Jim Hightower, - Alternet (U.S.)
Stephan: This article describes an emerging trend in which large corporations co-opt existing small businesses by buying them out. The problem with this strategy, as this report explains is, "with these fabricators of corporatized authenticity is that reality will win out in the end. Small and local has a genuine feel and flavor that the imitators can't sustain as they sprawl out into 1,000 and then 10,000 stores."
The leverage point to watch then is whether this business model can retain authenticity, or will it just become another form of generic chain? And to recognize that creativity is boundless and, in the end, there is always a new local iteration.
Credit: Shutterstock
Near my home in Austin, Texas, there is a great, old refurbished motel that I recommend to people when they come to visit our fair city. It not only is right on the famed Congress Avenue but also has a keep-it-real attitude that is expressed right on its iconic marquee: “No additives, no preservatives, corporate-free since 1938.”
The good news is that more and more businesses across the country are adopting this attitude, providing a buy-local, un-corporate, anti-chain alternative for customers. Food shoppers and restaurant goers, for example, have made a huge shift in recent years away from the likes of McDonald’s, Pepsi and Taco Bell, preferring upstart, independent outfits with names like “The Corner,” “Caleb’s Kola,” and “US Taco Co.”
But uh-oh, guess who owns those little local alternatives. Right — McDonald’s, PepsiCo and Taco Bell. Leave it to ethically challenged, profiteering monopolists to grab such value-laden terms as “genuine,” “local” and “honest,” empty them of any authenticity, then hurl them back at consumers as shamefully deceptive marketing scams.
In Huntington Beach, […]
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Brian Fung, Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan: Here is the Republican Party's latest act of liege-service to its corporate masters: the sabotage of net neutrality. It is an action against the wellness of the net that serves only corporate interests. This is what voting Republican gets you. This is what you are voting for.
The Federal Communications Commission’s new net neutrality rules officially go into effect Friday. But Republicans are making a last-minute legislative push to keep them from taking effect. And their efforts to do so just cleared an important hurdle in the House.
GOP lawmakers have inserted a provision in a must-pass funding bill that prevents the FCC from enforcing its Internet provider regulations. The rules aim to keep providers from blocking or slowing Web sites, and they ban the selective speeding-up of sites in exchange for money. But a part of the legislation would freeze the rules until the Internet providers that have sued to overturn them receive an answer from the court. And on Thursday, the draft appropriations bill containing the measure was approved by the House Financial Services Subcommittee.
The bill now goes to the full committee, and has to be approved by the House, Senate and President Obama, so there’s a ways to go.
[A federal court just refused to block the FCC’s net neutrality rules […]
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Samantha Lachman, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: As this article demonstrates clearly it is possible to make an enormous amount of money and yet be mentally and emotionally stunted in other aspects of your life. This story illustrates this central point common to all plutocracies. Of course Greg Gianforte is running as a Republican.
Greg Gianforte, Republican candidate for the governorship of Montana.
WASHINGTON — Greg Gianforte, a multi-millionaire tech entrepreneur who is “seriously considering” challenging Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D) in 2016, doesn’t believe he has to divorce his Christian faith from his professional life.
The potential candidate started the software company RightNow Technologies in 1997 and sold the firm to Oracle for $1.5 billion in 2011. Now, he’s traveling around the state promoting his Better Montana Jobs initiative, which includes a focus on telecommuting as a means to attract college graduates to Montana.
As he gears up for a potential race against Bullock, Gianforte’s support for socially conservative policies has drawn scrutiny to his record.
In a February talk at the Montana Bible College about how to find “godly purpose” in work, Gianforte explained why retirement isn’t consistent with biblical teachings.
“There’s nothing in the Bible that talks about retirement. And yet it’s been an accepted concept in our culture today,” he said. “Nowhere does it […]
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Thursday, June 11th, 2015
Jonathan Latham PhD, - Centre for Research on Globalization/Independent Science News
Stephan: I consider Monsanto t0 be an evil corporation. I say this because their business model is designed to be profitable by destroying the Earth's soil and ecosystem. Here is a report one how their industrial chemical model of mono-culture can be rendered obsolete.
By conventional wisdom it is excellent news. Researchers from Iowa have shown that organic farming methods can yield almost as highly as pesticide-intensive methods. Other researchers, from Berkeley, California, havereached a similar conclusion. Indeed, both findings met with a very enthusiastic reception. The enthusiasm is appropriate, but only if one misses a deep and fundamental point: that even to participate in such a conversation is to fall into a carefully laid trap.
The strategic centrepiece of Monsanto’s PR, and also that of just about every major commercial participant in the industrialised food system, is to focus on the promotion of one single overarching idea. The big idea that industrial producers in the food system want you to believe is that only they can produce enough for the future population (Peekhaus 2010). Thus non-industrial systems of farming, such as all those which use agroecological methods, or SRI, or are localised and family-oriented, or which use organic methods, or non-GMO seeds, cannot feed the world.
To be sure, agribusiness has other PR strategies. Agribusiness is “pro-science”, its opponents are “anti-science”, and so on. But the main plank has for decades been to create a […]
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Thursday, June 11th, 2015
Ben Cohen , Co-Founder, Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream - The Huffington Post
Stephan: I hope at least some of you saw the PBS Frontline special on prisons the other night. Turning the warehousing of humans into a profit making business model is something every American should be ashamed of. It is a stain on our humanity and integrity as a society.
Grotesque over-crowding is commonplace in America’s gulag.
Credit: sf.newleaderscouncil.org
The Mount Everest revenue growth in the private-prison industry unequivocally represents everything that’s wrong with our pay-to-play government.
These prison firms, with the help of political ties forged through campaign donations and armies of lobbyists, can regularly snag windfalls in government contracts and unduly expand their businesses by incarcerating more people for a greater amount of time.
The Center for Responsive Politics has tracked a total of $2.3 million in political contributions by Corrections Corporation of America and almost $1.2 million by GEO Group. And that doesn’t count dark money. Unsurprisingly, both of these giants in the for-profit prison industry have a long history of hiring former government officials as lobbyists.
These lobbyists have successfully pushed legislators to “get tough on immigration” so a new influx of immigrants can occupy prison cells and help expand their profit-turning penal enterprise.
And they have carved out loopholes […]
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