Category: Corporate Statism

Why we love GMO

~ susie

Because who would think that throwing together genetically-modified strains of various strange things with the food supply would be a problem?

(CBS News) ELGIN, Texas – A mysterious mass death of a herd of cattle has prompted a federal investigation in Central Texas.


Preliminary test results are blaming the deaths on the grass the cows were eating when they got sick, reports CBS Station KEYE.


The cows dropped dead several weeks ago on an 80-acre ranch owned by Jerry Abel in Elgin, just east of Austin.


Abel says he’s been using the fields for cattle grazing and hay for 15 years. “A lot of leaf, it’s good grass, tested high for protein – it should have been perfect,” he told KEYE correspondent Lisa Leigh Kelly.


The grass is a genetically-modified form of Bermuda known as Tifton 85 which has been growing here for 15 years, feeding Abel’s 18 head of Corriente cattle. Corriente are used for team roping because of their small size and horns.


“When we opened that gate to that fresh grass, they were all very anxious to get to that,” said Abel.


Three weeks ago, the cattle had just been turned out to enjoy the fresh grass, when something went terribly wrong.


“When our trainer first heard the bellowing, he thought our pregnant heifer may be having a calf or something,” said Abel. “But when he got down here, virtually all of the steers and heifers were on the ground. Some were already dead, and the others were already in convulsions.”


Within hours, 15 of the 18 cattle were dead.


“That was very traumatic to see, because there was nothing you could do, obviously, they were dying,” said Abel.


Preliminary tests revealed the Tifton 85 grass, which has been here for years, had suddenly started producing cyanide gas, poisoning the cattle.


“Coming off the drought that we had the last two years … we’re concerned it was a combination of events that led us to this,” Dr. Gary Warner, an Elgin veterinarian and cattle specialist who conducted the 15 necropsies, told Kelly.


What is more worrisome: Other farmers have tested their Tifton 85 grass, and several in Bastrop County have found their fields are also toxic with cyanide. However, no other cattle have died.

Stewardship

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Isn’t it great that corporations get to do pretty much anything they want? At least they have to drink this water, too:

Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation’s geology as an invisible dumping ground.


No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for millennia.


There are growing signs they were mistaken.


Records from disparate corners of the United States show that wells drilled to bury this waste deep beneath the ground have repeatedly leaked, sending dangerous chemicals and waste gurgling to the surface or, on occasion, seeping into shallow aquifers that store a significant portion of the nation’s drinking water.


In 2010, contaminants from such a well bubbled up in a west Los Angeles dog park. Within the past three years, similar fountains of oil and gas drilling waste have appeared in Oklahoma and Louisiana. In South Florida, 20 of the nation’s most stringently regulated disposal wells failed in the early 1990s, releasing partly treated sewage into aquifers that may one day be needed to supply Miami’s drinking water.


There are more than 680,000 underground waste and injection wells nationwide, more than 150,000 of which shoot industrial fluids thousands of feet below the surface. Scientists and federal regulators acknowledge they do not know how many of the sites are leaking.


Federal officials and many geologists insist that the risks posed by all this dumping are minimal. Accidents are uncommon, they say, and groundwater reserves 2014 from which most Americans get their drinking water 2014 remain safe and far exceed any plausible threat posed by injecting toxic chemicals into the ground.


But in interviews, several key experts acknowledged that the idea that injection is safe rests on science that has not kept pace with reality, and on oversight that doesn’t always work.


“In 10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our groundwater is polluted,” said Mario Salazar, an engineer who worked for 25 years as a technical expert with the EPA’s underground injection program in Washington. “A lot of people are going to get sick, and a lot of people may die.”

Halfway there

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Let’s see: Poor oversight, high-powered political sponsors in both parties. But the pesky prisoners have a way of escaping and causing problems. Oh dear, what shall we do?

After decades of tough criminal justice policies, states have been grappling with crowded prisons that are straining budgets. In response to those pressures, New Jersey has become a leader in a national movement to save money by diverting inmates to a new kind of privately run halfway house.

At the heart of the system is a company with deep connections to politicians of both parties, most notably Gov. Chris Christie.

Many of these halfway houses are as big as prisons, with several hundred beds, and bear little resemblance to the neighborhood halfway houses of the past, where small groups of low-level offenders were sent to straighten up.

New Jersey officials have called these large facilities an innovative example of privatization and have promoted the approach all the way to the Obama White House.

Yet with little oversight, the state’s halfway houses have mutated into a shadow corrections network, where drugs, gang activity and violence, including sexual assaults, often go unchecked, according to a 10-month investigation by The New York Times.

Perhaps the most unsettling sign of the chaos within is inmates’ ease in getting out.

Since 2005, roughly 5,100 inmates have escaped from the state’s privately run halfway houses, including at least 1,300 in the 29 months since Governor Christie took office, according to an analysis by The Times.

Some inmates left through the back, side or emergency doors of halfway houses, or through smoking areas, state records show. Others placed dummies in their beds as decoys, or fled while being returned to prison for violating halfway houses’ rules. Many had permission to go on work-release programs but then did not return.

While these halfway houses often resemble traditional correctional institutions, they have much less security. There are no correction officers, and workers are not allowed to restrain inmates who try to leave or to locate those who do not come back from work release, the most common form of escape. The halfway houses’ only recourse is to alert the authorities.

And so the inmates flee in a steady stream: 46 last September, 39 in October, 40 in November, 38 in December, state records show.

“The system is a mess,” said Thaddeus B. Caldwell, who spent four years tracking down halfway house escapees in New Jersey as a senior corrections investigator. “No matter how many escaped, no matter how many were caught, no matter how many committed heinous acts while they were on the run, they still kept releasing more guys into the halfway houses, and it kept happening over and over again.”

Foreign money

~ susie

Pouring into Romney’s campaign via Adelson:

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said that casino magnate Sheldon Adelson “is indirectly injecting millions of dollar in Chinese foreign money into Mitt Romney’s presidential election effort,”Josh Rogin reports.

Said McCain: “Much of Mr. Adelson’s casino profits that go to him come from his casino in Macau, which says that obviously, maybe in a roundabout way foreign money is coming into an American political campaign… That is a great deal of money, and we need a level playing field and we need to go back to the realization… that we have to have a limit on the flow of money and corporations are not people.”

This sounds vaguely familiar

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Doesn’t it? I wonder if it will have a different ending this time:

Sir Mervyn King has announced emergency measures to help banks and boost business lending after a warning from George Osborne that the “debt storm” raging on the continent had left the UK and the rest of Europe facing their most serious economic crisis outside wartime.


In a joint proposal between the Bank of England and the Treasury, banks will receive cut-price funds provided they pass on the benefits to their business customers.


This new “funding for lending” scheme could provide an £80bn boost to loans to the private sector within weeks and alleviate growing fears of a second slump since the start of the financial crisis in 2007.


In a second scheme the Bank will begin pumping a minimum of £5bn a month within the next few days into City institutions to improve their liquidity.

Hahahahahahaha! “Provided the pass on the benefits to their business customers.” Of course, they won’t put it in writing and make it a condition of accepting the funds. They’ll just shake hands on it, these bankers are men of honor, after all.

Why you don’t have a job

~ susie

(H/T to the reader who suggested this, whose name I can’t find.) From the Economic Populist, this piece explains how automated software is screening qualified people out of the job application process. While Mr. Cappelli is saying that companies are short-staffed and using software because of the overwhelming volume of applications, the real problem is that employers are demanding unrealistic qualifications and then blaming the applicant pool and the schools for the fact that they’re not offering enough of a salary to attract the high skill level they want.

This isn’t specific to this recession. When I was a recruiter, I saw employers turn into petty tyrants after 9/11, demanding absurd combinations of skill sets at lower wages because they were convinced they had the upper hand. Now, large corporations are using the inability to get qualified workers at slave wages as an excuse to bring in lower-paid workers from other countries. Progress!

Finally someone speaks the truth about U.S. employers claiming they just can’t find people for job openings. Wharton Business School Professor Peter Cappelli has analyzed why employers dare to claim they cannot find people to hire when the United States has over 27 million people needing a job.

There is no skills shortage, none. In fact employers are being absolutely ridiculous in their hiring practices. It’s so bad, employers use software and third party rejection job application websites, which pretty much guarantee a candidate will be rejected. These websites and software are like virtual wastebaskets for your resume. No human involved, it’s automatic, guaranteed rejection. It’s so bad, an HR executive applied for his own job and was rejected.

A Philadelphia-area human-resources executive told Mr. Cappelli that he applied anonymously for a job in his own company as an experiment. He didn’t make it through the screening process.

Another factor that contributes to the perception of a skills gap is that most employers now use software to handle job applications, adding rigidity to the process that screens out all but the theoretically perfect candidate. Most systems, for example, now ask potential applicants what wage they are seeking — and toss out those who put down a figure higher than the employer wants. That’s hardly a skill problem. Meanwhile, applicants are typically assessed almost entirely on prior experience and credentials, and a failure to meet any one of the requirements leads to elimination. One manager told me that in his company 25,000 applicants had applied for a standard engineering job, yet none were rated as qualified.


Watch the above interview with Professor Cappelli on the real problem with employers these days. It is not that people are lacking skills, it is employers have impossible requirements.


We’ve written about this many times, so it’s thrilling to see a Wharton School Professor amplify the insanity.

A 2011 Accenture survey found that only 21% of U.S. employees had received any employer-provided formal training in the past five years.


This is so obvious it hurts. If employers really wanted people, they would train them. That’s what employers did right up until the 1980’s or so. By 2000, companies wanted instant ready disposable workers.


Cappelli is hitting the press. The truth is employers do not want to hire U.S. workers, Americans. In some cases employers do not want to hire anyone at all, they think it’s cheaper to leave positions unfilled!   Hopefully this time some employers will wake up, realize to grow a business, one needs people. Maybe some will actually train some people.

The challenge will be getting top leaders of organizations to admit they are a big part of the problem, and to change their ways. Software can be coded so it is less restrictive. Leaders could pay higher market wages where necessary. And they could make more investments in training. That costs money, to be sure, but so does leaving jobs open that could be of significant value to the company (not to mention the economy at large).


Judging from employers’ initial reaction, however, that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. After writing the initial Wall Street Journal story, Cappelli heard from a few corporate leaders who told him there was really nothing they could do. He suggested he’d come out and take a close look at what they’re doing. “Nobody ever takes me up on that,” he says. “That usually shuts things up pretty quickly.”

When the corporations run the world

~ susie


Warning: Strong language, not suitable for work.

I’m not going to use this as an example of Obama’s flaws as a president, because it’s not even the point. Our system is so badly skewered in favor of multinational corporations and their financial and legal interests that Obama is almost irrelevant. Any politician who tried to stand up to the kind of people who want these treaties would most likely find him- or herself at the receiving end of a carefully arranged “accident” — or an assassin’s bullet.

The real question, then, is, what, if anything, are we willing to do about it? Because we’re seeing the tacit agreement by our politicians that Americans (real working Americans, not politicians!) simply have to get used to a Third-World standard of living, and their job is to herd us all into the Foxcomm-style pens so their patrons will get even fatter and richer:

President Obama campaigned in 2008 as a strong pro-labor candidate, and this year he will again. But for union activists who’ll be working hard for his re-election, a newly leaked document represents yet another bitter disappointment.

The document contains draft text of a chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement currently being negotiated between the U.S. and eight Pacific countries. The Obama administration has shrouded the negotiation in secrecy, but the document,published by the consumer group Public Citizen, sheds a light on the process — and the view isn’t pretty.

“The leaked document,” says Todd Tucker, the research director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division, “shows that in all of the major respects, this is exactly the same template that was used in NAFTA and other agreements that President Obama campaigned against.” Public Citizen warns the provisions of the agreement would allow other countries to join in the future, giving it the potential to become a new global trade agreement, larger than NAFTA.

Well, we already knew that Obama’s anti-NAFTA campaign speeches were pretty much for show, but this is rather staggering.

Consumer groups and unions are particularly outraged over the Obama administration’s plan that would allow corporations from TPP countries to bring suit before a multinational tribunal when laws or regulations in another member country harm their profits.Tucker warns that such language means that an individual company “that’s not necessarily pursuing the national interest as a whole can attack environmental regulations without first having to go through any kind of diplomatic process.” He notes that “We’ve seen over $300 million paid out to investors as a result of NAFTA cases” challenging environmental and financial regulation. Tucker gave the example of a Mexican municipality forced to pay $15 million to a U.S. investor who had bought a landfill which was being subjected to regulation. Tucker said companies are also “using it preemptively to cast a chill on regulation that might be coming down the pike.”

While he isn’t aware of a NAFTA case specifically targeting labor regulations, Tucker said that the “pretty broad” language of the draft TPP proposal could be used, for example, to attack an increase in labor inspections, as well. Tucker added that the current TPP proposal confers no equivalent power for labor unions to challenge anti-union or anti-worker policies in other countries.

Celeste Drake, a Trade Policy Specialist for the AFL-CIO, said the federation has voiced concerns with U.S. officials that the language could be used to attack labor regulations like mandatory overtime or maternity leave. She says “they have not shared our concerns, but have also not presented a compelling argument regarding why such challenges could not happen under our existing investment language.”
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