Month: August 2009

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Hunger & Charity Now Crimes in the US?

A friend sent me this link to a fascinating and distressing op-ed piece in today’s New York Times on the increasing criminalization of poverty. An excerpt:

“The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, and several members of the group were arrested. A federal judge just overturned the anti-sharing law in Orlando, Fla., but the city is appealing. And now Middletown, Conn., is cracking down on food sharing.” read more

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Disney: The Plasticizing of America

America has been transformed by marketing magic and a steady trend away from traditional values (a connection with the land, communities where people know and take an interest in their neighbors, respect for wildlife). We’ve assassinated deer populations and replaced their woodland homes with grass-lawned housing developments named Deer Run and Deerfield.

Many of us think of such wordly trends as being inevitable moves due to some nameless, shapeless “progress”. Doesn’t it bear pondering, though, that many of the most formative progressions of modern times have been merely a result of artificially engineered marketing strategies designed to give us the experiences that will make it easiest for corporations to separate the American people from our money and give up our senses of independence, creation and adventure? read more

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Many without TV after switch

It seems my family is just one of many with much less access to television since the switch to digital. Bush’s government kept telling us that all we needed to do to continue to watch TV after the switch to digital was buy a converter box with the free government coupon. Well, this wasn’t any more true than some of Mr. Bush’s other stories.

Thanks to President Obama postponing the switch date my family and many others were able to get a digitial converter box in time but that’s the end of the good news in this story. read more