California’s Prop 37 highlights the difference between GMOs and Organic foods

things worth noting/ zooming in about are the “natural products” lines on the left which were systematically bought out by corporations (such as Coca Cola, Pepsi, General Mills, and Kellogg) as part of their strategic green-washing campaigns.  Those supporting the organic food industry on the right of the poster include Organic Valley, Dr.Bronners, and Eden Foods.

 

For those of you voting in California, Prop 37 would require GMO labeling and increase transparency about the processes under which food is grown. Vote YES on Prop 37, November 6th.

This little news clip has more info:

 

Soul Food Junkies at The BlackStar Film Festival

via Hannah Slipakoff

Soul Food Junkies

The BlackStar Film Festival

730pm, Sunday, August 5th, 2012

International House (3701 Chestnut Street)

Dir. Byron Hurt, USA, 54 minutes
Documentary

PHILADELPHIA PREMIERE

Food traditions are hard to change, especially when they’re passed on from generation to generation. In this PBS documentary, award-winning filmmaker Byron Hurt shares his journey to learn more about the African American cuisine known as soul food. Through candid interviews with soul food cooks, historians, and scholars, as well as doctors, family members, and everyday people, Soul Food Junkies blends history, humor, and heartwarming stories to place this culinary tradition under the microscope.

Byron Hurt will be present for Q&A after the screening!

Grace Lee Boggs on #OWS and the 99% Movement

Women, Capitalism, and the State: Occupy Philly w/ Selma James

Part 6 of Occupy Philly Education and Training Working Group’s
Dissecting Capitalism series (co-sponsored by Mariposa Food Co-op):

Women, Capitalism, and the State
with Selma James

Selma James is a women’s rights and antiracist campaigner and author. Raised in a movement household, she joined CLR James’s Johnson-Forest Tendency at age fifteen, and from 1958 to 1962, she worked with him in the movement for Caribbean federation and independence. In 1972, she founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign, and in 2000 she helped launch the Global Women’s Strike, which she coordinates. She coined the word “unwaged” to describe the caring work women do, and it has since entered the English language to describe all who work without wages, on the land, in the home, in the community, and more. In 1975 she became the first spokeswoman of the English Collective of Prostitutes. She is a founding member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (2008). Selma has addressed the power relations within the working class movement, and how to organize across sectors despite divisions of sex, race, and class, South and North. She spoke recently at Tent City University at Occupy London on “Why Anticapitalism?” to a packed audience.

Selma is in the United States on a speaking tour for the publication of her new book, “Sex, Race and Class – The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings, 1952-2011” (PM Press, March 2012).

* * *

The Dissecting Capitalism series provides an introduction to capitalism, highlighting its historical, social, and political constructs as well as its systemic, global impact. Each session will feature speakers, open discussion, and for certain dates, short readings designed to facilitate participatory debate, dialogue, and popular education. We envision the series as forming a cohesive whole, and encourage participants to attend all ten sessions, if possible. The education series is free, as all education should be, but donations to West Philly’s collectively run LAVA (Lancaster Avenue Autonomous Zone; http://www.lavazone.org; 4134 Lancaster Ave Philadelphia, PA 19104), which is generously letting us use its space, are greatly appreciated.

The series’ themes and dates include:

Wed, Feb 1 at 7 p.m.
Part 1: What is Capitalism?
with George Caffentzis and Alex Knight
http://www.facebook.com/events/363895400302931/

Wed, Feb 8 at 7 p.m.
Part 2: Financial Crisis
with Mark Kuperberg and Julie Maitrejean
http://www.facebook.com/events/218676238226714/

Wed, Feb 15 at 7 p.m.
Part 3: The Historical Rise of Capitalism and Corporations
with Ariane Fischer and Jerry Krantman
http://www.facebook.com/events/205013412929063/

Wed., Feb 22 at 7 p.m.
Part 4: Contemporary Labor and Workplace Struggles
with Salar Mohandesi and Sean West Wispy
http://www.facebook.com/events/346185492080735/

Wed, Feb 29 at 7 p.m.
Part 5: Capitalism, Social Relations, and Power
with Ben Webster and Cindy Milstein
http://www.facebook.com/events/176568485785886/

Wed, March 7 at 7 p.m.
Part 6: Women, Capitalism, and the State
with Selma James
http://www.facebook.com/events/379287018763918/

Wed, March 14 at 7 p.m.
Part 7: Political Economy of the Environment
Amy Roe and E. Colin Ruggero
http://www.facebook.com/events/349894515054684/

Wed, March 21 at 7 p.m.
Part 8: Capitalism and the State
Gabriel Rockhill and Avi Alpert
http://www.facebook.com/events/331966520173743/

Wed, March 28 at 7 p.m.
Part 9: Capitalism and Racism
Josh Lukin and another presenter (to be announced soon)

Wed, April 4 at 7 p.m.
Part 10: Imagining a Postcapitalism (details will be announced)

Join us tonight!

Worker Co-ops Support the 99% Movement

Worker Cooperatives support Occupy Wall Street…
The United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC) stands in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street
movement, and the Occupy movements around the world. As a national grassroots membership organization of
worker cooperatives—businesses owned and democratically controlled by our worker members — we support
and are honored to join you in this call for an economy organized to meet human needs.
We are heartened to see the beginnings of a genuine discussion and debate about different economic models —
models that value fairness at their core. As many of us come together for the first time to discuss the problems
that face us, and as we begin to collectively reimagine our economy and society, we believe it is critical to
actively make space for all voices to be heard. We urge this new movement to remain open and plural.

…and we invite you to join us in occupying Main Street

Cooperatives are the fastest growing socioeconomic movement in the world, with close to one billion members.
Worker cooperative businesses are in all sorts of industries: engineering, importing coffee,
baking bread, doing web development, cleaning houses, nursing and home health care, running
grocery stores, driving taxis, and more. But worker cooperatives are part of a much larger cooperative
economy that includes credit unions, consumer coops, housing coops, agricultural producer coops, and rural
electric coops — in the US, nearly 30,000 cooperative enterprises own over $3 trillion in shared assets.

Cooperatives are based on values.

Worker cooperatives are businesses that are owned and operated on democratic principles by the people
who work in them. Because they are organized around the will, talents and needs of the human
beings who work in them rather than the imperative of growth and ever-increasing profit margins,
worker cooperatives have the capacity to promote and extend new, humane and imaginative ways of
meeting the material needs of people by producing and distributing goods and services in society.
When dozens, hundreds and thousands of these enterprises pool resources and cooperate with
each other based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and
solidarity, a fundamental transformation of culture and society occurs. This has taken place most notably
and enduringly in Mondragon, Spain, and the Emilia Romagna region of Italy, where worker coops drive
the economy and fund and control social services, health care, retirement and education.

The cooperative movement needs you. And the world needs the cooperative movement.

As the Occupy movements have made clear, and as the UN recognized in declaring 2012 the
International Year of Cooperatives, we need a new way forward to a better world. Cooperatives can be
economic engines and laboratories for democracy — a powerful, practical part of building an economy
and society that works for all its members.

Mill Creek Farm on WHYY’s Radio Times, Sept 23rd

On Friday morning September 23rd, tune in to 10-11am EDT (Eastern Daylight Time) to Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane at WHYY (90.9 FM) to hear Jade Walker, Co-Director of the Mill Creek Urban Farm discuss food deserts and food justice.

The interview on Radio Times is following the Hunger Symposium that is being held by Philabundance on the 22nd. The other guests will likely be Mari Gallagher, a leading expert on food deserts, and Bill Clark, director of Philabundance.

Shale Gas Outrage – Rally – September 7, 2011

Rally to Stop Dirty Gas Drilling — Protect Air, Water, Earth and Human Health & Food Systems

This demonstration is in response to the Marcellus Shale Coalition’s conference in Philadelphia on Sept. 7th and 8th. CEOs from major fracking companies will be plotting to expand their poisonous operations in PA, NY, OH, MD, WV, VA, and NJ. Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett and former governors Tom Ridge and Ed Rendell will be speaking in support of the industry. Dubbed “Shale Gas Insight,” this is not only a key trade show for the industry, but also a brazen expression of its political muscle.

When: Wednesday, September 7, Noon – 2 PM (March follows until 3 PM)

Where: Center City Philadelphia, Arch St., between Broad and 13th Streets; In front of the Pennsylvania Convention Center

Rain or Shine!!!: In the event of inclement weather the rally will be held in a 1,200-person-capacity indoor venue within walking distance of the scheduled outdoor rally.

Speaking:

• Josh Fox, Director of the Oscar-nominated “Gasland”
• Craig & Julie Sautner, Dimock, PA
• Blondell Reynolds Brown, Philadelphia City Councilwoman
• Curtis Jones, Philadelphia City Councilman
• Doug Shields, Pittsburgh City Council President
• Al Appleton, internationally respected water systems expert
• Iris Marie Bloom, Protecting Our Waters
• Tracy Carluccio, Delaware Riverkeeper Network
• Jim Walsh, Food and Water Watch
• David Braun, United for Action

Additionally, lifting our spirits in such serious times will be:

• Welcoming songs from the powerful Rev. Rhetta Morgan
• Rebel Diaz, bilingual political hip-hop
  
• Beth Nixon, West Philly’s comic genius (and FJAR Member)
• The Band Called Fuse, underground rock & hip-hop

Stay tuned as we will post additional appearances here in the coming days!

Why: Maximizing the sheer numbers attending this rally on September 7th will show a broad-based popular movement that will not tolerate contamination of our air, water, and earth by dirty drilling, or the corruption of our politicians by industry money. We will demand that not one more family be poisoned by fracking and shale gas extraction.

RSVP on Facebook

Post source & more information at:  ShaleGasOutrage.org.

Pope Benedict XVI Denounces Food Commodities Speculation, Demands Global Response

(AP) VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI denounced speculation in commodities markets Friday and demanded a global response to high food prices based on solidarity, not profit.

Benedict told delegates of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization that access to food is a basic human right that must be guaranteed. He said it’s urgent to develop economic models that aren’t just based on profit but take into account the “human dimension.” “How can we remain silent when even food has become the object of speculation or is linked to a market that, without any regulation and deprived of moral principles, appears linked solely to an objective of profit?” he asked. High food prices, he said, require an international response by countries and institutions like the FAO to uphold the dignity of all people.

Benedict’s call echoed the argument laid out in his last encyclical “Charity in Truth,” which denounced the profit-at-all cost mentality blamed for the global economic downturn. Members of the FAO who attended the audience earlier recently elected a new director-general, Jose Graziano da Silva of Brazil, who takes over at a time when FAO’s mission to eradicate world hunger has been challenged by near-record high food prices.

Youth Food Bill of Rights!

Young People are getting organized around nutrition, food access, and their right to control their own interaction with the food systems in their schools and all around them.

On July 30th, 2011, over 150 youth will gather at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia to present a Youth Food Bill of Rights:

What is the Youth Food Bill of Rights?

It’s what youth believe our food system should be like!
It’s a work in progress
It’s created by Youth
It’s a Statement to All
It’s a tool for Change!!!

Young people, educators, and allies everywhere can take part in the day of action, and help students give input for the Youth Food Bill of Rights!