Author Archives: Will7881iwjsf

Is the Senate About to Put a Halt to GMO Labeling?

by Will7881iwjsf Posted on June 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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As recently as two weeks ago, the food industry was preparing to place labels on food products that contain genetically modified ingredients. But if a bi-partisan deal cobbled together last Thursday in the Senate Agriculture Committee gets signed into law, widespread labeling likely won’t come to pass. Instead, food companies will have the option of disclosing GM ingredients on their products with QR codes that can be read by smartphones, accompanied by only the words “scan here for more food information”—without direct on-package mention of GMOs.

The fight centers on a Vermont law, due to go into effect on July 1, that would require labeling in that state. Rather than go through the trouble of segregating out and labeling products destined for a state with a population 626,000, many huge food companies had instead resigned themselves to labeling nationwide. In recent months Mars, General Mills, Kellogg, ConAgra and Campbell Soup all announced plans for labeling.

The looming prospect provoked a massive legislative effort, spearheaded by the Grocery Manufacturers Association, to pass a bill in Congress to nullify state labeling initiatives, full stop. Ever since that bill failed to gain traction in the Senate in March, Senate Ag Committee Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and ranking Democrat Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) began working to cobble together a compromise. Under their bill, products that contain GM ingredients will only have to include a QR code, which in-the-know consumers with smartphones can scan.

This week, Roberts and Stabenow began pushing hard for the full Senate to consider their compromise bill, reports Politico’s Helena Bottemiller Evich. They have industrial agriculture interests at their backs, Evich adds, noting that the American Soybean Association urged its members to email and call their senators “repeatedly until this legislation passes.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont), meanwhile, has vowed to “do everything I can to defeat this legislation.”

The Senate deal is widely viewed as a defeat for labeling advocates and a victory for the seed/pesticide industry. Andrew Kimbrell, a long-time industry critic and executive director of the Center for Food Safety, denounced the bill in an emailed statement. “This is not a labeling bill; it is a non-labeling bill,” he wrote. “Clear, on-package GE food labeling should be mandatory to ensure all Americans have equal access to product information.” Meanwhile, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a deep-pocketed trade group called funded by major food processors as well as agrichemical/GMO titans like Monsanto, DuPont, and Dow, praised it as the “commonsense solution for consumers, farmers and businesses.”

If the proposed QR-code solution passes, it will preempt Vermont’s law. Whether it will pass the full Senate and House and be signed by President Obama remains to be seen. Stabenow had opposed previous efforts to preempt state labeling laws, so getting her on board was a big step closer to putting a halt to GMO labeling.

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Is the Senate About to Put a Halt to GMO Labeling?

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This Is What It’s Like to Live Without a Country

by Will7881iwjsf Posted on October 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Greg Constantine began working on what would become the Nowhere People project in 2005. A year-long project spurred by meeting North Korean defectors in China morphed into a decade-long investigation that took him around the world. Initially Constantine focused on Asia: documenting the lives of stateless people in Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Nepal. Part of that work lead to the Exiled to Nowhere book, which examined the plight of the Rohingya people in Burma.

As he got deeper into the subject, Constantine took an ambitious leap and expanded the work to Africa, working with the UN refugee agency in Kenya and Ivory Coast. He traveled to Sri Lanka to photograph the Hill Tamils, and to Ukraine, the Dominican Republic, and then the Middle East: Kuwait, Lebanon, and Iraq. Most recently, Constantine’s turned to Europe—the Netherlands, Italy, Serbia, Poland, and Malta—visiting 18 countries in all.

This woman from the Roma community in Serbia was unable to register her four children, is now pregnant, and will likely not be able to register her newborn. (2014)

A woman from the Nubian community in Kenya holds a photograph of her grandfather and other soldiers of the King’s African Rifles. The Nubian community have lived in Kenya for more than 100 years. (2008)

Constantine’s book Nowhere People brings you into the homes of the Rohingya, Roma, Crimean Tartars, Nubians, Hill Tamils, Haitians living in the Dominican Republic, Kurds, Dalits, Ahwazi, Bihari, Bukinabé in Ivory Coast, and Bidoons of Kuwait. It’s a bit of a blur. The similarity in how these people live and suffer helps bring a sense of scale to the problem.

The book is a deep dig into a rather unsexy story about people who have been exiled from their home countries or are not accepted by their birth countries simply because of their ethnicity or where their families may have come from. Often they can’t leave the country that doesn’t want them because they have no papers. They have no passport, no birth certificate, nothing to verify who they are or where they came from. They’re stuck.

Constantine explains:

Without citizenship, stateless people belong to no country and are refused most social, civil and economic rights. In most cases, they cannot work legally, receive basic state health care services, obtain an education, open a bank account or benefit from even the smallest development programs. They are often deprived the freedom to travel, the right to own land or possess essential documents like an ID card, birth certificate or passport. As non-persons, they are excluded from participating in the political process and are removed from the protection of laws, leaving them vulnerable to extortion, harassment and any number of human rights abuses. Statelessness paralyzes them in poverty and constructs challenges that plague every aspect of a person’s life.

The book, in its scope and depth, brings to mind a vast Sebastiao Salgado project (think Migrations) or Ed Kashi’s excellent Curse of the Black Gold book on the Nigerian oil industry.

Nowhere People is the kind of project that young documentary photographers often dream about pursuing without fully taking into account how much time it will take and, importantly, how much money it will cost. Constantine worked with a number of NGOs and got grants to continue the project from such notable organizations as the Open Society Institute, the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, the Oak Foundation, the European Network of Statelessness, and Blue Earth Alliance, among other supporters. The back end of a project like this, stringing together the amount of support Constantine did, is every bit as impressive as the photography.

Youth from the stateless Urdu-speaking community (or the Bihari community) demonstrate at a rally in Dhaka in 2006. In 2008, the community was granted Bangladesh citizenship after 35 years of being stateless.

A young stateless boy pushes a cart at a fish market in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia. Up to 50,000 children, mostly of Filipino and Indonesian descent, are stateless in Sabah. (2006)

Ibrahim, 24, was born in Mali and migrated to Ivory Coast when he was fourteen. He is stateless and now trapped in the area of Soubré because he has no documents and cannot travel through check posts. (2010)

Originally from Bosnia, this stateless man from the Roma community has lived in Italy for more than 30 years but is still without citizenship. Without documents, he was arrested and put in detention at a facility in central Rome. (2015)

Children from the Dom (gypsy) community play in a slum outside of Basra, Iraq. The Dom are some of the most vulnerable people in Iraq. Most of the children in the community have no documentation. (2014)

A quick note on the book itself: It’s a hefty, beautiful beast. From the textured, embossed cover to the excellent black & white reproductions and smart layout, including nice foldout pages allowing for big, gorgeous horizontal images, it’s a book that as an object itself stands out.

Nowhere People book

Nowhere People book

Nowhere People book

Nowhere People book spread

Nowhere People is available November 3, 2015 from nowherepeople.org and Amazon.

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This Is What It’s Like to Live Without a Country

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Michael Bay: Hollywood’s Conservative Hero?

by Will7881iwjsf Posted on June 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Director Michael Bay is one of the most successful—if critically detested—filmmakers of the past 30 years. He is worth $400 million. He lives the life of a consummate playboy. His explosion-heavy action films (The Rock, Armageddon, the Bad Boys movies, the Transformers flicks, etc.) have grossed over $4.5 billion worldwide. His new movie, Transformers: Age of Extinction (released on Friday), is also expected to make all the money.

But what about his politics?

When I talked to the 49-year-old director last year, he demurred on the question of whether he leans right or left: “Yes, I am a political person, and I have my views about America,” Bay told me. “I’m very proud of my country; obviously it’s going through a lot of turmoil, and we have a very ineffectual government… It doesn’t matter at all whether I’m liberal or conservative—it’s not a part of what I do. I don’t feel the need to go out and tell people what to believe politically.”

Bay is obviously more private about his politics than, say, mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who worked with Bay on some of his biggest hits and is one of liberal Hollywood’s top conservatives. You won’t find much at all about Bay’s politics online or in his past statements, and a search of a public campaign finance records database turned up nothing.

However, Bay did tell me that, though he doesn’t receive a writing credit, he works closely with his screenwriters and will tweak the scripts as he sees fit. And there just so happen to be many hints of political conservatism in his movies. Out of the 11 movies Bay has directed, the one truly left-wing outlier is The Rock (1996), starring Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery. The action film depicts the blowback from illegal American covert operations overseas, and is critical of gun-toting “patriotism”; it was also co-written by West Wing creator (and diehard liberal) Aaron Sorkin, so there’s that.

But much of Bay’s filmography is loaded with political content and attitudes that your average (stereotypical?) American conservative can totally get behind. In Armageddon (1998), a NASA-recruited team of blue-collar oil-drillers agree to embark on a dangerous mission to blow up an asteroid and save mankind—on the condition that they never have to pay taxes again.

In Bad Boys II (2003), the film’s rowdy-cop heroes illegally invade (and destroy large chunks of) communist Cuba, in the name of fighting the international drug war. The subsequent car chase concludes in front of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, where a conveniently placed mine tears apart the body of the psychotic Cuban drug lord:

And Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), starring Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, easily doubles as a critique of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. Seriously. In this fictional Transformers universe, Barack Obama is identified as the president of the United States. (George W. Bush appears briefly in the first Transformers, where he orders some Ding Dongs on Air Force One.) President Obama orders the American armed forces to try to engage in diplomacy with the Decepticons (the bad-guy alien robots) and to suspend cooperation with the Autobots (the good-guy alien robots). The Obama administration also agrees to hand Sam Witwicky (LaBeouf) over to the Decepticons—the kind of act of shameful appeasement that the president’s real-life conservative critics so often accuse him of perpetrating.

Fortunately, brave members of the US military disobey these orders (a mutiny, essentially), and the day is saved! (Bay loves the US military, and also patriotism, very much so.)

“Optimus Prime truly cares about the future of the human race, unlike the Obama administration, which Bay represents as so prissy and antiwar it just wants the alien robots off the planet,” Mary Pols wrote for Time in 2009. “Bay’s Obama would probably drive his Prius over Optimus if he had the chance.” According to Bay, the reason Obama is in the film is because he once bumped into him—back when he was 2008 presidential candidate Obama—in a Las Vegas airport. Upon meeting, Bay said a couple of nice things to the future president, and Obama in turn complimented Bay by calling him a “big-ass director.”

This exchange was apparently enough to make the director want to turn the Democratic politician into a movie character. Here’s video of Bay recalling their encounter:

And in the new Transformers installment, Mark Wahlberg‘s tough-talking character, whose family property is cluttered with bold American flags, warns despotic, anti-Autobot government agents about “messing with people from Texas.” To be fair, the film can also be interpreted as a shallow pro-immigration-reform robot movie.

Regardless of how Michael Bay views Obama, or Bush, or the Democratic Party, or the Republican Party, or the tea party, his patriotic views may have been best captured in a line delivered by Wahlberg in Bay’s 2013 crime film Pain & Gain: “When it started, America was just a handful of scrawny colonies. Now, it’s the most buff, pumped-up country on the planet. That’s pretty rad.”

As for making public political statements, again, don’t hold your breath. If Bay is going to make a stand, he is way more likely to do so out of his love for animals than any political conviction. In late 2010, Bay offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and successful prosecution of a woman who threw puppies into a river. Bay is a dog lover who lives with two gigantic English mastiffs named Grace (after actress Liv Tyler’s Armageddon character) and Bonecrusher (after a Decepticon).

Looking out for puppies. That enjoys bipartisan support, right?

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Michael Bay: Hollywood’s Conservative Hero?

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