The Real Health Care Debate by Chris Hedges (repost)

Reposting in case you missed it.

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthout
April 9, 2012

Image by Public Citizen via Flickr

The debate surrounding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act illustrates the impoverishment of our political life. Here is a law that had its origin in the right-wing Heritage Foundation, was first put into practice in 2006 in Massachusetts by then-Gov. Mitt Romney and was solidified into federal law after corporate lobbyists wrote legislation with more than 2,000 pages. It is a law that forces American citizens to buy a deeply defective product from private insurance companies. It is a law that is the equivalent of the bank bailout bill—some $447 billion in subsidies for insurance interests alone—for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. It is a law that is unconstitutional.

William Morris’ Vision of Socialism: Self-sustaining Local Communities by William Bowles

by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
30 June 2012

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

There — it sickens one to have to wade through this grimy sea of opportunism. What a spectacle of shuffling, lies, vacillation and imbecility does this Game Political offer to us? I cannot conclude without an earnest appeal to those Socialists, of whatever section, who may be drawn towards the vortex of Parliamentarism, to think better of it while there is yet time.

Labor Across the Food System

Dandelion Salad

Updated: July 3, 2012, added another video, “Panel 2”

by IHR
http://vimeo.com/44764930

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

Labor Across the Food System | February 3-4, 2012
Presented by the UCSC Center for Labor Studies

• Steve McKay, Department of Sociology and Director, Center for Labor Studies, UCSC

• Julie Guthman, Department of Community Studies and Co-Director, Multi-campus Research Program on Food and the Body, UCSC

“No food labor? No food justice”.

Local businesses threatened by Chase and CVS Pharmacy by Shepherd Bliss

by Shepherd Bliss
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
June 28, 2012

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

I’ve operated the small, artisan Kokopelli Farm, which grows mainly berries, for the last 20 years. It is located a couple of miles from small town Sebastopol’s downtown commons in Northern California. Our town has less than 8000 people and is the economic center of what is called the West County of the coastal Sonoma County. We historically have had a vibrant local economy, which is now being threatened by the desires of big businesses to further concentrate their enormous power and drain the agrarian wealth out of the land and people.

American Autumn: an Occudoc (In Other Words: F*ck You, Gordon Gekko!)

Dandelion Salad

Image by Adrian Kinloch via Flickr

Jun 27, 2012 by ncftTV

more at Occudoc.org

written, directed & produced by Dennis Trainor, Jr

Associate producer, co-editor, graphics & titles, AJ Russo: vimeo.com/ajrusso

A Farm for the Future (must-see; repost)

Dandelion Salad

In case you missed this when it was first posted.

BBC
2009

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

Wildlife film maker Rebecca Hosking investigates how to transform her family’s farm in Devon into a low energy farm for the future, and discovers that nature holds the key. With her father close to retirement, Rebecca returns to her family’s wildlife-friendly farm in Devon, to become the next generation to farm the land. But last year’s high fuel prices were a wake-up call for Rebecca.

“The 15% Solution,” Serialization, 26th Installment: Appendix I, the Constitution of the “Old United States and the New American Republics”

Note: The Preface and Chapters One through Twenty can be found here: The 15% Solution

by Jonathan Westminster, Ph.D. aka Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on TPJmagazine.us
July 1, 2012

This is the twenty-sixth installment of the serialization of a book entitled The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022.  Herein you will find Appendix I, the Constitution of the “Old United States and the New American Republics,” as amended through the (fictional) year 2010.  This Appendix demonstrates how the Republican Religious Right used the procedures embedded in the original U.S. Constitution to amend it into a document that in effect resembled nothing like the original, except in form.