We welcome Rodrigo Lopes, Activist with Landless Rural Workers Movement of Brazil (MST) for a conversation about food sovereignty and the solidarity economy: a Community Response to Hunger

Tuesday November 11, 2008

4-6pm Driftless Café

118 West Court St Viroqua, WI

Soup will be served for a $15 donation with bowl from Local potters, or without for $5

* Proceeds go to the Landless Rural Workers Movement of Brazil

"All people have the right to decide what they eat and to ensure that agriculture in their community is fair and healthy for everyone"

For Info call Lori at 637-7136

Event followed by another talk this evening--call it Part II

Most excellent is the audio clip they provide of Virginia Woolf commenting on the English language.

It reminds me of another CD set of Jorge Luis Borges lecturing on literature, translation and art--"The Craft of Verse" (audio clips of Borges' lectures at the link above.)

And to end this remarkable week, Al Gore has started to Twitter, Obama has a new website for the transition, and one more celebration on election night. This one brought to us by Ill Doctrine's Jay Smooth from his Harlem neighborhood...

And how did we miss Obama's Flickr account?

So enjoy...and check out the Hobo Candy Code chalked at the end of driveways by some with-it kids.

One point he repeats often is that voting is a personal thing and we have to respect people's privacy in the voting area.  In actual fact voting did not start out that way at all. A post on LivelyThought reviews an article in a recent New Yorker that covers the history of voting in the U.S. This country started with gathering in a town hall and taking sides--no ballots at all. Much later the idea of a written ballot emerged, but it was a pretty imperfect start. Here's and excerpt from the LivelyThought post...

One of the things that great writing about history always does is to remind us that there are some notions that we don’t even think about today, ideas we find so commonplace and sensible that it is hard to believe they haven’t always been the status quo, but were once considered radical or controversial. For instance, Lepore tells us that 150 years ago, voting wasn’t a simple matter of showing up at the polling place and filling out your ballot. In fact, polling places didn’t even have ballots. Voters had to provide their own.

Nowhere in the United States in 1859 did election officials provide ballots. [...] Voters got their ballots either from a partisan, at the polls, or at home, by cutting them out of the newspaper. Then they had to cross through the throngs to climb a platform placed against the wall of a building (voters weren’t allowed inside) and pass their ballots through a window and into the hands of an election judge.

This was produced by the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society (website)

In short, Organic Monitor concludes, "Big was always beautiful for the mass market retailers; it appears that large-scale production could also be favored by Whole Foods Market."

And as operations scale up to meet the needs of the megabuyers, we've already seen what happens on the ground. We get mega, monocropped "organic" vegetable farms supplying the processing giants; and abominations like Aurora Dairy, with its 4,000- to 8,000-head "organic" feedlot dairy operations.

So the issue today is...

...despite a mobilization by thousands of organic consumers, Teamsters, and United Farm Workers, sending in petitions and handing out leaflets at Whole Foods Market stores in 33 states, WFM is refusing to stand up for workers rights!  Oregon-based Beef Northwest, the feedlot corporation that fattens up Country Natural Beef's herds, refuses to negotiate with the United Farm Workers in good faith. Whole Foods in the single largest seller of Country Natural Beef in the U.S. Joining leading elected officials in Oregon, Presidential Candidate Senator Barack Obama in a letter earlier this year urged Beef Northwest to sit down and negotiate.

Call and fax Whole Foods' Corporate Headquarters and your local Whole Foods'General Manager (closest is probably Madison) http://www.organicconsumers.org/ufw1.cfm

Spread the word in your community and send a letter to the editor in support of sweat free organic and natural food.

Best choice is support your local producer. Kickapedia.org has many links to on farm producers-marketers and other markets-stores in this area. If you know of more people selling locally update the wiki yourself, or send the info along to admins[at]kicktime.org

For more information see:
http://www.emptybowls.com

For a donation of $20, you will receive a beautiful pottery bowl (they are all different, the picture is just an example) along with a meal of soup and bread. Local artists make the bowls; local restaurants and individuals make the food. The event raises money to combat world hunger. Last year, our local food pantries received $2,700 from this event.