Corporations
It is often pointed out that some of the places most lacking in hope are not the industrial wastelands or the bleak landscapes shorn of beauty, but the places where there is too much mo
When Corporations Rule the World, by David Korten. In 1999, I participated in protests that shut down the WTO meeting in Seattle. In 2008, I read this book and finally understood why!
This week GM printed a full page ad in Automotive News magazine to make a public apology. They said:
As per usual, on Friday, we had all sorts of Buy Nothing Day festivities (check out the video here). But that's not what I want to talk about.
The day after Thanksgiving, thousands of Americans head for the shopping malls for a ritual known as Black Friday, called such as it's a day when many retailers move from the red (losses) into the black (gains).
Black Friday is "celebrated" nationwide by working off Thanksgiving's meal by shopping. Over a decade ago another celebration was started on the same day: Buy Nothing Day.
It's clear that one cause of the current food crisis is that poorer countries have been pressured into dismantling their food policies, leaving peasant farmers and eaters alike to bear all the risks of the extremely volatile world market. This has left corporations free to ship factory-farmed food to those countries, peasants free to migrate to urban slums, and corporately-dominated economic [...]
"Grain Markets Panic Buying, Export Controls, and Food Riots," trumpets the headline of one Web site I read while researching the world food price crisis for Sojourners' July issue. Was the site a moral [...]
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers announced Friday that after a prolonged and often heated campaign, Burger King has agreed to award tomato pickers 1.5 cents per pound of tomatoes picked, the equivalent of a 71 percent increase in wages.
The decision was announced on Capitol Hill last Friday. Watch the press conference:
I posted last November about legal proceedings against Chiquita for protection money paid to Colombian right-wing paramilitary organizations (AUC) that had been designated terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. Two stories this week shed more light on the situation and are worth checking out.
First, last week's 60 Minutes broadcast included a segment called