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The fourteen-acre community garden at 41st and Alameda in South Central Los Angeles was the largest of its kind in the United States. Started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers created a miracle in one of the country’s most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community.

Then, 12 years later, real estate developers and bulldozers moved in - poised to level the 14-acre oasis. Why was the land sold to a wealthy developer for millions less than fair-market value? Why was the transaction done in a closed-door session of the LA City Council? Why has it never been made public? The documentary film is The Garden, and it's just been short-listed for an Academy Award.

Tonight on GRITtv ARUN GUPTA, MARION NESTLE, and PETER HOFFMAN discuss the politics of food, why what we eat matters, and how community gardens are changing the urban landscape. You can see the full program, including a taste of The Garden at 8 pm.

But for three days a year, more than 800 volunteer doctors, dentists, nurses and other health-care workers come from all over Virginia and beyond to this isolated place in Appalachia to provide free medical care to those who cannot afford it. Sick and hurting people by the hundreds gather and wait for the gates of the Wise County Fairgrounds to swing open -- their presence a testament to the country's health-care crisis.

Every year now, it happens like this. On a Thursday afternoon in late July, trucks filled with thousands of dollars' worth of medical supplies and equipment wind through coal country and up the steep roads to the tip of southwest Virginia, just a few miles from the Kentucky border. Then a small army of health-care professionals, along with hundreds of community volunteers, get to work. In tents, in barns, in exhibition halls, they use clotheslines, hospital sheets and medical clamps to separate examination rooms, surgeries, a vast open-air dental clinic, a laboratory, eye and ear clinics and a pharmacy. Moving with swift efficiency, following a model used to respond to natural disasters, they create a vast field hospital out of thin air in just a few hours.
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"The need is massive," Brock says. "We pick up everything from brain tumors to lung cancer to cervical cancer to breast cancer."

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Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday.

A routine, $80 tooth extraction might have saved him.
If his mother had been insured.

If his family had not lost its Medicaid.

If Medicaid dentists weren't so hard to find.

If his mother hadn't been focused on getting a dentist for his brother, who had six rotted teeth.

By the time Deamonte's own aching tooth got any attention, the bacteria from the abscess had spread to his brain, doctors said. After two operations and more than six weeks of hospital care, the Prince George's County boy died.

Deamonte's death and the ultimate cost of his care, which could total more than $250,000, underscore an often-overlooked concern in the debate over universal health coverage: dental care.MORE

That's what "free trade" deals are about: limiting by treaty the policy space in which lawmakers can operate. As such, both of the presidential candidates are boxed into a cage of their respective parties' creation. It's the dirty secret of the 2008 campaign.

Recently, AlterNet asked Van Jones, founder of Green For All and author of The Green Collar Economy, about this issue, and he responded with defiance. "I want the WTO to tell us we can't do this," he said, "because then we won't have a WTO. I want the free traders to stand up in front of the world and explain to Americans why some people are going to tell you that you can't have clean energy and you can't have your home retrofitted (with American-made products) because it is more efficient for it to be made in Asia or Germany, that you can't bring Detroit back to build wind turbines. I want the free traders to defend having an overseas body to declare this agenda illegal. I want that fight."

It's a fight that might finally help achieve public awareness about what "free trade" really means. When most people hear the word "trade," they picture ships filled with goods crisscrossing the world's oceans. But the reality is that "free trade" is simply a well-tested euphemism for agreements between governments that limit their ability to intervene in the private sector, ostensibly to unleash the awesome "power of the free market."
They don't just cover trade between countries, but also a host of issues that most ordinary people would consider to be purely domestic matters, as long as they have some tenuous connection with international commerce, no matter how far removed.
Activists from across the developing world have been trying for years to call attention to that reality but have largely been ignored by a media and political establishment devoted to promoting the so-called "Washington Consensus."

Now, with Americans hungry for new approaches to the economy, health care, energy policy and a host of other issues, the "free trade" deals advanced by both Democrats and Republicans over the past 30 years may very well come back to haunt them.
According to a report by the watchdog group Public Citizen (PDF), "Many WTO rules have little or nothing to do with international trade," but every WTO country is still "required to 'ensure the conformity of its laws, regulations and administrative procedures'" with the WTO's orthodoxy. Failing to do so is not a meaningless act of diplomatic defiance; the WTO has an enforcement arm. As the report explains:

Domestic policies that extend beyond the WTO constraints are subject to challenge by other WTO signatory countries -- often at the behest of their affected industries -- before WTO tribunals. Of the 137 cases decided to date at the WTO, challenges to domestic laws have been successful nearly 90 percent of the time, with countries moving to alter their laws as ordered except in a single instance, where a country instead chose to pay indefinite trade sanctions to keep its policy in place.

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Consider Obama's plan, "New Energy for America" (PDF). At its heart is a proposal to "invest in a clean energy economy" and "create 5 million new green jobs, good jobs that cannot be outsourced." But most can be. While installing new solar panels would be a job that would stay in the United States, building those solar panels would not be. According to the WTO's Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures, any financial contribution by a government to the private sector that would give a preference to "domestic over imported goods," either by law "or in fact," is a no-no. Article 5 of that agreement allows a WTO challenge to "any subsidy (tax credit, funding for R&D, and other[s] ...) deemed to ... carry a benefit that has the effect of causing serious prejudice" against goods or services provided by another country. There was an exception for "environmental upgrades," but it expired in 2000.

When it comes to the government, "Buy American" is itself WTO illegal. Obama promises to "help nurture America's success in clean technology manufacturing by establishing a federal investment program to help manufacturing centers modernize" by using federal funds to provide the "critical up-front capital" to modernize "manufacturing facilities to produce new advanced clean technologies." It wouldn't stand a chance if challenged.