September 4, 2013

Matthew Rothschild: John Kerry, Warmonger

from The Progressive:


John Kerry, Warmonger
By Matthew Rothschild, September 4, 2013


John Kerry is not exactly inspiring confidence as Secretary of State.

He’s become the biggest cheerleader for war against Syria in the entire administration.

At the Senate hearings yesterday, he wouldn’t even rule out putting boots on the ground in Syria, even though President Obama had assured us on Saturday that this wouldn’t happen.

Asked directly about it, here’s what Kerry had to say: If chemical weapons were at risk of falling into the hands of Al Qaeda types in Syria, he said: “I don’t want to take off the table an option that might or might not be available to a President of the United States to secure our country.”

He then backtracked and tried to slam the door shut on putting U.S. ground troops there, but if you were listening, you had to conclude that this door is still kind of open. .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.progressive.org/john-kerry-warmonger

September 4, 2013

Is McDonald’s Kid-Themed Business Model Obsolete?

from Civil Eats:


Is McDonald’s Kid-Themed Business Model Obsolete?
By Michele Simon on August 29, 2013


A few weeks ago, USA Today announced: “Taco Bell will shock the fast-food industry on Tuesday by announcing plans to drop kids meals and toys at all of its U.S. restaurants.” CEO Greg Creed told the paper: “The future of Taco Bell is not about kids meals. This is about positioning the brand for Millennials.”

Some were skeptical about the announcement, given that kids’ meals only represent half of one percent of Taco Bell’s overall sales. While increasing pressure on the fast food industry to stop marketing to children wasn’t the main reason for the change, it’s still a significant development.

That a large fast food company thought it could gain a public relations boost by showing off what amounted to a failed business strategy is a sure sign of success by children’s health advocates. Restaurant executives have heard the message loud and clear: Marketing junk food to children is a scourge on their industry and any move that distances your company from such negative PR is a good thing.

The move also leaves McDonald’s increasingly isolated in its steadfast refusal to change its ways. Taco Bell is not in fact the first or only company to abandon children as a target market. In 2011, Jack in the Box announced it was pulling toys from its kids’ meals, explaining to Reuters: “Our advertising and promotions have focused exclusively on the frequent fast-food customer, not children.” ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://civileats.com/2013/08/29/is-mcdonalds-kid-themed-business-model-obsolete/#sthash.rHwHGXYD.dpuf

September 4, 2013

Building the Commons as an Antidote to the Predatory Market Economy

Building the Commons as an Antidote to the Predatory Market Economy

Wednesday, 04 September 2013 00:00
By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Truthout | Opinion


These are times of radical change. We are in the midst of an evolution. As David Bollier writes, "We are poised between an old world that no longer works and a new one struggling to be born. Surrounded by centralized hierarchies on the one hand and predatory markets on the other, people around the world are searching for alternatives."

The old world is one of concentrated economic power that hoards wealth; that creates corrupted and hierarchical governance to serve and further concentrate wealth through exploitation of people and the planet. People are experiencing the ravages of this global neoliberal economy in which the market reigns supreme and everything is a profit center, no matter the human and environmental costs.

We are at a crossroads in the global economic order. If not stopped, the two massive "trade" agreements under negotiation at present, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (known as TAFTA), will cement this globalized neoliberal market economy through greater deregulation, profit protection and an extra-judicial trade tribunal in which corporations can sue sovereign nations if their laws interfere with profits.

There is another way. We've reached a tipping point in awareness of the effects of the current global economy that has erupted in a worldwide revolt as we can see in the Occupy, Arab Spring, Idle No More and Indignado movements. People are searching for alternative ways of structuring the economy and society that are empowering and more just and sustainable. Part of this work includes understanding and building the "commons," which is the opposite of the predatory market economy. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/18582-building-the-commons-as-an-antidote-to-the-predatory-market-economy

September 4, 2013

Fairfax County Grapples With Huge Silver Line Costs

Fairfax County transportation officials say they are confident the necessary funds will be secured to pay for three facilities—two parking garages and a rail station—that are part of Phase II of the Silver Line Metrorail project to Dulles International Airport, sparing county taxpayers an additional burden as the $6 billion commuter rail extension is constructed.

As part of an agreement with then U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood and the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA), Fairfax and Loudoun counties pledged to fund the construction of parking and station facilities “outside the project,” a move designed to placate LaHood’s wish to reduce the overall cost of the Silver Line, which is being largely financed with toll revenues from the Dulles Toll Road.

In an interview with WAMU 88.5, Fairfax County Transportation Director Tom Biesiadny said planners are pursuing several avenues to fulfill the county’s commitment to building parking garages at the future Herndon-Monroe and Rt. 28 stations and the station stop at Rt. 28/Innovation Center, all of which will cost nearly a quarter of a billion dollars.

“Obviously we want to keep the total cost of the project for all of the funding partners as reasonable as possible. One of the beneficiaries of reducing the cost of the project obviously is the toll road users. Other beneficiaries are the taxpayers,” Biesiadny said. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://wamu.org/news/13/08/28/fairfax_county_grapples_with_huge_silver_line_costs

September 4, 2013

Across U.S., bridges crumble as repair funds fall short

(LA Times) SCHWENKSVILLE, Pa. — Engineers think that three of the bridges closest to Dave Wisler's home are about ready to collapse.

One, a picturesque one-lane structure built in 1893, became so perilous it was closed last summer, and the county doesn't have the money to fix it. Another bridge, just down the road, is well-known for the concrete that chips off the bottom as children play in the creek below — it's currently under repair.

Traffic was diverted to a third bridge nearby, but some drivers noticed a worrying humming noise as they drove over it, and their windows rattled. Authorities have since found that bridge is too dangerous to drive over too, and don't know when they'll be able to reopen it.

To get to a barn that he's restoring across the river, about 300 yards away, Wisler now has to drive 15 minutes past homes and parks and blinking orange and white construction signs. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-aging-bridges-20130904,0,4964515.story

September 4, 2013

The Colonist of Good Will: On Albert Camus

from The Nation:



The Colonist of Good Will: On Albert Camus
Algerian Chronicles shows that Camus still has something to say to us—not about terrorism but economic justice.

Thomas Meaney August 27, 2013


Toward the end of his recent memoir, Jean Daniel, the last surviving friend of Albert Camus and the most distinguished journalist in France, permits himself an anecdote. It’s the summer of 1951, and Camus’s book-length essay The Rebel will soon be published. The writer has taken his mother to a party with friends in Paris. After dancing with several women, Camus leans over and tells his mother that he’s been invited to the presidential palace. She is nearly deaf, so he repeats: “Mother, I’ve been invited to the Elysée!” Madame Camus is silent for a long moment. Then she takes her son’s ear and shouts: “Don’t go, my boy! It’s not for us! It’s not for us!” Camus smiles and gives a shrug to the table. “He didn’t say anything,” recalls Daniel, “but he seemed proud of his mother.” Camus never went to the Elysée, of course. The only palace this son of a cleaning woman ever entered was in Sweden to collect the Nobel Prize, and even then he went with reluctance.

For almost any other French intellectual, a humble background like Camus’s might have been a handicap, but for him it was a source of pride. Born in Algeria into the lowest stratum of the pieds-noirs—the French-speaking settlers who had lived on the land for more than a century—Camus was a pure product of the Third Republic. His family received a state pension after his father was killed fighting in World War I. He was a scholarship student educated by charismatic schoolmasters who had whisked him through the standard lycée curriculum. While the rest of the French intellectuals made a pastime of hating their bourgeois upbringing, Camus reveled in his hardscrabble origins. He was less prone to romanticizing the proletariat because he came from it: words like “exploitation” and “subsistence” were gleaned not from revolutionary brochures but from life itself. Whereas his great antagonist, Jean-Paul Sartre, grew up in a family that made him feel “indispensable to the universe,” Camus described the world of his childhood as one of “gentle indifference.” “I was not poor enough to feel my desires as demands,” Sartre declared in his autobiography. This was not a problem for Camus, whose passions often overwhelmed him.

But Camus’s outsider status also narrowed his vision. Coming from one of the rougher quarters of Algiers, he found it hard to feel implicated in the long history of French colonial oppression: his family, too, had felt the heel of the grands colons. Camus could never see with the same icy clarity as Sartre that colonies are the truth of the metropole. For him, the version of national independence propagated by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), which was founded in 1954, spelled a catastrophe for France, Algeria and the rest of the West. It meant not only turning Algeria over to a group of terrorists and forcing the exodus of more than a million pieds-noirs, but also handing a victory to Egypt’s “new Arab Imperialism” and the USSR’s “anti-Western strategy.” There was a deeper dimension to the analysis as well. As Camus and Sartre both understood, the Algerian Revolution was also a French revolution—one that would test the very foundation of the Republic. Could France finally embrace its Arab and Berber subjects with true equality, or would its universalist credo remain a cover for colonial interests? For Sartre, it was the latter; Camus thought the Republic still had a chance to redeem itself. ...........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/article/175947/colonist-good-will-albert-camus#axzz2dvzyQRTX

September 4, 2013

Protesting Activists' Firings, Walmart Workers Plan the Biggest Mobilization Since Black Friday

(The Nation) Walmart workers and supporters plan to mount protests in fifteen cities Thursday, a mobilization that the union-backed group OUR Walmart expects will be its largest since last November’s Black Friday strike. This week’s rallies follow an August 22 civil disobedience action at which the campaign announced a Labor Day deadline for Walmart to raise its wages to at least $25,000 per year, and reverse the terminations of twenty workers who participated in a June strike.

As The Nation has reported, nearly eighty OUR Walmart members have been disciplined by the company since returning from the June walkout. OUR Walmart’s response to the alleged illegal retaliation has included protest rallies, pressure on Yahoo! CEO and Walmart board member Marissa Mayer and outreach to members of Congress. The campaign has filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board alleging that the discipline violated federal labor law. Walmart has denied wrongdoing; a spokesperson told The Nation last month that “no associates were disciplined for participating in any specific protests.” The company did not respond to a Monday request for comment regarding the strikers’ demands and their deadline, which passed yesterday without any public concession by Walmart.

A Sunday mass e-mail to supporters from the allied Making Change at Walmart campaign referenced “intensified actions nationwide” Thursday if the retail giant didn’t respond by Labor Day. Fired employee Barbara Collins told The Nation prior to last month’s civil disobedience that “if they don’t reinstate us, our actions are going to be bigger and stronger every time, and this is just the beginning.”

Thursday’s actions will include a march through downtown Los Angeles to the site of a proposed Walmart in Chinatown, and a demonstration in Washington, DC, where all sides are awaiting word on whether Mayor Vince Gray will veto a bill (passed by City Council in July but formally sent to his desk last Friday) that would require “large retailers” like Walmart to pay employees at least $12.50 in total hourly compensation. Thursday actions are also planned for cities in the East, West, South and Midwest: Baton Rouge, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Denver, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Orlando, Sacramento, San Francisco and Seattle. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blog/175995/protesting-activists-firings-walmart-workers-plan-biggest-mobilization-black-friday#axzz2dvzyQRTX

September 4, 2013

Banksters win again

How the Bank Lobby Loosened U.S. Reins on Derivatives


(Bloomberg) One by one, Gary Gensler’s supporters deserted him. Now the chief U.S. regulator of derivatives was being summoned by Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew to explain why he refused to compromise.

Banks and lawmakers, as well as financial regulators from around the world, had besieged Lew with complaints about Gensler’s campaign to impose U.S. rules overseas.

The July 3 meeting in Lew’s conference room with a view of the White House grew tense, according to three people briefed on it. Gensler argued his plan was vital if the U.S. hoped to seize meaningful authority over financial instruments that helped push the global economy to the brink in 2008, taking down American International Group Inc. (AIG) and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and igniting the worst recession since the 1930s.

Lew insisted that Gensler coordinate better with the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose new chairman, Mary Jo White, was also present. Gensler, who was deep into negotiations with his European counterparts, was surprised by Lew’s demand. He’d been hearing the same request from lobbyists seeking to slow the process, and he told the Treasury chief it felt like his adversary bankers were in the room, the people said. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-04/how-the-bank-lobby-loosened-u-s-reins-on-derivatives.html

September 4, 2013

Crop-munching pests are traveling north as the climate changes

from Grist:


Crop-munching pests are traveling north as the climate changes
By John Upton


Pests are packing their metaphorical bags and heading for fresh starts nearer the North Pole as the climate warms around them.

Beetles, moths, fungi, and other pests that afflict forests and crops in the Northern Hemisphere are expanding their ranges northward by an average of 24 feet every day.

That’s according to British scientists who studied the records of infestations of 470 pests around the world since 1960 and measured the rate at which their ranges appeared to be shifting. They say their findings reveal a potential threat to food security posed by global warming.

The northerly march “is more rapid than that reported for many wild species,” the scientists wrote in a paper published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change. And it’s “nearly identical” to what would be expected from rising temperatures. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://grist.org/news/crop-munching-pests-are-traveling-north-as-the-climate-changes/

September 4, 2013

Mountain Grown: Appalachia's New Local Food Economy

Mountain Grown: Appalachia's New Local Food Economy
Hungry for okra, collards, and trout? In Appalachia, you can now get all your soul food cravings from local farmers.

by Erin L. McCoy
posted Aug 21, 2013




Restaurants like Knife and Fork didn't use to exist in places like Spruce Pine, a town of just 2,200 people nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina. About 80 percent of what the restaurant serves is sourced from within a 40-mile radius. For the most part, the only things that aren't local are beer, wine, and cheese.

"I see myself as less a chef and more as a sourcer or a seeker of great products," says chef Nate Allen.

Ten years ago, Allen says, there was no real demand for local food here. But over the last decade, southern Appalachian consumers have started seeking it out. Restaurateurs, specialty food producers, and farmers have shifted their business models to meet this demand, and for many, the local food movement has been a welcome answer to shifts in the national economy.

Since 2002, skyrocketing demand for local food has been recorded in the Local Food Guide published annually by the Asheville-based Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project. The number of local farms listed in that guide has grown from 58 to 691—a startling increase of 1,091 percent. Likewise, the number of farmers markets is up 197 percent, and the number of restaurants serving local food is up 542 percent. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/mountain-grown-appalachia-s-new-local-food-economy