This week’s recall of thousands of salmonella-tainted eggs is proof that the media is anything but a watchdog.

Two years ago, in the film “Food, Inc”, Eric Schlosser, author of “Fast Food Nation”, and Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, were featured by director Robert Kenner in a brutal expose of the deleterious practices of the food industry.

In one of the most disturbing segments of the film we see chickens crammed together in cages, hardly able to move, their feces dropping through the wire floor into spaces rarely cleaned. The buildings holding the chickens are hundreds of feet long, lit day and night, and dead birds are left to rot for days before anyone comes by to check on things.

Two years after a documentary vividly laid out the facts about industrial farming, the mainstream media is finally forced to report them because its practices have made large numbers of people sick – not to mention the money being lost by those having to recall their eggs.

This morning, a week after the recall of thousands of salmonella tainted eggs, CNN finally turned to Eric Schlosser and Dr. John Boyd, Founder and President of the National Black Farmers Association, who is a chicken farmer, for “insights” into this shocking state of affairs.

Alas, the excellent medical reporter Elizabeth Cohen, instead of being allowed to add her expertise on salmonella to the information provided by the chicken farmer, is there to exonerate the industry, pointing out that it is more difficult to be on top of things in industrial-size farms.

Instead of using the ‘teachable moment’ to suggest that industrial production of eggs is a bad idea, as eloquently demonstrated by a serious film two years ago, and explained today by the small producer and the investigative reporter, the message of the news channel that reaches into every household, is that salmonella is a minor matter compared to the (supposed) benefits of big agriculture.

The drill is the same for questions of war and peace – notably, this week, the growing threat of violence in our own streets over the building of a Muslim Community Center that will house a mosque. No meaningful information about Islam, its roots, its history, its brilliant scholars, etc.

But under the enlightening morning news features, the tiny crawler announced that Levi Johnson has filed papers to run for mayor of Wassila.

You maybe wondering what I mean, but think about it for a minute: on the home front we have the Tea Party which wants to turn back the clock to the eighteenth century, when the Constitution was written, and barring that, to the nineteenth, when the 14th Amendment declared that anyone born in the United States was automatically a citizen, with all the protections of the law.

Overseas, we have, loosely speaking, the Taliban, or Al Qaeda, or any number of other fundamentalist Islamic groups who don’t care about citizenship, since they dream of a universal umma , or community. But, like Americans on the extreme right, they want women to stay at home, and they’re fiercely against homosexuals.

Both fundamentalisms believe the commandments of God take precedence over the laws of men, many going so far as wanting the U.S. to be officially declared a Christian nation (which was not in the minds of the founders!).
I sometimes wonder how fundamentalist Christian-American soldiers rationalize killing fundamentalist Muslims who proclaim so many of the same principles? Has anyone looked into that aspect of the psychological toll on our troops? The answer is probably that American soldiers are unaware of the opinions about God, politics and women that they share with the enemy.

Moving on to the 14th Amendment, few Americans know that in the West, there are basically two conceptions of citizenship, based on the Napoleonic Code (I don’t know what goes on in the Orient). According to the most widespread usage, jus soli, (soli meaning the land) a person is automatically a citizen of the country he or she is born in. But there is another possibility, called jus sanguinis, (sanguinis meaning blood) in which either the father, the mother, or both must be a national of the country in which a child is born for the child to be considered a citizen.

Until the year 2000, unlike the rest of Europe, (but like Switzerland), children born in Germany to foreign parents were not entitled to German citizenship. It was only when pressure from Turkish guest workers reached a tipping point, that the ancient law was changed. Children born of immigrant parents are now Germans at birth, but must choose by the age of 23 whether to retain their German citizenship, or be citizens of their parents’ country of origin.

In Germany, there is also a law of return: Germans who had been expelled from Germany during the wars can claim German citizenship if they speak the language. But now, the right-wing government of Hungary, a country that has historically had close ties to Germany, has been inspired by the German law of return, to extend the right of Hungarian citizenship to all ethnic Magyars living beyond the country’s 1918 borders. This includes Romanians, Slovaks, Serbs and Ukrainians, two million people in all.

Although the Hungarian move is in response to events that took place almost a hundred years ago, now, nationalistic legislation is not likely to amount to much in the context of the European Union. But the fact that during what should be a lazy month of August, august American lawmakers fill the airwaves with calls for a repeal of the 14th amendment, that would deny citizenship to children of mainly Mexican immigrants born in the U.S., will, I wager, have long legs, leading ultimately to the creation, as I’ve already suggested, of USCANMEX.

Our political class has chosen to fight yesterday’s battle, instead of those of today and tomorrow: meeting the consequences of climate change that defy governments and their poor human means everywhere, from China, to Pakistan, to Moscow, to the American Gulf Coast.

Fundamentalists both Christian and Muslim may be right after all, to consider that man’s laws cannot compete with those of God/Nature.

Dear Joe:

A few days ago you sent out an email asking for contributions so that we could have a government ‘by the people, for the people and of the people’.

I find that a bit stiff, given the situation.

Those words were written 200 years ago by white, Protestant men who could no more conceive of a government of, for and by ‘the people’ than you can. There were the only real players. The farmers and crafts-people were nothing more than a – excuse me for mixing my metaphors – Greek chorus.

(Later we had ‘chorus lines’ but now we have only unemployment lines.)

Joe, you don’t seem to understand. (If it’s any consolation, you’re not the only one: twenty years ago, when the long-patient Russian people finally got angry, the well-intentioned, intelligent Gorbachev didn’t under-stand that it was too late to reform the Soviet system, so he was swept aside. The Russians lost their free health care and got inflation.)

Now, the American people are angry, but most of them figure they can’t do anything about it because they don’t have a leader. Oh, there are a lot of organizations on the left, but we have no national leader. On the right, it’s a different story: they have the equivalent of a communist party. I say that because the Communist Party was the most famous top-down organization the world had ever seen. Fascist parties were also top-down parties, and they worked pretty well for a while. But they couldn’t hold a candle to the communists because they were mainly into war.

The Communists weren’t interested in war: they wanted…. government of the people, for the people and by the people. They started with local Soviets: people power – in the beginning. Then they got the Supreme Soviet and that was the end of people power/

Here in America we’ve been taught that communism, socialism – any kind of real people power – is bad. It’s all right to be a democract – or even a Democrat. But that doesn’t allow you to talk about people power. The Tea Party talks about taking back ‘our’ government. But when the right goes out for rifle practice, it’s getting ready to take back ‘its’ government.

It’s not gonna be people power. They’re gonna stop paying taxes because taxes benefit welfare moms. They’re gonna do away with social security because folks who’ve been clever with their money shouldn’t need a common pot.

They might actually ‘bring the boys home’ from wherever they’re fighting when the Tea Party comes to power, because they’re gonna need them on the frontier – I mean the border. They’re gonna need them to round up all the immigrants and ship them back to wherever they came from (Hitler shipped ‘inferior’ peoples to concentration camps and gas chambers, but our Tea Partiers are just gonna ship them back to wherever they came from, even if there’s nothing to eat there.)

So Joe – and Barack and Nancy, and John and Howard – quit holding your hands out. It’s unseemly. Money can’t buy spine. And if you don’t get it, hopefully ‘the people’ – who thought you had it – are gonna realize they don’t need more voices in the wilderness, but a top-down organization like a Tea Party – or a Politburo. Before the glaciers melt, the sea rises, the oil and gas wells and electric lines come tumbling down, leaving us without even a fridge to keep a people’s dinner in.

Israel’s mounting paranoia offers an excellent opportunity to analyze how news is slanted, by whom, and to whom.

A friend in Europe emails me news from various sources, and recently I received a story whose original source was the Near East News Agency (NENA), a collaborative of journalists working in the Near East that publishes in Italian and English. The story was about Israel’s efforts to prevent its neighbor Jordan from building an independent nuclear energy capability.

Israel is one of four countries with known nuclear capabilities not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the others being India, Pakistan and North Korea. Not- withstanding its own rogue position, Israel has been waging a relentless campaign to persuade the world that Iran is a mortal threat, not only to Israel, but to everyone else.

Now, just in case its campaign against the relatively distant threat should ultimately be unsuccessful, Israel now asserts that an equal threat lies next door, in Jordan, a tiny Muslim country which has been its steadfast ally.

The NENA article emphasized that Israel, with the backing of the U.S., is withholding “acceptance” of its neighbor’s plans to build two nuclear fuel plants, until Jordan promises that it will send its nuclear fuel abroad for reprocessing. (The NENA article also revealed that Jordan possesses 3% of known uranium deposits.)

Curious to know more about this story, I went to the New York Times. A May 2 Times article placed the Israel/Jordan controversy within the larger scope of U.S. efforts to strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty during a month-long international conference. It pointed out that diplomats were negotiating agreements for overseas reprocessing with Jordan and Bahrain, and indicated there might also be a deal with Saudi Arabia.

The Times article quoted a participating diplomat saying that these endeavors were part of an attempt to isolate the Iranians, but that Iran and others at the United Nations non-Proliferation Conference, including Egypt, were more interested in forcing the region’s one nuclear-weapons state, Israel, to acknowledge its atomic arsenal and sign on to the nonproliferation treaty.

Egypt, in particular, wants the Middle East to be nuclear arms free, but the Obama administration only supports this idea within the context of a broad regional peace.
In other words, for Washington, a nuclear-free Middle East is contingent on resolving the situation with Iran, rather than the situation between Israel and the Palestinians.

This is worrisome because Egypt, while lobbying for a conference next year on its proposal for a nuclear-free zone, also plans to build several nuclear reactors. According to The Times, Egypt’s President, Hosni Mubarak has hinted that if there is no agreement, his country might feel that needs to develop nuclear weapons, too.

Although the Times article has broader thrust, it manages to obscure the fact that the Obama administration accumulates blunders in the most volatile part of the world. Unlike the admittedly partisan NENA story, it fails to mention fthat Washington is threatening Jordan with a loss of 600 million a year in financial support if it goes ahead with a project that makes Israel nervous. Nor does it mention that our close allies, France and South Korea, are planning to help this tiny, resource poor county ensure its future energy needs.

Without several sources for world news, American voters are blindsided, taken totally unawares by major events. Nuclear non-pro-liferation is a major policy goal of President Obama. But alternate news sources reveal not only that in this, as in so many other laudable goals, his policies are counter-productive; they document the fact that a multi-faceted world can pursue laudable goals without us.

The expression first became a rallying cry during the First World War, with the slogan “Never Again.”  Then there came Buchenwald, and it was “never again” all over again.

Katrina was a natural disaster piled on top of Army Corps indifference, which was never to be allowed to happen again.

The more recent worldwide financial debacle really concentrated minds worldwide, so that, two years later, heads of finance from the countries that make things happen (even things that are never supposed to happen again) gathered in Toronto to make sure that this particular event should never happen again. The President returned home with an assignment from the countries that America used to tell what do do, which was to kick domestic opposition into line to create a Consumer Protection Agency (or whatever it’s called, don’t hold me to names) so that at least if this does happen again, it won’t be our fault.

The President was unwise to hold that it would never happen again.  But hardly less wise than BP that has been assuring us that thanks to its good faith and its technical know-how what we could all a “magnitude ten” oil spill would never happen again.

Never?  With more than 3000 oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico alone, not to mention those we haven’t been told about in other oceans and on other lands.

Or, less spectacularly, the gas rigs whose numbers remain secret, on lands that used to be picture postcard perfect, throughout the country, fracking, or fracturing the soil hundreds of yards down, pumping scarce water laden with chemicals into once fertile land, sending fumes into the water pipes of nearby kitchens, causing them to burn in contact with a match.  At this point, the question becomes: “Never what?”

Never more jobs lost, never more private prisons built, never more men in search of work arrested, never more soldiers turned into invalids – never more what?

I don’t know if it was due to his famous poem “The Raven” that the early nineteenth century writer Edgar Allan Poe is seen as a forerunner  of science fiction, but surely our powerless lives today, would have been considered science-fiction in his time.

The hero of Poe’s poem hallucinates a black raven sitting unruffled over his bedroom door, repeating only one word: ‘Nevermore”.  He mourns the loss of his love Lenore, and asks the raven if there is “balm in Gilead”, to which the answer is also “Nevermore”.
Still not getting it, the poet implores:
‘Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore     But: “Quoth the raven,`Nevermore.’”

Now, with a dramatic gesture the poet orders the beast to:

“Get back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!”

“Take thy form from off my door!…. and leave no black plume as    a token of that lie…!”
Alas:
“The raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming

Unable to accept the finality of death, Poe wanted desperately to bring back the past.  We, very differently, imagine that we can prevent its repetition.   But like Poe’s demon, we are dreaming.

At various times since I began this blog, more than three years ago, I’ve suggested that America’s days as the dominating world power are numbered. Though I may have been one of the first to perceive this, the notion is spreading.

A recent blog on the site , by two Washington insiders, is entitled “Iran, the Post-American World and the Security Council’s Looming Legitimacy Crisis”. Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett note that by offering to refuel Iran’s research reactor, Turkey and Brazil, “two rising economic powers from what we used to call the ‘Third World’ have now asserted decisive political influence on a high-profile international security issue.” Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan is even questioning the Security Council’s credentials for dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue.

This pun is too good to resist: from cradle to grave. But it’s more than a pun: like most other European countries, Greece has a strong left wing and consequently it is what we would call a welfare state. It has a national health service, and the average retirement age is 61, although some workers in the public sector retire in their fifties.

I happened to hear this latter figure yesterday, when in the gym I frequent, I was subjected to an afternoon Fox News program. The anchor mentioned, in one breath, that Greeks retire at fifty, and are less evolved than Americans because when they have a problem with the government, they take to the streets.

I’ve never been good at math, but doesn’t early retirement make jobs available to more people? (As does the thirty-five hour work week in France?) Most European countries have chronically high unemploy- ment, compared to what used to be ours, yet they have free schools, free health care, five weeks vacation and, in the case of Greece, two extra months of salary, as used to be, and perhaps still is, the case in Italy.

It’s difficult not to see a connection between the fact that Europeans are more likely to take to the streets than Americans, and the fact that European workers manage to get and keep a much better deal than American workers.

An outgrowth, no doubt, of the ancient Greek agora, where direct democracy was practiced for a while. As populations increased, direct democracy became impractical, Kings and feudal lords arose, and ‘the demos’ were mightily used and abused.

All that is long since past: direct democracy is making a comeback, thanks to texting, and in Europe, at least, cradle to grave security is the norm. Meanwhile the United States prepares to follow the lead of its biggest state, Texas, in expunging from textbooks the likes of Thomas Jefferson, replacing the phrase ‘democratic societies’, with ‘societies with representative government’, and ‘capitalism’ with ‘free enterprise’, dropping all references to the Enlightenment.

Thus, while Americans wring their hands in despair at the ruination of the Gulf wetlands and lost income for our fishing industry at the hands of oil company-led cowboy capitalism, they’re being warned against what must, in the end, prevail: the cradle to grave democratic socialism the Greeks are currently defending, that puts people ahead of profits.

Is the news media more alert to what’s going on in the four corners of the world than it used to be? Or is there a steady increase in natural and manmade catastrophic events?

The rain in Spain is no longer in the plains, as Eliza Doolittle had to repeat in the play Pygmalion. The rains are everywhere, bringing floods and devastation here in the United States, but also, on any given day, to half a dozen other places around the globe.

This week so far, aside from a car packed with explosives left smoking in Times Square, there is serious flooding in Tennessee, following on tornados in other parts of the southeast.

Then there is the mother of all oil spills, courtesy of British Petroleum, which has shut down the huge fishing industry in the waters of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi Alabama and Florida, and threatens an area that is a major wildlife area.

Today, a fire broke out in a refinery in San Antonio, Texas, and Ireland and Scotland had to again suspend flights because of new ash from the Iceland volcano. Meanwhile desperate efforts are under way in Haiti to move refugees from the recent earthquake zone to higher, drier areas as the rainy season gets under way. China and Mexico too are coping with earthquake devastation, as is the southern part of Chile.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten as many catastrophes as I’ve listed. The question is, if we’ve been unable to prevent natural disasters from occurring when there are ‘only’ say, ten a week, will we be more likely to be able to prevent a hundred a week? And what will these events do to the world economy and the ability of governments to govern?

When I moved back to the United States after living in a series of other places, I was struck by the fact that when I crossed the Delaware River from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, into New Jersey, it was like going to a foreign country. A few miles beyond the river, people seem as unfamiliar with the only big city in the vicinity as if they had lived in Kansas.

Reading Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty, a detailed account of the years 1789 to 1815, which could be called this country’s axial years, one is struck by how very independent-minded the different states were. Woods’ mentions several threats of disintegration that occured long before the conflict that almost cut the country in two. He shows that the civil war we were taught to see as a previously unthinkable event, was really the one instance in which secessionist sentiment was so strong and pervasive that war could not be avoided.

With Arizona’s passage of a draconian emigration law, it’s clear not much has changed in two centuries. The Arizona immigration bill takes its place in a long line of crises that saw this state or that threatening to go its own way. And according to an article by Amy Goodman in Truthdig, Arizona, which in the twentieth century fought recognition of the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday, was also the only territory west of Texas to secede from the Union and join the Confederacy during the Civil War. The fact that the governor of that state is backed by the nation-wide Tea Party movement is a sign of historical continuity. Disgust with “big govern-ment” is widespread, but in Arizona it has led to a law that permits the “smaller” state government to usurp federal authority.

But is state government really less threatening than Washington? Tea-partiers believe that only a national government can ensure our security, yet they believe that states can police the border, a nation’s first line of defense. Yet when an oil slick threatens livelihoods and ecosystems in southern maritime states, federal troops are welcome to help meet the challenge too big for states to handle alone.

It is ironic that just as the European Union, with its common currency, the Euro, is testing the solidarity of its individual national members over Greek’s debt crisis, the country that inspired that union could be heading for an eventual break-up.

If that sounds like utter fantasy, consider the fact that a growing number of elected officials are leaving their respective parties to run as indepen-dents or cross over to the other party. If you think this has nothing to do with the push for states’ rights and smaller government, think again: everything is related, and the failure of the two party system that has prevailed since 19th century Americans realized they needed political parties not originally planned for or desired, is another crack in the sys-tem.

President Obama appeared on the national stage at a time when Red and Blue no longer suffice to describe the often contradictory aspirations held by Americans. His deep-seated partiality to compromise, though noble, prevented him from using his electoral mandate to insist on single payer health care, which would require a smaller bureaucracy than the hotchpotch that offered a handle for Tea Partiers to seize and loudly exploit.

The pattern is set to continue with immigration and climate change. The reforms desperately needed by this country require uncensored education and information about the world, its governing systems, ideologies and needs. A return to the quasi independent states of revolutionary times, each with its own view of the world and of what constitutes a good life, will hamstring efforts to cope with the major challenges the world faces.

And in a world which is increasingly moving toward regional entities, American state nationalism is more threatening than the rise of China.

Today, Earth Day, 2010, the House of Representatives honored the 40th anniversary of it’s founder, Wisconsin representative Gaylord Nelson.


While a handful of dinosaurs – excuse me, representatives – rose in turn in Washington’s almost empty people’s chamber to pay homage to an early whistle blower, fifteen thousand people from over fifty countries gathered in the Andean city of Cochabama to determine actions in favor of Mother Earth.

The People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth was called by Bolivian president Evo Morales following the stunning rejection of these rights by the world’s richest nations at the U.N. Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen last December.

President Obama, who led the charge at Copenhagen for modest goals and modest aide to those most at risk in the developing world, punished Bolivia’s audacity to hope for survival by cutting off the 3.5 billion aide it had been slated to receive to adapt to climate change.

While the Andean conferees discussed ways to maintain “right living” or “buen vivir” in the twenty-first century, calling on that ancient Indian tradition, air traffic to and from Europe resumed after five days of grounded planes and shuttered airports, as a result of the ash spewed over Europe from a volcano in Iceland.

As airlines scramble to find ways to beat Mother Earth the next time she pulls a stunt like this, a heretic thought forms in the mind of this committed internationalist: are the peoples of the world learning to do without the U.N. that many had hoped would evolve into an effective world government?

As ash from an Icelandic volcano continues to blanket the skies of Europe, canceling tens of thousands of flights for the 5th day in a row, I can’t help but wonder what will happen when several natural disasters of this mag-nitude happen simultaneously.

There is no place to run to. All we can do is hope that the movement started by Bolivia’s president Evo Morales, to defend the planet against climate change, will spread faster than the disasters in store, galvanizing massive resistance to the world as it is threatened today.

Ten years ago, while Americans nodded in front of TVs that extolled the benefits of commercially owned pure water, rural Bolivians rose up to protest the privatization of their lifeline. It was a bloody fight, but they won, setting the stage for the eventual coming to power of an indigenous small coco grower.

This week, President Morales is hosting a week-long World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth; government representatives from 54 countries will join thousands of grass roots organizations from all over the world near Cochabamba, where the Water Wars took place. They aim to make the next UN Conference on climate change, due to take place in Mexico later this year, more meaningful than December’s Copenhagen climate summit.

Bolivia’s ambassador to the U.N. (the U.S. and Bolivia no longer have reciprocal representation), Pablo Solon, explained on today’s Democracy Now, that the developed nations, though representing only 20% of the world’s population, “occupy” with their toxic emissions, 80% of the earth’s atmosphere. In that context, the idea of a Mother Earth is not a primitive image.

Listening to Amy Goodman interview the sister of the slain leader of the water wars, Oscar Romero, tell how the Andean peasants won the water war, it occurs to me that part of the reason for their success was that they were free from a ubiquitous media that claims all is well in the best of worlds. Unlike citizens of the developed world, they believed in their own understanding of right and wrong, and acted upon it.

Americans will never have free water, but what about a government that winds down military involvements in favor of better health care? In this week’s Nation, Michael Klare tells us that the Pentagon is planning for “Two, Three, Many Afghanistans”, increasing its ability to combat “sub-versive insurgencies”. Under the heading “subversives” are people fighting for equal access to the basic underpinnings of life: clean air, water, food, fuel.

As a first step in that war, President Obama announced it was cutting the $3.5 million dollars of aid Bolivia was slated to receive to help it combat climate change.