MoveOn members send a message to Obama: NO to Millionaire Bailouts. We miss you. Stand up and fight the millionaire bailout. We’ll fight with you.

MoveOn Members submitted their own messages to Obama in this member generated ad.

Transcript:
President Obama
Hi Barack
President Obama
What up B?

Hi I’m Monique and this is Ally. I’m asking for her…you stand tough and you don’t extend these tax cuts for the richest Americans

I voted for you in 2008.

We voted for you because for the first time in our lifetime a politician was actually laying out a plan that reinforced the values that we’ve come to believe in as American.

I wanna say, “Thank you for all the hard work that you do”,

but We The People want you back and need you back.

What’s happened to that bold progressive man we elected president in 2008?

The guy who stands for all the people and is not gonna let himself get pushed around?

Mr President, please do not compromise with the Republicans about extending the Bush tax cuts.

I am in the highest tax bracket. We don’t need the money–the country does!

You said in your campaign speech that “enough is enough” and it’s time to fight. Please fight. I’m willing to fight with you.

End Card: President Obama: Stay Strong. No Millionaire Bailouts

* Billions of people around the globe go to bed hungry and struggle to find nourishment. Why is it that communities with the most resources are often impoverished? How is food processed, who controls what we eat, and what if anything can we do to make change?

Here are some documentaries addressing issues of food and poverty across the globe.

The End of Poverty – This slow-paced documentary is highly reommended. Watch with a group and discuss!
(full version interspaced with advertising)

Synopsis

The End of Poverty? is a daring, thought-provoking and very timely documentary by award-winning filmmaker, Philippe Diaz, revealing that poverty is not an accident. It began with military conquest, slavery and colonization that resulted in the seizure of land, minerals and forced labor. Today, global poverty has reached new levels because of unfair debt, trade and tax policies — in other words, wealthy countries exploiting the weaknesses of poor, developing countries.

The End of Poverty? asks why today 20% of the planet’s population uses 80% of its resources and consumes 30% more than the planet can regenerate?

The film has been selected to over 25 international film festivals and will be released in theatres in November 2009. Directed by Philippe Diaz, produced by Cinema Libre Studio with the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 104mins, 2008, USA, documentary in English, Spanish, French with English Subtitles.

http://www.theendofpoverty.com/

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DIRT! the Movie – available on Netflix
Film Trailer

Summary

DIRT! The Movie, tells the amazing and little known story of the relationship between humans and living dirt.
Why Dirt?

“Floods, drought, climate change, even war are all directly related to the way we are treating dirt.”

DIRT! The Movie–directed and produced by Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow–takes you inside the wonders of the soil. It tells the story of Earth’s most valuable and underappreciated source of fertility–from its miraculous beginning to its crippling degradation.

The opening scenes of the film dive into the wonderment of the soil. Made from the same elements as the stars, plants and animals, and us, “dirt is very much alive.” Though, in modern industrial pursuits and clamor for both profit and natural resources, our human connection to and respect for soil has been disrupted. “Drought, climate change, even war are all directly related to the way we are treating dirt.”

DIRT! the Movie–narrated by Jaime Lee Curtis–brings to life the environmental, economic, social and political impact that the soil has. It shares the stories of experts from all over the world who study and are able to harness the beauty and power of a respectful and mutually beneficial relationship with soil.

DIRT! the Movie is simply a movie about dirt. The real change lies in our notion of what dirt is. The movie teaches us: “When humans arrived 2 million years ago, everything changed for dirt. And from that moment on, the fate of dirt and humans has been intimately linked.” But more than the film and the lessons that it teaches, DIRT the Movie is a call to action.

“The only remedy for disconnecting people from the natural world is connecting them to it again.”

What we’ve destroyed, we can heal.

http://dirtthemovie.org/

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Food Inc.
Food Inc. Official Trailer

Synopsis

How much do we really know about the food we buy at our local supermarkets and serve to our families?
In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation’s food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

http://www.foodincmovie.com/

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The Future of Food
About

The Future of Food has been a key tool in the American and international anti-GMO grassroots activist movements and played widely in the environmental and activist circuits since its release in 2004. The film is widely acknowledged for its role in educating voters and the subsequent success of passing Measure H in Mendocino County, California, one of the first local initiatives in the country to ban the planting of GMO crops. Indicative of its popularity, the Future of Food showed to a sold out audience of 1,500 at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco in 2004, a benefit for Slow Food, where it was introduced by Alice Waters.

Trailer

http://www.thefutureoffood.com/

http://www.hulu.com/watch/67878/the-future-of-food (on HULU with ads)
http://www.thefutureoffood.com/onlinevideo.html (without ads)
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Waste=Food
Waste=Food – Full movie on Google Video
About Waste=Food

An inspiring documentary on the Cradle to Cradle design concept of the chemist Michael Braungart and the architect William McDonough. Winner of the Silver Dragon at the Beijing International Science Film Festival 2006. OUTLINE: Man is the only creature that produces landfills. Natural resources are being depleted on a rapid scale while production and consumption are rising in na­tions like China and India. The waste production world wide is enormous and if we do not do anything we will soon have turned all our resources into one big messy landfill. But there is hope. The German chemist, Michael Braungart, and the American designer-architect William McDonough are fundamentally changing the way we produce and build. If waste would become food for the biosphere or the technosphere (all the technical products we make), produc­tion and consumption could become beneficial for the planet. A design and production concept that they call Cradle to Cradle. A concept that is seen as the next industrial revolution. • Design every product in such a way that at the end of its lifecycle the component materials become a new resource. • Design buildings in such a way that they produce energy and become a friend to the environment. Large companies like Ford and Nike are working with McDonough and Braun­gart to change their production facilities and their products. They realize that economically seen waste is destruction of capital. You make something with no value. Based on their ideas the Chinese government is working towards a circular economy where Waste = Food. An amazing story that will definitely change your way of thinking about production and consumption. Director Rob van Hattum Research Gijs Meijer Swantee Production Karin Spiegel en Madeleine Somer Editors in Chief Doke Romeijn en Frank Wiering

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FRESH

FRESH Synopsis

FRESH celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system. Each has witnessed the rapid transformation of our agriculture into an industrial model, and confronted the consequences: food contamination, environmental pollution, depletion of natural resources, and morbid obesity. Forging healthier, sustainable alternatives, they offer a practical vision for a future of our food and our planet.

Among several main characters, FRESH features urban farmer and activist, Will Allen, the recipient of MacArthur’s 2008 Genius Award; sustainable farmer and entrepreneur, Joel Salatin, made famous by Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma; and supermarket owner, David Ball, challenging our Wal-Mart dominated economy.

http://www.freshthemovie.com/

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KING CORN

King Corn is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop
that drives our fast-food nation.
In King Corn, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the
heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically
modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s mostproductive,
most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile
of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat—and how
we farm. http://www.kingcorn.net/

*Causes of Poverty – Poverty Facts and Stats

Samira Said was raised in Rabat in Morocco and Cheb Mami in Algeria. To many fans, this was a dream collaboration.