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	When our food is at risk we are all at risk by Willie Nelson, Anna Lappé Huffington Post & agencies USA   Over the last thirty years, we have witnessed a massive consolidation of our food system.   Never have so few corporations been responsible for more of our food chain. Of the 40,000 food items in a typical U.S. grocery store, more than half are now brought to us by just 10 corporations.   Today, three companies process more than 70 percent of all U.S. beef, Tyson, Cargill and JBS. More than 90 percent of soybean seeds and 80 percent of corn seeds used in the United States are sold by just one company: Monsanto.   Four companies are responsible for up to 90 percent of the global trade in grain. And one in four food dollars is spent at Walmart.   What does this matter for those of us who eat? Corporate control of our food system has led to the loss of millions of family farmers, the destruction of soil fertility, the pollution of our water, and health epidemics including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and even certain forms of cancer. More and more, the choices that determine the food on our shelves are made by corporations concerned less with protecting our health, our environment, or our jobs than with profit margins and executive bonuses.   This consolidation also fuels the influence of concentrated economic power in politics: Last year alone, the biggest food companies spent tens of millions lobbying on Capitol Hill with more than $37 million used in the fight against junk food marketing guidelines for kids.   Our food is under threat. It is felt by every family farmer who has lost their land and livelihood, every parent who can"t find affordable or healthy ingredients in their neighborhood, every person worried about foodborne illnesses thanks to lobbyist-weakened food safety laws, every farmworker who faces toxic pesticides in the fields as part of a day"s work.   When our food is at risk we are all at risk.   Feb 2012   Famine is predictable result of broken food system – UN expert. (AlertNet)   Viewing hunger and famine as extreme and unexpected events prevents aid agencies and policymakers from building effective systems to deal with hunger, a senior U.N. official on food issues said.   Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, argued that drought and famine are not extreme events but “merely the sharp end of a global food system that is built on inequality, imbalances and – ultimately – fragility.”   “This flaw is fatal, for it means failing to acknowledge that the food system is broken,” De Schutter wrote in an article in Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “It means failing to build readiness for persistent famine into international development and humanitarian policy. And it means waiting until people starve before doing anything.”   The current food crisis in the Sahel region of west Africa and last year’s famine in the Horn of Africa are the surface cracks of a broken food system in drought-prone areas rather than abnormal events, De Schutter said.   Poor local governance is one of the reasons why hunger crises happen, he wrote.   Governments in the Horn of Africa – with the help of international relief and development agencies - should have set up comprehensive anti-drought plans in advance, and should have sounded the alarm earlier, De Schutter added.   He noted that signs are already more promising in the Sahel. Apart from Senegal and Burkina Faso, all affected governments have been quick to declare an emergency, devise plans, and call in international aid, De Schutter wrote.   But a better response at the international level is also needed, he argued. Food aid is often counter-cyclical, De Schutter pointed out.   “Donors are more generous when prices are low due to significant harvests, which tends to be when needs are lower.”   A more efficient – and ultimately life-saving – way would be to set up standing regional food reserves to enhance access to affordable stocks as soon as needs begin to rise. This would allow emergency stocks to be pre-positioned in risk-prone regions, so that humanitarian agencies have access to food stocks below the market rate when local purchases are not possible, he said.   Diverse farming systems, agroforestry and reservoirs to capture rainfall are also needed in drought-prone areas, De Schutter said.   http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Food/Pages/FoodIndex.aspx Visit the related web page
	Wealth is concentrated in a small fraction of the populace by Garry Wills, Timothy Snyder New York Review of Books USA   Why 2012 Matters, by Garry Wills.   Republican operatives describe this year’s presidential election in apocalyptic terms. It will determine our future. It will seal our national fate. Well, they are probably right, but not for the reason they give. They tell Republican voters that President Obama, in a second term where he does not have to face re-election, will reveal and follow the full socialist agenda he has been trying to hide.   Only the gullible will swallow that. But the right does know that the future is at stake. That is because this election year gives Republicans one of their last chances—perhaps the very last one—to put the seal on their plutocracy. They are in a race against time. A Democratic wave is rising fast, to wash away the plutocracy before it sets its features in concrete, with future help from the full (not just frequent) cooperation of the Supreme Court.   It may seem odd to speak of the plutocracy as endangered. Surely it has established itself in every important political arena. Wealth is concentrated in a small fraction of the populace, the cosseting of whom with the Bush tax cuts plunged us into the great recession. Yet while the rest of the populace was suffering, the rich just got richer.   In 2009 and 2010, years in which millions were unable to find work, the top one percent reaped 93 percent of the “recovery” income, and corporations are making more than they ever did. And the Republicans can still propose even further cuts in the taxes of “job creators” whose only job creation has been for their own lawyers and lobbyists.   Modern political activity is driven by an incessant and corrosive search for funds, the top priority of all current or would-be members of Congress, state legislators, and executive office holders. The Supreme Court has intensified this gnawing need by protecting huge and secret sources of unregulated funding. The principal source of countervailing funds has been, for the Democrats, the public-service labor unions. But the wave of 2010 state legislative elections has damaged, perhaps fatally, that source. Since the election of Scott Walker in Wisconsin—whose power is now strengthened by his survival in this week’s recall election—the membership of the important AFSCME union (the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees) has shrunk by half. Democratic candidates are forced to mimic the obsessive need to raise funds, in a contest where they are heavily outgunned. So, hasn’t the plutocracy already won?   Not yet. There is help racing up over the horizon. The US Census for the year ending in July 2011, showed that white births in America were for the first time a minority compared to those of “minorities” (blacks, Hispanics, Asians). The state legislators seated by the 2010 elections have been fighting this drift with draconian immigration measures and new voter ID laws aimed at blacks and Hispanics, the young and the elderly. This slashing of the voter rolls may give them the edge of victory in 2012. But time is not on their side. It will get harder and harder to disqualify a growing majority of voters from non-plutocratic ranks.   That is why this election matters so much. It can give the plutocrats a seal on their accomplishments. New appointees to the Supreme Court can support drastic reduction of labor rights, voting rights, citizen rights. Further protections for corporate and lobbying power can be fixed by national and state legislators in laws difficult to undo or dislodge. The whole corporate superstructure of our economy can be made “too big to fail,” beyond retrospective regrets or futile tinkering. Finally, the plutocrats given power in 2012 can use their great ally, war or the threat of war. If, as Randolph Bourne said, “war is the health of the state,” it is doubly the health of a plutocratic state.   America accounts for almost half of the world’s spending on military defense (and probably more than half when we consider all the money that goes to contractors, “outsourced” military tasks , and future veterans’ health costs). Yet Mitt Romney thinks that is not enough; he would add another $96 billion to the military. Any cuts, he says, would fatally imperil us. In fact, we need more on defense expenditures since we now have more enemies than ever—terrorists all around us, abroad and at home. He still sees a threat from Russia. Iran must go on our war menu. Every possible (and expensive) new weapons technology must be developed and deployed.   Just think of it. We already outspend our nearest military-cost rival, China, by over four times. In fact, we spend more than the next twenty military-spending nations (including China). Yet this is not enough for the plutocrats. Not only does the military-industrial complex enrich corporations developing, making, and servicing the weaponry—it also gives the air of crisis that allows infringement of civil rights by way of surveillance, secrecy, detentions, and military trials.   Our present world posture is a rosy one for the plutocracy. Only a slim margin of our population fights (and returns to and commits suicide over) our wars; yet they give the excuse for intimidating the rest of the populace with war disciplining. Orwell made perpetual war the tyrant’s best tool in 1984. But the military personnel currently being used and abused and destroyed come largely from the minorities whose growth poses the threat the plutocrats fear. How long can they keep up their war-is-peace flimflammery?   The plutocrats have another tool they know how to use—religion. Not that the one percent crams our churches. But our religious leaders service causes helpful to the plutocrats. They are often supporters of war, of righteous certitude about America as an enforcer of “our values” around the world. They are also convenient opponents of the women who are part of the oncoming wave of a democratic demography. The explosion of anti-abortion laws and the opposition to workplace equality are used to placate and mobilize the religious allies of the plutocrats.   No wonder the plutocrats are desperate to get their present gains and future goals cemented into place while they still control the necessary means for their project. Plutocracy must work furiously against the coming of democracy. This could be its last chance.   Nov 2010   No, They are not a Hitler or a Stalin, by Timothy Snyder. (NYT)   For an American historian who researches totalitarianism and genocide, nothing is more disheartening than facile comparisons sometimes heard between Western leaders and Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin. When we are so wrong about history, we do a great injustice to ourselves.   The Stalin comparison rests on a basic misunderstanding of the history of communism. Americans often seem to think that social reforms are somehow steps toward communism. History tells a different story.   Communism has never once arisen — not in the U.S.S.R., not in China, not in Cambodia, not in Cuba, not in Vietnam, not in North Korea — as the cumulative result of social reforms. It was always brought by violent revolution carried out by a fanatical minority, usually during or right after war. Once in power, committed revolutionaries sought to transform agrarian countries such as Russia or China into modern industrial states by oppressing peasants and applying political terror.   The history of the welfare state is actually part of the history of the struggle against communism. After World War II, wise Europeans and Americans supported social reforms precisely as a way to hinder the spread of Soviet power. The Red Army had brought communism to Eastern Europe; the question was how to prevent its further spread to the nations liberated by the Western powers.   In war-torn Western Europe, democratic politicians of the left and right agreed that the extension of state services was the best way to assure democracy and to prevent revolution. Their policies were backed and enabled by the farsighted American aid provided by the Marshall Plan. American statesmen understood that the best way to prevent radical politics was to create contented societies. The welfare state worked so well that most recipients of Marshall Plan aid are now more prosperous than the United States.   In Western Europe, social democracy stopped Stalin. What about Eastern Europe, where Stalin’s supporters ruled by force? Under communism, Eastern European states indeed offered their populations public health care, retirement pensions and the like. When the peoples of Eastern Europe liberated themselves from communist rule in 1989, however, they did not do away with these institutions of the public good. Instead, they funded their public services with tax revenues drawn from their new market economies. If you tell Eastern Europeans that their public rail systems are a step toward Stalinism, they will think you are crazy.   Comparisons with Hitler are, if possible, even more far-fetched. The ideological foundation of the Nazi regime was racism. Hitler was a racist who believed that some Germans were real Germans and other Germans were not: the Jews, the handicapped, the long-term unemployed, the homosexuals, the Roma, the biracial. He thought that democratic politicians of the left should be placed in concentration camps. Hitler saw the outside world through the prism of a racial hierarchy, with Germans at the top and Jews and Slavs as racial enemies to be eliminated. He began the worst war in history to gain a colonial empire for the people he saw as a racial elite and killed millions of Jews and other Europeans along the way.   Had Barack Obama been born in Nazi Germany, of one white and one African parent, he would have been sterilized. His election as president was actually one of the strongest refutations ever offered to Nazi ideology.   It goes without saying that Hitler and Stalin controlled parties that opposed democracy and legitimated themselves by ideology, propaganda and force rather than free elections. In both the Nazi and Stalinist cases, the rise to power required violence, and the sustenance of the regime more violence.   That some people would compare their own peacefully elected president to ideological mass murderers is a sign of reckless and shameful disregard for some of the most important lessons of history.   And it is troubling to recall just who, in history, profited most from comparisons to Hitler and Stalin: Hitler and Stalin themselves. Each treated his political opponents as being in league with the other, and each thereby destroyed any middle ground for sensible debate.   In the 1930s, they together reduced political discussion to demagogic imagery, making it much harder for well-intentioned democrats to carry out sensible public discourse. No Western democracy recalls this age of totalitarianism. But the reckless comparisons of Obama or other democratically elected leaders to Hitler or Stalin do. Let us resolve to think and think deeply before we evoke them again.   * Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.” Visit the related web page
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