s debts for “pennies on the dollar,” according to a press release.
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Their purpose is to call attention to a “predatory” lending system, according to their website. If a hospital is unable to get patients to pay up, it usually sells this debt to a collection agency. And since chances of actually collecting are pretty low at that point, the agency is able to snatch up the debt for a much lower price than the original amount on a patient’s bill. The agency then takes over the job of hounding the debtor for money.
“People are made to suffer twice, first from injury or illness and then financial extortion,” the Rolling Jubilee team stated.
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“It is an industry designed to confuse, overwhelm, and exploit,” they said.
The team has raised more than $500,000 since it launched the campaign last November. The $1 million in debt announced Thursday was funded by $21,000 in donations, CNN Money reports.
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The randomly selected beneficiaries will receive letters in the mail stating that their debt has been forgiven. The patients’ names were not released, to ensure privacy.
But this is just a drop in the bucket. Since many personal bankruptcies in America are connected to medical bills, the group is demanding the cancelation of all the country’s medical debts. They also cite the exorbitant cost of medical school that leaves many doctors in debt at the beginning of their careers. The group claims that this educational debt shunts doctors into lucrative specialties.
Strike Debt is launching a national week of activism. While the main protests are based in New York, solidarity protests will take place in Los Angeles, Baltimore and Baton Rouge, La.
ANONYMOUS – OPERATION AWAKE THE MASSES!
We will no longer tolerate the sleep of the masses!
SHAME ON ALL SOCIAL MEDIA ADMINS, WHO REPORT ANON ACCOUNTS, CENSORING THE MULTITUDE, THAT IS THE NEW REVOLUTION!
TO HAVE NO FEAR
ONE MUST BE WILLING TO HEAR
THE TIME IS NEAR
THE TRUTH WILL PERSEVERE
UNTO THE END
FOR IN THE END THERE IS NAUGHT TO ENDURE!
Monsanto has yet another case pending in the court system, this time before the U.S. Supreme Court on the exclusivity of its genetically modified seed patents. Narrowly at issue is whether Monsanto retains patent rights on soybeans that have been replanted after showing up in generic stocks rather than being sold specifically as seeds, or whether those patent rights are “exhausted” after the initial planting. But more broadly the case also raises implications regarding control of the food supply and the patenting of life – questions that current patent laws are ill-equipped to meaningfully address.
On the specific legal issues, Monsanto is likely to win the case (they almost always do). The extant facts make this a relatively poor platform to serve as a test case of Monsanto’s right to exert such expansive powers. The farmer in this situation had previously purchased Monsanto soybeans for planting (back in 1999), and in this instance bought previously harvested soybeans with the intention of planting them – even spraying Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide on them in the hopes that at least some of the generic stock would be of the so-called “Roundup Ready” variety.
Despite this unfortunate posture, the case does provide another opportunity for critical inquiry regarding the unprecedented and perverse level of control Monsanto is asserting over the food supply. It is estimated that 90 percent of the soybeans in the U.S. are genetically modified and thus subject to potential patents. A random handful of soybeans procured anywhere is likely to contain at least some Monsanto-altered beans. Such a near-monopoly effectively gives Monsanto the right to control access to a staple food item that is found in a wide range of consumer products.
Other variations on this theme include pollen from Monsanto corn (similarly dominant in the U.S. market) pollinating a farmer’s crop, or seeds from Monsanto-engineered grains being distributed by animals, winds, or waterways and commingling with non-GMO plantings. In each case, Monsanto could have a cause of action against an unwitting farmer by claiming patent infringement.
More broadly, and unlikely to be addressed in the instant case, is whether Monsanto (or any other company) should be able to patent seeds – the core of global food supplies, and thus of sustenance for billions of people – in the first place. Activists will decry the fact that Monsanto is patenting life, and this is indeed an Orwellian (or perhaps a Huxleyan) prospect, to be sure. Yet I would submit that Monsanto is actually patenting death, which is potentially even more disconcerting.
Consider that by exerting this level of control over the food supply, Monsanto is rapidly creating a world in which people have to pay fealty to the corporation in order to grow food and/or consume it. In this sense, Monsanto gains enormous power to determine who is allowed to eat – and thus who lives or dies. Consider further that Monsanto’s patents also include technologies in which seeds are sold that cannot propagate themselves, resulting in plants terminating rather than perpetuating, requiring farmers to have to go back to the “company store” in order to replant their fields.
In the case currently before the Court, shades of the latter issue are present, with the question being whether the seeds of the seeds of Monsanto creations retain their exclusive patent rights – possibly in perpetuity. This sort of argument might give us cause to wonder whether an animal (or even a human being, someday?) who consumes these proprietary foods could be implicated in such assertions if they are somehow genetically altered in the process. Perverse slippery slopes aside, the permeation of patentable materials throughout the food chain is by now a clear and present danger.
These are troubling trends indeed. Monsanto wants the right to exert perpetual control, and with it the power to make decisions about who/what lives or dies. In addition to seed patents, their corporate creations include herbicides, pesticides, and biocides that toxify soils and poison waters. Genetically modified foods increasingly dominate the U.S. food supply (and supplies elsewhere, at least where they haven’t been explicitly banned) despite insufficient testing and concerns about their health impacts. The ability of corporations like Monsanto to continue plying such products with little oversight constitutes a de facto consumer beta test on a mass level, the full effects of which may not be known for decades, if ever.
Taking all of this together, it increasingly appears that Monsanto is patenting death, perhaps even more so than life. Their patent rights should not trump the rights of people to procure safe, healthy, living foods. Whatever the result in the Supreme Court case, we should roundly deem Monsanto a loser in the court of public opinion, and strive to loosen their death grip on our food supply.
Randall Amster, JD, PhD, teaches Peace Studies and chairs the Master’s program in Humanities at Prescott College in Arizona. He is the Executive Director of the Peace & Justice Studies Association, and serves as Contributing Editor for New Clear Vision. Among his recent books are Lost in Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness, and the co-edited volume Building Cultures of Peace: Transdisciplinary Voices of Hope and Action.
Monsanto’s Death Grip on Your Food
By Randall Amster, Occupy Monsanto
20 March 13
onsanto’s near-monopoly gives the company the right to control access to a staple food item that is found in a wide range of consumer products.
Monsanto has yet another case pending in the court system, this time before the U.S. Supreme Court on the exclusivity of its genetically modified seed patents. Narrowly at issue is whether Monsanto retains patent rights on soybeans that have been replanted after showing up in generic stocks rather than being sold specifically as seeds, or whether those patent rights are “exhausted” after the initial planting. But more broadly the case also raises implications regarding control of the food supply and the patenting of life – questions that current patent laws are ill-equipped to meaningfully address.
On the specific legal issues, Monsanto is likely to win the case (they almost always do). The extant facts make this a relatively poor platform to serve as a test case of Monsanto’s right to exert such expansive powers. The farmer in this situation had previously purchased Monsanto soybeans for planting (back in 1999), and in this instance bought previously harvested soybeans with the intention of planting them – even spraying Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide on them in the hopes that at least some of the generic stock would be of the so-called “Roundup Ready” variety.
Despite this unfortunate posture, the case does provide another opportunity for critical inquiry regarding the unprecedented and perverse level of control Monsanto is asserting over the food supply. It is estimated that 90 percent of the soybeans in the U.S. are genetically modified and thus subject to potential patents. A random handful of soybeans procured anywhere is likely to contain at least some Monsanto-altered beans. Such a near-monopoly effectively gives Monsanto the right to control access to a staple food item that is found in a wide range of consumer products.
Other variations on this theme include pollen from Monsanto corn (similarly dominant in the U.S. market) pollinating a farmer’s crop, or seeds from Monsanto-engineered grains being distributed by animals, winds, or waterways and commingling with non-GMO plantings. In each case, Monsanto could have a cause of action against an unwitting farmer by claiming patent infringement.
More broadly, and unlikely to be addressed in the instant case, is whether Monsanto (or any other company) should be able to patent seeds – the core of global food supplies, and thus of sustenance for billions of people – in the first place. Activists will decry the fact that Monsanto is patenting life, and this is indeed an Orwellian (or perhaps a Huxleyan) prospect, to be sure. Yet I would submit that Monsanto is actually patenting death, which is potentially even more disconcerting.
Consider that by exerting this level of control over the food supply, Monsanto is rapidly creating a world in which people have to pay fealty to the corporation in order to grow food and/or consume it. In this sense, Monsanto gains enormous power to determine who is allowed to eat – and thus who lives or dies. Consider further that Monsanto’s patents also include technologies in which seeds are sold that cannot propagate themselves, resulting in plants terminating rather than perpetuating, requiring farmers to have to go back to the “company store” in order to replant their fields.
In the case currently before the Court, shades of the latter issue are present, with the question being whether the seeds of the seeds of Monsanto creations retain their exclusive patent rights – possibly in perpetuity. This sort of argument might give us cause to wonder whether an animal (or even a human being, someday?) who consumes these proprietary foods could be implicated in such assertions if they are somehow genetically altered in the process. Perverse slippery slopes aside, the permeation of patentable materials throughout the food chain is by now a clear and present danger.
These are troubling trends indeed. Monsanto wants the right to exert perpetual control, and with it the power to make decisions about who/what lives or dies. In addition to seed patents, their corporate creations include herbicides, pesticides, and biocides that toxify soils and poison waters. Genetically modified foods increasingly dominate the U.S. food supply (and supplies elsewhere, at least where they haven’t been explicitly banned) despite insufficient testing and concerns about their health impacts. The ability of corporations like Monsanto to continue plying such products with little oversight constitutes a de facto consumer beta test on a mass level, the full effects of which may not be known for decades, if ever.
Taking all of this together, it increasingly appears that Monsanto is patenting death, perhaps even more so than life. Their patent rights should not trump the rights of people to procure safe, healthy, living foods. Whatever the result in the Supreme Court case, we should roundly deem Monsanto a loser in the court of public opinion, and strive to loosen their death grip on our food supply
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