Nuts!

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Hmmm, well now, this is interesting.

Peanut Corporation of America—you know, the salmonella guys—has had to close a second plant. 'waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy out there in George W. BushCo's West Texas good ol' boy country.

The other better known plant was in Georgia, and the investigation there is underway.

This is no joking matter.

Six At least eight people are already dead. And these salmonella-laced peanuts/peanut products were knowingly distributed to schools, nursing homes, consumers all over the country.

From the New York Times' article, we learn that Peanut Corporation of America has an interesting location for its corporate headquarters. Lynchburg, Virginia, best known as the hometown of Liberty University and the Jerry Falwell empire.

My, my. That's an intriguing coincidence.

Time to follow the bacteria....and see what vermin turn up.
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On the Street Where They Live....

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Much is made these campaign days of the candidates and their surrogates meeting the public in venues grand and small.

Tonight NBC's Chris Jansing reported on a place none of the candidates have gotten to, yet.

The back of the van that Scott and Kay Bishop live in these days.

In the hyperventilating pace of the campaigns and, if it's possible, the even more hyperbolic realm of the punditocracy which is pushin' pastor and horserace and polls and....

it all really comes down to folks like Scott and Kay Bishop. Who had a modest home, and now don't even have that anymore.

This country is so far in the ditch too many don't even recognize the depth to which we've fallen. Too many are vulnerable and too many are more than happy to prey upon that vulnerability.

Big Oil, Big Pharma, the banking and credit card industries and their wholly owned subsidiaries in Washington on K Street and in the Beltway Bubble media and in the Congress and most notably in the White House. Their greed and avarice is second nature so entrenched they don't even see it.

Permanent tax cuts, anyone? Grandpa Charlie? George Bush? John McCain? Bueller?

Some people call you the rich and powerful, I call you my base....

Not so funny to folks like Scott and Kay Bishop. Not so funny to anyone with an ounce of integrity.

In the hurly-burly of the campaign season, as candidates stage gas tax events by hopping out of their SUV caravans. As an ex-president whose ego seemingly can't stand a younger man of color upstaging him so he's doing "outreach" to rural communities. As the Republican talks gas tax holiday with no clue of the hundreds of thousands of people who'll be frozen out of their jobs on infrastructure... there's been too little time for what's real amid the posturing.

So consider the back of Scott and Kay Bishop's van. And ask yourself, how far away am I from that fate? And then, vote as if your country depended on it. Or, at the least, the very least, as if your neighbor depended on it.

Hungry...for Food, for Truth, for Life

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Google "Haiti hunger riots" as I did this morning and you'll get 165,000 links and counting... we touched on this issue back in January in Let Them Eat Mud Cookies... and then we got distracted again by "larger" world issues...

• the Iraq occupation/fiasco
• the assault on the Constitution, Yoo-hoo, anybody seen my civil liberties lately?
• the political campaign season and the media's best efforts to trivialize it to horserace and gotcha status...which spouse has the corniest jokes, or the most troweled-on cosmetics, or the most money-grubbing ties to Colombia....

When what we should all be doing is paying attention to our world. The media doesn't help. Shiny objects--the latest blonde in distress--get more attention than hunger. It's about ratings and profit centers and who's got the get... and there just is nothing glamorous about a starving nation, now is there? And we don't have to look to Darfur and Africa to find that.

We can look right in our own hemispheric back yard. Where Haitian immigrants fleeing their desperate straits across dangerous waters get turned back while Cubanos are welcomed to South Florida with open arms. Where rightwing ranters fly over on the way to Dominica and its sex tourism trade and juicy cigars.

And the rest of us "fly over" too, turning a deaf ear to the cries for food, for help; a blind eye to the gaunt desperation that drives people to riot, to burn buildings, to attack their neighbors. To foment the seeds of revolution.

We have a Current Occupant who doesn't have a problem with dictators, as long as they're "our" dictators; we have leadership on both sides of the aisle who go along, we have media who hide the truth or slant it for their cronies' convenience and their profit margins.

We are urged to SHOP--Self-absorbed hypnosis on parade.....

Where is our Golden Rule? Our Christian compassion? Our "whatsoever ye do unto the least of my brethren...."? An overarching government policy based on humanitarianism instead of warmongering, unity instead of divisiveness, diplomacy instead of saber-rattling and bombs is good business in the long run.

Starving people without decent jobs do not good consumers make.

This transcends a single program or policy. No matter how much I may care about a single issue, like healthcare, or restoring scientific research, or bringing our troops home, or..... I truly believe we must embrace the "and." Because this year, single issues are more of the same ol' destructive road we've been travelling far too long.

Hunger intersects with economics, and environment, and immigration, and global climate change, and revolutions, and we must look at the big picture we've ignored far too long, no thanks to the slice-n-dice political posturants and the media.

Cooked Goose

Long before there were telecommuting and home offices, there were—and are—American Farm Families. No 40-hour work weeks for them. Instead, a routine of daily chores, animals to be fed, a future to be planned for. Farmers are the ants of the economic biosphere.

The rest of us? Mostly grasshoppers.

Well, gather round, grasshoppers, as we contemplate the benefits of foie gras vs. golden eggs.

Foie gras—that oh-so-elegant and pricey paté for the have-mosts, goose liver to the rest of us—is basically force-fed geese forced to give up their lives for a moment’s rest on the tongues of the one percent crowd.

Don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling a lot like those geese for a few—oh, let’s say seven-plus—years now. Force-fed a steady diet of propaganda packaged as public relations on everything from the food we eat to the way the White House spends our money—profligate son, anyone?

The White House Bush Administration practices a kind of economics most of us at the kitchen table wouldn’t recognize. Laissez-faire. Let the capitalists do what they do without restraint. We don’ need no steenkin’ oversight. Cut the funding and the people [that would be jobs] for sensible regulation and monitoring of the [you fill in the blank] industry. The unseen hand—that would be the one up your skirts—will make sure things work the way they should work.

Tell that to the school districts across the country who are gathering up their beef from Hallmark Meat Packing in California. Or tell yourself, but check your Progresso soup can against the recall list before you do it over lunch.

Watching video of downer cows being scooped up by front end loaders to become part of the food supply, well, makes me contemplate going vegan.

Also pretty much sums up the philosophy of how the Bush Administration thinks about government and how little it thinks of ordinary Americans. Just throw everything into the meat grinder, offal included, and serve it up to the people. Hey, if they’re dumb enough to buy it….

For quick, short-term profits and profiteering and crony capitalism, you can’t do better than the Republicans who have run this economy aground the past seven years.

There’s a better way. Instead of killing the geese that lay the golden eggs, let’s sustain the economy and the country, lay the nest-full for future generations, build a strong, thriving flock that will keep our tummies healthy…and our country, as well.

That takes planning, and candor to the American people, and sensible monitoring of where the food supply and the propaganda supply both are coming from…and, yes, each of us thinking thru what’s being served up for us and separating the foie gras from the golden eggs.

Let Them Eat Mud Cookies

This morning in Prairie Country, the usual parade of honkin’ big Hummers and SUVs bearing one parent-one child were on their way to the school we pass by daily. This being Country, there’s plenty of talk around here about energy costs, and are those out in the western oil patch a getting a fair price for their crude, and should we build a refinery…hey, we have our own state-owned bank and state-owned mill. That’s us, a little bit Red State, a little bit shhhhh “socialist.”

Will there be a surge in gas prices again this spring? Will it hit $4 a gallon? How’s that going to affect the farmers growin’ for biodiesel? Yeah, there’s a whole lotta talk about energy around here.

This day in Haiti, mothers will be making mud cookies to feed themselves to keep from starving. Yes, “cookies” made from dirt, a bit of shortening, and water. Think about that the next time you’re bellyin’ up to the drive-thru lane at McDonalds…or belly-achin’ about the high costs you pay for grapes this time of year, or the cost of gas at the pumps.

The local daily, part of a network of family owned newspapers, published the same story as you’ll find at the link to National Geographic News. Funny thing, though. Apparently they figured we readers couldn’t understand the story without a third of a page photo of the “cookies.” Unfortunately, something had to be cut…and for them it was the section about the impact of Big Oil prices on food in the Caribbean.

So for any readers out there who live in Prairie Country, here’s what you missed:

Food Prices Up

Food prices around the world have spiked because of higher oil prices, needed for fertilizer, irrigation, and transportation. Prices for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat are also up sharply, and the increasing global demand for biofuels is pressuring food markets as well.

The problem is particularly dire in the Caribbean, where island nations depend on imports and food prices are up 40 percent in places. [Credit: Associated Press]

For too long we’ve been led around by a business philosophy that neatly—for themselves—looks at the quick fix, short term profit numbers and ignores the real costs of doing business. And that’s not just about people starving because their food costs are too high because Big Oil is profiteering from their puppet in the White House. Remember, it was George himself who described the “haves and the have-more’s” as his base. He should’ve called ’em the Vampire Capitalists that they are. Sucking the lifeblood from people literally and economically.

These guys are feeding off themselves, though, too. And that’s the bitter pill that will ultimately catch up on all of us unless something changes. While poverty festers around the globe, the fat hogs of Big Oil and the Tweetymedia, which divert attention from reality with American Idol-style tracking of political campaigns, take away from what could be savvy business for the long term.

Bring people up out of poverty, here and abroad, and you create a global population of consumers who can afford to buy your products. Sustain the planet with wise use of resources and innovative technologies, and you can begin to reach out to the stars…literally, not just in nostalgic replays of “one small step for mankind….” Or the latest sequel to Star Trek.

We lost the hemp industry to timber lobbying crying crocodile tears about marijuana menace—a big lie, and now renewable crops/agricultural income are lost. Vast swaths of timber are razed to make paper that crumbles into dust within short years while the air breathes a little harder without the trees’ recirculating power.

The cycle repeats itself now with Big Oil with its grotesque profits and still we subsidize and the President holds hands with the subsidizers of those who have already tumbled our Twin Towers and want to do worse.

At the end of the day, all these issues are interwoven. There is no energy policy without impact on food. There is no trade policy without impact on the pockets of Main Street and no street.

The president’s favorite philosopher said: whatsoever ye do to the least of my brethren. And Do Unto Others. So, how’s that Stewardship of the Planet thing workin’ out?

Yesterday was a disappointing day because John Edwards suspended his presidential bid. But my disappointment is tempered with the fervent hope that the Vampire Capitalists out there—and the politicians and media who harbor them—will have a lot more to fear from John Edwards, the proven champion already, as Paladin fighting poverty than as President sitting in the Oval.