What do we know?

We know that oil is a limited resource.  

We know that demand for it is climbing because of China and India.  

We know that we went into Iraq for oil and that supplies there have been threatened by fighting.

We know that Bush is an oil man.

We know that Exxon is now making the largest profits in the history of the world - billions.

We know that because there is the so-called oil "crisis," some Congress people want a windfall profits tax.

We know that because there is the so-called oil "crisis," Exxon and the other oil companies are pushing for  a tax BREAK so they will have some "incentive" to explore for oil.

We know that because of the so-called oil "crisis," the president and Exxon and others are pushing to lift bans  on drilling in ANWAR and off the coast of the US.

We know that because of the so-called oil "crisis," both the coal and nuclear industries, each known for large environmental threats, are suddenly saying "We're BAAAACK."

I am very sorry that Teddy Kennedy has been diagnosed with brain cancer and wish him the best.

That said, why are surgery, radiation and chemotherapy the only treatments being considered?

The treatment of cancer has started to move toward treatments that are less damaging.  Lung cancer is now being treated with heat, without surgery.

From: "vidarbha today" <vidarbhatoday@gmail.com>
Date: May 12, 2008 3:08:16 PM EDT
Subject: Debt woes drive thousands of Indian farmers to suicide-SAM DOLNICK-The Associated Press reports

Monday, May 12, 2008

By SAM DOLNICK
The Associated Press
Sunday, May 11, 2008; 12:48 PM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

KOCHI, India -- On the last night of his life, the farmer walked into his dusty fields, choked down pesticide and waited to die.

He owed more than $1,000 to banks and moneylenders and he had told his wife that if the cotton harvest was bad this year, he would kill himself.

Pandurang Chindu Surpam left the near-barren fields he worked with his sons to share a last meal with his family. Hours later, he died. He was 45.

Using intellectual property laws (as Monsanto did to take control of seeds worldwide), someone is pushing a law to say that "orphaned" artists' work is okay to use by others.

I don't see a lot of artists out there asking for this bill or any big flood of poor orphaned art work which can't find it proper owner.  But there are new digital registry companies which will benefit because unless artists pay to get their work registered digitally, it is open to total use by anyone claiming they couldn't locate the artist.

http://capwiz.com/...

Farming is the heart of every country.  Corporate agriculture - INDUSTRIAL agriculture - is destroying it worldwide.  

Notice that after the vaunted "Green Revolution" and the much ballyhooed "biotech" solutions to food problems:

  the earth is swimming in 6-10 more pesticides than before GMOs,
  fishing stocks are failing because of run-off into oceans,
  prices on commodities are sky-rocketing,
  people are not seeing the great promised yields that were allegedly proposed to solve hunger,

but in fact:

Trying still to get attention to rBGH milk, this petition is going around:

http://action.foodandwaterwatch.org/...

For those who don't know about it, rBGH is a genetically engineered bovine hormone approved during the Clinton administration when Clinton appointed Monsanto-connected-employees to run the FDA and they then approved Monsanto's own product over scientific objections about increased cancer risk.  Despite those links to cancer, the Clinton administration did not withdraw the hormone or warn the public or label the milk.

To learn how Monsanto pushed its genetically engineered hormone on the American public:  http://video.google.com/...

To learn more about Monsanto, you can see Vanity Fair's green issue this month:  http://www.vanityfair.com/... features/2008/05/monsanto200805

On Friday - April 25, 2008, in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Mark Nolt, a Wenger Mennonite (Horse and Buggy Mennonite) dairyman, threatened for months with arrest for selling raw milk without a permit was removed from his property by state troopers.  

Jonas Stoltzfus, a friend, fellow farmer, and Church of the Brethen, was asked by Mr. Nolt to speak for him, and said of the raid yesterday - "Six state troopers and Bill Chirdon of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture trespassed onto his property, and stole $20-25,000 of his product and equipment."  

Mr. Stoltzfus explained that Mr. Nolt did not have a permit because "he chose to turn his permit back in because it did not cover all the products he was selling.  He felt he was being dishonest selling stuff that was not covered by the permit.  He is a man of great integrity."  

Hillary Clinton got away with an amazing feat in Pennsylvania.  In a dairy state, one in which there are two looming bans on milk - one to ban labeling of milk associated with a 7 times increased risk of breast cancer in order to promote it without anyone knowing about it, and one to ban good plain raw milk - her own disturbing connection to milk remained a secret.  In a state where dairy farmers (and other farmers) are living in literal fear of Monsanto, the fact that Monsanto has been running her campaign (even with Penn in the shadows now), remained a secret.

A major study out of Kansas has now dispelled the myth (lie? charade?  PR scam?  boondoggle?)  that Monsanto has been using for years to promote its GMO crops - that GM crops produce greater yields.  It then slathers that manure ... no, manure is too real and valuable to work as an analogy ... that synthetic crap, with an even more synthetic concern for the world's poor and starving.  And thus evil disguised as goodness, worms its way in where it should never have gotten.

The missing back story to the Pennsylvania primary is milk.

Dairy farmers are critical to Pennsylvania and the state is fighting two milk bans - on labeling of milk, and on raw milk - but no one is talking about Hillary Clinton and her experience with milk.  Or the risk the unlabeled milk poses to women and girls.  Or what it means for a politician - particularly a woman - to be working closely with a corporation which not only created that risk but is going state to state to keep people in the dark about even "where" its product is.

Few people know:

The Ride For Farmers www.rideforfarmers.org (wishes to extend its full support and strong encouragement to all those in California fighting a ban on Raw Milk.

For information on Raw Milk, go to http://www.realmilk.com/...

The Ride for Farmers sees the push to ban Raw Milk, as part of a larger corporate push to control all milk sales in the country and to destroy family farming communities.

The Ride for Farmers believes the bans and the threat of bans are a corporate mean (via its corruption of agricultural departments across the country and at the federal level) effort to break the link between farmer and his neighbors and customers, a natural link independent of government/corporate intervention.  Using "raw milk scares" and "food safety" as the argument, the state departments of agriculture are destroying farming communities' well-being financially, as well as the interconnection between neighbors with their customer base.

I am not a farmer.  I didn't even pay much attention to farming issues until last year when I found out about Monsanto using Bollywood actors to trick illiterate Indian farmers into buying extremely expensive genetically engineered seeds.  Big yields promised.  No word that the heavy loans for the seeds would need to be followed by more heavy loans for Monsanto fertilizer and Monsanto pesticides.  No word that the seeds needed irrigation.  The package said so but the farmers couldn't read.  And besides, the small print was in English.  The farmers were Marathi.  

Crops failed.  

The Ride for Farmers, to accommodate requests now coming in from riders in other parts of Pennsylvania, and even from other parts of the country, is expanding the "trail".

For all those concerned about our farmers, our food, NAIS, silence around labeling, diseases we are being exposed to, loss of vitamin companies, control on our own property and in our communities, and corporate greed overwhelming all that matters to us ... saddle up.

Spreading the word of impending harm, just as Paul Revere did, is democratic down to its core.

How does one report - where does one report - that there is an immense take-over of US farmland about to happen and have get through on the left?

Just curious.  

On the 15th of this month, there will be a Freedom rally in DC having to do with NAIS and the left will see it as reactionary rather than desperate.  

I have tried my best here to say something massive is taking place but I have gotten nowhere.  

The Ride for Farmers, to accommodate requests now coming in from riders in other parts of Pennsylvania and even from other parts of the country, is expanding the "trail."

For all those concerned about our famers, our food, our animals, NAIS, silence around labeling, diseases we are being exposed to, loss of vitamin companies, control on our own property and in our communities, corporate lust overwhelming all that matters to us,  ... saddle up.

This writer has tried to let the liberal community, through this blog, know how dire things are for farmers, a community that continues to fall mainly outside of the scope of progressive attention to the benefit of those who making what can only be called a totalitarian move on what is left of family farming in this country through NAIS.

In HOW TO BECOME A SERF IN ONE EASY STEP

Doreen Hannes explains:

"All you have to do is register your property with the USDA under the National Animal Identification System. You'll be assigned a seven-character number that stays with the property forever and the USDA "owns" that number according to " A User Guide" which is their latest public document on the program.

Rob Kall at OpEd News wrote today:

I try to do SOMETHING every day to make a difference. I write, I do all kinds of things related to OpEdNEws. I volunteer with several non-profit organizations. I write to influential people. I call members of congress.

What do you do each day? It's not necessarily easy to find something to do every day. You have to think about it, plan, come up with alternate things to do when there's screaming need to call any legislator. You can write letters to the editor, to corporations that are not behaving well.

Of course, there are books listing things to do. What do you do? ...

Chazelle, a computer scientist at Princeton University, writes:

"There is palpable excitement out there on the left. A pity there is no there there. America has lefties but no left."

Think "Milk."  
Think Monsanto pushing rBGH in cows, with no labeling of the milk.  
Think farmers being sued for saying their milk is rBGH-free.
Think farmers in Pennsylvania facing prison for selling normal raw milk.

Think a 7 fold increased risk of breast cancer from the unlabeled rBGH milk.  http://www.sustdev.org/...

Think when it all began.
Think Clinton administration when Monsanto ran the FDA.
Think Monsanto altering the numbers in the studies.
Think FDA scientists fired telling congress about the fiddle of numbers.
Think Monsanto approving its own product - first GMO ever approved by FDA.
Think Monsanto hiring Burson-Marsteller to clean up the split milk. http://www.corporatewatch.org/...
Think pus in the milk and sick and dead cows and no labeling.