For more than a century, farms have been getting bigger while seeds, fertilization and pest control have been getting more uniform. Led by farm suppliers, it has raised productivity. But negative byproducts of this trend include increasing chemical dependence and loss of biodiversity. Ecofeminist Vandana Shiva is at the Organic...

The wine-making track of the Organic World Congress in Modena, Italy is a serious business, with dozens of scientists reporting the results of their surveys and experiments, all for the benefit of our personal enjoyment and health and the sustainability of our planet. Below I summarize their research on the...

McCain is well rid of his campaign co-chairman and chief economic adviser Phil Gramm, who has been a Samson of the U.S. financial system, not a Pillar. He designed the 1999 takedown of the Glass-Steagall Pillar. It's just too bad, if you support Obama, to see such a juicy target...

Wall Street indexes rise and fall but the economic misery index goes on forever as a guide to what is happening on Main Street. I therefore think it is well worth watching. The index, simply the sum of unemployment and inflation rates, rose in June to 10.5, the highest level...

Dr. Alan Greene, Stanford Professor and author of Raising Baby Green, addressing the 2008 Organic World Congress on epidemiological studies relating to bovine hormones. "We have it backwards," he says. "We should find out the adverse effects of additives before we introduce them...

Last week it went unnoticed in the Mainstream Media, but it was very big green news. The U.S. Green Building Council announced that starting next year it will abandon certifying green buildings to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards.

Instead, it appears that it will make its...

Yesterday I listened to Jack Brennan, CEO of the trillion-dollar Vanguard Group, pioneer in low-cost mutual funds and people's capitalism. He got me thinking that if the great Senator Carter Glass was the main force behind a financial structure that served us well from the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933 to...

May is Bike Month NYC, according to Transportation Alternatives, so it's a good time to report on a trip up and down the Seine with my wife Alice using the Velib' ("Velo-libre" or "free bike") system. This is the less-than-a-year-old brainchild of the socialist Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe....

Soon after President Bush swore his support of Israel before the Knesset, Senator McCain questioned whether Senator Obama fully appreciates the threat from Iran. Bush and McCain are double-teaming Obama, defining themselves as hawks, with the implication that Obama is an appeasing dove.

Sorry, but this picture doesn't fit the...

In Paris last month my wife Alice and I chanced to walk past the Paris Historical Library and discovered housed in its basement through July an exhibit ("Les Parisiens sous l'Occupation") of Nazi propaganda photos of Paris life. The exhibition is completely new because the photos of Vichy-era Paris were...

Burma is making China look like a world leader on human rights. The troops in China are pitching in to help Chinese earthquake victims, while in Burma the troops have blocked the way to relief from the Nargis cyclone. Now, 11 days since the cyclone, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband...

Senator John McCain told Katie Couric on May 8 that Myanmar has "a very bad government" and that the United States should "ask the other countries in the region as well as China" to "really put some pressure on the junta" to accept humanitarian aid for cyclone victims.

"Very...

While the Democratic Party is making up its mind between Senators Clinton and Obama, Senator McCain has produced his first TV spot.

It brings up Iraq indirectly as a test of national courage ("We will never surrender"), and emphasizes McCain's status as a POW in North Vietnam 40...

Monday, April 7, is the 75th anniversary of the day that Prohibition was first breached in 1933 by allowing 3.2 percent beer. The 18th Amendment was not fully repealed till December, giving beer an eight-month head start.

Back then, the American beer companies had been suffering from more than...

Today the McLaughlin Group showed a short video of the 1924 Democratic convention in Madison Square Garden as background to a cautionary exchange on the dangers of a brokered convention. The video is accompanied by the 1932 campaign song, "Happy Days Are Here Again." This anachronism must be outed.

The lead NY Times story yesterday is headlined: "81 Percent in Poll Say Nation Is Headed on Wrong Track" and the first paragraph tells us this is the highest number since 1992 poll (this Times/CBS News poll was first conducted in 1991) and way up from the 35 percent figure...

Senator McCain's approach to the credit crisis was today described by the LA Times as "dubious". He was speaking In Santa Ana, Orange County - home county of both Countrywide Financial and New Century Financial, the failed leaders of the subprime mortgage fiasco. McCain called for minimal federal interference...

In late 1999, the bulwark bank regulation of 1933, the Glass-Steagall Act -- the wall between investment banks and commercial banks -- was torn down. This was a great victory for creative bankers, who had found the wall irksome and restrictive.

However, this teardown reduced the stability of the financial...

American financial history is a sine curve of excess, crisis and reform. The Crash of 1906 and the Bankers' Panic of 1907 led to the birth of the Federal Reserve System in 1913. The crash of 1929 and related bank failures led to the SEC and FDIC. The S&L meltdowns...

Hops are scarce and their price has been rising. Barley too. But you can't make beer without them. So be afraid of a beer drought at some small breweries. These fears are no joke says Alonovo. It's enough to remind you of Prohibition, the end of which was 75...