For those of you who make New Year’s resolutions, here’s one to consider (albeit a few weeks late): resolve to become a part of the solution this year. It might be easier than you think, thanks to Colorado state senator Morgan Carroll. A major advocate for citizen involvement, Morgan, with her new book out this month, Take Back Your Government: A Citizen’s Guide to Grassroots Change, shows how any ordinary citizen can make and change law and policy in their state, through practical tips, checklists, and sample documents. Morgan aims to give readers an inside look at how state legislatures really work through this accessible how-to manual.

Morgan conducts hundreds of town hall meetings and community seminars, teaching ordinary citizens how to influence the legislative process, and it was her own civic activism that launched her ultimate decision to run for office. In Take Back Your Government, she shares practical information and easy-to-follow steps for beginner advocates, including:

• How to find out who your elected officials are
• How to make contact– sample letters, e-mails, and telephone scripts are all included
• How to write petitions and fact sheets
• How to  testify at a legislative hearing
• How to be an advocate in ten minutes or less
• And more!

 ♦    ♦    ♦

In America, almost every family has holiday traditions and cultural celebrations. Fulcrum Publishing has a fascinating book, New Year’s to Kwanzaa: Original Stories of Celebration by Kendall Haven (ISBN 978-1-55591-962-7, 240 pages, $16.95) that showcases 30 celebrations observed by a variety of worldwide cultures found in the United States. Through each story, readers learn about the culture, customs, people, and places of the celebration. What better way to understand people throughout the world than to understand what and how they celebrate?

New Year’s to Kwanzaa: Original Stories of Celebration by Kendall Haven (ISBN 978-1-55591-962-7, 240 pages, $16.95)

Recently, I had my own small cultural exchange with my elderly Swedish neighbor, Gunda Van der Mars.  Before I begin, I must pass along the quick Swedish language and cultural lesson Gunda shared with me. God Jul means “Good Christmas” in Swedish and is the common greeting of the season. The Tomten (and I do mean the Tomten) is a character from Swedish folklore who is similar to Santa Claus, but unlike the single Santa who helps Americans celebrate Christmas, The Tomten is one among many Tomtar, plural of Tomte, mythical creatures, both large and small, that live in the Swedish countryside. The Jul Tomten is the most important Tomte of the year. Other Tomte are associated with other Swedish holidays and seasons.

On December 29, 1929, Gunda Van der Mars was born in Tallsjo, a small Swedish village just south of the Arctic Circle. She remembers the unending forest where her father and the other villagers worked as lumberjacks. In the winter, three or four feet of snow covered the ground for four months.  She remarked, “My father made all eight of his children wooden skis. We cross-country skied to school through the winter.”

Gunda remembers the anticipation she felt before the Christmas holiday.  “On Christmas Eve, my father would strap on his skis and take his children into the forest to look for the perfect tree. If the tree wasn’t perfect, once we had it home, he’d drill holes in the trunk and insert branches so a perfect inverted V was created. We decorated the tree with cookies, little apples, candles, and woven heart baskets. Sometimes we put little treats in the baskets and ate them on Christmas Day. We also put Swedish flags on the tree.” Once up and decorated, the tree was kept in the house for twenty days after Christmas.

“My father was handy,” Gunda said. “He built our house and made the chimney from bricks he made himself.  He made a birch bark backpack to carry supplies when he was out in the woods. He sewed the bark together with juniper roots. Sometimes, he’d be gone all week in the woods and he’d take butter, bread, and other food with him. He even made a wooden butter dish to carry inside his pack. He made each of us children small packs too. In the fall, we’d all go berry picking for wild lingonberries and blueberries. We’d pick enough berries for the entire year and my mother would preserve them.” Gunda was handy herself; she learned to knit when she was six. In her words, “It was a necessity. We made almost everything we needed to live. I made socks and mittens for the family.”

In Sweden, children anxiously waited for The Jul Tomten to make his yearly visit. Gunda remembers sitting at the window, looking out into the Swedish winter night.  She told me, “Some years, the moon would be full and I could see a long way down the road. The Northern Lights would move across the sky in sheets of color: green, blue, and yellow. The lights looked like brilliant ribbons in the cold air. The lake near the village would ‘boom and sing’ – deep groaning noises came from the ice when the Northern Lights shone.  I could see the stars so clearly.  In December, Sweden’s days were very short, but the nights were so bright that sometimes I could read by moonlight.”  And, she could see The Jul Tomten making his way on the snow-covered road toward her house.

In her memory, a knock sounded on the door and The Tomten stepped in. Dressed in colorful clothes and wearing a red stocking cap on his head, he held a sack of packages in his arms.  His rosy cheeks glistened from the cold and perhaps a little something else as he asked, “Are any good children here?”

Gunda’s mother replied in a loud voice, “Yes,” and packages were passed around. Gunda and her brothers and sisters were excited. A soft package was likely to be mittens or clothes—welcome, but expected. A hard package, on the other hand, could be something wonderful!

“When I was six,” said Gunda, “my aunt sent me a ‘hard package’ from Stockholm. It was exciting to get a package from Stockholm, our capital city. It seemed so far away especially as I hadn’t even seen a train or airplane yet. My aunt had moved to Stockholm years before and worked as a clothes designer and seamstress. She created and made costumes for the opera and theatre. She sometimes sent us ‘fancy’ stuff. That year, when I opened her gift, I found a set of doll furniture hand-painted with beautiful flowers. I carried that furniture with me for months.”

While Gunda and her brothers and sisters opened their gifts, The Tomten joined Gunda’s father in the other room. For many years, Gunda didn’t know why. Now, she knows that The Tomten, a villager named Oscar, was enjoying a cup of cheer: a cup of schnapps. She also knows her mother placed the sack of gifts outside the house for The Tomten to deliver. Every house that The Tomten visited shared a cup of cheer with him, so by the time he’d made his village rounds, Oscar was a very tipsy Tomten indeed! Some years, he finished his Tomten duties facedown in the snow, but good Viking genes kept him unfrozen and alive to be The Tomten again and again. “God Jul!”

In a sincere reply, Katie, our marketing manager, explained how books can be more magical than Hollywood’s holiday blockbusters:

"At one time, most of my friends could hear the bell, but as years passed, it fell silent for all of them. Even Sarah found one Christmas that she could no longer hear its sweet sound. Though I've grown old, the bell still rings for me, as it does for all who truly believe."

Before it was a movie (which I refuse to see, based on principle), The Polar Express was simply THE GREATEST CHRISTMAS BOOK OF ALL TIME. Written and illustrated by  Chris Van Allsburg. My mom bought it for me the Christmas after I, um, found out the truth about Santa, ahem. It had been a devastating year for me, what with not only Santa, but the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, and she felt I needed some cheering up. My brother, on the other hand, just thought I was pathetic. I was 10 years old, after all, and I was still getting the same number of presents under the Christmas tree regardless of who bought them, so what was the problem, kid? I’m a simple sort of person, though, and believe in things whole-heartedly, and The Polar Express returned most of my childlike faith to me by the end of my first reading. I still have my copy and tear up every time I read it, remembering how beautiful both a child’s belief can be and how warm this season of love and family is to all of us. The Polar Express is the perfect Christmas book for children of all, ahem, ages.

Our editorial intern and another faithful blogger at Fulcrum, Marit, once again illustrates how the elegance of Christmas can get mixed up with a bit of sibling rivalry.

My favorite holiday book is actually a combination of the book and music recording for The Nutcracker. When I was three, my dance class did a recital (or rather, a three-year-old approximation of a recital) to the music from The Nutcracker. After that, until I was about ten, my sister and I officially welcomed the holiday season each year by reading the book, then putting on Mom’s old 33½ mm and dancing through the entire recording. There may or may not have been fights about who got to be the Sugar Plum Fairy.

As for me, I was torn. Being a die-hard Peanuts fan, I wanted to explain the warm and fuzzy feeling I used to get when A Charlie Brown Christmas was featured on CBS and the ABC every year. I planned to go into how, though it’s a television special, I do have the book with sound effects. (A very intuitive present from my little sister, Kara… two Christmases ago. I am not ashamed.) And, last but not least, how I have had a few Christmas trees who were likely direct descendants of Charlie Brown’s poor Christmas tree. Yet, I just can’t call it a favorite book… mostly because that wasn’t its original form.

courtesy of cstock.org

Instead, I’ve unearthed “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” by Barbara Robinson from the dusty tinsel of my childhood memory as one of my favorites. To be honest though, I didn’t remember much about it at first. I simply remember a bunch of hooligans taking over a Christmas pageant (therefore making it

better) and trying really hard in class not to burst out laughing during silent reading time. To this day, I think I was probably one of the five who were actually reading.

After reminiscing a bit over Wikipedia articles and Amazon book reviews, I was surprised how deeply religious the book was from an adult standpoint. As a child, I mostly remembered the narrator’s annoyance and terror when confronted with Imogene Herdman, the second-oldest in the Herdman hooligan clan, and the closest to narrator Beth Bradley’s age. What made the book incredible to me was how these kids, who where obviously not wanted in the church or by the community, made the yearly predictable Christmas pageant something real and valuable again. Whether they wanted to or not, the community invested in the Herdmans and showed that they, too, had value.

Whether you’re a Grinch or a giver, Scrooge or Santa, we at Fulcrum Publishing wish you all the warmest of holiday greetings.

And since I’m still a Peanuts lover at heart, I’ll leave you with this…

Related articles

• “A Charlie Brown Christmas” Makes the iPad Feel Like Magic (mashable.com)
• Children’s Christmas Books (ourtownbooks.com)

To begin this post, I need to refer back to a previous one– specifically, to Jessica’s Corn Bread creation.

As…interesting…as the final product may have been, in Jessica’s defense, I have yet to see a prettier cornbread than the one she concocted during our kitchen cooking adventure. We both agreed that had the sugar been added, the cornbread would have undoubtedly been pleasing to the eye and the palate.

For my own foray into cooking with The Mitsitam Cafe Cookbook, Recipes from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, I chose Hazelnut and Honey-Roasted Acorn Squash. I picked this recipe partly because I am currently obsessed with all things squash and partly because (as Jessica mentioned) it had only four ingredients.

Given my history with gourds, I probably should have known that preparing acorn squash was bound to be a challenge. Then again, even if pumpkins and squash weren’t determined to thwart my attempts to carve/prepare them, there are two things that would have made preparing this recipe much easier for me:

1)    A large, sharp knife. Emphasis on both large and sharp. Don’t be fooled by its size; acorn squash has relatively small seed pods, which means that the shell and flesh are very thick. A large, sharp knife will make quick work of parting the squash in two. Anything else (like, say, the smallish steak knife I used) will result in a fifteen-minute game of Stab the Sqaush.

2)    Actually knowing how to prepare acorn squash. Having baked acorn squash once or twice before, I assumed that I knew the best way to prepare it. I assumed wrong. As this blog shows, there are several tricks to make tackling this little squash easier, such as halving it vertically rather than horizontally. Since this recipe calls for the acorn squash to be sliced into wedges as well, use the natural ridges on the outside of the squash as guidelines. Also, don’t do as I did and attempt to cut the wedges with the “bowl” of the squash facing up; it will inevitably flip toward your face and you will nearly take off one of your fingers with the knife.

Aside from this little hiccup (and a brief session of hacking away at the hazelnuts with another small knife – a food processor, like the book suggests, would have been a better option), my Mitsitam cooking experience was decidedly less eventful than Jessica’s. Baked tender and golden and drizzled with honey butter and hazelnuts, the acorn squash was delicious.

Hazelnut and Honey-Roasted Acorn Squash

½ cup hazelnuts, toasted and skinned

½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter at room temperature

2 tablespoons honey

2 medium to large acorn squash, unpeeled, seeded, and cut into 1-inch-thick wedges

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

In a food processor, pulse the nuts 5 to 6 times, or until coarsely ground.

Add the butter and process for 15 to 20 seconds, or until combined. Scrape into a medium bowl. Add the honey and whisk until smooth.

Oil a rimmed baking sheet. Arrange the squash wedges, skin side down, on the prepared pan. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and spread with the hazelnut butter. Roast for 30 minutes, or until fork-tender. Remove from the oven and serve hot.

Next up: The December intern bake-off! My fellow interns had better brush off their skills with a spatula, because I plan to bring my A game to this pursuit of pastry prowess!

Related articles

• The Mitsitam Cafe Cookbook Honored at Gourmand World Cookbook Awards (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• Recipe: Butternut Squash Risotto With Hazelnut Oil (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Here are some of the lucky Goodreads winners of our titles!

Kyle Campbell from Plant City, Florida won Serengeti by Boyd Norton.

Maybe next time Boyd will take Kyle with him.

 Megan Anderson from Richmond, Kentucky, nagged a copy of Bobby Bridger‘s Where the Tall Grass Grows.

Do you mind telling us where, exactly, the tall grass grows? I somehow managed to miss that part, but I'm not great with directions.

Brooke-lynn Christian has a copy of Parks for the People headed to her mailbox in Muskegon, Michigan.

Parks by Frederick Law Olmsted, for the people... especially you, Brooke-lynn!

Things Natural, Wild, and Free is headed to Holly Perrin in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Flying to a mailbox near you, Holly!

Jealous of our readers? Want to get on the free-book train? Check out our other giveaways at goodreads.com!

***

Baking is like chemistry: it is a complex experiment with directions that, when followed precisely, can be repeated over and over again to produce identical results. There are ingredients to be measured and combined, stirred and mixed, and heated and cooled to the right temperature to create chemical reactions. But instead of a calcium-chloride concoction that does nobody any good, in baking, the results are far more delightful: fluffy sponge cakes, breads, light and airy soufflés, and buttery caramels and candies!

I love baking. However, unfortunately for me, one thing I learned from my high school chemistry class is that I am not good at chemistry—not one bit. As an amateur chemist in Chemistry 101, I couldn’t seem to re-create a single successful experiment to save my life, let alone my grade. “C is for Chemistry!” I told my mom.

And today, although my high school chemistry days are far behind me, I have realized that truly, I cannot fully escape the diabolical treachery of my own crappiness at chemistry…and baking.

It all started when Marit and I, aka Intern 3 and Intern 1, decided that we were going to try to re-create some of the seasonal recipes from one of Fulcrum’s latest books, The Mitsitam Cafe Cookbook, Recipes from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.

Excited to eat? Yes. Excited to dishonor Native culinary tradition with my horrible baking skills? No.

So, I searched for an easy recipe, one I couldn’t possibly mess up. A recipe with as few ingredients and directions as possible: I chose Corn Bread, with a total of eight ingredients and a single four-line paragraph of instructions. Piece of cake!  …or…corn bread.

My corn bread recipe called for four teaspoons of crystalline disaccharide sucrose (aka white table sugar) to be added to four teaspoons of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), along with sodium chloride (salt), an emulsifier (egg), lactose (C12H22O11, or milk), H2O, flour, corn/oil, and of course corn meal.

Here’s the breakdown for those of you who don’t speak chem-nerd lingo:

Corn Bread

Makes 9 3-inch squares

1 cup cornmeal
1 cup all-purpose flour
4 teaspoons sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1 large egg
1/4 cup corn or canola oil

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter a 9-inch square baking pan.

In a medium bowl, combine the cornmeal, flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Stir with a whisk to blend. In another medium bowl, combine the milk, egg, and oil. Whisk until combined. Stir the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients just until combined; do not overmix.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until lightly browned. Remove from the oven. Cut into squares and serve warm.

Marit chose to make the Hazelnut and Honey–Roasted Acorn Squash recipe for the main course. Her recipe only had four ingredients…we should have switched.

That night after work, I went home and got everything ready, measured out the dry ingredients, put them into a big Tupperware bowl to bring in the next day. Everything was going really well up until I realized that I was out of sugar and milk; it was late, it was dark and cold outside, and my neighbors are creepy, so I just decided I would use  four teaspoons of coffee sugar and a cup of creamer from work. Then I noticed that my recipe called for 1/4 cup of corn or canola oil. Well I didn’t have canola oil, and I like corn a lot better than I like oil, so I searched through the cupboards and found a can of corn—it is corn bread after all. I packed the Tupperware, the can of corn, and an egg into a brown bag and called it a night.

The next day during lunch, Marit and I headed to the Fulcrum kitchen and got to baking. I was shaking up all the dry ingredients in the Tupperware, and then went on a desperate search for a measuring cup so I could add the milk (uhh, creamer) and the corn. Meanwhile, Marit is grunting and trying not to remove her fingers as she carves away at a rock-solid acorn squash with a dull steak knife—of course, the recipe called for the squash to be cut into thin slices.

After checking the cupboards and drawers, I came to the conclusion that there was no measuring cup. So, I found a little plastic cup in the back of a drawer—it looked close to what I thought a cup”might look like. I measured out the milk, cracked the egg, and opened the can of corn and presto! Mix, mix, mix, pour into a pie tin (the corn bread was supposed to go in a 9-inch square baking pan, but we didn’t have one, so a round pie tin, I figured, would suffice). Preheated the oven to 350, inserted corn bread pie, and set the timer. Done!

We set the table and waited for the magnificent smells to begin filling the office.

When the timer buzzed, we ran to the kitchen, pulled out our masterpieces, and regretted that we forgot to bring a camera. Everything looked great.

I took the dull steak knife to cut my golden yellow corn bread into pie slices. But just like in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, when Clark carves into that fateful Christmas goose, I took one jab at my corn bread and realized to my horror…I forgot the sugar. And with four teaspoons of sugar to four teaspoons of sour, alkaliney baking soda, this was problematic. To top it off, Marit looked at my recipe and informed me that when the recipe said “1/4 cup corn or canola oil” it didn’t mean I had the choice between actual canned corn and oil, it was referring to corn oil. Ahh. Okay.

Well we both tried it anyway, and yep, my corn bread was downright awful. It was so bad and so sour (I never knew corn bread could be sour!) that the aftertaste was like a punch to your face and make your eyes hurt.

“Honey?” Marit suggested as she coughed it down.

“Yes, honey. Lots of honey.” But nope, honey didn’t help either. The corn bread was bad, just plain bad. To make light of the situation, we began to think about who we could play a prank on by making them eat the stuff.

Today I realized that I am still bad at chemistry, even after all these years, because, yes, I am very bad at baking. Nevertheless, I learned three valuable lessons that may have helped me during my amateur chemist days:

1) Read the directions carefully.

2) Do not deviate.

3) Don’t forget the sugar.

P.S. We are doing an intern Christmas bake-off in December. Look out Fulcrum Kitchen!

Want more yummy recipes?

• Tex-Mex Corn Bread (strawberryginger.wordpress.com)
• Sweet Corn Bread (jellyblu.wordpress.com)
• All Hail the Noble Pumpkin (fulcrumbookblog.com)
• Chili for a Chilly Night (hopeannfaith.wordpress.com)

Receive a 50% discount on this title at www.fulcrumbooks.com. Use discount code OCCUPY at checkout.

Today’s blog is a second excerpt from The Battle in Seattle by Janet Thomas. Thomas has written plays about abortion, sexual abuse, nuclear war, the Vietnam War, and the war against the environment, books about hostel travel in the West, and she’s been editor of a magazine about spas around the world. She lives and teaches on San Juan Island in Washington State.

***

It’s this same corporate illness that’s at the core of the policies of the WTO. A corporation per se could be a beautiful thing. It could foster health among employees, well-being throughout the cultures it impacts, a ray of hope for our beleaguered environment. It could help to make life better. But corporations are organized in a very specific way to make a very few people very rich—the behind-the-scenes players who are so well disguised by the corporate mask, the fictional entity that does not exist.

I say this over and over because it’s frightening. Corporations have become the Emperor-Without-Clothes of the planet, and the rest of us are acting as though this nonexistent, bare-assed corporate catastrophe is fully dressed for winter at the North Pole. The corporate structure starts with evasions. We are misled by savvy and slick advertising and kept in the dark about the devouring bottom line.

The World Trade Organization, as it now exists, is structured to support the care and feeding of corporate fortunes at the expense of the democratic way, and to fill the deep pockets of a few at the expense of the no pockets of the many. The question is: Can we wake up in time? The people on the streets of Seattle during WTO week had only one thing to say: “Yes!”

Now to the hard part. What exactly do we wake up to? A corporation is easy to vilify precisely for the same reason it succeeds so well: There is no readily visible person at the helm. Nobody is accountable; nobody is responsible. Nobody is there. When we recoil and rebel, we are recoiling and rebelling from that which appears inhuman. A corporation, let loose to do its job, will always exploit without conscience. When money is the only measure, there is no other landscape upon which to gaze. But when human beings become measurable, as they did in Seattle, suddenly there is a shift, and the geography of corporate cause and effect is shown in its rightful complexity. A complexity that encompasses us all.

Recently, somebody said to me that “a corporation has all the attributes of a person.” His comment took me aback because I realized that it was partially true. A corporation is as complex as each of us, but there is at least one critical thing missing: empathy. Which means that if a corporation is a person, it is a sociopath. It changes shape to please its audience, it charms and seduces, it’s brilliant in rationalizing its position and in getting it’s way. But it has no ability to feel. And this is why it engenders so much fear and frustration, so much reaction. The potent beauty of being human and in partnership with one another, as well as with this sustaining earth, is threatened by a nameless, faceless, powerful sociopath that is out of control.

Excerpt © Janet Thomas. All rights reserved.

***

Interested in reading more? Use the code OCCUPY at checkout when you order The Battle in Seattle by Janet Thomas and receive a 50% discount at  www.fulcrumbooks.com!

Read on, activists of the world, read on…

• Sitting It Out—In Which the Students Lead the Way and the Police Use the Spray (fulcrumbookblog.com)
• Seattle’s Ex-Top Cop Recalls WTO Riots – Nov 1999 (fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com)
• Vivian McPeak calls Occupy Movement Open Heart Surgery for Soul of America (occupy-stories.com)
• Tom Hayden: How Wall Street May Be Reformed (huffingtonpost.com)
• Michael Moore “Proud” Of Occupy Denver (huffingtonpost.com)

Receive a 50% discount on this title at www.fulcrumbooks.com. Use discount code OCCUPY at checkout.

Today’s blog is an excerpt from The Battle in Seattle by Janet Thomas. Thomas has written plays about abortion, sexual abuse, nuclear war, the Vietnam War, and the war against the environment, books about hostel travel in the West, and she’s been editor of a magazine about spas around the world. She lives and teaches on San Juan Island in Washington State.

***

There is a great irony behind the North American and European protest movement against the World Trade Organization: the students are protesting both the physically impoverished lives of those who are exploited in the name of profit, as well as the way in which corporate culture spiritually impoverishes their own lives.

Critics are quick to point the finger at students who are so privileged that they have nothing better to do but bite the hand of the system that feeds them. What the critics don’t understand is that’s precisely what the students are trying to do, because the system feeds them nothing but crass commercialism. And they are fed up with it.

In her book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Naomi Klein chronicles this rising tide of frustration and rebellion among younger people. And she includes herself: “What haunts me is not exactly the absence of literal space so much as a deep craving for metaphorical space: release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom.” This gilded age of high-tech wealth has produced a wave of youthful revolutionaries who want to get back to meaning, to mystery, to metaphor. To them, freedom means more—and less—than money. It means individual and personal experience, free of corporate definition.

To those of us who are more than a few years out of high school and college, this is not an easy reach. We already got defined—by the freedom of individuality in the ’60s, by the tragedies of the Vietnam War, by the threat of nuclear war in the ’70s and early ’80s, and by the giddy explosion into capitalistic consumerism in the mid-80′s. We have no way of knowing the depth to which this legacy of consumerism has hollowed out experience for our young people. They were born on the cusp of consumerism, and they are finding out what’s on the other side. Just as we looked over the dark edge of war, nuclear arms, and communism, they are looking over the dark edge of the advertising age into consumer-driven capitalism, and they don’t like what they see or what they feel. They are following the money to find out why. And money talks.

[...] What’s not getting lost on this rising generation is that much of the profits go not only into the pockets of a few, but into the actual creation of a corporate-induced value system, a lifestyle of consumption that is dependent upon the deprivation of others. “I think more and more Americans are realizing that our privilege, and our lifestyle, means that someone else is suffering,” says Seattle activist Vanessa Lee.

[...] Nike, Disney, Wal-Mart, Adidas, Liz Claiborne, and other companies with visible identities are relatively easy to identify. It’s the corporate ethic in its less easily identifiable form that breeds the more systemic threat: the politician who rides into office on a wave of corporate experience, promotes and supports free-trade laws, and then returns to the corporate marketplace to reap the benefits when the stint of “public service” is over; the military arms sales to foreign countries that don’t identify the corporations that benefit so grandly from the sales; the flowers in the marketplace that are grown abroad on corporate-owned farms that still use deadly pesticides that impact the health of poorly paid workers. Neither the guns nor the flowers have labels. Tracking down the origins of the things we buy has become a complex and confounding challenge. Even when we do know where things were made, we don’t know how or at what price to the laborers. And we are addicted to our ignorance.

Excerpt © Janet Thomas. All rights reserved.

***

To read more of what Janet Thomas has to say, check back around this neck of the woods this Thursday for another excerpt from her book The Battle in Seattle. And don’t forget that you can receive a 50% discount on this title at www.fulcrumbooks.com by using the discount code OCCUPY at checkout!

Related articles

• WTO Meets Occupy Wall Street (fulcrumbookblog.com)
• Place Your Bets for the SC11 Student Cluster Battle in Seattle (insidehpc.com)
• For the 99%: Fight rampant consumerism with a Cambodian cow (heidi-miller.com)
• 5 Reasons Why Interning Is Better than Working at a Restaurant (fulcrumbookblog.com)
• . An investigation of disaster capitalism, based on Naomi Klein’s proposition that neo-liberal capitalism feeds on natural disasters, war and terror to establish its dominance. (theboldcorsicanflame.wordpress.com)

"Becauseof her bright blue hair, we made friends everywhere we went."

Still, most everyone in the office has known Dani much longer than I, and so I’m posting a few of Dani’s best blogs, moments, and memories from her coworkers. If any of you have anything to say to Dani, be sure to post below!

Our warehouse manager, James Ruiz, on his favorite Dani moment: “I think the first time that I saw her come in with blue hair comes to mind. I still remember Bob’s face when he caught a glimpse. Up to that point I thought I was the only rebel here, with four tattoos, but she showed me up with that wild hair! That young lady will go places, and I wish her all the best!”

Karla, our accounts receivable manager, wrote, “Dani is a very unique individual. It was fun waiting every morning to see what tights she would have on or what color her hair would be. It made the day interesting. She has a great personality and is very talented.”

Finally, Katie, our marketing manager and publicity extraordinaire, had a few memories and photos to share: “Along with being my colleague, Dani was also my roomie in NYC for BEA this past May. Together, we ventured into the Big Apple (In the middle of the night, Dani arrived at the hotel room from another show on the West Coast and scared me half to death. We were both exhausted and only half-grunted at each other before collapsing into a fourteen-hour sleep.) to man our BEAUTIFUL booth, meet Tyra Banks , eat and drink very well, ride the carousel in Central Park, go shopping at H&M, and visit the Met. Because of her bright blue hair, we made friends everywhere we went, and I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for our NYC memories. Maybe someday we’ll meet up there again…Best of luck, Dani! Make us proud! “

Favorite posts from Dani:

• Editor Carolyn’s favorite post:  A Fulcrum Field Guide to Birds and Other Publishing Creatures
• Ingrid, our special sales rep, likes this post: Dani, the chicken farmer
• A blog about Katie’s favorite memory with Dani: BEA highlights

Yes, I’m twenty-five years old, today to be exact, and I’ve never had an official Halloween of sugar, scares, and Goodwill-assembled costumes. It all started when I was born. My mom is a Halloween hater, no way around it. (I’d love to say that she is just a disliker, but no, it’s an all-out abhorrence, and I have never gotten to the bottom of this mystery.) Mom discouraged Halloween joy from my very beginning. When I was brought home from the hospital, friends and family were asking what my little baby Halloween costume would be. Oh, no. Not happening. No daisy-petaled headband or orange pumpkin onesie; not even a baby jumper that says BOO in felt lettering. As I got older, trick-or-treating was out of the question—with the exception of a nice evening drive to the nursing home, and if Grandma and Grandpa were up for it, we’d drive half an hour to their house for watery pumpkin pie or stale sugar cookies in the shape of ghosts. Yes, I was deprived. When I headed off to college, I was certain I’d finally get to experience all my Halloween dreams.

This is my next project... maybe (credit:rockingfacts.com)

But when Halloween arrived that first year, my friends were busy dressing up and putting on loads of black eyeliner, and I, instead, was putting on my tuxedo/penguin suit, decked out with my bowtie and nonslip shoes. I drove off to work the annual Halloween banquet put on by Mayor Schmitt. (Sigh). The mayor had the same party every year, and I worked it every year. No haunted houses, no crazy costumes, no giant bags of candy, not even a single cavity…

But I did do my best to participate in the festivities that weren’t forbidden. Mom couldn’t find a reason to hate pumpkins, so, with desperate creative juices flowing, I became obsessed with all things pumpkin: homemade pumpkin pie, brownies, cookies, crispy-baked pumpkin seeds, pumpkin-patch hunting, and of course good ol’ pumpkin carving (my favorite). One year, I won the high school pumpkin-carving design contest, and today I proudly display my numerous creepy, crazy, overly detailed, dilapidated pumpkins on each step of my front porch. Yes, having five pumpkins glowing out into the street might seem slightly fanatical, but I gotta do something to make up for years of sugar deprivation!

When I heard that Fulcrum is putting on a Favorite Ways to Enjoy a Pumpkin contest, I was so excited—my time to shine! So although I’ll be on a plane, missing Halloween yet again, I’m thinking up my next big idea. The girl who has never experienced Halloween (and who’s only had a few lousy Tootsie Rolls and expired Bazooka Joe Bubble Gum from the nursing home) is looking for a challenge. I’ve had plenty of fun-filled pumpkin experiences, so all you competitors, look out! I may even send a photo of my next carved masterpiece all the way from Georgia.

Jessica Engman is the editorial intern at Fulcrum Publishing. She moved from Green Bay, Wisconsin (yes, she’s a Packer fan) to sunny Denver, Colorado in July 2011. Jess loves Disney movies, mornings, and spends way too much time at coffee shops. She is working to build a career in book publishing.

Tweet us @FulcrumBooks, tag Fulcrum Publishing on Facebook, or reply to this entry with your favorite ways to enjoy a pumpkin to enter for a chance to win a copy of In Search of the Perfect Pumpkin by Gloria Evangelista. The giveaway ends on October 31.

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