Last night, Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian doctor who suffered tremendous family loss in the 2009 Israeli assault on Gaza, spoke to a crowd of over 100 people at the Schuler Books on 28th Street.
Dr. Izzeldin, who spoke in Grand Rapids last year, was invited to speak again by the local group Healing Children of Conflict (HCC). Dr. Izzeldin shared his personal story of family loss, first his wife in 2008 and then his 3 daughters in January of 2009 as Israeli bombs hit his home.
Dr. Abuelaish said that he was the first Palestinian doctor to practice medicine in an Israeli hospital. He says that this demonstrated to many Israelis that Palestinians are just as capable of serving as are Israelis.
His words were not overtly political, rather he emphasized the need for all of us to spend time with family and to love each other as much as possible, because we never know when our last chance will be to treat each other in a loving manner. He knows all too well, since his daughters were taken from him in an instant.
Dr. Abuelaish said that he had just come from his daughter’s room when the bomb hit their house. His daughters were killed instantly. When he entered the room his daughters’ bodies were almost unrecognizable, with their heads missing from their shredded bodies and blood everywhere in the room.
He tells the audience that what would happen if his son (who is still alive) would turn to violence and even take his own life as a suicide bomber? Dr. Izzeldin says that he cannot judge him if he turns to violence. Instead, he says that we all need to ask ourselves what have we all done and what are the factors that led someone down the road of violence? “If we do nothing to change the circumstances that led people to violence then we can not claim to love peace.”
As tears rolled down his face, he told the audience that what he wants to do is to honor his daughters by working towards peace and to make sure that no other children suffer the same fate. He says he is more determined to not hate, to not create more victims in order to bring justice for his daughters.
For Dr. Izzeldin hate is a poison, that once it enters your body you will be infected by it. The antidote of hate, he said, is to challenge the one you hate to see the world differently and to show them that you believe in the power of peace.
He said that one of his surviving daughters had been studying to go to college. She was wounded in the Israeli Gaza assault and lost sight in one eye, but when she was discharged from the hospital she did not lose sight of her goals. She is now going to college in Toronto and wants to keep the memory of her sisters alive by not giving up and giving in to violence.
He spoke about needing to bring prescriptions to those who are sick. When patients come to a hospital they are looking for a prescription to be healed. “We can’t just tell patients that we hope they get better.” He said in the same way we need to find the right prescription to make the world better. We cannot just want a better world we have to make a better world. He called on all of us to investigate what is going on and to see that we can do something to support those who are fighting to live.
Dr. Izzeldin told the audience that there is now a foundation established in memory of his wife and daughters, called Daughters for Life. Dr. Abuelaish said that Palestinian women are the ones who have pushed the hardest for education for children. He believes that it is time for Palestinian women to lead, to show us the way of the future. The foundation will give education awards to girls from the Middle East so that they will be able to study at the university level.
He concluded by reading a poem written by an Israeli/Jewish woman and an excerpt from his book I Shall Not Hate.
There was some time at the end for Q&A. One man asked him what he thought about a 1 or 2 state solution for Israel and Palestine. Dr. Abuelaish responded by say that as a doctor he doesn’t ask the woman who is in labor in the delivery room if she wants a boy or a girl. He knows she would tell him to just make sure the baby is healthy. He says that a 1 or 2 state solutions are theoretical questions and that what we must do is to take action right now to deal with the more immediate. He said that the Israeli settlements continue to be built, “we can’t even freeze them for 3 months and the US continues to give $3 billion a year.” Theoretical questions mean nothing, especially when we can’t even make progress towards justice.
Another person asked him what he thought about what was happening in Egypt. He said that all political leaders exist to serve their people, not to intimidate them. He hopes that peace and freedom will prevail in Egypt and that he is inspired by the courage that young people have in Egypt. He said we could all learn from them.
Michigan Human Rights Activists Face Nearly a Decade in Prison for Anti-Imperialist, Anti-War Protest
(This Action Alert was sent out by the Campaign to Free Ahlam Mohsen and Max Kantar.)
Ahlam Mohsen and Max Kantar are both facing felony federal assault charges for their roles in an anti-imperialist, anti-war action that took place during a Democratic Party meeting in Big Rapids, Michigan on August 16, 2010. At the meeting, which was attended by Senator Carl Levin—Chairman of the Armed Services Committee in the U.S. Senate—Max Kantar, 23, stood up and denounced Sen. Levin for his complicity in and support for U.S. war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Middle East. After Kantar was finished speaking, Ahlam Mohsen, 23, pushed an apple pie into Levin’s face.
Mohsen and Kantar now face up to EIGHT YEARS IN FEDERAL PRISON for speaking out against U.S. atrocities and mass murder against the peoples of Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere.
Mohsen and Kantar’s legal defense team is in IMMEDIATE NEED OF FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE. Please make checks payable to the Campaign to Free Ahlam and Max C/O MECAWI and mail to MECAWI at 5920 Second Ave., Detroit, MI 48202. For questions, please contact the Campaign to Free Ahlam Mohsen and Max Kantar via email at campaignforfreedom@gmail.com.
The CAMPAIGN also calls on all freedom- and justice-loving people to respectfully demand that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Michigan drop all charges against Ahlam Mohsen and Max Kantar. Assistant U.S. Attorney HAGEN FRANK is prosecuting the case.
ASSISTANT U.S. ATTORNEY, HAGEN FRANK
330 Ionia Avenue, N.W.
Suite 501
Grand Rapids, MI 49503
Fax: 616-456-2408
Senator Levin was targeted because of his CRIMINAL ROLE in supporting the U.S.-led SANCTIONS on IRAQ during the 1990s which killed in excess of 1,000,000 people, including some 500,000 CHILDREN UNDER THE AGE OF FIVE due to the denial of food, medicines, and water sanitation items. In addition to receiving more PRO-ISRAEL lobby money than virtually any other member of the Senate, Levin has also been a major proponent of U.S. DRONE BOMBINGS in PAKISTAN which have killed mostly civilians, including thousands of men, women, and children. Levin has always voted without fail to fund and sustain the murderous and dehumanizing U.S. OCCUPATIONS of IRAQ and AFGHANISTAN—unjust wars which include vast amounts of U.S. torture, murder, imprisonment, death, and destruction. The full statement (with sources) read by Kantar to Senator Levin can be accessed here: http://www.mecawi.org/Ahlam.statement%20and%20sources.pdf or http://freeahlamandmax.blogspot.com/2011/02/statement-read-to-senator-levin-in-big.html.
For more information, or to find out how you can help, visit the website of the CAMPAIGN TO FREE AHLAM MOHSEN AND MAX KANTAR at http://freeahlamandmax.blogspot.com/ or contact us via campaignforfreedom@gmail.com.
DROP ALL CHARGES AGAINST AHLAM MOHSEN AND MAX KANTAR! FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS!
GVSU Students Stand in Solidarity with the Egyptian Freedom Struggle
Earlier today a small group of GVSU students braved the blistering cold outside at the Allendale campus to make a public showing of support for the people of Egypt.
Several students held signs, others gave out small Egyptian flags and everyone tried to engage the student body as they passed by about what is happening in Egypt. Their show of solidarity, while small in numbers, is a reflection of the kind of support that people are demonstrating worldwide as Egyptian civil society continues in their struggle against the repressive Mubarak regime.
We spoke with a few of the students on camera about their action, what this means for the US, the Obama administration’s response so far and what students can do to get involved in ongoing actions of solidarity.
What the Guns Are Saying: A Look at HB-4009 in Michigan
In mid-January, State Senator Mike Green sponsored House Bill 4009 into the Michigan Legislature. We have Green to thank for our concealed weapon laws in Michigan. Now he wants to take away “gun free zones” from the current state law. The new bill will allow people to carry concealed weapons into schools, bars, sports arenas, and churches.
Under the new law, gun owners will also be able carry guns into hospitals, college dormitories, casinos, and concert halls with capacities over 2,500 seats.
When Representative Gabrielle Giffords was gunned down in January along with eighteen other people, some pundits wondered if this might finally bring about tighter gun control regulations nationwide. It seems that, in Michigan, we’re having the exact opposite reaction. Just looking at the gun-free zones that might be going away makes the mind boggle: it’s easy to picture the consequences of guns at a rancorous sports event…in a college classroom where a professor’s grade just took away someone’s scholarship…in a hospital where a doctor failed to save the life of some outraged and grieving man’s partner or girlfriend.
But judging from reader comments at the Grand Rapids Press site, many people feel that they need guns with them at all times. They say they need them for protection. This even though Michigan ranks midway in gun deaths in the U.S., 27th out of 50 states, and gun violence in Michigan has dropped steadily throughout the 2000s.
Of course, gun owners will tell you the drop is due to more people carrying concealed weapons. These people routinely ignore studies that show that just owning a gun makes you more likely to become a victim of gun violence. They adamantly believe the opposite, in fact. As one person wrote on MLive, “An armed society is a polite society.”
There are well-known facts to counter that statement: The United States has more gun deaths than almost any other country in the world. We’re only lagging behind Columbia, South Africa, and Thailand. Current figures show that in a one-year period, there were 9 gun deaths in Chile, 12 in Ireland, 68 in Switzerland. Canada had 144, and Germany 296. El Salvador had 1,441 gun deaths, and Mexico had 2,606. Meanwhile, the United States had 9,369 gun deaths. An armed society is a killing society. Tighter gun controls obviously lead to less violence.
Still, it’s not a set of facts that sinks easily into the American consciousness. Why? Let’s start by thanking Buffalo Bill and the myth of the Wild West, the reason why little boys love to play cowboys. But it’s important to remember the real lure of the game. There are not just cowboys; there are also Indians.
There was plenty of real-life, wholesale slaughter of Indians during the 19th century in the battle for White supremacy in the Western states, but the image that most people hold in their minds of this violence is pure fiction. William Cody’s Wild West Show was the first to frame our familiar national tale: cowboys triumphantly shooting and killing hostile, menacing Indians who attacked wagon trains or military forts without provocation. Audiences in the stadium cheered the brave cowboys and booed the Indians.
By the 1930s, cowboy movies such as “Dodge City” and “Red River” were presenting the same myth—that Indians were always the attackers, and that cowboys, with deadly accuracy and perfect aim, always successfully gunned them down, protecting grateful women and children as they did so. In other words, in this story White people act solely in self-defense, putting them on the side of the angels.
This theme of defending against the aggression of “the Other,” the terrifying element bent on the destruction of American hard work and blocking American imperialism, has now carried over into action films—where the protagonist fends off the foreign enemy du jour (Russians, Vietnamese, Saudis). And it’s found in science fiction films, where alien invaders bent on taking everything away from us are destroyed by scrappy heroes who not only save their wives and children, but the entire planet.
Most people who want to carry concealed weapons into places like sports arenas, hospitals, and even churches aren’t usually planning to gun down random victims. Instead, fortified by these embedded myths in the male culture, they are sure that they will use these weapons in self defense—always successfully, just like any lawful cowboy.
What’s interesting is that you can actually hear these themes in the comments about HB 4009. “Gun free zones should be called sitting duck zones,” wrote one reader, and another added, “There is no reason that law abiding citizens should be denied the right to defend themselves with a firearm if they choose to do so. These ‘gun free’ zones only mean one thing…everyone but criminals are unarmed.”
Another man wrote earnestly about defending his family, adding, “This [law] does help the people of Michigan. It gives anyone that has the good sense to handle their own self defense the ability to stay ready wherever they are.”
Not one person in the thread spoke about the poor, the unemployed, immigrants, or racial minorities. No one named their imagined adversaries. But Michael Moore deftly nailed this point recently on the Rachel Maddow Show:
“That imaginary person that’s going to break into your home and kill you, who does that person look like? It’s not freckle-faced Jimmy down the street. We never really want to talk about the racial or the class part of this in terms of how it’s the poor or it’s people of color that we imagine we’re afraid of.”
The proposed Michigan legislation seems to go hand-in-hand with a growing fear that immigrants are taking jobs away from “real Americans”…that Arabs and Arab-Americans are all secretly bound in a conspiracy to take down the United States…that Black people would rather be on welfare than have jobs and will drain the unemployment coffers. At any moment, one of these perceived enemies can attack. You can read comments expressing this fear on MLive and other sites daily. And a recurring theme for those favoring what the Tea Party calls “Second Amendment solutions” is that arming oneself is the first step toward holding all this “chaos” at bay…at saving what gun owners see as the very fabric of American life.
Let’s revisit that man who pictured himself defending his wife and children at, say, a shoot-out at his church. It’s guaranteed that he sees himself as a person with perfect aim as well as what he calls “good sense.” Somehow you just know that he pictures the attacker as whatever “Other” he fears the most. Just as you can be sure that it doesn’t occur to him that all the good sense in the world may not boot up fast enough to help him during an actual attack by someone with a semiautomatic weapon. Or that, because he is armed, he might actually draw fire to himself and his family if he draws a gun. It’s highly unlikely he’ll have time to fire that spectacular, John-Wayne shot that he’s fantasized about a hundred thousand times.
Senator Mike Green either has these same fantasies himself, or he is cynically feeding on them to grab more votes during his next election cycle. The idea of circling the wagons against threatening hostiles has always played well in American politics. We like our stories simple and, quite literally, drawn in black and white.
New Media We Recommend
Below is a list of new materials that we have read/watched in recent weeks. The comments are not a “review” of the material, instead sort of an endorsement of ideas and investigations that can provide solid analysis and even inspiration in the struggle for change. All these books are available at The Bloom Collective, so check them out and stimulate your mind.
Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching, by Paula Giddings – This book is part biography and part history lesson. If you have never read much about Ida B. Wells, then this book is a must. Giddings does a great job of providing insight into a woman who not only challenged the White Supremacist practice of lynching she challenged the patriarchal norms of her day. Wells was an organizer, an agitator, a writer, a feminist and a deeply compassionate woman. After reading this book, Ida B. Wells has become one of my new heroes.
Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East, by Fred Jerome – Did you know that Albert Einstein was asked to be the leader of the State of Israel? I didn’t until I read Fred Jerome’s wonderful book about the very public position that one of the greatest scientist took on Israel and Zionism. This book makes clear that Einstein was not a supporter of Zionism or the State of Israel. Laid out in chronological order, the book mostly consists of letters, speeches and articles by Einstein beginning with his thoughts on anti-Semitism in 1919 all the way through til 1955. Einstein on Israel and Zionism gave me an even greater appreciation of the mind of a person who impacted the 20th Century in unimaginable ways.
Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s Image of Women, featuring Jean Kilbourne (DVD) – In this new, highly anticipated update of her pioneering Killing Us Softly series, the first in more than a decade, Jean Kilbourne takes a fresh look at how advertising traffics in distorted and destructive ideals of femininity. The film marshals a range of new print and television advertisements to lay bare a stunning pattern of damaging gender stereotypes — images and messages that too often reinforce unrealistic, and unhealthy, perceptions of beauty, perfection, and sexuality. By bringing Kilbourne’s groundbreaking analysis up to date, Killing Us Softly 4 stands to challenge a new generation to take advertising seriously, and to think critically about popular culture and its relationship to sexism, eating disorders, and gender violence.
Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968 (DVD) – This film brings to light one of the bloodiest tragedies of the Civil Rights era after four decades of deliberate denial. The killing of four white students at Kent State University in 1970 left an indelible stain on our national consciousness. But most Americans know nothing of the three black students killed at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg two years earlier. This scrupulously researched documentary finally offers the definitive account of that tragic incident and reveals the environment that allowed it to be buried for so long. It raises disturbing questions about how our country acknowledges its tortured racial past in order to make sense of its challenging present.
US Media Gloss Over American Role in Egyptian Repression
(This article is re-posted from the national media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.)
The political context of the current Egyptian uprising is clear: The United States has steadfastly supported dictator Hosni Mubarak, whose rule has been marked by sham elections and the jailing and torture of dissidents, propping up his regime since 1981 with some $60 billion in aid, most of it military.
But since U.S. corporate media are accustomed to viewing international affairs through the lens of U.S. elite interests, much of the current coverage elides Washington’s role, or presents it as a “tightrope” balancing act for the Obama administration.
As one New York Times story (1/26/11) put it, “The administration has tried to balance its ties to Mr. Mubarak with expressions of concern about rigged elections and jailed dissidents in his country.” USA Today (2/1/11) announced: “The upheaval in Egypt has put the United States in a delicate diplomatic situation: pressing for a more democratic Egypt, but wary that too much change could threaten the stability that Egypt helps bring to the Middle East.”
On the PBS NewsHour, Margaret Warner (1/31/11) said, “The chaos in Egypt posed a delicate diplomatic challenge for the United States: appealing for democracy without alienating an ally.” Or as NBC Nightly News anchor Kate Snow (1/29/11) asked: “Is it a bit of a tightrope that the U.S. has to walk here, though, in terms of wanting to promote democracy on the one hand, but being a longtime ally of the Mubarak administration?”
An L.A. Times editorial (1/28/11) implausibly argued that the U.S. record of support for Mubarak would assist efforts to promote democracy: “As an ally and benefactor, the United States has helped prop up the 82-year-old strongman since he took power 30 years ago, and today it is in a unique position to impress upon him the importance of democracy.”
Some of the recently released WikiLeaks cables on Egypt provided another window into media thinking on the issue. The January 28 New York Times story was headlined, “Cables Show Delicate U.S. Dealings With Egypt’s Leaders.” The same day, the London Guardian had a very different headline: “WikiLeaks Cables Show Close U.S. Relationship With Egyptian President.” The Times account buried some of the more damning details, which make clear that U.S. officials are keenly aware of the prevalence of torture and brutality under Mubarak (FAIR Blog, 1/28/11). ABC‘s Christiane Amanpour offered what amounted to a rationalization of U.S. support for Egypt, explaining (1/26/11) that the implications are really big because this is very fundamental. Egypt receives the most American aid, more than $1 billion a year. It has the same goals as the United States against radicalization and terrorism, pro the Israeli peace process. But the United States, many people are saying, needs to get ahead of the curve, because otherwise it might be left behind as the people demonstrate their will.
Some outlets saw a distinct shift in the Obama administration’s position–well ahead of any evidence to that effect. The Washington Post published a January 27 piece headlined “As Arabs Protest, U.S. Speaks Up,” which declared that the White House was “openly supporting the anti-government demonstrations shaking the Arab Middle East,” adding that the administration had “thrown U.S. support clearly behind the protesters, speaking daily in favor of free speech and assembly even when the protests target longtime U.S. allies such as Egypt.”
The Post‘s evidence, however, was thin: a quote from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stating that the Mubarak government should “respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.” The strongest support for the notion that the U.S. was backing the street protests came from an anonymous administration official–hardly an indication of “speak[ing] up” in “open support.”
Another Post article tried to make the case again on January 31:
The Obama administration firmly aligned itself on Sunday with the protest movement that has overtaken Egypt, calling for an “orderly transition” to a more representative government amid rising U.S. concern that the demonstrations are turning violent and that unrest could spread across the Arab world.
Several paragraphs later, though, the Post added that the “shift in message had no visible effect in Cairo and other Egyptian cities,” and reported that prominent activist Mohamed ElBaradei’s assessment was that the rhetoric “had landed ‘like lead” in the Egyptian capital.”
It would seem that Egyptians have a clearer view of U.S. policy than many pundits and mainstream journalists. That point was driven home when NBC reporter Richard Engel, to his credit, brandished a tear gas canister that had been fired at protesters (1/28/11):
These were the tear gas canisters that were fired by all those riot police today. And if you look at them closely, they say clearly in English, “Made in the USA.” Egyptians have been picking them up, they’ve been looking them over.
But then, as if this straightforward illustration of the U.S. role in Egyptian repression was too revealing, Engel qualified his observation: “And from an Egyptian perspective, it does seem like Mubarak and the United States are working together. So the U.S. is walking a fine line here.”
It does not, in fact, take an “Egyptian perspective” to appreciate how crucial U.S. support has been to the Mubarak dictatorship. One only needs to look at the history of the past three decades–a history U.S. media would prefer that we overlook, or treat as part of a delicate “balancing act.”
Partnering with Polluters
In this week’s MiBiz Michigan Loves Manufacturing e-blast there was news of a collaboration between Dow Chemical and the Nature Conservancy.
The e-blast news brief stated, “Dow Chemical and its foundation are committing $10 million over five years to a collaboration with The Nature Conservancy, to evaluate Dow’s environmental impacts.” For those wanting more details there was a link to Environmental Leader, which identifies itself as Energy and Environmental News for Business.
The article on Environmental Leader states, “The chemical company and environmental non-profit will apply scientific knowledge to examine how Dow’s operations affect nature, and how to factor the role of nature into global business decisions, the two organizations said.”
The article goes on to say that Dow and the American Chemistry Council worked to defeat an effort in Seattle to put a 20-cent price tag on plastic bags and a legislative proposal in California that would have eliminated plastic bags. This information is puzzling since it reflects to this writer an anti-environmental position, where Dow fought to keep plastic bag use the norm on the west coast.
The article then states, “The Nature Conservancy and Dow Chemical are both members of the United States Climate Action Partnership, which lobbies the government on the need for greenhouse gas reduction legislation.” However, according to Sourcewatch the US Climate Action Partnership is made up of major global polluters like Shell, GM, DuPont and Alcoa. In addition, there is no evidence that the group lobbies for greenhouse reduction, rather many of the partner groups are actually involved in opposing greenhouse-gas regulations.
In addition, the article does not raise any issues around the partnership between Dow and the Nature Conservancy. Why would a national environmental organization partner with a company that has a long track record of disregard for negative environmental and health consequences?
For some sectors of the environmental movement this partnership between a known polluter and the Nature Conservancy seems quite natural. Environmental reporter Jeffrey St. Clair notes in a recent series of stories that are critical of many of the national eco-organizations that the Nature Conservancy is “the most unapologetically pro-corporate of all environmental groups.”
The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has a history if supporting corporate friendly policies, with the recent example of their support for a water diversion canal in California that would benefit agri-business. In May of 2010, the Washington Post wrote a story about TNC’s long-time relationship with BP, in which the organization’s CEO defended this partnership.
TNC argues that it is better to develop partnerships with huge corporate polluters than to just see them as the enemy. This kind of relationship has been financially very lucrative, but does it compromise on real environmental protection? Is the decision by Dow to hire The Nature Conservancy merely a PR move to win over public support for their claims of practicing sustainability?
These are important questions that we should all demand that news sources ask when reporting on partnerships between large corporations and environmental groups. It is not enough to assume that real sustainability will be practiced just because the groups involved make such a claim.
Media Bites – Axe sells Sexualized Gender norms for Charity
In this week’s Media Bites we look at a new Axe body products commercial, which passes as a promotional piece for a new Axe charity challenge for college students.
The video invites colleges to participate in a competition to donate clothing, but the images continue to normalize sexualized gender roles and male fantasy. The reality for college campuses is less about sex and more about sexual assault, a fact which will not sell scented body spray.
(This article by Devon G. Pena is re-posted from Dissident Voice.)
Let us begin with a “defining moment,” courtesy of the Oxford World Dictionary:
Commissariat (kɒmɪˈsɛːrɪət)
Definition: chiefly Military department for the supply of food and equipment.
Origin: late 16th century (as a Scots legal term denoting the jurisdiction of a commissary, often spelled commissariot): from French commissariat, reinforced by medieval Latin commissariatus, both from medieval Latin commissarius ‘person in charge’, from Latin committere ‘entrust’
How does this relate to the news cycle? Well, on January 20, Wal-Mart announced plans to reformulate the ingredients of their in-house or private brand processed foods. An estimated 60 percent of the company’s annual grocery revenues are currently tied to the sale of processed food items. It is therefore expected that this formula change will place pressure on other private suppliers to follow suit.
This is perhaps the single most significant news story emerging in the corporate agrifood business sector with implications for food sovereignty and food justice movements across the world. Indeed, the company is touting its plan as a response to Michelle Obama’s call on the agrifood industry to clean-up its act of poisoning our nation’s children with highly processed foods. She has specifically called on companies to reformulate processed foods by reducing sugar, sodium, and fat content. Apparently, the company is making much of its efforts to listen to critics.
Wal-Mart executives announced they plan to reduce the sodium content of processed foods by a quarter and eliminate all added sugars across many selected items in their private brand lines of processed foods by 2015. They also announced a plan to eliminate all remaining trans-fats in their private brand lines. These would include items like luncheon meat, yogurt, salad dressing, and juice and soda products. Of course, critics — including Marion Nestle — already note that these reductions will still largely result in unhealthy amounts of sodium and sugar in processed foods. The reformulations will still exceed the recommended daily intake of these additives by 50 to 70 percent when seen in the context of three meals per day.
The First Lady has also been calling for increased access by all consumers to fresh fruits and vegetables. This is widely seen as representing an effort to mobilize support to address the role that “food deserts” play in the nation’s unequal geography of hunger and malnutrition in both urban and rural areas. The social science community has been studying food deserts at least since Robert Gottlieb first used the term in a 1996 report prepared for the University of California Transportation Center on strategies for food-related transportation in low-income, transit-dependent communities. Food deserts can be defined as residential areas that lack grocery stores, farmers’ markets, or other places where residents may shop for – or grow their own – fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, fish, and other unprocessed foods. Food deserts are characterized by a preponderance of cheap and unhealthy fast foods or mini-market and convenience stores that sell processed foods at inflated prices. Finally, food deserts are also typified by a lack of privately-owned cars and limited public transportation. There is no easy way to get fresh healthy food to the mouths of the people living in a food desert.
Wal-Mart’s plan includes changes in new store locations that would allow it to operate in urban core or inner-city neighborhoods that are currently harmed by food desert conditions. There has been widespread opposition, at least in Southern California, to the opening of ‘mega-stores’ in the inner-city. The ecological footprint would have to be greatly down-sized for these stores to become acceptable in many communities. The Wal-Mart supply chain would seek to source and stock more local fruits and vegetables. How it will do this and also address social justice concerns of farm workers and the protection of endangered small farms with heritage and heirloom crops remains unclear.
Wal-Mart stores are predominantly located in suburban or rural areas and, according to my own estimates, their current revenue from sales of fresh fruits and vegetables relies on national or globalized commodity chains for at least 80 percent of all perishable fresh foods on their shelves. Over the past 2 to 3 years, Wal-Mart has featured ‘local foods’ as seasonal niche products in some stores including one in Alamosa, Colorado that I have personally visited. The past two summers (in 2009 and 2010), that store was selling English peas produced and supplied by organic acequia farmers from the San Luis, Colorado area located about 45 miles away. Locally-sourced corn, potatoes, Mexican calabacitas, and other seasonal vegetables are also sold at the Alamosa store.
Wal-Mart executives clearly want us to see their plan as an honest and thoughtful effort to address the geography of environmental racism in the agrifood system while turning as much as possible to local sources and suppliers. They claim to recognize the disparate nature of the conditions in food deserts and thus aim for policies tempered by the fact that food deserts are predominantly located in low-income and/or people of color communities.
Several critical issues are at stake in making sense of the Wal-Mart plan to reformulate processed foods and transform its supply chain toward more local sourcing of fruits and vegetables as well as meat and fish. One issue is differential access to fresh food and commodity prices. Marion Nestle noted in a recent NPR interview that the price of processed food has decreased by 40 percent since 1980 while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent during the same period.
How Wal-Mart goes about cutting prices for fruits and vegetables, reversing the trends of the past thirty years of marketing and sourcing, is also a puzzle. What will this mean for small farmers? What is local? What about social justice? None of the proposals in the plan addressed the continued exploitation and suffering of marginalized farm worker communities or the survival of small family farmers. Moreover, no matter how serious and honest Wal-Mart may be in pursuit of this initiative, the sort of change required will have to occur in other organizations that shape, constrain, and control the agrifood system. First and foremost is the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which must expand its commitment to shifting from global to local food systems. This would require radical restructuring of the subsidy, research, rural development, resource conservation, credit market, and other facilities in its purview that will be reauthorized in the 2012 Farm Bill.
Yet even this is not the end of the story. Food and nutrition are important, but eating and dietary practices are constrained and shaped by cultural practice and social class position. We need, in short, a paradigm shift — one that recognizes that having access to fresh fruits and vegetables will not mean much if no one is around to prepare, serve, and share the food. We may do well to recall that so-called ‘convenience’, ‘processed’, and ‘fast’ foods were developed because capitalism intensified and expanded the labor time it demands from workers and consumers. ‘Power’ lunches are not a proletarian perk. Like a black hole, capital bends and warps the gravity of our living time, converting as much of it into working time that produces profit. Capital seeks to trap all our time inside the singularity of work time. Escaping that singularity must be a principle of a well-grounded movement for food sovereignty.
There are many reasons to remain constructively engaged yet skeptical of these efforts. Wal-Mart’s plan in the long term must eliminate processed foods altogether and it must downsize individual store footprints. My strongest objection, frankly, is that the last thing the democratic and grassroots food sovereignty movement needs is for Wal-Mart to become the centralized Local Food Commissariat. Local sourcing of food is a good principle, but it matters who controls the process. It also matters how the process is organized; namely, whether it is top-down or bottom-up. Increasing access to fresh fruits and vegetables in food deserts and low-income communities is also a good principle, but many of these are working-poor families in which parents have to work two or three jobs just to avoid homelessness.
Lacking living-wage jobs and affordable transit options, when are working poor parents to find time and resources to shop for fresh ingredients when they still can’t afford to prepare wholesome meals for their families on a daily basis? Too many of these are single-parent families, mostly headed by women in such circumstances with multiple jobs and marginal earnings. The demands of the local food movement are insufficient as the basis for any sort of deeply transforming and wider reorganization of the nation’s political economy of food and agriculture. We need to be asking ourselves: How do we create an economy where people do not live to work but work to live? In other words, how do we create an economy where people have the option to work less and play, pray, learn, cook, and share the table to eat together more?
Living-wage and 35-hour work week laws may help to resolve this problem by making it possible for people to work at single well-paid jobs instead of wasting their lives trapped in 60+ hours a week spread over three menial part-time and low-paying jobs that still keep families at bare subsistence. If people can earn a just, living wage, this may reduce the length of the work day and week, creating more free time and opportunities for people, including those families trapped in food deserts, to enjoy local shopping, cooking, and conviviality. Is not freedom from work the necessary precondition for people to enjoy sharing wholesome food at the dinner table with their loved ones and friends?
The path away from food deserts must also run along the road toward economic justice and workplace democracy. The goal of food sovereignty is ultimately not possible without these other values. Wal-Mart’s plans to moderately improve their food quality and become the Local Food Commissariat may yield some benefits, but they do not appear poised to achieve genuine food sovereignty.
The local branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is calling for solidarity with farm workers this Friday by supporting the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) campaign.
FLOC has been engaged in a campaign to get people to divest from JP Morgan Chase banks because of their financial support for the tobacco giant RJ Reynolds. The campaign is based upon the working conditions and wages of workers who are employed on tobacco farms in North Carolina.
According to FLOC the work conditions are horrendous, where workers are subjected to long hours, harassment at work, abject poverty, miserable housing in the labor camps and denial of basic labor and human rights conditions. FLOC also states, “Adequate shower and laundry facilities are often lacking, making it difficult to wash off pesticide residue. Each year, thousands of workers suffer from Green Tobacco Sickness (GTS), which is caused by a high level of nicotine absorption through the skin. Short term effects include dizziness, nausea, and dehydration, which can lead to more serious health problems such as heat stroke.”
Tobacco giant RJ Reynolds makes at least $2 billion a year in profits, but those profits do not translate into just wages for migrant workers who pick the tobacco. FLOC has been pressuring the company for over a year, with a campaign that includes targeting the tobacco giant’s largest financial lender, JP Morgan Chase.
We reported last June at the US Social Forum about a protest march in Detroit where members of FLOC and supporters went to the main branch of JP Morgan Chase to demand that they discontinue doing business with RJ Reynolds until the workers demands are met. JP Morgan Chase bank is the lead bank in a consortium of Reynolds American creditors, lending Reynolds American $489 million in funds.
The divestment campaign that FLOC initiated on Labor Day of 2010 is asking people to not bank with JP Morgan Chase bank. Many people have already pulled their accounts with JP Morgan Chase bank, but FLOC states that more people need to divest from the bank in order to put enough pressure on Reynolds America.
The Grand Rapids branch of the IWW will be one of 200 actions across the country this Friday, February 4 as a show of solidarity with farmworkers fighting for justice in North Carolina. IWW spokesperson Shannon Williams said, “We are participating in this action because the IWW believes that an injury to one is an injury to all. It is important for workers to act in solidarity with other workers when they are being exploited.”
The IWW plans on being at the 1100 Michigan Avenue branch of the JP Morgan Chase bank in Grand Rapids from 4:00pm til 5:30pm this Friday. They are inviting anyone to join them with signs and they will be handing out an informational flyer to bank customers during their solidarity action.
