#29: Beatles. Clinton-Empire? Critique. US Intelligence Privatization. US Farm Policy. 07.7.26=4 7:30pm.

Beatles: http://www.thebeatles.com/

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Clinton-Kissenger Empire? Critique:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/26/2774/

'Clinton, Kissinger and the Corruptions of Empire', by John Nichols; Published on Thursday, July 26, 2007 by The Nation

'" Of all the corruptions of empire, few are darker than the claim that diplomacy must be kept secret from the citizenry. "" ... ...
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"" In the race for the Democratic nomination for president, the two frontrunners are lining up on opposite sides of the question of whether foreign policy should be conducted in public or behind the tattered curtain of corruption that has given us unnecessary wars in Vietnam and Iraq, U.S.-sponsored coups from Iran to Chile, trade policies designed to serve multinational corporations and a seeming inability to respond to the crisis that is Darfur.

Hillary Clinton, the candidate of all that is and will be, wants there to be no doubt that she is in the Kissinger camp.

The New York senator’s campaign is attacking her chief rival, Illinois Senator Barack Obama ☼, for daring to suggest that, he would personally meet with foreign leaders who do not always march in lockstep with the U.S. government. ""
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"" Clinton is playing politics this week. But in a broader sense she is aligning herself with a secretive and anti-democratic approach to global affairs that steers the United States out of the global community while telling the American people that foreign policy is the domain only of shadowy Kissingers.

She is not just wrong in this, she is Bush/Cheney wrong.

John Nichols’ new book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson hails it as a “nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the ‘heroic medicine’ that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to ‘reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.’”

Copyright © 2007 The Nation ""

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US Intelligence Privatization:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/26/1410253

'Outsourcing Intelligence: Author R.J. Hillhouse on How Key National Security Projects Are Contracted to Private Firms', DemocracyNow! Thursday, July 26th, 2007:

"" Author R.J. Hillhouse caused a stir in Washington last month when she revealed more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service has been outsourced to private firms. Now Hillhouse has exposed private companies are heavily involved in the nation's most important and most sensitive national security document – the President's Daily Brief. And there appears to be few safeguards from preventing corporations from inserting items favorable to itself or its clients into the President's Daily Brief in order to influence the country's national security agenda. [includes rush transcript] ""
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"" To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (888) 999-3877. ""

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US Farm Policy:
1. http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/26/2778/

'Huge Farm Bill Offers More of Same for Agribusiness', by Carolyn Lochhead; Published on Thursday, July 26, 2007 by the San Francisco Chronicle

"" WASHINGTON - A prominent San Francisco patron of the arts, Constance Bowles — heiress of an early California cattle baron, widow of a former director of UC Berkeley’s Bancroft library and a resident of Pacific Heights — was the largest recipient of federal cotton subsidies in the state of California between 2003 and 2005, collecting more than $1.2 million, according to the latest available data.

That is the way U.S. farm programs are designed to work. Five crops — cotton, corn, wheat, rice and soybeans — received 92 percent of the $21 billion in federal farm payments last year. The biggest payments go to the biggest farms. ""
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"" About half of the continental United States is farmland. More than 150 million acres were enrolled in federal farm conservation programs in 2005, according to report by Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment.

“The environmental implications of U.S agricultural conservation policy … are enormous,” Craig Cox, director of the Soil and Water Conservation Society, wrote in the Stanford report.

Farm environmental programs now total $4 billion a year, far outstripping any other federal funding for private conservation. Environmentalists would like to see the crop subsidies also go to “green payments” to induce environmental protection for wildlife habitat, watersheds and the like. ""
© 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.
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2. http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_6467050?nclick_check=1

'Sustainable agriculture should become new Farm Bill priority', By Katherine Ellison and Barton H. `Buzz" Thompson Jr.
Article Launched: 07/26/2007 01:33:06 AM PDT
Published on Thursday, July 26, 2007, San Jose Mercury News, p. 15A:
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"" As the House votes today amid unprecedented summer fireworks over the 2007 Farm Bill - the five-year template for U.S. agricultural policy - it seems likely that the bill expected to be signed in September will direct several billion more dollars to "green payments." The Bush administration and the House and Senate Agricultural committees have both recommended steep increases from the $4 billion spent in 2006. That's already one of the world's leading investments in the environment, yet it comes nowhere near to meeting the need or the demand. An estimated two out of three farmers seeking conservation support are now turned away. ""
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"" Last year, the farm bill's price support and commodity payments amounted to a whopping $19 billion, the bulk received by a small group of corn and cotton farmers, many of whom are already well-off and whose farms are a net drain on the environment. U.S. agriculture today emits many potent greenhouse gases contributing to global warming, accounting for 70 percent of this country's total emissions of nitrous oxide and 30 percent of total emissions of methane, according to the World Resources Institute. ""
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"" Meanwhile, Full Belly farmers are looking more and more like the advance guard of a farm revolution. Instead of federal aid, they're getting premium prices for their organic food, delivered to homes and restaurants throughout the Bay Area in the growing Community Supported Agriculture Movement. They also host tours and summer camps on their attractive property, which further cement community bonds. "Nobody wants to see a desert," notes farmer Judith Redmond.

As Americans demand more from their farms, more farmers may find they'll be rewarded in kind, making conservation a newly respectable - and profitable - endeavor.

KATHERINE ELLISON, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Mercury News staff writer, is a journalist and consulting writer with Stanford University's Natural Capital Project. BARTON H. "BUZZ" THOMPSON JR. is a director of Stanford University's Woods Institute for the Environment and co-editor of "U.S. Agricultural Policy and the 2007 Farm Bill." ""