WRITE ON

WRITE ON: Progressive News for Northern Michigan Issue 5 July 2003
Local Links Marquette Citizens for Peace and Justice Northwoods Wilderness Recovery Keweenaw Now State, National and International Links Common Dreams Greenpeace Move On Independent Media Democracy Now! True Majority Michigan Citizens for Peace United for Peace Citizen.org Citizenworks.org Write On Issues November October September August July June May Home We would like to thank everyone who read the previous issue of Write On. Write On needs funding and articles on subjects that interest you. If you or your group would like to help us cover the costs of printing, $60 for 175 copies, please let us know either by telephone or by email. This assistance is needed if you would like to continue reading this newsletter. Articles for Write On should be no more than 600 words. Please send any questions, comments, upcoming events, or article submissions to writeonup@yahoo.com or call 228-2962. Look for the next issue of Write On in these locations: PWPL, Emma Joe's, Food Co-op, Sweetwater Café and others	Hello Readers, We are providing this monthly publication to inform our neighbors of news affecting the people of Northern Michigan. This newsletter will consider such subjects as environmentalism, social justice, and local activism, which do not receive adequate coverage in other media outlets. Table of Contents `Potential USDA Rule Would Cripple Public Participation` `Anne Newcombe` `National Healthcare Reform: Good Health, Part One` `Katy Nelson, VT Licensed Naturopathic Physician, Marquette Resident` Unitarian Universalists Choose Depleted Uranium as Object of Activism Gail Griffith The Dandelion Prerogative Carrie Plummer `Declaration of Independence from Corporate Rule` `Excerpts from A Declaration of Independence from Corporate Rule" by Alliance for Democracy Founder Ronnie Dugger; first read in front of the Liberty` B`ell in Philadelphia on July 4, 1997` US May Still Need UN Roger Cohn (excerpted from Motherjones.com) Focus on a Peacemaker: Arundhati Roy Ryan Backlund `Potential USDA Rule Would Cripple Public Participation` `Anne Newcombe` `Speak up now...or forever hold your peace. This dangerous legal precedent, should we allow it to stand, will directly affect our ability to actively participate in our government "of the people, by the people."` This is the Line, folks. This is yet another, admittedly more lethal, attempt to circumvent the 2 Million plus public comments received, not to mention 2 Million plus again and again every time the US Forest Service comes up with a new back door around public comment, against the USFS's plans to log in the Tongass, one of the last Old Growth US Forests coveted by multi-national timber companies. The USFS (and by extension the Bush administration) has launched another undercover raid on our civil liberties, one which could set a precedent for other public agencies to follow and effectively cripple the public's seemingly newfound ability to organize and participate in its governing process. The language in this proposed rule would eliminate email activism (along with signed petitions and mass produced postcards) as a viable way to make your voice heard in the "hallowed" halls of our government. It is only my humble opinion that it is this administration's, the public agencies', and, in many cases (admittedly not all), our elected representatives' most fervent wish that we would all just shut up and go away and let them go back to their old ways of Washington business with an uninformed, or, more likely, quite-informed-but-too-overworked-and-underpaid-to-have-time-to-ride-herd-on-their-actions electorate. It is probably not necessary to remind you that this agency (and all other public agencies) is required by law (or have been up to this point) to have an open Public Comment period and to use those comments when devising its final management plan. In this case, it would seem the USFS has decided, under pressure from the increasingly merging mega-corporate timber companies, that the public's wishes for its publicly owned lands are irrelevant. We have global corporate interests worried, and this latest, "buried deep," in the legalese attempt to end run around us is the evidence. I leave the next step to you and your consciences. More details follow below. `Text (and activism opportunity) that follows was excerptedfrom an activism alert list--Endangered Freedoms: Public` `Comments Under Attack.` `Buried in the National Forest Management Act (NFMA), is a proposal to limit or in some cases, disqualify, any comments that are "mass duplications." This means form letters, electronic actions, petitions, check-off lists, and pre-printed post cards would no longer be considered public comment.` In some cases, these sorts of mechanisms would be completely invalid. In fact, under "Objections to new plans, plan amendments, or plan revisions" on page 72803 of the ruling, the proposal states that when considering comments: ". . . any person or non-Federal entity may submit written objections regarding a proposed plan, amendment or revision to the Reviewing Official. Only original substantive comment that meet objection content requirements set out in paragraph (d) (2) of this section will be accepted. Form letter, check-off lists, pre-printed post cards, or similar duplicative materials will not be accepted as objections." The Forest Service knows more than any other U.S. agency how effective these means are to the public weighing in on decisions, and are now trying to undercut the democratic process. In 2000, the Forest Service received over 2 million comments in support of The Roadless Areas Conservation Act, the most widely and public supported piece of legislation in years. If it weren't for the ability of online activists, and local organizers to offer convenient forms of public comment, we might have lost the last of our national forests to the logging industry. `Please call the Forest Service and let them know that their attempts at censoring public comment capabilities is an attack on our first amendment rights, and is unacceptable in a democratic world. Call the Content Analysis Team of the ruling at:` `(801) 517-1023` `Or send a hand written letter to:` `USDA FS Planning Rule` `Content Analysis Team` `P.O. Box 8359` `Missoula, MT 59807` `For more information about the proposed ruling, just go to: www.fs.fed.us/emc/nfma/includes/final120602.pdf.` `See pages 72792 and 72803 to read the specific rules being presented that inhibit public comments.` top `National Healthcare Reform: Good Health, Part One` `Katy Nelson, VT Licensed Naturopathic Physician, Marquette Resident` In May’s “Write On”, one healthcare reform advocate described health care in America as “unjust, inefficient, costing too much, covering too little and excluding too many, despite spending almost double per person on health care expenses than any other nation”. Many reformists believe an expanded drug benefit, national health insurance, and some form of government sponsored or managed health care is not only “a right”, but the “right on” choice, as if health were only a function of dollars spent, or something to which one has a just claim that the government is in a position to deny. Where is the discussion on prevention (i.e. not just earlier symptomatic treatment--detection and earlier administration of pharmaceuticals-- but root cause identification)? Where is `the recognition that one’s “right” to good health is about responsibly exercising freedom of choice in the marketplace, and that access to good healthcare is less about ease of entry into a homogenous cyclopean medical system and more about the self, it’s healthcare needs, and equal access to alternative options?` Our Western European and Japanese counterparts have something figured out we haven’t yet: that a nation’s health is not about how much it spends, but about how the expenditures prevent illness in the first place. A recent World Health Organization (WHO) study ranks the US at 37th among 191 nations with Japan in first place, living 4.5 more years of good health at about half the cost (the US per capita $3,724 vs. $1,759 in Japan). France came in at #2, providing the best healthcare, at a per capita cost of $2,125, with a good health life extension over the US of 3 years. (www.earthchangestv.com/biology/June2000/0621controversial.htm). Uwe Reinhardt, co-author of the study, described ours as “expensive, heroic care” – meaning, we wait 'til the last minute, and then throw everything at the disease including the kitchen sink and its plumbing. And we continue to do so, instead of helping the person or treating the true cause. For example, the most recent discussions on lowering the very substantial national cost of diabetes focus on earlier detection, still overlooking the fact that we are an increasingly obese population, addicted to carbohydrates and fat (including the excess carbs that become fat), and that the two chief dietary factors responsible for adult onset diabetes are carbs and fat. Instead of funding a national diabetes detection initiative (and are we talking actual diabetes or insulin resistance, the diabetic precursor resulting from chronic excess of carbs & fat intake?) and instead of an expanded drug benefit remedy, how about funding a change in marketplace and lifestyle choices, increasing the national awareness of dietary impact on health overall? How about price supports for organic farmers at least equal the price supports on tobacco, alcohol and agribusiness? How about tax deductions or vouchers for persons below an income line to buy organic food, join a gym, have at least one preventative physical annually or at least biennially, and attend classes on health education that includes alternative points of view, not just the pyramidal diabetic diet, advocating aspartame as a sugar substitute, or low fat/no fat diets that increase the risk of heart disease? How about recognizing a Health Dividend where costs go down as health improves? Does one really want a healthcare system established by politicians, managed by insurance companies or think tanks, and currently in 37th place to be “expanded”? Or does one want a more health efficient system, like those in the top ten, where good health is not only a function of access, but of choice and focus on prevention? As a physician of natural medicine, educator, researcher, and healthcare reform advocate, I agree that we are greatly in need of change, and that it IS happening. However, my observation is that the healthiest Americans avoid drugs whenever possible, are educated about food as medicine and make conscious lifestyle choices, exercise physically and spiritually, are independently minded and feisty in supporting alternative thinking, living, & marketing, and appreciate their personal freedom enough to preserve and defend it, daily, without a reliance on the government. top Unitarian Universalists Choose Depleted Uranium as Object of Activism Gail Griffith Four members of the Marquette Unitarian Universalist Congregation attended the annual General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association in Boston last week. Reverend Kayle Rice, delegates Barbara Michael and Gail Griffith, and member Susan Halbrook joined more than 7500 other members of the denomination from the over 1000 congregations in North America. Delegates passed five Actions of Immediate Witness (AIW) to address recent events. They included one to endorse the proposed Depleted Uranium Munitions Study bill now in the House that would mandate studies of the effects of depleted uranium on the environment and the health of those exposed to it. The proposal for the AIW was presented to the General Assembly by Dr. Griffith, who has given seminars on depleted uranium munitions, chemical and biological weapons, and Gulf War illnesses at Northern Michigan University and at the Peter White Public Library in Marquette. She is a member Marquette Citizens for Peace and Justice. top The Dandelion Prerogative Carrie Plummer It was in early spring my husband and I were visiting our family downstate and staying with his parents. They had a large luscious green lawn with dandelions sprouting everywhere! I was so excited to see them in full bloom. It takes me back to my childhood. I ended up picking a plentiful amount of dandelion leaves one day- their lawn of course was untreated and away from roads, thus the greens were safe to eat. I added organic tomatoes and onions to the mix, topped with my mother-in-law's homemade balsamic vinegarette dressing and needless to say, it was a hit! Eating something so fresh and nourishing that took no fossil fuel to transport, no watering, no cultivating of any sort, is truly a gift from Mother Earth. European settlers brought the tenacious yellow flower to the New Land because it was widely used as both food and medicine. Dandelions are very high in vitamins and minerals like Vitamin A and have as much Vitamin C by weight as grapefruits. In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says dandelions pack more nutritional punch than even broccoli and spinach. You can make a coffee substitute, wine, and jelly out of them. They stimulate and aid the liver in the elimination of toxins from the blood and are used for breast tumors, cysts, fevers, kidney and gall stones, P.M.S., menopause, hypoglycemia, recent onset diabetes, high blood pressure, digestive disturbances, and hepatitis. They are also used as a skin cleanser and help increase production of mother's milk! Oh, and best of all - they're free! Unfortunately, many of the inheritors of this potent flower are unappreciative and, frankly, at war with it. A large green carpet with little to no diversity has become the convention. People are spending time and money routinely spraying poisons on their lawns. Many of the commonly used pesticides (herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides) are suspected human carcinogens. Air, water, and soil are being contaminated and in the process, wildlife is disappearing and the friendly beneficial bacteria in the soil are dying. What's most disturbing is that children are up to 6 times more likely to get childhood leukemia or brain cancer when living in or near homes where the lawns are treated with these indiscriminate chemicals. (See Children's Health Environmental Coalition's website: http://www.checnet.org and Pesticide Action Network: http://www.panna.org). Perhaps more of us can begin to see dandelions, as well as other so-called weeds, like clover and chickweed, as no longer eyesores but rather a gift from our ancestors and Mother Earth. Are we sensitive enough to learn from these survivors of our most deadly poisons? Many Native American Indians believe "whenever possible eat raw and eat wild"- some sage advice to us all. Wouldn't it be wonderful if neighbors came together with their children and picked many of the edible wild plants that grew right on each other's properties and shared a magnificent salad together! What a way to connect children to where food actually comes from (understanding that vegetables and fruits don't miraculously appear at the local grocery stores) as well as allowing them to be team players in the harvesting of the plants, and promoting healthy eating habits for the long haul. (Studies have shown that children are more receptive to eating foods that they normally would have rejected when they participate in the process of growing, harvesting, preparing, or cooking of the foods). Surprise your neighbor with a large delectable dandelion salad! The leaves, roots, and flowers are all edible (they're less bitter in early spring). Be proud of your dandelions, enjoy your arriving wild visitors (the pollinators), and take advantage of the incredible benefits these beautiful "weeds" provide! So by all means - LET THEM GROW! (Great books: The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook and Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (And Not so Wild) Places both by Steve Brill, and The Chemical-Free Lawn by Warren Schultz. See "Wildman" Steve Bril's website:http://www.econetwork.net/~wildmansteve/body.html.) top `Declaration of Independence from Corporate Rule` `Excerpts from A Declaration of Independence from Corporate Rule" by Alliance for Democracy Founder Ronnie Dugger; first read in front of the Liberty` B`ell in Philadelphia on July 4, 1997` We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all persons are of equal value and importance, that we are endowed with certain inalienable rights and shares, that among these are life, liberty, privacy, health care, unblinkered education, fairly paid work, the freedoms of speech, press, religion, assembly, association, sexual expression, and travel, due democratic and legal process, personal safety against war, domination, crime, exploitation, racism, and sexism, a decent if minimal comfort, minimal personal property up to a common limit, and a fair chance for self-realization and personal happiness. Because of the course of events in our country during the last 15 years it has become necessary for we the people of the United States to declare our government dead to our interests and to reassemble as free persons in a single movement to build a new country in this one. A decent respect for the opinions of our fellow citizens who may not yet aptly understand our present condition requires that we should list the grievances which impel us now to defy and declare our independence of the giant corporations which govern, through the hollowed-out forms of our own government, every stage and every exploitable aspect of our lives. Corporate giganticism is taking the earth and now is moving powerfully to kill both political and economic democracy.... Having started, in the main, after the Civil War, crushing down on the self-organizing people later on in that century, then concealed for the next 80 years behind the masks of antitrust, progressivism, and regulationism -- for the past 15 years those very abuses, lies, and deceptions of the oncoming American oligarchy have been cascading down from every quarter on our heads and necks and backs -- on our jobs, our pay, our pensions, our communities, our shops and family farms and small-town banks, our very hopes and dreams, all to the further engorgement of the giant corporations, the further enrichment of the hugely rich, and our impressment into humble work and service, earning only pittances and contempt. Those who established our present government....ordained and established the United States of America, not the United Corporations of America. Today the divine right of kings has been replaced by the divine right of CEOs.... The very structure and logic of corporate giganticism crushes free enterprise and democracy by requiring the absorption or destruction of business competitors small and large and the spurning and violation of the public interest for the corporation's good. So it must be and so it is that when a giant corporation succeeds, democratic society fails. We are being marched into a New World Order, as one of its buglers called it, but it is to be an order of One World Corporate Tyranny, with national democracies and their citizens absolutely subordinated to the divine right of the fewer and fewer, larger and larger survivors among these unnatural contraptions of production and destruction. Those few corporations that will be left will reign high above us and dominate our work, our health care, our shops and what's left of our farms, our co-ops and our credit unions -- our schools, "the news" we receive and do not receive in their newspapers and on our own airways--our national capital and our national credit, our public lands, our bank deposits, our mutual funds, our insurance policies -- our courts, our elections, our cities and states, our national government -- our amusements by day, our dreams at night, our very lives and deaths. We are ruled now by a form of government in which hierarchical and authoritarian corporations and the political class they have suborned combine to rule for their own profit and power against the people's interests. The name for that is not democracy, the name for that is crypto-fascism, still young in our case, but soon to be full-fanged. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1938, "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their Democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism." `As the people of the town of Topsfield Massachusetts resolved in June 1776 concerning their former loyalties to the King of England so say we to these self-crowned kings of our politics, our work, and our commerce, "The scene is now changed; our sentiments are altered."` We declare that the judiciary's audacious gift of our personal constitutional rights to the corporations we created is null and void. We instruct our government and courts to severely punish any corporation which violates any of our constitutional rights, most pointedly those secured by the First Amendment. We give fair notice to the egregiously criminal giant corporations of the nation and the world that we will close you down. On these requirements we will not compromise nor will we be denied. And for the support of this Declaration, we mutually pledge, to each other and to the people of the world, our hope, our patience, the risks we dare, the time, the work, and money we can share, and our sacred honor. top US May Still Need UN Roger Cohn (excerpted from Motherjones.com) To a baby-boomer kid growing up in New York, the United Nations was a revered, almost magical, place. Le Corbusier's sleek glass-and-marble building rising from the East River was a symbol of our hopes for the world's future. I remember my first grade-school trip there, marveling at people from all over the globe -- some wearing the robes or headpieces of their native cultures -- and at the cavernous General Assembly hall where delegates used headphones to listen to the proceedings in languages they could understand. When Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjšld was killed in a plane crash on his way to mediate a war in the Congo in 1961, America -- and the world -- felt we had lost an international hero. Somehow it's hard to imagine Kofi Annan racing off to one of the world's hot spots. The United Nations -- and the world's expectations for it -- has declined dramatically over the last few decades. And now, the Bush administration -- with its go-it-alone war in Iraq and its open contempt for the very idea of the United Nations -- has dealt a stunning blow not just to the United Nations, but to the dream of international cooperation. As David Rieff points out in his cover story ("Goodbye, New World Order"), "the most powerful nation on earth...has decided to turn the international system on its head" by rejecting the notion of consensus in international affairs. The fallacy of the Bush approach has already been evident in the botched U.S. occupation of Iraq. The sight of hospitals looted while the wounded and sick lay untreated, along with the inability of the international aid community to operate in a land reduced to chaos, illustrates in the starkest terms the limits of unilateralism. It turns out, despite the scorn of Cheney and Rumsfeld, those blue-helmeted, U.N. peacekeepers -- who are not the troops of an occupying power -- might have served a useful function after all. And it turns out that when it came down to the tough job of rebuilding Iraq, George W. Bush had told us the truth when he ran for president -- he doesn't believe in nation-building. The United States needs international consensus. The dangers this nation faces can only be overcome with the cooperation of the world community -- and not just for tasks like rebuilding Iraq or Afghanistan, but for dealing with such threats as nuclear proliferation and a belligerent North Korea, not to mention that terrorist group Bush seems to have forgotten. The last reports I read indicated that Al Qaeda was operating from places like Germany and Chechnya -- not from Crawford, Texas -- and was preparing to strike again. Until Bush's Iraqi adventure, most of the world stood with us in the fight against terrorism. But if we want other nations to work with us in stopping Al Qaeda, we must first rejoin the world. That's still the only real hope we have. top Focus on a Peacemaker: Arundhati Roy Ryan Backlund Arundhati Roy was thrust onto the international stage in 1997 by her Booker Award winning novel God of Small Things. Her literary acclaim has taken a backseat in recent years to her views on world affairs. She has been an outspoken activist in the fight against corporate globalization, especially relating to its effects to her homeland of India. Ms. Roy, in a September 29, 2001 article for The Guardian, denounced the westernizing of the World, “The dismantling of democracy is proceeding with the speed and efficiency of a Structural Adjustment Program.” Lack of corporate responsibilities concerning the Bhopal explosion and the flooding and consequent displacement of millions of people in the Narmada Valley of Western India have been her primary examples in her fight against globalization. Since the attacks on September 11, Ms. Roy has been relentless in her criticism of the United States’ new foreign and domestic policies. In the same Guardian article, she correctly predicted, “The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place.” She has been extremely critical of America’s involvement in Iraq and believes that such a powerful country need not throw its military might around the globe haphazardly, rather work with and among the global community to help provide a truly just world where hunger and lack of human rights are not looked at as collateral damage but as pieces of a violent past. Her criticism of American government policies do not, however, overflow to the American public. Ms. Roy seems to have a spirit of hope and optimism, even in these times of despair. During a recent interview, she was quoted as saying, “While the "Allies" wait in the desert for an uprising of Shia Muslims on the streets of Basra, the real uprising is taking place in hundreds of cities across the world. It has been the most spectacular display of public morality ever seen.” This faith in the human spirit may be Arundhati Roy’s greatest gift. top

WRITE ON: Progressive News for Northern Michigan

Issue 5 July 2003

Local Links

Marquette Citizens for Peace and Justice

Northwoods Wilderness Recovery

Keweenaw Now

State, National and International Links

Michigan Citizens for Peace

Write On Issues

July

We would like to thank everyone who read the previous issue of Write On. Write On needs funding and articles on subjects that interest you. If you or your group would like to help us cover the costs of printing, $60 for 175 copies, please let us know either by telephone or by email. This assistance is needed if you would like to continue reading this newsletter. Articles for Write On should be no more than 600 words. Please send any questions, comments, upcoming events, or article submissions to writeonup@yahoo.com or call 228-2962.

Look for the next issue of Write On in these locations: PWPL, Emma Joe's, Food Co-op, Sweetwater Café and others

Hello Readers,

We are providing this monthly publication to inform our neighbors of news affecting the people of Northern Michigan. This newsletter will consider such subjects as environmentalism, social justice, and local activism, which do not receive adequate coverage in other media outlets.

Table of Contents

Potential USDA Rule Would Cripple Public Participation

Anne Newcombe

National Healthcare Reform: Good Health, Part One

Katy Nelson, VT Licensed Naturopathic Physician, Marquette Resident

Unitarian Universalists Choose Depleted Uranium as Object of Activism Gail Griffith

The Dandelion Prerogative Carrie Plummer

Declaration of Independence from Corporate Rule
Excerpts from A Declaration of Independence from Corporate Rule" by Alliance for Democracy Founder Ronnie Dugger; first read in front of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia on July 4, 1997

US May Still Need UN Roger Cohn (excerpted from Motherjones.com)

Focus on a Peacemaker: Arundhati Roy Ryan Backlund

Potential USDA Rule Would Cripple Public Participation

Anne Newcombe

Speak up now...or forever hold your peace. This dangerous legal precedent, should we allow it to stand, will directly affect our ability to actively participate in our government "of the people, by the people."

This is the Line, folks. This is yet another, admittedly more lethal, attempt to circumvent the 2 Million plus public comments received, not to mention 2 Million plus again and again every time the US Forest Service comes up with a new back door around public comment, against the USFS's plans to log in the Tongass, one of the last Old Growth US Forests coveted by multi-national timber companies. The USFS (and by extension the Bush administration) has launched another undercover raid on our civil liberties, one which could set a precedent for other public agencies to follow and effectively cripple the public's seemingly newfound ability to organize and participate in its governing process. The language in this proposed rule would eliminate email activism (along with signed petitions and mass produced postcards) as a viable way to make your voice heard in the "hallowed" halls of our government. It is only my humble opinion that it is this administration's, the public agencies', and, in many cases (admittedly not all), our elected representatives' most fervent wish that we would all just shut up and go away and let them go back to their old ways of Washington business with an uninformed, or, more likely, quite-informed-but-too-overworked-and-underpaid-to-have-time-to-ride-herd-on-their-actions electorate.

It is probably not necessary to remind you that this agency (and all other public agencies) is required by law (or have been up to this point) to have an open Public Comment period and to use those comments when devising its final management plan. In this case, it would seem the USFS has decided, under pressure from the increasingly merging mega-corporate timber companies, that the public's wishes for its publicly owned lands are irrelevant. We have global corporate interests worried, and this latest, "buried deep," in the legalese attempt to end run around us is the evidence. I leave the next step to you and your consciences. More details follow below.

Text (and activism opportunity) that follows was excerptedfrom an activism alert list--Endangered Freedoms: Public

Comments Under Attack.

Buried in the National Forest Management Act (NFMA), is a proposal to limit or in some cases, disqualify, any comments that are "mass duplications." This means form letters, electronic actions, petitions, check-off lists, and pre-printed post cards would no longer be considered public comment.

In some cases, these sorts of mechanisms would be completely invalid. In fact, under "Objections to new plans, plan amendments, or plan revisions" on page 72803 of the ruling, the proposal states that when considering comments: ". . . any person or non-Federal entity may submit written objections regarding a proposed plan, amendment or revision to the Reviewing Official. Only original substantive comment that meet objection content requirements set out in paragraph (d) (2) of this section will be accepted. Form letter, check-off lists, pre-printed post cards, or similar duplicative materials will not be accepted as objections."

The Forest Service knows more than any other U.S. agency how effective these means are to the public weighing in on decisions, and are now trying to undercut the democratic process. In 2000, the Forest Service received over 2 million comments in support of The Roadless Areas Conservation Act, the most widely and public supported piece of legislation in years. If it weren't for the ability of online activists, and local organizers to offer convenient forms of public comment, we might have lost the last of our national forests to the logging industry.

Please call the Forest Service and let them know that their attempts at censoring public comment capabilities is an attack on our first amendment rights, and is unacceptable in a democratic world. Call the Content Analysis Team of the ruling at:

(801) 517-1023

Or send a hand written letter to:

USDA FS Planning Rule

Content Analysis Team

P.O. Box 8359

Missoula, MT 59807

For more information about the proposed ruling, just go to: www.fs.fed.us/emc/nfma/includes/final120602.pdf.

See pages 72792 and 72803 to read the specific rules being presented that inhibit public comments.

top

National Healthcare Reform: Good Health, Part One

Katy Nelson, VT Licensed Naturopathic Physician, Marquette Resident

In May’s “Write On”, one healthcare reform advocate described health care in America as “unjust, inefficient, costing too much, covering too little and excluding too many, despite spending almost double per person on health care expenses than any other nation”. Many reformists believe an expanded drug benefit, national health insurance, and some form of government sponsored or managed health care is not only “a right”, but the “right on” choice, as if health were only a function of dollars spent, or something to which one has a just claim that the government is in a position to deny. Where is the discussion on prevention (i.e. not just earlier symptomatic treatment--detection and earlier administration of pharmaceuticals-- but root cause identification)? Where is the recognition that one’s “right” to good health is about responsibly exercising freedom of choice in the marketplace, and that access to good healthcare is less about ease of entry into a homogenous cyclopean medical system and more about the self, it’s healthcare needs, and equal access to alternative options?

Our Western European and Japanese counterparts have something figured out we haven’t yet: that a nation’s health is not about how much it spends, but about how the expenditures prevent illness in the first place. A recent World Health Organization (WHO) study ranks the US at 37th among 191 nations with Japan in first place, living 4.5 more years of good health at about half the cost (the US per capita $3,724 vs. $1,759 in Japan). France came in at #2, providing the best healthcare, at a per capita cost of $2,125, with a good health life extension over the US of 3 years. (www.earthchangestv.com/biology/June2000/0621controversial.htm). Uwe Reinhardt, co-author of the study, described ours as “expensive, heroic care” – meaning, we wait 'til the last minute, and then throw everything at the disease including the kitchen sink and its plumbing. And we continue to do so, instead of helping the person or treating the true cause.

For example, the most recent discussions on lowering the very substantial national cost of diabetes focus on earlier detection, still overlooking the fact that we are an increasingly obese population, addicted to carbohydrates and fat (including the excess carbs that become fat), and that the two chief dietary factors responsible for adult onset diabetes are carbs and fat. Instead of funding a national diabetes detection initiative (and are we talking actual diabetes or insulin resistance, the diabetic precursor resulting from chronic excess of carbs & fat intake?) and instead of an expanded drug benefit remedy, how about funding a change in marketplace and lifestyle choices, increasing the national awareness of dietary impact on health overall? How about price supports for organic farmers at least equal the price supports on tobacco, alcohol and agribusiness? How about tax deductions or vouchers for persons below an income line to buy organic food, join a gym, have at least one preventative physical annually or at least biennially, and attend classes on health education that includes alternative points of view, not just the pyramidal diabetic diet, advocating aspartame as a sugar substitute, or low fat/no fat diets that increase the risk of heart disease? How about recognizing a Health Dividend where costs go down as health improves?

Does one really want a healthcare system established by politicians, managed by insurance companies or think tanks, and currently in 37th place to be “expanded”? Or does one want a more health efficient system, like those in the top ten, where good health is not only a function of access, but of choice and focus on prevention? As a physician of natural medicine, educator, researcher, and healthcare reform advocate, I agree that we are greatly in need of change, and that it IS happening. However, my observation is that the healthiest Americans avoid drugs whenever possible, are educated about food as medicine and make conscious lifestyle choices, exercise physically and spiritually, are independently minded and feisty in supporting alternative thinking, living, & marketing, and appreciate their personal freedom enough to preserve and defend it, daily, without a reliance on the government.

top

Unitarian Universalists Choose Depleted Uranium as Object of Activism Gail Griffith

Four members of the Marquette Unitarian Universalist Congregation attended the annual General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association in Boston last week. Reverend Kayle Rice, delegates Barbara Michael and Gail Griffith, and member Susan Halbrook joined more than 7500 other members of the denomination from the over 1000 congregations in North America.

Delegates passed five Actions of Immediate Witness (AIW) to address recent events. They included one to endorse the proposed Depleted Uranium Munitions Study bill now in the House that would mandate studies of the effects of depleted uranium on the environment and the health of those exposed to it. The proposal for the AIW was presented to the General Assembly by Dr. Griffith, who has given seminars on depleted uranium munitions, chemical and biological weapons, and Gulf War illnesses at Northern Michigan University and at the Peter White Public Library in Marquette. She is a member Marquette Citizens for Peace and Justice.

top

The Dandelion Prerogative Carrie Plummer

It was in early spring my husband and I were visiting our family downstate and staying with his parents. They had a large luscious green lawn with dandelions sprouting everywhere! I was so excited to see them in full bloom. It takes me back to my childhood. I ended up picking a plentiful amount of dandelion leaves one day- their lawn of course was untreated and away from roads, thus the greens were safe to eat. I added organic tomatoes and onions to the mix, topped with my mother-in-law's homemade balsamic vinegarette dressing and needless to say, it was a hit! Eating something so fresh and nourishing that took no fossil fuel to transport, no watering, no cultivating of any sort, is truly a gift from Mother Earth.

European settlers brought the tenacious yellow flower to the New Land because it was widely used as both food and medicine. Dandelions are very high in vitamins and minerals like Vitamin A and have as much Vitamin C by weight as grapefruits. In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says dandelions pack more nutritional punch than even broccoli and spinach. You can make a coffee substitute, wine, and jelly out of them. They stimulate and aid the liver in the elimination of toxins from the blood and are used for breast tumors, cysts, fevers, kidney and gall stones, P.M.S., menopause, hypoglycemia, recent onset diabetes, high blood pressure, digestive disturbances, and hepatitis. They are also used as a skin cleanser and help increase production of mother's milk! Oh, and best of all - they're free!

Unfortunately, many of the inheritors of this potent flower are unappreciative and, frankly, at war with it. A large green carpet with little to no diversity has become the convention. People are spending time and money routinely spraying poisons on their lawns. Many of the commonly used pesticides (herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides) are suspected human carcinogens. Air, water, and soil are being contaminated and in the process, wildlife is disappearing and the friendly beneficial bacteria in the soil are dying. What's most disturbing is that children are up to 6 times more likely to get childhood leukemia or brain cancer when living in or near homes where the lawns are treated with these indiscriminate chemicals. (See Children's Health Environmental Coalition's website: http://www.checnet.org and Pesticide Action Network: http://www.panna.org).

Perhaps more of us can begin to see dandelions, as well as other so-called weeds, like clover and chickweed, as no longer eyesores but rather a gift from our ancestors and Mother Earth. Are we sensitive enough to learn from these survivors of our most deadly poisons? Many Native American Indians believe "whenever possible eat raw and eat wild"- some sage advice to us all. Wouldn't it be wonderful if neighbors came together with their children and picked many of the edible wild plants that grew right on each other's properties and shared a magnificent salad together! What a way to connect children to where food actually comes from (understanding that vegetables and fruits don't miraculously appear at the local grocery stores) as well as allowing them to be team players in the harvesting of the plants, and promoting healthy eating habits for the long haul. (Studies have shown that children are more receptive to eating foods that they normally would have rejected when they participate in the process of growing, harvesting, preparing, or cooking of the foods).
Surprise your neighbor with a large delectable dandelion salad! The leaves, roots, and flowers are all edible (they're less bitter in early spring). Be proud of your dandelions, enjoy your arriving wild visitors (the pollinators), and take advantage of the incredible benefits these beautiful "weeds" provide! So by all means - LET THEM GROW! (Great books: The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook and Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (And Not so Wild) Places both by Steve Brill, and The Chemical-Free Lawn by Warren Schultz. See "Wildman" Steve Bril's website:http://www.econetwork.net/~wildmansteve/body.html.)

top

Declaration of Independence from Corporate Rule
Excerpts from A Declaration of Independence from Corporate Rule" by Alliance for Democracy Founder Ronnie Dugger; first read in front of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia on July 4, 1997

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all persons are of equal value and importance, that we are endowed with certain inalienable rights and shares, that among these are life, liberty, privacy, health care, unblinkered education, fairly paid work, the freedoms of speech, press, religion, assembly, association, sexual expression, and travel, due democratic and legal process, personal safety against war, domination, crime, exploitation, racism, and sexism, a decent if minimal comfort, minimal personal property up to a common limit, and a fair chance for self-realization and personal happiness.

Because of the course of events in our country during the last 15 years it has become necessary for we the people of the United States to declare our government dead to our interests and to reassemble as free persons in a single movement to build a new country in this one. A decent respect for the opinions of our fellow citizens who may not yet aptly understand our present condition requires that we should list the grievances which impel us now to defy and declare our independence of the giant corporations which govern, through the hollowed-out forms of our own government, every stage and every exploitable aspect of our lives.

Corporate giganticism is taking the earth and now is moving powerfully to kill both political and economic democracy.... Having started, in the main, after the Civil War, crushing down on the self-organizing people later on in that century, then concealed for the next 80 years behind the masks of antitrust, progressivism, and regulationism -- for the past 15 years those very abuses, lies, and deceptions of the oncoming American oligarchy have been cascading down from every quarter on our heads and necks and backs -- on our jobs, our pay, our pensions, our communities, our shops and family farms and small-town banks, our very hopes and dreams, all to the further engorgement of the giant corporations, the further enrichment of the hugely rich, and our impressment into humble work and service, earning only pittances and contempt.

Those who established our present government....ordained and established the United States of America, not the United Corporations of America. Today the divine right of kings has been replaced by the divine right of CEOs.... The very structure and logic of corporate giganticism crushes free enterprise and democracy by requiring the absorption or destruction of business competitors small and large and the spurning and violation of the public interest for the corporation's good. So it must be and so it is that when a giant corporation succeeds, democratic society fails.

We are being marched into a New World Order, as one of its buglers called it, but it is to be an order of One World Corporate Tyranny, with national democracies and their citizens absolutely subordinated to the divine right of the fewer and fewer, larger and larger survivors among these unnatural contraptions of production and destruction. Those few corporations that will be left will reign high above us and dominate our work, our health care, our shops and what's left of our farms, our co-ops and our credit unions -- our schools, "the news" we receive and do not receive in their newspapers and on our own airways--our national capital and our national credit, our public lands, our bank deposits, our mutual funds, our insurance policies -- our courts, our elections, our cities and states, our national government -- our amusements by day, our dreams at night, our very lives and deaths.

We are ruled now by a form of government in which hierarchical and authoritarian corporations and the political class they have suborned combine to rule for their own profit and power against the people's interests. The name for that is not democracy, the name for that is crypto-fascism, still young in our case, but soon to be full-fanged. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1938, "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their Democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism."

As the people of the town of Topsfield Massachusetts resolved in June 1776 concerning their former loyalties to the King of England so say we to these self-crowned kings of our politics, our work, and our commerce, "The scene is now changed; our sentiments are altered."

We declare that the judiciary's audacious gift of our personal constitutional rights to the corporations we created is null and void. We instruct our government and courts to severely punish any corporation which violates any of our constitutional rights, most pointedly those secured by the First Amendment. We give fair notice to the egregiously criminal giant corporations of the nation and the world that we will close you down. On these requirements we will not compromise nor will we be denied. And for the support of this Declaration, we mutually pledge, to each other and to the people of the world, our hope, our patience, the risks we dare, the time, the work, and money we can share, and our sacred honor.

top

US May Still Need UN Roger Cohn (excerpted from Motherjones.com)

To a baby-boomer kid growing up in New York, the United Nations was a revered, almost magical, place. Le Corbusier's sleek glass-and-marble building rising from the East River was a symbol of our hopes for the world's future. I remember my first grade-school trip there, marveling at people from all over the globe -- some wearing the robes or headpieces of their native cultures -- and at the cavernous General Assembly hall where delegates used headphones to listen to the proceedings in languages they could understand. When Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjšld was killed in a plane crash on his way to mediate a war in the Congo in 1961, America -- and the world -- felt we had lost an international hero.

Somehow it's hard to imagine Kofi Annan racing off to one of the world's hot spots. The United Nations -- and the world's expectations for it -- has declined dramatically over the last few decades. And now, the Bush administration -- with its go-it-alone war in Iraq and its open contempt for the very idea of the United Nations -- has dealt a stunning blow not just to the United Nations, but to the dream of international cooperation. As David Rieff points out in his cover story ("Goodbye, New World Order"), "the most powerful nation on earth...has decided to turn the international system on its head" by rejecting the notion of consensus in international affairs. The fallacy of the Bush approach has already been evident in the botched U.S. occupation of Iraq. The sight of hospitals looted while the wounded and sick lay untreated, along with the inability of the international aid community to operate in a land reduced to chaos, illustrates in the starkest terms the limits of unilateralism. It turns out, despite the scorn of Cheney and Rumsfeld, those blue-helmeted, U.N. peacekeepers -- who are not the troops of an occupying power -- might have served a useful function after all. And it turns out that when it came down to the tough job of rebuilding Iraq, George W. Bush had told us the truth when he ran for president -- he doesn't believe in nation-building.

The United States needs international consensus. The dangers this nation faces can only be overcome with the cooperation of the world community -- and not just for tasks like rebuilding Iraq or Afghanistan, but for dealing with such threats as nuclear proliferation and a belligerent North Korea, not to mention that terrorist group Bush seems to have forgotten. The last reports I read indicated that Al Qaeda was operating from places like Germany and Chechnya -- not from Crawford, Texas -- and was preparing to strike again.

Until Bush's Iraqi adventure, most of the world stood with us in the fight against terrorism. But if we want other nations to work with us in stopping Al Qaeda, we must first rejoin the world. That's still the only real hope we have.

top

Focus on a Peacemaker: Arundhati Roy Ryan Backlund

Arundhati Roy was thrust onto the international stage in 1997 by her Booker Award winning novel God of Small Things. Her literary acclaim has taken a backseat in recent years to her views on world affairs. She has been an outspoken activist in the fight against corporate globalization, especially relating to its effects to her homeland of India. Ms. Roy, in a September 29, 2001 article for The Guardian, denounced the westernizing of the World, “The dismantling of democracy is proceeding with the speed and efficiency of a Structural Adjustment Program.” Lack of corporate responsibilities concerning the Bhopal explosion and the flooding and consequent displacement of millions of people in the Narmada Valley of Western India have been her primary examples in her fight against globalization.

Since the attacks on September 11, Ms. Roy has been relentless in her criticism of the United States’ new foreign and domestic policies. In the same Guardian article, she correctly predicted, “The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place.” She has been extremely critical of America’s involvement in Iraq and believes that such a powerful country need not throw its military might around the globe haphazardly, rather work with and among the global community to help provide a truly just world where hunger and lack of human rights are not looked at as collateral damage but as pieces of a violent past.

Her criticism of American government policies do not, however, overflow to the American public. Ms. Roy seems to have a spirit of hope and optimism, even in these times of despair. During a recent interview, she was quoted as saying, “While the "Allies" wait in the desert for an uprising of Shia Muslims on the streets of Basra, the real uprising is taking place in hundreds of cities across the world. It has been the most spectacular display of public morality ever seen.” This faith in the human spirit may be Arundhati Roy’s greatest gift.

top