View from the Loft

Inexcusable: hunger in America

A recent report released by Feeding America, which operates a nationwide network of food banks and other programs (such as providing school kids with lunches during the summer), shows that the number of people using food banks and reporting "food insecurity" has increased dramatically.

Here are some findings from the report (I urge you t read more at the link):

• Feeding America is annually providing food to 37 million Americans, including 14 million children. This is an increase of 46 percent over 2006, when we were feeding 25 million Americans, including 9 million children, each year.
• That means one in eight Americans now rely on Feeding America for food and groceries.
• Feeding America's nationwide network of food banks is feeding 1 million more Americans each week than we did in 2006. 
• Thirty-six percent of the households we serve have at least one person working.
• More than one-third of client households report having to choose between food and other basic necessities, such as rent, utilities and medical care.
• The number of children the Feeding America network serves has increased by 50 percent since 2006.

After a year-long, bitter, rancorous debate--if you can call it debate, considering the epithets, falsehoods, and accusations being thrown around with abandon--some sort of health care reform has been signed into law. But health begins with nutrition. You can't be healthy if you can't get enough to eat, or if you can't get enough of the proper food to eat. Yet, according to Feeding America's study, one in four children is food insecure. ("Food insecure" is governmentese for not being certain where you'll find your next meal.) Since 2004, the number of children receiving food from Feeding America's food pantries has increased by 50%.

But people of all ages are finding that they have to turn to food pantries and other sources to get enough to eat. I know that food stamp use is at a record high, and this is true for the clients that seek help at food pantries as well (the number of their clients receiving food stamps has increased by 64% since 2006). Feeding America reports that over a third of their client households incude at least one employed adult, but the household income is so low that even the most basic necessities are difficult to afford. Ten per cent of clients are homeless. For all clients, the average monthly income is just $940.

What is wrong with a country that forces people to choose between heat and food, or medical care and food? What does that say about our social policy?

There are a lot of officeholders who don't seem to regard adequate food, shelter, and, yes, health care, to be basic human rights. Just recently several GOP Congress members have claimed that extending unemployment benefits would just discourage people from looking for work--this at a time when there just aren't enough jobs to go around. I suppose feeding children just encourages them to be layabouts who won't take responsibility for getting their own food. Or maybe it creates a bad habit, the habit of eating.

Please consider contributing to Feeding American at the above link, or seek out a local food bank. Money goes farther than donated goods, but any kind of donation is welcomed. If you are planning a garden this year, consider planting extra that can go to a local food pantry--fresh produce is always needed.

And here's something else you can do: ask Congress to increase funding for emergency food assistance, especially for children. Every five years Congress must reauthorize--and, one hopes, improve--government-funded child nutrition programs. Go here to sign the petition asking Congress to increase funding at this crucial time when we've seen such an alarming increase in hunger.

Take action on NAIS--more important than you know

What's NAIS? It's the National Animal Identification System. It would require that every small farmer tag his or her animals with a microchip or RFID (radio-frequencey identification). The supposed benefit is that we'd know where our meat comes from.

NAIS would require that any of us who own a couple of chickens in order to get our own fresh eggs would have to have those chickens tagged. Kids' ponies would have to be tagged.

The bottom line is that the time and money required for a small farmer to tag every last farm animal can be prohibitive. Some have estimated a cost of at least $30 per animal when labor and time are taken into account. Moreover, NAIS would not make our food supply safer. From judith2007's diary on Daily Kos:

The first reason NAIS will do nothing for food safety is that it ends when the animal dies. According to the CDC, most food borne illnesses are the result of contamination at the slaughterhouse and food processing/ handling facilities.  And with a typical burger patty containing meat from 50 to 100 cattle from multiple states and two to four countries, tracking individual live animals doesn’t translate to safer burgers.  NAIS ends before the real problem begins!

And the ultimate effect of NAIS will be to make food less safe.  NAIS favors factory farms and burdens small and sustainable farms.  The Big Ag companies ensured that NAIS had a loophole for them.  Factory confinement farms, raising thousands of chickens or hogs in a building filled with their own waste and fed poisons and hormones, would be able to use "group identification."  Yet small farmers, such as a pastured poultry farmer, will be stuck tagging each and every animal, right down to their individual chickens.  It’s not just an issue of cost, although that is significant – it’s also a question of time and labor.  For many farmers, it simply would be impossible to comply.

That's right: the big factory farms that are the source of most food-borne illness could use "group identification"--now how helpful is that in tracing an individual animal? Yet the expense and time of individual ID would be made mandatory for small farmers who sell locally--whose customers are local people whom the farmer has to look in the eye and deal with on a personal level.

I KNOW where my beef comes from, because I buy it from an actual person--the person who actually raised the cow. Why should he have to put an ID in/on his cows?

This is one more obstacle for small farmers that gives Big Ag an advantage in the marketing wars.

You can help by visiting Change.org and voting to stop NAIS. Change.org is sponsoring a competition of ideas to be presented to President-Elect Obama. The site offers an array of issues to vote on. If NAIS makes it into the top ten, it will undoubtedly receive media coverage, which is sorely needed, when it, along with the other nine, are presented to Obama on January 16 at the National Press Club.

Please go to Change.org and vote to stop NAIS. It could make the difference between having a choice between factory-farmed food and real food.

Boycott, Divest, Sanction: Israel out of Gaza. Take action!

Naomi Klein writes:

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.

Amen to that.

The carnage in Gaza should appall anyone with a conscience, and yet, as Free Learner points out, our own Senate--on a voice vote, so there's no record of who voted which way--passed a resolution expressing unequivocal support of the Israelis. 

The Israelis have shelled ambulances, schools, and hospitals. They have refused to let humanitarian aid through to the wounded in Gaza. They have rounded people up into a single house and then shelled the house. Humanitarian workers have found emaciated children left for days, without food or water, near the corpses of their parents. The Israelis have used white phosphorus, which burns deep into tissue and, because the phosphorus is absorbed by the body, can cause multi-organ failure.

Yet Hamas is to be condemned as entirely at fault and Israel is to be lauded for "defending" itself.

Claims of genocide are said to be inappropriate, yet there is evidence that Israel's intentions are nothing short of genocidal. Yet we are never to say the word, never to levy the charge; there is a collusion of silence on this topic. John Pilger on the silence of "the Anglo-American intelligentsia":

They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, "Israel's right to exist." They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine's right to exist was canceled 61 years ago and the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous "Plan D" resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as "ethnic cleansing." Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, "What shall we do with the Arabs?" Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, "made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, ‘Expel them'. The order to expel an entire population "without attention to age" was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world's most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapan Party co-leader Meir Ya'ari noted "how easily" Israel's leaders spoke of how it was "possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of strategy … who remembers who used this means against our people during the [Second World] war … we are appalled."

Pilger quotes Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, who wrote on January 2:

It seems that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as desperate events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system … Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology – in its most consensual and simplistic variety – has allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanize the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of genocide].

So, as Naomi Klein says, the time has come--or came quite a while back--for boycott, divest, sanctions. 

(As I was writing this, I just saw a diary on Daily Kos that says Israel has now banned Arab parties from running in next month's election. So much for any idea that Israel is a democracy.)

In fact, the Palestinians called for BDS back in 2005. Israel has ignored UN resolutions and the rulings of the International Court of Justice, building a wall to sequester the Palestinians, refusing them food, fuel, and humanitarian aid, and condemning the Palestinians to misery and death.

Visit this site to endorse the call for BDS and for more information.

Go here to find out how you, personally, can boycott Israeli-made products. A barcode of 729 indicates that the product comes from Israel. In addition, you can learn more about what companies draw on Israeli technology and components. In addition, some Western companies manufacture equipment used by the Israeli military against the Palestinians. It's time we educated ourselves about how we are complicit in the slaughtering of the Palestinians.

According to Naomi Klein, support for BDS is growing worldwide. The recent events in Gaza should intensify this movement. I hope my readers will do their part to join in this movement to make Israel understand that the enormity, unacceptability, and immorality of its actions have consequences.

 

Boycott Burger King

Constant readers will know that I don't give any fast-food "restaurants" my business. But I'm hoping to persuade any Burger King customers out there to give up their Whoppers, even if that means buying a Big Mac (shudder).

Let me give you some background, courtesy of Eric Schlosser (author of Fast Food Nation):

The Student/Farmworker Alliance and an affiliated nonprofit, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, have for years been urging the fast-food industry to accept some responsibility for the plight of Florida migrants who harvest the tomatoes for its hamburgers and tacos. . . . The wages of these farm workers, adjusted for inflation, have declined by as much as 70 percent since the late 1970s. And hundreds, perhaps thousands, of migrants have been enslaved by labor contractors and forced to work without pay. The McDonald’s Corporation and Yum Brands (which owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC) have agreed to subsidize a modest pay raise for their tomato pickers and work closely with the coalition to eliminate slavery from the fields.

The "modest pay raise" is a penny per pound of tomatoes picked. Schlosser's use of the word "enslaved" is not metaphorical: we are talking about actual slavery, people forced to work without pay. Last month a Senate committee hearing was held on the issue of working conditions for tomato workers. An investigator for the Collier County Sheriff's Office, asked by Sen. Bernie Sanders whether there was human trafficking occurring in Florida agriculture, replied,

"It's probably occurring right now while we sit here," Frost said. "Almost assuredly it's going on right now."

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and the Student/Farmworker Alliance have fought some tough battles on behalf of the farm workers. For their efforts, they are now being spied upon by the Burger King corporation.

At first the company denied using such tactics. Now, however, a Burger King executive has admitted to using a private security firm, Diplomatic Tactical Services, to spy on the Alliance--ostensibly to prevent acts of violence.

“It is both the corporation’s right and duty,” a company spokesman later wrote in an e-mail message to [Schlosser], “to protect its employees and assets from potential harm.”

Neither the CIW nor the Student/Farmworker Alliance has ever been guilty of any form of violence. Burger King spied on this group in order to learn of its plans in hopes of undermining those plans.

Additionally, a Burger King official

used his young daughter’s e-mail address to spread misinformation about the farm worker group. [See more on this here.]

Burger King's actions are unjustifiable and unconscionable. Publicly, officials say they want to work with the coalition to improve working conditions for tomato pickers, while privately they engage in actions seeking to discredit the coalition. Disinformation campaigns and spying are despicable acts, particularly when directed against efforts to improve workers' lives. A penny a pound would certainly not greatly erode Burger King's profits; McDonald's and Yum Brands have found it possible to reach an agreement with the CIW. In fact, Eric Schlosser has said that the penny-a-pound increase would cost Burger King only about $300,000 a year. Burger King reported $2.2 billion in revenues last year, and its CEO made $4.1 million. It's extremely hard to understand why they are balking at that extra penny.

The CIW presented, or tried to present, Burger King officials with a petition signed by 80,000 people promising to boycott the company if it doesn't do the right thing. You can sign the petition, and you can promise to stop patronizing Burger King.

While the fast-food companies haven't been the only beneficiaries of shockingly low wages and outright slavery--the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange is a particularly loathsome organization that has so far blocked that extra penny provided by McDonald's and Yum from reaching the workers--pressuring these companies, as the buyers, is a place to start. The buyers have the power to insist on decent treatment of workers and to look elsewhere for tomatoes (like Mexico) if growers refuse to be accountable.

Tomato workers have not had a raise in over twenty years. They average 45 cents per 32-pound bucket of tomatoes picked, about $50 per day. I hope that any Burger King customers reading this (and do follow the links for the whole story) will boycott the chain and urge others to do the same. Use your buying power to send a message.

Stop deceptive labeling of meat

The USDA is set to approve the use of the labels "natural" and "naturally raised" for beef that most of us would agree is neither. Such labels would apply to beef prophylactically and regularly dosed with antibiotics, beef confined in CAFOs and not allowed to roam freely, and beef not allowed to graze on pasture.

What, then, does "natural" mean to the USDA? Not much:

It will mean [the cattle] didn't get growth promoters, although there is no verification of even that more limited claim. The existing term "natural" only means that no artificial ingredients were added during processing.

You can sign a petition and add your own comment here. The USDA is accepting comments until January 27. Please take a minute to sign the petition. As things stand, the proposed labeling will only confuse consumers and mislead them. Much better would be such labels as "no antibiotics," "no hormones ever used," "no artificial ingredients added," and the like.

(On a related note, if you are concerned about the effects of CAFOs on the animals raised in such operations, on the environment, and on human health, please consider buying beef from an alternate source. If you are a Michigander and would be interested in buying a side of beef, perhaps in conjunction with another family or families, I can personally and heartily recommend this source, which raises beef not only naturally but organically. The taste is amazing, and the meat is much healthier for you than grain-fed beef [grain, soy, and corn are not natural foods for a ruminant].)

[cross-posted at You Are What You Eat]

"America's Family Prison"

Have you heard of this facility?

In May 2006, the Department of Homeland Security opened its first prison for immigrant families 30 miles north of Austin. It is the first family detention center in the country to be based on the penal model, though plans were quickly made to build more.

The T Don Hutto facility holds men, women (some pregnant), children, and infants, none of whom have a criminal past. Administered by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country's largest for-profit corrections company, Hutto lacks proper licensing and medical facilities, and has been proven to traumatize families.

Until a settlement resulting from the action of the ACLU, all of the "residents" (actually inmates) wore uniforms, even the infants. But let me quote from the ACLU itself on the improvements that occurred only after a lawsuit was brought against CCA:

Conditions at Hutto have gradually and significantly improved as a result of the groundbreaking litigation. Children are no longer required to wear prison uniforms and are allowed much more time outdoors. Educational programming has expanded and guards have been instructed not to discipline children by threatening to separate them from their parents.

In addition to making those improvements permanent, the settlement also requires ICE to provide, among other things:

• allow children over the age of 12 to move freely about the facility
• provide a full-time, on-site pediatrician
• eliminate the count system which forces families to stay in their cells 12 hours a day
• install privacy curtains around toilets
• offer field trip opportunities to children
• supply more toys and age- and language-appropriate books
• improve the nutritional value of food

ICE must also allow regular legal orientation presentations by local immigrants’ rights organizations; allow family and friends to visit Hutto detainees seven days a week; and allow children to keep paper and pens in their rooms. ICE’s compliance with each of these reforms, as well as other conditions reforms, will be subject to external oversight to ensure their permanence. [my emphasis]

Remember, all of these improvements happened only because of litigation. CCA couldn't have cared less about providing such necessities had they not been threatened. I suppose we shouldn't really be surprised that when a prison-operating corporation runs a facility, it tends to be, well, a prison.

The ACLU's suit was settled in August. But way back in February, there had been enough disgust and protest that the prison conducted a tour for news media to show that

Once all the barbed wire comes down, Gary Mead, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, said, “it’s going to look more like a community college with a very high chain-link fence.”

Look at this and tell me what you think about this statement. Worse, let me quote from a report by the Women's Commission for Refugee Women & Children and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, "Locking Up Family Val­ues: The Detention of Immigrant Families":

In the medical wing, for example, pregnant detainees were X-rayed with no lead screen; detainees received dental work without anesthesia; pregnant women were not allowed milk and were shackled when taken outside the facility for checkups. Additionally, the report reveals that overheated water scalded children at times. To punish children deemed unruly, guards "would turn up the air conditioning so that the room became very cold" and would turn off hot water for bathing, the report states. But the worst offense was that so-called errant parents and their children lived under the threat of being separated.

There has been at least one documented case of a sexual assault of a detainee by a guard, and in an irony not really that surprising, undocumented workers have been proven to work for the CCA at Hutto. Apparently, Williamson County's only concerns revolve around possible liability issues stemming from these outrages.

Don't kid yourselves: with the rabid anti-immigrant sentiment today (anti- brown immigrants, of course), we'll see more of these "residential facilities," and they'll all be sold to us as ways to keep families together. In reality, they are just one more way to intimidate the brown hordes and play to the nativist, xenophobic elements of the far right. I am frightened and chilled to think that the United States of America has sunk so low.

You can help. Sign the petition. Visit the Texans United for Families action page. E-mail your elected officials and ask them to agitate for a more humane way to deal with families whose immigrant status is in limbo. And please tell everyone you know about this horrific reality in today's America.

Take action on Iran

Wes Clark and VoteVets have a new site, StopIranWar, dedicated to preventing a US attack on Iran. Clark:

Yes, it is time for the White House and Congress to exercise leadership, but it is also up to you and me, as Americans, to engage in this dialogue.

At the site, you can send messages to Bush and Congress and write to your local newspaper. Please take a few moments to do so. As Wes Clark says,

Together, we must create a groundswell of activism. It is time for the American people to be heard.

Whatever happens, we have a responsibility to make our position clear. This is the very least we can do.

Bloggers keep their jobs--ACTION STILL NEEDED

This isn't news, of course, but my computer wasn't cooperating last night so I couldn't post. Sigh.

Anyway, you probably know by now that Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen are still working for the John Edwards campaign. According to Salon, they were fired and then rehired:

Salon reported yesterday that on Wednesday morning the Edwards camp fired Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen, the two bloggers whose hiring had sparked an uproar by conservatives. That information was confirmed by sources in and close to the campaign. But almost as soon as the decision had been communicated to the bloggers, a struggle arose within the campaign about possibly reversing it, the sources said, as the liberal blogosphere exploded.

Boy, did it!

While the Edwards campaign kept quiet on Wednesday, the blogosphere was reacting to Salon's story, often with anger at the prospect that the Edwards camp had thrown two of the blogosphere's own under the bus. Chris Bowers, a blogger at MyDD.com, wrote in one post, "While there is no way I will support Edwards with (sic) Amanda and Melissa are fired, I will immediately become a staunch Edwards supporter if they are not fired."

William Donohue of the Catholic League immediately responded with an angry statement that was more or less a declaration of war:

"We will launch a nationwide public relations blitz that will be conducted on the pages of the New York Times, as well as in Catholic newspapers and periodicals. It will be on-going, breaking like a wave, starting next week and continuing through 2007. It will be an education campaign, informing the public of what he did today. We will also reach out to our allies in the Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist communities. They worked with us before on many issues, and are sure to do so again. What Edwards did today will not be forgotten."

While Edwards' statement wasn't exactly a ringing defense of Amanda and Melissa, he did at least acknowledge that the entire controversy was an attempt to "hijack" the "debate about the future of our country," and that said hijacking should not be allowed to happen.

I'd have liked to see something not only a little stronger, but something pre-emptive in terms of the attacks that are certain to continue, not only against Edwards but against all the Democratic candidates. However, it's important that Edwards didn't cave in to the pressure.

It's equally important that the netroots support him now and in the face of the smears certain to come. As Chris Bowers says, "This isn't over":

First, because he refused to cave to right-wing pressure and establishment campaign advice, Edwards will receive a significant amount of criticism. When this happens, we need to remember that he stood with us during this fight, and so we have to stand with him against forthcoming attacks. This goes for everyone, whether or not you are an Edwards supporter. He didn’t throw us under the bus, and so we can’t let him get thrown under the bus, even—especially—if another Democratic campaign is trying to do the throwing.

Second, while Edwards did not cave into right-wing pressure, which was dutifully stenographed by the media, the power structure that allows Republicans to push any conceivable smear of Democrats and progressives into national focus is still fully operational. The current, bullshit attacks on Pelosi are a case in point. As such, it is time to turn our attention to how this story was reported on in the first place.

And that's what we all need to do: focus on the media, which once again failed miserably to do the minimal work of reporting a story, swallowing the RWNM's (Right Wing Noise Machine) hysterical rantings whole without even attempting to provide accuracry, let alone balance.

It's easy. BlogPac has set up a page that lets you e-mail ABC news, CNN, MSNBC, the NYT, and the Associated Press. There's a prepared message. Just fill in the blanks and let the media know that their mindless repetition of the RWNM's distortions is not acceptable.

A tale of two bloggers, the rightwing haters, and a political campaign [UPDATE]

[UPDATE: Guess I'm too late ... Salon says that Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan have been fired by the Edwards campaign. If that's true, John Edwards doesn't get my vote after all. If he can't stand up to this, he's not presidential material.]

 It's getting pretty bad when the right wing starts Swiftboating minor players in a presidential campaign, junior members of the team with little power.

Rightwing bloggers' whipping up of a controversy where none actually exists is a well-known phenomenon in these times, one that wouldn't be possible without the eager acquiescence of, and magnification by, the all-too-compliant mainstream media.

The latest example is, of course, the concerted effort by Michelle Malkin and the usual supporting cast to get Amanda Marcotte (of Pandagon) and Melissa McEwan (Shakespeare's Sister) fired from the John Edwards campaign, which hired them for its blog. For a summary of all the ugliness (not to mention hypocrisy, inappropriate and childish right-wing reactions to passionate posts by Amanda and Melissa, etc.), you can't beat Pam Spaulding.

From manufactured horrified pearl-clutching at profanity to misrepresentation of the lefty bloggers' views, we've seen it all. And we've also seen the mainstream media's delight to let itself be used as a bullhorn for the dissemination of the vitriolic, hate-filled, distorted accusations of the Shriekers of the Right. Not only does the MSM give these people a prominent stage on which to parade their spurious examples of leftwing "bigotry" and "extremism," it rarely if ever counters such with examples of the truly appalling bigotry and extremism of the right wing. (See Pam Spaulding, above link, or Glenn Greenwald on this.)

The plain fact is--and it's one that the media, the pundit class, and the politicians just cannot seem to get through their heads--that these rightwing extremists will always find something to blow up into a "controversy," and that playing along only encourages them in their endeavors to smear, slam, slander, and libel any and all liberals. It also means even less substance than currently exists in what passes today for political analysis and discussion as the focus is diverted not to policy but to matters completely irrelevant to choosing a candidate. They seek to intimidate, to create fear on the part of political candidates, to spread the idea that they are a powerful group that a candidate must pay attention to, a group that draws lines that must not be crossed.

In truth, they are not powerful. The people who will vote for John Edwards couldn't give a damn about profanity in a blog post. Many of them don't even know what a blog is. To go after a blogmaster and netroots coordinator would be silly--if others refused to play. For voters, these campaign slots are inside baseball. Paying attention to Michelle Malkin and Dan Riehl and their ilk is futile.

The Edwards campaign should have come out swinging right away. They should have backed their choices and called bullshit on Malkin and the Malkinettes. They should have pointed out how extreme these people are, how vicious and bigoted they are, and how full of holes their accusations are. And while they were at it, they should have aimed a few shots at the media for its one-sidedness and its willingness to go where there's really no story at all.

Please write to the Edwards campaign and ask them to support Amanda and Melissa. There is also a blogswarm going on, which you can read about here. This blog (tiny as it is) is part of it, and if you have a blog, please join in. It's way past time that we stopped letting the right wing rule the roost and decide the agenda and the framing. Don't let them get away with this. If the Edwards campaign caves, it will stand as a signal to all the other Dem candidates, and we will have nothing but yet more spineless people afraid to stand up for anything in the face of a group of cowardly but nasty and tenacious hatemongers.

New CODE PINK actions

Noting that most Americans and Iraqis would like to see a timetable for withdrawal of American troops from Iraq and that Iraq's Vice President asked Bush for a withdrawal timeline during the President's flash visit to Baghdad, CODE PINK has put a couple of actions in motion.

(1) First, they ask that voters of conscience sign the Voters Pledge:

I will not vote for or support any candidate for Congress or President who does not make a speedy end to the war in Iraq, and preventing any future war of aggression, a public position in his or her campaign.

Their hope is to get million of signatures and influence the 2006 and 2008 elections. It is indeed high time for Dems like Hillary Clinton to get the message that withdrawal is the only option left. We are not at war: we are implementing an occupation. As occupiers, we can withdraw or we can annex the land we occupy; the latter is hardly a serious option.

(2) Their second action is a time-honored one rooted in the tactics of non-violent resistance: the hunger strike. They will be launching a fast in Washington, D.C. on July 4. Called Troops Home Fast, this is an open-ended fast for which CODE PINK asks a show of support by persons willing to fast for at least a day.

Long-term hunger strikers will include Cindy Sheehan, Dick Gregory, Medea Benjamin, and Daniel Ellsberg. There's a long, long list of well-known names who will fast shorter-term.

Actions you can undertake in solidarity with Troops Home Fast are suggested here. You can also sign up to commit to at least a one-day fast here.

Please support CODE PINK in whatever way you can. They are people of conscience who refuse to give up the struggle to end the occupation of Iraq.