Forget The Maine! Remember The Powell Memorandum!

Mitch Jeserich's show on KPFK/Pacifica Radio, “Letters and Politics”, just keeps getting better.

Today he had an interview that will make your blood boil, with Marion Nestle - I imagine her surname is not a coincidence. She's the author of a new cartoon-book about the food industry, how it pollutes our food and distorts political processes around the world, its lobbying, freeloading on the taxpayer, propagandizing children to get them addicted to junk - general capitalist corruption - and what ordinary citizens can do about it. The title is "Eat, Drink, Vote" -

For instance, did you know that the Pizza Industry of the State of Maine were able to persuade Congress to over-rule Government regulators, to have a minimal amount of tomato paste accepted as a serving of vegetables in school lunches across the nation? A manipulation of our laws that made them millions of dollars.

If you love the show as much as I do, you can send compliments to Mitch at mitch@kpfa.org. You can listen to the program on the KPFK Archive now (I just checked).

But what really interested me, in addition to Ms Nestle's information, and perhaps will interest those who have learned from this Blog about the Powell Memorandum, was Mitch's introduction to the program.  He laid out some detailed information that I had not heard before, about other measures that the capitalist stooge and Nixon-appointed Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, introduced with the aim of subverting much of the progress that had been achieved by the American people from the Great Depression forward, including the Glass-Steagall Act, which if Democratic President Clinton had not signed the 1999 legislation which repealed it, might have saved the world from the economic meltdown of 2008.

Powell was, even more than I had realized, a hugely important General in "The War On The 60s". I'm writing to Mitch Jeserich, to try to obtain a transcript of his illuminating comments.  If I manage to get hold of them, I'll be delighted to pass them on to you.  Watch this space!


The blurb on "Eat, Drink, Vote" goes like this:  "What’s wrong with the US food system? Why is half the world starving while the other half battles obesity? Who decides our food issues, and why can’t we do better with labeling, safety, or school food? These are complex questions that are hard to answer in an engaging way for a broad audience. But everybody eats, and food politics affects us all.

Marion Nestle, whom Michael Pollan ranked as the #2 most powerful foodie in America (after Michelle Obama) in Forbes, has always used cartoons in her public presentations to communicate how politics—shaped by government, corporate marketing, economics, and geography—influences food choice. Cartoons do more than entertain; the best get right to the core of complicated concepts and powerfully convey what might otherwise take pages to explain.

In Eat, Drink, Vote, Nestle teams up with The Cartoonist Group syndicate to present more than 250 of her favorite cartoons on issues ranging from dietary advice to genetic engineering to childhood obesity. Using the cartoons as illustration and commentary, she engagingly summarizes some of today’s most pressing issues in food politics. While encouraging readers to vote with their forks for healthier diets, this book insists that it’s also necessary to vote with votes to make it easier for everyone to make healthier dietary choices."