You heard about them on radio, saw them on television.

You read about them in newspapers and magazines, on Facebook, Twitter, and every social medium known to mankind.

Because of extensive media coverage, you also know who dozens of singers and professional athletes are.

Here are two names you probably never heard of. Sergeant First Class Clifford E. Beattie and Private First Class Ramon Mora Jr.

They didn’t get into drug and alcohol scandals. They didn’t become pop singers or make their careers from hitting baseballs or throwing footballs. They were soldiers.

Both died together last week from roadside bombs near Baghdad.

Sgt. 1st Class Beattie, from the small rural suburb of Medical Lake, Wash., spent 17 years in the Army, and was in his third tour of duty in Iraq. On the day he was killed, according to the Spokane Spokesman–Review, he had participated in a run to honor fallen soldiers. Sgt. Beattie was 37 years old. He leaves two children, one of whom was three weeks from graduating from high school; four sisters, a brother, and his parents.

PFC Mora, from Ontario, Calififornia, a city of about 170,000 near Los Angeles, was in his first tour in combat. He was 19 years old. “He was a very serious student, and education was important to him,” Carole Hodnick, Mora’s English teacher and advisor, told the Ontario Daily Bulletin. Hodnick also remembers him as having “a charisma about him, and the students just fell in line with him.”

Clifford E. Beatttie and Ramon Mora Jr. were just two of the 6,049 Americans killed and 43,418 wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan in war the past decade, the longest wars in American history.
You can’t know or remember all of their names. But you can remember two.

Clifford E. Beattie. Ramon Mora Jr.

Two Americans. One near the end of his Army career. One not long out of Basic Training. A White Caucasian and a Hispanic. Two different lives. Two different cultures. Two Americans.

Clifford E. Beattie. Ramon Mora Jr. Killed together more than 7,000 miles from their homes.

As you prepare for Memorial Day barbeques, surrounded by celebrity-laden news, remember the names of Clifford E. Beattie and Ramon Mora Jr., and all they stood for. Theirs are the names that matter.

Walter Brasch

Walter Brasch is a social issues columnist and author. His next book is Before the First Snow: Stories from the Revolution, available at amazon.com and other stores after June 20. For more details, see YouTube.

One of 25 “Uncloaking the Kochs” protesters arrested. (Photo: Common Cause, Carrie Shargay)

Last weekend, Sharon and I joined the happy crew at the “Uncloaking the Kochs” event, which our friends at Common Cause, Anjuli Kronheim and Kathay Fang, had helped organize.

By now you know the story. Progressive activists, union organizers, and assorted lefties from throughout Southern California drove and were bused last Sunday to Rancho Mirage, the desert town near better-known Palm Springs, ultimately forming a spirited and rather well-mannered crowd of perhaps 1,000 or 1,500 protesters. Organized over several preceding weeks by Common Cause and sponsored by a number of other activist groups and publications — including our LA Progressive — the event was designed to place a withering spotlight on a four-day, invitation-only gathering of 200 wealthy, conservative business and political leaders organized by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, Wichita, Kansas-based sons of John Birch Society founder Fred C. Koch.

Photo: Common Cause, Brooke Erdmann.

The day started with a lively, overflow panel session moderated by Common Cause President Bob Edgar and featuring Van Jones from the Center for American Progress, UC Irvine Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, Think Progress reporter Lee Feng, and DeAnn McEwen, Acting President of the California Nurses Association. (Common Cause’s new Chairman Robert Reich was slated to participate, but reportedly picked up a bug on a visit to the Galapagos.)

The protest itself began with speeches by Jim Hightower, Courage Campaign’s Rick Jacobs, and Bob Edgar, among others, after which the chanting crowd looked both ways and then surged across Bob Hope Drive to barricade the Rancho Los Palmas resort where the Koch brothers, their wives, and well-protected guests watched, no doubt with amusement and ill-conceived disdain. Ultimately, 25 willing protesters were taken away by the police, charged with misdemeanors, and released.

Jim Hightower, Joel Francis, and Sharon Kyle

At first blush, the event was designed to protest the powerful sway the Koch brothers and their extraordinarily well-heeled cronies and political waterboys have on American politics and the lives of ordinary citizens. As former congressman Edgar wrote beforehand:

“Through those groups and others, the Kochs and their network seek to eliminate laws that give us breathable air and drinkable water but which have cost the Kochs millions of dollars in fines. They work to discredit the scientific consensus that pollutants from manufacturing operations maintained by Koch Industries and other firms — even with clean air laws in place – are dangerously warming our planet. And they sponsor public events aimed at defeating cap-and-trade legislation, which would make Koch Industries and other companies pay for the air pollution that they create.”

On a deeper level, the event was organized as an exercise in organizing.

Much was made at the morning panel session about how the Left is right on the issues and deeply passionate, but also forever underfunded and fragmented — as difficult to organize as herding stray cats, as the saying goes. By contrast, no matter how wrong the Right can be about issues that matter to most Americans, it is disciplined and backed by the deep-pocketed Koch brothers and their like.

David Koch and wife Julia looking on. (Common Cause Blog)

It would seem that Common Cause wants to play a role in rectifying at least the organizational needs with its “Uncloaking the Kochs” event, which they clearly intended not as an end in itself — no one could really think the Kochs and their pals would be discomforted by a few long-in-the-tooth hippies capering in the street down below — but as the first of many such events.

“If anyone thinks herding cats is hard,” Hightower remarked more than once that day, “they’ve never tried a can opener.”

Perhaps Common Cause can be a kind of can opener in offering its resources as a clearinghouse for information about progressive causes and as an organizing agent to pull together like-minded individuals and organizations as it did last Sunday. The venerable organization wants to broaden its scope from the election reform issues that have occupied it in recent years, according to Edgar, and this was a good start.

But it’s hard to see just how real movement will happen. Years ago now it seems, Sharon, my daughter, and I participated in lively, well-attended anti-war marches to demand an end to the Iraq invasion, our long line of protesters winding through the streets of Old Pasadena with jaunty defiance and appreciative smiles at passing motorists who honked their support. But what has ended? The wars? The bombings and killings? The senseless deaths of our soldiers and marines? No, just the marches.

But Van Jones offered a bit of hope.

“The Tea Party was just a loose, fairly ridiculous collection of wachos until Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts,” he said. “That ‘triggering event’ gave them credibility and set them on their way. Then look what happened.”

Maybe. Certainly, Americans are angry. Not Tunis angry. Not Cairo angry. But angry and afraid. As Lee Feng remarked, “People on both the Left and the Right are mad at Big Government, mad at Big Business, mad at Wall Street — and that anger has to go somewhere.”

Rancho Mirage itself triggered nothing, not yet anyway. But maybe it does provide a blueprint for organizing, collaborating, and generally raising coordinated hell until our moment comes. Lord knows, Americans of all stripes need that moment.

Dick Price
Editor, LA Progressive

Ken Grossman, founder, CEO, and owner of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company

No, the brewery doesn’t brew green beer, although it could, along with their flagship brew, Pale Ale, and Celebration Ale, Porter, Stout, Kellerweiss, Bigfoot, as well as many other award winning brews. Sierra Nevada Brewing Company in Chico, California, sixth largest in the nation, is the perfect entrepreneurial model for the progressive push of “Made in America ” and at the same time, concern for the environment and self-sustainability. Sierra Nevada is probably the only major brewer with a future goal of becoming totally environmentally self-sustaining.

Professor emeritus Michael J. Lewis at the University of California, Davis  recognized for establishing a brewing science program widely regarded as the best in the nation, made the following comment about Sierra Nevada Brewery. “The most perfect brewery on the planet.”

The Sierra Nevada mission statement is quite simple: “Quality, craftsmanship, and flavor in everything we do.” The mission continues: “In every aspect of the brewery, we strive to be as environmentally responsible as possible. From recycling and composting, to water treatment, bio-fuel production, and water conservation we work hard to minimize our impact on the environment.”

Ken Grossman, founder, CEO, and owner of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, started his successful visionary journey 30 years ago in a small Chico warehouse. Today, Ken and the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company are considered to be a premier pioneer and leader in the craft brewing industry.

As an avowed backpacker in his early days in the Sierra Nevada Mountain range, Ken has kept his abiding respect for the great outdoors and our Earth. Ken was quoted in People and Strategy: “He believes a company should pursue sustainable business practices because they benefit the social and natural environment, and because they drive the success of a company. To him, focusing on people and the planet as an integrated, strategic center improves profitability.”

In 2005, Sierra Nevada received California ’s top environmental award for sustainable practices of waste reduction and recycling and every year since 2001, Sierra Nevada won the prestigious WRAP (Waste Reduction Awards Program) award from California . However, marketing wise, Sierra Nevada doesn’t push their sustainability, since their beer is based on its evident quality and taste.

Sierra Nevada ’s philosophy extends to their excellent restaurant and tap room, featuring the freshest sustainable products available by using locally sourced and organic meat, poultry, seafood and produce, maintaining relationships with growers, farmers and ranchers, insuring the best quality. The brewery maintains a two-acre organic garden to supply fresh produce to their restaurant. They reuse spent grain and yeast as cattle feed, treated water as irrigation, food scraps into compost and old promotional products as packing for shipping.

• Solar power: In 2008, the brewery installed the largest privately owned solar arrays in the nation. Currently there are over 10,800 individual photovoltaic panels and an elevated, 3 acre, tracking system, providing about a third of the brewery’s total energy needs. In the near future, more photovoltaic panels will be added.

• Fuel Cells: In 2005, Sierra Nevada was the first brewery in the nation to install hydrogen fuel cells. Direct fuel cell technology allows the brewery to produce electricity utilizing a highly efficient and extremely low-emission process. Co-generation boilers recover exhaust heat energy, providing steam for brewing operations. The combination of solar and fuel cell energy production allows the brewery to produce more than half of all the energy needs on-site.

• CO2-Recovery: Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. installed a carbon dioxide recovery plant to recover and reuse CO2. CO2 is produced naturally in beer fermentation and is usually vented into the atmosphere. The brewery’s state-of-the-art system allows them to capture, purify, and reuse the gas, producing CO2 of much higher purity than available gas for the brewing process.

• Organic Recovery: Spent grain, hops, and yeast are sold locally to cattle farmers. The brewery maintains its own herd of naturally raised cattle, along with a little beer– to be used in the Restaurant and Taproom. Sierra Nevada installed the first HotRot composting system in the US in 2010. HotRot turns compost very quickly into a rich compost from the brewery’s waste organic products, for use in the hop fields and restaurant garden.

• Biogas Recovery: The anaerobic digestion of the waste water treatment process produces a methane-rich biogas that the brewery recovers and uses as a fuel source for their boilers.

• Water Treatment: Beer is over 90% water. Traditionally, breweries are notoriously wasteful of precious water. Sierra Nevada , through simple conservation, mindfulness, engineering efforts, water recycling, flow meters, and drip irrigation, is able to reduce water consumption to historic lows in the brewing industry.

• Efficient Shipping: In 2009, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. purchased the first Peterbilt Hybrid diesel-electric vehicle. Sierra Nevada is a member of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Smartway program, a voluntary way to score fuel efficiency for their fleet and shippers.

If President Obama wants to push ahead into the new century regarding a self-sustaining “Made in America,” energy policy, there is no better example than the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. in Chico , California , to hold a Beer Summit.

Jerry Drucker

Protests in Sudan

“Davos delegates do not seem to know how to react to events in Egypt,” Gideon Rachman, the Financial Times’ chief foreign affairs columnist, wrote last week. “The young people demonstrating on the streets of Cairo do not speak with the kind of voices that are represented at the forum.”

You can say that again.

The contrast between these two events on the world stage could hardly have been more striking and instructive. While the mucky mucks of the world, prominent characters from the fields of finance, industry, entertainment, journalism and labor, gathered to ponder the state of the planet the ground was trembling beneath their feet. What Frantz Fanon called the The Wretched of the Earth were pushing the lavish conclave in the Swiss Alps off the front pages. If Rachman was right, the luminaries in Davos were at a loss.

While Davos wound down, most of the world’s attention was focused on events in Egypt, and to lesser extent on Tunisia and Yemen. However, it would be a big mistake to assume the moving and shaking that has commenced is somehow restricted to “the Arab world.”

First of all, while Egypt is indeed part of the Middle East, it is also part of Africa, in fact the continent’s largest country. The tremors that started a couple of weeks ago in Tunis have extended south as well as east.

For some reason, the U.S. mass media has studiously avoided the situation in Sudan. Well, not quite. The big story has been the plebiscite by the Sudanese south to secede from the country (a prospect that is viewed with mixed feelings in Africa where the breakup of nations, particularly when championed from the outside, is viewed with trepidation). It’s the story of what’s happening in the North that has been ignored for three weeks now.

On Sunday, Reuters reported: “Heavily armed police patrol Khartoum’s main streets beat and arrested students in central Khartoum”

“Sudanese police have beaten and arrested students as protests broke out throughout Khartoum demanding the government resign, inspired by a popular uprising in neighboring Egypt,” said the news agency. “Hundreds of armed riot police broke on Sunday up groups of young Sudanese demonstrating in central Khartoum and surrounded the entrances of four universities in the capital, firing teargas and beating students at three of them. Police beat students with batons as they chanted anti-government slogans such as ‘we are ready to die for Sudan’ and ‘revolution, revolution until victory.’

“There were further protests in North Kordofan capital el-Obeid in Sudan’s west, where around 500 protesters engulfed the market before police used tear gas to disperse them, three witnesses said. ‘They were shouting against the government and demanding change,’ said witness Ahmed who declined to give his full name.”

Reuters said the students were “galvanized by social networks.”

Groups have emerged on social networking sites calling themselves Youth for Change and The Spark. “The people of Sudan will not remain silent anymore,” the Youth for Change Facebook page read. “It is about time we demand our rights and take what’s ours in a peaceful demonstration that will not involve any acts of sabotage.”

The demonstrations in the Sudan actually began January 13 with Sudanese police brutally trying to crush student protests against proposed cuts in subsidies in petroleum products and sugar. Widespread economic and political discontent has provoked sporadic street protests in north Sudan in recent weeks, with the security forces maintaining tight control in Khartoum.

Sudan is also part of the Arab world and Africa and conditions there are present in other parts of the latter, producing tensions and mass dissatisfaction in places like Zimbabwe and the Ivory Coast. “While most sub-Saharan African countries are freer than the Arab states, they also share some of the social tensions, political frustrations and high levels of unemployment that have proved so explosive in the north,” said the Financial Times on Sunday.

Last Saturday, police in Gabon fired tear gas to break up a demonstration in the capital Libreville by around 5,000 opposition supporters during which up to 20 people were reportedly wounded. It was the second such confrontation in a week. One report said five people have been killed and scores injured. “The usually sleepy central African oil exporter has been troubled since a 2009 election won by Ali Bongo Odimba, but which the main opposition group – inspired by power struggles in Tunisia and Ivory Coast – is insisting was rigged,” Reuters reported January 27. The 2009 election saw Ali Bongo Odimba replace his father, the late President Omar Bongo. Hundreds of supporters of opposition leader Andre Mba Obame, who declared himself president last week and formed a rival government, gathered outside the local United Nations offices to demand he be recognized as president. At a protest rally, Mba Obame pointed to Ivory Coast and Tunisia saying, “history was on the march.”

The problems that ignited the fire in Tunisia exist in other parts of Africa as well. As in other parts of the world, the prices of many basic commodities are rising and the effect is severe in some parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The economic crisis in the developed world has reverberated strongly in some places, and in most countries of the region, economic inequality has increased alongside ostentatious conspicuous consumption on the part of the native elites.

Africa and the Arab world are not the only places where the U.S. and European governments have found themselves allied with local despots now confronted with simmering discontent or open street protests. “Riddled with sporadic unrest for much of its recent history, Albania finds itself contending with anti-corruption riots as well,” Rene Mullen wrote on Yahoo News Contributors’ network the other day. “However, unlike Egypt and Tunisia, much of the media has turned a blind eye to Albanians’ current fight for better government. Albania’s recent demonstrations hold similar demographic triggers as Egypt’s demonstrations: anti-corruption sprinkled with general unrest over economic disparities. However, few are suggesting Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution helped instigate Albania’s unrest.”

Probably not; it could have been the other way around. We live today in a world globalized media and a Facebook page is a Facebook page is a Facebook page, wherever you are.

Or, take Uzbekistan. There have been sporadic street demonstrations over food prices there since 2005. That year, Uzbek security forces crushed protests, reportedly killing up to 1,000 people, mainly unarmed civilians. Last December, US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was in the Uzbek capitol Tashkent, signing a cooperation deal with the leaders of the natural gas–rich Central Asian country and asking them to “translate words into practice” to improve their human rights situation.” After Tunisia and Egypt, she should turn that plea into a robo call to be broadcast regularly – to no avail.

Meanwhile, back in Egypt, the drama continued to unfold. As the week began it appeared the stage was being set for a U.S.-sponsored military takeover.

It should be borne in mind that the conflict being played out in the streets of Cairo, Sharm El-Sheikh , Suez and Alexandria is not merely the Mubarak family versus the protestors. Hosni Mubarak is in power because the Egyptian ruling class wants him there. (Its constituents were busy fleeing the country over the weekend in their private jets). A Cairo chauffeur told the German Press Agency, “The only times people who live in better-off areas come into contact with those who are socially disadvantaged – many of whom live in illegally built shanty towns – are when they see their cleaners, their drivers, their concierges.”

Omar Suleiman

It is true that that the army [the 10th largest in the world] plays a somewhat independent role but it has been up to now to buttress the rich and the powerful. Since the end of the Egyptian monarchy, all four leaders have come from its ranks. It looks like, if Washington has its way, the next Egyptian ruler will emerge from the barracks as well. The tipoff may well have come when the capitol inside,r Columnist Fareed Zakaria, appearing on CNN Sunday advised the Obama Administration to ease Mubarak out and set up the new “vice-president” Omar Suleiman as the person to oversee what it usually refers to as “an orderly transition.” Suleiman is, in the words of the New York Times, “the establishment’s candidate,” “business oriented” and one who “shares Washington’s foreign policy agenda.”

According to Jane Meyer in The New Yorker, Suleiman is “a well-known quantity in Washington. Suave, sophisticated, and fluent in English” who “has served for years as the main conduit between the United States and Mubarak.” In her book “The Dark Side,” she describes how “since 1993 Suleiman has headed the feared Egyptian general intelligence service. In that capacity, he was the C.I.A.’s point man in Egypt for renditions – the covert program in which the C.I.A. snatched terror suspects from around the world and returned them to Egypt and elsewhere for interrogation, often under brutal circumstances.”

“The U.S. has long sought to block democracy in the Arab world, fearing that it would lead to the emergence of Islamist regimes,” writes Steven Kinzer in Newsweek. That’s not quite the story. Washington, Paris and London have, for six decades now, propped up repressive regimes and helped them brutally crush left, secular and Islamist movements and parties because it was afraid of popular revolutions that could sweep aside the local elites who control and sell their countries’ natural resources – like oil.

“With the once omnipotent security forces looking beatable, Egyptians of all backgrounds rose to join the fight: students, trade unionists, women, rights activists, Islamists and, crucially, the great workers’ army of Egypt’s employed and unemployed.,” read the lead editorial in the Guardian (UK) January 29. Here, truly, was people power in all its magnificent might. Here was democracy in the raw. Here was the legitimacy of an Egypt freed of its old fears and suddenly alive to its changing destiny. In five days of rage, they seized control of their country’s future. And so, inevitably, Mubarak must go.”

“The revolution threatens not only Hosni Mubarak’s regime but the strategy the US and Britain have constructed in the Middle East,” the paper said the next day.

“The hesitancy with which President Mubarak reacted last night was matched only by the perceptible shift in the emphasis of the statements by the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Only two days ago she said the US assessment was that the Egyptian government was stable and was looking for ways to respond to the legitimate interests of the Egyptian people. The primary importance of keeping a key Arab ally and Middle East interlocutor stable was also emphasized yesterday by Tony Blair, the Quartet’s envoy. Faced with the conflicting needs to keep an Arab partner of Israel afloat and to respond to demands for democratic reform, the US would choose the first every time. After yesterday’s events, Ms. Clinton’s calls to lift internet controls and respond to the grievances of Egyptians became more strident. But it was too little, too late. Ms. Clinton’s initial support for the Mubarak regime had not been lost on Egyptians battling for their freedoms.”

And the Middle East, Africa, and the rest of the world.

Carl Bloice

Reprinted with permission from The Black Commentator

It is in the cities that the 2011 food crisis hits hardest.  The revolution in Tunis began as a food riot.  As markets in Cairo, Algiers, and San`aa erupt, dictators are scrambling to buy off the opposition by lowering prices, but grain is scarce, and reports from the UN and the World Bank put the blame on overpopulation and climate.

Last year’s La Niña blighted harvests in Canada, Russia and the Ukraine, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture warns that an overcrowded earth is “putting unsustainable pressure on resources.”  But in 2009, when weather was good, things were not that much better.  Prices get high-level attention in the odd years when they are high, not in the typical years when they are typically abysmal.

2002, the index year against which the current disaster is measured, was the bottom of a steep 50-year decline in prices.  Commodities were cheaper by half than they are now, and there was no world crisis, only local misery.  Bankrupted peasants abandoned Chinese villages for urban slums.  Twenty thousand Punjabi farmers committed suicide.  Sugar workers clashed with police in Mexico, and Nebraska farmers took jobs at Wal-Mart to stave off foreclosure.

At last week’s Davos forum, French prime minister Nicolas Sarkozy and World Bank President Robert Zoellick urged stockpiles and “weather insurance or a rainfall index” as practical steps for dealing with nature’s limitations.

There may be another problem too, but it is hardly surprising that world leaders should overlook it.  Since the 1950s, chronic underinvestment in agriculture has been considered a normal feature of a healthy, growing economy.  For most of the twentieth century, a successful farm policy was one that delivered cheap food to urban consumers, whatever the cost at the producing end.

In the 1930s, German and Soviet planners first began to speak of an “agricultural sector,” a subordinate economy-within-the-economy whose profits could be diverted, by force if necessary, into industrial expansion.  Émigré economists brought the concept to Washington, but Franklin Roosevelt initially went a different way.

New Dealers lifted food prices by creating artificial scarcities.  In three years farm earnings rose to “parity” with 1916, the best year on record, and there they stayed.  When the Supreme Court threw out the Agricultural Adjustment Act, policy shifted toward subsidies that held farm income steady while filling grocery shelves with  low-cost staples.  By the end of the 1930s, according to Rebecca West, all countries—communist, fascist, and capitalist—had accepted “the insane dispensation which pays the food-producer worst of all workers.”

Dual-economy theory soon entered the canon of development policy.  Nobel economist W. Arthur Lewis realized in 1952 that the function of the rural sector was as a “reservoir of cheap labor” for the urban sector.  Development models were built around the “zero value” doctrine, which held that non-industrial production had no measurable worth until liberated for use in manufacturing.

Newly independent regimes saw the potential.  India’s five-year plans defined agriculture as “a bargain sector, which can produce the requisite surplus with relatively low investment and in a comparatively short time.”  Taxes, price controls, duties and currency policies were subtly or overtly designed to siphon “waste” profits from rural producers.  Enterprise was punished by anti-profiteering laws applied solely to the farm sector.  Cheap food meant cheap labor, which gave emerging Asia its competitive edge.  The Kennedy administration helped, depressing prices still further by flooding Asian markets with surplus wheat.

By 1965, India’s farmers had given up, and the country depended on an unsustainable 11 million tons of American grain.  Policy had to change, and it did.  The Green Revolution was hailed as the salvation of millions from drought and overpopulation, but it actually rescued Asia from its catastrophic disinvestment in agriculture.  Dwarf wheat, Norman Borlaug explained, was only a “catalyst” for policies that returned resources to the countryside, especially price supports which gave peasants a rare chance to make a decent living.

Governments took the lesson and food production rose dramatically, but the 1980s debt crisis forced African and Latin American countries again to squeeze their rural sectors for cash.  A neo-liberal consensus dismantled the remaining credit and subsidy programs, and when food prices spiked in the 1990s experts spoke soberly about climate and overpopulation.

Agriculture is a transparent, responsive sector, and quick profits fueled a production boom followed by the market collapse of 2002.  The cycles have become sharper.  The 2008 peak was followed by a 50 percent plunge in soy prices and then this year’s surge.

The price of onions in India is up 80 percent; South Korea and the Philippines face shortages of fish and powdered milk, and countries around the world are reaching for the standby solutions, cracking down on hoarders and adjusting quotas and duties to force down local food prices.

Last week the World Economic Forum, in an uneasy forecast, questioned whether farmers could meet the twin challenges of demography and climate.  If history is any guide, they can, as they have in the past, but not unless they get paid.  A recent poll shows half of India’s farmers want to quit.  Many who till high-risk lands on which the expansion of the food supply depends have already given up and left the losing sector to seek a place in the winning one.  There, like the mobs in Tunis, they can demand food, instead of having to grow it.

A lasting fix will require more than an adjustment to allow cultivators to survive.  It will require unlearning a half century of dogma which relegates agriculture to a subordinate status.  The global economy includes the global countryside, and the return of prosperity will have to begin there.

Nick Cullather

Nick Cullather is the author of The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (2010), a finalist for this year’s Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book on global affairs. He is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University.

Reposted with permission from The History News Network.

Charles Koch

David and Charles Koch, co-owners of Koch Industries and primary financiers of the Tea Party, have amassed one of the world’s largest private fortunes and Koch Industries is the second largest privately held company in America. Koch sycophants in the media have attacked anyone daring to criticize the company because Koch Industries employs nearly 50,000 people, according to a study produced by Koch Industries last week. In the last two years, David and Charles Koch have jumped from each being worth $16 billion to now being worth $21.5 billion. That means together they went from being worth $31 billion dollars to being worth $42 billion today. David is now the richest man in New York City, and the pair are now on the nation’s top ten list for richest Americans.

David Koch

However, at a time when the Koch brothers were enjoying spectacular financial gains, Koch Industries laid off well over 2,000 people. Using the same approximate “jobs multiplier” Koch Industries used in its study last week, that means Koch Industries extinguished nearly 8,000 jobs in recent years:

• – Koch’s John Zink Company subsidiary laid off 63 people in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
• – Koch’s Georgia Pacific subsidiary laid off 118 people at its Roxboro, North Carolina plant.
• – Koch laid off 50 people at its INVISTA plant in Wilmington, Delaware.
• – Koch’s Georgia Pacific subsidiary laid off 158 people at a paper-making plant in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Most of the jobs have been replaced with automated machines.
• – Koch’s INVISTA subsidiary laid off 50 people at its plant in Athens, Georgia.
• – Koch laid off 150 people at its headquarters in Wichita, Kansas.
• – Koch laid off 500 people at its Seaford, Delaware INVISTA plant.
• – Koch laid off 400 people in its Waynesboro, Indiana INVISTA plant. As one of the primary employers in the city, the layoffs were expected to have serious ripple effects. City officials said layoffs at Invista will “force cuts across Waynesboro.” “The rest of the community, this will probably instill a bit of a wake-up call and they will cut back also,” predicted Waynesboro Vice Mayor Frank Lucente.
• – Koch laid off 320 people at its Georgia Pacific plywood plant in Cleveland, Texas.
• – Koch laid off 60 people at its INVISTA plant in Victoria, Texas.
• – Koch laid off 169 people from its Flint Hills Resources plant in Odessa, Texas.
• – Koch laid off 300 people at its Georgia Pacific plant in Monroeville, Alabama.
• – Koch “indefinitely” idled its 60-worker Georgia Pacific mill in Louisville, Mississippi.

The Koch downsizing isn’t limited to the United States. In England, Koch laid off workers at its chemical plant in Wilton, England and closed down its INVISTA plant in Offenbach, Germany.

Koch Industries pretends that it thrives from the “free market,” and that the government only inhibits its growth. But in reality, as Koch slashed jobs, the company exploited government contracts, public forests, public land, narrow corporate loopholes, eminent domain seizures of private land, and has demanded taxpayer bailouts for its refineries.

Moreover, while Koch Industries has interests in a number of different businesses, much of its money is made by simply polluting for free. The core of Koch’s immense profits are based on burning fossil fuels that contribute to climate change, while not paying a dime for these “externalities.” For instance, Koch refines oil, including high carbon Canadian crude, at its Minnesota refinery, Koch owns one of the largest oil pipeline networks in America, Koch manufacturers fertilizer, Koch sells products for mining coal and owns coal-burning power plants, Koch transports coal, oil and natural gas, and finally, Koch sells financial derivative instruments to bet on the price of its own products, like oil or natural gas. Because Koch Industries gets rich burning fossil fuels, the Koch brothers are the largest funders of climate change denying organizations and “libertarian” nonprofits in the world. Koch political donations have helped the company escape serious prosecution for emitting cancer-causing chemicals as well.

Lee Fang
Think Progress

That’s the way I’m feeling about politics this year, and that’s why I’m renaming this my Lament. I’m extraordinarily proud of my adopted country, the Liberal nation, and I yearn to see it once again. Liberalism has had some great victories; chattel slavery is no more, women can vote, old people no longer beg on streetcorners thanks to Social Security, pure food and water are taken for granted, child labor is illegal, de jure segregation is barred, my daughter can go to law school (or any other school she likes), etc. The list is long; the causes celebrated; the heroes are in the pantheon.

Every one, every single one, of those victories was fiercely fought by entrenched power, and now entrenched power, through its surrogate, money, seems to be gaining in its effort to roll back those victories. Chattel slavery may be gone for good, but today’s economic slavery may be little better; with the too-high unemployment and foreclosure rates and union membership ever declining, a lot of people “owe their soul to the Company store” and who among them is so bold to challenge their bondage? We must privatize Social Security and reduce its coverage, some say, to pay for our never-ending wars and enrich the military-industrial complex. Pure food and water must be diluted because it is the result of an overreaching federal government. We must repeal health care security because if God meant for us to be well, he would not let us get sick. De facto segregation rules in much of the country. Good friends, a class war is being waged, and we are losing.

And why, why with such a joyous liberal victory just two years in the past, are we losing so badly? Are there so many people who can’t remember when or why the great recession started? Why the focus on the national debt now, when not a word was heard from the tea party or Republicans while our wars of aggression doubled it between 2001 and 2008? Has every single skilled propagandist been hired by the conservatives? Where, oh where, is the bully pulpit of the Presidency to preach, educate, explain, persuade, cajole and satirize, and when necessary, to thunder, to fulminate, to defy and to punish? Sadly, its silent, except to admonish liberals for timidly raising their voice.

No one has offered a satisfactory explanation of why the pulpit is silent, so I’ll propose an explanation based on what I know about lawyers. I’m a lawyer; so is President Obama. Though there are exceptions, lawyers are either litigators or transactional lawyers. Litigators try cases, advocate causes, challenge city councils, raise hell and call codswallop what it is. Transactional lawyers strategize, negotiate, do deals, find bipartisan solutions, lubricate the gears of commerce so that the economic engine can produce.

If that sounds like I’m exalting litigation and denigrating colleagues who do deals, I’m not. Transactional lawyers are vital to a nation’s prosperity. You simply can’t have prosperity unless someone helps people cooperate with one another for their mutual advantage. That’s what transactional lawyers do. In doing a business deal, though, one crucial assumption is made. It is assumed that both sides want a deal to be made. If one side wants a deal, and the other side doesn’t, no deal gets done. You can be the most skilled lawyer and negotiator, but you will never be successful if the other wins by not doing a deal.

That, I suggest, is what hobbles the President. His focus has been on the deal — or in his case, on doing what he believes will be in the best interests of the American people as a whole. He assumes that the conservatives ultimately want to accomplish that as well. The conservatives, however, want no deal. They figure that if they can avoid the blame for bad government, they regain power if they refuse to negotiate. And here is the key point. The President, never a litigator and without the instincts of a warrior, has so far not been able to make the absence of a deal politically costly for the forces of entrenched money. Until someone finds a way to punish Senator McConnell for making the defeat of Barack Obama more important than advancing the good of the nation, things will remain the same — and they could get worse.

But not forever. I do believe that the arc of history will eventually, though perhaps not in President Obama’s time, take back the ground that has been lost, and then gain new ground. Perhaps next year I can tell you how this will take place, but even now the emergence of a warrior seems essential. For now, I’m mildly comforted by recalling that Laments, while mourning losses, also foretell even better days to come. Though Scotland is no longer a sovereign nation, it’s people have a national anthem, a Lament, “Oh Flower of Scotland“, that mourns Scotland’s loss of sovereignty to the Sassenachs but celebrates a future victory:

Oh Flower of Scotland
when will we see
your like again,
that fought and died for
your wee bit hill and glen,
The hills are bare now
and autumn leaves
lie thick and still
o’er land that is lost now
which those so dearly held, Those days are past now,
and in the past now
they must remain.
But we can still rise now
and be the nation again
and stood against him,
proud Edward’s army,
and sent him homeward
to think again. that stood against him,
proud Edwards’s army,
and sent him homeward
to think again. that stood against him,
proud Edward’s army
and sent him homeward
to think again.

I yearn to be among those that stand against Proud Mitch’s army, and the armies of Proud Rush, of Proud Sarah and of Proud Glenn. For the sake of all, they must be sent homeward. We can still rise now and be the nation again that achieved greatness through generosity of spirit. Please rise as you are able and join me in the new year in a Lament, yet to be written, that stiffens the spine, celebrates our past and spurs on the liberal warriors among us.

And all the while wishing you joy and prosperity in the New Year.

John A. Blue

John Blue is an old lawyer who has lived in Pasadena, California, for many years and who occasionally writes something useful.

The billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles, are hosting their bi-annual meeting of right-wing billionaires. Odds are you’re probably not a right-wing billionaire and maybe you haven’t heard of the Koch brothers.

These are the guys that are known for their support of the Tea Party through their foundation, Americans for Prosperity. Many believe the Koch brothers are pulling the purse strings of  Congress. Although their meeting roster is secret, enough is known to raise concerns that their influence is a dangerous threat to American politics and climate progress. Their meeting will be held at the Rancho Mirage Resort in Palm Springs on Sunday, January 30. But unless you’re one of their ring-wing billionaire buddies, you probably haven’t received an invitation to that meeting. 

Here’s what you’re invited to attend –

In response to the Koch brothers meeting, a coalition of progressive groups, including Common Cause, CodePink, California Courage Campaign, and Ruckus Society, has organized a rally counter-protest and that’s where you come in. If you want to go to this rally, all of the information you need can be found on the Common Cause site. Click here to get the details.

Here is what Bob Edgar, president and CEO of Common Cause has to say about the event:

I’ve never met Charles and David Koch, or most of the other business executives and political activists who’ll be socializing and strategizing about our country’s future with them this weekend in Palm Springs. But I’ve read enough to know that they’re hardworking entrepreneurs, with firm convictions and a determination to advance them.

That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with making a lot of money or spending some of it on political activism. Nor is there anything wrong with the Kochs inviting people who share their ideas, or any other ideas for that matter, to get together for an exchange of views.

What’s troubling to me, what’s led Common Cause and other groups to call public attention to the Koch conclave and convene an alternative forum near theirs this weekend, is the Koch’s use of their considerable resources to advance public policies that will enhance their bottom line and endanger the rest of us and our country.

Thanks to some good journalism, particularly on the ThinkProgress website and in the New Yorker magazine, we know that the Kochs and many of those joining them have invested millions of dollars in groups like the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society.

Through those groups and others, the Kochs and their network seek to eliminate laws that give us breathable air and drinkable water but which have cost the Kochs millions of dollars in fines. They work to discredit the scientific consensus that pollutants from manufacturing operations maintained by Koch Industries and other firms — even with clean air laws in place – are dangerously warming our planet. And they sponsor public events aimed at defeating cap-and-trade legislation, which would make Koch Industries and other companies pay for the air pollution that they create.

Of special concern to me, as the leader of an organization formed 40 years ago to fight for government that is open, honest and accountable to every citizen, is the Koch’s effort to dismantle campaign finance laws that since the days of Theodore Roosevelt have served as a check on corporate power.

Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision last year, encouraged and then embraced by the Kochs, corporations and other special interests were able to pour more than $300 million into the 2010 elections.

More than $130 million of that came from secret donors, often using front groups like the Koch-founded Americans for Prosperity.

That money is an investment in our democracy, calculated to give the people providing it and their companies a voice loud enough to drown out the concerns of everyday Americans. And like investors everywhere, the people and firms behind the money want a return, perhaps here in the form of tax breaks or the repeal of some of the regulations that cut into the Koch’s profits.

At the very least, Americans need to know who those investors are and how much each has put into our political system. We need to know when some of them, like the Kochs, meet with the politicians their money helped to elect and with judges whose legal opinions made their donations legal. Otherwise, we’ll be none the wiser when the politicians all that money helped elect begin to provide the return.

A final thought. I read in some conservative journals that concerns about the Kochs and about corporate involvement in politics are driven by a desire to muzzle conservative voices. That is absolute nonsense. The Kochs and all who share their views should speak up, as long and as loudly as they care to, about public policy. But they should be required to do so openly, like the rest of us, and they should not be allowed to use their corporate economic clout to drown out other voices.

That’s why I’ll be in Rancho Mirage this weekend. — Bob Edgar