637 Building Food Policies 'From Neighborhood to Nation' by Jen Dalton

This past weekend over 600 policy wonks, city officials, public health advocates, food policy council members, good food advocates, community gardeners and other interested parties gathered in Portland for the first-ever national conference on local and state food policy, hosted by the Community Food Security Coalition. The goal of the gathering was “to create a space for policy makers and advocates to share their experiences in organizing for and implementing food policy” via an array of workshops, plenaries and networking sessions.

As I’m committed to sharing ways in which we can all continue to work towards a major paradigm shift in our social, cultural and democratic structures as they relate to our food system, I would like to offer the following notes. Similar to my report on the University of Oregon’s Food Justice Conference, I wasn’t able to attend all sessions but hope that my perspective promotes new ideas and continued action.

Overall the reviews were positive. People left inspired with action plans in hand, ready to share with the folks back home. As there are now over 100 food policy councils in some sort of organized structure across the country, where there were almost none five years ago, the conference came at a good time to reflect on and share a broad range of successes and failures, and sustainable food plans, all learning opportunities.

While, I missed the opening plenary entitled “Leading the Movement for Food Justice: Analysis, Organizing and Power for Policy Change” my ears on the ground reported that Saru Jayaraman of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United stole the show with her account of the neglect and needs of service workers across the country.

In the general session the following day, “What’s Next? Growing a Food Policy Movement” Congressman Earl Blumenauer of Oregon’s Third District spoke about our “entrenched political system that stifles change” and the need for “more evangelical work with farmers and ranchers who don’t understand that groups that purport to support them are in reality short changing them” while those in food systems change have an opportunity to be their partners to “support them in their natural inclination to be stewards of the land.” He also urged us to support Paul Ryan’s $30 billion cut in farm subsidies “because it’s an opportunity for coalition building.” And, he asserts that “farmers’ markets are a secrete weapon” for social change.

The 2011 Food and Farm Bill was, of course, another hot topic of conversation with CFSC supplying all attendees with a draft copy of their platform priorities developed with input from 11 listening sessions across the country. What emerged were two themes from which the CFSC developed their draft language: improving access to healthy food for everyone, especially low-income people and building local and regional food systems and infrastructure. They are asking for feedback on their document [PDF] by the end of May, so don’t hesitate to share your thoughts.

With many officials speaking and in attendance (from Portland’s Mayor Sam Adams to city supervisors, council people and representatives from the House and Senate, from many states and communities), a lot of advice and ideas on how to engage them in food systems change was shared. As reminders, common sense strategies for working with them include:

• Don’t be afraid to approach a politician. If they are someone who isn’t necessarily interested in food policy, don’t hesitate to engage them and educate them. Joe Cimperman, a Cleveland City Council member, mentioned that a group of food advocates shared their needs and passion with him and now 10 years later, Cleveland will be launching a Yard by Yard initiative that mandates that a community garden be built within five blocks of every residence. “We are in food policy because we want our friends to live longer,” he said, citing that neighborhoods with community gardens show increased health and safety for all residents.

• Phyllis Shulman from the City of Seattle stated ”We have to stop being afraid of each other and engage in how we need each other,” speaking to the need to collaborate and convene across scales from the grassroots, regional, city and state levels.

• Many, including Representative Dwight Evans of Pennsylvania, recommended that advocates and activists do the following:

o Create information graphics like maps to illustrate problems and needs. They are so much easier to read, understand and digest than lengthy reports

o Stop talking about food (I know, I know). Think about it this way: Food doesn’t change law. Job creation changes law. Improving community health change law. Economic and rural development change law. Come from any of those frames, rather than “food” and food needs can be addressed and money can be allocated through policy change.

o Politicians need to see and will act on the “low hanging fruit”. Show them how they can win; how the media will love their accomplishments and you’ve got yourself an ally.

While it’s abundantly clear that the time for action is now and we don’t have time to wait for the slow process of policy change, there is a process in place, as frustrating as it can be. And while there are clearly many avenues from which to address the myriad of needs from diverse groups working toward an equitable and secure food system, we have to play the game by their rules, for now. This is not a time to resist the game. It’s a time for bold requests, innovation, creativity and seizing opportunities as they present themselves. Politicians want your ideas. They just need them in a way that makes them look good.

Which brings me back to the Food and Farm Bill. Whether budget cuts result in another dismal year for food advocates or the bill gets pushed to 2013, there are still many perspectives on how to go about asking for what is fair and just. I heard from members of the “we have to stand up and stop fighting for crumbs” camp and the “we have to take on big ag and re-focus commodity subsidies towards a diversified approach to farming and feeding people” camp, as well as “SNAP needs a major overhaul” camp to “the big evil behind the industrial hunger complex” camp, each with valid arguments and sincere needs that require immediate action. The main issue remains though that this is a time when we need more people than ever to support smart changes to the Bill.

Many at the conference expressed a need for more education and outreach and a tool that communicates any and all wonky language into easy to digest and disseminate talking points so that lay people in the movement can share impacts and understanding with colleagues and community members. CFSC missed an opportunity to do so in the general session with 600 people eager for leadership in one room. They could have easily started with a synopsis of the Food and Farm Bill right off the bat, leading all attendees in an education session on one of the biggest policy battles that illustrates a neighborhood to nation perspective.

Finally, as those in attendance were people who, in a matter of minutes, reference the misappropriation of commodity subsidies, the corrupt actions of food and soda corporations, a school food system governed by the Department of Defense, debates over proper use of SNAP disbursements, diet-related disease and death, peak oil, climate destabilization, a raging Mississippi River and the “rapture” all as threats to food security, health and equal access for all, it was inspiring to be in a town with a sensible and enviable 15-year sustainable food action plan [PDF]. Sincere props to Portland for modeling programs that reflect simple, common-sense principals and initiatives that continue to develop and work for communities.

© 2011 Civil Eats

Jen Dalton is the editor of the Local Eats series, which features stories of how cities all over the United States are rebuilding local food systems from the ground up; and the co-founder of Kitchen Table Talks, a local food forum in San Francisco. Jen is also a communications and brandingconsultant who works to promote sustainable businesses, local economies and good food. She was the former Programs Director for Slow Food Nation.

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636 Why Liberal Sellouts Attack Prophets Like Cornel West by Chris Hedges

The liberal class, which attempted last week to discredit the words my friend Cornel West spoke about Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, prefers comfort and privilege to justice, truth and confrontation. Its guiding ideological stance is determined by what is most expedient to the careers of its members. It refuses to challenge, in a meaningful way, the decaying structures of democracy or the ascendancy of the corporate state. It glosses over the relentless assault on working men and women and the imperial wars that are bankrupting the nation. It proclaims its adherence to traditional liberal values while defending and promoting systems of power that mock these values. The pillars of the liberal establishment—the press, the church, culture, the university, labor and the Democratic Party—all honor an unwritten quid pro quo with corporations and the power elite, as well as our masters of war, on whom they depend for money, access and positions of influence. Those who expose this moral cowardice and collaboration with corporate power are always ruthlessly thrust aside.

The capitulation of the liberal class to corporate capitalism, as Irving Howe once noted, has “bleached out all political tendencies.” The liberal class has become, Howe wrote, “a loose shelter, a poncho rather than a program; to call oneself a liberal one doesn’t really have to believe in anything.” The decision to subordinate ethics to political expediency has led liberals to steadily surrender their moral autonomy, voice and beliefs to the dictates of the corporate state. As Dwight Macdonald wrote in “The Root Is Man,” those who do not make human beings the center of their concern soon lose the capacity to make any ethical choices, for they willingly sacrifice others in the name of the politically expedient and practical.

By extolling the power of the state as an agent of change, as well as measuring human progress through the advances of science, technology and consumption, liberals abetted the cult of the self and the ascendancy of the corporate state. The liberal class placed its faith in the inevitability of human progress and abandoned the human values that should have remained at the core of its activism. The state, now the repository of the hopes and dreams of the liberal class, should always have been seen as the enemy. The destruction of the old radical and militant movements—the communists, socialists and anarchists—has left liberals without a source of new ideas. The link between an effective liberal class and a more radical left was always essential to the health of the former. The liberal class, by allowing radical movements to be dismembered through Red baiting and by banishing those within its ranks who had moral autonomy, gradually deformed basic liberal tenets to support unfettered capitalism, the national security state, globalization and permanent war. Liberalism, cut off from the radical roots of creative and bold thought, merged completely with the corporate power elite. The liberal class at once was betrayed and betrayed itself. And it now functions like a commercial brand, giving a different flavor, face or spin to the ruthless mechanisms of corporate power. This, indeed, is the primary function of Barack Obama.

The liberal class, despite becoming an object of widespread public scorn, prefers the choreographed charade. It will decry the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or call for universal health care, but continue to defend and support a Democratic Party that has no intention of disrupting the corporate machine. As long as the charade is played, the liberal class can hold itself up as the conscience of the nation without having to act. It can maintain its privileged economic status. It can continue to live in an imaginary world where democratic reform and responsible government exist. It can pretend it has a voice and influence in the corridors of power. But the uselessness and irrelevancy of the liberal class are not lost on the tens of millions of Americans who suffer the indignities of the corporate state. And this is why liberals are rightly despised by the working class and the poor.

The liberal class is incapable of reforming itself. It does not hold within its ranks the rebels and iconoclasts who have the moral or physical courage to defy the corporate state and power elite. And when someone such as Cornel West speaks out, packs of careerist liberals—or perhaps one should call them neoliberals—descend on the apostate like hellhounds, never addressing the truths that are expressed but instead engaging in vicious character assassination. The same thing happened to Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, Dennis Kucinich, Jeremiah Wright and others who defied the political orthodoxy of corporate capitalism. The corporate forces, which have taken control of the press and which break unions, run the universities, fund the arts and own the Democratic Party, demand the banishment of all who question the good intentions of the powerful. Liberals who comply are tolerated within the system. They are permitted to busy themselves with the boutique activism of political correctness, inclusiveness or multiculturalism. If they attempt to fight for the primacy of justice, they become pariahs.

 

Leo Tolstoy wrote that there were three characteristics of all forms of prophecy: “First, it is entirely opposed to the general ideas of the people in the midst of whom it is uttered; second, all who hear it feel its truth; and thirdly, above all, it urges men to realize what it foretells.” 

Prophets put forward during their day ideas that the mass of people, including the elite, denounce as impractical and yet at the same time sense to be true. This is what invokes the rage against the prophet. He or she states the obvious in a society where the obvious is seditious. Prophecy is feared because of the consequences of the truth. To accept that Obama is, as West said, a mascot for Wall Street means having to challenge some frightening monoliths of power and give up the comfortable illusion that the Democratic Party or liberal institutions can be instruments for genuine reform. It means having to step outside the mainstream. It means a new radicalism. It means recognizing that there is no hope for a correction or a reversal within the formal systems of power. It means defying traditional systems of power. And liberals, who have become courtiers to the corporate state, must attempt to silence all those who condemn the ruthlessness and mendacity of these systems of destruction. Their denunciation of all who rebel is a matter of self-preservation. For once the callous heart of the corporate state is exposed, so is the callous heart of the liberal class.

© 2011 TruthDig.com

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

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635 Revitalizing the AFL-CIO by Ralph Nader

When Harry Kelber, the 96 year old relentless labor advocate and editor of The Labor Educator speaks, the leadership of the AFL-CIO should listen. A vigorous champion for the rights of rank-and-file workers vis-à-vis their corporate employers and their labor union leaders, Kelber has recently completed a series of five articles titled “Reasons Why the AFL-CIO Is Broken; Let Us Start a Debate on How to Fix It.”

The reaction: Silence from union leaders, their union publications and at union gatherings.

Kelber, operating out of a tiny New York City office, knows more firsthand about unions, their historical triumphs, their contemporary deficiencies and their potential for tens of millions of working families than almost anyone in the country. Over the decades, no one has written more widely distributed pamphlets that cogently and concisely explain unions, the labor movement and anti-worker restrictive laws like the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, than this honest, sensitive worker campaigner.

At a perilous period for both working and unemployed Americans, facing deep recession, corporate abandonment to China and other repressive regimes, and the Republicans’ virulent assault on livelihoods and labor rights, Kelber believes that AFL-CIO should be on the ramparts. Instead, he sees it as moribund, hunkering down, with control of the power and purse concentrated in the hands of the silent and Sphinx-like Federation officers and the tiny clique of bureaucrats who run the show.

“In the AFL-CIO, the rank-and-file have no voice in electing their officials, because only the candidates of the Old Guard can be on the ballot,” he writes.

Certainly, the AFL-CIO is not reflecting the old adage that when “the going gets tough, the tough get going.” They recoil from any public criticism of Barack Obama, who disregards or/and humiliates them by his actions.

Mr. Obama promised labor in 2008 to press for a $9.50 federal minimum wage by 2011, and the Employee Free Choice Act, especially “card check,” and then forgot about both commitments. He has not spoken out and vigorously fought for an adequate OSHA inspection and enforcement budget to diminish the tens of thousands of workplace related fatalities every year. He’s been too busy managing drones, Kandahar and outlying regions of the quagmire of our undeclared wars.

Nothing Obama does seems to publically rile the AFL-CIO. In February, he crossed Lafayette Square from the White House with great fanfare to visit his pro-Republican opponents at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce yet declined to go around the corner and visit the AFL-CIO headquarters. Where was the public objection from the House of Labor?

He prevents his vice-president from responding to the Wisconsin state federation of Labor’s invitation to address the biggest rally in Madison, Wisconsin protesting labor’s arch enemy, Republican Governor Scott Walker. Biden, a self-styled “union guy”, wanted to go but the political operatives in the White House said NO. Still no public objection from Labor’s leaders.

Kelber describes the lack of a strong, funded national and international strategy to deal with the growing gap between rich and poor and the expanding shipment of both blue and white collar jobs abroad. He laments AFL-CIO’s failure to develop a “working relation with the new global unions that are challenging transnational corporations and winning some agreements.” He also notes that the AFL’s top leaders “have minimal influence at world labor conferences. They rarely attend them, even when they are invited.”

Pushing for higher wages and worker rights in the poorer developing countries, including the adoption of International Labor Organization (ILO) standards has great merit and is also a constructive way to also protect American workers.

Kelber believes it is obvious “that U.S. cooperation with labor unions from other countries with the same employer is the best way to organize giant multinationals, but the AFL-CIO has spent little time, money and resources in building close working relations with unions from abroad.”

What is restraining AFL-CIO’s President Richard Trumka? A former coal miner, then a coal miners’ lawyer, and president of the United Mine Workers, Mr. Trumka has been at the Federation for over a decade. He knows the politics of the AFL-CIO, makes great speeches about callous corporatism around the country, and has a useful website detailing corporate greed.

Unfortunately, words aside, he is not putting real, bold muscle behind the needs of America’s desperate workers.

He can start by shaking up his bureaucracy and put forth an emancipation manifesto of democratic reforms internal to the unions themselves and external to the government and the corporate giants. They all go together.

When I asked Harry Kelber whether there were any unions he admires, he named the fast-growing California Nurses Association (CNA) and the United Electrical Workers.

CNA’s executive director Rose Ann DeMoro is on the AFL-CIO Board and has urged Mr. Trumka to be more aggressive. She has secured his stepped-up support for a Wall Street financial speculation tax that could bring in over $300 billion a year. He may even join her and the nurses in a symbolic picketing of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce headquarters next month.

The ever fundamental Kelber, however, sees a plan B if the AFL-CIO does not change. “Union members should be thinking about creating a new bottoms-up labor federation,” he urges, reminding them that in the nineteen thirties, the Committee of Industrial Organizations (CIO) seceded from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and went on “to organize millions of workers in such major corporations as General Motors, General Electric, U.S. Steel, Westinghouse, Hormel and others.”

The new labor federation, he envisions, for today’s times would be controlled by the membership and led by local unions and central labor councils that are impatient with the sluggish leadership of their international union presidents.

Harry Kelber, you epitomize the saying that “the only true aging is the erosion of one’s ideals.”

(Visit Harry’s Kelber’s website www.laboreducator.org for more of his insights.)

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book - and first novel - is, Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us. His most recent work of non-fiction is The Seventeen Traditions