Link Roundup: Immigration, High Food Prices, Loving Memorial

David Bacon, author of the forthcoming Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants , sent these pictures from Oakland in the wake of last week's raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) near schools in Oakland and Berkeley. You can read more about the impact the raids had on school children in Oakland at New American Media:

As word of the presence of ICE agents in the neighborhood spread, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums rushed over to Esperanza Elementary School, where a number of parents and community members had gathered.

Addressing them, the Mayor called the situation the "the ugly side of government."

Mayor Dellums, whose memoir Lying Down with the Lions: A Public Life from the Streets of Oakland to the Halls of Power chronicles a life of fighting for social justice, "labeled the ICE actions 'inappropriate and unnecessary' and reiterated that children needed education, not harassment. 'There should be no raids in Oakland,' he said."

The last picture here is from a rally last Friday in San Francisco to protest of the raids. For more on immigration in California, read Bacon's post from last week about immigrant farm workers in California, and also read his commentary at Truthout.org about the May Day rallies for immigrant rights.

Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap, posted on his blog about the effects of the rising cost of food on those who are already experiencing food insecurity:

For some, these events may mean that those weekly strolls down the tastefully lit aisles of Whole Foods now become monthly. For those who have naturally spurned such discount pariahs as Wal-Mart, second thoughts may be in order.  

But for another class of American shoppers, rising food prices, whether organic or conventional, is just another bump in the road on an already trying journey. I’m speaking of low-income families, and increasingly low-to-middle income families who now find themselves treading closer to the lower end of the income spectrum.

Also be sure to check out Mark Winne's post on our blog about the Food Gap, Poverty, and Income Disparity.

American Booksellers Foundation for Freedom of Expression (whose president Chris Finan has posted here about free speech) has joined the Media Coalition in a lawsuit challenging an Indiana law requiring bookstores to register with the state if they sell sexually explicit material. ABFFE has also joined Powell's Books, Dark Horse Comics, and others in Oregon to fight a law in that state making it a crime to allow a minor under 13 to view or purchase a “sexually explicit” work. An affidavit from Dark Horse explains why they feel the law is unconstitutionally vague:

“I believe the only way for Dark Horse to ensure compliance under the statute would be to refrain from publishing this material entirely,” He said. “Attempting to determine, book by book, what may fall under the purview of the satute, including whether there are any ‘sexually explicit’ portions and if so whether such portions ‘serve some purpose other than titillation’ (even if I knew what that meant) is totally impractical, unduly burdensome and surely would result in our over-inclusive self-censorship.”

The recent death of Mildred Loving, whose fight against a Virginia interracial marriage ban took her all the way to the Supreme Court, inspired this post on the Courting Equality blog about the ban on gay marriage in Virginia. On the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that ended racial discrimination in marriage, Loving issued a statement in support of gay marriage:

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don't think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the "wrong kind of person" for me to marry.  I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry.  Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.

Living Under the Trees: Indigenous Mexican Farm Workers in California

Today’s post is from award-winning photojournalist David Bacon. Bacon spent thirty years as a labor organizer and immigrant rights activist. His articles appear in The Nation, American Prospect, Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and he hosts a weekly radio show on KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California. Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, will be published by Beacon Press this fall. The photos in this essay are from his photography project, Living Under the Trees, and are used here with the photographer’s permission.

In 2006, Mexico experienced profound social turmoil. Dramatic political and economic conflicts uprooted and displaced thousands of families, forcing many to consider leaving home. Teachers struck in Oaxaca, and after their demonstrations were tear-gassed, a virtual insurrection paralyzed the state capitol for months. Economic desperation lies at the root of these political and social movements — one major basis of the pressure on people to migrate north. But repression brought to bear on those movements also leads to migration.  It's no accident that Oaxaca is one of the main starting points for the current stream of Mexican migrants coming to the U.S.

About 30 million Mexicans survive on less than 30 pesos a day — not quite $3. The minimum wage is 53 pesos a day. The federal government estimates that 37.7% of Mexico’s 106 million citizens — 40 million people — live in poverty. Some 25 million, or 23.6%, live in extreme poverty. In rural Mexico, over ten million people have a daily income of less than 12 pesos — a little over a dollar. In the southern state of Oaxaca that category of extreme poverty encompasses 75% of its 3.4 million residents, according to EDUCA, an education and development organization. That makes Oaxaca the second-poorest state in Mexico, after Chiapas.

Monday Link Roundup: Fresh Food, Seeds, Bulbs and more

The Seattle-Post Intelligencer ran a feature last week about poor access to fresh, healthy food in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. The article quotes Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty: "Unless cities begin to realize they have a role to play in ensuring access to healthy food, then we're going to keep stumbling along." Parke Wilde at the U.S. Food Policy blog posted a more personal take on the issue, focusing on the definition of "food desert" and the focus on chain supermarket stores as a marker of access to food. (Parke also recently interviewed Mark Winne for USFPB.)

In the wake of the leaked email showing that the VA tried to downplay the suicide epidemic, Penny Coleman wrote this analysis of the DoD's annual suicide prevention conference at Alternet.

Gristmill posted an excellent review of Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds by Claire Hope Cummings. You can also read an excerpt of Uncertain Peril at Alternet.

Last Tuesday, USA Today columnist Laura Vanderkam discussed Seattle's novel approach to homelessness: give people a place to live. The piece features Rev. Craig Rennebohm, author of Souls in the Hands of a Tender God: Stories of the Search for Home and Healing on the Street.

The other "L" word: Stephen Ducat, author of The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity, offers Obama some advice on how to take back the liberal label. (Once he does that, can he take back arugula?)

There's some fantastic coverage of the PEN World Voices Festival over at MetaxuCafe. Nice redesign of that site!

Bookseller David Unowsky offers some advice on how to get your book on the shelves. The piece is aimed at self-pubbed authors, but has some good insights for any author.

And here's a great springtime parable from our friends at UUWorld.

Bloody Foundation for U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement

Garry Leech is editor of Colombia Journal, author of Crude Interventions and Killing Peace, and coauthor of The People Behind Colombian Coal. A lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Cape Breton University, Leech lives in Nova Scotia. His account of being held captive by guerrillas, Beyond Bogotá, Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia, will be published by Beacon Press this fall.

There has been an ongoing debate in Washington about a potential free trade agreement with Colombia. The failure to implement a hemisphere-wide agreement—the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)—led President George W. Bush to push for a bilateral pact with his ideologically-aligned ally in Colombia, President Alvaro Uribe. The Bush administration signed a free trade pact with Colombia in November 2006, but congressional Democrats have stalled its ratification due to ongoing human rights abuses in Colombia, particularly against unionists.

The Bush administration repeatedly points to a recent reduction in the number of Colombian labor leaders killed as justification for the free trade agreement. In October 2007, U.S. State Department spokesperson, R. Nicholas Burns, declared, "Homicides of trade unionists have shown a steep decline…. Rather than condemning as insufficient the considerable progress already made by the Colombian people, we should help them consolidate that progress through expanded trade."

In the past 20 years, more than 3,000 Colombian unionists have been assassinated. In 2007, Colombia remained the most dangerous country in the world for unionists with thirty-nine labor leaders killed; a number significantly lower than the 197 assassinated in 2001—the year before President Uribe assumed office. Consequently, the Bush administration is clearly correct when it points out that there has been a marked decrease in the number of unionists killed under the Uribe administration.

Wal-Mart Takes Greenwashing to a New Level

Stacy Mitchell is a senior researcher with the New Rules Project, a program of the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and author of Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses.  To subscribe to her monthly email newsletter, click here.

Immersed as we are these days in discussions of carbon emissions and carbon offsets, food miles and feedback loops, Earth Day has come to feel more and more outmoded, a throwback to an earlier era before melting ice caps and the prospect of the end of life as we know it made the environment no longer a periodic concern but an everyday worry.

Earth Day is no longer ours anyway. That became abundantly clear this year. Corporations have seized Earth Day and turned it into a kind of holiday, which, like all holidays in modern America, affords ample opportunities to peddle more merchandise. Reusable shopping bags, Lexus Hybrid Living Suites, and other "eco-friendly" products are now to Earth Day what new cars are to Presidents Day. The trade journal Advertising Age neatly captured the trend in a recent headline that asked, "Is Earth Day the New Christmas?"

Most of these corporate greenwashing schemes are clumsy and transparent. But one company has developed a far more sophisticated, and ultimately much more dangerous, approach to manipulating environmental sentiment for its own expansion and profit.

Link Roundup: Mary Oliver in concert, Bob Herbert on Poverty, Suzanne Strempek Shea's Religious Roadtrip

Eight of Mary Oliver's poems were set to music by Ronald Perera and performed by the The New Amsterdam Singers this past Sunday afternoon. From the New York Times:

Ms. Oliver’s poetry, which has drawn comparisons to the work of Emerson and Thoreau, reveals an awestruck regard of nature that verges on the religious: “What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven,” she writes in “I Looked Up,” the fifth poem in Mr. Perera’s cycle. Her work also demonstrates a discerning eye and an ability to render vivid images with a few deft strokes.

Mr. Perera sensitively underscores both attributes in a cycle spanning a day from one dawn to the next, linked by a subtle, recurring four-note motif. His music neatly conjures Ms. Oliver’s rippling pond, wary crows, flitting bats and lazily unspooling snake. At the same time, the work’s dramatic progression, from the shivering anticipation of “Morning at Great Pond” to the radiant affirmation of the concluding title poem, “Why I Wake Early,” does justice to the poet’s more transcendental intents. Enhanced by Mr. Perera’s estimable knack for setting English, this is a substantial addition to the choral canon.

Listen to an excerpt of "Why I Wake Early" on Mr. Perera's website.

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Bob Herbert, in an op-ed about our current economic mess, quotes John Edwards' introduction to The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near-Poor in America:

“When we set about fixing welfare in the 1990s, we said we were going to encourage work. Near-poor Americans do work, usually in jobs that the rest of us do not want — jobs with stagnant wages, no retirement funds, and inadequate health insurance, if they have it at all. While their wages stay the same, the cost of everything else — energy, housing, transportation, tuition — goes up.”

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The Springfield, MA, Republican (the paper, not the party) ran a piece about Suzanne Strempek Shea's ambitious and illuminating adventure that resulted in the forthcoming Sundays in America: A Yearlong Road Trip in Search of Christian Faith. Suzanne has posted here about two of the churches she visited (Christmas Eve in Bethlehem and Barack Obama's Church) and this Sunday we'll run another about St. Patrick's Day at All Saints Episcopal in Brookline, MA.

All's Not Fair in Class Warfare

by Victor Tan Chen

If there's a lesson from the recent debacle over an economic stimulus package, it's this: Republicans need to stop engaging in class warfare.

Class warfare, as the Republicans have pointed out time and time again, is when public policy is unduly influenced by the interests of one group at the expense of everyone else.

Unfortunately, the Republican leadership has been guilty of such hypocrisy in its negotiations over individual tax rebates in the economic stimulus package, which the Senate approved last Thursday. First there was talk of making any legislation contingent on extending President Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. Then the Republicans sought to kill proposals to extend government checks to the poor, while demanding tax rebates for wealthy Americans. And they stamped out an effort by Senate Democrats to lengthen unemployment benefits.

So, how is this class warfare? An effective stimulus package, according to economists ranging from Ben Bernanke to Martin Feldstein to Lawrence Summers, should be timely, temporary, and targeted. Targeting the stimulus means putting money in the hands of poor and middle-income households. They're more likely to use that money to buy things rather than saving it or using it to pay down debt. (See these articles by economists Paul Krugman and Mark Zandi for more on this point. For some contrarian views, see this summary of recent research on tax rebates -- though it's axiomatic in social science that you shouldn’t put too much faith in surveys of what people say they will do in the future.)

The legislation that both houses of Congress approved will give some benefits to the poor -- a $300 tax rebate check to individuals with at least $3,000 in income -- but many will not receive the $600 maximum rebate for individuals or $1,200 maximum for couples, plus $300 per child, because they do not pay enough income tax. (This is also true for certain segments of the near poor, the group that Katherine Newman and I study in our book The Missing Class.) In passing their own version of the legislation yesterday, the Senate also extended tax rebates to Social Security retirees and veterans with disabilities, though, as for the poor, the benefit will be just $300.

Losing Sleep

by Kelly Bulkeley

Last night the students in my "Psychology of Dreaming" course at John F. Kennedy University turned in their first assignment of the quarter: a personal sleep history from childhood to the present. I like to begin my dream classes with a focus on sleep because it's a great way to jar people into taking a fresh look at the nocturnal dimension of their lives. Most people have never reflected on their sleep patterns or thought about sleep in relation to their life's development and growth over time. When they're encouraged to do so, the results are often startling. As soon as I opened the discussion in class last night, one of the students quickly raised her hand. I called on her, and with no further ado she declared:

"I'm 45 years old, and I just realized I've been sleep deprived for the last 40 years!"

Several other students followed with their own tales of sleepless woe, just like I've found every time I give this assignment in a class and just like I found in the research for American Dreamers. The conclusion is hard to avoid: We are becoming a chronically sleep-deprived nation. Problems with sleep afflict a surprisingly large number of people in contemporary American society, and we don’t really know how widespread these problems are or how they impact people’s long term health and well-being.

The Food Gap, Poverty, and Income Disparity

by Mark Winne

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.
—Plutarch

We have in America today a tale of two food systems—one for the poor and one for everyone else. The poor cobble together their week’s groceries from a combination of food stamps, food bank donations, and bus trips to Wal-Mart. If they are lucky, parents won’t be forced to skip meals to feed their children. The rest of us, driven by an ever expanding food consciousness, choose from an unprecedented abundance which increasingly leans toward the organic, local, and expensive end of the food chain. Our toughest choice is whether to pay for our food with Visa or Mastercard.  And as the numbers attest—35 million hungry or food insecure Americans (USDA); 50,000 emergency food sites visited annually by 10 percent of the country’s population (America’s Second Harvest); 26 million people receiving food stamps—we have allowed a significant segment of American society to eat at the lowest end of the food chain. These parallel food systems have become the norm, and like the streets and buildings that surround us, we have come to accept them as just part of our everyday landscape.

The United States is unique among developed nations in that it has evolved a stingy, crazy quilt of a social welfare system that places a disproportionate emphasis on food relief. Rather than address hunger’s underlying cause—poverty—in a direct and aggressive fashion, we rely on fifteen separate USDA nutrition programs, a vast network of private emergency food sites, and thousands of community-based food projects to, in effect, manage poverty.

Give a Gift To Our Economy: Shop Locally Owned This Holiday Season

The Broadside took a couple of days off for turkey, stuffing, and family fun. We're back today with a reminder of why we shouldn't spend our holiday shopping dollars without thinking about the impact of our choices.

by Stacy Mitchell

Whether to patronize a chain or a locally owned business is not top of mind for many holiday shoppers, but it should be.  It's a choice that has profound implications for our economy.

If you shop at an independent toy store, such as Be Beep in Annapolis, Maryland, you will likely see products made by Beka, a small toy manufacturer in St. Paul, Minnesota.

A family-owned business, Beka has opted not to sell to chains like Target and Wal-Mart. Doing so, explains co-owner Jamie Kreisman, would require moving production to low-wage factories overseas, which would eliminate what he and his brothers most love about the business: their relationships with their employees and working hands-on with their products.

Beka is healthy, but its future depends entirely on the survival of independent toy stores. Over the last decade, Wal-Mart and Target have aggressively overtaken this sector and now capture 45 percent of U.S. toy sales.

Closing the Food Gap: Live Chat With Mark Winne online today

Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, will be participating in a live chat about the shortcomings of our food bank system today at 1PM ET on the Washington Post website.

The discussion is related to his opinion piece from yesterday's WaPo about the problems of food banks and our lack of attention to the underlying causes of poverty. He draws on his experiences in the Hartford food bank system to illustrate the waste inherent in the system and to suggest that we redirect some of our energies to trying to end poverty instead:

My experience of 25 years in food banking has led me to conclude that co-dependency within the system is multifaceted and frankly troubling. As a system that depends on donated goods, it must curry favor with the nation's food industry, which often regards food banks as a waste-management tool. As an operation that must sort through billions of pounds of damaged and partially salvageable food, it requires an army of volunteers who themselves are dependent on the carefully nurtured belief that they are "doing good" by "feeding the hungry." And as a charity that lives from one multimillion-dollar capital campaign to the next (most recently, the Hartford food bank raised $4.5 million), it must maintain a ready supply of well-heeled philanthropists and captains of industry to raise the dollars and public awareness necessary to make the next warehouse expansion possible.

Katherine Newman on the Missing Class

Katherine Newman appeared on Bill Moyers Journal last week (you can watch the show here) to talk about the subjects raised in her new book (with Victor Tan Chen), The Missing Class. The book (reviewed recently in the Boston Globe) focuses on the struggles nearly 50 million American families cope with as they try to survive just above the poverty line.

The Moyers Journal website is fantastic. Rather than providing just a cursory description of each show, the site has an extensive summary, video, transcript, links to related content both on their website and around the web, and a blog with a vibrant comments section. It’s an excellent example of how the web can continue the conversations started in traditional media (something we care a bit about around here as well!).

We’re gearing up for a full week of Veteran’s Day Coverage beginning tomorrow. With posts from Marcus Eriksen on his experiences in the Gulf War, Helen Benedict on women in the military, Penny Coleman on preventing vet suicides, and more, we hope to use this week to foster discussion of the difficult issues facing veterans. We hope you’ll tune in and spread the word.

"Compassionate Conservatism" and the "Undeserving Poor"

by Annelise Orleck

On Wednesday October 3, President George W. Bush vetoed a bill that allocated $35 billion over the next five years to expand the number of children eligible for the successful and popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) which presently provides the only access to medical care for 6.6 million of the nation’s poorest children. Both houses of Congress approved a bill late this September that would have added at least another 3.4 million children to the program, significantly reducing the number of children who presently have no medical coverage. The President’s veto threatens the survival of the program, as the legislation that originally created SCHIP has come due for reauthorization. If the veto is sustained, children currently covered under the program will once again be without insurance, and the number of children in the U.S. without access to a physician’s care and to vital medicines will continue to grow.