Why Organics?

When I first heard about the recently announced Stanford University study on organic food which stated that organic food was no healthier than conventionally grown food I was duly skeptical. Then I learned from lefty websites that pesticide residues were not included in the term healthier, as if ingesting known carcinogens was no big deal. Next was the revelation that the study was funded by agribusiness and further that a primary researcher listed on Stanford’s website has a long history of being paid by the tobacco industry to cast doubt on tobacco’s dangers; in other words, the study was ultimate bullshit.

Before I learned of the agribusiness connection to the study a friend had posted the Stanford article on Facebook – It was an aha! I told you so posting. When I pointed out the nefarious connections to him he went on railing about how it was science and it didn’t matter who funded it. In the summary put out by the researchers they disingenuously state they received no outside funding for the study, conveniently omitting that the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford which did the study receives millions from Cargill and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has been pushing GM crops very hard.

In this case it was a meta-analysis of about 300 other studies, so if you have an agenda and Cargill is paying your salary, you look for studies that reinforce your objective. So, yes it does matter.

The study concluded that organic was no healthier based solely on nutrition content, largely dismissing the effect of ingesting pesticides, so let’s deal with that first. That fact organic food is no more nutritional is not surprising since you don’t even need soil, organic or otherwise to grow healthy plants. You can, for instance, get just as high off of dope grown hydroponically as in soil. All you need in that case is a neutral medium for the roots to take hold in, artificial light and chemical nutrients.

The same is true of Genetically Engineered foods; that is, there’s no discernable difference in nutrient content between GE and conventional crops, which is probably why the FDA insists that there’s no reason for labeling, let alone concern. Their lack of concern might also stem from the revolving door between the FDA and Monsanto. In the latest affront to health and reason, Obama recently appointed a former Monsanto exec to an important post at FDA. But of course as my friend would argue, it’s all science; that Monsanto flack can be totally trusted to be fair and impartial when regulating the use of Monsanto’s agrichemicals and certification of its GMO crops. Of course.

From the study summary; “ (the researchers) did not find strong evidence that organic foods are more nutritious or carry fewer health risks than conventional alternatives, though consumption of organic foods can reduce the risk of pesticide exposure.” (my emphasis) and “There were no long-term studies of health outcomes of people consuming organic versus conventionally produced food; the duration of the studies involving human subjects ranged from two days to two years.” So, to recap, no fewer health risks from organics even though they do involve less pesticide exposure, and no long term studies of health risks that might actually shed light on the effects of exposure to same.

And finally, “The review yielded scant evidence that conventional foods posed greater health risks than organic products. While researchers found that organic produce had a 30 percent lower risk of pesticide contamination than conventional fruits and vegetables, organic foods are not necessarily 100 percent free of pesticides. What’s more, as the researchers noted, the pesticide levels of all foods generally fell within the allowable safety limits. Two studies of children consuming organic and conventional diets did find lower levels of pesticide residues in the urine of children on organic diets, though the significance of these findings on child health is unclear. Additionally, organic chicken and pork appeared to reduce exposure to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but the clinical significance of this is also unclear.”

So, all the benefits of ingesting fewer toxic pesticides and fewer antibiotic-resistant bacteria are unclear, even the fact that children – who are much more sensitive to toxins –

fed organics had less pesticides in their systems didn’t seem important to the researchers because “they all generally fell within allowable limits” (my emphasis). Limits set by who? FDA, staffed by ex-Monsanto execs, of course. They generally fell within allowable limits, but evidently not always. Nonetheless, even though the researchers admit, somewhat grudgingly, that organics contain less of things we know are bad for us, they can still clearly state and publish to the world a study that says organics are no healthier than conventionally grown food.

So now it’s my turn to be clear. There is no totally safe level of pesticide exposure. There is no magic line between safe and unsafe. Ingesting smaller amounts reduces the probability of getting cancer, but the possibility is always there. Let me expand and illustrate from an experience in my past. In the nineties I participated in a citizens advisory committee for Portland’s sewage treatment plant. At one point the handling of hazardous materials came up for discussion. One of the hazardous materials the plant dealt with was chlorine. Sounds a bit odd, doesn’t it. Chlorine is part of the salt we use to flavor our food, we swim in it in public pools, it routinely is used to kill bacteria in our water, but still, when dealing with train car loads of it it’s classified as a hazardous material.

As part of the sewage treatment process, chlorine is added to the effluent to kill bacteria, but then before the cleansed water can be returned to the environment the chlorine has to be removed. So I asked if there was another way to kill bacteria without using chlorine. Yes, responded the plant manager, it can be microwaved, but it costs a lot more… think of the extra burden on the ratepayer, he emphasizes. Then another committee member said, Hey, it carries only a one in a million chance of giving you cancer, what’s the big deal? Only one in a million, I retorted, but then add all the other toxins in our water, in our air and in our food and give cancer a couple of decades to take hold and the easy to scoff at one in a million becomes a frightening one in seven.

At that point some people will respond saying, Well you have die sometime anyway, so again, what’s the big deal? It is a big deal; there’s a world of difference between dying of old age with a few assorted ailments and dying of cancer which comes with an extended period of pain and suffering (not to mention a great expense in America).

The other reason why organics are safer is the absence of GMOs. Every study I’ve heard about showed devastating consequences to animals who were fed them. Almost all of those studies have been suppressed, but one, about 10 years ago, did manage to break through the corporate news blockade. That was the study done on Monarch butterflies. Monarchs eat only milkweed. Researchers dusted milkweed with GM corn pollen. Within a reasonably short time half the butterflies died, while the other half suffered terrible stomach problems. The control group which ate milkweed dusted with conventional corn pollen were unaffected.

Yet the FDA insists there’s no difference between GM corn and conventional. That may be true when thinking only of nutritional value, but clearly there’s something else happening here if GE corn kills butterflies. One important theme in the corporate news articles was that Monarchs don’t eat corn so there was no reason to worry. Monarchs don’t eat corn but people do. GE corn includes genes from Bacillus thuringiensis a natural pesticide and one, in fact, used by organic farmers. One of the comments which my skeptical friend made in defense of pesticides was that they are water based so don’t remain on the crops. Great, but when the toxin is part of the corn there is no escape.

It’s possible that one species can remain unaffected by a certain substance while another is ruined but before a whole nation was experimented on there ought to have been real studies done. There has been a strong spike in asthma, certain cancers and other maladies in the past decade or so that coincides with the introduction of GM foods. And once again, these things may well take 20 to 30 years to show up in most people so the worst is yet to come. One interesting and frightening aspect of GE crops is they seem to have a much stronger will to live and propagate then natural crops. In one experiment on spinach where both GE and conventional were grown in close proximity, 95% of the next generation showed GE traits. In North Dakota which is heavily planted in GE rapeseed, which produces canola oil, the roadsides are lined with wild rapeseed, almost all of which is GE.  

Besides the impact on the individual consumer of conventional industrial agriculture, one must also think of the effect that type of food production has on the people involved in the process as well as the world as a whole. Researchers at Stanford can discount pesticide exposure to you and me but farmworkers suffer disproportionally.

Something like 80% of all antibiotic use in America is in industrial meat factories. Routine use of antibiotics in raising chickens and pigs has led to America’s rivers being contaminated with them. With so much antibiotics in both food and water, untreatable strains of bacteria have developed leaving many people without treatment possibilities. Many Americans drink treated river water, but there is no easy way to remove antibiotics, pesticides or chemical fertilizer runoff from that water.

Typical pig factories produce as much shit as a city of 100,000 people. It is left in large lagoons which smell so bad, it’s difficult for people to live within miles of them. They also sometimes leach into ground water or overflow into rivers. This is another case of industry externalizing costs. Yes, you get cheap ‘nutritious’ meat, but the true costs of that industrial process are born by society at large and by individuals whose bacterial infections, for instance, are no longer treatable with antibiotics. It would work as fertilizer but there’s so much of it in a small area and it’s so expensive to deal with, relative to application of chemical fertilizer, they just leave it to stink up the neighborhood.

Industrial agriculture produces ‘nutritious’ crops but the soil is rendered lifeless in the process. For instance, I’ve become a plant collector here in Cambodia where all those things referred to as house plants in the states grow outdoors here. I have hundreds of plants, most growing in pots. Several times I’ve purchased a plant that looked very good only to have it subsequently refuse to grow or start looking pale and unhappy, at which time I give it extra manure and compost to try to revive it. I grow only organically except for a water based pesticide I use to kill red ants which are an unholy pest, which I haven’t figured out how to get rid of otherwise; I would try a pepper spray if I could find it here. At a certain point I decide I have to repot it to try to give it a better lease on life. What I find is soil that is so thick and muddy the roots couldn’t penetrate. Some plants can grow in that type of soil, most can’t. The chemical fertilizer they applied made them look good in spite of the very poor quality of the soil.

In America some 25 to 30% of greenhouse gases are produced from industrial agriculture, which includes manufacture and application of petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers, the giant machines used to plow, plant, cultivate and harvest, and the long distance shipping of produce. Once again the true costs are externalized. Cheap food now, a boiling planet later.

Finally, industrial agriculture, being based on fossil fuels, is simply not sustainable. No matter how much oil is found in the Arctic or under 5 miles of water out at sea, it’s a finite resource. We’re past peak oil, which means we’ve already used up half of the total resource. The first half was the easy-to-get-to cheap oil, we’re now beginning the expensive half. Much before we run out, it’ll become devilishly expensive, but the bottom line is it’s a finite resource and we will run out. When that happens, there will be only one alternative, we will revert to farming organically, the way it was done for all the millennia since the beginning of agriculture until the late 1940’s. That being the case, it would behoove us, if we were intelligent enough to understand where the world is going, to switch now. Waiting until the last drop of oil is consumed to change to organic will result in mass hunger since it will take years of applying organics to the soil for it to regain its former natural fertility.

Not only that but to save ourselves we’d need to develop systems for the gathering and processing of every possible bit of vegetable, animal and human waste to add to the soil. That is also something that cannot be done overnight. Today organic farms are just as productive as conventional ones. Organic farmers have access to large amounts of organic material today because that sector is so small compared to the whole picture. When conventional farming is no longer an option there will be a mad rush for organic material to enrich the soil.

The Stanford study pointed out that 30% of conventional produce tested contained pesticide residues and even 7% of organic did also. The later is a testament to the pervasiveness of pesticides in the environment, since a farm cannot be certified organic until three years after the last chemicals were applied.

Personally I’d love to be able to eat strictly organically, but it’s very difficult in this world to be fanatic about it. If I were living in America with the income some of my friends enjoy, I’d eat about 80% to 90% organic. Achieving 100% would practically preclude eating out, since organic restaurants are extremely rare and very expensive. When visiting the states in the past – I haven’t lived there in 11 years – I’d be on a limited income so I’d buy organic occasionally whenever the price seemed reasonable; maybe making up 10% to 20% of my purchases. Every little bit helps; every time you choose organics, you’re improving you’re chances for a long and healthy life.

Here in Cambodia it’s sometimes easier to eat clean, sometimes harder. Many Cambodian farmers use pesticides but have no idea what the proper dose is because all the labels are in foreign languages. On the other hand, last time I went to the public market to buy veggies I spied a worm on a green vegetable I was looking to buy. The woman who owns the market stall was taken aback… eeew… when I showed it to her but I was happy to see it and purposely bought that stalk… evidently no pesticides on that one. Cambo cows eat grass, real cow food, not GM corn. There are no pig or chicken factories here where living conditions for the animals is so bad they have to be fed massive doses of antibiotics just to keep them alive.

Packaged food in Cambo comes from all over the world. At various times I’ve seen breakfast cereal from France, Germany, New Zealand, Argentina and Egypt as well as the US. Occasionally, there’ll be organic cereal from Germany or France at a reasonable price. The Egyptian brand says GMO free, so I buy that. Needless to say, I almost never buy packaged food from the US, since anything produced there that contains corn, soy or canola also contains GMOs; though I can’t resist an American candy bar on a rare occasion. Once in a while other organic foods will appear; if I’ve got the money in my pocket, I’ll take it. There are no specialty food shops in my small town. There are some in the capital but they are few and far between and have very limited offerings.

They are beginning to learn about organics here and many farmers are being taught the necessary skills, so I expect it will be easier to eat organic in the future. Meanwhile, I think it’s worse to be fanatic than eat what’s available, as long as you remain conscious of what you’re doing. Without any recourse to science, my feeling is if you try to eat healthy – lots of fruit and veggies – and choose organic whenever you can, get proper exercise to stay fit, avoid pharmaceuticals whenever possible and use recreational drugs and alcohol in moderation to counter life’s stresses, then you’ve got reasonable chance of beating the odds. After all, some people smoke tobacco all their lives and don’t get cancer.

That won’t work for everybody. Some are doomed no matter what they do: they’re predisposed in their genes or at a young age carcinogens were introduced into their bodies and had taken hold. Still, living right will make the challenges they face easier to handle. Some years ago I visited a friend in his mid-sixties who had recently had a mild heart attack. He had made a serious adjustment in his eating habits. When cooking chicken for dinner, he removed the skin and explained how he absolutely minimized animal fats in his diet. I asked him what his previous cholesterol level was, he said 340 which is almost twice safe levels. With his changed diet, he had another good ten years.

If, alternatively, you are stubborn and have to have your bacon and eggs for breakfast every day in spite of being a old coot and knowing (or being in denial) that you are eating a cholesterol bomb which might eventually have dire consequences, and at the same time you reject the lettuce on your plate thinking it’s only there for decoration, not for actually eating, then you are testing the gods and you might well fail the test. If you think life is not worth living without your daily triple-cheese-bacon-burger or the equivalent, then stop and think what life would be like confined to a wheelchair because one side of your body has been paralyzed from a stroke or heart attack.

Maybe some of you are familiar with Ram Dass. Previously, as Richard Alpert, he was one of the original Harvard acid heads. After blowing his mind, he discovered Hinduism, found a guru and not long later became a guru himself. He wrote a book back in the sixties called Be Here Now which had a profound effect on my life. Be here now, be where you’re at, whatever you’re doing, do it right. In the early 2000s I saw him speak not long after he had had a stroke which paralyzed half his body and confined him to a wheelchair. Though he was a brilliant speaker, it was difficult listening to him because it sometimes took him a long time to formulate and voice the ideas in his head. He spoke of how being a respected guru and spiritual teacher he thought he was above mundane concerns over diet and lifestyle. He learned the hard way that nobody is. You don’t have to be fanatic or absolutist about what you eat, but you are wise to be smart.

Ponder spending the last ten or twenty years of your life in a debilitated, dependent state stuck in a wheelchair or dying a horrible death from cancer and hopefully that’ll inspire you to buy organic whenever you can afford it and eat your damn veggies!

  

Euro Voters Reject Austerity

Voters in Greece, France and even in local elections in Germany rejected enforced austerity in recent polls. French voters narrowly elected the Socialist Francois Hollande on a platform demanding renegotiation of austerity measures demanded by the European Union. Taxes are already high in France so he’ll have his work cut out for him raising taxes enough to make a difference. At least if he can put people to work the country won’t dive deeper into debt and deficit.

In Greece the two main pro-austerity parties, who between themselves have governed the country for the last 40 years, together received less than 32% of the vote. The anti’s however, divided between the far left and right, will probably not be able to agree amongst each other to form a government so new elections are likely soon. But that means they won’t be eligible for additional bailout money and will likely default, though since they’ve already forced creditors to take substantial haircuts, to all intents and purposes they’re already in default. It’s no more than a pretense to think otherwise.

If they knuckle under and accept IMF and ECB austerity - the leftist candidate called those international bodies loan sharks - there’ll be 5 to 10 years of economic pain. If they default, they’re basically facing the same 5 to 10 years of wrenching changes and economic dislocations, but at least their pain won’t be for the benefit of the banksters and 1%.

The one percent’s mania for austerity for everybody but themselves is diving economies ever deeper into recession. If people aren’t working they aren’t paying taxes but are requiring government help for survival. Cutting is the wrong thing to do when a country is in recession, however, if a country runs big deficits in good times there’s no leeway for additional spending during downturns. As mentioned previously, the half of Keynesianism that governments have conveniently overlooked is the need to build surpluses during boom times. It’s too easy to prop up economies and make everything look good by spending money you don’t have. It’s too easy to think you can rely on growth or inflation or something to come along in the future to make the debt easy to manage, because as we are seeing it doesn’t always work that way.

 In any case, almost everybody is missing the point. Last year greenhouse gas emissions grew faster than ever before. Just imagine what would’ve happened if many parts of the world were not in recession and there was no effort whatever to curb emissions. Those record emissions might’ve been doubled. So while my heart goes out to those developed world people in America and Europe who are jobless and suffering, I have to say to those same people, Thank you for being poor and not being able to consume.

What’s needed is a new paradigm where slackers are tolerated if not appreciated and those who live simply by choice are honored; where growth is reserved strictly for non-material plane efforts: knowledge, intellect, beauty and spirituality. The tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is promoting a Gross Happiness Index in place of Gross National Product which includes everything that is bad for us as well as good… every time an auto accident causes personal or property damage, it gets added to GNP. You want to help the economy? Get cancer.

We have to retrench. If somebody really doesn’t want to work (and so much of what’s classified as work today is so demeaning and undesirable, who can blame them) why not give them the minimum for survival and thank them for not consuming. Nixon had the right idea with his guaranteed annual income, which, if I remember correctly was pegged at $4000 per year. With a little casual work on the side, that’d be enough (in today’s dollars) to live a simple but decent life. We also need to take France’s lead and shorten the work week along with encouraging deflation to make life cheaper. It’s already happened in the housing market. It’s now much more possible for an average person with a job to afford a home.

Shortening the work week has the added great advantage of tremendously reducing rush hour traffic. Some people would work shorter hours five days a week, others would work a day less. Either way, all transportation systems would have much lighter burdens. Now most people are forced by the eight hour day to come and go at the same time. Shortening the work week would also give people the time to get involved in society and community, not to mention family, self -improvement and pleasure.

The way to deflate the economy is to tax the rich, really tax them, tax the shit out of them. Nothing good comes from the wealthy having too much money. If they have less money to throw around, prices would be forced down. This is especially true in places like New York which are magnets for vast wealth. If people can no longer afford sky high prices for purchasing or renting housing, then their prices will go down, and all real estate prices will follow, benefiting everybody (but the landed wealthy) in the long run.

The current system is top heavy. BBC interviewed a bankster asshole a while back who kept repeating how important the financial community was to the UK and predicting doom and disaster if a small stock transaction tax were imposed. He conveniently ignored the hundreds of billions of dollars the banksters cost the people in bailouts. A majority of people in a UK survey working for the banks said they were there strictly for the money and that they didn’t think they deserved to earn as much as they did. With so many people in finance earning upwards of half million a year, they’ve turned once middle class London neighborhoods into enclaves where only the upper classes can afford to live and by extension have raised the cost of housing for everybody in the city.

The other major change that needs to happen to save the world is to tax advertising, exempting only small businesses. I’m convinced that marketing is the root of all evil, not money. Money, after all, can do good things, while the sole purpose of marketing is to convince people to buy things they might not need or are possibly bad for them. Even if what they are encouraged to purchase through adverts isn’t necessarily bad, the act of consuming is going to consume our planet and people need to be encouraged to hold back, to not indulge, to buy only what they really need. The present path is not sustainable, let alone healthy.

Admittedly I’m way out of synch with prevailing philosophy (it’s not the first time). The idea of applauding slackers and promoting deflation and reduction in place of growth is about as likely in the present political climate as encouraging pedophilia and welcoming pollution-caused cancers, nonetheless that’s where the world needs to go. That it can’t possibly go that way is a sad commentary on the state of our only planet and its inevitable downward slide into catastrophe.  

It Doesn’t Compute

April is supposed to be the height of hot dry season here in Cambodia. The sun is now directly overhead and most years there’ll be few clouds and no rain for months around this time or it may rain once or twice between January and May. This year we’ve had clouds nearly every day with occasional rains which have been very heavy at times. The rain cools things off a bit, otherwise it’d be in the mid to upper 90’s with humidity up around 50% - super sweaty weather for sure. The rain also relieves me of having to water my plants which now takes about an hour every other day.

Last month America experienced an unprecedented late spring heat wave in which not only about fifteen thousand high temperature records were broken but they were surpassed by 20 and 30ºF  margins, even in one case 40ºF - equivalent to 22º C. In many cases overnight lows were higher than the previous record highs.  

And yet, mention of global warming by America’s politicians is either off limits, for those who you believe still have a brain left, or derided as a monstrous hoax by the idiot/lying class of conservative politicos. Besides it’d be too much trouble to actually do anything about it so we’re just going to keep drilling baby drilling. That’s the ‘practical’ option; after all, think about all those windmills and solar panel arrays and geothermal sites that would have to be developed as an alternative. Or how about the great inconvenience to all those people who’d have to conserve energy by turning off lights they aren’t using. No, as long as there’s a drop of oil or cubic meter of gas in the ground, it’s easier and simpler to stay on our present path.

But it’s kind of depressing just the same to think there are no good options on the table, none that would change the present trajectory to destruction. Bill McKibben, leading climate campaigner, has stated unequivocally that full development of the Canadian tar sands spells certain doom since it’s the dirtiest oil on the planet requiring a lot of energy for processing. The Keystone XL (for extra large) pipeline that’s supposedly essential to the exploitation of that oil is planned to bring the oil to the Gulf coast strictly for export, it’s not even for America’s use. Routing the pipeline across Canada to the Pacific Ocean is possible but it would be much more expensive going over the Rockies, besides the people on that route decidedly don’t want it. The Alberta tar sands don’t produce crude oil, rather a thick tar like substance called bitumen. It is highly corrosive to pipelines and a section operating in Michigan has experienced twice as many leaks as a typical crude pipeline.

An oil platform in the North Sea has recently had a gas blowout and copious amounts are now bubbling to the surface. There’s now a two kilometer exclusion zone for ships, four for airplanes and six for any kind of drilling work, otherwise an explosion of magnificent proportions is possible. It could be six months before the leak can be plugged. The methane that is leaking has 20 times the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide.

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is now big business in many parts of the US. In addition to large quantities of methane leaking out when fracking is used to bring oil up from layers of shale, it also causes earthquakes, permanent contamination of groundwater and results in large quantities of toxic liquid waste to be disposed of. The toxic chemicals used in the process are trade secrets so the people are not allowed to know what their environment is being poisoned with. Typical of America where the corporations own the government, but how do the people who run those corpses live with themselves, how do they sleep at night knowing the havoc they are wreaking on the environment?

Now that global warming has reduced summer sea ice, the Arctic is now open for exploration. There couldn’t be a more difficult or more dangerous place on the planet to experience a blowout. If one happened in winter with the sea covered in thick ice,  temperatures of minus 40 or 50 degrees and darkness all the time, drillers would just have to wait until the next summer to even begin to tackle it. By then the ocean could well be beyond repair.

Meanwhile with the developed world in the economic doldrums, demand for fossil fuels there is not growing much, but here where I am in Asia growth is very fast. Cambodia which is growing at 7% is typical of this area. At that rate an economy doubles in 10 years and since we are starting from such a low point, electricity demand is growing 25% per year. India and China, which combined have nearly a quarter of the world’s population, are growing even faster at 8 or 9%. China is adding to it’s wind and solar power production very quickly but at the same time is still adding the equivalent of a 1 megawatt coal powered plant every week. They’re also buying cars like crazy and why not? Isn’t everybody supposed to be rich, to be able to live like Americans?.

It doesn’t compute, the numbers don’t add up, the world cannot continue on its present path. And yet it will, until it can no longer, because the voices of reason are overwhelmed by the quest for profit.

On another note, America’s political left will once again yearn for a presidential candidate who not only represents their own views, but the people at large. After all, it isn’t just people who call themselves Democrats who want a single payer, Medicare for all, health care system, it’s desired by 2/3rds of the population. It isn’t just Democrats who want taxes raised on the wealthy before Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are cut, it’s a large majority of all Americans. It isn’t only radical socialists who want to eliminate subsidies for the big oil companies, the world’s most profitable corporations, it’s the people at large. It can’t happen because of the obscene power of the corporations and because the Dumbocrats who’re supposed to represent progressive policies are feckless crybaby wimps, gutless wonders who have no fight in them.

The Senate recently held a vote to eliminate big oil subsidies, the Repugs said we’ll filibuster, the Dumbos said, Okay great, we give up. Instead why not say, Okay great, go ahead and filibuster, go ahead and spend a week or two or more explaining to the people of America why it’s so important to subsidize the oil companies while you, the masses, face budget cutbacks in all the programs you so greatly depend on for your quality of life.

But I’ve said it all before and I’m having a difficult writing lately because it seems so hopeless. I greatly admire those political, social, environmental campaigners who never give up, who keep pounding at the truth to try to break through the fog of corporate media and hegemony but I find it hard to maintain any faith that any of it will make a difference.

Still I’m heartened by the people’s response to the one percent’s harsh prescriptions on the lives of the rest of us. In Greece, for instance, jobless, homeless people are taking over and squatting in unused public buildings, with many also being used as community space. Some 70 buildings have been converted in Athens. Crises bring adaptability and change, or at least the opportunity for such. FDR took that opportunity and ran with it, to the great benefit of the people at large and the great frustration of the 1% who are still livid after all these years about Social Security, for instance, and the way it keeps millions of seniors out of poverty or at least off the streets.

Obama’s good at talking the talk, but he walks, along with the Congress, with the banksters. He just signed into law the JOBS act. The acronym stands for Jumpstart Our Startup Businesses. It aids startup businesses by exempting them from normal accounting rules and reporting. According to Matt Taibbi, one of the best investigative reporters of the financial scene who writes for Rolling Stone magazine, who coined the giant vampire squid moniker for Goldman Sachs, it’s basically a license to commit fraud. So after financial shenanigans brought down the world economy, the president and congress are eagerly facilitating further fraud.

Meanwhile the Repugs have given Obama a great electoral gift by waging a war on contraception in particular and women’s health in general. Thanks to sanctimonious Rick Santorum who believes that sex should only be for procreation and blubberhead Rush Limbaugh who called a young woman a slut because she advocated for contraception health coverage, Obama now has a 20% lead amongst women. There’s always been a political gender gap in America with men typically voting Repuglican while women vote Dumbocrat, but before the recent conservative tirades against women the gap was a few percentage points. With the manic Repug quest for ideological 19th century purity, Obama is way out in front.

I guess it’s a good idea that the Repugs are shooting themselves in the feet. Though I couldn’t personally bring myself to vote for Obama it’d be good if he gets to appoint supreme court justices and as I’ve mentioned previously he’s a good ambassador to the world even if he’s a mediocre president for the American people.