Chipotle Challenge: time to back up ‘food with integrity’ | Grist
In Florida, the human rights crisis engulfing farm labor is perhaps most starkly visible. Tomato pickers have received virtually the same harvesting piece rate since 1980: 40-50 cents for every 32-pound bucket they fill. At this rate, workers must pick and haul a staggering 2.5 tons of tomatoes in order to earn minimum wage for a typical 10-hour day. Decades of class-action lawsuits have exposed a pattern of systematic minimum wage violations, and supervisor violence in the fields is not unheard of.
In November 2007, three farmworkers in Immokalee – the heart of Florida’s winter tomato production – escaped from more than a year of bondage after punching through the ventilation hatch in a box truck where they were held captive by their employers. In total, a dozen workers were forced to pick tomatoes by day and then chained, beaten, and robbed of their pay at night in one of southwest Florida’s “biggest, ugliest slavery cases ever,” according to U.S. Attorney Doug Molloy.
The enslaved crew harvested for farms owned by two of Florida’s largest tomato growers. It was the seventh farm labor slavery case prosecuted by federal civil rights officials since 1997, now involving well over 1,000 workers. All of which brings us to a question posed by Eric Schlosser at last year’s Slow Food Nation conference: “Does it matter whether an heirloom tomato is local and organic if it was harvested with slave labor?”
‘food
with integrity
Al Jazeera English – Asia-Pacific – Holy hip hop
Kansho Tagai, a Buddhist monk known as MC Happiness, believes in keeping the appeal of his religion fresh.He regularly holds music sessions at a 400-year old temple in central Tokyo to teach Buddhist principles and rituals through hip hop.
Tagai’s status as Japan’s premier rapper monk has turned him into a local icon with a loyal fan base of followers and performance artists.
Al Jazeera’s Zeina Awad reports…(video) Holy
hip hop
Al Jazeera English – Europe – France denies citizenship over veil
On Tuesday, Eric Besson, the immigration minister, said that during checks into the man’s application, he had explicitly stated that he would never allow his wife to leave the house without wearing a full veil and that he believed a woman is “an inferior being”.
Winter Olympics on slippery slope after Vancouver crackdown on homeless | World news | guardian.co.uk
The anxiety stems from a recent provincial government law empowering the police to force rough sleepers into shelters in extreme weather, a move which homeless groups appear to view as an Orwellian effort at civic image control. Police officers have been told to use only “non-forceful touching” in implementing the Assistance to Shelter Act, but that has not stopped critics calling it the Olympic Kidnapping Act.
Hey, it worked for China.
TIANJIN, China — China vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last year to become the world’s largest maker of wind turbines, and is poised to expand even further this year.
China has also leapfrogged the West in the last two years to emerge as the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. And the country is pushing equally hard to build nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power plants.
Reminds me of the story about the fellow leaning on his shovel in the shade, saying, “One of these days I’m gonna run this company!” How long before we’re holding our place in the world by force instead of by offering it something worthwhile? Oh, wait…
China Finally Realizes How Badly It Bungled Tibet – Newsweek.com
China has failed, despite billions of dollars in aid, to win over Tibetan loyalty. And now Beijing is finally realizing just how badly it mishandled things.
Not that anyone really trusts them…
My wife and I were discussing some of the silent relationship killers that we have observed recently.The big things are easy to spot…. abuse, infidelity, raging, name-calling, etc. Those are no-brainers. Any relationship would be endangered where these are present and it would be obvious.
But what about the silent killers?
I’m truly proud to be an American these last few days. It’s heartening to see my country finally stepping up and leading in an endeavor from which it can expect to gain nothing but the knowledge that it did the right thing — and the approval, at last, of the rest of the world. It’s been far too long.
For nearly two centuries we have been the tough kid on the block. We were blessed by having managed to steal a land, rich in resources, from the previous tenants. We made rapid use of those resources and our relative isolation from the powers in Europe and Asia to build a worldwide economic power alongside which the 1st Century power of Rome pales in comparison. We have pretty much told the rest of the world how things were going to be, and made it stick through the power of our money and, too often, by force of arms. Yes, yes, on a couple of occasions that was warranted by circumstances beyond our control, but even those wars were as much about economics as principle.
As Americans, we tend to forget that we are members of a global community, and that all we are depends on so many who preceded us. We owe who and what we are to other cultures, those that went before and those that attempt to coexist with us today. The currently much-maligned Arabs invented the zero, without which modern mathematics would not exist. Africa gave us the rhythms that melded with European influences and became jazz. The Far East gave us philosophical insights; the Native Americans — the true owners of this land — an understanding of how we fit into the big picture along with all God’s other creations.
And so it goes. Every culture, every religion, every idea is built on those that have gone before. We Americans are the sum of all those parts: the Arabs, the Yoruba — stolen from their homes and forced to find another way to be themselves — the Hindu mystic, the Ojibway shaman, the Druid in his grove.
We need to think about this carefully. We need to understand that we are not isolated here in the US; that we are very much a part of the world, and it of us, and that we have the ability to decide the course of history. That course will be predicated, in turn, on our ability to discern our true place in the scheme of things: not whether we can kick the asses of those who disagree with our policies, but whether we can influence them to not want to kick ours. The days of gunboat diplomacy are over. They ended with the development of that most guided of missiles, the suicide bomber.
It is time to take our place as leaders in the quest for peace, not in the art and appliances of war. When I see our powers diverted from that end to wage peace and compassion, as we are this week in Haiti, I have hope again.
If only we can remember that everyone hates a bully.
