The following release came to us from the National Farmers Union about legislative changes to the country of origin labeling law.

We couldn’t agree more!

NFU Will Not Support Legislative Changes to COOL
WASHINGTON (Jan. 27, 2012) – National Farmers Union (NFU) President Roger Johnson issued the following statement today to urging U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Ron Kirk to pursue a robust appeals process on the recent decision of the World Trade Organization (WTO) that ruled against the United States’ implementation of the country-of-origin-labeling (COOL) law:
“NFU has a proud record of supporting COOL. We were instrumental in getting the COOL laws passed in 2002 and again in 2008.
“We will oppose any attempt to change that law. Fortunately, the WTO decision against U.S. country-of-origin-labeling did not find fault with our law. It simply found fault with the rules and regulations which were used to implement the law.
“As the office of the USTR contemplates its approach to the WTO decision, we urge them to mount a robust and vigorous defense of COOL.
“We are aware that behind the scenes attempts at negotiating a settlement to the WTO decision have some stakeholders arguing that we must weaken our law. We strongly disagree and urge a fervent defense.
“Consumers have a right to know where their meat comes from – and they overwhelmingly want to know just that.”
The labeling law was passed as a part of the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 and amended in 2008. COOL requires retailers to notify their customers of the source of certain foods. Canada and Mexico filed a complaint against the United States’ law, which led to the recent ruling. The deadline for filing an appeal to the WTO decision is March 23, 2012.

Posted on February 1st, 2012 by DebbySKoz
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

Today is Blog Action Day, an annual event in which tens of thousands of bloggers address a subject they have chosen by voting earlier in the year. This year’s subject is food.

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson

A single glance at the photo of a skin-and-bones baby in the arms of a skin-and-bones mother is all it takes for the brain to call up the concept of malnutrition and its probable result, a miserable, painful death.

While we sympathize with people starving in Darfur, Sudan, and elsewhere in Africa, India, North Korea, and other nations under intolerable stress, we look around for someone to make the famine end, and then we realize we are the ones we are waiting for. If we don’t act, at least in telling our country’s leaders that they must act, we must assume that no one else will, and the people who stare at us through the camera lens will die because no one cares, or cares enough.

Malnutriton is easy to recognize in the stick-fiigure human beings we see on the nightly news. It’s much harder to identify malnutrition in the morbidly obese – people who weigh at least 100 pounds (45 kg) more than is good for them. People who are stirred by the sight of malnutrition in the painfully thin are often disgusted by the massive bodies of those who are obese by virtue of malnutrition.

I don’t mean to equate the plight of those suffering from famine with that of those suffering from an abundance of food that offers virtually no nourishment, only, and temporarily, a full belly. These are the malnourished people in the developed world, and the result of such malnutrition is also likely be a miserable, painful death.

In the case of those who are morbidly obese, death will take longer to come. It will likely come in the form of a heart attack or stroke, or the consequences of diabetes – heart failure, kidney failure, dementia caused by the deterioration of nerves and blood vessels in the brain among them.

How can it be that so many people in the world’s richest nations, where food is obscenely plentiful, can be both fat and malnourished? The answer is poverty. One-third of American adults (and thirty percent of American children) are obese. A far smaller percentage are morbidly obese, but no one seems to be keeping statistics to that fine a point. In America, sixteen percent of people live below the poverty line, and many more, while not officially in poverty take in too little money in the course of a week to be able to buy properly nourishing food, or even to live in a place where such food can be bought.

In America, the corner grocery store has all but disappeared, giving way to large supermarkets that serve a more affluent area in which most people must drive to buy their food. These are the stores that stock fresh meat, fruit, and vegetables – the foods we need to eat a healthful diet. Lacking automobiles or any other way to get to the supermarkets, people in the poorer neighborhoods must rely on convenience stores. These sell almost nothing but prepared foods, full of sugars and salt, starch and fat. And the poorest of the poor buy the cheapest foods they can find, mainly snack foods and cakes. These fill their bellies for a while, then soon leave those who eat them as hungry as before. So they eat more low-nutrition but cheap snacks and never experience the satisfaction of a nourishing meal. And the weight, born of sugars and salt, starches and fats, piles on.

In many, the result is akin to alcoholism – a never-ending craving to satisfy the itch that is addiction. It’s easy to look down on the alcoholic or person who is morbidly obese if you’ve never been in their place. The causes of alcoholism are several, including an inherited inability to process the sugars in alcohol efficiently – nobody’s fault. The causes of obesity are fewer, and generally come down to societal indifference to social and economic justice. That’s the fault of those who could object, but do not.

Ask yourself this: When was the last time you saw a person who was both morbidly obese and rich? Rich people don’t have to stuff themselves with food devoid of nutrients to stave off the pain of hunger. Poor people often do. Rich people can get their food from the best markets. Poor people buy from convenience stores.

And the point is this: There is no excuse in rich, developed nations for the disparity we find between rich and poor. No excuse at all, except that the rich people like it that way. And they have the money to spend to ensure that the wealth gap, and the nutrition gap, don’t go away.

They can make it so, that is, unless those of us who are fortunate enough, though we’re not rich, to maintain a decent level of nutrition and, thus, of energy, say it can’t be that way any more.

We have only to look around us to see plentiful examples of peaceful objections to the way things are. In the name of humanity, we must.

Click here to sample today’s blogs.

Posted on October 16th, 2011 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Food, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson

If you’re not convinced about the Republican Party’s agenda for the current legislative session, listen up. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) called the shot after the 2010 congressional mid-term election.  His goal for the next two years, he said, was to ensure that Barack Obama is a one-term president.

I didn’t hear any other Republican leader disavow that goal, and the Gross Old Party has bent to the task of helping McConnell achieve his ambition.

This is the party that campaigned on the promise to create jobs for American workers. Of course, they knew full well that any decrease in the unemployment rate would be to Obama’s re-election advantage in 2012. And so, instead of focusing on job creation, the Republican legislative leadership decided to make a crisis out of the budget deficit and consequent increase in the national debt. A compliant President Obama yielded the initiative and climbed on the spending-cut bandwagon.

Decreased spending during the current congressional term, in which the Republicans hold a majority in the House, and thus control money bills sent to the Democratically-controlled Senate, has led to greatly decreased funding returned to the states. And that has led to a huge loss in jobs in state government.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,

Since employment peaked in September 2008, local government has lost 550,000 jobs.

But wait: there’s more.  Last February, in Forbes, of all places, there appeared an article with the headline

GOP Budget Cuts Lead To One Million Lost Jobs – But Protect Boehner’s Congressional District

In the article, the author first took House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to task for his well-publicized lying claim that Obama had added 200,000 jobs to the federal payroll, an assertion that the nonpartisan PolitiFact (I know they’re nonpartisan because I hate them as often as I love them) proved false. The article continued

As luck would have it, Washington Post’s Dana Milbank did take a close look at the end result of the proposed GOP cuts – a net of $59 billion in the last half of fiscal year 2011 – and discovered that they would mean the direct loss of 650,000 federal government jobs. Factoring in the ‘indirect losses’ – those who would lose their employment due to the loss of the money put into the system by the 650,000 federal workers who will no longer have much cash to spend  - the total approaches one million jobs lost.

In the interest of full disclosure, Milbank acquired these projections from budget expert Scott Lilly of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with close ties to the Obama Administration. So, if it makes you feel any better – make whatever adjustments you think appropriate. However, if you are at all familiar with the cuts to agencies of the federal government proposed by the GOP, pretending that there will not be a dramatic loss of employment would simply be kidding yourself.

Now, keep in mind that the jobs market — including both the public and private sectors — needs to add 125,000 jobs per month just to keep up with population growth.

Then factor in the fact that corporations and banks are sitting on more than a trillion dollars in cash, some of which could be put to job creation, were the owners of this fortune willing to help ease the pain that millions of Americans are feeling. They’re not willing, say the Republicans, because of uncertainty.  And what uncertainty would that be?  The fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the country’s economic future being promoted by guess who?  The same Republicans who are gleefully blaming the president for the loss of jobs.

History has shown more than once that the way to overcome an economic recession — we may as well be honest and call it a depression, regardless of the euphemism the government and most economists choose — is to spend money to create jobs, thus putting money in working people’s pockets which they go out and spend on goods and services, creating more jobs.

The current legislative fracas is another piece of the Republican strategy: Refuse to fund disaster aid unless cuts of the same amount are made to a clean car loan program, even if that refusal leads to a shutdown of non-essential government services at the start of the Fed’s fiscal year 2012, which begins October 1.

Yet last year, according to NPR’s Weekend Edition,

more than a dozen Republicans who voted to cut funding to the program, yet also in recent years sent letters to the Department of Energy pushing for clean-car projects in their own states.

One of those legislators was Rep. David Drier (R-CA), who said a company in his district would create 2,300 jobs making lithium ion batteries, if it got the loan it was seeking.

Last point: some 70% of the economy is attributable to the spending of ordinary Americans. But most folks are avoiding non-essential spending as much as they can.  Why? The fear, uncertainty, and doubt fostered by the Republicans. Why should we spend money unnecessarily when the Republicans are saying spending is bad and to be avoided?

If these facts have persuaded you that nothing will get better until the Republicans don’t have the power in Congress to tie things up, kill jobs, and make us all afraid to spend a dollar we don’t have to spend, what are you going to do about it?  I suggest you want to challenge your Representatives and Senator, if they are Republicans, with the facts you’ve found here and tell them you don’t want them to make things worse, which is what they’re bent on doing.

Don’t just sit there.  Do something.

Posted on September 25th, 2011 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Jobs, Uncategorized | No Comments »

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson

Between 1973 and 1975, the US economy was in the grip of stagflation, which Wikipedia describes this way:

In economics, stagflation is a situation in which the inflation rate is high and the economic growth rate is low. It raises a dilemma for economic policy since actions designed to lower inflation may worsen economic growth and vice versa.

The nation’s Vietnam War effort was coming unravelled. Not unlike today’s situation, the US had spent itself into near-poverty, and for similarly specious reasons. OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, quadrupled the price of oil. Inflation was high and on its way to becoming worse. Richard Nixon, facing the ultimate disgrace of having to choose between impeachment and resignation, was said to be walking the halls of the White House, talking to the portraits of his predecessors. At its peak in this period, unemployment was 9 percent.

I was in my 30s, the newly-single mom of four teenagers, and unemployed. I was volunteering as an advocate for people having trouble with the local welfare system (the Commonwealth of Massachusetts hadn’t yet taken charge of it, so welfare administration was left to the state’s 351 cities and towns. You can imagine the variety of ways in which officials in various towns responded to requests for aid from people suffering in the existing economy. It was the kind of chaos the a certain segment of the Republican Party longs to return to.)

In the course of that volunteer work I learned of a Federal jobs program aimed at getting people back to work. At the same time, I read of an opening for a proofreader at the local newspaper – actually a chain of local papers in six or so small towns north of Boston.

I’d lived in one of the towns, the one in which the newspaper chain had its headquarters, for about six years. I’d worked locallyin the 1968 McCarthy campaign with the publisher, the man who owned the papers. We weren’t friends, but he knew my name. I phoned for an appointment. He was willing to see me.

I told him what little I knew about the federal jobs program – a tax credit to small businesses that hired people who had no jobs. I told him, with unwarranted confidence, since I’d never done the work, that I’d make a good proofreader and that we would both benefit if he hired me. He’d seen examples of my writing – press releases I wrote for Gene McCarthy – and figured I knew the English language well enough to do the job. He hired me. The pay was $3.25/hour – $14.89 now, according to the BLS inflation calculator.

Until that point, I’d never earned a nickel by working with the written word, although I’d been writing stories and poems since I was a child. That Federal jobs program changed my life, and the life of my children, who otherwise might well have lived in poverty until they were old enough to go out on their own.

Someone in the shop taught me how to proofread. I was to compare what the reporter wrote with what the typesetter set, mark errors (there’s a code of proofreader marks that I had to learn), and send them back to the typesetter.

It wasn’t long before I was spotting factual errors in the copy, and sentences that were ungrammatical and confusing, and talking with the reporters about them. That wasn’t my job – I was supposed to let the reporters’ errors go through. It was the typesetter I was monitoring. But I couldn’t be that cruel, both to the writers and the paper’s readers. A couple of my co-workers suggested over lunch that I back off, but I couldn’t. I don’t know what I was thinking. I could have been fired.

Instead, I was promoted with the enthusiastic approval of the chain’s various editors and the scowling disapproval of the shop foreman, my boss. I worked my way up in the chain until I was moved into the advertising department and eventually became business manager for the entire chain. That’s when I decided I wanted to own my own community newspaper so – call me stupid, or call me a risk taker – I applied to be a correspondent at the area’s largest daily paper, and I got the job. The money was worse, but I loved the work. I’m the kind of person who, if I’m going to be a boss, which I’d have to be if I owned a newspaper (don’t ask me where I’d get the money; I didn’t think about that little detail) I’d need to know about everyone’s job so I’d know what I could reasonably expect.

I never got my own newspaper, but I never tried. Six months into being a reporter I realized that reporting was more fun than owning a business, so I stayed with the regional daily until I got cross-threaded with the publisher by failing to greet him at 4 a.m. In the hallway leading from the news room to the production department. I was the Saturday editor at that time, in pretty well over my head, worried about a problem that had just been presented to me. I never dreamed the publisher would be there that early on a Saturday and I walked right by him, deep in thought.

I learned from the city editor that Monday that the was furious at my disrespect, and eventually, though he couldn’t fire me (it was Newspaper Guild shop) he could make my life miserable, which he did, and I left.

I went on to writing for magazines, then writing books, and now that I’m old, writing for the Web.

And all that has come about because a US Congress not bent on destroying a president (said president – Nixon – was doing a decent job of that without help,) worked together across party lines to make life better for people who were suffering.

Today, for people — congressmembers included — who have never experienced what a little boost from government can mean to an individual struggling in a hostile economy, jobs programs and all the rest of the help government can offer are nothing but an abstract notion. To someone like me, who went from worry bordering on terror to the ability to support a family of five, that $1,500 tax break my employer gained by hiring me meant the world, as it could to millions of Americans unemployed today.

We live in a different America these days. I’ll be surprised if Obama gets the jobs portion of his bill enacted. If unemployment decreases and people’s suffering is relieved even to a small extent, he’ll be reelected next year, and no self-respecting Republican these days can let that happen.

Posted on September 12th, 2011 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Economy, Uncategorized | No Comments »

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson

I’ll record Barack Obama’s Thursday night jobs speech – I mean, his warm-up act for the NFL season opener’s pre-game show – on my DVD recorder and watch it later in the evening. At 7 I’m usually not finished cleaning up after dinner, but I’ll get to the DVR when I’m done.

I don’t know why Obama is going through this charade. I can’t imagine him reassuring those of us who donated time and treasure beyond our reasonable capacity to do so. I can’t imagine him telling the Republican legislators “Here’s what needs to be done and if you don’t help me do it I’ll find a way to work around you.” I expect he’ll be conciliatory, talk about bipartisanship, and how the deficit can’t be erased on the backs of those who have no voice on Capitol Hill.

Of course it can be, and unless the Obama of principle and compassion comes to the joint session, it will be. Obama’s already thrown people like me over the cliff (forget about the bus) by offering to cut life-protecting programs such as fuel assistance. I’m not exaggerating by calling LIHEAP life-protecting. When you’re in your 80s and 90s, the cells of your body don’t make as much energy as they once did, and it’s not easy to keep yourself warm when there’s no heat in the house on a bitter New England winter day. You can stay in bed under the covers, but inactivity brings with it other hazards to the life of an old person. Come October, the local council on aging will again bombard us with leaflets on hypothermia and how to keep from freezing to death. They don’t mention lobbying Congress; they’ve been around long enough to know better than that.

I realize that offering people up to be killed is part of the president’s job description. Think Iraq. Think Afghanistan. I can’t name a president in my lifetime (which started while Franklin Roosevelt was running for his second term) who hasn’t sent people to their death. But people in their 80s and above? We didn’t elect Obama to do that.

What I most hold against Obama these days is his willingness to let the budget deficit and national debt (two different but related issues that should be addressed separately) overshadow the economy – no, to replace it – on the Congressional agenda. The Republicans who got themselves elected in 2008 did so largely on the basis of promising to create jobs. So what did they do? They created chaos instead, holding the economy hostage by threatening to force the US to default on its current financial promises to pay; giving Standard and Poor an excuse to deflate the country’s credit rating, which may turn out to mean higher interest rates (good for people who lend money, bad for those who invest in stocks).

And what did Obama do? He went along with the hoax. He could have invoked Section 4 of the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” He could have said to the hostage-takers, “Forget you. I’m the President and I will not let anyone wonder if the US considers its debt to be valid. I will not let anyone or any nation worry about being repaid on time and in full. If you don’t like it, sue me.” Not even the craziest Tea Party legislator would have had the anatomical attributes required to sue for the right to put the US in default of its obligations.

And you and I know that if the giant corporations, with their gigantic tax-avoidance departments; and the super-rich, with their lawyers and accountants and their insatiable appetite for money and toys, paid their fair share of taxes, we could wipe out the budget deficit without breaking a sweat. Or killing old people in their unheated homes.

If we created jobs – real, useful, soul satisfying jobs – for the millions who want desperately to work, they’d be paying taxes, too. And they’d have money to buy clothes for their kids going back to school, maybe they’d be able to go out to eat once in a while – all the things they can’t do now they could do with the money they earned, and other people would get jobs making the things they want to buy, cooking and serving in the restaurants they go to. It takes money to make money. Get people working again and we’ll work our way out of the financial mess the “starve the beast” Republicans got us into.

The Republicans insist that the way to solve our debt and deficit problems and create jobs is to cut taxes and repeal consumer protection and environmental regulations. How self-serving can you get? If tax cuts enable corporations to create jobs, how do the Republicans explain the paltry 3 million jobs created during George W Bush’s eight years in office, despite the tax cut that wiped out the budget surplus Bill Clinton bestowed on Bush? The Clinton administration, on the other hand, saw 23.1 million jobs created during its eight-year term. Don’t listen when they say tax cuts create jobs. All they create is a greater disparity between the rich and the poor.

In his Labor Day speech to an audience largely of auto workers in Detroit Obama was supposedly previewing what he’s going to say to Congress Thursday night. If he couples the tone of Monday’s speech with specific proposals for legislative spending to create jobs, my attitude temperature toward the president, currently close to freezing – 32 degrees Fahrenheit – will go up a few degrees. Trouble is, I doubt he will.

Monday Obama was talking to the people he’s been forgetting about for the past three years – some 13,000 of them, according to an estimate from Detroit’s department of homeland security. Obama was looking at a multicolored sea of faces. He dropped his Ivy League mode of speaking and lapsed into the vernacular – dropping g’s at the ends of words, using a slightly southern-tinged cadence. People used to laugh at Al Gore for doing the same; I’d rather hear Obama talk like a human being rather than a robot watching a tennis match as his head swings from one TelePrompTer to another without ever pausing to look into the camera lens and engage the American people to whom he should really be talking.

Here are a couple of quotes from Monday’s speech:

We’ve gone through a decade where wealth was valued over work, and greed was valued over responsibility. And the decks were too often stacked against ordinary folks in favor of the special interests. And everywhere I went while I was running for this office, I met folks who felt their economic security slipping away, men and women who were fighting harder and harder just to stay afloat. And that was even before the economic crisis hit, and that just made things even harder.

So these are tough times for working Americans. They’re even tougher for Americans who are looking for work –- and a lot of them have been looking for work for a long time. [...] So we’ve got a lot more work to do to recover fully from this recession.

But I’m not satisfied just to get back to where we were before the recession; we’ve got to fully restore the middle class in America. And America cannot have a strong, growing economy without a strong, growing middle class and without a strong labor movement.

On Thursday, we’re going to lay out a new way forward on jobs to grow the economy and put more Americans back to work right now. I don’t want to give everything away right here, because I want you all to tune in on Thursday but I’ll give you just a little bit.

We’ve got roads and bridges across this country that need rebuilding. We’ve got private companies with the equipment and the manpower to do the building. We’ve got more than 1 million unemployed construction workers ready to get dirty right now. There is work to be done and there are workers ready to do it. Labor is on board. Business is on board. We just need Congress to get on board. Let’s put America back to work.

So I’m going to propose ways to put America back to work that both parties can agree to, because I still believe both parties can work together to solve our problems. And given the urgency of this moment, given the hardship that many people are facing, folks have got to get together.

But we’re not going to wait for them. We’re going to see if we’ve got some straight shooters in Congress. We’re going to see if congressional Republicans will put country before party. We’ll give them a plan, and then we’ll say, do you want to create jobs? Then put our construction workers back to work rebuilding America.  Do you want to help our companies succeed? Open up new markets for them to sell their products. You [...]say you’re the party of tax cuts? Well then, prove you’ll fight just as hard for tax cuts for middle-class families as you do for oil companies and the most affluent Americans. Show us what you got.

The time for Washington games is over. The time for action is now. No more manufactured crises. No more games. Now is not the time for the people you sent to Washington to worry about their jobs; now is the time for them to worry about your jobs.

Don’t ever forget that Mitch McConnell, the minority leader in the Senate, said in 2008 after the Republicans won the House and decreased the Democratic majority in the Senate, that his goal for the coming two years was to be sure that Obama was a one-term president. Not to ensure that Americans got back to work, not to ensure that the gap between the rich and poor was diminished, not to work for social and economic justice – just to get rid of Obama, regardless of what harm it did the American people that Congress is meant to serve.

And just about everything the Republicans have done legislatively since then has been toward that end. They’ve tightened the screws on the federal government, throwing tens of thousands out of work. They’ve decreased the money the Fed sends to the states, throwing more tens of thousands of government workers out of work. These are not drones, either. We’re talking police and firefighters and public works employees and teachers – the people who enhance our quality of life. The Republicans are fomenting ill will between local officials and citizens who can’t or won’t understand that the reason their cities and towns are hurting is because the people at the top of the hill are pinching them where it hurts the most.

To my knowledge, Obama has never done anything to go around a recalcitrant Congress. There are executive orders and signing statements and a raft of powers this man has never exercised. I want him to let Congressional Republicans know that he’s going to call them out every time they try to pinch working people. I want him to remind everyone that he’s the President of the United States, not some patsy they can push around at will.

Once, in my government reporting days, I was at a confrontation between a certain big city mayor and the city council that was trying to thwart him. The mayor came in, reached into his jacket pocket, and took out two shiny brass balls, each about two inches in diameter, and put them on the table in front of him. He never referred to them during the meeting, nor did anyone else, but the council members’ tone was noticeably less disdainful than it had been.

Obama can’t do that, of course. He’s the President of the United States, not the mayor of a largely working-class city. And I can’t imagine him using the diction and cadence that he used in front of those workers and would-be workers in Detroit. But if he does his Harvard look-down-his-nose thing and fails to call out the Republicans the way he did in Detroit, I’ll tell you this.

As far as I’m concerned, it will be Game Over. I don’t know what I’ll do on election day 2012, but I know what I’ll do on his behalf between now and then. Absolutely nothing.

Posted on September 6th, 2011 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Economy, Uncategorized | No Comments »

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson

I apologize for the long silence. What follows is both my explanation and information you may find important.

Shingles (herpes zoster) is related to chicken pox (varicella virus).  If you had chicken pox, it’s likely that some of the virus is lurking along your spinal cord.  Shingles happens when that virus becomes active and attacks one of your spinal nerves. The pain is indescribable. The illness lasts 4-6 weeks. The good news is it’s not contagious – except that someone with an active case of shingles shouldn’t get near a baby who hasn’t had the chicken pox vaccine .

If you’re 60 or over, ask your doctor about the shingles vaccine. It’s been available only for a year or two, and many people don’t know about it. It’s expensive, but you’ll spend as much or more on meds to control the illness, and more than that in lost work time, if you get shingles. The older you are, the worse it is.

Conventional wisdom is that you can’t get the vaccine if you’re under sixty, but if you’re in your fifties you should know this:  It’s from a paper on shingles in the June 15 edition of the journal American Family
Physician.

“The FDA recently approved the [shingles] vaccine for healthy patients between 50 and 59 years of age, and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is expected to vote on recommending the vaccine for this population in late 2011.”

The journal article says everyone should get the vaccine, whether or not they had chicken pox. I know a man who had one chicken pock (?) while his siblings were covered with them. If his mother hadn’t noticed the one, he’d think he never had chicken pox and is therefore exempt from shingles.

The vaccine lasts for life.

I was going to ask for it when I had my annual physical in October.

I shouldn’t have waited.

You can get shingles more than once.  Now I have to wait until next July to get the shot.

Don’t you wait.  Act now.

Posted on August 10th, 2011 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Health and Healing, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson

Claude Desmarais (L) and his Belgian draft horse Fred pull fiber optic cables between utility poles in East Burke, Vermont June 24, 2011. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Charged with bringing fiber optic broadband internet access to all of Vermont by 2013, a Belgian draft horse named Fred is part of the cabling crew. Reuters has the story.

In Vermont’s remote Northeast Kingdom an aging Belgian draft horse named Fred is part of a team racing to bring broadband Internet access to all corners of the state by 2013.

The horse, 14, and his owner, Claude Desmarais, 66, have been laboring up to seven days a week, over all four seasons, to haul miles of fiber-optic cable and rig it to telecommunications lines.

It is part of Governor Peter Shumlin’s vow to get Vermont entirely wired for broadband and cell phones.

The man and animal are indispensable to cable and phone-service provider FairPoint Communications because they easily can access hard-to-reach job sites along country roads, which bulky utility trucks often cannot.

“It just saves so much work – it would take probably 15 guys to do what Fred and Claude can do,” said Paul Clancy, foreman of a line crew from FairPoint. “They can pull 5,000 feet of cable with no sweat.”

Read more and see a 15-photo slide show….

Posted on July 7th, 2011 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Telecommunications, Uncategorized | No Comments »

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson

I just stumbled across a little-known USDA program (thanks to a mention in Civil Eats) that deserves publicity. For nearly 40 years, people who use food stamps have been able to use them to buy vegetable seeds and plants for their own gardens.

The 1973 Farm Bill included an amendment to the Food Stamp Act that enabled food stamp recipients to use their stamps to buy seeds or vegetable plants. As any gardener knows, a few dollars worth of seeds can yield a return of $50 or even $100 worth of food. Senator James Allen of Alabama, who proposed the amendment, noted that “the recipients of food stamps would thus be able to use their own initiative to produce fruits and vegetables needed to provide variety and nutritional value for their diets.”

This may not apply to you because you aren’t enrolled in what is now called SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), but you know people who are. In April, 2011, nearly 45 million Americans depended on SNAP help to feed themselves and their families. That number isn’t going down any time soon.

It may not apply this year, because your garden is already underway and your growing season is too short for much more planting, but there’s always next year, and there are vegetables that do well if planted in the fall for harvesting in early spring.

And if you think you don’t have enough space for a garden, maybe you’ve set your sights too high. No patch of dirt is too small, and there are community garden plots all over the place. When I was a child in a Philadelphia row house, during World War II, my family had a victory garden in an unpromising-looking sandy patch about six feet square. We grew tomatoes and stringbeans enough to can for the winter. We were city folk to the hilt, with no idea of how to nourish the dirt and turn it into soil. We had to separate table scraps from trash – the city picked up both, but in separate containers – but “compost” was not in our vocabulary. Still, our little garden fed us.

Seeds and plants have a will to live as strong as any human being’s. What you must bring to the garden are water in a dry spell and a commitment to protect it from being overwhelmed by weeds. Of course you get more yield if you can add nourishment for the soil, but the important thing is to start. And who wouldn’t want to turn a $2 packet of seeds or a young plant into $50 worth of food?

It may take some doing to find a SNAP-authorized retailer that sells plants and seeds, but it doesn’t take a lot of energy to ask where you already shop. And many farmers’ markets are now authorized to accept SNAP payments. You can do a search here. (Click the “Payment Accepted” tab, then check the box next to “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, and select your state from the dropdown menu).”

There’s more information at SNAP Gardens. The site is new and is trying to collect (confidentially) stories from people who have grown food using SNAP benefits. They’re also trying to connect people with available garden plots with those who want to use them. The site is multilingual, too. Look for the list box titled “Select a language” at the bottom of each page.

Here’s a really nice opportunity for you or someone you know. Pass it on.

Posted on July 5th, 2011 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Agriculture, Uncategorized | No Comments »

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson

Philip Brasher, one of the last Washington-based reporters focused entirely on agriculture and food policy, has lost his job at the Des Moines Register. Brasher, along with 12 other Register reporters, fell prey to a mandate by parent company Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, that it’s 80-some properties lay off 700 workers (link is behind a paywall.) This is the fourth round of layoffs at Gannett in three years. Decimating the ranks of those who inform the public has become epidemic in the newspaper industry. Invariably, the reason given is declining advertising income because of the rise of Internet news sites.

But Gannett makes that excuse hard to believe. Des Moines TV station WHO reports that

In March, Gannett disclosed that CEO Craig Dubow was paid $4.9 million in 2010, double his 2009 pay. He also received a cash bonus of $1.75 million for implementing cost-cutting measures, including company-wide layoffs in 2010.

Why should you care that the only DC-based reporter covering the US Department of Agriculture is silenced? In an e-mail to Paula Crossfield at CivilEats.com, Brasher wrote

This is a critical time for food and agricultural policy because of the deep budget cuts that are coming and the choices that Congress is going to have make… about what money there is available. It’s vital that the public understands the impact of those policy choices and the tradeoffs they involve.

Brasher and Crossfield are not the only ones upset at Gannett’s abandoning on-site agriculture reporting. I asked Jerry Hagstrom, editor of the agriculture/rural-focused Hagstrom Report (content is for subscribers, behind a paywall), what he thought of the layoff decision. Hagstrom was in Rome to cover the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization conference, walking to dinner. With the bustle of Roman traffic in the background, Hagstrom called the firing

A tragedy for Iowans and for agriculture journalism. It eliminates one of the few remaining publications that are covering agriculture on a regular basis. There’s no substitute for an on-site Washington reporter.

There’s more to this story than one man’s career, or even the loss of a valuable source of food and agriculture policy information to Iowans and those elsewhere who read Brasher’s reporting in USA Today, another Gannett newspaper.  It’s also about how a government can tighten the screws so that the public goes ignorant about matters of pressing importance to life and health.

If I had ambitions to be a tyrant, and I had the power to make things happen, here’s what I’d do. I’d make the people in my country crazy with fear — fear of terrorists would be a good place to start. I’d spend every cent I could get my hands on, to the point of borrowing everywhere I could get a loan, to pay for as many wars as I could engage in without sparking outright rebellion at home. I’d make the people crazy with fear of such enormous debt so they would let me cut spending on everything they value — education from preschool through university, road repairs, public transportation, financial support for the poor and the old, police and fire protection, health care for those who need it most. I’d make money so tight you could hear it squeak, so that people could barely buy necessities. I’d destroy the reputations of news outlets.  If someone hadn’t beaten me to it, I’d call them “the lamestream media.”

As a byproduct of all this money fear, people would lose their jobs, or fear losing them. People would lose their homes, or fear losing them. They’d be so busy surviving that they couldn’t pay attention to the decisions their government was making against their best interests. They’d be so fearful, they wouldn’t say Boo if they knew their government was harming them.

On top of fear, I’d build a layer of ignorance — in the sense of the word that means not knowing what was going on. Then I, or the people who followed me in ruling the country, could do what they pleased without hindrance.

Gannett’s firing 700 people in one stroke is part of the ignorance-building. Tightening the money supply by capitalizing on people’s fear is part of Gannett’s perceived need to cut expenses by firing 700 people. So, too, is today’s culture of raw greed among the top 1 percent who own most of the nation’s treasure. Gannett’s $1.75 bonus to Craig Dubow for cutting costs by ruining people’s lives is part of today’s culture of raw greed.

Firing Philip Brasher is a piece of it, too. Work is underway on the 2012 Farm Bill.  People, especially in the mid-West, will find it harder to know what measures are under consideration, even harder to let their legislators know what they think about those measures.

If anybody wanted to destroy our democratic republic, they couldn’t be doing a better job.

Posted on June 28th, 2011 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Agriculture, Media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson

This video runs about 20 minutes. It’s from Netroots Nation, the bloggers’ convention that took place last weekend. Van Jones issues a challenge to us all to Rebuild the American Dream. (Jones, you may remember, was an advisor on environmental matters to the Obama administration until right wing radicals hounded him out of the White House. You may not remember Barack Obama standing up for him, because he didn’t.)

If you can see Jones’s Netroots speech on your computer, you really want to. It’s a good antidote for the despair so many of us are feeling right now. (If your Internet access is slow, start the video, put it on pause, and come back in a half hour.  You’ll see it all without a flicker.)

If you visit the Rebuild the Dream site, you’ll see a place at the right where you can find a house party not too far from you, where people will gather in July to develop the agenda that will let us take back our country from those who hate it — they hate government, they hate hearing that we’re all in this together, that we should take care of each other as we take care of ourselves.

We’re a better country than that, and we can do this if we really want to.

Let’s not let them make us a third world nation. If you’ve never been involved before, now’s your time.

Posted on June 24th, 2011 by Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
Filed under: Politics and Political Issues, Society and Culture, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »