Musings of a Liberal Texan

When the media is the disaster In the wake of the Haiti earthquake, false depictions of victims as criminals hinder the relief effort By Rebecca Solnit Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences. I'm talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I'm talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti. Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a se...

My husband and I saw Food Inc. To me, it is “must” viewing for every American. Not because it glimpses the horror that is the life of the factory farm animal in the United States but because it shows how our food, our sustenance, our “fuel” has been hijacked by the corporate machine. It's not that I am anti-business. I am absolutely not. What I am against is a few owning most. Because when a few own most we get corruption, we get manipulation, we get monopoly. Which is what is happening in our food production. Farmers are literally indentured servants – forced to get loans to provide the required CAFOs for the giants like Tyson, and then continuous mandated to revise filtration systems and overhaul the feeding apparatus to company mandates, going further and further in debt. If they refuse, the corporate giants pull their contracts, and they are left with nothing. Monsanto has copyrights on seeds. Yes. That's right. Seeds. So when the farmers plant their crops, they are not all...

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed. Herman Melville