The Big Fat Whale (If Corporations Were Really People)

http://www.bigfatwhale.com/archives/bfw_446.htm

Tell USDA That You Care About GE Contamination of Organic Food!

the Center for Food Safety (CFS) sued the Department of Agriculture (USDA) for its illegal approval of Monsanto’s genetically engineered (GE) Roundup Ready alfalfa.  The federal courts sided with CFS and banned GE alfalfa until the USDA fully analyzed the impacts of the plant on the environment, farmers, and the public in a rigorous analysis known as an environmental impact statement (or EIS). USDA released its draft EIS on December 14, 2009.  A 60-day comment period is now open until February 16, 2010.  This is the first time the USDA has done this type of analysis for any GE crop.  Therefore, the final decision will have broad implications for all GE crops.

CFS has begun analyzing the EIS and it is clear that the USDA has not taken the concerns of non-GE alfalfa farmers, organic dairies, or consumers seriously.  USDA’s preliminary determination is to once again deregulate GE alfalfa without any limitations or protections for farmers or the environment. Instead USDA has completely dismissed the fact that contamination will threaten export and domestic markets and organic meat and dairy products.  And, incredibly, USDA is claiming that there is no evidence that consumers care about such GE contamination of organic!

USDA also claims that consumers will not reject GE contamination of organic alfalfa if the contamination is unintentional or if the transgenic material is not transmitted to the end milk or meat product, despite the fact that more than 75% of consumers believe that they are purchasing products without GE ingredients when they buy organic.

USDA claims that Monsanto’s seed contracts require measures sufficient to prevent genetic contamination, and that there is no evidence to the contrary. But in the lawsuit requiring this document, the Court found that contamination had already occurred in the fields of several Western states with these same business-as-usual practices in place!

USDA predicts that the approval of GE alfalfa would damage family farms and organic markets, yet doesn’t even consider any limitations or protections against this scenario.  Small, family farmers are the backbone and future of American agriculture and must be protected. Organic agriculture provides many benefits to society: healthy foods for consumers, economic opportunities for family farmers and urban and rural communities, and a farming system that improves the quality of the environment. However, the continued vitality of this sector is imperiled by the complete absence of measures to protect organic production systems from GE contamination and subsequent environmental, consumer, and economic losses.

Tell USDA That You DO Care About GE Contamination of Organic Crops and Food!

http://ga3.org/campaign/alfalfaEIS?rk=edbl4G1aH2M2E

The Narcissist Inventory*

1. How often does the person need to be right at all costs?
2. How often does the person act impatient with you for no good reason?
3. How often does the person interrupt you in the middle of what you're saying, and yet take offense if you interrupt?
4. How often does the person expect you to drop whatever you're thinking about and listen to him or her--and does the person take offense when you expect the same in return?
5. How often does the person talk more than he or she listens?
6. How often does the person say "Yes, but," "That's not true," "No," "However," or "Your problem is"?
7. How often does the person resist and resent doing something that matters to you, just because it's inconvenient?
8. How often does the person expect you to cheerfully do something that's inconvenient for you?
9. How often does the person expect you to accept behavior that he or she would refuse to accept from you?
10. How often does the person fail to say "Thank you," "I'm sorry," "Congratulations," or "Excuse me" when it's called for?

rating the person on a 1-to-3 scale (1 = rarely; 2 = sometimes; 3 = frequently):

To score your inventory, add up the total:
10-16 =The person is cooperative
17-23 = The person is argumentative
24-30 = The person is a narcissist

 

'Shadow Elite': Do You Know Whose Agenda You're Being Sold?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janine-r-wedel/shadow-elite-do-you-know_b_430998.html

'Shadow Elite': Do You Know Whose Agenda You're Being Sold?

With the shadow elite, we don't know how and when we're being maneuvered.

Take, for instance, former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, who has taken to the airwaves virtually nonstop since Christmas day. Pushing for full body scanners as a cure-all for lax airport security, he revealed only belatedly that he also represents the only company to have initially qualified for the government contract to manufacture the full-body scanners. Before this came out, how would we have known if we were being directed to a certain viewpoint? The public had no way to sort this out because the public didn't know there was something to sort out. And even after the revelation, the public will likely remember Chertoff's warnings more than any caveat.

Or Ambassador Peter Galbraith. He engaged in insider self-dealing while supposedly serving an altruistic agenda for the Kurdish people. Galbraith, a longtime champion of Kurdish autonomy, has worn many hats vis-a-vis Iraqi Kurdistan in the last decade. He advised Bush's Deputy Secretary of Defense on Kurdistan and helped draft the Iraqi constitution. Presenting himself as a disinterested expert, he published opinion pieces in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other outlets staunchly advocating Kurdish independence and the right of the Kurds to control oil resources in their region. At the same time, we now know, he acquired the potential to make up to $100 million in business dealings involving these same oil reserves. Even associates in Galbraith's non-business Iraq activities said they were unaware of his business goals. As one former Iraqi diplomat and legal advisor put it: "The idea that a foreign oil company was in the room drafting the Iraqi Constitution has me reeling....It casts a tremendous pall on the legitimacy of the process."

The public trusts such people for expertise about everything from the financial system and national security to health care reform and where we should keep our money. Meanwhile, the public, which tends to take these players at face value, much as they might be able to do in a small community, has virtually no way of knowing that the players have incentives to be less than impartial, much less means to do something about it. There is no real-time or almost real-time mechanism of information flow as there is in a small town. And the full range of flexian activity is almost always difficult to detect.

A democratic society looks to the media--a cornerstone of accountability--for such detection. Yet full (or any) disclosure of a flexian's array of affiliations may not be in the interest of a given media outlet. "Experts" like Chertoff and Galbraith are continually given air time without their relevant roles, relationships, and sponsors being fully revealed. Last Sunday the New York Times' public editor Clark Hoyt chastised these two, as well as two other players, for not revealing roles that might affect the impartiality of their public pronouncements. He also took to task the journalists who interviewed them for not asking for such information.

When attention is paid after the fact, the damage has already been done. The public has been influenced. For instance, the revelations about Galbraith are too late to avert bad PR. They give fodder to those, Iraqi or otherwise, who believe that the United States and its allies invaded the Middle East for oil.

To make matters worse, the public's acceptance of truthiness enables public figures to make whatever claims that suit them at the moment; track records vanish. My most recent favorite is "the economy is getting better." Not when one out of six people who want to work full time can't find a full time job. In today's world of 24-7 news, investigative journalism has virtually gone by the wayside and viewers' memories of the resumes of influencers they see on television dissipate into the here and now--because that's what counts in the truthiness society. [link to both my and Arianna blog on truthiness]

Until we find a way of creating a credible information system that holds flexians and flex nets accountable, these power brokers will only become more influential as the next generation of shadow elite gathers steam. Steadily, they will keep breaking down the walls of separation that were erected in the name of democracy.

 

'Shadow Elite': Outsourcing Government, Losing Democracy

It is a condition which leaves the people feeling unrepresented, unprotected and utterly disregarded, a prop in their own play, a hollow feeling the great Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorriti once eloquently described as "cosmetic democracy."

According to Janine, whose unflinching social anthropological work I have respected for years, three out of four people doing the work of the federal government today are actually private contractors. Think about that a minute...That means private company employees -- with less stringent conflict of interest requirements and also not generally obligated to adhere to the Freedom of Information Act -- increasingly have become the government and now substantially rule the roost.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-lewis/shadow-elite-outsourcing_b_420752.html

A Fight for the Homeless and Against Authority

Burly, bearded and gleefully obscene, Dan de Vaul does not look the part of the bleeding-heart homeless advocate, sporting as he does a feather-topped cowboy hat, a large collection of guns and a bushel of hoary wisecracks.

But for nearly a decade, Mr. de Vaul has been housing dozens of homeless men and women in a farmhouse and a collection of tents, trailers and sheds spread around his 72-acre ranch here on the outskirts of this city in central California.

Mr. de Vaul says he is simply doing the work his county cannot or will not do. But officials say that the housing at Mr. de Vaul’s ranch, known as Sunny Acres, is substandard, often illegal, and rife with dangerous code violations, including missing fire detectors and faulty wiring.

Now Mr. de Vaul faces possible jail time, and his activities are sharply dividing residents of San Luis Obispo and the surrounding county, even as the county’s surging homeless population — estimated to be 3,800 people — outstrips the capacity of its shelters, which have about 125 beds.

The feud reached a boiling point in recent weeks after Mr. de Vaul’s conviction in November on two misdemeanors related to code violations, a judgment that the authorities had hoped might cajole Sunny Acres into compliance. But Mr. de Vaul refused a deal for probation and has since been sentenced to 90 days in jail and fined $1,000 by a judge, who called Mr. de Vaul’s behavior “irresponsible and arrogant.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/us/12homeless.html

 

Did a Court Just Deal a Fatal Blow to Tasers for Police?

In what is being heralded as a landmark decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently declared that police officers could be held liable for using a Taser without proper cause. And in making their determination, the court also set new legal parameters on how law enforcement is to use Tasers, stating, "The objective facts must indicate that the suspect poses an immediate threat to the officer or a member of the public." The federal finding substantially changes the landscape of Taser usage, and may signal the end of Tasers for law enforcement agencies who are now more vulnerable to civil and criminal action than ever before.

The decision, which has already caused law enforcement agencies to re-evaluate their Taser policies, stems from a case involving a Coronado police officer, Brian McPherson, who tased unarmed 21-year-old Carl Bryan during a traffic stop for a seatbelt infraction in Southern California. After being pulled over, Bryan was standing outside of his vehicle, wearing only boxer shorts and tennis shoes. He was 20 to 25 feet from the officer, and when tased, fell face first to the ground, fractured four teeth, and had to get the Taser prongs removed with a scalpel. Bryan went on to sue the Coronado Police Department, and the federal appellate court was making a determination if McPherson had immunity to the lawsuit as an officer. The court ruled in favor of Bryan.

And while any regulation on Taser use is a move forward from the status quo, which repeatedly has left civilians tased for innocuous circumstances, and the decision acknowledges some of the inherent dangers of the weapon, it falls short in a most critical way. The instruction is based on a false premise that Tasers "fall into the category of non-lethal force" as stated in Judge Wardlaw's written opinion. By denying the lethality of Tasers, the court mistakenly treats Tasers as an intermediary weapon, like a baton, when it should be treated as a deadly weapon, like a firearm.

According to Amnesty International, there have been more than 350 deaths due to Tasers. In San Jose, which was the first city to arm every one of its officers with the weapon in 2004, there have been six Taser-involved deaths, more than a death a year since its inception. Currently, the city is facing a $20 million lawsuit from the family of one of the more recent victims, Steve Salinas. The unarmed Salinas was tased to death in his motel room in 2007. Like Bryan, Salinas's ultimate tasing originated from a minor starting point: police were called to the scene due to allegedly loud noises emanating from the room. Salinas, who was naked at the time, died in the room shortly after the police arrived.

The growing body count attributed to Tasers refutes the commonly accepted advertisement from its leading manufacturer, Taser International, that Tasers are a non-lethal option for officers. Furthermore, the unreliability of the weapon to bring down its target makes it dangerous even for officers who may be in a situation requiring deadly force. According to a San Jose Mercury News study of the San Jose Police Department use of Tasers in 2007, Tasers in dart mode are only effective 70 percent of the time in bringing down their target, and in stun mode only 60 percent of the time.

The Taser consequently is left in a state of limbo. Its capacity to unintentionally kill leaves it too dangerous to use in non-lethal circumstances, say when an officer would use an intermediate weapon, such as pepper-spray or a control hold. Yet, due to its unpredictability to subdue a target, using a Taser would not be a gamble an officer would want to bet on if his or her life were in jeopardy.

 

http://www.alternet.org/rights/145039/did_a_court_just_deal_a_fatal_blow_to_tasers_for_police

Mega Giant Corporations Are Very Bad for America

Rather than having a winner-take-all battle among automobile makers or between Wal-Mart and Target, for example, we have competition between the monopoly and all the people under its power. In the case of Wal-Mart, this includes its workers and its suppliers as well as its customers. The real competition, in other words, is between the billionaires who make and wield monopolies like Wal-Mart and people like you and me.

 

Today’s monopolies increasingly appear in the shape of giant trading firms like Wal-Mart, which are designed to govern entire production systems, even entire swaths, of our economy.

 

For those Americans who believe in what we were taught in civics class and Econ 101, the most disturbing revelation was not even the fragility of our food systems, but that some of our most cherished beliefs about how the U.S. economy works appear no longer to be true. We are told that companies are engaged in a mad scramble to discover exactly what we the U.S. consumers want and to devise perfectly tailored systems to supply those want as efficiently as possible. We are told that our economy is characterized by constantly chaotic yet always constructive competition and that any American with a better product and bit of gumption can bring that product to market and beat the big guys.

 

Instead of having infinite choice, as we thought, we are really presented with a wall of standard-issue cans and pouches that are distinguished only by the words and colors on their labels.

 

Let’s take a quick walk around the average U.S. grocery or big-box store.

Over in the health-care aisle we find that Colgate-Palmolive and Procter & Gamble split more than 80 percent of the U.S. market for toothpaste, including such seemingly independent brands as Tom’s of Maine.

In the cold case we find that almost every beer is manufactured or distributed by either Anheuser-Busch InBev or MillerCoors, including imports like Corona, Beck’s, and Tsingtao; regional beers like Rolling Rock; once independent microbrews like Redhook and Old Dominion; and even “organic” beers like Stone Mill Pale Ale.

Perhaps Americans are comfortable with the fact that Campbell’s controls more than 70 percent of the shelf space devoted to canned soups. After all, the firm grew to prominence after its launch in 1869, thanks to its pioneering successes in integrating advanced chemistry, mass manufacturing, and modern advertising.

But what are we to make of the modern snack aisle, where Frito-Lay in recent years has captured half the business of selling salty corn chips and potato chips?

And what about the business of selling tap water in plastic bottles? Here, if anywhere, is an activity that any enterprising young American should be able to master. All you would seem to need to enter the local market for water is a spigot, some bottles, and a cool label. Yet nine of the top ten brands of bottled tap water in the United States are sold by PepsiCo (Aquafina), Coca-Cola (Dasani and Evian), or Nestlé (Poland Spring, Arrowhead, Deer Park, Ozarka, Zephyrhills, and Ice Mountain).

Furthermore, what can we learn from the size of the corporation in whose store we now stand? Until we elected Ronald Reagan president, both Democrats and Republicans made sure that no chain store ever came to dominate more than a small fraction of sales in the United States as a whole, or even in any one region of the country. Between 1917 and 1979, for instance, administrations from both parties repeatedly charged the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, the chain store behemoth of the mid-twentieth century that is better known as A & P, with violations of antitrust law, even threatening to break the firm into pieces.

Then in 1981 we stopped enforcing that law. Thus, today Wal-Mart is at least five times bigger, relative to the overall size of the U.S. economy, than A & P was at the very height of its power. 13 Indeed, Wal- Mart exercises a de facto complete monopoly in many smaller cities, and it sells as much as half of all the groceries in many big metropolitan markets. Wal-Mart delivers at least 30 percent and sometimes more than 50 percent of the entire U.S. consumption of products ranging from soaps and detergents to compact discs and pet food.

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/144716/mega_giant_corporations_are_very_bad_for_america/?obref=obnetwork

. Finally unveiled: the secret of the Big Mac's "secret sauce."

Soybean oil, pickle relish [diced pickles, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, vinegar, corn syrup, salt, calcium chloride, xanthan gum, potassium sorbate (preservative), spice extractives, polysorbate 80], distilled vinegar, water, egg yolks, high fructose corn syrup, onion powder, mustard seed, salt, spices, propylene glycol alginate, sodium benzoate (preservative), mustard bran, sugar, garlic powder, vegetable protein (hydrolyzed corn, soy and wheat), caramel color, extractives of paprika, soy lecithin, turmeric (color), calcium disodium EDTA (protect flavor).

 

http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/141959/15_horrifying_reasons_to_never_let_anyone_you_love_near_a_mcdonald%27s?page=1