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Note
29th December 2011
Verizon to Start Charging $2 Fee for Paying by Phone or Online
I certainly hope that Verizon is the next company to start feeling the wrath of the 99% as people en masse start transferring their accounts away from this greed. According to our sources, Big Red will start charging you a $2 fee both over the phone and online for your monthly bill transaction unless you have your account set up to pay automatically.
Maddening.
(Source: droid-life.com)
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Note
5th January 2011
At Least 13 New Republican Members Of Congress Hire Corporate Lobbyists To Manage Their Office
To many Americans, Washington is fundamentally broken. While corporations enjoy record profits and executives reward themselves with million-dollar bonuses, lobbyists have gamed the system so corporate behemoths like ExxonMobil and GE pay zero corporate income taxes. During the economic crisis, with high unemployment and stagnant wages, middle class Americans seem to be bearing the sacrifices. Riding a wave of this popular discontent, Republicans won a historical congressional election this year by channeling anger against “Beltway insiders” and Washington corruption.
Perhaps to the surprise of many Tea Party populists who helped elect them, the Washington Post reports, “Many incoming GOP lawmakers have hired registered lobbyists as senior aides. Several of the candidates won with strong support from the anti-establishment tea party movement.” These lobbyists are not public servants. They are experts at carving out special deals and tax giveaways to powerful corporations:
Way to go America.
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Quote
26th November 2010
“Former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff has long been an energetic advocate for the controversial airport full-body scanners as a way to detect hidden explosive devices. While publicly advocating for the use of full body scanners as a security matter, Chertoff fails to reveal how Rapiscan Systems (the main manufacturer of full body scanners) has hired Chertoff’s private security consulting firm to lobby for them. Chertoff has said, “Screening technologies with names like millimeter-wave and backscatter X-ray can show the contours of the body and reveal foreign objects. Such machines, properly used, are a leap ahead of the metal detectors used in most airports, and supporters say they are necessary to keep up with the plans of potential terrorists. ”
~
The terrorists have won.
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Link
2nd August 2010
NYT: Death of a Farm
I was born and raised in a small farm town in Indiana, stories like these always strike a chord with me.
Farms go out of business for many reasons, but few farms do merely because the soil has failed. That is the miracle of farming. If you care for the soil, it will last — and yield — nearly forever. America is such a young country that we have barely tested that. For most of our history, there has been new land to farm, and we still farm as though there always will be.
Still, there are some very old farms out there. The oldest is the Tuttle farm, near Dover, N.H., which is also one of the oldest business enterprises in America. It made the news last week because its owner — a lineal descendant of John Tuttle, the original settler — has decided to go out of business. It was founded in 1632. I hear its sweet corn is legendary.
The year 1632 is unimaginably distant. In 1632, Galileo was still publishing, and John Locke was born. There were perhaps 10,000 colonists in all of America, only a few hundred of them in New Hampshire. The Tuttle acres, then, would have seemed almost as surrounded as they do in 2010, but by forest instead of highways and houses.
It was a precarious operation at the start — as all farming was in the new colonies—and it became precarious enough again in these past few years to peter out at last. The land is protected by a conservation easement so it can’t be developed, but no one knows whether the next owner will farm it.
In a letter on their Web site, the Tuttles cite “exhaustion of resources” as the reason to sell the farm. The exhausted resources they list include bodies, minds, hearts, imagination, equipment, machinery and finances. They do not mention soil, which has been renewed and redeemed repeatedly. It’s as though the parishioners of the First Parish Church in nearby Dover — erected nearly 200 years later, in 1829 — had rebuilt the structure on the same spot every few years.
It is too simple to say, as the Tuttles have, that the recession killed a farm that had survived for nearly 400 years. What killed it was the economic structure of food production. Each year it has become harder for family farms to compete with industrial scale agriculture — heavily subsidized by the government — underselling them at every turn. In a system committed to the health of farms and their integration with local communities, the result would have been different. In 1632, and for many years after, the Tuttle farm was a necessity. In 2010, it is suddenly superfluous, or so we like to pretend.
via/ icelandicbutterflies (whom you should be following)
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Note
31st July 2010
White House Memo from 1969 Warns of Global Warming from Greenhouse Gasses
If only we could have known about what sort of damage corporate irresponsbility would do to the environment.
Fortunately, the average temp has only risen 2 degrees over the past 40 years, not the predicted 7 degrees in the memo. Luckily our icecaps are only partially completely melted rather than totally completely melted.
What’s even scarier is now we have to face the sad truth that all of these godless scientists who still insist that global warming is real are actually part of a cult created by the Nixon Administration.
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Note
29th July 2010
As Opposition to Health Care Reform Continues to Decrease Seniors Still Alarmingly Misinformed
For more than a a hundred million years there have been two absolute certainties in life. Two constants that are integral in balancing out the randomness of the universe. Two universal truths that you can absolutely count on.- Death
- Taxes (It’s a little known fact that even dinosaurs paid taxes. Recent archeological evidence uncovered has revealed that a little more than 65 million years ago a “conservative” dinosaur was elected dinosaur president and almost immediately cut taxes on the rich dinosaurs in a completely futile and ridiculous attempt to stimulate the dino-economy. Not only was it a miserable failure, it eventually resulted in massive agency cutbacks and the closing of the DMDA, the Dinosaur Meteorite Detection Agency (See #1).
- An astonishingly large number of hard-working, decent Americans will, given the choice, vote against their own best interest in favor of the interest of the corporations.
- There seems to be some correlation between a person’s age and how emphatically they will argue a point and make sweeping generalizations on a subject they are woefully misinformed on. (Hint on the age: People aren’t getting wiser with years.)
One hundred million years later two more certainties have been added to that list.
A large number of seniors “mistakenly believe the law includes provisions that cut some previously universal Medicare benefits” and 36% think that the law creates ‘death panels.’ Also, only 14 percent of seniors know that the law will increase the Medicare Part A trust fund by 12 years “and nearly half (45%) of seniors think the health reform law will weaken the financial condition of the fund. ”
