Obama’s “Secretary of Food”?

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, Op-Ed Columnist for the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/opinion/11kristof.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&pagewanted=print
As Barack Obama ponders whom to pick as agriculture secretary, he should reframe the question. What he needs is actually a bold reformer in a position renamed “secretary of food.”
A Department of Agriculture made sense 100 years ago when 35 percent of Americans engaged in farming. [...]

Obama Transition and Agriculture/USDA Policy: Selling Out?

Posted by Tom Philpott at Grist
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/11/19/6373/9820
The transition named its “team members” looking at energy and natural resources agencies, which includes USDA. The list includes Michael R. Taylor, a man who spent his career bouncing between the employ of GMO-seed giant Monsanto and Bill Clinton’s FDA and USDA. Taylor is widely credited with ushering Monsanto’s recombinant bovine growth hormone [...]

Pro-Agribusiness Vilsack on Obama’s Short List for Sec of Agriculture

By Keith Good
FarmPolicy.comà http://www.farmpolicy.com/?p=927#more-927
 
As the executive branch transition unfolds, attention has focused on who might by the next Secretary of Agriculture.
 
Al Kamen noted in today’s Washington Post that, “The Obama transition team considers former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack a near shoo-in for secretary of agriculture, according to a source close to the transition. Vilsack, who [...]

Barack Obama Cites Michael Pollan

SOURCE: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/11/obama-cites-michael-pollan.php
During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama responded to Michael Pollan’s “Farmer in Chief” article (see ACLUSA blog files) in an interview with Joe Klein. He stated, “There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy. I was just reading an article in the New York Times [...]

A New Hope: Big Business to Soon Be on the Defensive in D.C.

By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers
 
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/economics/story/55374.html
 
WASHINGTON — After years of playing offense, big business is getting ready for the less familiar role of playing defense following President-elect Barack Obama’s victory and legislative gains by other Democrats.
Corporate America enjoyed favorable treatment under the Bush administration for almost eight years and for most of [...]

Not Joe the Plumber but the “Other”: the deeper narrative of the McCain campaign

Watching the McCain campaign change its message frequently since September has caused me to wonder what the message really is. It is definitely not the economy, stupid.
 
But what is it? McCain and the Republicans have changed the labels of Obama as follows: from the “Inexperienced” to the “Rock Star” to the “Muslim” (Barack Hussein [...]

Cuba: a change in sight?

By Patricia Gogg
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44356
 
HAVANA, Oct 20 (IPS) – If elected, Democratic candidate Barack Obama could become the first United States president to engage in talks with Cuba after almost five decades of severed relations, but it will all depend on his refraining from trying to “control” a process that involves two sides, say academics from this [...]

The Corporations over the People? ACLUSA endorses Obama

The financial crisis that has fallen onto the heads of the American people in recent weeks is one that highlights one of the fundamental problems with the prevailing ideology of our nation since the beginning of the post-World War II period.
Soon after the war, conservatives began to work on an ideological reprogramming of the dominant [...]