Larry Pinkney

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” -Frederick Douglass

“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience...Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves...[and] the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.” -Howard Zinn

BC Question: What will it take to bring Obama home? As the corporate/military U.S. Empire, headed by the nominally black Barack Obama, with the complicity of his Democrat[ic] and Republican party political pimps, rumbles along, crushing the economic needs, human rights, and aspirations of everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people in this nation and around the world, conditions for just plain ordinary people are worsening and deteriorating at lightning speed. Only the avaricious, blood-sucking, bloated rich are financially benefiting from the increasing misery of the masses of ordinary people.

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By Rady Ananda

Oh, gag me with a bowl of propaganda. The National Archives is hosting an historical exhibit on government say in what we eat and grow and how to cook it: “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam: The Government's Effect on the American Diet.” From the opening lines of the website, you know our control freak “Uncle” has launched another major psyops campaign to convince us that Government Knows Best when it comes to food:

“We demand that our Government ensure that it is safe, cheap, and abundant. In response, Government has been a factor in the production, regulation, research, innovation, and economics of our food supply.”

Though painting Uncle Sam as Mrs. Doubtfire, when it comes to the results of government intrusion into the food supply, he’s more like Joseph Mengele. Over the last hundred years, we've seen climbing rates of cancer, diabetes, obesity, heart disease and neurological disorders, thanks to Uncle Sam's "regulation" of food additives and environmental pollutants. We've also seen the number of farms decline by 98%.

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by Ellen LaConte

Spring has sprung--at least south of the northern tier of states where snow still has a ban on it--and the grass has ‘riz. And so has the price of most foods, which is particularly devastating just now when so many Americans are unemployed, underemployed, retired or retiring, on declining or fixed incomes and are having to choose between paying their mortgages, credit card bills, car payments, and medical and utility bills and eating enough and healthily. Many are eating more fast food, prepared foods, junk food--all of which are also becoming more expensive--or less food.

In some American towns, and not just impoverished backwaters, as many as 30 percent of residents can’t afford to feed themselves and their families sufficiently, let alone nutritiously. Here in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina where I live it’s 25 percent. Across the country one out of six of the elderly suffers from malnutrition and hunger. And the number of children served one or two of their heartiest, healthiest meals by their schools grows annually as the number of them living at poverty levels tops twenty percent. Thirty-seven million Americans rely on food banks that now routinely sport half-empty shelves and report near-empty bank accounts. And this is a prosperous nation!

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By Rady Ananda

In a January 2008 meeting, US and Spain trade officials strategized how to increase acceptance of genetically modified foods in Europe, including inflating food prices on the commodities market, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.

During the meeting, Secretary of State for International Trade, Pedro Mejia, and Secretary General Alfredo Bonet “noted that commodity price hikes might spur greater liberalization on biotech imports.”

It seems Wall Street traders got the word. By June 2008, food prices had spiked so severely that “The Economist announced that the real price of food had reached its highest level since 1845, the year the magazine first calculated the number,” reports Fred Kaufman in The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it.

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