Barbecued mystery meat, compliments of WTO

Posted on July 5, 2012 by oddmanout215

I hope you had a delicious Fourth of July. As noted in Public Citizen, “your holiday meat could be much more mysterious” next year:

If you’re looking forward to grilling up some hamburgers and hot dogs, think about this: Where does the food you’re eating come from?

That simple question is going to be a lot harder to answer after a ruling from the World Trade Organization (WTO), which decreed last week that such basic consumer information as country-of-origin labels on meat are “unfair trade barriers” to multinational corporate profits…

… It’s the third consecutive WTO attack on a popular U.S. consumer protection or information policy to go down this year. (See the attacks on dolphin-safe labels and cancer prevention through cigarette controls.)

And there was this today from a Public Citizen online petition protesting U.S. trade policy and, in particular, the Obama administration’s handling of the super-secret Trans-Pacific Partnership, which some people are calling NAFTA East:

The recent WTO ruling is not merely advisory. Unlike other international institutions, the WTO packs a punch. The United States will have to abandon some hard-won labeling rules or pay to maintain them in the form of fines or sanctions.

Two decades ago, when the WTO and NAFTA were being forced on us, Public Citizen warned that this day would come.

We said — over and over — that these agreements had little to do with trade as conventionally understood, and everything to do with making giant corporations even more powerful. We said corporations would use the agreements to block important consumer, environmental and worker protections.

Now, we’re past the point of prediction. It’s reality.

You might think the U.S. government would be working to cure this problem and certainly not to make it worse. But if you thought that, you’d be wrong.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is being negotiated in secret. We know some of what is being negotiated because of leaks. But while 600 corporate advisers are permitted to see the draft text and the U.S. negotiating proposals, the public is locked out.

Footnote: The Yes Men video is a few weeks old, but it’s still funny.

Posted in food, globalization | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Defacing is for fascists

Posted on July 4, 2012 by oddmanout215

From the July 2 Philly.com:

A vandal lobbed black paint at a mural of former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo in the Italian Market over the weekend and sprayed “fascista” in red beneath him.

Police said they received a report on Saturday that the mural at 9th and Montrose streets had been hit and are investigating the incident. A large black splotch of paint hit directly over Rizzo’s right eye, and paint splattered along the parking lot that the mural faces. On Sunday afternoon, the occasional passer-by stopped to take a picture of the defaced former mayor and police commissioner.

Rizzo was a fascist and I’m glad he’s long gone, but I can’t warm up to the barbarism of trashing public art. And would the rad guy who threw the paint, maybe after a few beers at The Dive, have the balls to face off against a live cop? Not likely.

I know the woman who painted the mural, a liberal academic and a good person. Apparently, the vandal(s) didn’t get the irony of the artist’s fascist-style depiction of Big Frank. He didn’t understand that the mural spoofs everything Rizzo stood for while, at the same time, pleasing the sort of people who admire fascists and other totalitarians. It is neatly subversive. The vandal is more of a totalitarian than Rizzo, another irony that he is too stupid to appreciate.

Posted in arts, life in the big city, Philadelphia, Politics | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Shopping at Urban Outfitters — how ironic

Posted on June 29, 2012 by oddmanout215

Never underestimate the apathy, ignorance or sheer stupidity of young American consumers, especially the “hip” ones:

…There are a few reasonable explanations for why the Urban Outfitters Romney tees exist, actually. For one thing, Urban Outfitters (which also owns Anthropologie and Free People) is owned by a far-right conservative, Richard Hayne. All that youthful, vaguely hippie-feeling merchandise in his stores? That’s just a way to make some dough – dough that Hayne, in turn, gives to right-wing politicians like Rick Santorum. For Hayne, the young people and lefties who shop in his stores are just chumps to whom he can sell $69 peace-sign tank tops while supporting conservative politics.


Now the company is selling shirts that represent Hayne’s political perspective while appealing to hipsters’ penchant for irony, with slogans like “Mitt Is the Shit” and “2 Legit 2 Mitt.” Ironic conservatism: hilarious(ly stupid)! As Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams put it:

What’s revolting about the latest Urban Outfitters gambit is its sneaky ploy of making conservatism seem so uncool it’s cool, all funny and retro and Kelly Kapowski. Which, in turn, is how some doofus winds up using his chest as free advertising for a candidate he’d otherwise never in a million years vote for…

Posted in humor, Mitt Romney, Politics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Can the other senators hear Sanders?

Posted on June 28, 2012 by oddmanout215

I often wonder how Bernie Sanders’ fellow senators are reacting when he’s on the floor, warning us for the umpteenth time that super-wealthy right-wingers, with much help from the Supreme Court, are snuffing out what’s left of our democracy. Maybe they’re too busy conferring with lobbyists to hear the guy. Or they take long bathroom breaks when he gets up to speak. Or simply turn down their hearing aids:

“… So we have people like the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson. The Koch Brothers are worth $50 billion. That’s what they’re worth. And, they have said they’re prepared to put $400 million into this campaign to defeat Obama, to defeat candidates who are representing working families. Sheldon Adelson says he’s only worth $20 billion. He’s kind of a pauper. But he’s willing to spend what it takes to buy the government…”

Adelson’s hubris is breathtaking. As a recent New York Times editorial noted, the ugly little greedhound’s ideological fervor is a smokescreen:

Mr. Adelson… rails against the president’s “socialist-style economy” and redistribution of wealth, but what he really fears is Mr. Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on companies like his that make a huge amount of money overseas. Ninety percent of the earnings of his company, the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, come from hotel and casino properties in Singapore and Macau. (The latter is located, by the way, in China, a socialist country the last time we checked.)

Because of the lower tax rate in those countries (currently zero in Macau), the company now has a United States corporate tax rate of 9.8 percent, compared with the statutory rate of 35 percent. President Obama has repeatedly proposed ending the deductions and credits that allow corporations like Las Vegas Sands to shelter billions in income overseas, but has been blocked by Republicans.

Posted in campaign finance reform, Congress, mainstream media, taxes | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Jong on Arianna’s ‘special place in hell’

Posted on June 27, 2012 by oddmanout215

Author and “zipless fuck” pioneer Erica Jong is seventy years old now, and her brand of feminism looks a bit naive in perspective, but it’s nice to read her priorities are still in good order. Here she is calling out the greedy, ideological shapeshifter Arianna Huffington for refusing to pay all those writers who helped make her online publication such a lucrative venture:

The idea that everybody’s writing for free is hurting writing as a profession. I wrote many articles for Arianna when she was establishing her aggregator blog and attracting all those eyeballs.

When she got $300m from the AOL acquisition, I said, ‘OK, Arianna, we all helped you get there so now you’re going to pay writers.’ She said, ‘No, I pay my editors.’ I’ve known Arianna for years…

I knew her when she was anti-feminist. I knew her when she was right wing. I knew her when she turned left wing. We promoted our first books together in the UK a million years ago… I admire her energy. She can be very interesting and she’s very clever.

But ‘there is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women,’ as Madeleine Albright once said. Artists who turncoat and exploit other artists — I have no words.

Arianna ditched the writers soon enough. That hurts… Now authors are blogging everywhere for free, and it’s not a good development. They are starving.

I care about artists — the oxygen of society. Suppress them and you asphyxiate discussion and change. Arianna was a writer once… She forgot her origins… We need to be paid! We cannot barter poems for food…

Clarification: I never gave Huffington any freebies and I’m not posting this because of a personal grudge. I just think it’s important for writers to call out con artists whenever their names come up.

Posted in mainstream media, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Sorkin channels Howard Beale in ‘The Newsroom’

Posted on June 26, 2012 by oddmanout215

Jeff Daniels is, at least for one scene, the mad prophet of the digital age in the debut of “The Newsroom.”

Here’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, an Atlantic editor and blogger, quoting from Aaron Sorkin’s “deeply unpleasant, condescending and sexist” interview with the Globe and Mail:

“I think I would have done very well, as a writer, in the forties,” [Sorkin] says. “I think the last time America was a great country was then, or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.”

Coates thought Sorkin, in the interview, was insensitive to victims of segregation and “gender repression” back in the ’40s. He scolded Sorkin for extolling a great era that never really existed, and for expressing “attendant notions that the internet [has] ruined everything.”

What a crock. In the interview, Sorkin betrayed an unfortunate nostalgic streak and apparent insecurities about the quality of his work. But I’m still trying to figure out what it is about him and his new HBO show, The Newsroom, that so deeply offended Coates and the many non-fans of Sorkin who posted comments on Coates’ site.

Coates ignored the brilliance of the show’s initial rant about America’s steep decline, delivered by Jeff Daniels, playing (at least in this scene) a latter-day Howard Beale:

…We’re seventh in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, No. 4 in labor force, and No. 4 in exports…. America leads the world in only three categories: Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending…

Does it really matter that Sorkin glosses over what was bad about previous eras, that he is old-fashioned in some respects, an asshole sometimes? That he is skeptical about some current uses of the internet?

Decades ago, who but Howard Beale would have imagined that the Supreme Court, with something called the Citizens United decision, would all but eliminate government by the people? That labor unions would be close to extinct by 2012 and the gap between rich and poor at an all-time high? That America would elect a Democratic president willing to compromise with those who would dismantle Social Security, and hang out with the CEOs who have off-shored millions of American jobs?

Yes, some overtly racist and sexist laws were overturned in mid-twentieth century America. However, at almost the same time this was happening, reactionaries were developing a blueprint for a country that would in some ways be even more inequitable than America under the old laws. That’s fact, not nostalgia.

And yet Coates, in putting down Sorkin, doesn’t even acknowledge that America took a turn for the worse in the late twentieth century, away from the ideals codified in New Deal legislation and toward the dog-eat-dog world of Birchers and Ayn Rand acolytes.

It’s a big mistake to forget that collective ignorance is a force than fluctuates throughout history, and that most Americans in our era seem to be profoundly ignorant of the rights and protections fought for and won by their grandparents and great-grandparents.

Question for Coates: Are we really talking social progress if more and more Americans, regardless of race and sex, are reduced to living like serfs, and the mainstream media all but ignores this fact?

Give Sorkin credit, if only for stating the obvious with energy and eloquence.

Footnote: After the initial scene, The Newsroom‘s first episode became more like Broadcast News than like Network, but that’s not a putdown. It should be fun to see whether the show turns out to be truly bold.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Rich Greeks feel fine

Posted on June 15, 2012 by oddmanout215

From Guardian UK:

…Since the outbreak of Greece’s runaway debt crisis, its moneyed class has been notable more by its absence than presence. Oligarchs, who made vast fortunes cornering the oil, gas, construction and banking industries, as well as the media, have been eerily silent – often going out of their way to be as low a profile as possible.

Greek shipowners, who have gained from their profits being tax-free and who control at least 15% of the world’s merchant freight, have also remained low-key. With their wealth offshore and highly secretive, the estimated 900 families who run the sector have the largest fleet in the world. As Athens’ biggest foreign currency earner after tourism, the industry remitted more than $175bn (£112bn) to the country in untaxed earnings over the past decade. Greece’s debt currently stands at €280bn.

As ordinary Greeks have been thrown into ever greater poverty by wage and pension cuts and a seemingly endless array of new and higher taxes, their wealthy compatriots have been busy either whisking their money out of Greece or snapping up prime real estate abroad…

Posted in apocalypse, economic collapse, pop music, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

In Philly, taxed extra for paying taxes

Posted on June 14, 2012 by oddmanout215

Just what a struggling major city needs — more property tax hikes for tax-paying property owners, in order to make up for the huge amounts owed by deadbeat property owners, many of whom don’t even live in Philly:

From Patrick Kirkstra at PlanPhilly:

Philadelphia property tax delinquents piled up an additional $43.8 million in new debt over the last year, increasing the total amount owed to the city and financially desperate School District to $515.4 million, an increase of 9.3 percent in a single year, city records show.

There are now about 103,000 tax delinquent properties in Philadelphia. About 18 percent of all parcels in the city are in arrears. As documented in a PlanPhilly/Inquirer series last August, no other big city in the nation approaches that level of property tax delinquency.

Past due property taxes have long been a contentious issue in Philadelphia, but the growing pot of delinquent cash has attracted even more attention than usual in recent months.

And for good reason. City Council and Mayor Michael Nutter have enacted two straight property tax hikes, and are close to approving a citywide property reassessment that would collect as much as $94 million in additional property taxes. Meanwhile, the School District of Philadelphia – which relies on property taxes for 80 percent of its local funding – is in the midst of perhaps the worst financial crisis in its history…

I live in Philly. I often ride my bike around City Hall, the largest municipal building in the country, built in the grandiose Second Empire style. It is rumored that governance is going on somewhere in that building — that Mayor Nutter and City Council are actually taking steps to save the public school system and the middle-class tax base, despite opposition from PA’s wing-nut Republican Gov. Tom Corbett and the Philly-hating General Assembly.

I don’t believe it. The only government employees who seem to get anything done in Philly are the pests who issue parking tickets.

Posted in economic collapse, livable cities, Philadelphia, taxes | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Good luck finding those black holes

Posted on June 14, 2012 by oddmanout215

I don’t know how much taxpayer money was used to construct and deploy this orbiting telescope, but it will be money well spent if NASA can finding the black holes that sucked away millions of jobs and homes, a functioning federal government, honest officeholders, and hopes for economic recovery in the United States:

NASA is poised to launch on Wednesday a sophisticated orbiting telescope that uses high-energy X-ray vision to hunt for black holes in the universe.

The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) will first be carried into the skies by a jet which will deploy a rocket that sends the satellite into space, NASA said.

“Why launch from the air? Plane-assisted launches are less expensive than those that take place from the ground. Less fuel is needed to boost cargo away from the pull of Earth’s gravity,” the US space agency said in a statement.

The project aims to study energetic phenomena such as black holes and the explosions of massive stars…

Posted in humor, unemployment | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

O’Donnell spins recall defeat as victory

Posted on June 6, 2012 by oddmanout215

MSNBC hosts Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow seemed as disappointed as most rank-and-file Democrats when NBC analysts declared early Tuesday evening that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker would survive the bid to recall him. However, another of the network’s prime-time hosts, the one who’s an Obamabot spin doctor, announced at the top of his program that everything was just peachy:

Lawrence O’Donnell declared President Obama the “big winner” of Tuesday night’s Wisconsin recall election.

O’Donnell hosted the network’s breaking news coverage of the Wisconsin recall election results, along with MSNBC political analyst John Heilemann. O’Donnell called Obama the “big winner” after exit polls indicated that the president fared better among Wisconsin voters than GOP candidate Mitt Romney. When voters were polled, 53 percent said they would vote for President Obama. 42 percent said they would vote for Mitt Romney.

Heilemann said that was good news for Obama since his campaign seemed to feel confident about the president’s prospects of winning Wisconsin in the general election… He added that while Wisconsin has voted Democratic for a number of years, there was one downside to consider.

“In a hotly contested state election—where to some extent, it was a contest between outside money and boots-on-the-ground, grassroots organizing on the other side—money won,” Heilemann said. “And if you think about the army of Republican multi-millionaires and billionaires who are thinking about writing big checks to super PACs, they look at Wisconsin and say, ‘Our dollars helped keep Scott Walker in his job. Our dollars can help beat the Democratic ground game in a lot of states where it is really close, unlike Wisconsin.'”

But O’Donnell just kept smiling and taking solace in the exit polling data that showed Barack Obama has more support in Wisconsin than Mitt Romney. As if that means anything, given the fact that we’re still five months away from the presidential election.

It must be said: O’Donnell is a reality-denying Obama cheerleader, a liberal version of the Republican-backing talking heads on Fox. The “big winner” Tuesday were the billionaire fascists — the Koch brothers and the others who spent huge sums on political ads that helped ensure Walker’s victory. Only a propagandist would conclude otherwise.

Posted in mainstream media, Mitt Romney, Obama, Politics | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment