Obama's message of "Hope" is dead

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Tuesday December 22, 2009 · 6:25 PM PST

2009/12/22 · 18:25

Studs Terkel, the eternally optimistic author of Hope Dies Last was always a champion of the little guy. The health care legislation we can expect from Congress still leaves millions of Americans uninsured, does nothing to lower premiums and certainly does nothing to increase access to health care in under served areas. Studs must be rolling in his grave.

Farmers and other rural residents are severely limited in their access to health care. Rural hospitals and clinics have been taken over by health care corporations, closed or merged, their services outsourced. Small town doctors in private practice are, in many cases, forced by the inherent economics of the insurance bureaucracy, to become part of the corporate system.

jgoodman

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Wednesday September 30, 2009 · 7:28 PM PDT

2009/09/30 · 19:28

Author Michael Pollan is no stranger to controversy. He has broadened the discussion of what we eat, where and how it is grown, big vs. small, organic farming vs. conventional. When he speaks some in the audience will love him, some will not.

Advocates of large scale agriculture see Pollan as the enemy, they believe he stands against everything they see as the future of agriculture. Pollan however is not an absolutist, his basic premise is that people need to think more about their food; where it was grown, how it was grown, was the farmer paid fairly, is it good for you?

Pollan wants people to think about cooking, about food freshness and flavor, about the dinner table as more than a "filling station".

jgoodman

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Sunday September 06, 2009 · 5:22 PM PDT

2009/09/06 · 17:22

Cross posted on LaVida Locavore

Labor Day, to most people, is little more than the end of summer. Labor Day commemorates the labor union movement, the demand for an eight hour work day, better working conditions, fair wages and an end to child labor.

In 1894 Labor Day became a federal holiday celebrated as a "workingman's holiday" on the first Monday of September honoring the contributions of working men and women to America.

While labor unions were organizing in the 1870's, small farmers, through the Grange Movement were trying to break the power of the railroads, the meat packers and the grain milling interests. Mary Elizabeth Lease urged the farmers to "raise less corn and more hell", but farmers could never unite as the labor unions had.

jgoodman

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Tuesday August 18, 2009 · 6:37 PM PDT

2009/08/18 · 18:37

Open town meetings were supposed to be a forum for open, civil discussion between citizens and their elected representatives. The 'deathers', who insist a government run health insurance system could, as IA Senator Charles Grassley says, decide "when to pull the plug on grandma", have forever changed that.

Many of the town hall protesters are justly concerned about their health care coverage; happy with what they have, concerned about costs and fearful of single payer universal health insurance.

Others just wanted Obama to fail.

jgoodman

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Tuesday June 30, 2009 · 6:37 PM PDT

2009/06/30 · 18:37

Farmers often depend on off farm jobs to provide health insurance, if that wasn't an option they could generally afford an individual plan. Farming is one of the most dangerous occupations in America, heavy machinery, large animals, long hours in the sun, chemicals and that always present independent streak that keeps us from seeing the doctor when we should. Still, we need insurance.

Most jobs are cutting insurance benefits, if the jobs are still there. Individual plans for farmers are expensive with high deductibles since our work is dangerous, we probably have pre-existing conditions and we are nearing an average age of 58 years.

The Center for Rural Affairs in Nebraska notes that rural residents are twice as likely to be uninsured as urban Americans while farmers and ranchers are four times as likely to be "underinsured", covered by insurance with reduced benefits and a high deductibles.

jgoodman

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Monday March 16, 2009 · 7:15 PM PDT

2009/03/16 · 19:15

cross posted on LaVida Locavore

The name Immokalee Florida has come up many times, just another place where migrant workers were paid low wages for doing work, very hard work, that "Americans won't do". I farm, so hard physical work has never bothered me, and I know the work migrant laborers do is hard, never ending and it is done for very low pay. It all goes to the society we live in and the economy that makes it possible.

jgoodman

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Monday January 26, 2009 · 7:11 PM PST

2009/01/26 · 19:11

My family has been farming the same land since 1848, when the potato famine drove them out of Ireland. Over the past 160 years there have been good times and bad, times of prosperity and wars that farmers did well by (armies move on their stomachs) if they weren't drafted. There were floods, droughts, recessions, depressions and green revolutions.

My dad had lots of stories about farming through the great depression, people loosing their land, hobos walking the roads, farmers sending sheep to the Chicago Stockyards and getting a bill because the sale of the sheep didn't even cover the rail shipping.

jgoodman

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Friday January 02, 2009 · 7:41 PM PST

2009/01/02 · 19:41

With the arrival of 2009, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) notes nearly a billion people a day go hungry worldwide. While India supplies Switzerland with 80% of its wheat, 350 million Indians are food-insecure. Rice prices have nearly tripled since early 2007 because, according to The International Rice Research Institute, rice-growing land is being lost to industrialization, urbanization and shifts to grain crops for animal feed.

jgoodman

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Wednesday November 26, 2008 · 7:29 PM PST

2008/11/26 · 19:29

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, while we eat, hopefully, we will be thinking about the food, where it comes from, who produces it and at what cost.

Food Is Different: Why the WTO Should Get Out of Agriculture, a great book by Peter Rosset a book everyone who cares about food should read.

The dedication of the book is to Lee Kyung Hae, a Korean farmer who took his life in protest against the WTO on September 16, 2003 at the farmers protest march in Cancun Mexico. He is pictured on the cover, atop the barricades that separated the marchers from the trade negotiations. Free Trade, opposed by the small farmers of Korea and the rest of the world because it meant an end to their way of life, sacrificed to corporate domination.

jgoodman

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Sunday November 23, 2008 · 5:51 PM PST

2008/11/23 · 17:51

After reading A Hungry Thanksgiving for Many Americans by OrangeClouds115 http://www.dailykos.com/... I started thinking that in spite of the fact that many will be going hungry on Thanksgiving (like every other day) how may of us who will be eating, will be getting exposed to unsafe food (like every other day) ? We are told we have the safest food supply in the world. Do we really? I suppose it depends on the comparison. Somalia? Kenya ? In developing countries close to 2 million children die every year from contaminated food and water. So I guess we can say we have a safer food system than theirs, wow! How do we fare compared to other industrialized countries?

jgoodman

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Monday October 27, 2008 · 5:48 PM PDT

2008/10/27 · 17:48

Cross posted on La Vida Locavore

John McCain and Barack Obama need to answer some serious questions. In a year marked by a world wide food crisis, melamine tainted food, energy shortages, climate change and an international credit crisis, we are not lacking for problems needing a solution. Personally I think agriculture should be a prominent issue in every political media event and in every discussion. As always the attention is instead focused on meaningless issues, like Bill Ayers and Sarah Palin's wardrobe. Damn it, get a life!

Candidates are seldom pressed for answers or details on their promises. A couple of examples, Obama promises health care for everyone, close to 50 million Americans without health insurance, and folks like me, I have insurance, but a $10,000 deductible doesn't really make for much of an insurance policy, will my coverage will be the same as his ?

jgoodman

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Tuesday October 14, 2008 · 7:19 PM PDT

2008/10/14 · 19:19

Cross posted on La Vida Locavore

So, how many people know that October 16th is World Food Day (WFD) and how many people know what WFD is and how many people care?

I'm guessing not many could answer yes to any of the above questions. WFD is observed on October 16th, the day the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations was founded in 1945. WFD is observed in hopes of raising awareness of the issues that cause poverty and hunger. "World Food Security: The Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy", has been chosen as this years theme. Thats a timely theme, and overall, WFD is a good idea, but I'm guessing more people are probably aware of Super Bowl Sunday than WFD. Which one is more important?.

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Obama's message of "Hope" is dead

Why are (some) farmers afraid of Michael Pollan?

Why Honor Organized Labor?

'Deathers' One, Obama Zero

The Health Insurance Industry Doesn't Deserve Our Trust

Worker injustice in Immokalee

Hard Times in Rural America

A REAL "Change we can believe in" Dumping Industrial Agriculture

Food Is Different

Some Will go Hungry, Others Will Get Sick

Obama is good, but---

World Food Day is a sad observance, it could be a celebration