Category Archives: organic

Remember back in the 60′s when the hippies wanted to live in peace on the land, in self-sustaining communities and the establishment made fun of the dirty hippies lifestyle? True, there were a lot of druggies. And people got distracted. Nowadays, we hear similar remarks about the Occupiers. Bringing the message that Inequality exists is a gift from the Occupy Movement. Birthing a new awareness. And optimally, creative new ways of making changes happen.

In my humble opinion, that is not going to happen with the focus on protesters and police battles. The Occupy movement can (and some are) bring their energy and enthusiasm to local communities and making needed changes (ie, helping people unfairly being foreclosed, stay in their homes).  What interested me initially about the movement was the lifestyle … walking the talk… this needs expansion and creative solutions. Forget about camping out and doing battle. Instead, little changes add up to BIG ONES.

a little bit of history of the roots of capitalism

…”Using Adam Smith’s own estimates of factory wages being paid at the time in Scotland, a factory-peasant would have to toil for more than three days to buy a pair of commercially produced shoes. Or they could make their own traditional brogues using their own leather in a matter of hours, and spend the rest of the time getting wasted on ale. It’s really not much of a choice, is it?

But in order for capitalism to work, capitalists needed a pool of cheap, surplus labor. So what to do? Call in the National Guard!

…If having a full belly and productive land was the problem, then the solution to whipping these lazy bums into shape was obvious: kick ‘em off the land and let em starve. 

…“Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society…It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”

 http://truth-out.org/news/item/8612-recovered-economic-history-everyone-but-an-idiot-knows-that-the-lower-classes-must-be-kept-poor-or-they-will-never-be-industrious

could this Great Recession (what is so great about it?) be a systemic, entrenched way of dealing with the masses?  hmmmm…

Two other powerful items passed my desk this week… now I know about Monsanto and their seeds…and Monsanto free seeds

GMO foods/seeds

I now understand why I cannot get raw healthy goat’s milk nor fresh farmers eggs, it’s ALL politics… why have healthy empowered citizens when you can make money off of sick, overweight, uneducated, wage slaves.

“Americans’ right to access fresh, healthy foods of their choice is under attack. Farmageddon tells the story of small, family farms that were providing safe, healthy foods to their communities and were forced to stop, sometimes through violent action, by agents of misguided government bureaucracies, and seeks to figure out why.

Filmmaker Kristin Canty’s quest to find healthy food for her four children turned into an educational journey to discover why access to these foods was being threatened. What she found were policies that favor agribusiness and factory farms over small family-operated farms selling fresh foods to their communities. Instead of focusing on the source of food safety problems — most often the industrial food chain — policymakers and regulators implement and enforce solutions that target and often drive out of business small farms that have proven themselves more than capable of producing safe, healthy food, but buckle under the crushing weight of government regulations and excessive enforcement actions.

Farmageddon highlights the urgency of food freedom, encouraging farmers and consumers alike to take action to preserve individuals’ rights to access food of their choice and farmers’ rights to produce these foods safely and free from unreasona-bly burdensome regulations. The film serves to put policymakers and regulators on notice that there is a growing movement of people aware that their freedom to choose the foods they want is in danger, a movement that is taking action with its dollars and its voting power to protect and preserve the dwindling number of family farms that are struggling to survive.

http://farmageddonmovie.com/

Radical Idea: What if women’s work, ALL work, were VALUED, respected and compensated properly???

“Why do women who contribute by producing the whole workforce have to plead for maternity leave that would allow them to recuperate from childbirth, get to know their children and their children to know them, and feed babies the best possible food?

“Why are such basic and humane demands so controversial? What qualifies those who favor formula to deny the overwhelming evidence and individual personal experience that favor breast milk?

“The wealth of information assembled here also strengthens the case for acknowledging women as perhaps the greatest producers of food. The individual production and one-to-one delivery of breast milk often goes hand in hand with subsistence farming on small plots of land “too small to count,” perhaps with a few chickens, a goat or cow, and individuals’ endeavors day in day out which benefit mainly those with little political clout or social status. Entire communities are surviving on that work—up to 80 percent of the food consumed in Africa is grown by women almost all outside the market. Are those of us who spend long hours of every day in this work also “too small to count?”

…Between breastfeeding and agricultural work, women are feeding the world!

http://womensenews.org/story/books/120414/work-breastfeeding-moms-unwaged-unvalued

…Cruel, unsustainable factory farms have come to produce more than 99 percent1 of the animals grown in the United States. Globally, livestock now cover 30 percent of the earth’s surface,2 and as a result of modern fishing techniques, scientists are measuring an overall drop in the health and diversity of ocean life. During this same period, these new farming methods have devastated rural communities by reducing the number of farmers in the nation by 85 percent—even as the U.S. population more than doubled.3 Given this scale, it is no surprise that the choices we make when we eat and produce food have a bigger impact on animal suffering, global warming,4 and other major environmental concerns than anything else we do.

 http://www.farmforward.com/

http://www.squidoo.com/square-foot-gardening-adventure

Change Needs to Happen