- Eliminating federal agricultural subsidies
Last week Congress took the first momentous step of ending federal subsidies for school junk food lunches by passing the Child Nutrition Bill, which had been stalled for two years. The next step is to eliminate federal subsidies on corn, soy, and wheat. These were initially enacted during the Depression to keep small family farmers from losing their farms when there was an oversupply of these commodities causing a steep drop in the price they were paid for them. Now that these subsidies mainly go to corporate farm giants like Monsanto, Cargil and Archer Daniel Midlands, they actually hurt small farmers more than they help them. There is currently a proposal on the budget cutting table to eliminate the $14 billion in annual food subsidies, and citizens need to organize and get behind this proposal (see http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html)
- Abolishing "food ghettos" via the urban garden movement
What is happening in Detroit is truly inspirational. Housing foreclosures and vacancies have turned many blocks of downtown Detroit into empty, abandoned land - which local residents are converting into urban gardens to produce fresh fruits and vegetables. (see http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2521061/detroits_urban_gardens_a_food_revolution.html?cat=62). There are similar grassroots projects in Milwaukee (see ) and Los Angeles (see http://www.good.is/post/five-innovative-urban-gardening-programs-in-los-angeles/)
- Guaranteeing access to preventive care (and nutritional counseling) by expanding Medicare to cover all Americans
The reality is that ObamaCare, Obama's corporate welfare plan for insurance companies, simply cannot be funded in a recession. It will have to undergo major amendment before it's fully implemented in 2014. The only affordable way to finance health care for all Americans is to eliminate insurance company profit, advertising and overhead from the health care equation by expanding Medicare, an highly popular, efficient, and economical program, to cover people under 65. (see http://www.healthcare-now.org/)
**Ending corporate interference in federal, state and local elections: via a national grassroots movement called Move to Amend. Move to Amend seeks to end the ability of corporations to claim Bill of Rights protections for something called "corporate personhood." The ultimate goal is to amend the US Constitution to reverse one hundred years of Supreme Court decisions that have granted corporations the same "rights" as individuals. This was clearly never intended by the Constitutional framers, many of whom wrote extensively about the risk of powerful corporations corrupting government.
Go to www.movetoamend.org and click on the "Move to Amend" tab in the lower left hand corner. Then click on the "Sign the Motion" tab on the right to add your signature to the 95,000 on the petition to amend the Constitution.
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