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On January 31, family farmers will take part in the first phase of a court case filed to protect farmers from genetic trespass by Monsanto’s GMO seed, which contaminates organic and non-GMO farmer’s crops and opens them up to abusive lawsuits. In the past two decades, Monsanto’s seed monopoly has grown so powerful that they control the genetics of nearly 90% of five major commodity crops including corn, soybeans, cotton, canola and sugar beets.

In many cases farmers are forced to stop growing certain crops to avoid genetic contamination and potential lawsuits. Between 1997 and 2010, Monsanto admits to filing 144 lawsuits against America’s family farmers, while settling another 700 out of court for undisclosed amounts. Due to these aggressive lawsuits, Monsanto has created an atmosphere of fear in rural America and driven dozens of farmers into bankruptcy.

h/t Stewart Lundy

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Here is an article describing how Kansas is leading the way toward a less centralized future.

The “revolution in a cornfield” that is happening today in Gov. Sam Brownback’s Kansas is potentially as important as what happened here in 1776. Because in the last two years the states have learned that they don’t have to do what the federal government tells them to do. They can think for themselves and govern themselves, just as Dorothy promised. As The Washington Post reports with an excellent article today titled “In Kansas, Gov. Sam Brownback puts tea party tenets into action with sharp cuts”: “If you want to know what a Tea Party America might look like, there is no place like Kansas. In the past year, three state agencies have been abolished and 2,050 jobs have been cut. Funding for schools, social services and the arts have been slashed. The new Republican governor rejected a $31.5 million federal grant for a new health-insurance exchange because he opposes President Obama’s healthcare law. And that’s just the small stuff.”

These changes may help shake up politics at the national level as well.

If Ron Paul wins Iowa — Dorothy Rabinowitz of the The Wall Street Journal, who advocated Gingrich weeks back, this morning declares Paul to be “the best-known propagandist for our enemies” (Surrender Dorothy!) — and he is doing well in New Hampshire, we will have a new party system. One a combo of Dems and Republicans (“No Labels”? Whigs?); Republicans such as George W. Bush and Dems like Obama with the same policies with cosmetic differences. The other a Jeffersonian party in the direction of Gary Johnson, Judge Nap and Ron Paul. Economically this might be seen as a shift in contention from the twins that have ravaged the world for 150 years, Marx and Keynes, to one between Keynes and Hayek. This returns us to our original nature: Hamilton vs. Jefferson.

Kansas may be blazing the trail, but as the federal government shows itself increasingly paralyzed and often inept, other states are sure to follow.

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In this essay, former Wall Street Investment Banker, Michael Thomas, expresses his frustration and disillusion with our current economic system. His credibility comes from three decades on Wall Street. In 1961 he landed a job with Lehman Brothers

to begin what for the next 30 years would be an involvement—I hesitate to call it “a career”—in investment banking. I would promote and execute deals, sit on boards, kiss ass, and lie through my teeth: the whole megillah. In consequence of which, I would wear Savile Row and carry a Hermès briefcase. I had Mme. Claude’s home number in Paris and I frequented the best clubs in a half-dozen cities. But I had a problem: I was unable to develop the anticommunitarian moral opacity that is the key to real success on Wall Street.

He is not optimistic about the future.

As 2011 slithers to its end, none of the major problems that led to the crisis point three years ago have really been solved. Bank balance sheets still reek. Europe day by day becomes a financial black hole, with matter from the periphery being sucked toward the center until the vortex itself collapses. The Street and its ministries of propaganda have fallen back on a Big Lie as old as capitalism itself: that all that has gone wrong has been government’s fault. This time, however, I don’t think the argument that “Washington ate my homework” is going to work. This time, a firestorm is going to explode about the Street’s head—and about time, too.

This former Wall Street insider thinks the fallout will be messy. Perhaps even violent.

At the end of the day, the convulsion to come won’t really be about Wall Street’s derivatives malefactions, or its subprime fun and games, or rogue trading, or the folly of banks. It will be about this society’s final opportunity to rip away the paralyzing shackles of corruption or else dwell forever in a neofeudal social order. You might say that 1384 has replaced 1984 as our worst-case scenario. I have lived what now, at 75, is starting to feel like a long life. If anyone asks me what has been the great American story of my lifetime, I have a ready answer. It is the corruption, money-based, that has settled like some all-enveloping excremental mist on the landscape of our hopes, that has permeated every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we live now. Sixty years ago, if you had asked me, on the basis of all that I had been taught, whether I thought this condition of general rot was possible in this country, I would have told you that you were nuts. And I would have been very wrong. What has happened in this country has made a lie of my boyhood.

Is the moral purity he longs for possible? Did it ever exist? But even if there is a hint of utopian nostalgia here, surely it is possible to do better than we have in recent years.The OWS crowd surely has its problems, but they seem to be identifying (if in only piecemeal ways) the problems more clearly articulated here (assuming this writer’s description of the facts is correct). If he is right, though, the fix is going to require either a) a complete overhaul of the current system, or b) a complete overhaul of our collective moral and political culture, and perhaps both.

H/t Rod Dreher

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We are at a turning point, according to McKibben. The era of the big and few is being replaced by a new era of the small and the many. Take but one example:

Last year the USDA reported that the number of farms in America had actually increased for the first time in a century and a half. The most defining American demographic trend—the shift that had taken us from a nation of 50 percent farmers to less than 1 percent—had bottomed out and reversed. Farms are on the increase—small farms, mostly growing food for their neighbors. They’re not yet a threat to the profits of the Cargills and the ADMs, but you can see the emerging structure of a new agriculture composed of CSAs and farmers’ markets, with fewer middlemen. Which is all for the good. Such farming uses less energy and produces better food; it’s easier on the land; it offers rural communities a way out of terminal decline. You could even imagine a farmscape that stands some chance of dealing with the flood, drought, and heat that will be our destiny in the globally warmed century to come. Instead of the too-big-to-fail agribusiness model, this will be a nimbler, more diversified, sturdier agriculture.

And what works on the farm works elsewhere too.

There are practical policies that can help facilitate these changes.

Your average state or city leader could help push change in those directions: small investments in, say, slaughterhouses and canneries will help local farmers diversify. New zoning regulations can make rooftop solar quicker and easier to install. Higher reserve requirements will move money from Wall Street’s casinos back to Main Street’s banks. None of them will produce utopia—we will still have endless problems, but they’ll be more limited. A careless local farmer can still sicken his customers, but he can’t sicken millions of them at once. A corrupt banker can wreak havoc in his community, but not so much havoc that it topples the financial system. Problems will stay problems, instead of ramifying into disasters. If a hailstorm wrecks my solar panels, I’ve got an issue, but it’s not blacking out the East Coast.

This new era is one where limits are once again acknowledged. One where appropriate scale is recognized. It’s not utopian, but it is human.

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At long last The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry is available. This volume, published by ISI Books and co-edited by Nathan Schlueter and yours truly, includes sixteen original essays on various facets of Berry’s work as well as an open letter written to Berry by his teacher and friend Wallace Stegner. An array of FPR writers contributed essays including Allan Carlson, Jason Peters, Patrick Deneen, Mark Shiffman, Caleb Stegall, D.G. Hart, Rod Dreher, and myself. You can order this book from ISI at a special discounted price of $14.95.

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Video of the September 24, 2011 conference at Mount St. Mary’s University is now up on You Tube. Search for “human scale conference” or click here.

Thanks to the tech folks at Mount St. Mary’s for making this happen.

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The American Conservative has published a symposium commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jane Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of the Great American Cities. The symposium features a variety of individuals reflecting on the significance of this important book. Also be sure to see the article by Austin Bramwell titled “Cobblestone Conservative.”

Here is the introduction provided by TAC:

Fifty years ago, discussion on the future of urban life was reshaped by the release of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Today the book and its recommendations remain a hot topic among urbanism advocates, planners, architects, and sociologists — and varying interpretations still cause controversy. As Austin Bramwell writes in the October issue of The American Conservative, “Since her death in 2006, Jacobs’s reputation has continued to soar. Folk hero and philosopher, author and activist, she has entered the pantheon of beloved Americans, a mid-to-late 20th-century Mark Twain. Inevitably, her apotheosis has provoked a reaction. Even her admirers feel compelled to distance themselves from uncritical worship of Saint Jane. The skeptics are worth listening to, if only to put Jacobs’s achievement in proper context.” (Full article here).

TAC asked several writers who cover urban issues for their assessment of Jacobs’s Death and Life in its jubilee year.

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A neighborhood in Ithaca, NY is doing something special. It’s called Porchfest. Here’s a taste, but be sure to go to the story and scroll down to the video.

Porchfest began in 2007 when Fall Creekers Lesley Greene and Gretchen Hildreth got the idea that musicians from the neighborhood should play on their porches on one particular Sunday. They recruited 20 or 30 acts, printed a map with times and addresses and descriptions, and Porchfest was born.

Such a simple idea — and it has grown every year. Greene and Hildreth email a call for musical acts and locations. The pair organizes the groups into three time slots so that they don’t bump into each other. Almost everything else is up to the residents and musicians — who hold practices, provide their own sound, and organize house parties. Churches and businesses open their restrooms.

Porchfest is beginning to spread to other cities and towns, from Napa, California, to Somerville, Massachusetts. The only requirement is a walkable neighborhood and some home-grown musical or other talent. It’s a great way to build culture and community and show off these assets to the world.

H/T Philip Bess

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Here’s a taste:

Yesterday I rented a house in the historic district of St. Francisville, my hometown. I was on the phone with Mr. Walter, the owner, settling the terms. He was incredibly gracious, and I was tickled to learn that he and his wife will be living just down the street half the year. “Your daddy and my wife Puddin’ were classmates all through school,” he said. “He raised her 4-H Club hog for her when they were children, and she won first place.” I interviewed Miss Puddin’ years ago about the time she spent as a child in an old plantation house in town that is said to be one of America’s most haunted houses. She’s the daughter of the late Mr. Davis Folkes, a Louisiana state senator and dear friend of my late grandfather Murphy Sr., whom he called “Mercy” because he couldn’t quite say the name right. They spent their last years every day sitting with their friends on a bench in town on the front porch of the real estate office, watching the world go by.

I love the South.

So we are moving to St. Francisville at the end of the year. If you had said to me two weeks ago that I would be writing that sentence, I would have thought you drunk or crazy. But then two weeks and one day ago, my sister Ruthie died. And then life changed for all of us.

Read the rest of his wonderful account here.

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We are pleased to announce that John Schwenkler has joined our merry band and has agreed to edit an on-going series titled “The View From Your Front Porch.” The first entry is the view from his own porch. Here’s how he describes the series: “Want to share a portrait of life in your community, no matter how plain or quotidian? E-mail a photograph of the view from – not of – your front porch to frontporchviews@gmail.com, together with a written reflection of no more than 250 words. Writing may be lightly edited. We’ll gladly withhold your name if you ask us to.”

We welcome John to the Porch. Please send him your photos and reflections about your place.

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