The U.S. has no remaining grain reserves

AAM Concerned with CCC Inventories

WASHINGTON - Larry Matlack, President of the American Agriculture Movement (AAM), has raised concerns over the issue of U.S. grain reserves after it was announced that the sale of 18.37 million bushels of wheat from USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust.

“According to the May 1, 2008 CCC inventory report there are o­nly 24.1 million bushels of wheat in inventory, so after this sale there will be o­nly 2.7 million bushels of wheat left the entire CCC inventory,” warned Matlack. “Our concern is not that we are using the remainder of our strategic grain reserves for humanitarian relief. AAM fully supports the action and all humanitarian food relief. Our concern is that the U.S. has nothing else in our emergency food pantry. There is no cheese, no butter, no dry milk powder, no grains or anything else left in reserve. The o­nly thing left in the entire CCC inventory will be 2.7 million bushels of wheat which is about enough wheat to make ½ of a loaf of bread for each of the 300 million people in America.”

The CCC is a federal government-owned and operated entity that was created to stabilize, support, and protect farm income and prices. CCC is also supposed to maintain balanced and adequate supplies of agricultural commodities and aids in their orderly distribution.

“This lack of emergency preparedness is the fault of the 1996 farm bill which eliminated the government’s grain reserves as well as the Farmer Owned Reserve (FOR),” explained Matlack. “We had hoped to reinstate the FOR and a Strategic Energy Grain Reserve in the new farm bill, but the politics of food defeated our efforts. As farmers it is our calling and purpose in life to feed our families, our communities, our nation and a good part of the world, but we need better planning and coordination if we are to meet that purpose. AAM pledges to continue our work for better farm policy which includes an FOR and a Strategic Energy Grain Reserve.”

AAM’s support for the FOR program, which allows the grain to be stored o­n farms, is a key component to a safe grain reserve in that the supplies will be decentralized in the event of some unforeseen calamity which might befall the large grain storage terminals.

A Strategic Energy Grain Reserve is as crucial for the nation’s domestic energy needs as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. AAM also supports full funding for the replenishment and expansion of Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust.

The May 1, 2008 CCC Inventory report may be reviewed here (pdf file).

~ Source: TriState Observer ~

Nine meals from anarchy - how Britain is facing a very real food crisis

The phrase 'nine meals from anarchy' sounds more like the title of a bad Hollywood movie than any genuine threat.

But that was the expression coined by Lord Cameron of Dillington, a farmer who was the first head of the Countryside Agency  -  the quango set up by Tony Blair in the days when he pretended to care about the countryside  -  to describe just how perilous Britain's food supply actually is.

Long before many others, Cameron saw the potential of a real food crisis striking not just the poor of the Third World, but us, here in Britain, in the 21st Century.

The scenario goes like this. Imagine a sudden shutdown of oil supplies; a sudden collapse in the petrol that streams steadily through the pumps and so into the engines of the lorries which deliver our food around the country, stocking up the supermarket shelves as soon as any item runs out.

If the trucks stopped moving, we'd start to worry and we'd head out to the shops, cking up our larders. By the end of Day One, if there was still no petrol, the shelves would be looking pretty thin. Imagine, then, Day Two: your fourth, fifth and sixth meal. We'd be in a panic. Day three: still no petrol.

What then? With hunger pangs kicking in, and no notion of how long it might take for the supermarkets to restock, how long before those who hadn't stocked up began stealing from their neighbours? Or looting what they could get their hands on?

There might be 11 million gardeners in Britain, but your delicious summer peas won't go far when your kids are hungry and the baked beans have run out.

It was Lord Cameron's estimation that it would take just nine meals  -  three full days without food on supermarket shelves  -  before law and order started to break down, and British streets descended into chaos.

A far-fetched warning for a First World nation like Britain? Hardly. Because that's exactly what happened in the U.S. in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. People looted in order to feed themselves and their families.

If a similar tragedy was to befall Britain, we are fooling ourselves if we imagine we would not witness similar scenes of crime and disorder.

Well, today Britain is facing a very real crisis. Granted, it is not the threat of a sudden, terrifying phenomenon such as the hurricane that struck New Orleans. But in its capacity to cause widespread hardship and deprivation nationwide, it is every bit as daunting.

Oil prices are spiralling  -  $120 a barrel this week, up 23 per cent since the start of the year  -  and the cost is being felt not only by drivers but by each and every one of us who has seen our food bills soaring.

This week, the British Retail Consortium revealed that food price inflation had risen to 6 per cent  -  the highest figure since comparable records began  -  and up from 4.7 per cent in April and 4.1 per cent in March.

At its most basic, the reasons for this food inflation are twofold: increasing demand (particularly in the emerging economies of India and China) and spiralling production costs.

The former had been predicted for years, but the latter is more unexpected.

Conventional wisdom had it that in an age of mechanisation, the cost of producing the food that we eat would decrease as technology found new ways of improving yields and minimising labour costs. But there was a problem that hadn't been factored in. Production methods are now such that 95 per cent of all the food we eat in the world today is oil-dependent.

The 'black gold' is embedded in our complex global food systems, in its fertilisers, the mechanisation necessary for its production, its transportation and its packaging.

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U.S. Rep. Kucinich introduces articles of impeachment against President Bush

From: The Public Record

Ohio Congressman and former Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich introduced 35 articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush Monday evening, stating the commander-in-chief is guilty of numerous crimes, including launching a war on false pretenses, and spying on American citizens, and should be removed from office.

"The House is not in order," Kucinich said to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who has said impeachment "is off the table."

Pelosi pounded her gavel. Kucinich then began to read the impeachment articles.

Kucinich, an outspoken critic of the Iraq war who has consistently voted against funding the conflict, introduced a resolution last year that called for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney, but the House did not act upon it. Kucinich is up for reelection this year. The move by the congressman to impeach President Bush is not expected to go anywhere. But his recitation on the house floor of the nearly three-dozen articles of impeachment will become part of the Congressional Record.

Impeachment has not been considered by Congress because the Democratic leadership believes it will hurt their party's chances of securing the White House in November's presidential election. Additionally, Democrats said they do not have enough votes to support a move to impeach the president.

Last week, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a long-awaited report on prewar Iraq intelligence that concluded President Bush and Vice President Cheney knowingly lied to the public and to Congress about Iraq's links to al-Qaeda and the threat the country posed to the U.S. in the aftermath of 9/11.

Kucinich said Monday night that President Bush misled "the American people and members of Congress to believe Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction so as to manufacture a false case for war."

"President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office," Kucinich said.

Democrats would consider impeachment proceedings if the president authorizes a military strike against Iran without first consulting Congress, according to a May 8 letter sent to President Bush by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers.

"Late last year, Senator Joseph Biden stated unequivocally that “the president has no authority to unilaterally attack Iran, and if he does, as Foreign Relations Committee chairman, I will move to impeach” the president.

"We agree with Senator Biden, and it is our view that if you do not obtain the constitutionally required congressional authorization before launching preemptive military strikes against Iran or any other nation, impeachment proceedings should be pursued, Conyers' letter says.

Still, knowingly using flawed intelligence to win support for the Iraq war amounts to High Crimes and Misdemeanors, an impeachable offense, according to former Nixon counsel John Dean.

"To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked," Dean wrote in a June 6, 2003 column for findlaw.com.

"Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.

The articles of impeachment against President Bush comes on the heels of a letter signed by 56 House Democrats Friday that was sent to Attorney General Michael Mukasey calling for the appointment a special counsel to investigate whether President Bush and other White House officials violated the War Crimes Act when they authorized brutal interrogation methods against detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison facility.

The letter says the International Committee of the Red Cross conducted an independent investigation of interrogation practices at Guantanamo Bay and “documented several instances of acts of torture against detainees, including soaking a prisoner’s hand in alcohol and lighting it on fire, subjecting a prisoner to sexual abuse and forcing a prisoner to eat a baseball.”

"This information indicates that the Bush administration may have systematically implemented, from the top down, detainee interrogation policies that constitute torture or otherwise violate the law," the letter to Mukasey says. “We believe that these serious and significant revelations warrant an immediate investigation to determine whether actions taken by the President, his Cabinet, and other Administration officials are in violation of the War Crimes Act, the Anti-Torture Act, and other U.S. and international laws.”

Bob Fertik, president of Democrats.com, one of the organizations that has called on Congress to impeach President Bush said Kucinich demonstrated "historic leadership" by introducing the articles of impeachment.

"We've waited seven years to find one Member of Congress brave enough to stand up for our Constitution, for which generations of Americans have fought and died," Fertik said. "We are thrilled and honored that Dennis Kucinich has chosen to be that one genuine patriot."

Hopi and Navajo truth confirmed in censored climate report

With the release of the US censored climate report -- that Bush and his corporate handlers censored for four years -- the words of the late Hopi spiritual leaders are mirrored forth.

Hopi Sinom, including Thomas Banyacya and Dan Evehema, foretold of a time when hurricanes, storms and wildfires would seize the planet if human beings did not care for Mother Earth. They also warned if the secret agenda of coal mining was carried out on Black Mesa, under the guise of the so-called Navajo Hopi land dispute and Navajos were relocated, that natural calamities would increase.

Just a few days ago in the Navajos' Chuska Mountains, I was listening to a traditional Navajo farmer talk about how dry the earth is. Looking at the dry pinon trees and dusty earth, she said it would be hard to get the corn and squash to grow this summer. The earth is so dry that it does not absorb water like it used to. Every year it gets worse.

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Ohio Police terrorized Longest Walk women and children

From Censored News:

CAMBRIDGE, Ohio -- Seated at the Longest Walk Northern Route camp in the woods, Marie Littlemoon, Mescalero Apache cook and walker, remembers how Columbus, Ohio police grabbed her, bruising her right arm, and terrified the preschoolers in the car, as the walkers walked the prayer near downtown Columbus.

Marie Littlemoon, 60-year-old grandmother, said she was shocked by the brutality of the officers and the way they terrified the children.

"I saw what I thought was a gun pointed at Michael Lane, which was a taser. The taser was only two to three feet from his face, pointed directly between his eyes.

 

"Immediately to the right, I saw four officers wrestle and throw Luv the Mezenger to the ground. The officers stepped on Luv's neck.

"I immediately got out of the car and began filming. When I tried to ask the officer to let my car with the children go, I was grabbed and spun around. So I kept videotaping the police officer verbally attacking Michael Lane.

"Michael remained very calm and explained we were a peaceful prayer walk. The children's mother tried to reach her children in the car. The police officers would not let her. So I stepped forward while she ran around the other side to get in. I was grabbed again and spun around again.

"At that point, the police were taking Luv to the paddy wagon. I started following and taking pictures, to make sure Luv did not get abused again.

 

 

US police point Taser at Kiwi

A New Zealander who took his family to join Mohawk, Paiute, Navajos, Choctaw and the American Indians making a symbolic "Longest Walk" across the USA has been threatened by police in Ohio.

Michael Lane - a lawyer who participated in the first "Longest Walk" in 1978 - intervened when police confronted marchers in Columbus Ohio.

Squad cars and paddy wagons pulled up walkers in Columbus, and one held a Taser about a metre from Mr Lane's head.

A journalist accompanying the walkers, Brenda Norrell, reported: "Michael Lane, who arrived on the walk with his wife, Sharon Heta ... and their children from New Zealand, was targeted by police with a Taser.

"As dozens of police came at the walkers, a police officer held a Taser three feet away from Lane's head," she said on independent news websites.

Police had not checked whether the Longest Walk marchers had notified the Ohio Department of Transportation of their route.

Mr Lane, who has a law degree from the Arizona State University, said the worst part of being targeted by a police officer with a Taser was that it terrified his daughters who only knew that a gun was being pointed at their father's head.

He has been accompanied on the 5800km walk by his wife, Sharon Heta, of Tuhoe, and their three children, Merehuka, Ranguitau and TeRuihi.