The disclosures come as European countries, including Britain, prepare to vote on whether the GM-modified corn should go on sale to the public. A vote last week by the European Union failed to secure agreement over whether the product should be sold here, after Britain and nine other countries voted in favour....However, the disclosure of the health effects on the Monsanto rats has intensified the row over whether the corn is safe to eat without further research.

A bit of history. Last May, Monsanto pulled its genetically modified Roundup Ready wheat from the launch pad because millers, bread and wheat councils, and trade groups from all over the world told them, effectively, that America would face a global ban if they tried to bring a GM wheat to market.  In light of these very serious trade threats, a deal-breaking study from an influential Iowa State University ag economist, Dr. Robert Wisner, written in late 2003, spelled out exactly what would happen to rural America if such a global ban went into place.

Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency [as the writer calls this Great Depression-style collapse -b.]. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high tech, not "services" like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming. This is no doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work. The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. Food production will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for decades. We can anticipate the re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring class. It will be composed largely of the aforementioned economic losers who had to relinquish their grip on the American dream. These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.

Bruce Sterling has said that the monolithic structures we've come to rely on in the 20th century are doomed - not just the notion of superpowers, but all large, cumbersome structures, no matter how profitable they seem to be right now. Like Kunstler, the Rolling Stone writer, I think food and its distribution will drive the change. Right now the average case of food travels 1500 miles before it arrives at your grocery (it's coffee - the world's second-largest commodity after oil - that puts that average into quadruple digits and keeps it there). That's totally insane and unsustainable. So are pears from Argentina and peppers from Israel. So is all the cheap grown food in America, particularly corn and soybeans grown for our beef industry. The price of corn is actually lower per bushel today than it was in 1950 - because of corporate giveaways known as the Farm Bill - in order to keep the price of meat down. And don't even get me started on what farm laborers earn. It's an absolute sin, considering what they bring to our tables. But that's a rant for another day.

The "economic underpinnings" of my book (to again reference Sterling) are based on theories like Kunstler's about what will happen to America and its wobbly, unsustainable ecomony. What will happen if there's an agricultural crisis? What will happen if America can't afford its impossibly cheap food any more, or if the gargantuan food distribution system in this country collapses? Back to Rolling Stone:

Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. 

Bigness, which was the American Dream of the two Roosevelt presidencies, is now a value we can't afford. We can't afford a new New Deal, no matter what the modern "Democrats" say, because if gas prices keep edging upward, very soon we won't be able to afford Franchise America, either. 

I don't say this to depress or even to incite. Kunstler's article speaks about what I see every day in my grocery job, talking to the farmers from whom my store buys product. This job of mine gives me a rare perspective, since groceries don't normally buy directly from farmers, don't even know the farmers whose food they turn around sell. It makes me wonder what would/will happen to a city like mine - Minneapolis, a northern town utterly reliant on California, Texas, and Florida for its winter food - if gas prices doubled. It makes me wonder what would happen to America if we became dependent on our own food resources, as we were a century ago.  

Buying locally, that catch phrase from the nineties, isn't an act of lefty nobility. It's not a quaint bumper sticker. It's boot camp for eaters. "Buying locally" is a training course for shoppers, distributors, and retailers, getting them to look up from their damn shopping lists and wholesale buying clipboards long enough to get them ready for the next Great Depression.

OK. Kid's stirring. Nap's over. No time to edit for neatness.

Chow!

* that working people create their own society through collective action from below; and

* that exploitation of labour will always exist and needs community action to correct it through active redistribution of wealth and power.

-George Galloway

"The United States was not only aware of Iraqi oil sales which violated UN sanctions and provided the bulk of the illicit money Saddam Hussein obtained from circumventing UN sanctions," the report said. "On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the illicit oil sales."

As if it matters. The air over Washinton DC is choked and black with the discharge from smoking guns. Images of Cheney wearing a Halliburton blazer and eating the spleens of children could be broadcast simultaneously across every news channel, and Americans would say, "What? This is outrageous! Everybody Loves Raymond is off the air??"

Twice in the past week, doctors at the provincial hospital in the northern city of Uíge were exposed to blood from infected patients, and so are now at risk of developing the disease themselves. The virus causes a hemorrhagic fever that can be fatal within a week.

Some of the practices in this hospital are astoundingly stupid, especialy when one considers that theWHO, CDC, Doctors without Borders and other medical groups have descended on the city like, well, a plague. With 255 deaths in the most deadly Marburg outbreak in history, idiocy like this is still happening:

In another case, staff members put a baby into the cot of a child who had just died of Marburg virus, without first disinfecting the cot.

So, if they don't bring patients here, the locals are "superstitious" and "uninformed," eh?