corporations
$FREE! Lawrence Arts Center. 940 New Hampshire.
Lawrence, KS. 7pm.
In the digital age, half our electricity still comes from coal. Dirty Business reveals the true social and environmental costs of coal power and tells the stories of innovators who are pointing the way to an alternative energy future. Guided by Rolling Stone reporter Jeff Goodell, the film examines what it means to remain dependent on a 19th century technology that is the largest single source of greenhouse gases. Can coal really be made clean? Can renewables and efficiency be produced on a scale large enough to replace coal? The film seeks answers in a series of stories shot in China, Saskatchewan, Kansas, West Virginia, Nevada and New York.
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Sometimes, the mainstream press does a good job, and today's investigative feature in the New York Times serves as an excellent example of what all journalism should look like: journalism that puts the people's interests above corporate interests.
The Times has compiled an interactive database that shows water pollution violations in all 50 states. A look at documented violations in Kansas totals 33, with the total amount paid for these violations racking up to a whopping ZERO dollars. Well that's justice in America, where the American people get cancer, rashes, and rotting teeth from fowl water, and America's corporation's get off with more subsidies, lax regulations, and hefty profits for their CEOs. Check out the article after the jump - Tim Hjersted
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More than one out of every five requests for medical claims for insured patients, even when recommended by a patient's physician, are rejected by California's largest private insurers, amounting to very real death panels in practice daily in the nation's biggest state, according to data released Wednesday by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.
CNA/NNOC researchers analyzed data reported by the insurers to the California Department of Managed Care. From 2002 through June 30, 2009, six of the largest insurers operating in California rejected 47.7 million claims for care -- 22 percent of all claims.
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Corporate Capitalism As a State-Guaranteed System of PrivilegeManorialism, commonly, is recognized to have been founded by robbery and usurpation; a ruling class established itself by force, and then compelled the peasantry to work for the profit of their lords. But no system of exploitation,including capitalism, has ever been created by the action of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive as feudalism. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable.
The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.
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HSBC, one of the biggest banks on the planet, has taken to calling itself "The world's local bank." Winn-Dixie, a 500-outlet supermarket chain, recently launched an ad campaign under the tagline "Local flavor since 1956." The International Council of Shopping Centers, a global consortium of mall owners and developers, is pouring millions of dollars into television ads urging people to "Shop Local"—at their nearest mall. Even Wal-Mart is getting in on the act, hanging bright green banners over its produce aisles that simply say, "Local."
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There is a revolution happening in the farm fields and on the dinner tables of America that is transforming the very nature of the food we eat. This well-researched documentary by Deborah Koons Garcia, the widow of the legendary Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, takes an in-depth look at the disturbing truth behind the unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods that have quietly filled U.S. grocery store shelves for the past decades.
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The Senate Commerce Committee appears to be poised to confirm Julius Genachowski, President Barack Obama's choice to head the Federal Communications Commission.
In a hearing that lasted around 90 minutes Tuesday afternoon, Democrat and Republican lawmakers praised Genachowski, with committee chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) going so far as to say he was "thoroughly impressed" with the nominee.
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Montana Senator Max Baucus, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is the Senate’s point man on healthcare reform. A new article in the Montana Standard finds that Senator Baucus has received more campaign money from health and insurance industry interests than any other member of Congress.
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It may not be as exciting as the Thrilla in Manila, but its outcome will have far more impact on the lives of tens of millions of families across the country. The story is straightforward. President Obama had stepped up to challenge the insurance industry in order to reform the health care system in the United States.
Specifically, he is proposing to create a public health insurance plan, like Medicare, that people would have the option to buy into. Ideally, this would ensure that everyone had a good health insurance option available to them and provide real competition to the existing private plans.
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As of last Monday, the Kansas Governor, Mark Parkinson, traded a 900MW coal fired plant for a tepid state energy policy, and the Legislature went along. The agreement first of all forces the Secretary of KDHE to issue Sunflower Electric an air quality permit, and it also limits his authority to issue air quality regulations beyond the Federal EPA guidelines. In return, it creates a true 1:1 bidirectional net metering, but ONLY for investor-owned utilities, not for rural electric co-ops of small municipal utilities. The agreement also establishes a Renewable Energy Standard (RES), but with a meager goal of 20% by 2020.
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Burt’s Bees lip balm was originally sold at independently owned health food stores. But more recently, Burt's Bees products have appeared everywhere -- in grocery stores, drug stores, and big-box stores like Target and Wal-Mart. That’s because Burt's Bees is now owned by Clorox, a massive corporation that has historically cared very little about the environment.
Many of the products you may trust and respect for their independence and social responsibility are now owned by big corporations that are going out of their way to hide their link to the small, socially responsible brands.
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Human rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million - mostly Black and Hispanic - are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don't have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don't like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.
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America is devolving into a third-world nation. And if we do not immediately halt our elite's rapacious looting of the public treasury we will be left with trillions in debts, which can never be repaid, and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate. Our anemic democracy will be replaced with a robust national police state. The elite will withdraw into heavily guarded gated communities where they will have access to security, goods and services that cannot be afforded by the rest of us. Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, will live in perpetual poverty. This is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism. The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them. We can resist, which means street protests, disruptions of the system and demonstrations, or become serfs.
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It’s not the milk mustache, but high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is being promoted in a series of advertisements to dutifully inform the public that the cost-effective sugar substitute isn’t the bad guy we all made it out to be.
These ads urge us to visit a website full of “facts” and testimonies from professionals disputing attacks on the chemically processed fructose/glucose construct.
The site even goes so far as to tout the benefits of HFCS and to ensure us of the safety of its use.
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Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community's top legislative priority.
Participants on the October 17 call -- including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG -- were urged to persuade their clients to send "large contributions" to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.
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Can anyone really own water? That was the questions that got French filmmaker Irena Salina inspired to take on a mammoth project -- chronicling the global water crisis and solutions -- from privatization to politics to pollution.
Her creation, the award-winning film "FLOW: For Love of Water," was a Sundance hit and now is making its theatrical debut in theaters across the country. Her film includes interviews with some of the world's leading activists, scientists and policy makers. But it also looks at how everyday people are affected around the world -- from the United States to South Africa to India and the growing network of grassroots activists that are coming together.
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