Hey, maybe she can entice Princess Kate to grab a hammer?
Michelle Obama to help with NC 'Extreme Makeover' home
The Associated Press
Posted: Monday, Jul. 18, 2011
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. First lady Michelle Obama will participate in an episode of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" that features a boarding house being built in North Carolina for homeless women veterans.
The White House says Obama will join the crew of the ABC television show Thursday to help build the new home for Barbara Marshall and the women of the Steps N Stages Jubilee House in Fayetteville.
Several families will be able to live in the new house, which will include a resource center. Marshall is a 15-year Navy veteran who is working to end homelessness among female veterans.
Obama is participating as part of Joining Forces, an initiative to support service members that also involves Dr. Jill Biden, the wife of the vice president.
The episode will air in October.
Read more:
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/20...dy-to-help-with-nc-extreme.html#ixzz1SaOSwLAH
Excerpt from: Breadbasket of Democracy
In 2004, George Bush carried North Dakota with 63 percent of the vote. It seems like the last place that one might go looking for a revolt against the powers that be.
Nor does a man like Todd Leake seem like the type of person to participate in any such uprising. “Extreme traditionalist” might be closer to the mark. Lean and soft-spoken, Leake has spent the past twenty-eight years farming the homestead established by his great-grandfather, a Canadian immigrant who arrived here over 120 years ago. “I guess you’d describe me as an umpteenth-generation wheat farmer,” he says, “because as far back as we can tell, on both sides of the family, it’s been farmers. And as far back as we can tell, it’s also been wheat.”
On a crisp, windy November day, Leake reflects on the events that turned him into a thorn in the side of the agribusiness establishment, especially the Monsanto Company. He gestures toward two symbols. The first, just visible through his kitchen window, is the outline of the North Dakota Mill, the only grain-handling facility owned jointly by the citizenry of any state. “Sort of the epitome of farmers cooperating,” he notes.
The other symbol offers a less inspiring vision, one of farmer fragmentation and disempowerment. It is a simple refrigerator magnet inscribed with the words, “MONSANTO CUSTOMER SUPPORT 800-332-3111.”
“They call it customer support,” says Leake. “It’s actually a snitch line, where you report that your neighbor is brown-bagging. Or where somebody reports you, and a week or two later you find a couple of big guys in black Monsanto leather jackets standing in your driveway.”
Brownbagging is an old term in rural America. It refers to replanting seed from your own harvest, rather than buying new seed. Lately the term has come to possess a second meaning, that of a crime, a consequence of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1980 decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty allowing private companies to obtain patents for lifeforms, and the Court’s 2001 decision in J.E.M. Ag Supply v. Pioneer affirming that the saving of seed constituted a patent violation.
When Todd Leake first became aware of genetic engineering in the mid-1990s, the prospects sounded enticing, including heady promises that new biotech crops capable of producing industrial chemicals and even pharmaceuticals would expand agricultural markets and thereby raise farm incomes. “But when they finally came out with actual product,” he said, “it was all about selling more Roundup.”
Roundup, Monsanto’s leading product, is the trade name of an herbicide based on the chemical glyphosate. By using genetic engineering to create glyphosate resistance in common crops, Monsanto made it feasible for farmers to apply Roundup directly to fields at any time in the growing season, killing weeds without killing crops.
By 2000, Monsanto had successfully introduced “Roundup Ready” corn, alfalfa, canola, soybeans, and cotton in the United States and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the company began field-testing and pursuing USDA permits for Roundup Ready spring wheat. Wheat is the world’s most widely cultivated food, and Monsanto wanted to introduce it as the crown jewel of genetically modified (GM) crops. North Dakota, which accounts for 47 percent of the U.S. acreage for spring wheat, was vital to the company’s plans.
But Leake wondered whether the new seed would end up actually hurting farmers. One worrisome possibility was that “Frankenfood”-averse European or Japanese markets would reject GM wheat, causing the price to collapse. Something similar had happened in the late 1990s, when the Japanese had begun rejecting soybean shipments containing transgenic material.
Another concern was Monsanto’s record of suing scores of farmers whose crop was found to contain patented genetic material, even miniscule amounts that had arrived via spillage, wind-blown seed, or pollen drift. He found himself sympathizing with Percy Schmeiser, the Canadian farmer who had been sued by Monsanto in 1998 for violating the company’s patent on Roundup Ready canola. Schmeiser had never bought Monsanto’s seed. He had only planted seed saved from his own fields. Apparently, his fields had been contaminated through seed blown from passing trucks, but it didn’t matter: brown-bagging had turned him into a common thief.
When Leake talks about wheat, his tone shifts subtly, becoming almost reverential. “Wheat’s an amazing plant,” he notes. “It’s a combination of three Middle Eastern grasses, and that gives it a huge genome. In many languages, the word for ‘wheat’ is the same as the word for ‘life.’ There’s a ten-thousand-year connection between wheat and human beings, each generation saving seed. Now it’s in our hands.”
In January 2000, Leake began urging various organizations in North Dakota to oppose the introduction of genetically modified wheat. One of the groups he approached was the Dakota Resource Council, a network of local groups that originally formed in the late 1970s to deal with strip mines and power plants. (For full disclosure, I should note that I spent several years working for the council in the early days, first as a field organizer and later as staff director, until I left in 1982.)
Leake’s concern about GM wheat fit naturally within the DRC’s scope, but questions remained: what tactics should be adopted, and what objectives should be pursued? A reasonable political strategy might start from the assumption that GM wheat would inevitably come to be a presence in fields, freight cars, and grain elevators; hence, those concerned about negative effects would try to shore up protective regulations so that GM wheat would not contaminate non-GM wheat.
But Leake and the DRC opted to seek a different solution: an outright ban on GM wheat in North Dakota until all outstanding concerns were addressed.
