sam clovis withdraws nomination for agriculture department chief scientist

credit: Charlie Neibergall/AP

We’ve written about his preposterous nomination before due to his sheer inadequacy for the job and thankfully Sam Clovis has finally withdrawn his nomination for chief scientist of the agriculture department. Clovis is a climate change sceptic and was just another cog in the anti-science Trump administration. However make no mistake, his lack of qualification for the job is not why he withdrew his nomination. Clovis wrote to president Trump this week saying that he ‘did not want to be a distraction’ after it was revealed that he had communication with George Papadopoulos  who admitted to the FBI that he lied about his work with Robert Mueller as part of the investigations into the links between the Trump campaign and Russia. Clovis who had not yet been confirmed by the senate would have faced presumably intense scrutiny on his Russian connections by the Senate agriculture committee had he not withdrawn.

Either way, Clovis’ withdrawal is good news for the department of agriculture’s science department, perhaps their next pick will be an actual scientist suited to such an important governmental position.

new resource: national sustainable agriculture oral history archive

credit: Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funders

The National Sustainable Agriculture Oral History Archive is a collection of interviews with people who have been instrumental in the development and implementation of public policies to advance sustainable agriculture in the United States. It was started in 2015 and has been growing ever since. Several of the interviews are with key members of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) and their interviews document the process of formation and evolution that has led to the NSAC that we know today. They also discuss the federal policy reforms NSAC, its allies, and predecessor coalitions have achieved over the past four decades.

To date there are 31 interviews available in the archive, most in a video format with accompanying written transcription. The plan for the next year involves conducting 8-10 more interviews featuring  several farmer/civil rights activists in the South among others.

Among the main topics covered in the interviews are:

• The political and social context surrounding the initial federal policy efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to advance organic and sustainable agriculture;
• The evolution of what became the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, from its early days as an informal network of grassroots organizations, to the more formal structure of regional Sustainable Agriculture Working Groups (SAWGs) in the 1990s, to the NSAC of today with its 120 organizations from around the country;
• A review of the policy gains that support organic and sustainable agriculture achieved through federal Farm Bills from 1985 through 2014, including a discussion of where policy proposals fell short, despite the efforts of sustainable agriculture advocates;
• What now? Exploration of priorities going forward that are needed to strengthen organic and sustainable farming and build a healthy food system.

Check out the archive HERE

The archive is housed at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Sustainable Agriculture. The interviews were conducted by Ron Kroese (rkroese@visi.com), a senior fellow with the University’s Endowed Chair in Agricultural Systems. 

emergency day of action against DAPL

The Sacred Stones Camp at Standing Rock has put out the call for immediate emergency action to stop the drilling below the Missouri River for the Dakota Access Pipeline after yesterday’s announcement by the Army Corps of Engineers of their intent to issue permission to proceed with construction, ignoring a previous order to conduct an environmental impact study on the project before doing so. Without action, drilling will likely begin today, Wednesday February 9, and the pipeline could be completed in 80 days.

If there were ever a time to flood TDP banks, shout outside of Army Corps of Engineers offices, and share this information widely, this is it. Find actions near you today!

We’ll leave you with this excellent quote from indigenous American Kandi Mosset in the Guardian today: “The Dakota Access pipeline is a symptom of the larger problem, which is the fracking that’s continuing to happen. Society as a whole needs to wake up and realize there are no jobs on a dead planet.”

don’t back down on DAPL, SEND PUBLIC COMMENTS TODAY!

Friends, it’s clear to us that the activism bug is sweeping the nation. Suddenly even my once-apolitical mother is calling her senators every day. It’s beautiful, and it’s important. On this note, we’ve got one URGENT request for you today: please, please add the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to your call and write lists. President Trump may have put the fast track on the Dakota Access Pipeline, but you still have the opportunity to voice your opposition to this dangerous and unnecessary project!

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ public comment period on the proposed 1,172-mile-long pipeline is open now, and the Water Protectors at Standing Rock need your support before the comment period closes February 20, 2017.

 

Send your public comment now and continue to stand with Standing Rock in opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Given this week’s current events,  we think the the sooner, the better!

*Photo by John Wathen, Hurricane Creekkeeper

speaking your truth: in honor of every human being marching in the women’s march tomorrow

I once had the great privilege of living for a while with a lovely and formidable witchy nature woman in Maine. She had the following passage from Audre Lorde‘s The Cancer Journals posted on the inside of her bathroom door, and I have since followed suit. I cannot tell you what good it does for the spirit, to read this first thing every morning! But tomorrow morning, oh on this morning of mornings, I wanted others to read this too as we take to the streets to speak our collective truths; may we also  listen as allies to women of color, and may we remember, may we be bolstered by the words of those who have marched before us. 

“I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you…. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.

I began to ask each time: “What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?” Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, “disappeared” or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.

Next time, ask: What’s the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end.

And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”

indivisable: a how-to for resisting the trump agenda

We are only exaggerating a little when we say that these ideas are too big for google: originally a GoogleDoc, Indivisable was so popular that the traffic overloaded GoogleDocs and has been moved to its own website. The 24-page document was written by former congressional staffers and uses Tea Party strategies as a model for grassroots resistance of Trump initiatives in congress. The basic idea is that, though progressives may not agree with the Tea Party’s values, their basic strategy successfully dead-ended most of the major legislative projects of the Obama administration– and these tactics can be adapted for use in the name of “inclusion, tolerance, and fairness.”

While we abhor the idea that this kind of stalemate partisan politics will continue to be business as usual in congress, we have to admit that the authors are clearly well-educated, thoughtful, and careful in their approach. At the very least, this guide is easy to read, informative, and provides an excellent refresher course in American civics. At the very best, it offers those of us who care about continuing to make our society more inclusive, most just, and more peaceful a hand up out of feelings of powerlessness. As such, this is considered required Greenhorns reading.

successful tribunal and peoples assembly

TNC’s (Transnational Corporations) currently have world policy customized to streamline their interests. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is a primary example along with many other ‘free trade’ arrangements established by neo-liberal politicians. The damage to regional agriculture and human rights in the most vulnerable countries has been done, though many have resisted.

On 24-28 October, Friends of the Earth International (FOEI) were able to deliver 10 formal presentations in Geneva detailing human rights abuses by TNC’s to representatives from a wide variety of governments.

To read more about the Geneva Conference click HERE

 

queer farmer voices wanted for white house meeting

Listen up, queer farmers! Jonah Mossberg, director of the Queer Farmer Film Project’s documentary Out Here has been invited by the White House Rural Council to a meeting at the White House titled “Advancing LGBT Progress in Rural America.” The meeting’s agenda and exact purpose remains unclear, but Jonah is seeking feedback, input, advice, and commentary from LGBTQ farmers, rural folks, and anyone who might know LGBTQ farmers and/or rural folks. What issues are important in these communities? How can LGBTQ farmers in rural America be better served? The meeting will take place Friday, December 2, so get in touch with Jonah before then!

Email: queerfarmerfilmproject@gmail.com

declaration against the criminalisation, persecution and judicialization of the struggle for the defence of life, rights, land, water, seeds and mother earth

International Conference on Agrarian Reform

La Via Campesino, The Peasant’s Movement
Marabá, 15 April 2016

From 13 to 17 April 2016, in Marabá, Pará, Brazil, more than 130 delegates from 28 countries around the world were brought together as part of La Vía Campesina and allied movements, as part of the International Conference on Agrarian Reform, a symbol of the fight for freedom for men and women in the fields, the mangroves and on the sea. The aim of the conference was to draw up a much-needed proposal for Popular Agrarian Reform to override capitalist and neoliberal expansion. 

At this time of struggle and resistance for peoples of the world, we debated thecriminalisation, persecution and judicialization of the struggle for the defense of life, rights, land, water, seeds and mother earth, promoted by capitalist interests imposing political, economic, military and social terrorism. This all occurs with the consent of State Governments by means of their lethal projects such as extraction-based infrastructure projects, or capitalist ‘development’ (tourism, carbon markets, mining, hydroelectricity, monoculture, agribusiness, industrial agriculture and mariculture), as well as the militarisation of our lands. Deprivation, social instability and repression are widespread as a result of systematic assassinations, massacres, forced disappearances, high rates of femicide, imprisonment and arbitrary detention, intimidation, harassment and threats, prosecution of leaders, forced migration and wars against ordinary people.

On top of this there is political instability with the purpose of maintaining an imbalance among populations over the world, as well as frequent coups on the US government’s radar, a state which begins by creating unstable, failed states, as is the case in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Paraguay, Ecuador, Bolivia, South Africa, and the current attempted coup against the Brazilian people and the systematic meddling in the Venezuelan process.

We see collusion between the State, private companies, corporations and elites who create a culture of impunity that allows perpetrators to escape unpunished.

Faced with this wave of unbridled criminalisation of those of us who defend water, land, mangroves, sea, territory and life, we denounce and call for the punishment of those responsible for thousands of assassinations of social leaders, we denounce the legal prosecution of thousands of campaigners, we call for the liberation of thousands of political prisoners, we denounce the extreme case of the assassination of Berta Cáceres, one of the most symbolic leaders in the fight against capital plundering and a campaigner for peace in Honduras. We urgently need an end to the criminalization of the fight for land, mangroves and sea, and the social struggle.

Today, more than ever, we reaffirm that our fight is part of the defence of human rights and life. For life we give everything, for death we give nothing.

Throughout our lifelong struggle, not one moment of silence for our dead!

 

La Via Campesino is an international movement  that seeks to unite peasants, landless, woman farmers, and rural youth to fight to defend and promote small-scale sustainable agriculture as a lifestyle and livelihood. Read more about their work here! And check out our 2011 blog post about their food sovereignty youth training program.

do you know where the presidential candidates stand on agriculture?

This week, for In These Times, John Collins researches what the current presidential candidates have to say about agriculture— and what he discovers might surprise you. For instance, Hilary Clinton has the most detailed proposition for supporting small farms, including mention of student debt reform. She even proposes doubling funding for the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program. But, then again, she has received significant campaign funding from GMO industries. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, has a sort of nebulous proposition that ignores the details and gets to the heart of the matter, notably including: reversing NAFTA and a fun little historical rid-bit about how Abraham Lincoln called the USDA the “People’s Department.”

rick berman, gun for hire, is attacking chipotle

Who is Richard Berman?

Richard “Rick” Berman is a longtime Washington, D.C. public relations specialist whose lobbying and consulting firm, Berman and Company, Inc., advocates for special interests and powerful industries. Berman and Co. wages deceptive campaigns against industry foes including labor unions; public-health advocates; and consumer, safety, animal welfare, and environmental groups.

Non-profits linked to Berman include:

• The Center for Consumer Freedom

• The Employment Policies Institute

• The Center for Union Facts

• The American Beverage Institute

To learn more, click HERE!

we are all flint

The same forces that have made the Flint disaster possible are the same ones
that are bent on privatizing public water supplies and preventing a just
resolution to the growing world climate disaster.

The following is an excerpt from a Statement from SxSW Experiment about the water crisis in Flint, MI. The experiment is a powerful grassroots coalition of Latino, African American, and low income communities hailing from the American South and Southwest and working to incur racial and socio-economic justice in their regions and across the country. (Sidenote: Their website contains a wealth of amazing resources and information for social justice activism.)

Read the entirety of “We are All Flint” here.

There is another critical question: How do we address the infrastructure
crisis throughout the United States? As in Flint, this issue
disproportionately burdens communities of people of color and of
low-wealth. This is not simply a question of failure of public
investment. It reflects a deep structural problem that threatens to
create future public health disasters.

The deeper message of Flint goes beyond the dangers of human error or
even negligence, and beyond the actions of state governments that would
facilitate the impoverishment of our people. It is about a crisis in the
U.S. that threatens the lives and well-being of a growing majority of
the population.

The neoliberal model of development that underlies the strategic
political policies in Michigan that led to this crisis has as its
cornerstone the privatization of public resources and public services.
This model is supported by both major political parties and bankrolled
by those who have accumulated tremendous wealth at the direct expense of
people of color and of low-wealth.

It is a mode of development that is rooted in the systematic undermining
of the right to democratic participation by limiting the capacity of
local people to impact the formation and implementation of public policy
… whether in Flint, across the US, or in other parts of the world. The
same forces that have made the Flint disaster possible are the same ones
that are bent on privatizing public water supplies and preventing a just
resolution to the growing world climate disaster.

We stand in solidarity with the people of Flint, who are on the
frontlines of the struggle for democracy. We share their struggle for
democracy and for a transition to a just society that more fully values
human life and development.

the propagandists: outing corporate ties

Propagandists.org posts information about propaganda, its history, and dossiers of known government and industry propagandists that operate today.

Each year, the US Government and industries spend hundreds of millions of dollars to promote propaganda (now called “social marketing”), assigning government- or industry-funded propagandists (also known as social marketers, social scientists, and thought leaders) who use their academic credentials and smiles to promote a product or idea that you don’t want. Websites like Wikipedia and http://www.CDC.gov are largely controlled by faceless and nameless industry and government propagandists who ensure that what’s posted does not challenge the industry or governmental dogma.

Many propagandists appear on the evening news and talk shows, promoting the latest pills, tests, and treatments without mentioning the funding they receive from drug companies. Popular actors and activists are sometimes hired to use their celebrity to connect with fans. Propagandists influence television and movie scripts to sell ideas and products.

Unlike propaganda websites used to attack honest clinicians and scientists who question propaganda, we plan to use this website to compile dossiers on prominent propagandists who fail to identify their corporate or government ties.

ttip information!

This week’s Ind.ie roundup focuses on de-mystifying two areas relevant to our privacy and freedoms: encryption and trade deals. They can both sound like dull and difficult topics, so I’m going to do my best to make them clearer, with the help of many, much-smarter, people…

Encryption

Encryption is a way to make data more secure, and unable to be intercepted by anyone unauthorised to view it. For example, encryption allows us to send messages to each other that can’t be read by anyone besides the intended recipient.

Accordingly to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Surveillance Self-Defense guide, there are three key concepts in encryption:

Private and public keys

Common types of encryption include a private key, which is kept secret on your computer and lets you read messages that are intended only for you. A private key also lets you place unforgeable digital signatures on messages you send to other people. A public key is a file that you can publish or give to others that allows people to communicate with you in secret, and check signatures from you. Private and public keys come in matched pairs.

Click here to visit the ind.ie roundup blog to read lots more!

gmo right to know and april 28 rally in new york

Big money is trying to kill the effort to label GMOs in the state of New York, but GMO Right to Know bills are moving forward. If you’re a New Yorker, please attend the GMO Labeling Rally & Lobby Day at the NY State Capitol in Albany on Tuesday, April 28, 2015. Reserve your seat on a bus today!

Update on GMO Labeling Bills in New York
The GMO labeling bill numbers you need to know are NY State Assembly bill A.617 and NY State Senate bill S.485. Bill A.617 was successfully voted out of the NY Assembly Consumer Affairs and Protection committee in early March and is now awaiting a vote in the Codes committee. The companion bill in the Senate, S.485, has not yet seen any action; it’s in the Consumer Protection committee and will hopefully be voted on soon.

Vote With Your Voices and Feet
Assembly members need to be told to push Bill A.617  forward because people should be able to know if it’s GMO. Go to www.gmofreeny.net to learn how to contact your Assembly member and Senator and what you should say when you call. Even better if you can stop by one of their offices in Albany in person!

Rally for Your Right to Know on April 28
On Tuesday, April 28th, 2015, the NY GMO Labeling Rally & Lobby Day will take place at the State Capitol in Albany, from 11:30 am – 3 pm. The rally will have food, great speakers, and like-minded people. Bus transportation is available from Manhattan, Westchester, Hudson Valley, Long Island, Rochester, Syracuse, Ithaca, and Binghamton and student scholarships are available.

No matter how you get there, just get there and make some NOISE in Albany! See this flyer for more information: April28Rally