"Organic Foods Exposed"

An Australian magazine called Cosmos recently published an article titled "Organic Food Exposed" [Issue 16 of Cosmos, August 2007] by Elizabeth Finkel.

Finkel makes some good points about organics, admittedly, but the core premise is fundamentally flawed because it tries to lead us to the conclusion that we do not need to rethink how our food is produced by large agribusiness companies. She uses a host of conventional thinkers to make those points such as Bruce Aimes and Norman Borlaug. David Pimental is another reference she uses but he of course is well known for questions the viability of industrial farming and in particular about the ability of biofuels like ethanol to be used as a replacement for fossil fuels and a robust debated has emerged about this.

Borlaug on the other hand is being discredited by many who increasingly see his policies to feed a hungry world as leading to many unsustainable policies that are now evident in places like India where irrigation of monocultures is no longer viable due to depletion of the water supplies. So the major problem with industrial agriculture is that it relies on unsustainable supplies of surface and subsurface water that are being depleted on mass scale in many parts of the world.

There is a debate about whether organics is relevant or not. This is part of a larger campaign on the part of establishment thinkers all over the world and the English speaking world in particular to render the movement to challenge conventional modern thinking. Finkel is selective though in accepting the issues of the environmental and social justice movement in terms of challenging prevailing assumptions of reality, for example she accepts the problem of meat eating as a major cause of the global ecological challenge that we face, and yet she attempts to discredit organics on the whole.

Yet there are legitimate concerns about the industrialization of our food supply and indeed our lives in general and these go much deeper than whether or not pesticides should be used. They relate to the way in which we have modified nature, created the modern built environment and production system which under-grid our modern lives.

The real question is whether we should accept business as usual or whether we need to fundamentally rethink modernism under capitalism? This is what the organics movement has attempted to do although it has recently being in many respects co-opted by capitalism with the take over of many rapidly growing companies by larger food conglomerates. A holistic view is needed to understand the context of the organics movement in relation to a large effort to rethink our modern lives and move towards a comprehensive approach to sustainable development.

Whats Missing in Current Health Care Legislation?

It is time we take action on real solutions to health that include the development of a comprehensive health care policy. I would include this to be the development of a clear map towards savings that accrue to the economy as a result of these reforms. The fact that this is so lacking makes me believe that the health care approach is not really comprehensive. Yet I feel this is the best we can get now due to the huge array of corporate interests arrayed against the kind of common sense, people first policies that we need to put to ensure adequate and also low cost health care for all.

Questions about Obama and Co's "Interventionist" Strategy

In terms of my previous work with regards to Obama's mistake is compromising the economic status quo players....

We can see that Bernanke is definitely deserving of an A for effort in terms of avoiding the mistakes the policymakers supposedly made before and during the great depression.

However what if the kinds of approaches that might have worked then won't work or don't apply here? What if we are dealing with something much deeper than as an issue of a housing bubble that has infected the financial sector?

What they are basically is that they have to pursue Fed credit policies contrary to what people have been educated to see as normal reason and logical judgment in terms of the role of government. This is of course be very much contrary to conventional wisdom about the state of the economy. The idea of a president ejecting a CEO of one of the largest American corporation just shows how far things slipped in a very short period of time.

While it is good to see that on some level Bernanke has some concerns about possibly a deeper problem, on the public level at least he seems to give little indication that he sees a problem on a fundamental level such as relating to the distorted dynamics of the national economy and unsustainable indebtedness of the world's lone superpower.

The Fed's powers are limited because it is long term economic policies put in place neoclassical economists that's the ultimate cause for America's economic malaise. This led to the shift towards debt spending to finance American's economic prosperity and a focus on short term individual gain for a very rich few over the long term economic security of the vast majority.