Over the years GRIID has done lots of youth-based media projects. This week we are working with a group of students in the Holland area who are members of an organization called SLIC – Student Leaders Initiating Change.
This group of students is focusing on tobacco, alcohol and drug prevention and creating media to influence their peers. We know from research that the alcohol and tobacco industries target youth through a variety of means.
After spending the first day talking about how drug, alcohol and tobacco messages are normalized in media students began by producing media literacy pieces to help their peers understand the various techniques to target them. Here is a movie review video that some of the SLIC participants created.
In addition to media literacy pieces the students also created news pieces, conducted interviews with experts from the community and video profiles, where participants talked about why they decided to join the SLIC Media Project.
You can follow the SLIC Media Project on facebook.
BP Is Destroying Evidence and Censoring Journalists
(This article is re-posted from Alternet.)
While President Obama insists that the federal government is firmly in control of the response to BP’s spill in the Gulf, people in coastal communities where I visited last week in Louisiana and Alabama know an inconvenient truth: BP — not our president — controls the response. In fact, people on the ground say things are out of control in the gulf.
Even worse, as my latest week of adventures illustrate, BP is using federal agencies to shield itself from public accountability.
For example, while flying on a small plane from New Orleans to Orange Beach, the pilot suddenly exclaimed, “Look at that!” The thin red line marking the federal flight restrictions of 3,000 feet over the oiled Gulf region had just jumped to include the coastal barrier islands off Alabama.
“There’s only one reason for that,” the pilot said. “BP doesn’t want the media taking pictures of oil on the beaches. You should see the oil that’s about six miles off the coast,” he said grimly. We looked down at the wavy orange boom surrounding the islands below us. The pilot shook his head. “There’s no way those booms are going to stop what’s offshore from hitting those beaches.”
BP knows this as well — boom can only deflect oil under the calmest of sea conditions, not barricade it — so they have stepped up their already aggressive effort to control what the public sees.
At the same time I was en route to Orange Beach, Clint Guidry with the Louisiana Shrimp Association and Dean Blanchard, who owns the largest shrimp processor in Louisiana, were in Grand Isle taking Anderson Cooper out in a small boat to see the oiled beaches. The U.S. Coast Guard held up the boat for 20 minutes – an intimidation tactic intended to stop the cameras from recording BP’s damage. Luckily for Cooper and the viewing public, Dean Blanchard is not easily intimidated.
A few days later, the jig was up with the booms. Oil was making landfall in four states and even BP can’t be everywhere at once. CBS 60 Minutes Australia found entire sections of boom hung up in marsh grasses two feet above the water off Venice. On the same day on the other side of Barataria Bay, Louisiana Bayoukeeper documented pools of oil and oiled pelicans inside the boom – on the supposedly protected landward side – of Queen Bess Island off Grand Isle.
With oil undisputedly hitting the beaches and the number of dead wildlife mounting, BP is switching tactics. In Orange Beach, people told me BP wouldn’t let them collect carcasses. Instead, the company was raking up carcasses of oiled seabirds. “The heads separate from the bodies,” one upset resident told me. “There’s no way those birds are going to be autopsied. BP is destroying evidence!”
The body count of affected wildlife is crucial to prove the harm caused by the spill, and also serves as an invaluable tool to evaluate damages to public property – the dolphins, sea turtles, whales, sea birds, fish, and more, that are owned by the American public. Disappeared body counts means disappeared damages – and disappeared liability for BP. BP should not be collecting carcasses. The job should be given to NOAA, a federal agency, and volunteers, as was done during the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.
NOAA should also be conducting carcass drift studies. Only one percent of the dead sea birds made landfall in the Gulf of Alaska, for example. That means for every one bird that was found, another 99 were carried out to sea by currents. Further, NOAA should be conducting aerial surveys to look for carcasses in the offshore rips where the currents converge. That’s where the carcasses will pile up–a fact we learned during the Exxon Valdez spill. Maybe that’s another reason for BP’s “no camera” policy and the flight restrictions.
On Saturday June 12, people across America will stand up and speak out with one voice to protest BP’s treatment of the Gulf, neglect for the response workers, and their response to government authority. President Obama needs to hear and see the people waving cameras and respirators. Until the media is allowed unrestricted access to the Gulf and impacted beaches, BP – not the President of United States – will remain in charge of the Gulf response.
For more information on community rallies, please visit HERE.
Sunday evening, The Grassroutes Caravan bicycled in to the Fourth Street Garden Oasis for a potluck and casual conversation with local folks gathered at the garden. En route to the US Social Forum in Detroit, the group of 23 cyclists included men and women of all ages—and even children in trailers. They had set out from Wisconsin around 4 a.m., ferried Lake Michigan and rode the Musketawa Trail from Muskegon to Grand Rapids.
The gathering shared food brought by local folks as well as home cooked spaghetti, salad and homemade bread made aboard the Permibus, which is accompanying the riders on their way to Detroit.
On Monday, after spending a day of volunteer work weeding for a local independent farmer at Blandford Farm, the Caravan presented its Variety Show. The 
PermiBus puppeteers enacted humorous skits showing how permiculture could overthrow the system.
Thistle, Page and friends sang songs, including a powerful ballad about the BP oil disaster.
The Grassroutes Caravan Puppetistas concluded the show with a skit that demonstrated the power of community and the theme of the Social Forum, “Another world is possible. Another US is necessary!”
Once in Detroit, the Caravan will set up a bicycle city at the corner of Temple and Woodward, about a half mile from Cobo Hall, where the USSF takes place. The bike city will offer on-going bike maintenance and workshops.
If you missed the Caravan while they were in Grand Rapids, introduce yourself to them at the US Social Forum, Tuesday June 22 and through Saturday June 27. For information on how you can take part in this fantastic opportunity for envisioning another US, visit www.ussf2010.org.
On Sunday, the Grand Rapids Press began a series of profiles on the Republican and Democratic candidates for Governor. These “profile” are in the Your Life section of the Press and read more like high school yearbook reflections.
The first candidate featured is State Senator Tom George, a Republican who has been involved in state politics for the past 10 years. The article includes some comments from George and a few of his supporters, but the bulk of the story is devoted to where he went to high school, his family life and his professional life as a doctor.
The article then concludes with the Press talking to political analyst Bill Ballenger and his assessment of why George will not win the Republican Primary. According to Ballenger George doesn’t have the money to do the advertising necessary to get enough name recognition. Not surprising that the Press allows such an assessment to go unchallenged, since they endorse the notion that money wins elections.
Unfortunately for voters, what is missing from this “profile” piece is any information on where George stands on issues. According to the candidate’s own web page, he considers himself Pro-Life, he favors the construction of new coal-fired power plants, that public employees contribute more to their health care benefits and he supports making Michigan a Right to Work State. These are basic positions, but information that one would be hard pressed to find in local news coverage.
Having served as a State Representative and State Senator over the past ten years also means that George would have a voting record, yet the Press in this profile piece and all previous coverage have not bothered to share any of that information with potential voters, but we do know that he likes to ride bike.
To add insult to injury, the Press editor Paul Keep in his Sunday column asks us to take a quiz on the gubernatorial candidates. The quiz, however, asks questions like “which candidate likes to have a Twix and Diet Coke for lunch?” The column is designed to further announce the candidate profiles for Governor that the Press will be running over the next two months, but most of the text is dedicated to banality. This is the type of reporting that contributes to a superficial political culture where people value what movies candidates like over substantive issues.
(This article is re-posted from Common Dreams.)
Josh Gerstein has an article in Politico on the massive silence coming out of the enviros on the BP oil catastrophe, which has been notable ever since the rig collapsed. This weekend the groups took out an ad in the Washington Post, not to criticize the administration for their response, but to praise the President for putting a hold on a drilling project in Alaska:
“President Obama is the best environmental president we’ve had since Teddy Roosevelt,” Sierra Club chairman Carl Pope told the Bangor Daily News last week. “He obviously did not take the crisis in the Minerals Management Service adequately seriously, that’s clear. But his agencies have done a phenomenally good job.”
If they aren’t saying anything negative, it’s because they believe there’s nothing to criticize:
Asked if Sierra Club has any concerns about the administration’s response to the spill, [Sierra Club’s Dave] Willett said, “Overall, we’re satisfied with the cleanup and recovery effort.”
Now, I listened to Mike Pence yesterday on CNN complaining about the administration’s cleanup efforts, and it was utter bullshit. They should’ve had a photo up of Pence with oil dripping off of his hands. The GOP has been waging a decades-long campaign for offshore drilling without limit, massive deregulation and complete contempt for environmental oversight that paved the way for this. The entire gulf is going to hell as a direct result of his actions. He’s in no position to criticize anything, and any journalist who lets him get away with it isn’t doing their job.
But the reluctance of the environmental groups to criticize the administration over the cleanup means they can’t credibly make that argument. Their decision to act as partisan cheerleaders has hamstrung their ability to act as trustworthy arbiters and advocates in the situation. We all know what their tone and tenor would be if George Bush was at the helm right now. If they are perceived as acting as an arm of the Democratic Party rather than stewards of the environment, they destroy their brand and the integrity of their message.
Part of it is because they’re in the veal pen, and the White House has done an excellent job of keeping them in line since they took office with groups like Common Purpose, Unity 09 and the “8:45 Call.” Matt Nisbet, a professor of environmental communications at American University, says “it’s difficult for the national environmental groups to be critics of the administration – they’re working so closely with the administration. … They have reacted cautiously and softly.”
There’s also “a practical sense among the groups that Obama is about the best they’re going to do when it comes to their key issues,” says Gerstein. And according to Doug Brinkley, “they’re feeling they have one person to do business with. … We’re down to like two Republican senators who want to deal with these environmental groups.”
The Sierra Club has one of the most well-known progressive brands, and they have a membership that is both deep and broad. Their ability to advocate for environmental causes doesn’t depend on access to politicians. It appears that they have they have opted for an “inside” game, and have completely dropped the ball on pressuring elected officials from the outside – right when they could have the most impact.
They also don’t want to jeopardize the passage of a climate legislation bill, and have been fearful from the start that making too much fuss about offshore drilling could endanger Kerry-Lieberman. Is the passage of some shitty big coal bailout what their members desire most? Because it sounds more like what the Democratic Party and its lobbyists want.
The “veal pen” strategy executed by the White House insures this silence, which Obama consciously uses as cover:
“We have responded with unprecedented resources, and when you look at what most of the critics say …and you ask them, specifically, what is it that the administration could or should have done differently that would have an impact on whether or not oil was hitting shore, you’re met with silence,” Obama said in an interview aired Tuesday on NBC’s “Today Show.”
But the Sierra Club isn’t alone. They’ve got plenty of company with the National Resources Defense Council:
“I think that made people plenty angry. Every time you see a picture like that, it breaks your heart,” Deans said. “Certainly, we’re outraged, but it’s not our job to generate outrage. It’s our role to try to focus that sentiment on priorities we need to make our country stronger.”
Some say that even though environmental groups aren’t dominating the debate, their issues certainly are -and are driving huge swings in public opinion against drilling and in favor of action on climate issues.
Well those swings are being channeled by the Center for Biological Diversity, the group that was out there proving that the administration’s actions didn’t match up with its words, and that MMS was still granting offshore drilling permits, even after Ken Salazar promised they wouldn’t. Meanwhile other groups were sitting on their hands, or doing what veal pen outfits do – reaping the benefits of a catastrophe by expanding their memberships and fundraising.
The oil industry has done a good job of buying the silence of many “environmental organizations.” PBS has been virtually silent on the spill, as sponsorship of its major shows is largely dominated by oil money. Media outlets that likewise depend heavily on advertising from oil companies have provided pathetic coverage of the spill and its consequences, focusing instead on completely stupid distractions like “has the President shown enough emotion.”
The environmental groups that have the brand names and the public trust are thus the only entities that can penetrate the message machine. When they speak, the public knows who they are and they listen. And they are the ones that the media goes to for quotes and commentary for just that reason. Their wide brand name recognition guarantees them that platform, and it’s difficult to organize around them when they’re AWOL.
Corralling the veal pen is a tactic that the White House has successfully used to cover their left flank since Obama took office. We saw it with the choice groups during the health care bill. As a result, Obama’s poll numbers with liberals stay high, and he feels no need to address the issues of the base. By stitching up the validators, he’s able to pursue a corporatist agenda while groups with brand name trust wage a public relations campaign to cast it as “progressive.”
These groups have demonstrated by both their action and inaction that they do not deserve that public trust. Unlike the Center for Biological Diversity, fawning groups like the Sierra Club have been successfully manipulated both by corporate money and by partisan gamesmanship. They’ve become such complete Washington DC creatures that they don’t know how to be advocates from the outside any more – their primary function is to give political cover in the midst of a PR battle. They have abdicated the role of non-partisan watchdogs, and the public should find new organizations independent of party control in which to place their trust.
Invisible hands pull strings in Michigan campaigns
(This article is re-posted from the Michigan Campaign Finance Network.)
In the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned precedent to allow corporations to make independent expenditures in election campaigns on a narrow 5-4 vote.
Less noted was Part IV of the Citizens United decision, where the Court ruled 8-1 that corporate spenders in election campaigns can be required to disclose the identities of their contributors and the amounts they give. The Court’s opinion said, “The First Amendment protects political speech; and disclosure permits citizens and shareholders to react to the speech of corporate entities in a proper way. This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.”
So, what is the state of campaign finance disclosure in Michigan? In a word: pathetic.
The Michigan Chamber of Commerce recently asked the Department of State to make a declaratory ruling on disclosure requirements for its newly won right to engage in ‘express advocacy’ – those campaign communications that explicitly exhort a vote for or against a candidate.
The Department told the Chamber that it cannot solicit or accept a contribution from any entity that is given for the purpose of paying for campaign express advocacy. But if a sympathetic-minded person or corporation just happens to give the Chamber a million dollars without saying it is “purposed” for express advocacy, then the Chamber can use the million bucks to pay for TV ads that tell you how to vote and it will only be required to report that the source of the funds was its general treasury. It doesn’t have to reveal who contributed the money.
Furthermore, if the Chamber, or one of the political parties, chooses to buy television ads that say, “Kilgore has our values and he’s fighting for us,” or “Call Kilgore and ask him why he hates the elderly,” the sponsor of the ads doesn’t even have to report that it spent money. Under the prevailing interpretation of the Michigan Campaign Finance Act, an electoral communication that doesn’t explicitly tell you how to vote is not an expenditure.
A contribution is not a contribution unless it is purposed. An expenditure is not an expenditure unless it has magic words of express advocacy. That is not a Lewis Carroll fantasy. That is the operational interpretation of our law.
Over the past decade the Chamber and the political parties have spent more than $45 million for campaign television ads that carefully avoided the language of express advocacy. They reported nothing about that spending or the contributions that enabled it. I know the scope of this undisclosed spending because I collect the data from the public files of our state’s television broadcasters and cable systems.
Most of the money in the 2008 Michigan Supreme Court campaign was off the books. In the 2006 gubernatorial campaign, nearly $20 million was off the books. If you remember any TV ad from one of those campaigns, it is very likely that it wasn’t financially disclosed.
Why does this matter? Because campaign spending in a judicial election may compromise the impartiality of a judge. Because interest groups that pay for election campaigns expect to have their policy agenda addressed.
Citizens have a right to know whose money is driving political processes so they can properly evaluate the conduct of public officials.
This is not a matter of Republicans against Democrats. It is a matter of interest groups and political parties against citizens. Big-money donors’ desire for anonymity pitted against citizens’ need to know whose money is paying for election campaigns.
Transparency and accountability are progressive values and they are conservative values. In Michigan politics, transparency and accountability are an unknown ideal.
We need a new political culture. We need an end to the old shell game where the political masters of the universe arrogantly condemn the electorate to ignorance.
To legislators: If you want trust from an angry, disaffected electorate, write serious new campaign finance disclosure laws that cover all campaign ads.
To the angry electorate: If you want to take back your country, this is where to draw the line. This may be democracy’s last stand against the invisible hands that pull the strings that make politics inexplicably polarized and dysfunctional.
We’ll have better government when we have transparent politics. Not before.
Chomsky on the Israeli assault on the Freedom Flotilla
(This article by Noam Chomsky is re-posted from ZNet.)
Hijacking boats in international waters and killing passengers is, of course, a serious crime.
But the crime is nothing new. For decades, Israel has been hijacking boats between Cyprus and Lebanon and killing or kidnapping passengers, sometimes holding them hostage in Israeli prisons.
Israel assumes that it can commit such crimes with impunity because the United States tolerates them and Europe generally follows the U.S.’s lead.
As the editors of The Guardian rightly observed on June 1, “If an armed group of Somali pirates had yesterday boarded six vessels on the high seas, killing at least 10 passengers and injuring many more, a NATO task force would today be heading for the Somali coast.” In this case, the NATO treaty obligates its members to come to the aid of a fellow NATO country—Turkey—attacked on the high seas.
Israel’s pretext for the attack was that the Freedom Flotilla was bringing materials that Hamas could use for bunkers to fire rockets into Israel.
The pretext isn’t credible. Israel can easily end the threat of rockets by peaceful means.
The background is important. Hamas was designated a major terrorist threat when it won a free election in January 2006. The U.S. and Israel sharply escalated their punishment of Palestinians, now for the crime of voting the wrong way.
The siege of Gaza, including a naval blockade, was a result. The siege intensified sharply in June 2007 after a civil war left Hamas in control of the territory.
What is commonly described as a Hamas military coup was in fact incited by the U.S. and Israel, in a crude attempt to overturn the elections that had brought Hamas to power.
That has been public knowledge at least since April 2008, when David Rose reported in Vanity Fair that George W. Bush, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Elliott Abrams, “backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.”
Hamas terror included launching rockets into nearby Israeli towns—criminal, without a doubt, though only a minute fraction of routine U.S.-Israeli crimes in Gaza.
In June 2008, Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement. The Israeli government formally acknowledges that until Israel broke the agreement on Nov. 4 of that year, invading Gaza and killing half a dozen Hamas activists, Hamas did not fire a single rocket.
Hamas offered to renew the cease-fire. The Israeli cabinet considered the offer and rejected it, preferring to launch its murderous invasion of Gaza on Dec.27.
Like other states, Israel has the right of self-defense. But did Israel have the right to use force in Gaza in the name of self-defense? International law, including the U.N. Charter, is unambiguous: A nation has such a right only if it has exhausted peaceful means. In this case such means were not even tried, although—or perhaps because—there was every reason to suppose that they would succeed.
Thus the invasion was sheer criminal aggression, and the same is true of Israel’s resorting to force against the flotilla.
The siege is savage, designed to keep the caged animals barely alive so as to fend off international protest, but hardly more than that. It is the latest stage of longstanding Israeli plans, backed by the U.S., to separate Gaza from the West Bank.
The Israeli journalist Amira Hass, a leading specialist on Gaza, outlines the history of the process of separation: “The restrictions on Palestinian movement that Israel introduced in January 1991 reversed a process that had been initiated in June 1967.
“Back then, and for the first time since 1948, a large portion of the Palestinian people again lived in the open territory of a single country — to be sure, one that was occupied, but was nevertheless whole. …”
Hass concludes: “The total separation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank is one of the greatest achievements of Israeli politics, whose overarching objective is to prevent a solution based on international decisions and understandings and instead dictate an arrangement based on Israel’s military superiority.”
The Freedom Flotilla defied that policy and so it must be crushed.
A framework for settling the Arab-Israeli conflict has existed since 1976, when the regional Arab States introduced a Security Council resolution calling for a two-state settlement on the international border, including all the security guarantees of U.N. Resolution 242, adopted after the June War in 1967.
The essential principles are supported by virtually the entire world, including the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic States (including Iran) and relevant non-state actors, including Hamas.
But the U.S. and Israel have led the rejection of such a settlement for three decades, with one crucial and highly informative exception. In President Bill Clinton’s last month in office, January 2001, he initiated Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Taba, Egypt, that almost reached an agreement, participants announced, before Israel terminated the negotiations.
Today, the cruel legacy of a failed peace lives on.
International law cannot be enforced against powerful states, except by their own citizens. That is always a difficult task, particularly when articulate opinion declares crime to be legitimate, either explicitly or by tacit adoption of a criminal framework—which is more insidious, because it renders the crimes invisible.
Obama Administration Might Hold Non-Afghan Detainees at Bagram Indefinitely After Prison Transfer
(This Media Release was sent out by the American Civil Liberties Union.)
According to a Los Angeles Times report, a senior U.S. official said the Obama administration wants to detain and interrogate non-Afghan terrorism suspects captured in countries outside Afghanistan in a section of the Bagram prison, even after it turns the prison over to Afghan control. The proposal is reportedly in the early stages of development.
The U.S. government has stated its intention to turn over control of the Bagram detention facility to the Afghan government early next year. In May, a federal court ruled that unlike at Guantánamo, prisoners in U.S. custody at Bagram, including those who were captured far from any battlefield and brought to Afghanistan, cannot challenge their detention in U.S. courts. That decision paves the way for the U.S. government to use Bagram to detain indefinitely, without any judicial oversight, terrorism suspects captured far from any battlefield who have not been charged with a crime.
“The Guantánamo problem is not solved simply by recreating a Guantánamo somewhere else. Closing Guatánamo is essential but it is equally important that the Obama administration put an end to the illegal indefinite detention policy behind Guantánamo,” said Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “The entire world is not a battlefield. We cannot just capture people far from any zone of armed conflict and lock up them up indefinitely without any access to the courts or due process. Such a policy not only flies in the face of our justice system, but opens up the possibility that mistakes will be made and the wrong people will be imprisoned – which is exactly what we have seen at Guantánamo.”
The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in September 2009 demanding information about Bagram, which has thus far been shrouded in much secrecy. In response to the lawsuit, the government has turned over some important information but continues to withhold key details about the prisoners detained at Bagram, as well as information about the implementation of its new detainee status review procedures and about a separate “secret jail” on the base. The secret facility is reportedly run by either the Joint Special Operations Command or the Defense Intelligence Agency, and detainees maintain they have been abused there. It is unclear whether guards and interrogators at the secret facility are subject to the same rules that apply at the main Bagram detention facility.
“The possibility of continuing to hold and interrogate detainees at Bagram is even more disturbing given the lack of transparency about the facility,” said Goodman. “Plans to continue holding prisoners in U.S. custody at Bagram must be accompanied by the disclosure of key information about what currently goes on there.”
As part of the ongoing FOIA lawsuit, the ACLU late Tuesday received several documents from the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Justice. The disclosures include a number of detainee policy documents from the early years of the Bush administration, including a 2004 document describing “Global Screening Criteria for Detainees” used to determine who – no matter where they were captured – could be detained as an enemy combatant and which detainees could be transferred to Guantánamo. Also just turned over to the ACLU are Obama-era records including policy guidance from February 2010 regarding access to detainees and facilities by non-DOD government officials, foreign governments, members of the media and representatives of non-governmental organizations that confirms non-DOD agents can visit detainees at Bagram in order to interrogate them. The DOD also disclosed its policy regarding the waiver of autopsy requirements for detainee deaths.
The documents received in the ACLU FOIA lawsuit are available online at: www.aclu.org/national-security/bagram-foia-dod-and-doj-documents-released-692010
More about the FOIA lawsuit is at: www.aclu.org/national-security/bagram-foia
When Eating Locally becomes a class issue
In recent years the issue of eating healthy and eating local has become quite mainstream. Years ago the very idea was only found with people who took gardening or small scale farming seriously as well as people who have understood for a long time the importance of eating that promoted justice.
Now you can’t turn the radio or TV on without someone talking about selling local produce. At one level this is a good thing. For decades in the US most of us ate food that would travel on average over a thousand miles before it arrived on our plate. The amount of fossil fuel used to transport and grow food in an agribusiness model is overwhelming.
Another benefit to eating locally means that you have a greater chance of having a relationship with the people who grew the food. Eating locally doesn’t always mean that those who labor in the fields are treated well, but with the increased emphasis on eating local and organic more and more people are turning to small scale farms that rely more on family labor or production models used with Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs).
However, this new emphasis on eating locally has also received the attention of the private sector, business people who see the marketing potential of eating locally. This new brand of green capitalists realized the market value of selling “locally grown and organic foods,” so much so that eating local and eating organic is now often a class issue.
Take for instance an article posted on MLive today, which featured a partnership between JW Marriott and Trillium Haven Farm. The article communicates that the upscale hotel/restaurant of JW Marriott will offer classes on “what local, organic food brings to the table nutritionally and to the area’s economy.”
While this may sound like a wonderful idea upon further investigation one finds that the classes that they will be offering over the next few months cost $125. According to the Facebook posting for these classes participants will be instructed by Trillium Haven Farms and JW Marriott chefs, along with some meals, a T-shirt and a guided tour of the Jenison-based farm.
The article also includes a picture of two of the chefs from JW Marriott who are growing food at the hotel facility and provide a link to what kind of food is offered at their Six, One, Six restaurant. Looking at the dinner menu of this restaurant we find that appetizers range from $6 to $12 and dinner meals can cost from $21 to $27.
These prices beg the question, “who can afford to eat organic and local?” Most working class individuals and families are not likely to pay those prices for a meal, which means that more often than not they will be eating at fast foods joints. This is what I meant by eating locally grown food at local restaurants as a class issue.
One could argue that the cost of eating local food served at the JW Marriott restaurant or many other local restaurants does not preclude working class individuals and families from buying locally grown produce at a farmers market and preparing it for themselves. While this is true, it does not take into account that most working class individuals and families have less leisure time to be able to prepare meals, but this fact also distracts us from the larger question of why healthy local foods are not affordable for everyone.
Community Supported Agriculture is one way to provide healthy, local, organic and affordable food to people, which is why Trillium Have Farm’s partnership with the JW Marriott hotel/restaurant is troublesome. Eating well should not be a privilege, but a right for everyone.
There are local groups attempting to address some of these food justice issues, particularly for working class families. The Greater Grand Rapids Food Systems Council addressed this topic at a gathering last month and Our Kitchen Table will be addressing the issue of Food Justice at a Food Summit they are hosting Thursday, June 10 from 6 – 9pm at the Film Farm, located on the 7th Floor of the Masonic Temple in Grand Rapids (233 E. Fulton St).
Oil spills, oil kills. Learn more and take a stand.
Crude: The Real Price of Oil
7pm Thurs. June 17
Trinity U M Church
1100 Lake Dr. SE Grand Rapids
Rally against BP
5pm Friday June 18
BP in Eastown
1560 Lake Dr SE, Grand Rapids
Does the oil spill make you angry? Does it have you wondering just how much more corporate inflicted damages the earth and the creatures living on it can withstand?
Here’s your chance to learn more about the true costs of oil and take action against BP.
Thursday June 17, The Bloom Collective hosts a screening of Crude: The Real Price of Oil, 7 p.m. at Trinity United Methodist Church, 1100 Lake Dr. SE in Grand Rapids. “The inside story of the infamous ‘Amazon Chernobyl’ case, Crude is a real-life high stakes legal drama, set against a backdrop of the environmental movement, global politics, celebrity activism, human rights advocacy, the media, multinational corporate power.”
This is the film that made headlines in May, 2010, when Federal Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ordered Joe Berlinger, its producer and director, to turn over more than 600 hours of raw footage used to create the film to Chevron. Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001 and is attempting to wiggle out of potential damages of $27.3 billion for the horrific injury that Texaco’s personnel inflicted on the indigenous people.
Rally against BP!
On Friday June 18, a group of local folks is asking everyone who is fed up with BP’s actions, including its latest PR ploy to highjack Internet searches about the oil spill, to join for a 5 p.m. rally against BP at the BP in Eastown,1560 Lake Dr SE, Grand Rapids.
Take a stand for a viable future. Find out more about the BP disaster. And, come away with ideas for challenging our social and economical dependence on—and addiction to—oil.
Watch the trailer:
