It was three days short of a year since UC Berkeley campus cops evicted Occupy the Farm from their three-week takeover [previously] of the university-owned Gill Tract in nearby Albany when protesters returned to their occupation today.
From vlogger Em Raguso:
Judith Scherr reports for the Oakland Tribune:
Chanting “Whose farm? Our farm!” some 150 people marched from Albany City Hall to a weed-strewn plot of University of California-owned land where they yanked out 3-foot-tall weeds and planted squash and tomato seedlings.
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Protesters want the Gill Tract to become an urban farm, while the university said it uses the land for agricultural research. A development is planned for an area adjacent to the land which has not been agriculturally zoned in decades, university officials have said.
As protesters entered the area Saturday, bringing with them two chickens, three goats and a rabbit, police informed them via bullhorn that they were trespassing and subject to arrest. As of late Saturday afternoon, no arrests had been made.
Three days after UC Berkeley’s new development proposal on the Gill Tract was voted down at the City of Albany’s Planning and Zoning Commission meeting on May 8th, the organizing group Occupy the Farm has again taken a stand for public education and urban agriculture, setting down roots on the hotly contested land.
“People have been fighting to preserve this land for farming for decades, because they recognize that because this is UC land, all residents of the East Bay have a stake and a say in what happens to this public resource,” said Lesley Haddock, a third year student in UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources. “After fifteen years of trying to work through UC’s undemocratic process, public protest is our last option.”
Since 1997, coalitions of local residents, non-profits, and UC students and faculty have brought forth proposals to the UC administration for the creation of a sustainable urban agriculture curriculum on the entire Gill Tract. Administrators consistently rejected these proposals, and have been accused of not giving the proposals due consideration.
“Today we’re planting on the site of the proposed commercial development because we want to remind people what they will lose if a chain store and parking lot get built here,” stated Ashoka Finley, urban farmer and UC alum. “The UC, Albany even, could be on the cutting edge of participatory, community-based urban ag research, and they’re just throwing that opportunity away.”
Building on Occupy the Farm’s action in April-May 2012, today’s protest was focused on community education around food production . Farmers and activists were seen planting vegetables together, watering crops and passing out free plant starts to passers-by. There was a range of educational activities, including a seed-ball making workshop organized by a seven year-old. The young girl stated, “I just wanted to do it at a time when I knew a lot of kids would show up.”
As one of the last large plots of fertile agricultural soil left in the East Bay, the Gill Tract holds great potential for shifting our communities towards self-sufficiency through large-scale urban agriculture education. Occupy the Farm will be working all weekend to turn the south plot of the Gill Tract from an empty lot into an urban farm and community asset.
For more visuals and interviews, see this brief clip from ABC News 7 in San Francisco.
And here’s a report from the Daily Californian on the 14 May 2012 police raid ending the last occupation:
Sometimes two items just seem to go together, especially for a blog that’s devoted some attention to AFRICOM and its links to Pentagon plans to exercise military suzerainty over resources in times to crisis.
First, consider the latest move to bolster AFRICOM, the command spawned by a general who’s since become a private sector agrofuel and security consultant.
From Eric Schmitt of the New York Times:
The United States military is preparing to establish a drone base in northwest Africa so that it can increase surveillance missions on the local affiliate of Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups that American and other Western officials say pose a growing menace to the region.
For now, officials say they envision flying only unarmed surveillance drones from the base, though they have not ruled out conducting missile strikes at some point if the threat worsens.
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A new drone base in northwest Africa would join a constellation of small airstrips in recent years on the continent, including in Ethiopia, for surveillance missions flown by drones or turboprop planes designed to look like civilian aircraft.
In light of the above, consider this question from Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard, in a blog post headlined “Top ten tough questions for Hillary Clinton”:
U.S. military forces are now organized in various regional combatant commands, each under a designated regional “commander-in-chief” or CINC. These regional CINCs have a vast array of military, intelligence, and other assets at their disposal, and the resources they can bring to bear far exceed those of the State Department. For this reason, foreign governments often pay as much or more attention to the CINCs as they do to the U.S. ambassador, for the simple reason that the CinCs can do more for or against them. Here’s my question: if you were an ambitious young person who wanted to make a mark on U.S. foreign policy, why go to a nice four-year college and then join the Foreign Service? Wouldn’t it make more sense to go to West Point, Annapolis, or Colorado Springs and try to become a senior military leader instead?
From Farm Industry News, reporting on the infestation of half of America’s farms by so-called superweeds, plants with genetic resistance to the glyphosate, the weedkiller in Monsanto’s market-dominating Roundup:
The area of U.S. cropland infested with glyphosate-resistant weeds has expanded to 61.2 million acres in 2012, according to a survey conducted by Stratus Agri-Marketing.
Nearly half (49%) of all U.S. farmers interviewed reported that glyphosate-resistant weeds were present on their farm in 2012, up from 34% of farmers in 2011. The survey also indicates that the rate at which glyphosate-resistant weeds are spreading is gaining momentum, increasing 25% in 2011 and 51% in 2012.
The Stratus Glyphosate Resistance Tracking study is conducted annually. It’s now in its third year. In 2012, Stratus completed interviews with nearly 3,000 farmers during the summer and fall.
Here’s a remarkable video from *faircompanies, a Spanish website focused on voluntary simplicity and sustainable living.
It’s the story that might be called Occupy Lakabe, the saga of the occupation of an abandoned village in the hills of Northern Spain that began three decades ago and has blossomed into a exemplary community, showing that a different way of living is not only possible but desirable.
Medieval Spanish ghost town now self-sufficient ecovillage
It’s a utopian fantasy- discover a ghost town and rebuild it in line with your ideals-, but in Spain where there are nearly 3000 abandoned villages (most dating back to the Middle Ages), some big dreamers have spent the past 3 decades doing just that.
There are now a few dozen “ecoaldeas” – ecovillages – in Spain, most buil[t] from the ashes of former Medieval towns. One of the first towns to be rediscovered was a tiny hamlet in the mountains of northern Navarra.
It was rediscovered in 1980 by a group of people living nearby who had lost their goats and “when they found their goats, they found Lakabe”, explains Mauge Cañada, one of the early pioneers in the repopulation of the town.
The new inhabitants were all urbanites with no knowledge of country life so no one expected them to stay long. At first, the homes weren’t habitable so they lived 14 in a large room. Slowly they began to rebuild the homes and the gardens.
When they first began to rebuild, there was no road up to the town so horses were used to carry construction materials up the mountain. There was no electricity either so they lived with candles and oil lamps.
After a few years, they erected a windmill by hand, carrying the iron structure up the hill themselves. “Even though it seems tough and in some ways it was, but you realize you’re not as limited as you think,” says Mauge. “There are a lot of things people think they can’t do without a lot of money and there’s never been money here.”
In the early years, they generated income by selling some of their harvest and working odd jobs like using their newfound construction experience to rebuild roofs outside town. Later they rebuilt the village bakery and sold bread to the outside world.
Their organic sourdough breads now sell so well that today they can get by without looking for work outside town, but it helps that they keep their costs at a minimum as a way of life. “There’s an austerity that’s part of the desire of people who come here,” explains Mauge. “There’s not a desire for consumption to consume. We try to live with what there is.”
Today, the town generates all its own energy with the windmill, solar panels and a water turbine. It also has a wait list of people who’d like to move in, but Mauge says the answer is not for people to join what they have created, but to try to emulate them somewhere else.
“If you set your mind to it and there’s a group of people who want to do it, physically they can do it, economically they can do it. What right now is more difficult is being willing to suffer hardship or difficulties or… these days people have a lot of trouble living in situations of shortage or what is seen as shortage but it isn’t.”
From our own experience going back a few decades, we can say that we lived life at its fullest when we had the least cash and the most friends, all working toward common goals.
Austerity’s getting a bad rap these days, because the term has been coopted by economists to signify the sacrifice of the common good for the sake of private profits.
For Buckminster Fuller the desideratum was synergistic emphemeralization, which he defined as the art of doing more with less. With human communities, the process occurs when we rely more on community and less on commodity, finding the infinite variety of richness that comes from interaction with others in pursuit of common, mutually enriching goals.
So our hat’s off to the people of Lakabe for giving us a glimpse of what’s possible now.
From the Beeb, a very important three-part look into the corporate capture of the food we eat and it’s devastating consequences for our health and well being.
Around the world, obesity levels are rising. More people are now overweight than undernourished. Two thirds of British adults are overweight and one in four of us is classified as obese. In the first of this three-part series, Jacques Peretti traces those responsible for revolutionising our eating habits, to find out how decisions made in America 40 years ago influence the way we eat now.
Peretti travels to America to investigate the story of high-fructose corn syrup. The sweetener was championed in the US in the 1970s by Richard Nixon’s agriculture secretary Earl Butz to make use of the excess corn grown by farmers. Cheaper and sweeter than sugar, it soon found its way into almost all processed foods and soft drinks. HFCS is not only sweeter than sugar, it also interferes with leptin, the hormone that controls appetite, so once you start eating or drinking it, you don’t know when to stop.
Endocrinologist Robert Lustig was one of the first to recognise the dangers of HFCS but his findings were discredited at the time. Meanwhile a US Congress report blamed fat, not sugar, for the disturbing rise in cardio-vascular disease and the food industry responded with ranges of ‘low fat’, ‘heart healthy’ products in which the fat was removed – but the substitute was yet more sugar.
Meanwhile, in 1970s Britain, food manufacturers used advertising campaigns to promote the idea of snacking between meals. Outside the home, fast food chains offered clean, bright premises with tempting burgers cooked and served with a very un-British zeal and efficiency. Twenty years after the arrival of McDonalds, the number of fast food outlets in Britain had quadrupled.
Part 2, the plague of supersizing
The program notes:
Jacques Peretti investigates how the concept of ‘supersizing’ changed our eating habits forever. How did we – once a nation of moderate eaters – start to want more?
Speaking to Mike Donahue, former McDonalds Vice President, Peretti explores the history behind the idea of supersizing. 40 years ago, McDonalds hired David Wallerstein, a former cinema manager who had introduced the idea of selling larger popcorn servings in his Chicago cinema. Wallerstein realised that people would eat more but they didn’t like the idea of appearing gluttonous by going back for seconds. By increasing the portion sizes and the cost, he could sell more food. In 1972, he introduced the idea to McDonalds and their first large fries went on sale.
By the 1980s, we were eating more – and eating more often. Perretti speaks with industry professionals to examine the story behind the introduction of value meals, king-size snacks and multi-buy promotions. How did the advertising industry encourage us to eat more often?
The programme also explores the developments in dietary advice – by 2003, the Chief Medical Officer was warning of an ‘obesity time bomb.’ Peretti speaks to obesity expert Professor Philip James, who made recommendations in his 1996 report that the food industry should cease targeting children in their advertisements. He also speaks with Professor Terry Wilkin, who led a pioneering study into childhood weight gain; and former Labour MP David Hinchliffe, who chaired the 2003 Parliamentary Select Committee on Health.
Part 3, the wizards of marketing
The program notes:
Jacques Peretti examines assumptions about what is and is not healthy. He also looks at how product marketing can seduce consumers into buying supposed ‘healthy foods’ such as muesli and juices, both of which can be high in sugar.
He speaks with Simon Wright, an ‘organic consultant’ for Sainsbury’s in the 1990s, who explains how the food industry cashed in on the public’s concerns around salmonella, BSE and GM crops. By 1999 the organic industry was worth over £605M, a rise of 232% within two years.
How did the mainstream food producers compete? Peretti speaks with Kath Dalmeny, former policy director at the Food Commission, who explains some of the marketing strategies used by mainstream food producers to keep our custom.
The programme also explores the impact of successive government initiatives and health campaigns, such as the proposal of ‘traffic light labelling’, the introduction of which the food industry lobbied hard against.
But in 2012, when we have an Olympic Games sponsored by McDonalds and Coca Cola, has anything changed?
From Bloomberg Businessweek, putting events in a proper 1960′s journalistic perspective, an era when newsrooms were fueled by large intakes of caffeine and nicotine:
Another Reason to Hate Global Warming: Lousy Coffee
The huge influx of corporate cash and a deceptive ad blitz convinced California voters to go against their own interests and defeat Proposition 37, which would’ve required the labeling of food derived from genetically modified organisms.
The gutted news media failed to report on the true scale of deception involved in the campaign, and the source of the paychecks for all those “experts” who appeared in the corporate-sponsored ad blitz. The corporateers won, and handily.
Here in Berkeley, neoliberal Mayor Tom Bates, who rolls over the instant he hears a corporateer’s or a real estate developer’s wallet open, win reelection, but two of his pet measures didn’t.
One, Measure S, was designed to “cleanse” the streets of the homeless, the victims of neoliberalism, by barring them from sitting or lying on the city’s sidewalks. Measure S was defeated by a narrow margin, losing by 1,055 of a total of 33,767 votes cast.
The mayor’s second major proposal, Measure T, would have gutted a citizen-crafted plan for the city’s shoreline region, allowing high-rise development in hopes of attracting “synthetic biology” and other corporate startups spawned by would-be billionaire scientists from the university up the hill.
The measure went down to defeat by 123 votes of a total of 31,611 votes cast.
For complete results from local races, see the Alameda County Registrar of Voters web page and click on “open all categories.”
We’re voting yes on California’s Proposition 37, a ballot initiative that requires labeling foods containing the fruits of genetic modification.
Living in Berkeley, when “bioengineering” reigns supreme at the little college up the street, we’re rather bemused at the millions corporations are spending to defeat the measure, using the classic forms of deception previously employed to convince folks that smoking was equivalent to breathing pure mountain air.
You’d think corporateers would be delighted to have the efforts labeled and acknowledged. But no. They want to conceal their “contributions” to our dietary intake.
So here are two of the many excellent video spots produced by Vote Yes on Prop 37 featuring some very familiar faces:
Trust Us: Vote Yes on Prop 37
Grocery Costs: Vote Yes on Prop 37
Please join us in voting yes. Let’s give the corporateers their due acknowledgment.
And, no, we have no sponsors other than our own peculiar sense of obligation.
A Discovery Channel documentary, posted while undergoing an experiment with the substance in question following a congenial meet with a dear friend, via vlogger Nlsko:
Did you know that beer was critical to the birth of civilization? That’s right. Beer. Scientists and historians line up to tell the amazing, untold story of how beer helped create maths, poetry, pyramids, modern medicine, labor laws and America.
H/T to our perennial source of inspiration, Moussequetaire.
A brilliant and prescient dissection of GATT and NAFTA from 1994 by then-UT Austin Professor of Economics and Latin American Studies Michael Conroy, including impacts on U.S. labor, Mexican corn farmers, and so much more.
Note also that he compares the loss of sovereign state powers created by NAFTA to those implemented by the creation of the European Economic Community.
Note too that he predicts the rise of the Mexican drug cartels, enabled by NAFTA’s facilitation of fast movement of goods across borders.
We were warned.
Part 1:
Part 2:
From the late, lamented, and utterly wonderful Austin public access show, Alternative Views. Lots more on their website, including this previously featured and utterly fascinating conversation with a brilliant journalist on the role played by the Central Intelligence Agency in the Reagan-era collapse of the U.S. savings and loan industry.
Fresh from Gallup, which reports that, since 2007, “Americans in nearly every age group today are more likely to be obese than those same age groups were four years ago. Obesity is up the most among older adults. For example, 14.4% of 84- to 87-year-olds are obese today, up from 12.2% in 2008. Obesity remains most prevalent in middle age.”
Click on the image to enlarge:
Just how much of the impact is due to anxiety and how much to our ongoing exposure to environmental chemicals like BPA remains an open question.
With Proposition 37, the California ballot measure to require labeling of foods, plunging in popularity because of a massive advertising campaign funded by Monsanto, DuPont, and other Big Agra giants, we decided it’s time to offer some support for the measure.
So here’s a documentary from Gary Null:
GMO Ticking Time Bomb – Part 1
GMO Ticking Time Bomb – Part 2
Monsanto has kicked in $7 million to the No on 37 campaign, with DuPont adding another $5 million. Altogether, the No camp has raised $34.6 million, compared to the $5.5 million raised by supporters of the measure.
Lisa Baertlein of Reuters reports on the impact:
An intense advertising blitz, funded by Monsanto Co and others, has eroded support for a California ballot proposal that would require U.S. food makers to disclose when their products contain genetically modified organisms.
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For more than a week, an opposition group funded by Monsanto, PepsiCo Inc and others has dominated television and radio air time with ads portraying the labeling proposal as an arbitrary set of new rules that will spawn frivolous lawsuits and boost food prices, positions disputed by supporters of the proposed new measures.
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Support for the GMO labeling proposal has plummeted to 48.3 percent from 66.9 percent two weeks ago, according to an online survey of 830 likely California voters conducted for the California Business Roundtable and Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy by M4 Strategies.
At the same time, the proportion of respondents likely to vote “no” on the measure – known as Proposition 37 – jumped to 40.2 percent from 22.3 percent two weeks ago, according to the survey results released on Thursday.
From The Real News Network [transcript here], a fascinating discussion between Paul Jay and Timothy A Wise about the role of government ethanol mandates in fueling Third World hunger:
Some background on Wise via TRNN:
Timothy A. Wise is the Research Director of the Global Development and Environment Institute (GDAE), Tufts University, and leads its Globalization and Sustainable Development Program. With a background in international development, he specializes in agricultural policy and rural development. He is involved in ongoing research in the areas of: Sustainable Rural Development, Beyond Agricultural Subsidies, Mexico Under NAFTA, WTO and Global Trade. He is the co-author of the book (in English and Spanish), Confronting Globalization: Economic Integration and Popular Resistance in Mexico, and The Promise and the Perils of Agricultural Trade Liberalization: Lessons from Latin America. He is the former executive director of Grassroots International, a Boston-based international aid organization. He holds a Masters in Public Policy from Tufts’ Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Department.
Al Jazeera has an extended report on Wise’s work here. His report on the impacts of the U.S. ethanol mandate on Mexico is here [PDF].
One of the few items on this year’s ballot we can wholeheartedly endorse is Proposition 37, the California ballot measure requiring labeling of food containing genetically modified organisms.
With that in mind, here’s a plea from Food & Water Watch featuring some familiar faces:
“What makes you think you have the right to know?” asks Danny DeVito in a witty, ironic public service announcement by the political action committee sponsored by consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch in support of Proposition 37. California’s ballot initiative to label genetically engineered foods. A diverse, all-star cast joins DeVito in the “Right to Know” PSA, including Bill Maher, Dave Matthews, Jillian Michaels, Emily Deschanel, John Cho, Glenn Howerton, Kaitlin Olson, KaDee Strickland and Kristin Bauer van Straten.
A very important meeting tonight in Berkeley will confront some of the most important issues of the day, both for folks concerned about the future of the University of California and for the world.
