Saturday, September 13th, 2014
DAVE LEVINTHAL, - The Center for Public Integrity
Stephan: The Koch brothers don't just want to buy the U.S. government -- and are well on their way to achieving their goal -- they also want to buy colleges so that they will teach their idiosyncratic Theocratic Rightist worldview. I'm not making this up, as this report spells out. I first covered this a few years ago this is the latest.
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In 2007, when the Charles Koch Foundation considered giving millions of dollars to Florida State University’s economics department, the offer came with strings attached.
First, the curriculum it funded must align with the libertarian, deregulatory economic philosophy of Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialist and Republican political bankroller.
Second, the Charles Koch Foundation would at least partially control which faculty members Florida State University hired.
And third, Bruce Benson, a prominent libertarian economic theorist and Florida State University economics department chairman, must stay on another three years as department chairman – even though he told his wife he’d step down in 2009 after one three-year term.
The Charles Koch Foundation expressed a willingness to give Florida State an extra $105,000 to keep Benson – a self-described ‘libertarian anarchist” who asserts that every government function he’s studied ‘can be, has been, or is being produced better by the private sector” – in place.
‘As we all know, there are no free lunches. Everything comes with costs,” Benson at the time wrote to economics department colleagues in an internal memorandum. ‘They want to […]
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Saturday, September 13th, 2014
ALLAN HOLMES, - The Center for Public Integrity
Stephan: This is why the U.S. has second rate internet. Third rate compared to countries like Korea. This is a classic monopolist move to block competition and keep prices high and service poor. Only citizen action is going to stop this. You need to get involved. It's just that simple, we all need to get involved. Only 57,1% of Americans voted in the last Presidential and that was one of the largest percentages in years. That means in our best years over 42% of those eligible don't vote.
The 400-acre Coffee County Joint Industrial Park, outside Tullahoma, Tennessee, struggles to attract businesses without high speed internet. Allan Holmes/Center for Public Integrity
Janice Bowling, a 67-year-old grandmother and Republican state senator from rural Tennessee, thought it only made sense that the city of Tullahoma be able to offer its local high-speed Internet service to areas beyond the city limits.
After all, many of her rural constituents had slow service or did not have access to commercial providers, like AT&T Inc. and Charter Communications Inc.
But a 1999 Tennessee law prohibits cities that operate their own Internet networks from providing access outside the boundaries where they provide electrical service. Bowling wanted to change that and introduced a bill in February to allow them to expand.
She viewed the network, which offers speeds about 80 times faster than AT&T and 10 times faster than Charter in Tullahoma according to advertised services, as a utility, like electricity, […]
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Saturday, September 13th, 2014
Stephan: My recommendation is to buy free-range organic chicken raised locally. But I know that many people don't have that option, so I am always on the lookout for food stories that might help you. This report is the story of another breakdown arising from inadequate regulation enforcement and greed. Another triumph of profit over wellness. After reading it it will be clear why I suggest you never buy Foster Farms chicken.
Credit: Picsfive/Shutterstock
After a 17-month long Salmonella outbreak linked to at least 634 illnesses, Foster Farms officially stopped poisoning people with its chicken this July. The company insists it’s since cleaned up its act, lowering its Salmonella rate to just five percent of chickens tested (way below the industry average of 25 percent). It’s newfound commitment to safety has been so successful that, NPR recently reported, ‘some food safety experts are now saying the whole poultry industry should follow this company’s example.”
But new documents reveal that the company had a lot more to overcome than it’s let on. The Natural Resources Defense Council just released hundreds of pages of USDA documents, obtained through a FOIA request, that expose some pretty nasty – and widespread – health and safety violations at the company’s processing plants, more than 200 of which occurred at two California plants directly linked to the outbreak. Those violations include, per the NRDC, ‘descriptions of mold growth, cockroaches, an instance of pooling caused by a skin-clogged floor drain, fecal matter and […]
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Friday, September 12th, 2014
Stephan: This is lovely good news about the transition out of our carbon energy addiction. The report presents what I think is an accurate assessment of the Non-carbon Energy Trend.
In spite of constant government coddling, endless subsidies, and the huge sums available to buy influence, along with ads to protect its dominance, carbon energy is quickly becoming uncompetitive. One can only wonder where we would be now if the attempt Jimmy Carter made to shift away from carbon had not been blocked by Ronald Reagan, whom I believe history will identify with the beginning of the decline of America. In any case, in spite of everything non-carbon will prevail because it is cheaper, and easier, and doesn't cause climate change. There will also be a little discussed effect: an increase in wellness as the diseases caused by carbon decline.
The real monster in the closet is nuclear waste. Nothing proposed actually deals with the problem, and solar and wind will help only marginally. We haven't a clue what to do with waste, and the timebomb is ticking. Tanks leak. Pools degrade. An how does one really calculate the costs? How does one project expenses for something that is deadly for 10s of thousands of years? Finding a solution to nuclear waste within the next 15 years is going to become an urgent issue.
Happily, by then we will have dealt with a large percentage of carbon usage, as the report describes.
Solar power has come a long way in a short period of time. Just five years ago, the bulk of the energy community viewed it as being unreliable, expensive and difficult to source. Without massive government subsidies, utilities generally shunned solar, sticking with more traditional and reliable generation, namely, coal and natural gas. This was despite fossil fuels trading at or near record highs of $10 per mmBtu amid strong demand and tight supplies. If solar couldn’t even beat natural gas when it was trading that high, chances were it would never play a significant role in America’s energy mix and would only be economic through governmental intervention.
But five years on, America’s energy landscape looks significantly different. Natural gas has come well off its pre-recession highs and is now trading steadily around $4 per mmBtu, with little to no volatility. Oil and coal prices dropped as well. Given this, one would surmise that solar was now even farther out of the money. Surprisingly, though, the economics of solar power have changed at a much faster clip, and are now close to achieving pricing parity with cheaper natural gas in several places throughout the United States.
No doubt, over the last decade, […]
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Friday, September 12th, 2014
Stephan: This is more good news and, I confess it surprised me a bit, although when I travel I see a lot of Millennials reading books on tablets and phones, with music in their ears. I am very glad to see these numbers. I think we are finding that interacting with technology requires reading skills, and supports imagination. That is encouraging.
Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images
On Thursday, as A.O. Scott mourned the death of adulthood in American culture (R.I.P.), a new study by the Pew Research Center confirmed that it’s young adults who are keeping American (literary) culture alive. Contrary to reports that have questioned whether or not millennials read, younger Americans actually read more than their older counterparts: 88 percent of Americans younger than 30 reported having read a book in the past year, compared with 79 percent of those older than 30.
What’s more, libraries are not a cherished refuge of the old, but a destination for the young: In a September 2013 survey, 50 percent of respondents between the ages of 16 and 29 had used a library in the past year, compared with 47 percent of their older counterparts, and 36 percent of people under 30 had used a library website in that same time frame; compared with 28 percent of the over-30s. (Admittedly, the numbers for high school and college-aged respondents may actually seem surprisingly low, […]
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