May 14, 2008 (LPAC)—(The following is a firsthand report from LYM activists in Seattle)

In our effort to activate large networks to build for Helga LaRouche’s call to transform the FAO summit (Rome June 3-5), and the Seattle LYM town hall meeting around the same call, (May 31st), we’re thinking of the population as fellow organizers in the existential drive to double world-wide food production and halt the British intention to eradicate the human race through famine. Half of our office targeted networks within the University of Washington by mass distribution of five boxes of literature (the Interim LPAC report on the 2008 election, Is the Devil In Your Laptop?, and the British Agent Al Gore is Taking Your Food Away leaflet). We distributed literature in the morning and then visited a few of the schools on campus.

At the School of Public Health and Community Medicine, we were directed to a Head faculty member who has been concerned by the rise in obesity and diabetes from the inflated cost of food. At another desk, a woman kept closing and cracking open her office door to listen to us as we briefed her secretary, until we asked if the secretary knew of the FAO. She burst out: “I know the FAO, I work for the FAO!” She agreed that biofuels are insane but ironically works with the FAO to prevent poor nations from using pesticides. The woman left her card with us and said she would post Helga’s leaflet in her department.

The most exciting progress at UW was with a few of the student groups. LYM activist Stewart got in touch with a representative of a new student club which has been volunteering to help with homelessness and hunger in Seattle. In Stewart’s words, he was “Blown away” by the magnitude of our activities and was very excited at the potential of networking with the organizations with which they have been collaborating. He will bring our mobilization up with his group and is reading the information that Stewart sent. We also contacted student organizations from the Mid-East and Asia, areas where the food crisis is most recognized. The student groups were very excited to hear from us and will be discussing Helga’s leaflet at their next meetings. The head of two Asian groups are having a group board meeting with other associations next week where we may give a presentation. We’ll be in touch with this young woman in the next few days.

We also did outreach today to farms in the Carnation area of WA. Carnation is a town named after a large research and development farm that once was working on developing different animal feed-stocks and other projects to utilize new potentials of man’s power in the universe, but was bought out by Nestle around 1985 to be used to hold sales conferences! This was around the time that Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volker jacked up the interest rates on loans, which bankrupted our communities’ farms and industry, the well-spring of ingenuity. The local groundskeepers remembered that it was difficult to get loans at the time, unless you were Nestle, and implied that the cartels were in the pocket of the banks. We visited eight farms including Carnation, and met a female farmer who exclaimed, when we said we wanted to double food production, “But what do you want me to do? I can’t work twice as many hours in the day!” When we replied that we needed to change the environment to increase yields, she said that we really need to damn the Snoqualmie River, since we lose much of the crop to flooding. She assumed we wouldn’t want to do that, thinking we were nutty Greenies. “We’re Smokestack Democrats!” Dave told her. She hates the grain cartels and left her contact information to help organize.

At the farmers market, anyone who saw our giant sign “FREE FOOD…… from Free Trade” or heard us ask “Do you want to kill the World Trade Organization?” would make a bee-line for our table. We have about four good contacts to follow up with, one of whom is now thinking of doing outreach with us and another who had become a contributor through the website, and another who really wants more people to know the kind of slime ball Al Gore really is.

The last highlight of the day was the group of sixth graders who joyously told us fat Al Gore jokes: Al Gore is so fat that when he rolls by in a poncho, people yell, “Taxi!” Al Gore is so fat, when he was at the Holiday Inn, he asked for a water bed, and they put a blanket on the ocean!