Duty to Warn

Agency Accused of Refusing to Enforce Law

CORNUCOPIA, WI:  In a letter today, The Cornucopia Institute informed the USDA of their intention to file a complaint in federal district court accusing the agency of ignoring the organic regulations, and the intent of Congress, by their failure to enforce the law.

The impending lawsuit is just the latest salvo in a seven-year-long dispute between organic family farmers and the USDA.  "A wide cross section of the organic industry has repeatedly petitioned the USDA to crack down on an increasing number of industrial-scale factory-farms that are producing ‘organic’ milk,” said Mark Kastel, Senior Farm Policy Analyst at the Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute.

At the center of the controversy are two major agribusiness corporations, Dean Foods and Aurora Dairy.  Dean's Horizon brand and private-label milk produced by Aurora (marketed by Safeway, Wild Oats, Trader Joe's, and Wal-Mart, among others) have gained a dominant market share, estimated to be as high as 70%, by ramping up production on feedlot dairies milking as many as 2000 to 10,000 cows.

For a documentary on the 100-year history - and horror - of aerial bombardment, Barry Stevens' "The Bomber's Dream" has a remarkably deft touch. The emotion driving the film isn't outrage so much as jumpiness, of the sort that bedeviled Stevens' mother, a survivor of the Nazis' rocket blitz on London during World War II, who was thereafter spooked by loud noises.

She was permanently unsettled, Stevens says, by "a memory just below the skin, of things going very wrong very quickly." Multiply that by all of us and you have modern society, which lives on this edge and calls it peace . . . or the closest we can get to it.

"The Bomber's Dream" tears back the assumptions and paradoxes and, yes, the good intentions of high-tech war and leaves us mourning not so much its millions of victims - or even the 40,000 dead of the Hamburg firestorm of 1943, survivors of which Stevens interviews ("outside, the wind sucked babies out of their mothers' arms") - as a single 15-year-old girl. Her sad and pointless death is a stand-in for all the others.

Congressman John Conyers, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has used the following rhetoric repeatedly in recent weeks:

"George Bush has the habit of firing military leaders who tells him the Iraq war is failing. But let me tell you something. He can't fire you. He can't fire us. But we can fire him! We can fire him!"

You can watch Conyers say those words to a crowd of 500,000 on January 27th in this video: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/18494

He said the same thing at an event a few days later, and went further, suggesting that he will favor impeachment if Bush attacks Iran. Here's the audio: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/18457

It has been a great week for America due to two sources typical of the new media – bright people with standards that simply don’t allow the sufferance of injustice and false claims of victory and morality when the opposite is clear.

1)  Alastair Thompson, Co-Editor, GM, and Director of “Scoop” Independent News is a great friend of the US Voting Rights movement.  “Scoop” has covered stories for years that are archived in American Coup II.   (New Zealand) took on one of the worlds “big bullies,” Prime Minister John Howard of Australia.  Just before a visit to New Zealand, Howard had the impertinence to say the following:  "If I was running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats…I hope Mr. Obama does not become President of the U.S.”

In a video interview with Tom Andrews posted at http://www.movecongress.org Congressman Jack Murtha makes clear that the limitations on additional war money that he intends to include in the forthcoming "emergency" supplemental bill are aimed only at undoing the recent escalation (a.k.a. "surge"), not at ending the war.

Murtha begins by claiming that this week's nonbinding vote opposing the escalation reinforces the message of the Nov. 7, 2006, election.  That would be quite a feat, given that Bush did not propose his escalation until after the election, an election that everyone understood as expressing opposition to Bush, Cheney, and their war.  Americans wanted then what they still want: to end the war.

Murtha explains that the next step after this week's nonbinding vote will be a House vote on a Supplemental bill adding more money to the war.  Murtha plans to include in that bill restrictions on how troops can be used in Iraq: 
1. They can't be kept there over a year.
  2. They can't be sent without proper training and equipment. 

It requires no special skill to sell Michael Gordon, chief military correspondent of the New York Times, the Brooklyn Bridge. All you have to do is whisper down the phone to him that the transaction will occur at a background "briefing" by anonymous intelligence sources and a "senior official" or two.

            One would think that it would require astonishing rhetorical ingenuity on the part of the sales team (in fact, operating out of the U.S. Defense Department) to keep on selling Gordon the Brooklyn Bridge, long after the deed from the first sale has been pronounced an obvious fraud.

            But it's not so strange, really. Your true sucker is a vain fellow, who can never accept the evidence of his own gullibility and who therefore regards each successive purchase of the Brooklyn Bridge as a sound investment, certain to re-establish him in the public eye as a man with a keen eye for a good deal. He thus becomes psychologically and professionally a captive of the bridge salesmen.

When analyzing the consequences of and remedies for discrimination against African Americans, courts and scholars characterize African Americans as a minority.  This Article shows that the traditional approach is wrong: When it mattered, when the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were enacted and for decades after, African Americans were a majority or controlling plurality in the states where most lived. African American-backed majoritarian governments controlled the South after the Civil War; while in power, they enacted strong civil rights laws and created a public education system. These policies were reversed, and segregation imposed, not because African Americans were a minority, destined to lose in the majoritarian political process, but rather through elimination of democratic politics and imposition of minority rule.  African Americans and their white allies were stripped of their electoral majority through fraud, violence and illegal disenfranchisement.

With the Bush administration taking increasingly provocative actions toward Iran, like the deployment of aircraft carriers to the Gulf, the arrest of Iranian representatives in Iraq, and the sharp escalation in bellicose rhetoric it seems clear that they’re at least considering a military strike. Here’s an idea that might help deter it.

Suppose groups like MoveOn, TrueMajority, and Democracy For America circulated a petition where those who signed it would ask our Senators, Representatives, and any of the other Democratic Presidential Candidates to pledge to oppose any attack on Iran and to also promise to initiate impeachment hearings if Bush attacked Iran without getting explicit Congressional authorization.

This MyDD blog entry and this Politico article describe this PDF showing the results of a poll of all 100 U.S. Senators. It asks how they voted on the war in 2002, whether they regret that vote, whether they support escalating the war, and whether they support ending the war by a certain date. This fairly well cuts through the courageous debate over whether to have a debate over whether to meaninglessly dissent from Bush's escalation plans for a war that most Americans want ended.

The first thing that stands out is that Senators Byrd and Cardin, rather than saying that Yes they support ending the occupation by a certain date, both wrote in the word "Immediate." That's 2 Senators for ending the thing. 98 to go.