hmmmm...

I always like reading about vegan celebrities. Don't judge. I mean, they have so much influence on people and they can promote veganism, which is just kind of awesome. Who doesn't like a cool vegan celebrity? Alec Baldwin, Moby, Steve-O, Glenn Beck… Wait. What!? I know that's what you're thinking. But yeah, apparently Glenn Beck is one of us now.

I'll admit, it was tough for me to watch the video Vegetarian Star posted of Beck talking about his veganism, but I wanted to know what he had to say. I mean, maybe I'm wrong about him. Maybe he's actually a compassionate human being with political views just a tad different than mine. Well, I watched and I listened and I can say this: he's not. He bitches about drinking wheatgrass and that it's "not awful, it's apocalyptic." "I'm eating crap I don't even know…" "Last night I had spaghetti and meatballs and there's no meat! […] How are you getting a meatball?" He's going vegan, gluten-free and sugar-free for health reasons. Yeah, it's tough. But I'm sure he has people who cook for him, and they probably make it really tasty for him. Stop bitching, Glenn! Get over it.

I doubt that Beck even considered veganism when he called out celebrity environmentalists such as Al Gore and George Clooney for eating meat back in 2007. "I mean, I like to eat a nice pink-in-the-middle filet stuffed with ham, topped with chicken while wearing a full leather bodysuit!" Yeah, doesn't sound too compassionate to me.

Anyway, this got me thinking. Aren't vegans supposed to be all cool and liberal and progressive? I know all of my vegan friends are. But I guess I was wrong. Glenn Beck is actually in good company.

Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes magazine and Republican came out as "(almost) vegan" in HuffPo about a year ago.

Matthew Scully has written countless speeches for George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Sarah Palin. But he's also written Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. And he's vegan. How does that work? How can someone be vegan but at the same time be anti-abortion and pro-war? I don't know. It doesn't make sense to me.

Billionnaire vegan Las Vegan casino devleoper Steven Wynn may be a registered Democrat, but he's loudly criticized the Obama administration for its managing of the federal stimulus and health care.

I bet most of us have been asked "why do you care about animals more than about humans?" Well, I can only speak for myself here, but I care about humans just as much as I care about other animals. The difference for me, though, is that other animals don't have a voice. And that's is why I go to protests: to speak for the animals and to give them a voice. And I'll go to pro-choice protests and anti-war protests, too. It all goes hand in hand. It's not about choosing animals over humans; it's about compassion for other beings, humans and animals equally.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy about anyone who switches over to a vegan diet. It really makes me think if people really do want to be Vegan or is it just all show and publicity???

Everyday is Earth Day!

Happy Earth Day 2011! If you rode your bike to work today or planted a tree, that's fantastic. But if you're passing on meat and dairy products today to help the planet, that's even better.

For damage to the environment, meat takes the icky, Earth-destroying first-place prize. Consider the following:

• Producing a single pound of meat emits the same amount of greenhouse gases as driving 40 miles in an SUV.  
• It takes 10 times as much fossil fuel to produce one calorie from animal protein as it does to make one calorie from plant protein.
• Animals raised for food in the U.S. produce 89,000 pounds of waste per second without the benefit of waste-treatment systems.
• If every American  skipped one meal of chicken per week and opted for plant-based foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads.

Celebrate Earth Day today by opting for delicious, meat-free dishes and sharing this with your eco-conscious Facebook friends.
 

Crimethinc's New book out! Work.

After so much technological progress, why do we have to work more than ever before? How is it that the harder we work, the poorer we end up compared to our bosses? When the economy crashes, why do people focus on protecting their jobs when no one likes working in the first place? Can capitalism survive another century of crises?  We had to revisit our previous analysis of employment and develop a more nuanced understanding of the economy. Months s were spent studying obscure history and comparing notes about how we experience exploitation in our daily lives, slowly hammering out a grand unified theory of contemporary capitalism. In combination, the book and poster explore the positions we occupy within this pyramid and the mechanics that maintain it. From the industrial revolution to the internet, from the colonization of the Americas to the explosion of the service sector and the stock market, from the 2008 financial crisis to the upheavals taking place right now across the globe, Work offers an overview of how capitalism functions in the 21st century and what we can do to get beyond it. The poster is based on the classic illustration of  the pyramid of the capitalist system published in the Industrial Worker in 1911. With the assistance of Packard Jennings.

Celebrate Earth Day

A recent U.N. report concluded that a global shift toward a vegan diet is necessary to combat the worst effects of climate change. Climate change is caused mostly by carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Raising animals for food is one of the largest sources of carbon-dioxide emissions and the single largest source of both methane and nitrous-oxide emissions.

The U.N. also reported that raising animals for food (including land used for grazing and to grow feed crops) now uses a staggering 30 percent of the Earth's total land mass. While factory farms are ruining our land, commercial fishing methods such as bottom trawling and long-lining have virtually emptied millions of square miles of ocean and pushed many marine species to the brink of extinction. Commercial fishing boats indiscriminately pull as many fish as they can out of the sea, leaving behind ecological devastation and the bodies of nontarget animals in their wake.

Nearly half of all the water used in the United States goes to raising animals for food. With watering the crops that farmed animals eat, providing drinking water for billions of animals each year, and cleaning away the filth from factory farms, transport trucks, and slaughterhouses, the farmed-animal industry places a serious strain on our water supply.

Simply put, going vegan is the easiest and most effective way for you to help the planet.

If you're not ready to dive headfirst into veganism, consider going meatless one day a week.

Eating vegan one day a week lowers your carbon footprint more than eating local every day of the week! Browse our database filled with hundreds of free vegan recipes to get started.

Tomorrow is the day!

Earth Day is Friday, peeps! Loving the Earth means loving all the animals in it and our environment!… but what can you do to show them both some extra love this year? Glad you asked.  Here are 5 super-duper, easy-peasy things YOU can do for animals this Earth Day:

1. Go Vegan. We've said it before but one more time for the cheap seats in the back:MEAT'S NOT GREEN! Adopting a vegan diet is the easiest and most significant way to reduce your carbon footprint, hands down. As if saving more than a hundred animals a year wasn't reason enough, right?
2. Spread the word about poop. 
3. Share this video. If a picture says a thousand words, this video says a million. Share it on Facebook and let the truth speak for itself.
4. Post an Earth Day fact on Facebook. I know, some of your friends don't want to hear it– but knowledge is power and a fact is a fact. When you share one that is common knowledge (albeit often ignored), you're putting it out there and believe me, it will resonate! One of my personal faves: According to the United Nations, raising animals for food generates more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, planes, ships, trucks, and trains in the world COMBINED.
5. Shop cruelty-free. Most products that are cruelty-free use natural and organic ingredients. Plus, buying products that aren't tested on animals means you're not supporting a multi-billion dollar industry that generates harmful toxins and wastes a scary amount of energy and resources on ineffective and unreliableexperiments.

Spread the word

We know consuming animal products results in millions of animals suffering needlessly and is awful for your health, but did you also know that the factory farming industry is severely damaging our planet too?

For example, 70% of the rain forest in the Amazon is leveled to raise animals which eventually are killed for meat consumption and farmed animals use over 50% of the water consumed in the U.S. There's another way factory farming is harming our planet—poop.

Here's some more facts that STINK:

• In the United States, there are currently more than 3.8 billion farmed animals which produce more than 1 billion pounds of solid feces every day.
• A single hog excretes up to 17.5 pounds of manure and urine each day.
• On factory farms, waste is commonly mixed with water and held in pits (called “lagoons”), and then spread or sprayed on cropland. These lagoons can leak or spill into surface waters—that's water that people drink. Vom!
• Every second, animals raised for food produce more than 89,000 pounds of waste? Dude that's 130 times more than the entire U.S. population—that's a whole lot of shit!

Now that I've completely grossed you out—it's time to spread this dookie around.

    How else do you plan on speaking out on Earth Day?

& how

Why?

• Better Skin: Dairy gives you zits. Nobody wants a pizza face. Ditch dairy and watch your skin glow!
• Better Hair: Plant-based whole foods are high in antioxidants which nourish your hair (and skin).
• Better Overall Awesomeness: Compassion radiates beauty from the inside out.
• Better Scent: Eating meat makes you stinky… whether it's meaty (sulfur-laden) farty fumes or B.O., most stank can be cured by switching to a healthy diet (i.e. going vegan).  ;)
• Better Physique: Pork can make you porky and beef can make you a heffa… just sayin'. Going vegan helps you drop those unwanted pounds. You'll look fab and more importantly, you'll feel fab!

Award-winning journalist Naomi Klein on climate change

My fear is that climate change is the crisis, the biggest crisis of all, and that if we aren’t careful, if we don’t come up with a positive vision of how climate change can make our economies and our world more just, more livable, cleaner, fairer, then this crisis will be exploited to militarize our societies, to create fortress continents. And we’re really facing a choice. And, you know, I think what we really need now is for the people fighting for economic justice and environmental justice to come together.

I started trying to understand these dramatic drops in belief that climate change is real. I mean, we’ve just ended the hottest decade on record. There’s overwhelming evidence that climate change is real now. It’s not just about reading the science. It’s about people’s daily experience. And yet, we’ve seen this remarkable drop, where, in 2007, 71—this is a Harris poll—71 percent of Americans believed climate change was real, and two years later, 51 percent of Americans believed it. So, a 20 percent drop. And we’ve seen a similar dramatic just the floor falling out in the same period in Australia, in the U.K. It’s not happening everywhere. It’s happening in countries that have very polarized political debates, where they have very strong culture wars.

And there are some people who have been doing some really interesting analysis of these numbers, where you see—like there’s a political scientist named Clive Hamilton in Australia who’s done some really terrific writing on this, where what he shows is that climate change didn’t used to be a partisan political issue. You couldn’t—you wouldn’t know whether somebody believed in climate change or not just by asking if they were Republican or Democrat. That’s completely changed. Democrats overwhelmingly believe in climate change. That hasn’t—their position hasn’t changed. Republicans now don’t—overwhelmingly do not believe in climate change. So that drop has been split along partisan lines. Now, it seems kind of obvious that that would be the case, but still it’s remarkable, because what it means is that it no longer really has anything to do with the science. And the environmental movement has just been shocked by how it would be possible to lose so much ground so quickly when there is so much more scientific evidence, so that, you know, there’s all kinds of attempts to respond to this, to get climate scientists out there explaining things better, to popularize the science, and none of it seems to be working. And the reason is that climate change is now seen as an identity issue on the right. It’s—people are defining themselves, like they’re against abortion, they don’t believe in climate change. It’s part of who they are.

But something very different is going on on the right, and I think we need to understand what that is. Why is climate change seen as such a threat? I don’t believe it’s an unreasonable fear. I think it is—it’s unreasonable to believe that scientists are making up the science. They’re not. It’s not a hoax. But actually, climate change really is a profound threat to a great many things that right-wing ideologues believe in. So, in fact, if you really wrestle with the implications of the science and what real climate action would mean, here’s just a few examples what it would mean.

Well, it would mean upending the whole free trade agenda, because it would mean that we would have to localize our economies, because we have the most energy-inefficient trade system that you could imagine. And this is the legacy of the free trade era. So, this has been a signature policy of the right, pushing globalization and free trade. That would have to be reversed.

You would have to deal with inequality. You would have to redistribute wealth, because this is a crisis that was created in the North, and the effects are being felt in the South. So, on the most basic, basic, "you broke it, you bought it," polluter pays, you would have to redistribute wealth, which is also against their ideology.

You would have to regulate corporations. You simply would have to. I mean, any serious climate action has to intervene in the economy. You would have to subsidize renewable energy, which also breaks their worldview.

You would have to have a really strong United Nations, because individual countries can’t do this alone. You absolutely have to have a strong international architecture.

So when you go through this, you see, it challenges everything that they believe in. So they’re choosing to disbelieve it, because it’s easier to deny the science than to say, "OK, I accept that my whole worldview is going to fall apart," that we have to have massive investments in public infrastructure, that we have to reverse free trade deals, that we have to have huge transfers of wealth from the North to the South. Imagine actually contending with that. It’s a lot easier to deny it.

But what I see is that the green groups, a lot of the big green groups, are also in a kind of denial, because they want to pretend that this isn’t about politics and economics, and say, "Well, you can just change your light bulb. And no, it won’t really disrupt. You can have green capitalism." And they’re not really wrestling with the fact that this is about economic growth. This is about an economic model that needs constant and infinite growth on a finite planet. So we really are talking about some deep transformations of our economy if we’re going to deal with climate change. And we need to talk about it.

Well, I mean, this is related, in that we often hear, "Well, we’re not doing anything about climate change. It’s just business as usual." But it’s not true that it’s just business as usual, because we are now in the era of extreme energy. The easy-to-get fossil fuels have pretty much been gotten, and now it’s the harder-to-get stuff, the more-expensive-to-get stuff and the riskier stuff. And that means deepwater drilling, which puts whole ecologies at risk, as we’ve seen on the Gulf Coast. And it means the tar sands in Canada. There’s a proposal to have a tar sands project in Utah. It means fracking for natural gas, and you’ve covered that a lot on the show. I mean, these are methods that are a lot riskier, and it’s affecting many, many more people. And so, I think we need to get away from this idea that we’re just going on as we’ve always gone on. No, we aren’t. If we don’t get off fossil fuels, we are accepting a much, much higher-risk energy trajectory.

And we need to really be aware of this, because with the oil prices increasing, now we’re already starting to get the "drill here, drill now" chorus reemerging, the energy security line that, you know, the real problem is the dependence on fossil fuels—not the dependence on fossil fuels, period—that’s the real problem—but the dependence on foreign fossil fuels. And now this oil shock, the shocking oil prices are being used to push more aggressively for opening up Anwar, for more offshore oil drilling in the Arctic. And if we’re not careful, this crisis will be used to push for some disastrous resource policies.

Thousands Marching Down NYC Streets 4-9-2011

Bring U.S. Troops Home Now: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza!

Trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for all, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.

End FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.

Immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads.

Thats what I thought; Democrats, Republicans agree on a budget deal.

Democrats and Republicans narrowly averted a partial shutdown of the federal government Friday night, agreeing on a budget deal and a short-term funding extension little more than an hour before the clock struck midnight and time ran out.

The new funding extension, which cuts spending by $2 billion, will last through next Thursday.

"The government will be open for business," President Barack Obama said.

"In the final hours before our government would have been forced to shut down, leaders in both parties reached an agreement that will allow our small businesses to get the loans they need, our families to get the mortgages they applied for, and hundreds of thousands of Americans to show up at work and take home their paychecks on time."

Negotiators capped days of frantic closed-door talks and public recriminations by agreeing on a framework for a package of $38.5 billion in spending cuts covering the rest of the fiscal year, which expires September 30.

Republicans, bolstered by their capture of the House of Representatives in last November's midterm elections, had initially pushed for $61 billion in cuts.

Government Shutdown Looms Even as "Government’s Got Plenty of Money to Keep Going"

Negotiations continue between Democrats and Republicans to break a U.S. budget deadlock and avoid a government shutdown. Without an agreement on spending for the next six months, money to operate the government runs out at midnight tonight. We discuss the possible shutdown and the latest news from Wisconsin with John Nichols, Washington correspondent for the The Nation magazine and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison. He is also co-founder of the media advocacy group Free Press, the organization behind the National Conference for Media Reform. “This is not a fight about money, it is not a fight about budgets. This is a fight about a gaming of the budget process. We have a group of Republicans who are saying the most critical overspending in the United States, the biggest budget that just has to be addressed, is that of Planned Parenthood,” says Nichols.

New York City Vegetarian Food Festival Recap

Last Sunday (April 4, 2011), the first ever New York City Vegetarian Food Festival was held to celebrate cruelty- free food. The event was organized by Sarah Gross, founderof Rescue Chocolate, and Nira Paliwoda. Both entrepreneurs and foodies, they realized that no single event existed to bring together the range of conscientious eaters in the New York City area. The festival was a gigantic hit with thousands of people showing up and waiting in line for more than two hours to get into the Altman Building where it was held in Manhattan.

The festival illustrated the wide variety of plant-based foods and products available in the marketplace. Vendors provided free samples in the event while several vegan restaurants provided food for sale outside of the event. The festival literally took over several blocks - the line stretched from the middle of 18th Street to 7th Avenue to 19th Street and around the corner back to 6th Avenue. Those that waited for entry were greeted with world-class speakers, live music, and fun food contests throughout the day in addition to the vast array of vegan food samples.

The event was sponsored by such organizations as PETA, Rescue Chocolate, Balance, Gilda Mulero, HappyCow and Yelp - to name a few. I had a chance to talk with Chef Cindi Avila, Victoria Moran and Dr. Rob Streisfeld (aka Doc Rob), three of the speakers at the festival.

And it has begun