Outward Journey / Inward Journey

Thanx @ a diary at Dailykos, here’s a list of the top 25 underreported news stories you’re unlikely to hear about on CNN, MSNBC, or FOX in 2009.  Courtesy of Project Censored, a training project in media and the First Amendment at Sonoma State University.

Here are some excerpts from one:

In August 2007, one of the biggest and best-known American charity organizations, CARE, announced that it was turning down $45 million a year in food aid from the United States government. CARE claims that the way US aid is structured causes rather than reduces hunger in the countries where it is received.

[...]

CARE’s 2006 report, “White Paper on Food Aid Policy,” points out that the current food aid program is motivated by profit rather than altruism. The policy, which dictates that donated money be used to purchase food in the home country, results in a program driven by “the export and surplus disposal objectives of the exporting country” and not the needs of people in hunger.

The US policy implements the practice of monetization, a food aid policy in which the US government buys surplus food from American agribusinesses that have already been heavily subsidized, and ships it via US shipping lines (generating transport costs that eat up much of the $2 billion annual food aid provided by the US government) to aid organizations working around the world. The aid organizations then sell the US-grown crops to local populations, at a dramatically reduced cost. The aid organizations use proceeds from these sales to fund their development and anti-poverty programs. But several groups, with CARE at the forefront, have pointed out that this policy has the effect of undermining local farmers and destabilizing the very food production systems that aid organizations are working to strengthen.

[...]

“We are not against emergency food aid for things like drought and famine,” CARE spokeswoman Alina Labrada said, “but local farmers are being hurt instead of helped by this mechanism.”

I’m not even being hyperbolic.

January 20th can’t come fast enough.

Also: Down the tubes.  Another prediction correct.

It turns out that my predictions were pretty accurate.  Obama carried all the states that I predicted he would, plus Florida and Indiana, which I did not predict (not that I’m complaining).  I predicted that the electoral count would be 326 to 212.  With the results from Omaha still in question (Nebraska splits its electoral votes), the electoral count will either 364 to 174, or 365 to 173.

There are still votes to be counted, but for the moment, DailyKos is putting Obama’s popular vote percentage at 52.4, which is outperforming my prediction by .9.  McCain is at 46.3 percent, outperforming my prediction by 4.3 percent.

My predictions for the Senate races were largely accurate, although Minnesota and Alaska are still up in the air.  So is Oregon, although the largest newspaper in that state has called it for Jeff Merkley, the Democrat.  Georgia will indeed go to a run-off, as the Republican there fell just short of the required 50 percent of the vote.

In House races, there are several seats still up in the air so it’s too soon to tell if I was on target but it’s looking as if the Democratic majority will pick up upwards of twenty seats.  I stand by my prediction that we are seeing what is now a more-or-less permanent Democratic majority in that chamber.

The Democrats did indeed take control of the New York State Senate, narrowly, as I predicted.  They now have a one seat majority in that body.

What we witnessed last night was more than a return by the Democratic Party to the reigns of power.  I believe it was their restoration as the natural party of government in this country.  Within Democratic politics, Obama’s election is a repudiation of the failed center-right, Republican-lite, DLC-style of politics in favor of the old standbys of populism and participation by increasing turnout.  I was impressed by the efficiency of the Obama voter turnout-and-protection operation in Philadelphia: it was remarkably disciplined.  In places like Philadelphia, we are building a new machine politics, one led by young people of all colors, and one which will necessarily supplant the one currently in place.

The task of the progressive movement is to steer that machine.  The must not use our majority and our Administration merely for the purposes of achieving and maintaining power.  We have to ensure that the new, durable majority is for something, enacting policies that will make the economy more humane and democratic, healthcare available to all as a matter of right, and reflect a worldview that is cosmopolitan and positive to the rest of the world.

I will write more about the election results once I have gotten some sleep.