Tag: corporations

     The concept is very simple. You are what you eat.

     Economically speaking, this also means that you are what you consume.

    Since consumer spending makes up over 70% of our national eonomy, logic dictates that the smarter, healthier and more sustainable our purchasing is as individuals, the more sustainable and strong our national economy will become.

    The simple ripples in the water can have drastic effects, in the long run.

     So, here’s what we do.

    If Americans ate less meat, less fast food and manufactured food and instead ate more locally grown fruits and vegetables, as well as whatever food you can grow yourself, we could bring about the change we need without having to wait for anyone to take the lead.

    Simple changes to your daily diet, even if done in moderation, combined with enough people doing the same thing can literally change the world.

In his farewell address to the nation after spending 8 years as president, in 1961 Eisenhower warns of a growing danger.

Eisenhower on the Military Industrial Complex



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

Why would a respected President, set the sights so high, for his successors, and for America, as the dawn of the Television Age, blazed its path, towards an unknown Future?  

Power has to be insecure to be responsive.

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

Ralph Nader

Other problems include the fact that this system rewards the least scrupulous behavior and penalizes community oriented behavior. It concentrates wealth in the hands of the wealthy and in so doing also concentrates the power at the top, creating a plutocracy in the least case and economic feudalism in the worst case.
The problem in the United States is a kind of willed ignorance. A decision that people make not to know things. I think that is the primary problem in the United States;that people with education and access to information make a choice not to know things. Because to know things if one retains any sort of moral sensibility, if you know about something that's going on that is inconsistent with your own principles, once you know about it there is the moral question about why have you not acted.

 

In the United States part of this mass mediated, mass marketed mass medicated world is about allowing people to remain willfully ignorant. That is another level that we have to combat. This is where I often find myself again in tension because if you look at things like the movie industry and television and spectacle sports, all of this industry that is designed to keep people out of touch, that has to be resisted and when you resist that, then you are told that you are being elitist and ya know you got to understand that it is good to go to the Cubs game now and then. And I think, “No!” I actually think that's part of the problem. So these tensions work out too, in organizing. How do you reject that part of the society without doing it in a way that seems to be talking down to ordinary people? How do you make that analysis part of a bigger politics that tries to offer an alternative to the mass mediated, mass marketed, mass medicated world? So its both about critique and construction of alternatives.
Robert Jensen – “The Old Future's Gone – Progressive Strategy Amid Cascading Crises” which can be heard in its entirety at Unwelcome Guests #428 and #429.

Now that we’ve had a couple days to rest up from the long presidential campaign, it’s time to get busy again.  President-elect Obama is not going to govern from the left, or even that mythological “middle” everyone seems content to obsess over – he’ll govern from the hard right, only subtly, as Bill Clinton did.  Those who thought to use him as a springboard to enacting progressive policy failed to understand that Obama is a user, not someone who lets himself be used.  Let’s begin the work of making that fanciful notion so many of us held a reality.

I’ve done my criticism, and I’ll continue to criticize, because I take Theodore’s admonition regarding presidents to heart.  But this entry is about offering up ideas and starting points; future ones shall be along this line of argument.  We absolutely must organize, unite, and apply pressure before the tiny window of opportunity between now and January closes.  We cannot afford a repeat of the Clinton years.

A good first step is in redirecting oil policy away from the industry and more toward independence – alternative, renewable sources of energy, naturally, but in other areas as well.  The September-October issue of Science Illustrated contained a piece on bioplastics, that is, plastics made with chemicals derived from plant-based chemicals instead of petroleum.  I wasn’t able to find a direct link to the magazine article, unfortunately, but I did locate links pertaining to the subject.

http://findarticles.com/p/arti…

http://www.justchromatography….

From the first link:

Scientists are one step closer to replacing crude oil as the main source for plastic, fuels and scores of other industrial and household chemicals with inexpensive, non-polluting renewable plant matter (Science, vol. 316. no. 5831, pp. 1597-1600, June 15, 2007). “What we have done that no one else has been able to do is convert glucose directly in high yields to a primary building block for fuel and polyesters,” says Z. Conrad Zhang, senior author who led the research and a scientist with the PNNL-based Institute for Interfacial Catalysis (UC; iic.pnl.gov). That building block is hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), a chemical derived from carbohydrates such as glucose and fructose and that is viewed as a promising surrogate for petroleumbased chemicals.

Glucose, in plant starch and cellulose, is nature’s most abundant sugar. “But getting a commercially viable yield of HMF from glucose has been very challenging,” says Zhang. “In addition to low yield, until now, we always generated many different byproducts,” including levulinic acid, making product purification expensive and uncompetitive with petroleum-based chemicals.

Zhang, lead author and former post doc Haibo Zhao, and colleagues John Holladay and Heather Brown, all from PNNL, were able to coax HMF yields upward of 70% from glucose and nearly 90% from fructose, while leaving only traces of acid impurities. To achieve this, they experimented with a novel nonacidic catalytic system containing metal chloride catalysts in an ionic liquid capable of dissolving cellulose. The ionic liquid, enabled the metal chlorides to convert the sugars to HMF.

What this means is that scientists are making glucose-derived plastics a viable alternative to the petroleum-based variety we commonly use.  As the first step toward moving away from reliance on fossil fuels, funding and regulations could be implemented so as to grow the bioplastics industry.  Glucose can be gotten from straw and saw dust – waste products generated by the agricultural and wood industries – for example, meaning freeing up more farmland for food production.

Combined with passing laws raising fuel efficiency standards, improving public transportation, and creating advertising campaigns to promote carpooling and energy efficiency, pushing bioplastics may be used to start us on the road to energy independence.  With fossil fuels dwindling, and wars to obtain control over sources increasing in frequency and intensity, this is a matter of genuine pragmatism and economic sensibility.  It’s also something to press our elected officials over.  President Obama will not be so stupid as to oppose his own political party if it passes progressive legislation.

“Don’t talk to Strangers.”



Mom & Dad

The dark car rolls up and the window slides down…

“Hey kid! Want some candy.” You like puppies, right?”

“All I need is your name, address, phone number and you’ll need to initial… right here, and sign here…Aah, don’t bother reading it, I’m a good guy. Trust me.”

I realize that this type of story has been reviewed endlessly, but I still think that it cannot be opposed too often.  This is not the answer.

Ethanol!  Ethanol!  Rah!  Rah!  Rah!

The cheers go up we can finally end our dependence on foreign oil.  Now that is a one pound bag of manure, which they are selling to the people.  Guess what!?  They are buying this crap (pun intended).  As long as we allow the oil companies to make obscene profits, you will NEVER be weaned from foreign oil.  Why is that?  Ethanol cannot be transported through pipelines, for it will pick up impurities like water.  So, the only way to transport it is in trucks.   Now guess what?  Trucks use diesel and that is another pollutant.  Ethanol IS NOT the answer, sports fans.

Let us talk about how environmentally friendly ethanol is, NOT!  A Stanford study showed that ethanol is at least as polluting as gasoline and could be more so.  The burning of ethanol produces more lung damaging ozone than the burning of gasoline.  Another polluting factor of ethanol is that farmers will use a nitrogen based fertilizer which will enter into the water supply, killing marine life and such.  This alone should make it unwise to push the use of corn as an alternative.  But who cares, it is all about who makes the profits, not what it will do to the environment.

Now let us talk about corn prices.  Ethanol refiners use huge amounts of corn and with that food prices will go up and up. Corn is used in food production from feed for the cattle that make our steaks to the syrup for our soft drinks.  As the demand for ethanol rise, so will the price of our food.   The more corn that is planted the less other crops are raised and this will also add to the price of food.  Nothing about ethanol is a good.

Corn is not even the best source of ethanol.  Sugar cane is and it produces 8 times more energy than it uses to make.  Corn, however, the ratio is 1.3 to 1.  This basically means that corn produces a little more energy than it consumes in the refining process.  Not an efficient product.

The US is importing foreign oil so that ethanol can be produced and distributed.  The only thing that is being accomplished by the production of ethanol is we are putting the grocery store in competition with the gas station for the use of the corn.

Ethanol is nothing new!  It was used in Ford’s original Model T and it was considered in the 1970’s during the oil embargo.  If ethanol is inefficient and costly why is it even being considered?  That is the easiest question to answer-PROFITS!  No one in the oil business wants to eliminate out dependence on foreign oil.  Why would they shoot themselves in the ass?  Answer-they will not cut off their supply of profit.  

This is not an answer to dependency, it is however an answer to oil companies retaining their profit margin, for an additive will still need a supply of the original product and that translates into continued exploitation by the oil companies.