MAKING FACTS FIT IDEOLOGY
If an ideologically incorrect study is done inside the Bush regime, does it make a noise?Not if the Bushites can squelch it, which is exactly what they’ve tried to do to a report about labor abuses in Central America. For more than a year, George W’s department of labor has fought ferociously to block the release of a study showing that working conditions in six Latin nations are abysmal and that government officials in the region do little to enforce labor protections. These findings do not fit with the Bushites’ ideological insistence that workers worldwide can trust global corporatization to improve their lives.
The 400-page report was particularly inconvenient and untimely for Bush & Co., because they had been pushing hard this year to ram another glob of globaloney called “CAFTA” down our throats. CAFTA – the Central American Free Trade Agreement – was this summer’s No. 1 legislative priority for Bush’s global corporate backers, and the last thing they wanted was documentation that their corporate ilk are already exploiting, injuring, and otherwise abusing workers in the CAFTA region.
In hilarious irony, the study in question was commissioned by – guess who – Bush’s own labor department! It contracted with the International Labor Rights Fund to do the study, but when the results were not what the Bushites wanted to hear, they impounded the report, forbade the Labor Rights Fund from publishing it, and even denied repeated requests by members of Congress to review it.
Finally, after Rep. Sandy Levin filed a freedom-of-information action to force the release of the tax-paid study, the labor department relented. Not before trying to taint its own report, however, blasting it as “rife with unsubstantiated and unverifiable claims.”
Of course, the Bushites’ real objection is that the report was not rife with corporate correctness. To see the report yourself, go to: www.house.gov/levin/index.html.
EDIBLE EDUCATION
Emma Goldman said she wanted no part of any revolution unless it included dancing. That’s good, but better yet is Alice Waters’ idea that a revolution should be “delicious.”
Waters, who is both a fabulous chef and a pioneer leader of America’s sustainable food movement, believes deeply in the transformative power of having our local communities grow, cook, and share good meals. So she has launched what literally will be a delicious revolution, focusing it squarely on those who are America’s future: schoolchildren.
Ten years ago, Waters led an effort to establish what she calls the “Edible Schoolyard” at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, Calif., where she has her home and restaurant. Rather than a burger-and-soda lunch, MLK’s 900 or so students now draw meals, lessons, and values from a 1-acre schoolyard garden that they pitch in to till, plant, maintain, and harvest. They also help prepare and serve the food in the school cafeteria, enjoying the bounty of their own efforts.
Not only do the children get meals that truly are good and good for them, they absorb more from the garden and kitchen about biology, health, the environment, science, history, geography, stewardship, cooperation, and community than they can possibly glean from textbooks and sterile classrooms.
The Edible Schoolyard has been such a success that Waters and Berkeley’s school board are expanding it to all of the city’s 16 public schools. But their revolution involves more than a garden in every schoolyard – they are making lunch an academic subject, integrating the entire food experience into lesson plans from K through 12, thus providing rich nourishment not only for children’s bodies, but for their minds and souls as well. Edible Education, they call it.
To learn how you can bring this revolutionary model to your schools, call the Chez Panisse Foundation: 510/843-3811.
This article appears in August 12 • 2005.