Duty to Warn

CORNUCOPIA, WI: When the staff at The Cornucopia Institute surveyed Wal-Mart stores around the country last September, analyzing the giant retailer’s pronouncement that they would begin selling a wide variety of organic food at just a 10% mark-up over similar conventional products, they were surprised to discover widespread problems with signage misrepresenting nonorganic food as "organic."

Now, Cornucopia, one of the country's most prominent organic watchdogs is even more surprised that more than four months after informing the company of the problems, which could be interpreted as consumer fraud, and two months after filing a formal legal complaint with the USDA, the federal agency regulating organic labeling, many of the deceptive signs at Wal-Mart stores are still in place.

It wasn’t Katrina, not even close, but Seattle’s storm of the century was no picnic. It gave me one more a taste of a future where the weather can suddenly turn--and destroy the habitability of our world.  The storm hit Seattle mid-December with pounding rain and 70 mile-an-hour winds, reaching 110 miles per hour, 35 miles to the east, on the slopes of the Cascade Mountains. The ground was already soggy from the wettest November in Seattle history, and as the wind and rain uprooted trees, many fell on houses and cars, blocked roads and took down local power lines, cutting off heat and light to over a million residents in the city and surrounding areas. Thirteen people died. Sanitation systems overflowed, dumping tens of millions of gallons of raw sewage into Puget Sound. A week later, nearly a hundred thousand people were still living in the cold and the dark. Although my own lights stayed on, the next street was dark, and I could drive ten minutes and pass block after block of blackened houses.

“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism and militarism. . .”     from Beyond Vietnam speech, April 4th, 1967

I’m always personally touched when the King birthday holiday in January and the King April 4th assassination date come around. It was on that April 4th date in 1968 that I moved from concern about war and injustice to activism against them. His violent death motivated me to compose and post a petition to Congress that was signed by about half of the students at the college I was attending, Grinnell College in Iowa, before I sent it off to Washington, D.C. I’ve been active ever since on a wide range of issues.

"Two things only the people anxiously desire -- bread and circuses."
--Juvenal

Searching for masculine bliss incarnate?

Look no further than NFL football and its myriad machismo delights….

Fierce armor-clad gladiators applying wicked hits, battering each other relentlessly, engaging in bone-jarring collisions, and performing feats of near super-human athleticism….

Provocatively undressed cheerleaders manifesting our culture’s ideal of feminine perfection…..

Rivers of ice cold beer gushing forth to satiate our desire to numb the mind and lower inhibitions….

And lest we forget, the NFL provides us with “Man Law” to shield us from our long repressed anima, which is constantly poised to assail our grossly exaggerated masculinity ….

A make-or-break speech by a beleagured American president is usually preceded by a demonstration of American might somewhere on the planet, and the run-up to Bush's address last night was no exception. The AC-130 U.S. gunship that reportedly massacred a convoy of fleeing Islamists on Somalia's southwestern border, apparently along with dozens of nomads, their families and livestock, was deployed on its mission on Sunday, to make timely newspaper headlines indicative of Bush's determination to strike at terror wherever it may lurk. Moral to nomads: When the U.S. president schedules a speech, don't herd, don't go to wedding parties, head for the nearest cave.

            President Bush stuck to his expected script and said he plans to boost America's forces in Iraq by 4,000 Marines to Anbar province and five combat brigades -- 17,500 troops -- to Baghdad, in a new scheme to regain control of the city. Past strategies to do this had failed, Bush explained, because of insufficient numbers. He added ominously, "Also, there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have."

"Much of the government's behavior at the Pine Ridge Reservation and in its prosecution of Mr. Peltier is to be condemned. The government withheld evidence. It intimidated witnesses. These facts are not disputed."

BACKGROUND

For over 30 years I have sought justice from the United States Courts which have failed to provide me with any relief despite acknowledging numerous acts of Government misconduct. For example, after my trial, my lawyers issued Freedom of Information Act Requests ("FOIA") and discovered that the Government fabricated the ballistics evidence which it used at trial to argue that I shot the agents in cold blood. Once we revealed this egregious misconduct, the Government has had to admit on several occasions in open Court and before the Parole Commission that it could not prove I shot the agents and that it could not prove who shot the agents.

The purpose of this old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war is not to make George W. Bush look like the dumbest president ever. People have done dumber things. What were they thinking when they bought into the Bay of Pigs fiasco? How dumb was the Egypt-Suez war? How massively stupid was the entire war in Vietnam? Even at that, the challenge with this misbegotten adventure is that WE simply cannot let it continue.

            It is not a matter of whether we will lose or we are losing. We have lost. Gen. John P. Abizaid, until recently the senior commander in the Middle East, insists that the answer to our problems there is not military. "You have to internationalize the problem. You have to attack it diplomatically, geo-strategically," he said.

            His assessment is supported by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who only recommend releasing forces with a clear definition of the goals for the additional troops.

Here's a statement that's blasphemy both in the peace movement and in the halls of the warmongers:

Whether we escalate the war or not is unimportant. 

Back to Saddam one last time, and his trial and death, and the strong possibility - indeed, the common-sense conclusion - that part of the point of the charade was to silence him.

Why else try him only for his earliest crimes when the later ones racked up the big numbers (and, incidentally, served so nicely as a moral cover for our own activities in Iraq)?

Our alliance with Saddam in his "foment war with Iran" phase is so well documented - who hasn't seen the photo of him shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld, President Reagan's special envoy, in 1983, for instance? - that there's almost certain to be something hideously compromising in the secret record, which an ex-dictator at large would surely have talked about and a real trial would have unearthed.

President Bush may be a headless horseman. But the biggest problem is what he rode in on.

Martin Luther King Jr. had a good name for it 40 years ago. “The madness of militarism.”

We can blame Bush all we want -- and he does hold the reins right now -- but his main enablers these days are the fastidious public servants in Congress. They keep preparing the hay, freshening the water, oiling the saddle, even while criticizing the inappropriately jocular rider. And when the band plays “Hail to the Jockey,” most of the grown-up stable boys and girls can’t help saluting.

The people who actually live in Iraq have their own opinions, of course. UPI reported at the end of December that a new poll, conducted by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, found that “about 90 percent of Iraqis feel the situation in the country was better before the U.S.-led invasion than it is today.” Meanwhile, according to a CNN poll last month, 11 percent of Americans support sending more U.S. troops to Iraq.