Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. The following article--in its
entirety--is sure to echo many of your thoughts and feelings on the
holiday. A treat in its way for people like us -- if you have not
already read it.  --Warm regards at this time of turmoil, Pamela
Rice, pres., VivaVegie Society



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/opinion/22steiner.html?_r=1&sq=miserable&st=cs\
e&adxnnl=1&scp=1&adxnnlx=1259244372-/FPQIIy5Gj0TMrZUDwUvYA


The New York Times

November 22, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Animal, Vegetable, Miserable
By GARY STEINER

Lewisburg, Pa.

LATELY more people have begun to express an interest in where the
meat they eat comes from and how it was raised. Were the animals
humanely treated? Did they have a good quality of life before the
death that turned them into someone's dinner?

Some of these questions, which reach a fever pitch in the days
leading up to Thanksgiving, pertain to the ways in which animals are
treated. (Did your turkey get to live outdoors?) Others focus on the
question of how eating the animals in question will affect the
consumer's health and well-being. (Was it given hormones and
antibiotics?)

None of these questions, however, make any consideration of whether
it is wrong to kill animals for human consumption. And even when
people ask this question, they almost always find a variety of
resourceful answers that purport to justify the killing and
consumption of animals in the name of human welfare. Strict ethical
vegans, of which I am one, are customarily excoriated for equating
our society's treatment of animals with mass murder. Can anyone
seriously consider animal suffering even remotely comparable to human
suffering? Those who answer with a resounding no typically argue in
one of two ways.

Some suggest that human beings but not animals are made in God's
image and hence stand in much closer proximity to the divine than any
non-human animal; according to this line of thought, animals were
made expressly for the sake of humans and may be used without scruple
to satisfy their needs and desires. There is ample support in the
Bible and in the writings of Christian thinkers like Augustine and
Thomas Aquinas for this pointedly anthropocentric way of devaluing
animals.

Others argue that the human capacity for abstract thought makes us
capable of suffering that both qualitatively and quantitatively
exceeds the suffering of any non-human animal. Philosophers like
Jeremy Bentham, who is famous for having based moral status not on
linguistic or rational capacities but rather on the capacity to
suffer, argue that because animals are incapable of abstract thought,
they are imprisoned in an eternal present, have no sense of the
extended future and hence cannot be said to have an interest in
continued existence.

The most penetrating and iconoclastic response to this sort of
reasoning came from the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer in his story
"The Letter Writer," in which he called the slaughter of animals the
"eternal Treblinka."

The story depicts an encounter between a man and a mouse. The man,
Herman Gombiner, contemplates his place in the cosmic scheme of
things and concludes that there is an essential connection between
his own existence as "a child of God" and the "holy creature"
scuffling about on the floor in front of him.

Surely, he reflects, the mouse has some capacity for thought;
Gombiner even thinks that the mouse has the capacity to share love
and gratitude with him. Not merely a means for the satisfaction of
human desires, nor a mere nuisance to be exterminated, this tiny
creature possesses the same dignity that any conscious being
possesses. In the face of that inherent dignity, Gombiner concludes,
the human practice of delivering animals to the table in the form of
food is abhorrent and inexcusable.

Many of the people who denounce the ways in which we treat animals in
the course of raising them for human consumption never stop to think
about this profound contradiction. Instead, they make impassioned
calls for more "humanely" raised meat. Many people soothe their
consciences by purchasing only free-range fowl and eggs, blissfully
ignorant that "free range" has very little if any practical
significance. Chickens may be labeled free-range even if they've
never been outside or seen a speck of daylight in their entire lives.
And that Thanksgiving turkey? Even if it is raised "free range," it
still lives a life of pain and confinement that ends with the
butcher's knife.

How can intelligent people who purport to be deeply concerned with
animal welfare and respectful of life turn a blind eye to such
practices? And how can people continue to eat meat when they become
aware that nearly 53 billion land animals are slaughtered every year
for human consumption? The simple answer is that most people just
don't care about the lives or fortunes of animals. If they did care,
they would learn as much as possible about the ways in which our
society systematically abuses animals, and they would make what is at
once a very simple and a very difficult choice: to forswear the
consumption of animal products of all kinds.

The easy part of this consists in seeing clearly what ethics requires
and then just plain doing it. The difficult part: You just haven't
lived until you've tried to function as a strict vegan in a
meat-crazed society.

What were once the most straightforward activities become a constant
ordeal. You might think that it's as simple as just removing meat,
eggs and dairy products from your diet, but it goes a lot deeper than
that.

To be a really strict vegan is to strive to avoid all animal
products, and this includes materials like leather, silk and wool, as
well as a panoply of cosmetics and medications. The more you dig, the
more you learn about products you would never stop to think might
contain or involve animal products in their production - like wine
and beer (isinglass, a kind of gelatin derived from fish bladders, is
often used to "fine," or purify, these beverages), refined sugar
(bone char is sometimes used to bleach it) or Band-Aids (animal
products in the adhesive). Just last week I was told that those
little comfort strips on most razor blades contain animal fat.

To go down this road is to stare headlong into an abyss that, to
paraphrase Nietzsche, will ultimately stare back at you.

The challenges faced by a vegan don't end with the nuts and bolts of
material existence. You face quite a few social difficulties as well,
perhaps the chief one being how one should feel about spending time
with people who are not vegans.

Is it O.K. to eat dinner with people who are eating meat? What do you
say when a dining companion says, "I'm really a vegetarian - I don't
eat red meat at home." (I've heard it lots of times, always without
any prompting from me.) What do you do when someone starts to grill
you (so to speak) about your vegan ethics during dinner? (Wise vegans
always defer until food isn't around.) Or when someone starts to
lodge accusations to the effect that you consider yourself morally
superior to others, or that it is ridiculous to worry so much about
animals when there is so much human suffering in the world? (Smile
politely and ask them to pass the seitan.)

Let me be candid: By and large, meat-eaters are a self-righteous
bunch. The number of vegans I know personally is ... five. And I have
been a vegan for almost 15 years, having been a vegetarian for almost
15 before that.

Five. I have lost more friends than this over arguments about animal
ethics. One lapidary conclusion to be drawn here is that people take
deadly seriously the prerogative to use animals as sources of
satisfaction. Not only for food, but as beasts of burden, as raw
materials and as sources of captive entertainment - which is the way
animals are used in zoos, circuses and the like.

These uses of animals are so institutionalized, so normalized, in our
society that it is difficult to find the critical distance needed to
see them as the horrors that they are: so many forms of subjection,
servitude and - in the case of killing animals for human consumption
and other purposes - outright murder.

People who are ethical vegans believe that differences in
intelligence between human and non-human animals have no moral
significance whatsoever. The fact that my cat can't appreciate
Schubert's late symphonies and can't perform syllogistic logic does
not mean that I am entitled to use him as an organic toy, as if I
were somehow not only morally superior to him but virtually entitled
to treat him as a commodity with minuscule market value.

We have been trained by a history of thinking of which we are
scarcely aware to view non-human animals as resources we are entitled
to employ in whatever ways we see fit in order to satisfy our needs
and desires. Yes, there are animal welfare laws. But these laws have
been formulated by, and are enforced by, people who proceed from the
proposition that animals are fundamentally inferior to human beings.
At best, these laws make living conditions for animals marginally
better than they would be otherwise - right up to the point when we
send them to the slaughterhouse.

Think about that when you're picking out your free-range turkey,
which has absolutely nothing to be thankful for on Thanksgiving. All
it ever had was a short and miserable life, thanks to us intelligent,
compassionate humans.

Gary Steiner, a professor of philosophy at Bucknell University, is
the author of "Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral
Status and Kinship."

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Thank God the Turkey is Fake Feast!
Join other compassionate souls for Thanksgiving dinner at Veggie
Heaven, Teaneck, NJ

Dear VivaVegie People and others:
Today we are thankful for our lives. Let's give an animal his or her
life today as well. Let's not take it away.
Hearts for Animals, and the Hackensack/Teaneck Veggie Vegan
Meetup Group,
<http://vegan.meetup.com/512/calendar/11900840/>http://vegan.meetup.com/512/cale\
ndar/11900840/
are joining
forces for a serious Thanksgiving dinner,
"Thank god the Turkey is Fake Feast" at Veggie Heaven. Bring
your own spirits.

When: November 26, 2009 (Thanksgiving day)

Where: Veggie Heaven (Strictly Vegan Dining)
473 Cedar Lane
Teaneck, NJ 07666

Regular Menu:
<http://www.veggieheavennj.com/index.php?p=1_13_Teaneck-Dine-In>http://www.veggi\
eheavennj.com/index.php?p=1_13_Teaneck-Dine-In
Time: 6:00PM
Thanksgiving Dinner:
Order from their regular menu or
have the ThanksVegan feast.
Cost: $17.95 - $22.00 a plate.
Menu:
Soup (Choice of Won-ton, Hot & Sour, or Mixed Vegetables)
Dinner Salad
Vegan Turkey includes stuffing, mashed potatos, gravy, rice.
Dessert is extra.

Directions:
Will pick you up if you need a ride and live near WNY, JC area.
Just email Greg: mailto:newdlhead@... .

Transportation from NYC:
Take the A train to the GW Bridge bus station, catch the New
Jersey transit bus #175 to Ridgewood.
Get off right in front of Veggie Heaven in the center of
Teaneck at the corner of Garrison Ave. and Cedar Lane.
175 timetable, thanksgiving (sunday timetable)
<http://vegan.meetup.com/512/photos/>http://vegan.meetup.com/512/photos/.
Bus leaves GWB at 5:15pm, 6:15pm, 7:15pm, 8:15pm and takes 20
minutes to get to Veggie Heaven.
Bus leaves back to New York City at roughly 9:42pm, 10:42pm and
11:42pm.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

original, w/images & links:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/11/24/vegetarian.thanksgiving/index.html


CNN.com


In lieu of turkey, Thanksgiving sparks vegetable-inspired creativity
By Madison Park, CNN
STORY HIGHLIGHTS

      * A vegetarian Thanksgiving doesn't
necessarily mean opting for a Tofurkey or tofu log
      * For many iReporters, holiday is all about
experimenting with eclectic flavors
      * Vegetarian chef: "It has become easier to
cook vegan and vegetarian meals"

(CNN) -- Going vegetarian on Thanksgiving doesn't
mean forcing tofu into faux poultry or shaping
legumes into meat-like blobs.

Forget tofurkey. Why bother, some vegetarians say, with the pretense?

"That scares me," said Melissa Melcombe, a
25-year-old vegetarian. "If you try to shape a
loaf like a turkey, it looks like piles of mush
and ends up more comical than traditional. I
don't think it's ever occurred to my family. It's
kind of like making a piece of tofu look like
filet mignon. We don't have to kid ourselves."

Rather than lamenting the lack of a basted bird
at the center of the table, vegetarian iReporters
like Melcombe relish the opportunity to
experiment beyond the traditional side dishes of
mashed potatoes and green bean casseroles, on the
food-friendly holiday.

Melcombe, a longtime vegetarian from Brentwood,
California, said she is frequently asked what she
eats for Thanksgiving.

"I thoroughly enjoy setting the record straight
-- we vegetarians do appreciate a delicious
Thanksgiving meal sans the turkey," she wrote in
her iReport. "Turkey has tryptophan anyhow, so
the good news is that those of us who don't
consume the bird can actually stay awake for
dessert."

Thanksgiving is an opportunity for Melcombe, her
vegetarian parents and 16-year-old brother to
brainstorm an eclectic menu. Usually, they settle
on a blend of the traditional -- such as squash
and corn dishes, mashed potatoes and a homemade
cranberry apple sauce -- and nontraditional side
dishes such as sweet potato oven fries and a
broccoli dish with basil, pine nut, parmesan and
spinach in phyllo pastry.

"Our main dish -- that's always the topic of
discussion," Melcombe said. "It's easy for people
who eat meat, because they know what they're
going to eat. It's fun for us every year, because
it's a good time to try a new recipe."

Sometimes they buy a premade protein loaf made of
lentils or a wheat protein known as seitan, or
they experiment with an elaborate rice dish. But
last year's cranberry and pecan wild rice pilaf
didn't satisfy everybody's taste buds, so the
Melcombes are back at the drawing board.

For many iReporters, Thanksgiving is all about
experimenting with eclectic flavors.

Swathi Krishnam plans to celebrate the holiday by
infusing spices and flavors into the food that
influenced her childhood in India and Trinidad.
The lifelong vegetarian plans to serve an
all-vegetarian meal to her Thanksgiving guests in
her Glen Allen, Virginia, home.

"Even with vegetarian dishes, there's so many
varieties," said Krishnam, 27. "It's not a
monotonous menu."

Her Thanksgiving menu considerations include
stuffed mushrooms, chili biscuits, spicy
cauliflower, banana pie and flavored soya chunks
marinated in green chili.

"I've heard turkey is pretty filling," Krishnam
said. "My main goal is to have the plate full of
variety. Once you have variety, when people put
it on their plate, you don't notice the turkey is
missing. There's so many things. You give them
other options."

Her favorite protein is soya chunks. Click here
for her recipe. Also derived from soybeans, soya
chunks lock in flavor and seasoning better than
tofu, she said. Krishnam submitted several
iReports featuring her favorite vegetarian
recipes.

Soya's consistency is more similar to vegetarian
burger patties than tofu and can be found in
ethnic grocery stores. Krishnam knows she has
some skepticism to overcome with omnivorous
guests.

"Soya is so filled with protein, it fills you
up," she said. "It sustains you. They get over it
-- the initial skepticism."

Health.com: 25 healthy recipes for a vegetarian Thanksgiving

Experimenting with different cultures' cuisines
came naturally after Judith Lautner of San Luis
Obispo, California, 63, became vegetarian 25
years ago. Two years ago, she went vegan.

"I started to explore other foods and culture,
much more than when I was eating meat. Generally,
we stick to what we're comfortable with. This
pushed me to cook Indian, Vietnamese, Chinese,
Thai -- anything that looks interesting. We get
more familiarity with spices and different
elements of cooking."

And no, Lautner said, she does not miss the
traditional turkey for Thanksgiving. She joins a
group of vegans who celebrate Thanksgiving with
their annual vegan potluck that includes homemade
Tofurkeys, stuffed squash, and a three sisters
stew -- made of squash, corn and beans.

Lautner likes to eat vegan ice cream. And to make
homemade desserts, she uses applesauce or silken
tofu instead of eggs, and margarine instead of
butter.

Scot Jones, executive head chef of VegiTerranean,
an Akron, Ohio, restaurant owned by rocker
Chrissie Hynde, said it has become easier to cook
vegan and vegetarian meals. Trained in
traditional Italian and French cuisine, Jones
said the word vegan "never popped up in culinary
school." With growing awareness about animal
products, he said, food is becoming more
vegan-friendly.

For Thanksgiving, Jones offers special
Thanksgiving classes for vegans. The entree: a
pot pie made with roasted vegetables, gravy and
tofu. He taught the class to make raw honey
cheesecake bars with cranberry topping, root
vegetable sticks with roasted garlic dip, and a
wild field green salad with sun-dried cherries,
blueberries and strawberries dressed with a warm
blueberry vinaigrette with tofu ricotta.

"I love Thanksgiving," Jones said. "It's the
harvest month. You have such wonderful harvest.
Squash, different nuts are coming into season,
things of that nature -- things that are great,
like fresh cranberry."

Instead of a plain potato gratin, he's planning
on sweet potatoes, leeks, soy mozzarella and
fresh thyme for a vegan-friendly side dish.

"If you concentrate on a side dish, and pack it
full of flavor, you don't miss the animal
protein," Jones said.



Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/11/24/vegetarian.thanksgiving/index.html

© 2008 Cable News Network

FROM TODAY'S NEW YORK TIMES:

ORIGINAL w/ images:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/recipes-for-a-vegan-thanksgiving/?emc=e\
ta1



November 24, 2009, 10:20 am
Recipes for a Vegan Thanksgiving
By TARA PARKER-POPE

A Vegetarian Thanksgiving

These days, it isn't enough to offer vegetarian
dishes at Thanksgiving - some of your guests may
adhere to a vegan diet. Vegan foods are meatless
dishes prepared without dairy, eggs or any animal
products.

While cooking without butter, cheese, eggs or
milk may sound like an impossible feat at
Thanksgiving time, some cooks may enjoy the
challenge. Jason Wyrick, a Phoenix chef who
specializes in vegan cooking, offers two
delicious recipes - a mushroom roulade and a
gnocchi with pumpkin sauce - that are likely to
tempt everyone at your holiday table, whether
they are meat eaters, vegetarians or vegans.

Mr. Wyrick, 36, who learned at age 28 that he had
Type 2 diabetes, says he was able to reverse his
diabetes by following a low-fat, vegan diet. He
publishes the online magazine Vegan Culinary
Experience. He notes that the mushroom roulade
recipe requires several steps and can be time
consuming, so he prepares the marinade for the
mushrooms early in the day.

"It is well worth the wait, especially when I
have guests," he said. "The nothing-else-exists
looks of culinary ecstasy on their faces reminds
me why I became a chef."

The gnocchi dish, meanwhile, is much simpler. If
you're in a rush, skip the basil cream topping,
which requires soaking cashews in advance, and
serve the gnocchi with the simple pumpkin sauce.
"It's hearty, tasty and a huge hit during the
holidays," he said.


Smoked Mushroom Roulade

4 very large portobello mushrooms
8 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
2 cups red wine
Olive oil for brushing
Pinch of salt
Toothpicks

Filling:
2 cups of cubed whole wheat French bread
1/4 of a white onion, chopped into 1/4-inch pieces
1 stalk of celery, 1/4-inch slices
1/2 of a green apple, chopped into 1/2-inch pieces
1 teaspoon olive oil
1 tablespoon smoked paprika
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1/2 cup vegetable stock

Smoking:
Apple or mesquite wood chips for smoking the
mushrooms. (If you're using a grill, soak for an
hour. Don't soak if you're using the oven smoking
method described below.)

1. Marinate the mushrooms in advance. Start by
removing the stems and gills from the
portobellos. Mince the garlic and grate the
nutmeg, then mix both with red wine. Marinate the
portobello caps in the wine solution for at least
4 hours, covered.

2. Near the end of the marinade process, prepare
the filling. (Takes about 20 minutes.) Cube the
French bread and set it aside.

3. Chop the onion, slice the celery and dice the
apple. Sauté the onion and celery on medium heat
in the 1 teaspoon olive oil until the onion
starts to brown, then add the apple and sauté for
another 2 minutes.

4. Add the cubed French bread, paprika, salt and
pepper. Reduce the heat to medium, and sauté for
about 5 minutes.

5. Add the vegetable stock. Cook for another 5 to
7 minutes, then remove from heat.

6. Smoke the mushrooms. If you have a charcoal
grill, light it with the soaked apple chips. Take
the portobello caps out of the red wine marinade.
Brush with olive oil and sprinkle with a touch of
salt. Place on the grill until they are soft and
pliable. If you don't have access to a grill, you
can either buy a smoker bag from a cooking store
or online, or make one of your own with foil.
Using a large piece of foil, add the dry chips
(don't soak the chips if you use this method) and
the mushrooms. Seal to make a pouch. Bake the
foil pouch or the smoker bag at 375 degrees for
25 minutes.

7. Assemble the mushroom roulade. Use about 3
tablespoons of filling per mushroom, depending on
their size. Wrap the mushrooms around the filling
and pierce the mushrooms with toothpicks at a
diagonal at the point where the ends meet to hold
them together.


Gnocchi in Pumpkin Sauce

4 cups whole wheat gnocchi
1 1/2 cups pureed pumpkin
1 1/2 cups almond milk
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon salt

Basil Cream:
1/4 cup raw cashews, presoaked in water for 12 hours
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup fresh basil
1/4 teaspoon fresh pepper

1. To make the basil cream, drain the soaked
cashews. In a blender or food processor, blend
cashews with 1/4 cup water, basil and pepper
until the mixture has the consistency of a thick
cream, meaning it should slowly drip off a spoon.

2. Boil the gnocchi until they float, then drain
in a colander. Shock them with a quick spritz of
cold water from your faucet.

3. To prepare the sauce, mix the pureed pumpkin
with the almond milk, nutmeg and salt. Simmer for
5 minutes, then add the gnocchi. Simmer for
another minute.

4. Assemble the dish by placing the gnocchi and
sauce on the plates. Add dots or swirls of basil
cream.

Meatless Day - November 25
sponsored by the Sadhu Vaswani Center

This year, November 25, is the 130-year anniversary birthday of the
organization's guru Sadhu T. L. Vaswani

The Sadhu Vaswani Center was an active component of the Veggie Pride
Parade earlier this year, sending their current delightful and
inspirational leader, J. P. Vaswani

They're looking for vegan pledges.

Contact them and take part of this great effort.

All information is available in an online PDF:
Access is available at via:
http://www.vivavegie.org/vvi/pdf/sadhu.pdf


SADHU VASWANI CENTER, USA
494 Durie Avenue, Closter, New Jersey 07624
Tel: (201)768-7857  *  Fax: (201)768-0433

Sadhu Vaswani Center Office Hours:
Monday thru Friday 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

My friend Roni Shapiro sent this to me. It could be a great option for you.
Pamela R., VivaVegie



Healthy Gourmet To-Go
100% Delicious, Organic, Vegan
Meals delivered right to your door:  Upstate, Westchester, NYC

Thanksgiving Delivery Week:
Delivery will be on Wednesday, November 25th.  Scroll down  for our
holiday menu...order soon!


Two Ordering Options for Thanksgiving Week:

Option 1:
Your regular weekly Bag of Specials for November 25th

Scroll down to see the menu for the week of Nov. 25th.
Your Bag of Specials will include 10 dishes from the menu.
Everything is vegan and organic.  Dishes with (GF) next to them are
Gluten-Free.
Please place your order for November 25th as soon as possible so we
can be sure to fit you in this busy holiday week.
***Your total comes to $110.00 plus delivery charges.

Option 2:
Your Compassionate Thanksgiving Dinner for November 25th

Scroll down to see the menu for the week of Nov. 25th.
Your Compassionate Thanksgiving Dinner will include any dishes you
choose in the amounts you'll need to feed your guests.
Everything is vegan and organic.  Dishes with (GF) next to them are
Gluten-Free.
Below each dish is the container size with price and serving
suggestion so you can order your ala carte holiday dinner with ease.
Container size listed by each dish is the minimum order for ala carte
orders.
Please place your order for November 25th as soon as possible so we
can be sure to fit you in this busy week.
***There is a $100.00 minimum, plus delivery charges and tax for delivery.
***Holiday orders for more than $200.00 require a 50% deposit by
November 18th.


Eat well & be well,

Reach Roni at:
mailto:carrottalk@...
(212) 561-0854
(914) 388-2162
(845)  339-7171

The following post comes from UNITED POULTRY CONCERNS.
Pamela R., VivaVegie Society




13 November 2009
UPC Invites You to Our Thanksgiving Events
Vigil for Turkeys & Thanksgiving Open House

Thanksgiving Vigil for Turkeys
Please Join Us in Bethesda, MD, November 20th
<http://www.upc-online.org/alerts/turkey_vigil/2009.html>http://www.upc-online.o\
rg/alerts/turkey_vigil/2009.html

United Poultry Concerns will hold a Vigil for Turkeys on Friday
evening, November 20th from 7:00 to 8:30pm. Please join us at the
Giant Food Store corner of Arlington Road & Elm Street, in Bethesda,
Maryland, to leaflet and hold posters on behalf of the millions of
turkeys who are being slaughtered for Thanksgiving Day.

The Vigil will begin with a five-minute talk by UPC President Karen
Davis about the atrocities committed against turkeys. This will be
followed by a silent demonstration, including leafleting and
sign-holding, until 8:25pm. UPC member, Sarah Kindrick, will conclude
the Vigil with a five-minute eulogy for all of the turkeys who have
suffered and died needlessly for Thanksgiving.

For more information, please call Sarah Kindrick at 301-496-2253
(day) and 301-740-9455 (evening). Or call United Poultry Concerns at
757-678-7875.

We look forward to having you with us to remember the turkeys and to
advocate for a compassionate Thanksgiving celebration. UPC will
provide our Turkeys brochures, Life Can Be Beautiful - Go Vegan!
Brochures, Banners & Posters. All we need is YOU!

To order our brochures and posters for your own Thanksgiving events,
please visit our merchandise section at
<http://www.upc-online.org/merchandise>www.upc-online.org/merchandise.

For more information about turkeys, please visit
<http://www.upc-online.org/turkeys>www.upc-online.org/turkeys.

UPC's 19th Annual Thanksgiving Open House on the Virginia Eastern Shore
Saturday November 28th from 2-5pm

You are cordially invited to attend United Poultry Concerns' 19th
annual Thanksgiving Open House at our sanctuary in Machipongo,
Virginia on Saturday afternoon, November 28th from 2 to 5pm. Please
bring one all-vegetarian, vegan dish to share. Children are welcome!
<http://www.upc-online.org/alerts/openhouse/2009.html>www.upc-online.org/alerts/\
openhouse/2009.html


United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes the
compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl.
Don't just switch from beef to chicken. Go Vegan.
<http://www.UPC-online.org>www.UPC-online.org

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Watch the incredible "Rocco" segment on The Dr. Oz Show.
Click for video of show.
http://tinyurl.com/yhc5d6m

Regrettably, per last paragraph of accompanying story reprinted
below, the doctor recommends that the cowboy reintroduce meat to his
diet, albeit slowly. Why would he say this?!?
POST COMMENTS at:
http://tinyurl.com/yhc5d6m
- Pamela R.


---------

Cowboy Gives Up Meat for Dr. Oz Show:
Rocco Wachman, Cowboy, Goes Vegan

When you think of a cowboy, your mind goes to images of horseback
riding, Western boots, a Stetson and a steak dinner. But for Rocco
Wachman, chief instructor at the Arizona Cowboy College in
Scottsdale, the steak dinners have been replaced by soy burgers -- at
least temporarily. For 28 days, the 55 year-old man's man gave up
eating meat and adopted a vegan diet as part of a challenge for The
Dr. Oz Show.

During the four-week diet, Wachman lost 30 pounds, reduced his waist
by six inches and was able to stop taking medication for cholesterol
and diabetes, reports The Arizona Republic. The formerly 265-pound
cowboy, who once turned city slickers into cowboys for Country Music
Television (CMT), now eats seven small meals a day, none of which is
bigger than the size of his palm. Wachman believes that prior to
starting the diet, he was addicted to food.

"The difficult part is: If I were an alcoholic or addicted to a drug,
I would stay away totally from that type of behavior, but everyone
must continue eating," he says.

Eating vegan means eschewing all meat or animal products and
consuming fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes. Michael F. Roizen,
M.D., who works with Mehmet Oz, M.D., says that this 28-day diet is
designed to break the body's addiction to sugar and saturated fats.
"The first seven days were the hardest," says Wachman.

Roizen also insisted that the cowboy incorporate more exercise into
his daily routine. Wachman was told to walk 10,000 steps per day, a
goal he achieved by giving up riding his ATV.

Wachman is pleased with his success and has even learned to enjoy a
soy burger with hummus spread between two slices of tomato. But does
he plan to stick with the diet? "I figure I will stay away from
anything with a face or legs for a few more weeks at least," he says.

Vegans eat only plant-based foods, which means that milk, eggs and
cheese are off the table. If you decide to go vegan, it's important
to make sure you are still getting adequate nutrition. Be sure to
find food alternatives that will give you the nutrients you may be
missing by not eating meat, such as B-12, iron, zinc and calcium.
Roizen recommends reintroducing meat back into your diet slowly -- 2
to 3 ounces a few times a week.

The following post was sent along from the NYC Animal Advocacy
Network Meetup group. Call 212--242-0011 to pick up copies of 101
Reasons Why I'm a Vegetarian, pamphlet edition (Union Square area).
-Pamela R.


_____________

Announcing a new Meetup for NYC Animal Advocacy Network!

What: Compassionate Choices Outreach at the Ani DiFranco Concert

When: November 21, 2009 7:00 PM

Where:
The Town Hall
123 W 43rd St
New York, NY 10036
212.545.7536

The average person eats about 35 farmed animals per year, adding up
to thousands in a lifetime. Leafleting with literature on factory
farming is proven effective in creating new vegans and vegetarians,
and convincing others to reduce their consumption of animal products.
By educating the public about animals suffering on factory farms, we
can inspire others to spare thousands, if not millions, of animals
and ultimately work toward the end of exploitation.

Join us at the sold-out Ani DiFranco Concert at The Town Hall. This
popular event will be an opportunity to reach many with our message
of compassion and justice.

For more information on this event, please RSVP by email to Pamela at
pamelap@... or call her at 718.965.0125. An RSVP is
not required, but it will help us determine the correct number of
leaflets to bring. We will also notify you if we have to cancel the
event due to bad weather (or you can call the day of the event to
confirm).

Where: The Town Hall, 123 W. 43rd St., NYC
When: 7 p.m. - 8 pm

Learn more here:
http://www.meetup.com/nycanimaladvocacy/calendar/11891690/

Some local Thanksgiving menus ...


Veg-activist Demetrius Bagley sent in the following local Thanksgiving menus.


Candle Cafe: http://files.meetup.com/160956/CandleCafeThanksgivingInhouse.pdf
Candle 79: http://files.meetup.com/160956/Thanksgiving_09_79.pdf
Counter: http://files.meetup.com/160956/CounterThanksgiving2009.pdf
Sacred Chow: http://files.meetup.com/160956/tgiving2009.pdf


If you know of others, please pass them along so we can post for all to enjoy.

Personally, I go to VP2 at 144 West 4th Street in Manhattan every
year for my yearly gorging. Their Paradise "turkey" is the gobbler's
gobble.  It's listed at:
http://www.vp2-nyc.com/menu.html
Pamela R.

TONIGHT


Eating Animals author Jonathan Safran Foer

at Barnes & Noble - Union Square, New York NY


http://store-locator.barnesandnoble.com/event/60519

See the online video ....

Al Gore on the hot seat: Have you become a vegetarian, he's asked.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8341908.stm

re: $100 ticket available for LOHV gala, tonight. One minor
stipulation. Call immediately to claim it.


I have a $100 ticket for the LOHV gala taking place tonight.

Call me immediately, and you can use it.

Just one stipulation: That you take copious notes on everything that
happens, just as if you were a secretary or a reporter.

Can you do it?

Call me at:

212-242-0011

You have until 5:30 p.m., today, Thursday, November 12.

- Pamela Rice

HealthyPlanet - TurkeyFree Thanksgiving


Turkey-free Thanksgiving
Saturday, Nov. 21st, 2009
Sweet Hollow Hall in Melville
West Hills County Park on Gwynne Road

Full information at:
http://www.healthy-planet.org/Series/index.asp

The following comes from MHVS:
- Pamela R.




http://hosted.verticalresponse.com/225703/37ce2b70a8/1531001675/45492658a5/


Hi MHVS Members and Friends,

Once again Mid-Hudson Vegetarian Society will hold a TURKEY-FREE
potluck on Thanksgiving Day at the Milan Town Hall at 1:30 PM.

Please bring a vegan dish to share along with a recipe card. To be
environmentally sensitive, please bring you own table setting, it can
be plain or fancy - there will be a contest for the most attractive
one.

We have 60 reservations, the capacity of the room is 100, so please
do reserve now either by calling 845.876.2626 or sending an e-mail to
rsvp@... - hope you will be joining us.

Many vegetarian organizations have a Thanksgiving dinner shortly
before or after the holiday but for the past twenty-five years we
have celebrated on the day as many of us no longer wish to be where
there is a turkey on the table. More people are coming with their
families, although many do come without. It is also a very welcoming
event for singles as we are all one extended family on this day as we
share our compassion for animals and our earth. We feel this is not
only more humane but allows humans to live better too.

Do join us for this festive afternoon. There will be special
activities for all the children attending.

Thanks to those of you who have sent your RSVP. If you have not
reserved, please do so by November 20.

Our website www.mhvs.org has our Upcoming Events for the next few
months. Please check it out and save the dates. As we do not like to
send too many e-mails, please take special note of the New Year's Day
Open House also.

We hope to hear from you soon,
Judi Gelardi, President
Roberta Schiff, Events Coordinator

re: VivaVegie need help editing VPP video footage. We have FINAL CUT PRO


VivaVegie has its hands on four un-edited digital video files it
wants to edit and post to YouTube and to the Veggie Pride Parade Web
site.

http://www.veggieprideparade.org/

The footage is of the 2009 parade.

Who out there knows the fundamentals of video editing?
This is all we need right now.

We have FINAL CUT PRO.  If you know how to use this program in the
Machintosh environment, please step forward.  Your  help is needed.

If you know iMovie.  That could also work.

All work will take place at the VivaVegie office near Union Square Park.

Please call or reply to this email if you can help:

Pamela Rice
212-242-0011

We've Bailed out the Banks. When Do We Go After
the Crooks Behind our Financial Collapse?
By James Lieber
published: October 27, 2009
THE VILLAGE VOICE

+++++++
Author James Lieber is a lawyer whose books on
business and politics include Friendly Takeover
(Penguin) and Rats in the Grain (Basic Books).
His previous story on the Wall Street meltdown,
"What Cooked the World's Economy?," appeared in
the Voice this past January.
Where did our wealth go? How do we claw it back?
When are we going to punish the culprits?
+++++++

When Barack Obama donned the crusader's mantle
during the 2008 presidential campaign, his
Web-savvy campaign team created
KeatingEconomics.com and pushed it on millions of
voters. The main video showed the Ichabod
Crane-like Charles Keating-the wealthy,
politically connected poster child of the '80s
savings-and-loan scandal-in handcuffs.

The Obama video portrayed John McCain as
Keating's stooge and likened the S&L crash to the
2008 Wall Street meltdown, except that the
current crisis is global and its bad guys bigger
and badder. Today's corporate villains were
flashed on the screen, among them AIG, Bear
Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, and Freddie
Mac. The opening narrator was Bill Black, a Ph.D.
criminologist and lead lawyer at the Office of
Thrift Supervision, who helped steer the
brilliant federal effort that cleaned up the S&L
industry and won more than 1,000 felony
convictions of senior insiders while recovering
millions of their ill-gotten dollars.

Those watching the compelling attack ad (still
online) had every reason to believe that Obama's
approach would be just as hard-edged, and that
felon-busting G-men would rout the crooks and
recover our money.

This was not to be.

As it stands now, there is only one federal
prosecution related to the credit crash and
bailout cycle, and it was begun by the Bush
administration's Justice Department in June 2008.

Not that there aren't culprits. Bernie Madoff and
the other accused Ponzi schemers like Allen
Stanford are mere pickpockets compared with Wall
Street's institutional buccaneers, who, so far,
have carted off up to $12.7 trillion-almost the
size of the entire gross domestic product.
They've multiplied their booty with billions in
subsidies and a flood of derivatives-some of them
merely old, soured wine in new bottles. Today's
pirates are sailing away from the light
regulatory scrutiny that apparently will continue
in our benighted, weakened, financially
top-heavy, and bubble-addicted economy.

Black says that Obama's current efforts are
doomed to fail-and, in a twist, it's for lack of
trying. "There is not a single successful
regulator giving him advice," says Black. Obama's
is a fresh face, but those of his crew aren't.
Black pointedly views Treasury Secretary Tim
Geithner and SEC Chair Mary Schapiro as flops in
the prelude to the crisis, who flacked for the
financial industry's "self-regulation." Some of
Obama's appointees have a history as ardent
advocates for financial crooks and active foes of
regulation. Because neither the Obama team nor
its proposed reforms pack the requisite punch,
Black predicts, "There will be far more
catastrophic losses." That would be on top of the
trillions of dollars already lost.

Though the public has been cast away, all hope
for justice is not lost. Scammed consumers could
get their day in court, thanks to a Supreme Court
decision this past June in Cuomo v. Clearing
House Association. Justice Antonin Scalia broke
ranks and joined the court's four most liberal
judges in ruling that the federal government
cannot stop states from conducting their own
crackdowns on financial crooks-with more
stringent laws than Washington's-against such
evils as the predatory mortgage lending that
sparked last fall's meltdown. In that case, the
Obama administration shed its crusader's mantle
and defended the dark side in vain.

In 2008, American households lost 18 percent of
their wealth-more than $11 trillion. But, like
energy, wealth doesn't just vanish. Most of it is
parked in unregulated hedge funds, in ex-hedge
funds that are now just bulging foreign bank
accounts, and in a variety of opaque financial
institutions. The money almost certainly remains
parked-otherwise, there would be massive
inflation after the amount of bailout money that
has spewed from the Fed, the U.S. Treasury, and
foreign central banks.

Conceivably, what money was taken away could be
"clawed back," in the parlance of regulators. A
precedent exists: a similar crisis a decade ago
involving Long-Term Capital Management, a
Connecticut hedge fund that included two Nobel
Prize-winning economists and a few ace traders
from Wall Street, and had bet on bond spreads in
Russia, Italy, and Latin America. The outfit
started well, but then crashed and dug a
trillion-dollar hole that was considered
dangerous to the entire system at the time.
Instead of paying the fund's many investors at
retail, the New York Fed forced Wall Street to
settle the whole thing for about $3.5 billion-in
other words, a couple of beans on the dollar.
There was no bailout by taxpayers.

It's clearly too late for that approach to the
current crisis. The best way to retrieve at least
a significant portion of our wealth is through
prosecution, followed by forfeiture. This is what
we do when we catch money launderers and drug
lords. It's what we're trying to do to Ponzi
schemers like Bernie Madoff. It's retributive
justice. It fills a social need as well as an
economic one.

So, where is the justice in the current crisis?
Why have there been so few prosecutions and only
feeble attempts, at best, to claw the money back?
One reason may be that, in such infamous cases as
the Lehman Brothers collapse and Bank of
America's absorption of Merrill Lynch, the Fed
and the Treasury were intimately involved with
the financial elite's deal making at the time.
It's difficult to prosecute others for securities
fraud if you condoned the deals to begin with.

And there's another, more pertinent reason: The
top federal law enforcement establishment is
simply not in the mood. People who expect
President Obama's Department of Justice to take
the lead will be severely disappointed-not
necessarily because the task is difficult, but
because the Obama administration is showing that
it lacks the will.

Instead, the new administration is putting its
energy into creating what it believes will be a
meltdown-proof new system of elite
"too-big-to-fail" banks, regulated by a beefed-up
Federal Reserve.

Even the business establishment's Wall Street
Journal used the word "oligopoly" when it noted
this summer that the Obama administration, "after
saving the banks, is now planning regulatory
changes that could establish an elite group of
U.S. institutions with large investment-banking
activities" that will be "hard to join and
compete against."

Bill Black calls that elite group of megabanks,
like Citigroup and Bank of America, "zombies."
And they're not done feeding. All of the devilish
tools remain in place, says Black, including "the
subprime loans, with securitization and the
credit default swaps. And the Obama
administration astonishingly wants to re-create a
secondary market in subprime loans-even though it
cost us more than a trillion dollars."

It may seem that some sort of über-regulator is
needed. But Camden Fine, a small-town banker who
now leads a trade group of 5,000 community banks,
sees a pumped-up, unified regulatory agency as "a
big, hairy cyclopean beast" that would protect
the megabanks no matter how reckless they are,
and continue to favor Wall Street over Main
Street. Compared with the Obama administration,
America's small-town bankers look like populists.

An administration whose claws are far from
sharpened shouldn't really surprise us: Obama was
Wall Street's preferred candidate in terms of
campaign contributions. His SEC chair, Mary
Schapiro, ran FINRA, the Street's self-regulatory
private agency. Gary Gensler, chair of the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission, actually
worked a decade ago to exempt credit default
swaps and other derivatives from regulation.

More importantly, the nation's new top
prosecutor, Attorney General Eric Holder, has a
history of preferring that deviant corporations
be held to no more than a "voluntary cooperation"
system in which they investigate themselves
privately.

Under the "Holder Memo," which he wrote in 1999
as deputy AG in the Clinton administration,
bad-boy executives and their corporations who
turn over evidence to the government qualify for
lenient sentences and fines and, sometimes, for
settlements without even indictments. The
consequences of their crimes often amount to only
the cost of doing business.

After leaving government, Holder followed the
mandates of his own memo and made a lucrative
living by conducting internal probes for
companies and negotiating outstanding results for
white-collar clients. He was public about it:
Holder's 2002 op-ed "Don't Indict WorldCom" in The

Wall Street Journal argued on behalf of the
corporate perpetrator of one of the sleaziest
frauds of the past decade.

Holder takes a hard line on social issues, but
not on financial issues: He favors re-dedicating
the DOJ to civil rights, and he has vowed to
investigate Bush-era torture. But when asked if
he plans to prosecute the financial mayhem that
erupted under Bush, Holder has said that he isn't
inclined to engage in what he calls "witch hunts."

The previous chief of the DOJ's Criminal
Division, Rita Glavin, seemed motivated: She
testified to Congress last spring, before she was
replaced, about the need to hire numerous FBI
agents to fight white-collar crime. After 9/11,
hundreds of FBI agents had been shifted from
financial fraud to counterterrorism, so the
agency was perilously thin when the tidal wave of
financial fraud inundated the system.

Glavin's successor couldn't be further from the
right person to root out white-collar crime. Last
spring, Holder tabbed Lanny Breuer, his former
partner at the major D.C. firm Covington &
Burling, to head the DOJ's Criminal Division. In
2008, Breuer represented Roger Clemens at Senate
hearings when the big right-hander denied under
oath using steroids or human growth hormones. If
Clemens gets indicted for perjury, the next
question would be whether Breuer suborned him.

More to the point of high-level white-collar
crime, in 2006, Breuer represented Mario Gabelli,
a billionaire broker and money manager who, in
some recent years, has been the highest-paid
person on Wall Street, with compensation in
former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain's class. When
Gabelli got in hot water for setting up straw
entities to bid at federal auctions of coveted
cell phone licenses, Breuer savaged the person
who blew the whistle on the scheme and kept his
client out of criminal court. "Super Mario"
eventually paid a $130 million settlement under
the federal False Claims Act, but he made more
than $200 million from the scam, so the
litigation amounted to the cost of doing
profitable business.

As chief of Covington's white-collar department,
Breuer was known for his "rogues' gallery" of
corporations and individuals under investigation
or indictment. His clients included Halliburton,
the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation
(Freddie Mac), Exxon Mobil, and big
pharmaceutical companies. He also represented
Canadian mogul Eugene Melnyk, who was charged
with accounting fraud by the SEC, and the
lieutenant governor of American Samoa, who was
indicted for bribery and bid-rigging. Breuer
represented so many companies that had problems
with the federal government that the Department
of Justice promised to erect "Chinese walls"
around him to keep him from traipsing into his
former clients' matters. Nevertheless, the
napping Senate confirmed him by 88-0.

Breuer's connection to Freddie Mac is especially
troubling. One of the executives at the heart of
the global meltdown was Franklin Raines, the CEO
of Freddie's older sister, the Federal National
Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae). Freddie and
Fannie bought and securitized mortgages from
other banks at a breakneck pace that fueled the
bubble and led to their federal bailouts and
takeovers in September 2008. Politically wired-he
was Bill Clinton's director of the Office of
Management and Budget-Raines aided and abetted
the process by orchestrating massive accounting
and compensation fraud at Fannie Mae. He paid a
small civil settlement and has never been
criminally charged. Will the DOJ indict him? That
would be a problem for the Obama administration:
Although Freddie was set up to compete with
Fannie, the two often operated similarly, so an
investigation of Fannie and Raines's practices
could spread to Freddie, which is not something
Breuer or any other lawyer would want for a
former client. The Justice Department refused
requests from the Voice to interview Breuer and
Holder. Asked whether Raines will be indicted, a
senior DOJ spokesperson would neither confirm nor
deny it.

Obama played the populism card during the
campaign, making fodder of Countrywide, then the
nation's largest mortgage company and a dominant
player in the subprime scandal: "These are the
folks who are responsible for infecting the
economy and helping to create a home foreclosure
crisis-2 million people may end up losing their
homes." We are, in fact, north of 3 million, and
the widely expected criminal prosecution of
Angelo Mozilo, Countrywide's chief during the
heyday of predatory home loans, hasn't
materialized. Mozilo's case was merely channeled
to the SEC for civil sanctions.

The SEC accused Mozilo and two top aides of
selling $140 million in stock based on inside
knowledge of the riskiness of credit that
Countrywide extended while it told investors that
the loans were secure. A Mozilo e-mail called one
subprime loan "the most dangerous product in
existence. . . . There can be nothing more
toxic," and another "poison." It would seem as if
a criminal securities fraud case could be made
against Mozilo and his crew. The Justice
Department wouldn't confirm or deny pending
indictments, but Mozilo is probably safe.
Usually, when there's going to be a prosecution,
the SEC refers the case to the DOJ and doesn't
press it alone.

You would think that AIG's Joseph Cassano would
also be prosecuted for securities fraud. (See The
Village Voice's "What Cooked the World's
Economy?," January 28, 2009.) As boss of AIG
Financial Products, Cassano made ungodly amounts
of money by selling credit default swaps (CDS),
which were side bets on collateralized debt
obligations (CDO) swelled to the gills with
subprime-mortgage toxins. In fact, the AIG arm
sold so many credit default swaps that it lost
track of the number, but they totaled more than
the total value of AIG, which was one of the
world's biggest companies. The ensuing collateral
calls to satisfy the deals choked AIG nearly to
death, triggered the financial crisis of
September 2008, and led to the biggest bailout of
all: $182.5 billion to keep AIG afloat as an 80
percent government-owned company.

A grand jury was reportedly convened to look at
Cassano. Again, the DOJ won't confirm nor deny
the existence of a probe, but given the remarks
of Cassano's lawyer, F. Joseph Warin, in
September, the grand jury probably exists. Warin
said that his client was cooperating and that AIG
had known about all of Cassano's deeds. Will the
Justice Department seek to indict AIG's
leadership, including its CEO, chief financial
officer, and boardroom audit committee? No
comment.

You have to go back to the Bush era for the only
real prosecution related to the subprime crisis.
Two Bear Stearns hedge fund managers, Ralph
Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, are accused of
securities fraud for not telling investors in
2007 about the shaky nature of their fund-based
on subprime mortgages-before it collapsed. While
the act was typical of the times, the two are far
from the top rungs of Wall Street, and there
seems to be little else going on in the justice
process. Elite white-collar defense attorneys
report no clamor for their counsel from major
financial managers. Regulators talk of no demand
for their services and for evidence from
prosecutors. As they say in the trade, there's no
"buzz."

So far, then, the common person has reaped little
relief. Well, maybe clearer credit card
statements, plain-vanilla mortgages with slightly
less fine print, and probably some "green"
infrastructure jobs. But these have been slow to
come on stream, and, so far, there is no great
morality-based thrust as there was in the New
Deal with the WPA, CCC, AAA, and TVA, the
labor-intensive alphabet soup of that era that
was fed to the bottom first. About a billion
dollars have been dedicated to putting and
keeping "cops on the street." Remember the
poignant vignette during the State of the Union
address in which Obama talked about saving 57
police jobs in Minneapolis? Well done and
warranted, yes, but keeping the public safe from
financial criminals is another story: The
administration and Congress have failed to bulk
up white-collar fraud enforcement with either new
FBI agents or new forensic specialists.

Which annoys the hell out of proven
financial-crime fighter Bill Black. Athletic and
red-bearded, Black looks more like a lumberjack
than a scholar, criminologist, and bureaucrat
who, in 2005, authored The Best Way to Rob a Bank
Is to Own One, the definitive history of the S&L
debacle as well as an insider's report. A legend
among regulators, he faced down House Speaker Jim
Wright and the "Keating Five" senators (including
McCain), who fought tooth and nail to protect
that corrupt industry, and also overcame stiff
resistance from within the Reagan administration
and from Keating himself. Wright, who later
resigned in disgrace over ethics charges, called
Black a "red-bearded son of a bitch." Keating
hired detectives to get dirt on Black. When that
failed, the thrift magnate told his Washington
lobbyists to "kill him dead," which he probably
meant figuratively, in the sense that Keating
wanted Black's power shut off. It wasn't, and
Keating, though he was as plugged into the
Republicans as Franklin Raines is to the
Democrats, ended up doing hard time.

Black always has a big smile and a ready joke,
but he burns with the intensity of an Old
Testament prophet, especially against "control
fraud," the lawlessness that emanates from the
top of legitimate businesses and causes bigger
financial losses, he has said, than all other
forms of property crime combined. Corporations
practice control frauds with crooked accounting
and perverse compensation systems, using bonus
formulas that lead executives to loot their
companies rather than serve them.

Now an associate professor of law and economics
at the University of Missouri at Kansas City,
Black has continued the fight against fraud and
for regulatory controls as a consultant to a
gamut of agencies from the FBI, where he trained
agents in white-collar forensics, to the World
Bank.

In 2007, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise
Oversight hired him to investigate the problems
at Fannie Mae. His 70-page report plainly
outlined how Raines and his lieutenants used
"fraudulent accounting" and "perverse
incentives," and took "unsafe and unsound risks"
that "collectively caused Fannie to violate the
law and deceive its investors and regulators."

Almost two years before the financial crisis
broke in late 2008, Black, the FBI, and others
outlined the structural problems that would wreck
the economy, but Washington did nothing and
continued to exercise "regulatory forbearance."
In fact, the crisis did not have to happen, and
there was certainly no need for the panicky
response to it by Washington in the fall of 2008.

Black vents particular ire at Tim Geithner, who,
as New York Fed chair, fiddled while Wall Street
imploded; Henry Paulson (and Geithner again),
who, as Treasury secretaries, refused to enforce
a key banking law; and Alan Greenspan and Ben
Bernanke, who, as Fed chairs, were supposed to
regulate banks, especially the renegade mortgage
units. The two Fed chairs closed their eyes to
excess and continued to blow easy money into the
bubble.

The key statute that Treasury flouted under
Paulson and Geithner is the Prompt Corrective
Action (PCA) law. Congress passed it in the wake
of the S&L scandal in 1991, and the first
President Bush signed it. It's probably the best,
fairest, and clearest piece of financial
legislation since the New Deal. Under the law,
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)
examiners initially rate banks as "Well
Capitalized," "Adequately Capitalized,"
"Undercapitalized," "Significantly
Undercapitalized," and "Critically
Undercapitalized." The tags determine the
examiners' actions, if any. Undercapitalized
banks must build up their capital and get FDIC
approval for acquisitions and opening new
business lines. When a bank becomes significantly
undercapitalized, a regulator can order serious
sanctions, ranging from firing management to
restricting stock sales and forcing divestitures.
Critically undercapitalized banks must be placed
in receivership, unless the FDIC determines that
some other action like a merger or sale would
better protect the depositors. That's it in a
nutshell-obviously, there was a whole lot more
that regulators were allowed to do, like forcing
a change in accounting systems and blocking
bonuses. Bottom line: The PCA worked like a charm.

In the entrepreneurial Reagan-Bush era, the
banking system had become a mess. Often more than
a hundred banks failed annually (as has happened
this year). After the PCA, banks cleaned up and
failures became rare-only a handful per year and
sometimes none. U.S. Treasury secretaries even
pushed the PCA idea to Japan during its "lost
decade."

But in the U.S., after the second Bush's election
in 2000, the PCA began to wither from disuse,
especially because of opposition from the
megabanks and the laissez-faire policy makers.
Toward the end of the Clinton administration,
Washington caved in to the financial lobby and
passed new laws that promoted risk. Congress
repealed the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act,
which had drawn a sharp line between commercial
banks and investment banks. Another new law
immunized securitizers from lawsuits even if
their products were rubbish. A third new law
allowed the wildest form of derivatives-"naked"
credit default swaps-side bets on CDOs that could
be placed by investors who didn't even own the
bonds. The old prudent conservative banking model
gave way to the sleek megabank casino, which was
fine with the Fed. Ben Bernanke, then a Fed
regional governor, spoke in 2004 of the new
"Great Moderation," which the industry took to
signal a period of ultra-lax regulation.

The message from the Bush administration was
clear: The PCA "ceased to be applied to the big
boys," says Camden Fine, president of the
Independent Community Bankers of America. With
his square jaw and plainspokenness, Fine calls to
mind Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life. Like
Stewart's George Bailey, Fine is a small-town
banker, though now he is the sole lobbyist for
about 5,000 member banks around the United
States. For more than 20 years, he ran the
Mainstreet Bank on Main Street ("not Wall
Street," he emphasizes) in Ashland, Missouri, a
town of 2,000. He had 11 employees. Like the
members of his trade group, Fine isn't fond of
Wall Street, or the "too-big-to-fail" banks-the
"systemically important" megabanks that the
taxpayers bailed out.

"The community banks didn't cause this [crisis],"
he points out. "This was Wall Street, the
mortgage banks, and near-banks," by which he
means the herd of largely unregulated
non-depository institutions that extend credit.
"Much of the regulated industry didn't have
anything to do with this."

Fine says he can live with the PCA law and even
endorses it, but he detests the fact that it was
no longer being used for the megabanks. It makes
him smolder. "Greenspan-banks couldn't get too
big for him," Fine says ruefully. He recalls a
2004 battle in which the Fed wanted to remove all
capital-reserve requirements from the big banks.
Fortunately, the FDIC won that scrum. Otherwise,
the megabanks' behavior could have been even
riskier and more devastating than what occurred.

It was bad enough that, during that run-up to the
crash, bank examiners who wanted to scrutinize
the giants were intimidated. One told Fine that a
bank's CEO had "a direct line into Washington,
and it could destroy the examiner's career." In
another incident that, Fine says, "outraged" him,
an examiner who tried to sanction Wells Fargo had
his decision reversed after the CEO visited the
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency; the
examiner was then transferred out of the bank's
district.

Eventually, it became clear that "nothing was
happening to the big banks, and everyone knew
they were sliding south," says Fine. When four
majors-Wachovia, National City, Bank of America,
and Citigroup-became critically undercapitalized,
Fine went to FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair to ask
why they weren't being subjected to the PCA law,
which could have resulted in replacing their
executives or even breaking them up. Fine likes
Bair, who has a populist streak of her own and
whom he finds to be a candid, "hard-as-nails
regulator." But he says she "basically gave a
non-response": that there were complicated issues
and that, perhaps, if she had a free hand, action
would be taken. "She was very sympathetic," he
says, but what he gathered was that there "was
great resistance from the political community."

Fine isn't merely griping that the free pass
given to the big banks was grossly preferential
and anti-competitive. He means to underscore that
the financial crisis didn't need to reach full
bloom, and that we could have avoided the
bailouts following the "too-big-to-fail" theory,
which he detests as anathema to the free market.
The big banks could have been put in
conservatorship, reduced to rational size, or
sold off in working pieces. The depositors,
consumers, and taxpayers would have been
protected, but "we would have had to wipe out the
investors and shear off the management," he says.
It's a plan he still favors.

Like his members, he has feared a "Citibank or
Bank of America on every corner." Would the new
administration tackle the big banks? Last winter,
12 hours after being sworn in as Treasury
Secretary, Geithner summoned Fine to a meeting.
"He asked me what was on the mind of the
community bankers of America," recalls Fine. "I
said, 'Do something about "too-big-to-fail." ' "
Fine says he told Geithner that he was worried
that the taxpayers would be on the hook again for
further bailouts and that the economy would
suffer. He raised the anti-competitive impact of
propping up Citigroup and Bank of America. "Why
are they treated differently from us?" Fine
recalls asking.

Fine says Geithner's response was, in effect: "I
understand where you're coming from, and it's
something the Treasury should address." Then,
says Fine, "I asked him point-blank if these
firms should be bailed out. He looked me in the
eye and said, 'No, I don't.' " The Treasury
Secretary has recently hinted to Congress about
ultimately getting rid of the "too-big-to-fail"
concept, but his suggested measures "don't go
nearly far enough," says Fine.

Recently, Paul Volcker, the former Fed head and
current Obama adviser, indicated that the White
House remains committed to the concept of
"too-big-to-fail," meaning that the megabanks
will continue to have a safety net and may ask
for more bailouts. Presently, 19 financial
institutions are on the protected list. Their
business model hasn't changed materially since
the crisis. They're still bloated and addicted to
gambling. They could have benefited from prompt
correction, but were spared.

Washington may very well foist one unified
regulator on the industry, a consolidation that,
at first glance, could seem like a good idea. The
Big Four banks-Citi, BofA, Wells Fargo, and JP
Morgan Chase-now control about 53 percent of all
bank assets; the biggest 20 banks control 80
percent. There's no denying the appeal of a
Transformers-type battle between a heroic Autobot
regulator and the financial world's Decepticons.
But that's make-believe.

The cyclops theory of bank regulation that would
fuse all four bank regulators into one
"superagency" is actually the heart of a bill by
Senator Chris Dodd (after Obama, the number-two
recipient of AIG money in the 2008 campaign
cycle). A number of other proposals have been
floated by the administration and Barney Frank,
chair of the House Financial Services Committee.
Those drafts have been discussed for almost a
year and have mutated all the while. What we'll
end up with is uncertain, but comprehensive
reform is unlikely to be hashed out until after
health care is settled.

Will it result in real protection or platitudes?

Camden Fine is concerned about such a monolithic
regulator, saying the big boys would be able to
influence it more easily than they can the
current mélange of the Fed, FDIC, Office of the
Comptroller of the Currency, and Office of Thrift
Supervision. But the structure of such a new
beast is far from set.

For instance, Dodd wants the Fed to lose its
regulatory hold over banking and consumers
(especially credit cards). Conversely, the Obama
administration strives to make the Fed the
über-regulator of banks and "shadow
banks"-non-depository units like Countrywide and
GE Capital. You may have heard some TV pundit say
that this is a great idea, that the Fed has
tremendous expertise, and that Bernanke has done
a fabulous job.

But the idea of Super Fed as top financial cop as
well as the nation's central bank is colossal and
colossally bad, and not just because the Fed is
notoriously secretive-the opposite of Obama's
pledged "transparency." The Fed chair is, by law,
independent and doesn't answer to the president
or Congress. A lax chief-and there's every reason
to expect him or her to be lax, considering the
cheek-by-jowl closeness of the Fed to banking and
other financial magnates, and the baleful history
of Fed enforcement-could not be simply removed.

As for Bernanke, he's an academic economist with
no enforcement or justice chops who, in tandem
with Henry Paulson, force-fed the nearly
worthless Merrill Lynch to the foundering Bank of
America.

And that story just keeps getting worse. When the
House Committee on Oversight and Reform recently
investigated the federal outlays of $20 billion
to help BofA buy Merrill in one of last year's
most questionable bailouts, it also heard
evidence that BofA CEO Ken Lewis committed
securities fraud for which the bank already had
been charged civilly by the SEC (again without a
DOJ criminal indictment). The facts speak for
themselves: Lewis sold the BofA shareholders on
the merger without telling them that the bank
would not only swallow $12 billion of Merrill's
$27.6 billion in losses, but also pay accelerated
bonuses of $3.6 billion to Merrill executives.

It was such a clear case of securities fraud that
BofA and the SEC reached a quick settlement of
$33 million, a relatively skimpy amount. In
September, federal judge Jed Rakoff rejected the
settlement, which didn't specifically name Lewis
or any other executive, as a shady deal between
Wall Street and Washington. He said that it
"cannot remotely be called fair." Rakoff added
that the agreement "suggests a rather cynical
relationship between the parties: The SEC gets to
claim that it is exposing wrongdoing on the part
of the Bank of America in a high-profile merger,
and the bank's management gets to claim that they
have been coerced into an onerous settlement by
overzealous regulators. And all of this is done
at the expense, not only of the shareholders, but
also the truth."

The judge scheduled the case for trial in
February and has ordered the SEC to tell him why
it didn't charge Lewis personally. Long at odds
with the SEC for its coziness with Wall Street,
the New York Attorney General's Office announced
it would also file civil charges against BofA and
Lewis. On October 1, the embattled CEO resigned
and received a platinum parachute wafted on TARP
funds-BofA had already received a $45 billion
bailout and would not have had the wherewithal
for such a severance without it.

What the House Oversight Committee found and Ohio
Representative Dennis Kucinich showed through
internal Fed documents was that Paulson and
Bernanke ignored "evidence that the Bank of
America withheld information from its
shareholders about mounting losses at Merrill
Lynch before the crucial shareholder vote on
December 5-a potentially illegal act." In short,
the Fed and Treasury have been accused of
condoning a titanic securities fraud. But
government approval of an offense often makes it
more difficult to prosecute the culprit
criminally, which may be why Lewis hasn't been
indicted. Interestingly, internal e-mails from
Bernanke to his top counsel, Scott Alvarez,
reflect that Lewis requested a letter from the
Fed that, in Bernanke's words, would show that
the Fed "supported the safety and soundness case
for proceeding with the merger and that we
communicated that to Lewis." Bernanke favored
giving Lewis the note-what could be seen as a
get-out-of-jail-free card. The Fed chair asked
Alvarez, "What would be wrong" with such a
letter, "if requested by the defense in
litigation?"

The hard-nosed attorney rebuffed his boss: "I
don't think it's necessary or appropriate to give
Lewis a letter along the lines he asked."

It's unclear whether Lewis ever got the
permission slip he sought from the Fed. But he
probably has made enough of a record of
government assent to enjoy his retirement package
not behind bars, and perhaps to beat his upcoming
civil cases as well.

The problem of the financial elite not being
indicted due to the sensitive involvement of the
government may be cooling the securities fraud
investigation of Lehman Brothers and its CEO,
Richard Fuld, who puffed the stock to investors
while on the brink of diving into bankruptcy a
year ago. It's well known that the Fed and SEC
had camped at Lehman with full access to books
and financial records after Bear Stearns had
burned down six months before. So Fuld may draw a
pass, too.

The Fed's obsession with secrecy is another major
problem. Take Congressman Ron Paul's popular bill
to subject the central bank to audits like every
other federal financial agency. The Fed pushed
back vindictively through Alvarez. He warned
that, if passed, the bill could cause the Fed to
raise interest rates-it remains a mystery how an
audit could affect macro-economic conditions on
which rates are based. Even when Geithner-himself
a former New York Fed chief-asked for a public
review of the Fed's murky governance and
structure, the secretive agency declined.

In August, a federal judge granted a Freedom of
Information Act request by Bloomberg News to
reveal the identities of banks that borrowed from
10 Federal Reserve programs during the peak of
the financial crisis last fall, the dollar
amounts, and the collateral pledged. The Fed
claimed that the material was confidential and
would hurt the banks' "competitive position."
Nonsense. Americans have the right to know how
their money is spent, and the information also
has historical value in understanding the
meltdown. "One way or another," says Florida
Representative Alan Grayson, "the Fed is going to
have to come clean." Maybe. Maybe not. The Fed
won't willingly give it up-unseemly behavior, you
would think, for a regulator.

But at least the public would get some measure of
satisfaction if executive compensation were
reined in, right? That's not coming along well,
either. All of the reform packages contemplate
limiting executive compensation or, at least,
bonuses. Pay czar Kenneth Feinberg's widely
publicized limits on compensation would affect
only a handful of firms in any meaningful way,
according to early reports. The administration
does plan to support "say on pay," which means
that shareholders in public companies would get
the right to vote on executive pay. But such
votes would be non-binding on companies'
management and boards, so that equals nothing.

Shareholders, by the way, can be pretty
avaricious themselves, especially during bubbles,
when speculation pumps stock values to hookah
highs, as in recent years. It's hard to see "say
on pay" as other than vacuous.

All hope is not lost. The administration and
congressional Democrats do support a promising
reform called the Consumer Financial Regulatory
Agency (CFRA). Obama's 80-plus-page proposal
contains yawning gaps that Congress may fill and
the financial industry will fight: Insurance
isn't covered, nor are 401(k) retirement plans,
and the majority of financial consultants and
planners (including all the mini-Madoffs out
there) evade scrutiny and standards. But the CFRA
would actually wrest consumer-protection powers
away from the Fed, which has them now and has
failed consumers utterly.

Critically, a CFRA could allow scammed consumers
to go to court against the securities industry.
This is major. Any claimant who has been through
the securities industry's kangaroo court might
prefer the courts of Iran. At present, individual
rights against financial predation are about
where anti-discrimination protections were 60 or
70 years ago. Then the Civil Rights Acts came
along, with their provisions allowing Thurgood
Marshall and thousands of lawyers who followed in
his footsteps to sue in courts everywhere.
Financial reformers want nothing more than what
the Founding Fathers contemplated when they
crafted the Seventh Amendment as a public jury
trial antidote to rigged, remote, windowless,
non-jury British enforcement proceedings on the
Stamp Act and other forms of financial bullying.

Of course, this is a bridge too far for the
financial industry. Its lobby, the most powerful
in recent American history, has won every major
legislative battle in the past 20 years. Wall
Street's lobbyists and their congressional allies
can be expected to fight hard. They'll call in
all their markers to ensure that securities-fraud
and other financial-crimes cases won't be heard
in front of hometown juries.

There's something more encouraging: The CFRA, at
least as now envisioned, would be a model of
financial federalism, allowing states to pass
even more stringent protections. In other words,
there would be plenty of room for populist
attorney generals like New York's Andrew Cuomo,
Connecticut's Richard Blumenthal, and
California's Jerry Brown to erect more protection
for consumers.

The money lobby will have more trouble beating
down this reform because of the Supreme Court's
Cuomo v. Clearing House Association decision.
Though it carries the name of the current New
York attorney general, the 5-4 opinion this past
summer amounts to a last big regulatory gift to
the consumers from former New York AG Eliot
Spitzer, who tried to probe the big national
banks about whether their credit interest rates
for racial minorities were ratcheted up. The Bush
administration sued to block New York from
enforcing its laws on national banks, a posture
strangely continued by Obama's lawyers. But the
high court's four liberals, plus usually
arch-conservative business ally Antonin Scalia,
collaborated to vindicate Spitzer. The decision
appears to give the go-ahead to states to pursue
big-time financial criminals even if the federal
government won't do it. The Wall Street Journal's
editorial page sensed real danger to the behemoth
banks from pro-consumer local prosecutors, raking
the court and treating Scalia as if he had been
smoking green shoots.

Despite their atrocious management and
performance, the big banks have been propped up,
enabled, and enshrined in their
competition-thumping oligarchy by Washington. In
a pleasant surprise, the court is allowing the
states to brandish a whip hand to rein them in.

Too big to contain, probably, are the
derivatives, especially the synthetic (also known
as naked) CDS that crashed us last fall. Warren
Buffett, among others, thinks that this financial
plutonium can't be controlled and that it should
be outlawed, as it was until 2000. But a new ban
may already be off the table. Barney Frank,
usually the most avid reformer on derivatives,
pointedly left out a ban on naked CDS deals in
the proposal he submitted in early October. The
Obama team wants default swaps cleared by a
"central counterparty"-in other words, on a
public exchange. That way, we're told, if the
slaughter starts, we'll see it and stop trading
before it's too late.

It's not enough. Naked swaps are the equivalent
of financial gang rape. As soon as hedge funds,
investment banks, and big-time short sellers
sense that a bond is flailing, they can pile on
with as many derivatives as they like to make
millions in what are, in effect, side bets in a
craps game. Today, electronic trades take five
milliseconds, according to the New York Stock
Exchange. The carcass will be picked clean long
before any bureaucrat gets regulatory authority
to shoo away the vultures. The
central-counterparty market applies only to
standard, rather than "customized," derivatives.
So if you're savvy enough to put a few bells and
whistles on your swap, you can still push it
through the dark digital over-the-counter alleys,
far from the gaze of prying regulators. We're
just as vulnerable as we were in the dizzy days
of AIG, JP Morgan, Lehman, and Bear Stearns.

The truth about naked swaps is that they're as
sordid as they sound. To be clear: They're the
costliest, riskiest form of gambling on earth.
Only a few economic patricians can play: hedge
funds, banks, pension funds, insurance companies,
and governments. But, as we learned the hard way
in 2008, just about everyone, including the
system itself, loses when they win.

Geithner told Congress that the government was
"blindsided" last year by the explosive risk of
the derivatives market, but can regulate it now.
That's wrong on both counts. Everyone in
Washington knew or should have known the risks in
2000, when the government stopped regarding these
complicated bets as felonies and started calling
them "investments." Then, as now, the main
argument was that if American markets won't clear
such swaps, someone else will. But two wrongs
don't make a right; nor do a trillion. Plus, our
government takes the opposite stance on, say,
bribery in foreign countries by Americans, whom
it prosecutes vigorously despite the fact that
other nationals could pay the bribes if our
companies don't. In fact, the DOJ is emphatic
that bribery will stop only when people who pay
bribes go to jail (which they do).

Washington's soft-core approach to the epic
financial fraud that caused the crash remains
hard to understand. As Bill Black says: "When you
don't prosecute, things don't get better."

They're not getting better or safer. Credit is
tight as a tick-especially for consumers. The
financial industry is expanding its use of new
and exceedingly complex derivatives. The mortgage
market, the source of the raw material for
mayhem, remains unchecked. The FBI said this
summer that mortgage fraud is "rampant" and
growing. Suspicious-activity reports (known as
SARS) rose from 47,000 in fiscal 2007 to 63,000
in fiscal 2008, which ended last September at the
height of the crisis and its publicity, and now
such reports are on schedule to exceed 70,000 for
fiscal 2009. A growing source of exploitation
involves reverse mortgages marketed to the
elderly.

People want justice. They've lost savings, homes
(or the value of homes), jobs, and retirements.
Foreclosures continue to rise. People can't
believe that the mega-grifters who pulled off
mortgage, securitization, and derivative frauds
walk the streets with lined pockets. And the
venal "experts" who issued bogus ratings that
deodorized subprime cesspools should be in the
dock. But it almost seems as if Bernie Madoff's
150-year sentence for a scheme that had nothing
to do with causing Wall Street's meltdown is
supposed to cover all the crooks, and that we're
supposed to be satisfied.

Veggie Pride Parade, NYC, won EVENT OF THE YEAR, VegNews magazine,
December 2, 2009 issue.  Buy a single copy via mail order HERE:
http://vegnews.myshopify.com/collections/back-issues/products/november-december-\
2009-70

The Veggie Awards are not yet posted online.  (At present, you can
only learn of the winners by purchasing a copy of the magazine --
also available in NYC at Whole Foods Market.)  However, VivaVegie got
advance notification that its Veggie Pride Parade NYC-2009 won EVENT
OF THE YEAR (readers' choice) -- now the second year in a row.

VegNews's Veggie awards are the most coveted we can think of....
(what's  better?, I ask you).

To say the least, on behalf of VivaVegie Society, "We are awesomely pleased!"

Thank you to all the volunteers and participants who made Veggie
Pride Parade NYC-2009 such a tremendous event.

... Stay tuned ... more to come.


- Pamela Rice, organizer, Veggie Pride Parade NYC-2009

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-ap-us-farm-scene-killing-cows,0,69208\
63.story

Milk glut has dairy farmers killing hundreds of thousands of cows in
hope prices will rise

MICHAEL J. CRUMB

Associated Press Writer

2:16 AM CDT, October 27, 2009

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - After burning through $1 million in savings
and seeing no end to their losses, dairy farmers Jake and Lori
Slegers figured they didn't have much choice - they had to kill the
cows.

So one day last summer their sons tagged all 1,571 cows, loaded them
onto trailers at their farm south of Fresno, Calif., and watched them
rumble away to a slaughterhouse.

Lori Slegers said her husband came into the house and broke down.

"He said it was the hardest thing he ever had to do," she said.
"Luckily, my boys could do it."

Growing demand in developing nations drove up milk prices when times
were good, and dairy farmers expanded their herds. But the global
recession hurt exports and left farmers with too much milk on their
hands. Milk processors cut the price they were willing to pay
farmers, in many cases below what it cost to produce milk.

In the past year, hundreds of farmers have come to the same
conclusion as the Slegers: The only way to raise prices is to reduce
the supply, and that means killing cows. In some cases, whole herds
have been turned into hamburger. In others, farmers have kept their
best producers and sent the rest to slaughter.

The Slegers turned to an industry-run program called Cooperatives
Working Together, or CWT, which pays farmers going out of business to
kill - rather than sell - their cows and help remaining dairy
operations by reducing the milk supply. Until this year, the
6-year-old program had paid for about 275,000 dairy cows to be
slaughtered. This year alone, it has paid for more than 225,000 to be
killed.

In addition, individual farmers are sending cows to slaughter at a
pace of about 55,000 per week, said Robert Cropp, a professor
emeritus at the University of Wisconsin. At that rate, about 3
million cows could be killed in a year.

Lifelong dairy farmers Keith Sammon, 55, and his brother, Mark, 53,
decided to sell their herd to CWT last summer after considering the
low milk prices, the cost of modernizing their operation and some
personal health issues.

Keith Sammon recalled the somber mood as he loaded the 80 cows onto
livestock trailers one Sunday morning at their farm in Faribault,
Minn.

"As we milked the cows ... it was pretty quiet, but then my son came
out with my granddaughter, who was 10 months old and she was just
beginning to walk around. Just having her around made it easier,"
Keith Sammon said. "We would load the cows for a while and then go
back and play with her for a while. It kind of took your mind off of
it."

The slaughter has helped some. Dairy farms pay CWT 10 cents for every
hundred pounds of milk they produce. As the cows have been killed,
the price processors pay for milk has gone up an average of 66 cents
per hundred pounds of milk, said Scott Brown, an assistant research
professor for dairy livestock at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Consumers haven't seen prices go up because processors still pay
dairy farmers much less than the retail price, Cropp said. In fact,
grocery store prices may still drop some because the milk supply
remains much greater than the demand, he said.

That's because even as thousands of cows are killed and many farmers
call it quits, others are increasing their herds. In Wisconsin, the
nation's second-largest dairy producer after California, the number
of cows increased to about 1.25 million in August, up about 5,000
from the year before, according to state figures.

Most of the growth was the result of state tax credits and grants
approved a couple of years ago to help the industry modernize and
expand. When those credits were approved, the industry was booming.

Also, Wisconsin farmers haven't been hit as hard as those in western
states such as California, where farmers must buy more of their feed.
High feed, utility and other costs have compounded the losses created
by the drop in milk prices.

CWT spokesman Christopher Galen said most of the cows slaughtered in
the program have come from western farms.

For the Slegers, the future is cloudy. They are still farming corn,
sorghum and winter oats this year but are looking at moving away and
starting over. They're not sure what they would do.

"We still don't know if it was the smartest move we ever made," Lori
Slegers said. "One day, when the dairy business turns around, will we
kick ourselves? We promised we wouldn't do that."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-ap-us-dairy-aid-vermont,0,2394165.sto\
ry

chicagotribune.com
President signs emergency aid for dairy farmers; Vermont's delegation
says more help needed

By Associated Press

2:01 PM CDT, October 21, 2009

MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) - Vermont's congressional delegation says $350
million in emergency funding will give struggling dairy farmers
across the country a temporary boost but more help is needed to
stabilize the dairy industry and preserve family farms.

The president signed the legislation on Wednesday.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who sponsored an amendment that added the funds
to the bill, says dairy farmers are in desperate need.

The average price paid to farmers has fallen to $11.30 per hundred
pounds of milk, down from $19.30 in July of 2008, while it costs
farmers at least $18 per hundredweight to produce the milk.

The bill provides $290 million in support to dairy farmers and $60
million to purchase cheese and other dairy products for food banks
and nutrition programs.

This is huge, people...  It's time for vegans to jump on this...
Since 2006 we vegans have been saying that livestock production is
responsible for 18 percent of all human-caused global warming gasses
in CO2 equivalent. Now, we're hearing that the percentage we should
be quoting is 51 percent!-- Pamela R.



____________

Click here
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6294

and here:
http://www.worldwatch.org/epublish/1/current?emc=el&m=312770&l=5&v=3248bba2aa
for originals and more links.


Livestock and Climate Change

by Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang

Livestock and Climate Change: What if the key actors in climate
change are...cows, pigs, and chickens?

The environmental impact of the lifecycle and supply chain of animals
raised for food has been vastly underestimated, and in fact accounts
for at least half of all human-caused greenhouse gases (GHGs),
according to Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, co-authors of
"Livestock and Climate Change".

A widely cited 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization, Livestock's Long Shadow, estimates that 18 percent of
annual worldwide GHG emissions are attributable to cattle, buffalo,
sheep, goats, camels, pigs, and poultry. But recent analysis by
Goodland and Anhang finds that livestock and their byproducts
actually account for at least 32.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide per
year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions.

Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary ThanksLiving Dinner fundraiser
October 18, 2009
http://www.woodstockfas.org/events.shtml

Location
      Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary
      http://www.woodstockfas.org/

      35 Van Wagner Rd
      Willow, NY 12495

      How to find
them:
      "We'll be on the Adirondack Trailways bus from NYC! Failing that,
we'll see you on the farm."



The Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary in Woodstock, NY is gearing up
for its fourth-annual ThanksLiving dinner fundraiser -- a day of
music, speakers, and a delicious vegan dinner prepared by local,
veg-friendly restaurants. This year the always-sold-out celebration
will be held a month earlier, October 18th at 1pm, mostly because of
the gorgeous leaves and warmer weather.

On top of the world-class vegan chow, Nathan Runkle of Mercy For
Animals will speak, and we can promise excellent entertainment from
comedian Dan Piraro and the band "Ida." And of course, the farm's
100+ rescued and rehabilitated animals are there to make the day
complete.

My partner and I will be taking the 9:30am Adirondack Trailways bus
out of Port Authority and heading up to Woodstock for the
celebration. (This will be the first year I actually get to enjoy the
day, instead of working behind the scenes to make it happen!) We'd
love to invite other members of the NYC Animal Advocacy Network to
join us for the ride and make a beautiful, vegan day trip to the
Catskills for this unforgettable event.

ThanksLiving tickets MUST be purchased in advance through the WFAS
website. This event typically sells out well in advance, so plan your
weekend now!

Standard Adult $80.00 / Child 12 or under $50

This ticket includes:
* Admission to the farm
* A gourmet, multi-course meal (need gluten-free? let us know!)
* Desserts, coffee and tea
* Goodie Bag
* Program
* Infants/Toddlers not taking up their own seat are free!

VIP Ticket $125

Includes all of the above, plus:
* Reserved seating at one of the best tables
* 5 Raffle tickets per ticket included
* An extra-fantastic Goodie Bag

VIP TABLE FOR EIGHT $800

October 25 - 31, 2009
WORLD GO VEGAN WEEK


original with images and links, click here:
http://www.worldgoveganweek.org/



"I chose to be vegan initially as an energetic pursuit, as meat and
dairy slowed me down, but have since become convinced that it is not
only the most healthy way to live, but also the most compassionate
and ecologically responsible way."  -Woody Harrelson, World Go Vegan
Week Supporter



World GO VEGAN Week
Celebrate Compassion...

The 4th annual World GO VEGAN Week is taking place this year from
October 25 through 31. This week is a celebration of compassion and a
time to take action for animals, the environment and everyone's
well-being. We encourage people to use this week to use this week to
educate their community about the vegan lifestyle as a compassionate,
sustainable, and healthy way of eating and living. Promoting veganism
through outreach events and the media, we know that our annual World
GO VEGAN Week is helping make the word "vegan" a household word,
universally recognized as meaning love and compassion for all living
beings.

World GO VEGAN Week is also about celebrating what it means to be
vegan. Veganism enables people to live in balance with all of Earth's
creatures and promote freedom from exploitation for animals as part
of their everyday lives. Modern animal agriculture is cruel and
violent toward the chickens, cows, pigs and other creatures used to
make meat, milk and eggs. During World GO VEGAN Week, we encourage
people to become conscious of what - and who - they are eating, the
effect it has on the world, and that a non-violent alternative exists.

We urge people to recognize the effects their actions have on the
world, and our ability to actually avert some impending disasters
such as global warming.

For the health of people, the environment, and farmed animals,
veganism is the best choice. World GO VEGAN Week embodies this idea.
As an international campaign, it encourages people around the world
to experience the benefits and joys of a more compassionate way of
life.

Here are some ways you can celebrate World GO VEGAN Week:

Be sure to register your event with us so we can send you flyers,
posters and other materials to make you event a success. Contact Hope
Bohanec: hope@... (415)448-0048 ex. 208.

      * Plan an event or activity to get people interested in veganism,
such as a public lecture, cooking demonstration, feed-in with vegan
food samples, leafleting, tabling, library exhibit, or street theater
performance. If you serve vegan food at your event, you can get
refunded for the cost through the VegFund.

      * Contact your local paper and encourage them to publish vegan
recipes or a vegan article. We have a "editor's pack" that you can
send to your local newspaper with information and vegan recipes.
Contact Hope Bohanec, hope@..., to have it sent to you.

      * Order Vegan Starter Kits to distribute.

      * Host a vegan potluck dinner or restaurant outing to show your
family and friends that they don't have to sacrifice taste to save
animals' lives. Sharing delicious vegan food with others is a fun and
easy way to make a difference in the lives of animals and the people
you care about.

      * Ask your local natural foods store to offer vegan samples for
the week. Ask your favorite local food store to offer vegan samples
or specials for the last week of October. Let them know that we can
send information, posters and materials to help them celebrate World
Go Vegan Week.

      * Ask veg-friendly restaurants to offer discounts or specials on
their vegan food. Encourage restaurants to have vegan specials for
the week or to offer a discount for bringing in a veg-curious
customer.

      * Host a screening of Fowl Play, an eye-opening documentary about
the egg-industry, at your local library or another venue. Fowl Play
illuminates the plight of factory-farmed laying hens through
interviews with people who are fighting diligently to save them.
Invite To get a copy of Fowl Play, contact IDA at (415) 448-0048 ext.
208 or hope@....

      * Show a powerful, short vegan video at your next potluck or
social gathering. Here's one of our favorites: Vegan video by
NonViolenceUnited.org.

      * Host a vegan pie-baking contest. You can do this in your own
home in a public place. Offer prizes like gift certificates to veggie
restaurants or IDA T-shirts. Don't you want to be a judge? Yum!

      * Host a Vegan Halloween Party. Have a costume party and have
prizes for the best animal costume, most compassionate, and the most
vegan creative! Have vegan Halloween candy and treats on hand and go
trick-or-treating, offering folks at the door vegan candy and
brochures.

      * Students: join or start a vegan club in your school and plan an
event with your friends that will educate people about the benefits
of a vegan diet to human health, animals, and the environment. Write
a paper on veganism, hand out vegan literature at a college campus or
help get vegan meals into your school's cafeteria. Visit Choice to
learn how.

      * Have a well-known vegan author or athlete come speak in your
community. Host an event where a famous vegan offers an inspiring
presentation. Have vegan treats for folks to try. IDA can help you
contact the person.

      * Send a friend or family member who lives far away a gift
certificate to a restaurant in their own town. Visit Happy Cow for
reviews of vegetarian restaurants around the country.

      * Encourage meat-eating family and friends to try Meat Out Monday
and give meatless meals a try for one day a week. If they sign up for
the newsletter, they get reminders, recipes and inspriation in a
weekly newsletter. Go to: www.meatoutmonday.org.

      * Write a letter to the editor about the benefits of a vegan diet
or the cruelties of factory farming, or ask your local newspaper to
write a story on the subject.

      * If you are religious, or participate in spiritual services or
gatherings, look for opportunities to incorporate the vegan message
into the discussions. If you participate in study groups, suggest
discussion fo the vegan message.

      * Enter cooking competitions and bake sales using vegan recipes.
Emphasize the fact that you didn't use any animal ingredients to make
your delicious dishes. Attend cooking competitions and support the
vegan entries.

      * Visit a farmed animal sanctuary and take a friend who still
eats meat. There are a number of farmed animal sanctuaries where you
can visit rescued cows, pigs, turkeys, chickens, ducks, goats, sheep
and rabbits live naturally in peace and harmony without fear of abuse
or slaughter. Check out Animal Acres, Animal Place, Farm Sanctuary,
Poplar Springs Animal Sanctuary, or IDA's Project Hope.

      * Order t-shirts, bumper stickers, posters, pins and other fun
stuff to have for the day of your event from IDA and other vegan
merchants.

      * Join or start a vegan dinner club. Find veg-friendly
restaurants and invite the community for dinner. Try a different
restaurant every month.

      * Encourage a Compassionate Thanksgiving. Since Thanksgiving is
coming up in a few weeks, talk to your community food banks about
providing vegan options such as Tofurkys. Consider buying a few
Tofurkys, preparing them, and bringing them to your food bank or
other similar community dinner. Be sure to check out Gentle
Thanksgiving which offers a lot of information and guidance on this
special observance.

      * Share the ideals of veganism with your community of friends and
colleagues by adding this quote to your email signature:

        "Veganism gives us all the opportunity to say what we 'stand
for' iin life -- the ideal of healthy, humane living. Add decades of
health to your life, with a clear conscience as a bonus." - Donald
Watson

      * If you are a part of an animal protection organization, become
a presenter of World GO VEGAN Week. There are no costs to you for
joining us as a co-presenter. All you need is to post the World GO
VEGAN Days banner on your web site, which links to the World GO VEGAN
Days web page. Contact Hope Bohanec, for more information:
hope@... or call (415) 448-0048 ext. 208.

      * Adopt an activist.

      * Add a link to IDA's World GO VEGAN Week Web site from your web site.

      * Create a plan to promote veganism all year.


original with images and links, click here:
http://www.worldgoveganweek.org/

http://www.change.org/farm_animal_rights_movement/actions/view/urge_president_ob\
ama_to_pardon_all_turkeys_this_holiday_season


Urge President Obama to Pardon ALL Turkeys This Holiday Season

To: The President of the United States

Started by: Farm Animal Rights Movement

Abusing and killing an innocent bird betrays the life-affirming
spirit of giving thanks for our life, health, and happiness. Each
year, the President symbolically "pardons" one or two turkeys while
condemning millions of others to a cruel fate they did nothing to
deserve.

The nearly 300 million turkeys killed each year in the U.S. spend
their entire lives crammed in large sheds with little room to move.
Artificially inseminated and bred to gain enormous amounts of weight,
they suffer heart attacks, broken limbs, lameness, and death from
their genetically-induced accelerated growth rate.

After 16 weeks of misery, they are hung on a conveyer belt, their
throats are cut, and they are dumped -- sometimes still fully
conscious -- into scalding water to strip their feathers. All birds
whether "free-range" or conventionally raised - are excluded from
coverage under the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. All
animals raised for food are excluded from the Animal Welfare Act.

Please urge the President, who recently won a Nobel Peace Prize for
his belief in the nonviolence, to pardon all the turkeys bound for
the dinner plates at the White House this year.

To get active and spread compassion this holiday season, please visit
www.GentleThanksgiving.org

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

http://events.nydailynews.com/new-york-ny/events/show/88464615-nyc-vegfest

NYC VegFest

Sunday, Oct 11, 2009
12:00p to 6:00p
at Tompkins Square Park, New York, NY

On Sunday, October 11, the 1st edition of NYC VegFest
Noon to 6pm
Tompkins Square Park
Celebrate Vegetarianism
FREE

VivaVegie will be there!
Call to don the Penelo Pea Pod costume.
(212-242-0011)  We'll set you up.
Physiques best: tall & slim
Volunteer to be Penelo Pea Pod.
Volunteer to pass out copies of 101 Reasons Why I'm a Vegetarian to
the meat eaters in the park... !

Sign up with Vegan in New York City Meetup:
http://www.meetup.com/veganinnewyorkcity/calendar/11405432/


NOTE: I apologize for not posting this event sooner. I actually
thought I had done this, but I later realized that my emails were
bouncing with Yahoo Groups. -- Pamela R.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/28/090928fa_fact_orlean

Susan Orlean, Popular Chronicles, "The It Bird," The New Yorker,
September 28, 2009, p. 26
(Subscription required to read the full text of this article in the
digital edition.)
This article is in the current news-stand edition -- the September
28, 2009 Issue


ABSTRACT: POPULAR CHRONICLES about the writer's chicken fixation.
Chickens seem to be a perfect convergence of the economic,
environmental, gastronomic, and emotional matters of the moment. In
the past few years they have undergone an image rehabilitation so
astounding that it should be studied by marketing consultants. The
writer admits that she is an animal fancier, but until recently, only
of the fur-bearing type. Describes the effect of the documentary "The
Natural History of the Chicken" on the writer. Also mentions the
presence of chickens in Martha Stewart's book "Entertaining" and in
the pages of her magazine. Until the nineteen-fifties, it was common
to keep a few chickens around. They were cheap and easy to raise.
Gathering eggs was so easy that children were often assigned to do
it. Buying eggs year round at a supermarket is a relatively recent
development. Part of what is unusual about chickens is that they have
always been women's livestock: women and chickens just seemed to have
a natural harmony. Mentions books and magazines about chickens,
including "A Little Journey Among Anconas" and tells about the
creation through breeding of a new type of chicken, the Cochin, in
the 1840s. A frenzy of poultry breeding and showing and speculative
trading followed, a crazed bubble nearly on the scale of Dutch tulip
mania. As Americans drifted from the country to the cities, they took
their chickens with them. Writer tells about her decision to own
chickens. Discusses the concept of the hundred-mile diet and the
popularization of locavore eating. Describes how she came to purchase
an Eglu, plastic chicken coop designed by the British company Omlet.
Briefly interviews Johannes Paul, one of the founders of Omlet, who
describes the origins of the idea for the Eglu. Writer tells about
the arrival of her Eglu and her early experiences of rearing
chickens. Even people central to the chicken world are predicting
what might supplant chickens, if and when chickens run their
course-goats or ducks. Chickens have already survived hen bubbles and
cholesterol scares and the enormous social change that chased them
out of the back yard. But, the chicken, that thing with feathers,
always sunny and useful, will endure.

Some super legal tips / strategies on how to fight corporate /
agribusiness power....

Please watch it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HowKoNmODNY

Talk by Thomas Linzey, attorney with Community Environmental Legal
Defense Fund (CELDF) speaking in Seattle February 10, 2005.

Pamela R.

Part II of this talk...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTpGzd...

The following came in from
International Day of Peace.
Sounds like a great event.
This is not a VivaVegie event. Please contact the organization directly.
Pamela Rice
VivaVegie



>
>Hi Pamela,
>
>I would like to invite you and your friends to celebrate
>International Peace Day
>at a free event: "Peace begins with our Plate"
>
>WHAT:
>The event will include lectures, free light vegetarian (vegan) food,
>and the opportunity to spread the veg message to the public.
>http://www.internationaldayofpeace.org/
>
>WHEN:
>10:30 am Saturday September 19, 2009
>
>WHERE:
>Marte Valle Junior High School
>145 Stanton St. 2nd Floor
>NY, NY 10002 (use Suffolk St. entrance)
>
>WHY:
>To spread the veg message and positive impact a vegetarian
>(vegan) diet has on health, animals, and the planet! A peaceful diet
>spreads peace =)
>
>Please RSVP to heidimurdock@... to reserve your spot
>
>Peace,
>Heidi Murdock
>Be Veg ~ Go Green ~ Save the Planet ~
>  http://FreeVegCookingClassNYC.blogspot.com

Following is a message from Yetta Kurland, animal rights candidate
for the 3rd district in Manhattan. She's running against city council
speaker Christine C. Quinn, who is now besieged by scandal and who
has received low marks from the League of Humane Voters, NYC.




Yetta Kurland 2009

Dear Friends and Supporters,

As you know this is the final week of our campaign and we are doing
everything in our power to make sure we win on September 15th.

If I had a few moments, I would reach out to each of you personally.
I would  tell you how much I appreciate your time and your support
over the past year and would ask how you are doing.  I want you to
imagine that even though this is a less personal email, the feeling
and the sentiment is there!

I would also tell you that I need you this week, like I have never
needed you before.

If we get out this week, we win.  It's that simple.  The big papers
who won't conduct a poll, and won't report on what the people in our
District are saying, will tell you don't bother, the insiders will
tell you there's no use in even trying, but I am here to tell you
that, based on the 20,000 people we have spoken with in the 3rd
District, people are ready for change.

So, whether its morning, afternoon or evening, whether its one hour
or ten hours, I need your help.

Don't wait for me to call you, call us at the campaign headquarters
and let us know when you want to get involved.  The number is
646-435-9800.  Or just stop by, on your lunch break, instead of yoga
this week, this will be your yoga.

See you there!  And let's prove that people who stand up for
democracy really can make a difference.

Yetta

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

You walked in the Veggie Pride Parade.  Here's another opportunity to
show desperately needed support for farmed animals.  The following
information comes from Farm Sanctuary.  It gives you all you need to
know to get started.  Walk to support them and to them supporting
animals. - Pamela Rice

-----------

http://www.firstgiving.com/farmsanctuary


Take your compassion to the streets - get involved in the 2009 NYC
Walk for Farm Animals!

On October 4, concerned citizens will take to the streets of the Big
Apple to raise awareness about the plight of farm animals - and raise
vital funds for Farm Sanctuary's rescue, education and advocacy work.

Will you join them?

Now more than ever, farm animals need people like you to spread the
word about what's happening to them on factory farms. They need you
to be their voice.

So, please consider taking your compassion to the streets by
participating in the 2009 NYC Walk for Farm Animals.

Your $15 registration fee entitles you to our limited edition 2009
Walk t-shirt, designed by Herbivore Clothing Company Founder Josh
Hooten. To reserve your shirt, make sure to register by September 13.

NYC has bragging rights as the biggest annual Walk for Farm Animals
in the country. We expect over 500 walkers, and we hope you'll join
us for eats, treats and an awesome raffle with great prizes. This
year's speaker line-up includes Farm Sanctuary President and
Co-founder Gene Baur, Jane Velez-Mitchell, author and host of HLN's
"Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell," New York State Assemblymember
Linda Rosenthal, and Shawn Sweeney of the Jane Goodall Institute.
Special musical guest Joy Askew will also be performing, so don't
miss it!

If you can't join the Walk, please consider making a donation.
http://action.farmsanctuary.org/site/R?i=FafyBF0I4sZkFhUAiNUiqg..
Every dollar counts in our work to protect farm animals from abuse,
neglect and cruelty.

For more information, contact local Walk Coordinators Robyn Lazara
and Ruth Santana. nyc@...

To register - or make a gift of support - visit
http://action.farmsanctuary.org/site/R?i=Hi89sfNj3RRIRNg-YfysXQ..
today!

For the animals,

Beth Begany
National Walk Coordinator
Farm Sanctuary

P.S. Check out the latest event buzz on our new "Walk Talk" blog.
http://action.farmsanctuary.org/site/R?i=-PZgGvQsaXfczSYS2QZ7Jw..