Flood of Mexican sugar coming Washington - Starting this fall, Mexican sugar growers can ship into the United States up to 10 times as much duty-free sugar as is now permitted. The influx will be anything but sweet for American farmers, who already face a 25 percent drop in sugar prices this year.The manipulative imagery is awe inspiring in its' biases! It is not enough that we must cope with their wetback illegal aliens, now they are sending their sugar to depress prices and harm 'American Farmers!' Apple Pie and bedrock values, and all down the toilet due to them Mexicans!
It can be interesting to waste an hour learning about some obscure (to me) field, in order to feel superior to the author of a one 'graf blurb in the newspaper.
It turns out that the 'culprit' in this case is NAFTA.
"On October1, 2000, Mexico's duty-free access to the U.S. market, as set out in the side-letter agreement to the original NAFTA, increases to the smaller of 250,000 MTRV (metric tons raw value) or Mexico's "net surplus production," which accounts for Mexican consumption of high fructose corn syrup.The US produces something like five million tons of sugar, and as part of the 'Free' market NAFTA we agreed to allow Mexico to export up to 1/20th of our national production to the US. Assuming I am doing my math right, Mexico was allowed to sell us up to 1/200th of our sugar, and now mean old NAFTA has upped that to 1/20th (from 0.5% to 5%. You gotta love 'free' markets).
But sometimes the jackals of the corporate media leave a bit of flesh on the bones of the truth. Today, the meat was in a book review by Duane Davis of Joseph Heller's last book, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. The book is the story of an old and successful novelist, Eugene Pota (read 'Joseph Heller') and his attempts to create one last blockbuster novel before giving in to the weight of life.
Perhaps it is best to let Pota speak the summation, the eulogy, for Heller. Heller writes of Pota walking from the podium amid laughter and applause after delivering a speech at a college.I read the quote and it made me shiver inside."They just don't know, do they?" murmured Pota to himself in a moment of twinging gloom, walking from the stage with a gesture at a lighthearted wave. They thought I was joking."
This afternoon I shot some video of Molly and Danny Tallman messin' with Sunny and Cinnamon, and of Madeline sitting on the porch eating her popcicle and drinkin' soda.
I spent a few minutes experimenting with frameing. Specifically, how meaning changes depending on the location of the subject in the frame. Lower corner, upper corner, lot of foreground, no foreground, etc.