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“If a man has an apartment stacked to the ceiling with newspapers we call him crazy. If a woman has a trailer house full of cats we call her nuts. But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish the entire nation, we put them on the cover of Fortune magazine and pretend that they are role models.”
-– B. Lester
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 | Environment: ExxonMobil’s Mayflower Mess |
Tar sands crude is both more toxic and much harder to clean than ordinary oil.
By Michael Brune
Several weeks after ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline gushed at least 500,000 gallons of tar sands crude and water into the Arkansas community of Mayflower, many of the evacuated families still can’t return to their homes.
Sierra Club organizer Glen Hooks, who grew up about 20 miles southeast of this disaster site, recently attended a meeting for the displaced families at Mayflower High School. “I had to really stare down some ExxonMobil goons who told me to leave because it was a private meeting,” he said. “I politely explained that it was a meeting in a public building about a public subject with numerous public officials in attendance, and that I was planning to stay.”
During the Mayflower meeting, Hooks listened as an ExxonMobil executive apologized to the families and said that the focus was on safety and helping the homeowners. “The meeting then moved into a phase where ExxonMobil met with individual family members about their claims in a side room guarded by no fewer than six uniformed police officers.”
Here’s something that the Big Oil leader probably didn’t tell those homeowners: In 2010, it was fined $26,200 by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration for failing to regularly inspect each point where the Pegasus line crosses under a navigable waterway.
This is a pipeline that crosses under the Mississippi River — just one of the places ExxonMobil failed to do inspections. It’s hard to say which is more shocking: that “safety first” ExxonMobil has been so cavalier about pipeline inspections or that it was fined such a pittance for its irresponsibility. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Thursday, April 18 @ 21:20:17 EDT (111 reads)
(Read More... | 4742 bytes more | Comments? | Environment | Score: 0)
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| International: GMO Agribusiness and the Destructive Nature of Global Capitalism |
By Colin Todhunter
Capitalism is based on managing its inherent crises. It is also based on the need to maximise profit, beat down competitors, cut overheads and depress wages. In the 1960s and 70s, in the face of increasing competition from abroad, the US began to outsource manufacturing production to bring down costs by using cheap foreign labour. Other countries followed suit. Even more jobs were lost through the impulse to automate. To provide a further edge, trade unions and welfare were attacked in order to suppress wages at home. Problem solved. Or was it?
Not really. As wages in the west stagnated or decreased and unemployment increased, the market for goods was under threat – if people have less money to buy things, then what to do? New problem, new ‘solution’ – lend people money and create a debt-ridden consumer society. Of course, it produced great opportunities for investors in finance, and all kinds of dubious financial derivatives and products were created, sold to the public and repackaged and shifted around the banking system. That market became saturated and the debt bubble burst. This time around the ‘solution’ is to print money and give bailouts to the banks to cover their gambling losses and to get them lending once again. With a huge hole appearing in state coffers due to the bailouts and national debt spiraling during the years of neo-liberalism, the current crisis has become an opportunity for the finance sector to exert long-term debt-related control over sovereign states, including public asset stripping via ‘austerity’. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Wednesday, February 20 @ 18:34:16 EST (257 reads)
(Read More... | 9770 bytes more | Comments? | International | Score: 0)
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| Business/Economy: Retail Injustice |
Most big retail chains treat their employees as nothing but a drain on profits.
By Jim Hightower
The Powers That Be say the bulk of America’s middle-class manufacturing jobs are gone and aren’t coming back. High-tech jobs are being outsourced, as is an increasing share of the work historically handled by our accountants, lawyers, and some other professionals.
Retail jobs at brick-and-mortar shops, however, can’t be exported.
But wait, those aren’t jobs, they’re “jobettes.” They’re part-time, pay poverty wages, offer no benefits, feature lousy schedules, come with little training, and boast few advancement opportunities.
Most big retail chains treat their employees as nothing but a drain on profits rather than an asset worth investing in. Sales people are typically paid only $10 an hour, clerks get only $9.70, and cashiers just $9. Even worse, 94 percent of retailers define full-time work as only 30 hours a week. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, February 18 @ 20:22:30 EST (209 reads)
(Read More... | 2989 bytes more | Comments? | Business/Economy | Score: 0)
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| Health News: Don’t Put a Fork in It |
Despite consumer opposition, the FDA is one step away from approving genetically engineered salmon.
By Wenonah Hauter
While most Americans were enjoying the holiday season or stressing out over the nation’s imminent leap off the so-called fiscal cliff, the Food and Drug Administration delivered some big news as quietly as possible.
On December 21, the agency announced that AquaBounty’s genetically engineered salmon had cleared the final hurdle before clinching FDA approval.
Despite insufficient testing and widespread consumer opposition, AquaBounty’s food experiment is dangerously close to becoming the first genetically engineered animal produced for human consumption. Yes, a newfangled fish may soon land on a dinner plate near you.
For those who have been following this news for the past several years, the timing of the FDA’s release of its draft environmental assessment — the Friday before Christmas — was no surprise. But the news was still frightening: The FDA may give this transgenic animal the green light under a new approval process that treats the fish as an “animal drug.”
Prefer your salmon without those eel genes spliced into its DNA? Pay close attention because this frankenfish may hit the market without any sort of label. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, February 11 @ 19:41:14 EST (168 reads)
(Read More... | 5576 bytes more | Comments? | Health News | Score: 0)
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| The High Cost of Free Trade |
Negotiations over the new Trans-Pacific Partnership are secret — not even members of Congress get to see the drafts.
By William A. Collins
Tidy rip-offs
From free trade;
For which we
So dearly paid.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement, being negotiated in secret even as we speak, has a lot to say about worker rights and environmental protections. This pact, which is shaping up between the United States and 10 other nations, comes out squarely against them.
Like most other global trade deals, the true purpose of this so-called “partnership” is to “free” corporations from government rules, particularly those aimed at protecting us all from devastating pollution, barbaric working conditions, consumer fraud, and other forms of corporate abuse.
No wonder these negotiations are secret. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, January 25 @ 19:55:46 EST (170 reads)
(Read More... | 4897 bytes more | Comments? | Score: 0)
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| Politics: Wall Street Pulls the Strings: Social Security Under Attack in February |
by Dave Lindorff
The all-out assault on Social Security has begun.
The set-up for the big battle was the Fiscal Cliff charade. That hyped drama in the last days of December was a moment of truth for the Democratic Party and for President Barack Obama to make it clear whether they were still defenders of the New Deal legacy, or whether they were ready to toss Social Security overboard on behalf of the party’s new constituency: the Wall Street gang.
The president and the Democrats in House and Senate could have said there would be no deal on the artificial Fiscal Cliff that was created by Congress back in August 2011 unless Congressional Republicans agreed not to hold the nation hostage again this February over the issue of raising the national debt ceiling. Republicans were in a weak position, since if the “cliff” deadline were allowed to pass, the Bush tax cuts would have expired. They would have been put in the position of being unable to pass new legislation restoring tax cuts for the wealthy, while Democrats could have forced them to pass tax cuts for those in the middle and lower classes.
Instead of doing that, the president and his vice president, former Senator from the über-corporate headquarters state of Delaware, Joe Biden, offered a “compromise” that give tax breaks to the 1% of Americans who earn between $250,000 and $400,000 a year, protected up to $5 million in estate value from inheritance taxes, and left the GOP free to hold Congress and the Country hostage in February and March when Congress has to pass a new increase in the debt ceiling. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, January 07 @ 20:05:25 EST (259 reads)
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| Health News: Why the Chicken Crossed the Road |
Factory farms are animal concentration camps.
By Jim Hightower
Thanks to the industrializers of American agriculture, we finally know why the chicken crossed the road: to run away from the factory farm.
These livestock and poultry factories are encased in thousands of sprawling, low-slung, metal buildings that now litter much of our nation's rural landscapes.
Rarely seen by consumers, much less entered by them, the prison-like facilities are officially called "confined animal feeding operations." They're as far from pastoral as that name suggests.
Typically, a factory farm has many thousands of chickens, cows, hogs, turkeys, or other animals jammed together in tiny cages and crates that permit little movement beyond eating and defecating. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, November 09 @ 18:36:00 EST (295 reads)
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| Labor News: WalMart Workers Taking Action Against the Corporate Giant |
By Steve Edwards and Joshua H. Koritz
Many workers and activists have been excited by the recent reports of walkouts and strikes against Walmart. For years unions have tried to organize workers in this notoriously antiunion corporation. Walmart employs over 1.4 million people in the U.S. and many earn so little that they have to rely on food stamps and other government assistance. Activists want to know if the strikes at warehouses in California and Illinois and walkouts at retails stores in multiple states mark a turning point, or merely a ramping-up of the UFCW's public relations campaigns against the $400 billion retail giant?
The warehouse strikes were launched by two separate campaigns, the one in Illinois led by Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ) with organizing staff from UE - the independent, Left-wing unionthat successfully occupied Republic Windows in December 2008 - and the California Warehouse Workers United which is sponsored by the SEIU and UFCW.
In these warehouse strikes, "permanent temps" employed through employment agencies (rather than WalMart "associates" who are subjected to an intensively anti-union regime, complete with token company shares and an imposed rah-rah culture) were fighting back on behalf of workers who were fired for filing wage-theft claims. Having stepped to the front of the struggle the warehouse workers then marched to take their message to company HQ in Benton, Arkansas and to the retail stores, dozens of which have now seen walkouts. The Elwood, Illinois campaign was a smash success, with all employees returned to work after 21 days with back pay for the period they were on strike. This is a sharp victory which needs to be publicized far and wide. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, October 19 @ 19:08:06 EDT (176 reads)
(Read More... | 9700 bytes more | Comments? | Labor News | Score: 0)
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| Screwed Again: Morgan Stanley Sued for Racial Discrimination |
in Pushing Predatory Loans to Black Homeowners
American Civil Liberties Union, aclu.org
Landmark Lawsuit First to Link Bundling of Mortgage-Backed Securities and Racial Discrimination; Suit Charges Violation of Fair Housing Act
NEW YORK – Morgan Stanley discriminated against black homeowners and violated federal civil rights laws by providing strong incentives to a subprime lender to originate mortgages that were likely to be foreclosed on, according to a groundbreaking lawsuit filed today.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, is the first that connects racial discrimination to the securitization of mortgage-backed securities, which were sold to institutional investors and pension funds. It is also the first case where a prospective class of victimized homeowners is suing an investment bank directly rather than the subprime lender whose loans the bank bought.
The lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Michigan, the National Consumer Law Center, and Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, a San Francisco-based law firm, on behalf of five Detroit residents and Michigan Legal Services. The complaint asks the court to certify the case as a class action. As many as 6,000 black homeowners in the Detroit area may have suffered similar discrimination. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, October 16 @ 19:08:21 EDT (293 reads)
(Read More... | 5815 bytes more | Comments? | Screwed Again | Score: 0)
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| The News: Big Food Fight |
If the products they sell us are as great as they say, what are General Mills, Kraft, and other processed food giants hiding?
By Jill Richardson
I'm going to sell you something to eat, but I won't tell you what's in it. Trust me, the ingredients are perfectly safe — but I absolutely oppose telling you what you're eating. I also won't let independent scientists study the ingredients. And I'm making a bundle of money by selling these unlabeled products. But trust me, they are safe. Go ahead, take a bite.
Does that sound ridiculous? Well, chances are, your pantry is full of products made by companies that are spending millions in California to avoid telling consumers what's in their food. On Election Day, Californians will vote on Proposition 37, a measure to require mandatory labeling of foods containing genetically engineered ingredients. Coca Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, Kellogg, and Nestle have each kicked in more than half a million bucks to defeat the measure. And even if Californians win the right to know what's in their food, the rest of the country may remain in the dark. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, October 12 @ 20:22:01 EDT (176 reads)
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| Politics: Radioactive Ties |
Whether corporate political money shouts or whispers, it still corrupts.
By Jim Hightower
Not only does corporate political money shout, scream, bellow, and bay in our elections, but afterwards it quietly slips into the back rooms of power to talk softly about payback.
Meet Exelon Corporation, America's biggest electric utility, owner of our country's largest array of nuclear power plants, and among the largest donors to Barack Obama's political career. One Exelon board member alone has raised more than $500,000 for Obama and is tight enough with him to get into the occasional presidential basketball game. Also, Obama's top political operative, David Axelrod, has been an Exelon consultant. Overall, Chicago-based Exelon is so connected that it boasts of being "the president's utility." ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, September 11 @ 20:44:51 EDT (192 reads)
(Read More... | 2760 bytes more | Comments? | Politics | Score: 0)
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| Screwed Again: The Lipstick Profiteers |
Mary Kay's biggest revenue source may be the dreams of its own pink-clad sales force.
By Virginia Sole-Smith
In July, 30,000 Mary Kay ladies flooded the Dallas Convention Center for the company’s annual "seminar" — a conference that is equal parts beauty pageant and mega-church revival. They wore cute suits and evening gowns, won piles of glitzy prizes, attended leadership workshops, and gave standing ovations to any video footage of their company’s late iconic founder, Mary Kay Ash.
On the surface, there seems to be plenty to celebrate at this upbeat ritual. Mary Kay Inc. boasted a 94,000 increase in new sales force members last quarter. This would be a staggering feat of job creation compared to the United States’ 8.4-percent unemployment rate — if only being a Mary Kay lady offered the basics of a real job, such as a steady paycheck.
But it doesn’t, as I discovered while reporting “The Pink Pyramid Scheme” for Harper’s magazine. In fact, out of the nation's 600,000 Mary Kay sales force members, only around 300 of them earn six-figure incomes. Most of those bigger paychecks come from commissions derived when “downlines,” sales force members on the lower rungs of Mary Kay’s “Ladder of Success,” buy inventory. And those "independent beauty consultants" buy a heck of a lot of the company's lipstick, concealer, and other products. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Thursday, August 30 @ 20:45:24 EDT (192 reads)
(Read More... | 4977 bytes more | Comments? | Screwed Again | Score: 0)
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| Labor News: Turning College Students into a Commodity |
After graduation, students' incomes would be "attached" by financiers.
By Jim Hightower
Let's take a trip deep into the magic kingdom of "Laissez Fairyland" and prostrate ourselves before the infallible and inscrutable force known as the free market.
While this awesome deity cannot be seen, the high priests of free-market fundamentalism insist that we mere mortals must simply have faith that its mysterious workings are always in our best interest. Yeah, sure, your holiness. We saw how well that worked out for us wandering pilgrims after you true believers deregulated Wall Street, which then crashed on our streets.
Well, get ready. Free-market purists want us to have another ungodly religious encounter with their omnipotent deity. Looking at America's trillion-dollar student debt crisis, these spiritualists had a burning-bush revelation. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, August 06 @ 19:32:14 EDT (730 reads)
(Read More... | 2736 bytes more | Comments? | Labor News | Score: 0)
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| Business/Economy: Titanic Banks Hit LIBOR Iceberg: Will Lawsuits Sink the Ship? |
by Ellen Brown
At one time, calling the large multinational banks a “cartel” branded you as a conspiracy theorist. Today the banking giants are being called that and worse, not just in the major media but in court documents intended to prove the allegations as facts. Charges include racketeering (organized crime under the U.S. Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO), antitrust violations, wire fraud, bid-rigging, and price-fixing. Damning charges have already been proven, and major damages and penalties assessed. Conspiracy theory has become established fact.
In an article in the July 3rd Guardian titled “Private Banks Have Failed – We Need a Public Solution”, Seumas Milne writes of the LIBOR rate-rigging scandal admitted to by Barclays Bank:
It’s already clear that the rate rigging, which depends on collusion, goes far beyond Barclays, and indeed the City of London. This is one of multiple scams that have become endemic in a disastrously deregulated system with inbuilt incentives for cartels to manipulate the core price of finance. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, July 20 @ 19:52:07 EDT (606 reads)
(Read More... | 14382 bytes more | Comments? | Business/Economy | Score: 0)
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| Screwed Again: 50 Years of Gutting America's Middle Class |
Walmart's explosive growth has gutted two key pillars of the American middle class: small businesses and well-paid manufacturing jobs.
By Stacy Mitchell
Sam Walton opened the first Walmart store in Rogers, Arkansas, 50 years ago this month. Sprawled along a major thoroughfare outside the city's downtown, that inaugural store embodied many of the hallmarks that have since come to define the Walmart way of doing business. Walton scoured the country for the cheapest merchandise and deftly exploited a loophole in federal law to pay his mostly female workforce less than minimum wage.
That relentless focus on squeezing workers and suppliers for every advantage has paid off since July 1962. Walmart is now the second-largest corporation on the planet. It took in almost half-a-trillion dollars last year at more than 10,000 stores worldwide.
Walmart now captures one of every four dollars Americans spend on groceries. Its stores are so plentiful that it's easy to imagine that the retailer has long since reached the upper limit of its growth potential. It hasn't. Walmart has opened over 1,100 new supercenters since 2005 and expanded its U.S. sales by 35 percent. It aims to keep on growing that fast. With an eye to infiltrating urban areas, Walmart recently introduced smaller "neighborhood markets" and "express" stores. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Wednesday, July 04 @ 21:00:31 EDT (580 reads)
(Read More... | 5224 bytes more | Comments? | Screwed Again | Score: 0)
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| Old Articles | |
| Monday, June 25 | | · | Big Cable's Plan to Lock Down Your Future |
| Tuesday, June 19 | | · | Wisconsin's Alien Seed |
| Monday, June 04 | | · | Not Only the Cows Are Mad |
| Tuesday, May 29 | | · | Walmart's Unsurprising Bribes |
| Thursday, May 24 | | · | The State of the Military-Industrial Complex Is Strong |
| Monday, May 07 | | · | Wall Street's Speed Freaks |
| Wednesday, April 18 | | · | ACLU Tells Federal Appeals Court to Reinstate Lawsuit against Wal-Mart |
| Thursday, March 22 | | · | Our Health Care Racket |
| Saturday, March 17 | | · | Why The Huge Spike in Oil Prices? |
| Friday, March 16 | | · | Everything Dies |
| Friday, March 09 | | · | Raw Trade Deals |
| Thursday, February 16 | | · | The Chief Twinkie Goes Ding Dong |
| Wednesday, February 15 | | · | Leak Reveals How Big Business Funds Climate-Change Deniers |
| Saturday, January 28 | | · | Staring at Empty Pages |
| Monday, December 12 | | · | Protesters Occupy Goldman Sachs |
| Friday, November 04 | | · | Jobs Not Cuts National Week of Action |
| Tuesday, October 11 | | · | Job Destroyers Don't Deserve a Tax Holiday |
| Monday, October 03 | | · | New Rules will Support Farmers and Jobs |
| Tuesday, September 27 | | · | America's Government Contracting Bonanza Bilks Taxpayers |
| Monday, September 12 | | · | DuPont's Herbicide Goes Rogue |
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