when is oatmeal not really oatmeal, or, why mcdonald's is always crap, no matter what they claim

Q. How do you take a nutritious, pure, easy-to-prepare food and turn it into garbage?

A. Ask the experts: McDonald's.

In this excellent little piece, Mark Bittman deconstructs McDonald's self-described "bowl full of wholesome", which in reality contains 11 not-food ingredients, more sugar than a candy bar, and only 10 fewer calories than a McDonald's cheeseburger.

This is a perfect example of so much that's wrong with the industrial food chain, how advertising lies, and why fast food should be avoided. And if you need some ideas for quick, nutritious breakfasts, Bittman has those, too.

How To Make Oatmeal... Wrong

by Mark Bittman

There’s a feeling of inevitability in writing about McDonald’s latest offering, their “bowl full of wholesome” — also known as oatmeal. The leading fast-food multinational, with sales over $16.5 billion a year (just under the GDP of Afghanistan), represents a great deal of what is wrong with American food today. From a marketing perspective, they can do almost nothing wrong; from a nutritional perspective, they can do almost nothing right, as the oatmeal fiasco demonstrates.

One “positive” often raised about McDonald’s is that it sells calories cheap. But since many of these calories are in forms detrimental rather than beneficial to our health and to the environment, they’re actually quite expensive — the costs aren’t seen at the cash register but in the form of high health care bills and environmental degradation.

Oatmeal is on the other end of the food spectrum. Real oatmeal contains no ingredients; rather, it is an ingredient. As such, it’s a promising lifesaver: oats are easy to grow in almost any non-extreme climate and, minimally processed, they’re profoundly nourishing, inexpensive and ridiculously easy to cook. They can even be eaten raw, but more on that in a moment.

Like so many other venerable foods, oatmeal has been roundly abused by food marketers for more than 40 years. Take, for example, Quaker Strawberries and Cream Instant Oatmeal, which contains no strawberries, no cream, 12 times the sugars of Quaker Old Fashioned Oats and only half of the fiber. At least it’s inexpensive, less than 50 cents a packet on average. (A serving of cooked rolled oats will set you back half that at most, plus the cost of condiments; of course, it’ll be much better in every respect.)

The oatmeal and McDonald’s story broke late last year, when Mickey D’s, in its ongoing effort to tell us that it’s offering “a selection of balanced choices” (and to keep in step with arch-rival Starbucks) began to sell the cereal. Yet in typical McDonald’s fashion, the company is doing everything it can to turn oatmeal into yet another bad choice. (Not only that, they’ve made it more expensive than a double-cheeseburger: $2.38 per serving in New York.) “Cream” (which contains seven ingredients, two of them actual dairy) is automatically added. . .

. . . Here’s the thing: McDonald’s wants to get people in the store. Once a day, once a week, once a month, the more the better, of course, but routinely. And if you buy oatmeal, they’re o.k. with that. But they know that, once inside, you’ll probably opt for a sausage biscuit anyway.

And you won’t be much worse off.

Read it here. And don't ever buy what they're selling - not just the products, but the lies behind them.

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local food on the big stage

I love to see the mainstream media jumping on the local/organic food bandwagon. When you hear a story on AM drive-time radio about buying local to preserve Ontario farms, as a co-worker of mine recently reported, you know a very high level of public awareness has been breached.

The Globe and Mail is running a series about food production. Many of the stories focus on corporate agriculture, food safety, subsidies, and genetically modified foods, but it also includes stories about the local eating movement, food traceability and how to at least partially extricate oneself from the global food chain. Depending on how well versed you are with this issue, it may or may not tell you anything new, but the fact that it's there is very welcome.

One story emphasizes raising your own consciousness about the origins of what you eat, and making small changes - the perfect strategy for the beginner.

Lesson 1: Be aware of your choices

Even if you can't afford to buy local, free-range and organic, and don't have the resources to grow your own, the first step is to simply be mindful of the consequences of your food choices, says Jes Goulet of Cobble Hill, B.C.

Ms. Goulet grows much of her own fruits and vegetables, raises hens for eggs and buys her other groceries from an organic delivery service. She recognizes not everyone has the time, yard space, inclination and ability to do the same.

But, she says, it starts with “sitting down and in your head evaluating, ‘Okay, these are the different sources for this particular food? Which one of these is ideal? Can I afford it?'… and trying to get the best you can with what you've got.”

That often requires making sacrifices. Ms. Goulet estimates she spends $200 a month on organic milk alone for her family of four, but has cut costs in other areas to keep her total grocery bills to about $400 a month. Even though it's less expensive to buy organic milk in plastic jugs, she's willing to pay more for the stuff that comes in glass bottles, since she prefers the taste and the bottles can be reused instead of recycled. . . .

Lesson 2: Start small

If you were to analyze the lifecycle of every grocery item you bought, you'd be paralyzed whenever you went shopping, says Liz Gaige, the Vancouver resident behind the website LocalDelicious.com.

“You don't have to change your whole diet,” she says. “But if you just shifted 5 per cent of your grocery budget into eating more locally, eating more healthfully and … thinking about where your stuff's coming from, it has this huge impact.”

Lessons 3 and 4 involve planning, both short- and long-term, and collaborating with others with similar goals.

Another story deals with food traceability as marketing technique. Surprise, surprise: if the government won't act on our behalf, Walmart, Loblaws and other for-profit enterprises end up enacting policy for us. This works, to a very limited degree, only as long as food safety and the environment stay "hot" concerns, so public interest can be used to leverage profit. But corporate and public interests will rarely dovetail. It's usually quite the opposite. Corporations exit to create profit, not to protect our health or the environment. Let's not forget, that's how the industrial food chain came to exist in the first place!

“The idea that companies might help us all by imposing some standards is not a bad one,” said Charles Fishman, an investigative journalist and author of ‘The Wal-Mart Effect.’

“A corporation is not accountable, except in the marketplace,” he said, adding: “If we depend on corporations to figure out what the standards should be and impose them ... we may like it in the first year, stop noticing it in the middle eight years, and in the 10th year, the corporation may decide ‘This is just killing us in terms of money. We’re not going to do it any more’,” he said. “There’s no recourse [for consumers]. That’s not the way a food safety organization should work.”

Jorgen Schlundt, the recently departed director of food safety at the World Health Organization, worries big retailers view food safety as a marketing tool.

“There is a huge difference between what consumers ... think is important and what is really important,” Dr. Schlundt said. “It is extremely important that the science that standards are built upon and the standards themselves are not made by industry – not made by the people who are supposed to be monitored by government,” he said. . . .

“If the food safety system isn’t up to the task of a complicated global food supply, it may be that. . . we’ll be sorry if we don’t fix the normal system rather than simply relying on corporate food cops, so to speak,” Mr. Fishman said.

So when you see your local supermarket congratulating itself for being green, remember that it's good, but not good enough.

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petition to ban plastic packaging on local fruit in ontario

Last summer, I was dismayed - horrified, really - to discover that all the clear plastic packaging I've been throwing into the recycling bin for years is not, in fact, recyclable (details). I emailed with both Region of Peel Waste Management and my MPP's office, but ended up in a runaround, each office telling me someone else was responsible.

Later, I wrote about a related green problem: non-recyclable plastics and organic lettuce.

In short, other than buying eggs in cardboard containers, we haven't been able to cut down on buying clear plastic at all. We're not able to shop at a farmer's market, and so much of the produce we buy at Loblaws is packed in clear plastic, even if it hasn't traveled very far from farm to store. It really bothers me, and I haven't been able to do anything about it.

So I was very happy when wmtc reader and friend Stephanie sent me this petition: Stop Packaging Local Fruit in Plastic. It was started by two women in Ottawa, through a blog called The No-Plastic Project, which looks at simple steps we can each take for greener living, and maybe some less-simple collective action we can figure out, too.

One post shows a blue recycling bin overflowing with all kinds of non-recyclable plastic. The blogger asks:

Monday morning in OOS. Garbage day. The blue boxes are lined up on the curbs, full of plastic of all sorts and shapes and sizes. I see plastic bags, clamshell packages, empty flower pots, styrofoam, a watering can, even plastic furniture!! These overflowing blue boxes sit smugly beside almost empty garbage cans.

I wonder: Are people completely unaware of what is and is not recyclable in this city, or are they just incredibly hopeful?

I can answer that for one recycler in Mississauga: I was unaware - although not completely, just on this one point. Now I am just hopeful. I continue to put all my plastic in the recycling bin. Hoping.

If you live in Ontario, please read and consider signing this petition.

We the undersigned ask that Ontario Tender Fruit Producers and Loblaw Companies Ltd. stop using plastic clamshell containers in the packaging of fresh fruit due to the negative environmental and health impacts of plastic pollution caused by such single-use containers.

Sign here.

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monbiot: ethical meat eating is possible - and better for the earth

I have two pieces to post, both of great interest to me, both of which confirm my own point of view.

I realize in some sense I'm suffering from an echo-chamber effect, reflecting and enlarging on what I already believe. But in another sense, seeing others more knowledgeable in a field use their research and experience to confirm my beliefs is not only comforting, it's illuminating. It's not as if the beliefs that are being reinforced are thoughtless or knee-jerk. My beliefs are the result of years of reading, observation, challenge, debate and internal conflict.

The first piece was sent to me by very-longtime reader and internet friend deang: George Monbiot writing about ethical meat-eating.

Conversations about omnivorousness, vegetarianism and veganism often leave people feeling bruised, if not attacked. So I feel I must emphasize that I am not arguing for anyone else. I have tremendous respect for anyone who chooses not to use animal products out of respect for animals.

Regular readers of wmtc already know the drill. I was a vegetarian for slightly more than two years. It didn't work for me personally, in terms of health and diet, but beyond that, I came to realize that I don't believe eating animals is wrong. However, I've learned too much about the horrors of industrial food production - on animals, on the earth, on labour, on our health - to eat in ignorance. So I'm striving for conscious, ethical, sustainable omnivorousness. It's an imperfect system, but it runs on the theory that whatever we do is worth doing, and the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Long ago, I had a co-worker-friend who was active in the animal rights movement. She decried my emphasis on animal welfare, because, to her mind, it enabled cruelty. She believed we should not improve animal-farming conditions; we should eliminate meat production altogether. We should not try to pressure McDonald's into sourcing meat from farms with better practices; we should shut down McDonald's. I appreciated her radicalism, but after our conversation, I moved further into the animal-welfare camp. Withdrawing from the system started looking like a cop-out.

George Monbiot, who formerly preached that a vegan diet was the most ethical choice, now believes otherwise. In doing so, he does what so few of us can manage: he decides he was wrong, admits it publicly, and agrees with someone who has previously excoriated him. That's a rare and impressive feat in this world.

I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly

This will not be an easy column to write. I am about to put down 1,200 words in support of a book that starts by attacking me and often returns to this sport. But it has persuaded me that I was wrong. More to the point, it has opened my eyes to some fascinating complexities in what seemed to be a black and white case.

In the Guardian in 2002 I discussed the sharp rise in the number of the world's livestock, and the connection between their consumption of grain and human malnutrition. After reviewing the figures, I concluded that veganism "is the only ethical response to what is arguably the world's most urgent social justice issue". I still believe that the diversion of ever wider tracts of arable land from feeding people to feeding livestock is iniquitous and grotesque. So does the book I'm about to discuss. I no longer believe that the only ethical response is to stop eating meat.

In Meat: A Benign Extravagance, Simon Fairlie pays handsome tribute to vegans for opening up the debate. He then subjects their case to the first treatment I've read that is both objective and forensic. His book is an abattoir for misleading claims and dodgy figures, on both sides of the argument.

There's no doubt that the livestock system has gone horribly wrong. Fairlie describes the feedlot beef industry (in which animals are kept in pens) in the US as "one of the biggest ecological cock-ups in modern history". It pumps grain and forage from irrigated pastures into the farm animal species least able to process them efficiently, to produce beef fatty enough for hamburger production. Cattle are excellent converters of grass but terrible converters of concentrated feed. The feed would have been much better used to make pork.

Pigs, in the meantime, have been forbidden in many parts of the rich world from doing what they do best: converting waste into meat. Until the early 1990s, only 33% of compound pig feed in the UK consisted of grains fit for human consumption: the rest was made up of crop residues and food waste. Since then the proportion of sound grain in pig feed has doubled. There are several reasons: the rules set by supermarkets; the domination of the feed industry by large corporations, which can't handle waste from many different sources; but most important the panicked over-reaction to the BSE and foot-and-mouth crises.

Feeding meat and bone meal to cows was insane. Feeding it to pigs, whose natural diet incorporates a fair bit of meat, makes sense, as long as it is rendered properly. The same goes for swill. Giving sterilised scraps to pigs solves two problems at once: waste disposal and the diversion of grain. Instead we now dump or incinerate millions of tonnes of possible pig food and replace it with soya whose production trashes the Amazon. Waste food in the UK, Fairlie calculates, could make 800,000 tonnes of pork, or one sixth of our total meat consumption.

But these idiocies, Fairlie shows, are not arguments against all meat eating, but arguments against the current farming model. He demonstrates that we've been using the wrong comparison to judge the efficiency of meat production. Instead of citing a simple conversion rate of feed into meat, we should be comparing the amount of land required to grow meat with the land needed to grow plant products of the same nutritional value to humans. The results are radically different.

. . . .

He goes on to butcher a herd of sacred cows. Like many greens I have thoughtlessly repeated the claim that it requires 100,000 litres of water to produce every kilogram of beef. Fairlie shows that this figure is wrong by around three orders of magnitude. It arose from the absurd assumption that every drop of water that falls on a pasture disappears into the animals that graze it, never to re-emerge. A ridiculous amount of fossil water is used to feed cattle on irrigated crops in California, but this is a stark exception.

Similarly daft assumptions underlie the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's famous claim that livestock are responsible for 18% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, a higher proportion than transport. Fairlie shows that it made a number of basic mistakes. It attributes all deforestation that culminates in cattle ranching in the Amazon to cattle: in reality it is mostly driven by land speculation and logging. It muddles up one-off emissions from deforestation with ongoing pollution. It makes similar boobs in its nitrous oxide and methane accounts, confusing gross and net production. (Conversely, the organisation greatly underestimates fossil fuel consumption by intensive farming: its report seems to have been informed by a powerful bias against extensive livestock keeping.)

Overall, Fairlie estimates that farmed animals produce about 10% of the world's emissions: still too much, but a good deal less than transport. . . .

The meat-producing system Fairlie advocates differs sharply from the one now practised in the rich world: low energy, low waste, just, diverse, small-scale. But if we were to adopt it, we could eat meat, milk and eggs (albeit much less) with a clean conscience. By keeping out of the debate over how livestock should be kept, those of us who have advocated veganism have allowed the champions of cruel, destructive, famine-inducing meat farming to prevail. It's time we got stuck in.

Read the column here.

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"drilling, spilling and killing": why we protest, part two

This is the second part of my report on the "Shout Out for Global Justice" event that I attended on Friday, June 25. Part One is here.

* * * *

Next Amy Goodman took the stage. Her first three words were: "Drilling, spilling and killing." These so-called world leaders gathered here for the G20, she said, are not discussing how to fix the world's problems, but how to augment them.

Goodman related a few stories from Democracy Now!'s travels in the US Gulf of Mexico states right after the BP disaster. The fishermen whose lives have been devastated by the explosion, temporarily hired on cleanup crews, were afraid to talk to NPR because they had all been forced to sign hush contracts - forbidding them to speak in exchange for work.

This is why, she said, we need a media covering oil disasters that is not brought to us by energy companies.

Goodman read about the latest Canadian soldier to die in Afghanistan. (Two more were announced today.) This brings the number of Canadian forces killed in Afghanistan to 150. Thousands of American soldiers have been killed in that war-for-oil. And the only thing sadder, Goodman said, than knowing those numbers, is not knowing the numbers of Afghans who have been killed.

She mentioned Brock McIntosh, a US Afghanistan veteran who is speaking out against the war there, and the brave veterans, many in uniform - which puts them at great risk for military arrest, court-martial and punishment - who lead peace marches during the 2008 US political conventions. But the public never saw them on mainstream media.

This is why we need a media covering war that is not brought to us by weapons manufacturers.

A media covering the US health care crisis and the piecemeal privatization of Canadian public health care that is not brought to us by insurance companies.

"Two hundred tea-partiers hold a protest," Goodman said, "and their numbers are dwarfed by the number of mainstream media reporters covering the show. 15,000 people participate in the People's Climate Conference in Cochambamba, Bolivia, and 200,000 people crowd the 2010 US Social Forum in Detroit, and no corporate media covers it."

This is why we need a media not brought to us by the same companies who profit from war and globalization and privatization.

Goodman told the story of the arrest and police abuse of herself and her colleagues at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. When she showed her media credentials, a secret service agent ripped them from her neck and confiscated them. One of her colleagues was dragged by her legs, face-down on the street. They were charged with felony offenses. Many in the audience didn't know about this, and they were gasping.

Right now, here in Canada, Goodman said, we are seeing the criminalization of dissent. A billion dollars spent on security means there is a truth they need to contain. She smiled and asked, "A billion dollars to contain all of you?"

* * * *

Leo Gerard spoke next. Gerard is the president of the United Steelworkers, and vice-president of the AFL-CIO. I imagine that for many in the audience, Gerard was the least interesting speaker, but his presence at the event was crucial. It is only through organized labour that workers can succeed in challenging corporate power. Even when workers unite, the battles are dire and desperate. But alone, it is hopeless. And when I say "organized labour," that doesn't have to mean a traditional union, although that may work. Vandana Shiva's farmer's networks are organized labour, too.

Gerard grew up in Sudbury, Ontario, a mining community with deep union roots. The town has been devastated by the mining giant Vale Inco. The mine workers of Sudbury have been on strike a full year. But still, facing so much pressure and loss, they stood strong and overwhelming rejected Vale's latest insulting offer. They have help and support from union leadership and rank-and-file all over Canada and the US, and they set an example for all of us. Gerard acknowledged the Sudbury strikers from the stage and all the union activists in the audience cheered them.

When Vale Inco came to Sudbury, it promised to be part of the community. Instead, it created a social disorder that, no matter what the settlement, will reverberate in the community for generations. And the Canadian government didn't just let this happen, Gerard said. The government made it happen.

He said that right now in Canada, 475,000 people are currently collecting Employment Insurance, but at least that many more have given up looking for work and are ineligible for the narrowly-defined benefits.

He reminded us that all over the US, people lost their homes and their life savings, taxpayers were forced to bailout the financial institutions from the mess they themselves created, and the heads of those companies helped themselves to hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses.

Economic sustainability, Gerard said, means regulation. It means a tax on global financial transactions. It means an end to the idea that we can have either good jobs or a clean environment - for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren, we will have both or we will have neither.

* * * *

After more incredible rhythm music from the Raging Asian Women, John Hilary spoke. Hilary is director of UK-based War on Want. War on Want is an anti-poverty organization that understands that poverty is political. It works in partnership with people in developing countries, campaigning for human rights, and against the root causes of global poverty: inequality and injustice. It works with farmers, factory workers and people living on the margins of society, building networks and communities - not for charity, but for lasting change.

Hilary told us that Canada's image in EU countries has taken a drastic downturn, as former PM Paul Martin travels around lecturing on deficit reduction. How should countries reduce their fiscal deficits? By visiting pain on the poorest sectors of society, through drastic cuts to the social welfare systems.

It took decades to build these public systems so that seniors could live in dignity, children could be cared for while parents worked, and taxes could be used to help people meet their basic needs. And with one stroke of a corporate-government pen, these vital systems are destroyed. To Europeans who care about social justice, "Canada" now means the most regressive and socially unfair economic model.

We're seeing, Hilary said, a kind of macho game among governments to see who can cut the most services. With an emergency budget, the UK saw 25% of its public services cut, 500,000 public-sector jobs eliminated, and the VAT, the most regressive tax that hits working people the hardest, raised yet again.

And it's even worse for countries dependent on the IMF. Latvia saw a full 40% of its public spending cut in order to receive IMF funding. (If you've read Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, you know how that works.)

The G8/G20, Hilary said, has declared war on working people and marginalized communities. The bankers get a free ride and we pay for the crisis they caused.

Now, he warned, the Canada/EU free-trade agreement that is being negotiated behind our backs is privatizing sectors of our society that we don't even realize can be traded away: water, health care, indigenous resources.

The G8/G20 is reviving all the failed institutions that caused such poverty and destruction in the 1990s: the IMF, the WTO, the World Bank. The re-emergence of these failed institutions goes to the heart of the illegitimacy of the G8/G20.

Hilary reminded us that the so-called leaders will emerge from their conference saying they will help this country or that need with a few million here and there. "They will dole out little bits of charity and aid. Don't get taken in!"

* * * *

Next came the other speaker, with Vandana Shiva, I was most excited to see, Pablo Solon, the Bolivian ambassador to the UN. In an amusing sidenote, emcee R. H. Thomson mistakenly introduced Solon as the "Bolivian ambassador to the US". Solon reminded us that Bolivia has no ambassador to the US, because they kicked the US embassy out of their country!

Solon was a water warrior; now he is a water warrior ambassador. If you saw the movie "The Corporation," you know something about the stunning victory of the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia over the Bechtel corporation, reversing the unilateral privatization of Bolivia's water supply. I have not yet seen the documentary Blue Gold: World Water Wars but I'm told it's a must.

Solon's present battle - the battle he urges us all to join, the battle the Council of Canadians leads in Canada and Maude Barlow leads in the UN - is to have water declared a human right. We must bring a UN declaration of Water As A Human Right to a vote, and, Solon said, "We must expose those countries who vote against it, as sometimes we must expose vampires."

After the people of Cochabamba kicked Bechtel out of their country, Bechtel sued Bolivia for $30 to $100 million to recover what they said were their losses. After a ten-year court battle in which the people would not surrender, Bechtel was paid damages of one dollar. And they left.

Then the people of Bolivia went on to re-nationalize all the industries that had been privatized: gas, oil, banking. "We re-nationalized our government," Solon said, which brought great cheers. Bolivians created public jobs, raised salaries, restored and increased social benefits. "We can do this," he said, "because we now control the economic power of the country, not the corporations." Before, 82% of the profits of the energy sector went into private hands, and 18% went into the public coffers. Now 18% goes to private hands and 82% is reinvested in the public sector. And do you know what? The companies still see a profit. There is no deficit. There is a surplus.

This is why we must listen to people like Pablo Solon and Vandana Shiva. They bring us living proof that another world is possible.

Solon spoke of the urgency of climate change and establishing "Mother Earth rights," as the people's climate conference in Cochabamba established. "We must recognize," he said, "that there are some things that cannot be commodified."

* * * *

As I said, I had to leave during Naomi Klein's talk and I didn't see Maude Barlow. I heard Barlow was a bit overwhelming and depressing, giving a litany of statistics and not a lot of hope. But I wasn't there. Barlow and everyone from the Council of Canadians deserve heaps of credit for organizing and promoting this incredible evening.

The part of Klein's talk that I did hear outlined how the G20 - which seems to have appeared out of nowhere - was created by Paul Martin, Bill Clinton and Larry Summers in 1999. Three powerful men choosing a few regional players who were friendly to North American interests to help the world's most powerful nations create the conditions that caused the global economic crisis. Summits like the G8 and the G20 are attempts to sideline and marginalize an already-weak United Nations, so these rich, powerful countries can't be outvoted by the world's poor.

Klein also mentioned how weird it is seeing Stephen Harper lecture the world on how to manage their countries, when she's not sure why Harper is allowed to run this country.

Of course we all laugh and applaud, but really. Why?

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"we need g6,000,000,000": why we protest, part one

Sunday morning, the day after.

The day after massive peaceful protests against the G8/G20, after small non-peaceful protests and vandalism, after police-provoked and police-allowed violence.

The day after police violence against peaceful demonstrators - after rubber bullets, pepper spray, baton beatings, bicycles smashing against bodies, pre-dawn raids with guns drawn.

The day after 25,000 people march in the rain in Toronto, carrying signs about women's human rights, the for-profit destruction of the planet, the rights of seniors to live in dignity, the demise of democracy, the rights of indigenous peoples.

The day after, I'm going to change the subject, turn back the clock, just a little.

These are some of my notes from the stellar event called "Shout Out for Global Justice," held at Massey Hall on Friday night. (Held there because the University of Toronto closed down completely and cancelled everything on campus - with three weeks' notice and without paying many of their employees. Union grievances abound.)

Unfortunately, because of transit schedules, I wasn't able to stay for the entire event, so my notes drop off a cliff - I heard only half of Naomi Klein and none of Maude Barlow. But I hope the notes I have will paint a picture of why we must protest the G8/G20, and what is being done to our world in the name of capitalism.

If you don't already know these speakers and the issues they speak and write about, I encourage you to follow links and buy their books and learn, learn, learn.

* * * *

The event was emceed by Canadian actor R. H. Thomson and streamed live via Rabble across Canada, to the US Social Forum in Detroit, and to several different countries. It was kicked off by the Raging Asian Women taiko drummers, who also played after intermission. They were amazing! I was quite smitten.

Thomson said while the G20 so-called leaders are talking about financial deficits, the real leaders are here in Massey Hall, talking about more dire deficits: environmental deficits, social justice deficits, deficits of native rights, water as a human right, media, peace.

The first speaker was Clayton Thomas-Muller of the
Indigenous Environmental Network, organizer of their tar sands campaign for the past 20 years. (I also heard Thomas-Muller speak at the Marxism conference.)

He spoke about Canada's shameful record on native rights - how native lands are exploited for resources while the people on those lands benefit the least - how the great resource wealth of native land is stolen in exchange for environmental degradation, health crises, and a paltry token royalty.

At the same time, leaders of the environmental movement do not necessarily include aboriginal people in their plans and those plans often do not reflect the realities of aboriginal people, people of colour, low-income people and people in other marginalized communities that are disproportionately affected by environmental destruction.

Because of this, the IEN calls for climate justice - the link between the rights of indigenous peoples and the environment.

Thomas-Muller reminded us that his community has a 60,000-year track record of providing green jobs for the community. It will be native people, he said, joining with the labour movement, who will bring down the tar sands. (Also at the Marxism conference, Thomas-Muller gave a separate talk about the tar sands. I wish I had been able to attend, but there's a lot of great info on their website.)

Thomas-Muller was passionate and stirring, calling on us to reject the authority of the G8/G20, and look to the authority of the people, ourselves.

He said: I am here to tell you: you are not sheep. You are wolves.

* * * *

Next Vandana Shiva took the stage. I hope you know Dr. Shiva's work. She is a scientist, philosopher, writer, environmental activist, and global food and farming activist. She is the founder of Navdanya, a network of organic producers that trains farmers in seed sovereignty, food sovereignty and sustainable agriculture, and helps set up and promote fair trade organic networks in India. I can't really do Navdanya justice in this description. You should go to their website and learn for yourself.

Shiva is a warm, funny, engaging person, and her presence onstage filled me with joy and hope. She said, "You know, I'm actually starting to feel sorry for the G20. Not only are they so boring, they don't even know what they want to do anymore! Not only are we more than them, we are so much more fun!"

When Shiva read about the civil liberties' crackdowns and the noise cannons, she thought, they are really afraid we will be heard. She said in India women use their own sound cannons: they bring out their pots and pans and rolling pins and take to the streets. "And let me tell you, that noise we make has a way of scaring the patriarchs!"

Shiva said that her country, India, is being used to enlarge the nuclear agenda. 200,000 tonnes of uranium, mined on indigenous lands in North America, is being forced on India, as the nuclear industry there balloons to a $15-billion enterprise. The corporations who profit from this have worked out a deal to cap their own liabilities at a ridiculously low level - so, as Shiva said, they can create another Bhopaul and have the legal right to walk away from it. This courtesy of US corporate economist under a Democrat administration, Lawrence Summers.

US international "development" money is now all about biotechnology and profits for Monsanto. It's no coincidence, Shiva said, that the provinces most associated with this "development" have the highest rates of farmer suicides. It's the same pattern being forced on the entire world: the socialization of risks and costs, the privatization of profits. Now even liabilities are socialized, as taxpayers are forced to bail out the corporations from the effects of their own disastrous policies.

And Shiva brings the story full circle: none of this can happen without militarization. Global military budgets are sucking the life out of our needy world. The money must be redirected to reversing climate change, local food production, clean water, global health.

She noted something I had never thought of before: why is it that only these financial and economic meetings bring out the heavy police presence and civil liberties crackdowns? The United Nations represents almost 200 nations, "not just this pathetic 20," but we don't see the thousands of police for the UN.

The police presence at the G20 is both a symptom and a symbol of the militarization of the entire economic structure, where the land of the world's poorest people is being grabbed and exploited by the world's most powerful corporations.

Shiva asked, who is the G8 or the G20 that they presume to speak for us? The United Nations, G198, is much better, but even that is only a start. We need G6-billion. G6,000,000,000. The whole world.

She said, We are here to tell them, there is a world order beyond corporate power.

Part 2: Amy Goodman, Leo Gerard, John Hilary, Pablo Solon.

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