FOOD ABUNDANCE AND SCARCITY: FEEDING OUR FOOD TO OUR FOOD.
Frances Moore Lappe enters a Thanksgiving reflection on the irony that the world produces enough food to feed world population, but much of it gets wasted in ways that prevent its consumption in nutritional forms. Among the ironies of the agri-business mode of food production is that it feeds large amounts of human-edible grains to animals who process them back into less nutritional “foods.” Another is that the consumption of these grains (like soy and corn) are converted in the fuel tanks to provide the energy that drives engines even as human bodies suffer energy-starvation.
(Huffington Post)
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REMEMBERING THE HUNGRY ON THANKSGIVING DAY: AND FORGETTING THEM THE REST OF THE YEAR.
Director of a food bank in Flagstaff, Arizona notes the pattern of public generosity in seasonal helping to feed the hungry. For her, as for those with other food banks, it is obvious that this level of charitable giving does not survive the season, especially now with escalating poverty rates in Arizona as elsewhere. When 30% of Arizonans who patronize food banks are “working poor” whose wages do not allow them to feed their families, it is pretty apparent that the whole wage system is seriously out of whack, and that hunger will not be eliminated by sporadic outbreaks of good will assistance to the poor.
(Sedona.biz)
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DISPOSITION OF BIN LADEN’S BODY BY U.S. GOVERNMENT: ANOTHER MYSTERY FOR THE AGES?
49 years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and his body was removed from Dallas to D.C. under still-undetermined circumstances, new releases of government documents of the supposed at-sea dump of bin Laden’s body after he supposedly was killed by Navy Seals at a Pakistani compound may raise afresh the issue of public deceit on post-mortem treatment of a body. Cryptic communications from the ship from which his body was dumped to the helicopter bringing it there, and tight security and concealment of operations even from those at the scene of the burial are reminiscent of nothing so much as the cloud of confusion in 1963 regarding the removal of JFK’s body from Parkland Hospital in Dallas to a morgue in Bethesda Maryland.
(Yahoo News)
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BLACK FRIDAY: DO YOU REALLY WANT TO GO SHOPPING AND CONTRIBUTE TO THE DELINQUENCY OF WAL-MART AND OTHER RETAILERS?
Lauren Kelley poses this question, noting how Wal-Mart as the nation’s largest employer of retail workers has routinely abused its workers with its low wage policy and abuses them especially with requiring their presence at the 5 a.m. “door buster” sales event tomorrow. If sympathy for the plight of store workers were not sufficient to deter shoppers, Kelley details some of the “horror stories” associated with Black Fridays past to convince would-be shoppers that a shopping mall may not be the safest place to be on Friday.
(Alternet)
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FLORIDA KEYS’ NEEDIEST: PLENTY OF OPPORTUNITIES FOR SOME SEASONAL ALTRUISM.
Key West News follows example of New York Times in describing some of the struggles in which local people find themselves embroiled in their daily lives. Some of these involving debilitating diseases like diabetes and cystic fibrosis, conditions that led one mother of a diabetic son to observe: “they’re moments when we get depressed.”
(Keys News)
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Quote of the day…
The retailers are taking what was a very plannable sport that was four or five hours where you can get things done and turned it into a marathon. I think the retailers have diluted the sport.
Patty Edwards, financial investment adviser on “Black Friday” sales events beginning as early as 8 pm Thursday night.
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