by Dylan Ford <dford@suffolk.lib.ny.us>
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/ideaforpresidentessay28jul04.shtml
Original date, July 28, 2004
Posted on September 16, 2004

http://www.ideaforpresident.com/

Introduction: Help Wanted
Since it has become impossible for a poor person to run for the Presidency of the United States of America nowadays, and because I don’t foresee either party promoting a candidate who has the goods to help us adjust the present to insure a future, I have decided to run an Idea For President.

I will promote the candidacy of anyone from any party who endorses this Idea and pledges to make it a priority of his or her administration. My support for any candidate for any other office will also depend upon their endorsement of this Idea.

In these stormy times there are so many issues in the wind, so many small and large differences that divide us up into separate, competing groups, that We, the people, can never speak to power with one voice .Instead of waiting for the parties or candidates to supply solutions, perhaps it is time for the people to generate a solution and then ask who will implement it.

People Finally United?
When the Earth becomes too poisoned to support human life, all of our other differences, big and small, will suddenly seem trivial.If every day more citizens of the USA are unable to earn a dependable living, unable to feed their children a proper, nourishing diet and provide for their education, unable to afford healthcare and housing for their families, then We, The People, must unite to impose our solutions upon our “leaders”.For if we do not unite to restore and detoxify this planet, we will certainly be united in our extinction.

Idea for President
This idea is intended to make our country stronger, our employment more certain, our people healthier, to reduce our need for healthcare, and to begin to return our environment to a state where it does not sicken us and can sustain all life forever. We cannot change the needs of the environment to adapt to the needs of the economy. When our environmental safety is at odds with our economic safety, we must begin to transform our economic needs to adapt to the needs of the environment.

Paradise Misplaced
Don’t judge the Idea too quickly. Put your cynicism on “Pause”. Read a little and consider it .Remember, just because something hasn't’t been proposed, or tried, doesn't’t mean it can’t work .Consider this: America was a cleaner, prettier, more decent and secure, healthier, and happier country when we had lots of local family farms.

United States Life Corps
The centerpiece of the Idea is the creation of a new, national volunteer service, independent of the military but based on a similar model of discipline and chain-of-command. But this service will be devoted to teaching and demonstrating the theory and technique of sustainable, poison-free farming, and to repairing our damaged environment.It will provide a way a person can perform service for their country that is based on a different, but no less important sort of national security.The point is to create an opportunity to bring back the local family farm in circumstances where it can work again, and to train some recruits to do the work necessary to make a start toward environmental restoration .I suggest we call it the United States Life Corps.

Security Alert
America has evolved a corporate-controlled, petroleum-based form of farming.This is a terrible security weakness for our country.We are in a position where we would begin to starve if our access to cheap foreign oil were interrupted.Many chemical fertilizers and pesticides are manufactured from natural gas and petroleum, and fuel is required for the engines of the machinery with which our crops are planted, tended, harvested, shipped, and processed.It is estimated that our factory-farming model expends 80 calories of energy to produce 1 calorie of food energy.And when corporations must choose between profit and the public good, profit always wins.

Hidden Costs
The model of corporate maximum-yield factory-farming by which our food is produced is based on chemical fertilizers and poisons being applied to ruined, exhausted soils .Although the food produced looks attractive, there is growing evidence that as the old-time flavor and quality is lost, so is the nutritional complexity that our health requires.here is no longer any doubt that the run-off from factory-farms of fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides and sewage from meat-mills is poisoning our waterways and drinking water.And there is no doubt that our precious topsoil is blowing and washing away at an alarming rate.Can anybody argue that our country and our culture and our environment have not suffered from the loss of small, local family farms?

Back To Basics
This Life Corps would teach people how to recreate our lost topsoil, how to farm without poisons, how to raise food for themselves and others while improving their own health and that of the soil, restoring the environment, and reducing the vast perpetual waste-stream that our culture produces.And over the next ten years as we prepare a new generation of trained poison free farmers and interns, an essential part of this plan must be a scheduled reduction and eventual elimination in the production and use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides.Many of the hundreds of thousands of man-made chemicals that never occurred in nature are now present in the bodies of every human being and every other animal on this planet .Another part of the plan would be to withdraw the outrageous subsidies the government shells out to the factory farms, subsidies that helped destroy the small farm.

The factory farms that are ruining our environment and undermining the safety of our food must switch over to environmentally friendly farming methods and must do it on their own dime, or have their contaminated lands appropriated through the means of Eminent Domain and sold to those trained to begin the process of restoring it.

Goals and Mentors
To get this program running we would have to seek the assistance of those who already have learned to farm organically to help create working demonstration farm-bases in conjunction, perhaps, with some experienced military personnel (individuals who are intrigued with this idea) to provide logistical expertise.The first goal of the pilot project would be to generate sufficient food to feed itself while it heals and builds the soil of the demonstration farms and begins to train expert instructors.The second goal would be to begin composting local biodegradable garbage into humus and incorporating it into the soil .Eventually this service would also be responsible for the manufacture of bio-diesel from used cooking oils collected from homes and restaurants.

Discarded bio-degradable vegetable matter and yard wastes collected from homes, supermarkets and restaurants would also be processed to make industrial alcohol.In case this sounds like fantasy, let me assure you that the manufacture of bio-diesel from cooking oils is being done on a very small scale right now, is very simple, and yields a fuel superior in ways to petro-diesel.The manufacture of high-octane alcohol from the starch and sugar in vegetable wastes and discarded food is also being done in some other countries every day .Eventually the goal here would be that all machinery in this service would run on fuels recovered from the national waste-stream. While this would not help lessen global warming, it would reduce by a little bit our dependence on foreign oil and create a working model for resource recovery .Moving to break our century-long addiction to oil must begin somewhere if it is ever to get underway.

Alcohol is not the answer, bio-diesel is not the answer, wind power is not the answer, hydro-power is not the answer, solar energy is not the answer, geothermal is not the answer, hydrogen is not the answer; It is only all of these things together that begins to be the answer.

Traditional Skills or…
The idea of an organic farming service was chosen for several reasons. For one thing, farming was once a series of skills one learned from a father, or other working farmer.The advent of chemical farming and the corporate factory farm drove down prices, and made the small family farm become uneconomical. As small farmers tried to compete, they adopted more and more of the factory farm techniques and chemicals, and the old traditional skills were lost. Fortunately, many individuals have continued to study and perfect organic farming techniques, and in principle and practice, organic farming is now better developed, more scientific, and more successful than ever before. And consumers are responding; organic food is already a booming market.More people are selecting organic produce each day as they become aware of its superior flavor and nutritional benefits.

Additional Pills
One of the reasons healthcare demand and cost has sky-rocketed in this country is because the factory-farmed food Americans are eating is ever more processed and denatured.At its best, food delivers two separate (but connected) things that the human body requires – calories and nutrition. Calories are for energy. Nutrition is for system maintenance, protection and repair. Factory farming and industrial food processing provide modern Americans with an unprecedented flow of calories, but at the expense of nutrition. After the energy needs of the body have been met, excess calories are stored as fat. But excess calories do not satisfy the body’s need for nutrition.In a bizarre paradox, many Americans have become overweight and malnourished at the same time .A malnourished body is hungry all of the time, because it craves the nutrition that either isn't in the factory-farmed food, or has been processed out of it .A malnourished body cannot protect and repair itself, and the person becomes sick.Sick people become sedentary and depressed, and thus sicker, and so the cycle of illness begins to perpetuate itself.

The American medical-industrial complex is now larger and more powerful than the military-industrial complex.The medical establishment and the corporate pharmaceutical companies have become prosperous by exploiting malnourished, sedentary victims of our factory farms and food processors.The names for the conditions that people suffer are numerous and specific, and the pills that mask the symptoms are just as diverse.But the vast majority of these illnesses begin with malnutrition, body toxicity, sedentary lifestyle and depression.

Dirty Water
The chemical run-off from the factory farms pollutes our waterways and drinking water, which also makes people sick. This run-off is also killing off the wildlife as our streams and lakes and bays and oceans grow increasingly toxic.As Americans become ever sicker, they are being prescribed an ever larger array of antibiotics, anti-depressants, hormones, patent medicines and proprietary elixirs, and all of these products are passed in the urine and are now appearing in our waterways and drinking water as well.Even those people who are not currently sick are taking in measurable amounts of pharmaceutical products in drinking water .America cannot afford to be victimized by factory-farms anymore, or predatory pharmaceutical companies, but as we phase them out we must first teach many, many people the skills necessary to farm organically and to keep their health by growing, selecting, preparing and eating foods that deliver nutrition, as well as calories.

Finding Farmers
None of this is intended to suggest that everyone who elects to enter this service will become a farmer, any more than everyone who does a stint in the armed forces becomes a professional soldier.Not everybody has the interest or temperament necessary for farming. But at very least participants will know where their food comes from, and a proper way to eat to keep themselves from becoming malnourished.And those who participate in environmental restoration projects will carry through their lives the pride of having turned back the tide of planetary ruination.

Equal Opportunity
Unlike the military that must have minimum physical requirements for the recruits whose lives may depend upon their personal fitness, the Life Corps need not. There are all sorts of jobs to be done related to farming and restoring the environment that do not require full range of motion or anything else.The Life Corps could find a place for anyone willing to make a serious effort toward these goals.And a goal of this service would be to improve the health of its members and associates by access to clean, healthy food and work.

Mess Overhaul
Another important goal of this service would be to provide healthy food for the military services.Old-timers to whom I have listened generally said something similar about military food in the past: That it wasn’t delicious, but it was nourishing, and filling, and you got all you wanted.The modern military has more and more contracted such support services as food provision to private corporations .I have heard many complaints from peacetime servicemen who are underfed or forced to supplement their meager processed rations with fast food (the only option made available) to get sufficient calories, and I have heard stories in the press about troops in Iraq today unwilling or unable to eat the awful processed and pre-packaged meals provided to them.

And I have heard of military families living on bases who must apply for food stamps to get enough to eat .Neglecting or mistreating people in the Armed Services of our country is a betrayal and a disgrace.You cannot expect your service-people to perform at their best if they are under-fed or malnourished, or if their families are left at risk.And you can’t pretend you are supporting our troops if you don’t insure their nutritional safety and that of their families.The very least we can do for our service-people is to guarantee them a well-prepared and superbly nutritious (and hopefully tasty) meal, three times every day.This will be a responsibility of the Life Corps in peacetime and in war.

Veterans Benefits
A further goal would be to provide healing food for servicemen who become sick due to any form of biological contagion or chemical contamination or personal breakdown during their service.The first step in restoring the health of any sick person should be detoxifying their body and restoring it with clean, healthy food, free of chemical poisons.We are the richest nation the world has ever known and we have homeless war veterans living in our streets, men who lost their health and their happiness in the defense of our presumed interests, poisoned by our tools of war and the memory of experiences they can not forget or move beyond.We owe all of these veterans all of the physical, mental, and spiritual healing we can supply. And more.

Feeding Peace
It is important for the future of our country and our world that everyone have access to superb food that has been raised in a manner to heal the planet, and that we produce a great many people who know how to grow it, how to defend it from pests and disease by environmentally safe means, and how to prepare it in a healthy and flavorful manner. There can never be true peace without nutritional justice. We must guarantee that every person in the world have a place at the table.We must discover and educate and nurture those among us who have the interest and temperament to be organic farmers.And we must develop a workable system for guaranteeing those who apply themselves and learn these skills to get a starter farm of their own, and inexpensive access to interns (working toward their own farms) to share the seasonal work, as well as access to informational resources and other supports to get and keep them going.

Oxygen Reclamation
And we must begin developing a means of setting in motion the restoration of ruined eco-systems such as forests and prairies, not only as wildlife habitat but as carbon dioxide traps.The large-scale growing of tree seedlings and the planting of them in ruined eco-systems would be a step in the right direction. Global warming is the greatest threat to our existence that humanity has ever faced. Carbon dioxide that our burning of fossil fuels has released into the atmosphere is now known to be a major factor in this warming.Fire is a form of oxidation. When we burn carbon-based fuels every atom of carbon in the fuel becomes attached to two atoms of precious oxygen.In addition to the greenhouse effects, carbon dioxide is poisonous to humans and other animals, and oxygen is necessary.We can re-trap some of that carbon and release some of that oxygen by just planting trees. It is not enough, but it is a start.

Resource Recovery
The establishment of the U.S. Life Corps is a way to make a first step on so many necessary changes in how we treat our world. In this time of war I frequently hear our officials saying that the resources of Iraq belong to the Iraqi people. It stands to reason, then, that the resources of the U.S. belong to the American people.This is a first step toward Americans rolling up our sleeves and taking back our country and our environment, our atmosphere and our food and our health from the corporate structure that has gradually co-opted and undermined it all, for money.It is a start for people from all parties and philosophies to temporarily set aside our less immediate differences in order to make our work security, our food security, our water security, our health security, our environmental security, our atmospheric security, and our families’ security our top priorities right now.And any politician who won’t sign on to help us do this must be sent packing.And the corporations must be put on notice that they can no longer bribe our politicians to betray us. Corporate use of American resources will once again be at the discretion of We, The People.

Maximum versus Optimum
Even people who are not yet aware or convinced that there is a profound difference in the quality of food raised with natural methods will now admit that chemical-based factory farming is a major source of pollution of the environment, especially our drinking water.But, they say, organic farming techniques cannot produce enough food to feed the population. They claim that organic farming cannot guarantee the maximum crop yields that factory farming produces, and therefore is not economically feasible.This is a misleading and short-sighted argument.To begin with, most American consumers are not yet familiar with the economic and ecological concepts of Maximum yield versus Optimum yield .Maximum yield is the practice of squeezing the most profit out of anything right now (in this case, farming) by any and all means, regardless of the consequences.The more crops you can procure with the least amount of expense and chance, the higher the profits to the corporation.

But the defenders of this form of farming don’t admit to the hidden costs to our country, to the health of the American people, and to the survival of the ecosystem, to the water .Factory farming is the ruthless exploitation of this planet’s resources and, as a by-product, the sabotaging of our children’s futures for quick profit. Optimum Yield is the most you can harvest from a field without adding vast quantities of expensive and carcinogenic pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and harsh, chemical fertilizers, without the extensive and perpetual use of irrigation and without polluting local waters, without killing or depleting the topsoil and exposing it to erosive effects of water and wind, without killing off the natural soil organisms and local wildlife, without poisoning the farmer or the consumer, and without destroying the social structure of rural communities. Optimum yield recognizes that there will be a tomorrow and it can be better than today if we prepare for it. In a well-maintained organic agriculture, the soil actually improves each year, the quality of human food and animal feed improves, the farms once again become home to a broad spectrum of beneficial wildlife which help control insect populations.

Trouble Downstream
Using petrochemical fertilizers will certainly promote fast growth of plants, largely from the surplus nitrogen provided. But these fertilizers kill the life in the soil, destroy millions of natural interactions that take place between harmless soil insects and invertebrates and bacteria and fungi.hese organisms and interactions are the basis of life on earth, where the food chain begins.To destroy these is like randomly removing and discarding parts from the engine of your car, and then eventually wondering why it won’t run well, or at all .Chemically treated soils eventually become dead, and the natural structure is lost. There is no way for impoverished soil to hold the excess fertilizer, and so it washes out and ends up in our waterways, ruining the natural cycles there. Chemically raised crops are more vulnerable.All of the natural controls and balances between insects, bacteria, and fungi in the soil are gone. Thus it becomes necessary to preemptively spray the plants and soils with pesticides and fungicides which also end up in the food or drift and leach into our waterways.

The dead and eroded topsoil cannot hold water anymore, and vast quantities must be pumped from our precious ancient aquifers or diverted from rivers for irrigation.All the water on earth is always on its way to the sea, carrying dissolved mineral salts with it, or on its way back to the land as clouds, at which time it should be pure.If we put pesticides and chemical fertilizers and other pollutants onto the land, these substances follow the same path to the sea as the mineral salts.The rainwater run-off now carries these poisons also, and it gets into our drinking water and our lakes and streams and bays, damaging the life there. Eventually these poisons end up in the oceans, and when the water evaporates, these man-made poisons are left behind.The oceans of the world at the mouths of many rivers are becoming toxic chemical cesspools. Beyond the once fertile wetlands at the mouth of the Mississippi River where fleets of fishermen once made a living, and where wildlife teemed, there is now a tremendous dead zone, where nothing lives, which is growing and spreading out into the Gulf of Mexico.That is the future for our oceans everywhere if we don’t clean up the water that flows into them.

Wasting Water
By now most people in the America know we are facing a crisis in the loss of our pure drinking water.We all know what water is supposed to be like; Clean, clear, energized, naturally sparkling, health giving.We are turning all of the world’s water into a filthy, lifeless, toxic fluid.How many people over the age of thirty ever imagined that we would have to buy clean drinking water at the supermarket? Would we have been able to imagine that we could so quickly squander and pollute all of the drinkable water on earth?Does factory-farmed food still seem like a bargain?Using the Life Corps to facilitate the change-over of America’s agriculture back to organic family farms is a way to move toward the restoration of the water on which we depend back to its pristine state.

A Salt of The Earth
Another associated problem with chemical agriculture is that it exhausts the organic matter in the soil. The soil can then no longer hold water, and the crops must be irrigated.The water that is diverted from rivers and springs and used to irrigate crops on the dead soil quickly evaporates, leaving the dissolved salts in the soil.As more and more of these salts build up in the soil, the soil starts to become toxic to the plants.Just as the human body requires small amounts of mineral salts to survive, too much salt in the diet becomes a poison.

The Greater Generation
Tom Brokaw recently published a book called “The Greatest Generation”.No offense to those who endured Depression and World War, and to their tremendous efforts and sacrifices, but “The Greatest Generation” will be the one that makes the adjustments necessary to start to switch from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energies, and to restore the soil, water, and air of the earth to their healthy, life-enhancing and pristine state of perpetual renewal.And there is no time like the present.The stakes are very high.The hour is very late.We have the ability to fix it, if we start now.

Now .Before too long it will be too late.

Prevention Vs. Cure
The first place to attack the healthcare crisis in our country is at the source of the illnesses. People are getting sicker and sicker .Babies are being born ill.Auto-immune diseases are on the rise. Cancers and heart diseases are on the rise .Autism is on the rise .Learning disorders are on the rise.More and more school children are being kept drugged with pharmaceuticals, and some of the children taking these drugs are arming themselves and committing atrocities in the schools.In the U.S. there are over 40,000 suicides each year.40 million Americans have been diagnosed with depression.The evidence just keeps growing that something is going terribly wrong in our country, and the doctors are prevented from addressing these problems with any means except the prescription pad .Clearly nobody in power can or will address any of these problems at the root unless we force them to.The poor quality of the food that is raised with artificial chemical fertilizers and carrying traces of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, and then highly refined and industrially prepared with chemical additives are making American people a nation of malnourished poison victims with overburdened and dysfunctional immune systems.

Working Out The Bugs
As our farming methods and other forms of continuing pollution kill off birds and fish and amphibians and bats and reptiles, more and more insects will survive to multiply, and not the beneficial insects such as bees, but rather insects that can pose a threat to the health of humans and other animals such as mosquitoes.With mosquitoes come blood diseases like West Nile Virus, and in the subtropical and tropical regions, malaria, etc.The rise of these diseases will cause more panicked and haphazard spraying of insecticides, which will cause the the death of more animals that eat them, and another self-perpetuating spiral of destruction will be revved-up.With a service like the Life Corps, we can begin to experiment with less wasteful alternatives as we also spare the lives of wild insect eaters.

A Modest Proposal
If the Life Corps were to be implemented, imagine this possibility: A special garbage truck (running on bio-diesel or industrial alcohol) makes its round of homes, supermarkets and restaurants picking up biodegradable wastes (food scraps, fresh yard wastes, food past its selling date).These are delivered to a Life Corps base where the wastes are mixed in vats with water and yeast and allowed to ferment. After the alcoholic liquid has been strained from this material, the material is taken to local farms where it is spread on chosen fields and composting earthworms are introduced.The worms live in this material, eating and digesting it into worm castings, a rich form of natural fertilizer that is already in place on the field.The worms will have massively multiplied and then chickens, ducks and other fowl may be released to forage for the worms and add their own bits of fertilizer to the field.Back at the alcohol works, the alcoholic fluid is then distilled in solar stills, requiring no additional energy input.

Harvest Moonshine
We are told by corporate scientists that making and using industrial alcohol as a fuel is not economically feasible, but again this is misleading.It is not feasible the way they do it.The model for the way they do it is to raise corn on exhausted soil using large amounts of expensive fertilizers and pesticides and irrigation, using huge fuel-guzzling machines at every step in the process.They then refine it in fuel-guzzling plants to make highly-refined, pure alcohol, which is required for making gasohol and other products that they sell.In this model it requires more energy in the fossil fuel inputs than there is in the resulting alcohol product.But the engines of vehicles can be simply modified to run on a far less pure form of alcohol that is not mixed with gasoline.

Certainly starch and sugar must be present in the mix of biodegradable wastes to get a reasonable return of alcohol, but alcohol can be made from any material containing sufficient carbohydrates.In the first step we reduce the waste stream going to landfills and incinerators, in both of which the caloric and nutritional value of the biodegradable trash is squandered.We make a primary product, alcohol, two secondary products, mulch and worm food, two tertiary products, worm castings and free-ranging fowl (who spread their manure on the field as they feed).And then one can grow superior organic food upon this revitalized soil.It would never be economically feasible for corporate America to undertake this sort of experimental process, but the Life Corps would use the manpower of enlistees.It would be an additional value to our society if many citizens had first-hand knowledge and awareness of the problem of the waste stream.

Directing Energies
This service could also be of social benefit, by directing the unfocussed energies of young people toward socially constructive projects .People join the armed services for many reasons.Some young people are simply at a loss as to what to do with themselves.Some go as an alternative to prison.Some go for the guarantee of an education.Some go to get away from bad neighborhoods and dangerous situations.Many have a great wish to serve their country, or be engaged in something important, something bigger than themselves.Some have just made it through high school and need a break before starting college.To also have a non-military service would serve all of these needs just as well, and could also profit our country by producing organic farmers and skilled farm workers.

It would provide an opportunity for the handicapped, the conscientious objectors, and the agriculturally inclined to serve their country in a very important capacity.It would also create thousands of associated jobs, in clean industries, as one example, Integrated Pest Management (natural controls for crop pests).For those who find they have the interest and the temperament to be farmers, it could be an avenue where by there own efforts and achievements, they could get a farm of their own, under terms they could manage, in a marketplace where they could succeed.For others who don’t seek such a life, it could be a means of trading their energy and effort for education toward some other sort of career.For some it could just be a healthy, low-paid temporary job of honest outdoor work among other people, giving something back to their country and receiving in return, superbly nutritious food and a place to live.here could be associated opportunities for retirees who still feel they have something to offer, or are simply bored and lonely.

Brutal Cages
And there is another factor not to be dismissed; not to be taken lightly. This country has over two million people in jail, more per capita than any other country in the world, even those we look down upon as repressive and backward.As small family farms were forced out of existence, many rural areas of the United States were left without any employment to take its place.Many states began building prisons in these areas, to provide employment to the local people. For this to work these prisons then must be kept filled.By chance or design, these rural prisons are being filled (to an alarming degree) with members of urban minority groups, many convicted of non-violent crimes, such as drug possession .Prisons are terrible, dehumanizing places, and extremely expensive to run. Being in prison, either as a prisoner or a guard, has a terribly corrupting effect on people.When a person has been caged and brutalized for what society deems is a sufficient period to have gotten revenge for the crime committed, the prisoner is then pushed back out onto the street with no training, no support system, and in many cases is virtually unemployable.

Bringing back the family farm in an organic system that can work economically is a far more positive and creative use of rural people’s working lives than is guarding prisoners, and a far better alternative to putting people in cages and brutalizing them.Just consider this: If a prisoner is released and has nothing to do, no way to take care of himself, no path to re-enter society in a meaningful way, he will likely end up committing another crime.If one considers the cost to society of chasing down criminals, prosecuting and defending them, keeping them in jail for upward of thirty thousand dollars per year each, and then doing it all over again when they get out, it seems a terrible waste of energy and money.

If the released prisoner goes on to commit a crime of violence, imagine that cost to society: in ruined families, in medical costs, in lost work, in counseling for the victims, in now bearing the additional expense of keeping the prisoner in a maximum security facility. Imagine the cost to our culture in the loss of a reasonable certainty of personal safety and security.If the criminal kills someone and receives the death penalty the cost of appeals brings the cost to well over a million dollars.But if there were a way provided that the non-violent prisoner could earn the right to do his time in a non-military service such as I describe, it would allow the prisoner to earn his own keep, to have access (for perhaps the first time in his/her life) to adequate nourishing, healthy meals, and meaningful work.And to be safe from brutalization at the hands of fellow prisoners and guards.And at the end the person would have developed skills and knowledge and the option of continuing in this life and surroundings rather than being tossed back into the circumstances that moved him to commit their original crime.

Shameful Numbers
In the United States, the richest nation the world has ever seen, 33 million people, many of them children, will go to bed hungry tonight.60 million people, many of them children, live at or below the poverty level.here are 3 million homeless people on our streets.Many of them are children .Surely we can do better than this.With a world population of 6.3 billion (75% of whom are hungry or starving) estimated to grow by forty percent in the next 5 decades, we not only need a way for the world to provide food for them, but to provide work as well.uman effort is non-polluting, small bio-diverse farms can produce far more food than chemical factory farms and require more skilled workers.

Exporting Opportunity
The Mexicans and Central Americans who flock to the United States looking for work do not come because they hate their homelands. They leave the homes they love looking for any opportunity to turn their labor into food and income for their families .A future goal of this idea would be to also train many people from other countries, and try to establish a means to export this idea to other countries, with organic teachers and working farmers ready to go home and show how it can be done there.

Invitation To A Feast
I send this out in the hopes that it will find support and inspire others to come on-board bringing their skills and ideas and innovations and hope with them.hese issues and ideas are not Democratic or Republican, conservative or liberal, rich or poor, black or white .Everybody needs clean food and water and work, and a planet to live on. We can have it all.

That is the Idea For President:

The United States Life Corps.

A Growing Concern.

Spread the Word
If you agree with this plan, I ask that you e-mail this idea to everyone you know right away .I ask that you print it out and photocopy it for people without computers .I ask that you distribute it through the organizations and clubs and churches to which you belong .I ask that you bring it to your local media .I ask that you discuss it .I ask that you get it to everyone running for office in your state.bove all I ask you to demand that those for whom you intend to vote endorse this idea, pledge to make it happen.This can only work if it is widely circulated and publicly embraced, well before the next election.here are thousands of people in this country that have an equal or better understanding of these issues than I. Imagine if we could get everybody’s input, how much collective knowledge they could bring into this.

Strength In Numbers
There have been people farming organically for a long time, even before there was much of a market for their produce.They did it out of respect for life on earth, and to protect their own health. There are even more who have gardened organically for themselves and their families and friends.Now there have been organic standards created by the USDA, and many of these long-term farmers and gardeners are being hassled or excluded by over-zealous, misguided, or misinformed regulators.If we could create a vast network of working organic farmers, they would have the power to challenge the USDA bureaucracy with the informed collective voice of a union.Just as we should now challenge our politicians with the informed collective voice of a people demanding sane change .America should lead the way in this. Americans must lead the way in this.

No one else will, no one else can.

We can.

What we sow today, we shall reap tomorrow.

Dylan Ford

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© 2004 Dylan Ford