An article in The New York Times says U.S. Senator Pat Roberts doesn’t live in his home state — he instead rents a room from friends.
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An article in The New York Times says U.S. Senator Pat Roberts doesn’t live in his home state — he instead rents a room from friends.
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U.S. officials believe Snowden could have more than 1.5 million classified documents still in his possession.
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This week, Florida Atlantic University announced a deal to rename its football stadium after GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies in the world. The deal came with a $ 6 million dollar price tag, the “largest one-time gift in the history of FAU athletics.”
But GEO Group has a history of human rights abuses that it would rather keep secret, especially once 30,000 screaming football fans begin seeing the company"s corporate sponsorship. So, in all the excitement surrounding the announcement, GEO took to quietly covering up parts of its shady past–by scrubbing its Wikipedia page.
As Brave New Foundation’s Jesse Lava reported, a GEO Group employee deleted the entire “controversies” section of the company’s Wikipedia page and replaced it with some glowing propaganda. Before GEO’s lackey doctored the article, it outlined a slew of horrific abuses in the company’s prisons, including reports of squalid conditions and the deaths of dozens of prisoners.
Wikipedia editors quickly noticed the changes and restored it to its original form Wednesday evening. The highly educational, yet alarming article is available for your perusal—controversies and all—here. And just before they changed it back, Wikipedia took a jab at the company that tried to game its netizen-dependent editing process, posting this delightful disclaimer on the top of the page:
“The article appears to be written like an advertisement. Please help improve it by rewriting promotional content from a neutral point of view and removing any inappropriate external links.”
But the Wikipedia cover-up is just the beginning of this story"s deceit. Details are emerging on how the GEO’s stadium buyout is only part of a university-prison circle jerk of unprecedented proportions. As the New York Times notes, GEO Chairman George Zoley, and several other employees in the ranks, are all alumni of Florida Atlantic University. And GEO Group’s headquarters sits only four miles away from campus. GEO and university officials laughably claim that the deal is strictly philanthropic, and in no way, shape or form a corporate sponsorship, or, worse, a way to recruit new employees and desensitize people to the horrible private of for-profit prisons.
But marketing professionals have trouble taking that claim in good faith. They say slapping your name in huge letters over an ocean-view stadium hosting America’s most revered sport is probably more than an act of compassion.
“If it"s pure philanthropy, you don"t ask for your name to go on the stadium,” Don Sexton, a Columbia University marketing professor told The Huffington Post. “The only reason you want your name on the stadium is because you want to get something back.”
HuffPost’s Chris Kirkham reports a potential ulterior motive for GEO’s $ 6 million dollar deal with FAU. Private prison critics say the public university donation is part of a grand plan to “gain influence with state and local public officials who decide whether to hand out contracts.” Kirkham notes that GEO has a rich history of shelling out for favors:
“For the last three election cycles, the GEO Group has donated more than $ 1.2 million to the Florida Republican Party. Republicans in the state legislature last year came close to approving a massive expansion of private prisons in south Florida, a deal that the GEO Group mentioned frequently in calls with investors.”
Fri, 02/22/2013 – 09:17
By now you’ve likely heard about the horse meat scandal that is rocking Europe. As far as food scandals go, this one is intriguing. Of course, this is not the first time we’ve learned that the meat we buy may not be everything we thought it was. Remember “pink slime”? The only good news here is that, so far, it doesn’t seem to be an imminent health threat, although it does raise some very alarming questions.
As food politics expert Marion Nestle wrote, “The unfolding drama around Europe’s horsemeat scandal is a case study in food politics and the politics of cultural identity. Cultural identity? They (other people) eat horsemeat. We don’t.”
As Nestle explains, “Most Americans say they won’t eat horsemeat, are appalled by the very idea, and oppose raising horses for food, selling their meat, and slaughtering horses for any reason.” Horse meat, however, is eaten in numerous countries around the world like China, Japan and Indonesia, as well as countries in Europe, including France and Switzerland.
It’s one thing to knowingly eat horse meat; it’s quite another to have it slipped into your food. This opens a pandora’s box of questions about the food we"re buying. For starters: What else is in there (donkey and pig, and the list may grow)? What does it reveal about food safety and our complex food chain? Who is responsible for duping consumers, and how did they get away with it?
It turns out there is a lot we can learn from Europe’s surplus of horse burgers.
1. The Mighty Fall
The most recent news surfacing today is that Nestlé, one of the largest food companies in the world, has now been entangled in the scandal. The New York Timesreports that Nestlé is pulling two products sold in Italy and Spain: Buitoni Beef Ravioli and Beef Tortellini, as well as Lasagnes à la Bolognaise Gourmandes sold to catering companies in France.
Nestlé is just the latest in the list of Europe’s top food companies involved. The story first broke in the UK and Ireland when major supermarket chains Tesco and Aldi were found to be selling beef products that contained horse meat. It spun from there. AdAge reports, “Burger King binned thousands of Whoppers and Angus Burgers, which were sourced from the same Irish beef supplier, Silvercrest, and Findus ‘beef’ lasagna was found to contain 100% horse meat.”
Silvercrest has been fingered, as well as Liffey Meats in Ireland and Dalepak in Yorkshire, accordingto Felicity Lawrence of the Guardian:
Silvercrest and Dalepak are both subsidiaries of ABP Food Group, one of the largest beef processors in Europe.”
… Huge blocks of frozen meat at a cold store in Northern Ireland, Freeza Foods, which had been quarantined by officials suspicious of its labelling and state of packaging, were found to contain 80% horse.
Other top food companies were implicated when the scandal hit France (more on that soon), but the presence of large food companies at the heart of the issue is troubling. While bigger companies are often able to offer products cheaper than small and local stores, some may be questioning if the savings are really worth it if consumers are getting duped. A look at the complex supply chain raises even more fears.
Lawrence writes:
Supermarket buyers and big brands have been driving down prices, seeking special offers on meat products as consumers cut back on their spending in the face of recession. The squeeze on prices has come at a time when manufacturers" costs have been soaring. Beef prices have been at record highs as has the price of grain needed to feed cattle. The cost of energy, heavily used in industrial processing and to fuel centralised distribution chains, has also soared. There has been a mistmatch between the cost of real beef and what companies are prepared to pay.
So, are we really shocked?
2. A Tangled Web
Horse meat has ended up in so-called beef products to varying degrees — some have been found to contain traces of horse DNA, which may have been the result of processing plants not properly cleaning equipment. And some products have been found to contain upward of 80 to 100 percent horse meat, which signals a much larger problem.
Getting to the bottom of how this came about has involved a lot of finger pointing. In Ireland, the ABP Food Group blamed supplies in Netherlands and Spain, and later Poland. “Five weeks into the scandal and the links in the Irish chain have still not been fully established,” writes the Guardian"s Lawrence.” But this gets even more interesting in France, as she explains:
Comigel had subcontracted its ready meal production to a factory in Luxembourg, Tavola. It was supplied with meat by a company called Spanghero. Spanghero had bought meat from a Dutch fraudster already convicted of passing horse off as beef, Jan Fasen.
The Dutch trader ran a company called Draap, which spelled backwards is paard or Dutch for horse. It was registered in Cyprus in 2008, with an offshore vehicle in the British Virgin Islands. It emerged during Fasen"s trial in Holland that he had supplied French companies with horsemeat imported from South America and Mexico fraudulently labelled as Dutch and German “beef” going back to 2007.
The horsemeat found in the recent tests on ready meals exported from France was said to have been sourced by Draap from Romania. The Romanian government has said its meat was legally exported correctly labeled as horse. The French government said Spanghero was the first agent to stamp the horse as beef; Spanghero has denied doing so deliberately. Fasen says Spanghero and French manufacturers were in on the deception from the beginning.
It turns out there may be a whole lot more criminal to this case.
3. Trouble in Romania
It just so happens that Romania may have an excess of dead horses on its hands. John Lichfield of the Independent reports that a change in traffic rules is to blame:
Horse-drawn carts were a common form of transport for centuries in Romania, but hundreds of thousands of the animals are feared to have been sent to the abattoir after the change in road rules.
The law, which was passed six years ago but only enforced recently, also banned carts drawn by donkeys, leading to speculation among food-industry officials in France that some of the “horse meat” which has turned up on supermarket shelves in Britain, France and Sweden may, in fact, turn out to be donkey meat. “Horses have been banned from Romanian roads and millions of animals have been sent to the slaughterhouse,” said Jose Bove, a veteran campaigner for small farmers who is now vice-president of the European Parliament agriculture committee.
While the explanation of where some of the horse meat could have come from is straightforward, how it got to dinner plates is not. As Lichfield explains, “It came from abattoirs in Romania through a dealer in Cyprus working through another dealer in Holland to a meat plant in the south of France which sold it to a French-owned factory in Luxembourg which made it into frozen meals sold in supermarkets in 16 countries.”
4. Blame the Mafia
From here, the story just gets weirder. Jamie Doward reports for the Observer that organized international gangs are suspected of involvement in the scandal. Doward writes:
Experts within the horse slaughter industry have told the Observer there is evidence that both Polish and Italian mafia gangs are running multimillion-pound scams to substitute horsemeat for beef during food production. There are claims that vets and other officials working within abattoirs and food production plants are intimidated into signing off meat as beef when it is in fact cheaper alternatives such as pork or horse. …
“I"m concerned that this is an international criminal conspiracy here and we"ve really got to get to the bottom of it,” [Britain’s environment secretary Owen Paterson] said.
5. Rethinking Our Food
So, we found out that beef products may contain horse, and also pig, and possibly donkey, as well. What to do with that information? For some people, it means buying less meat or from different sources. Reuters reported that 60 percent of people it surveyed in the UK said they were turning to local butchers for their meat and 25 percent said they would buy different cuts instead of processed meat.
AdAge reported that sales of frozen burgers dropped 40 percent in the beginning of February, while the meat-substitute Quorn saw a spike in sales of 10 percent. Emma Hall writes that, “More than two-thirds of British adults said they would be less likely to buy frozen meat products in the future.”
The biggest effect so far has been a drop in public trust. But after countless food safety scandals over the years, some of them deadly, why do we trust a system that’s needlessly complex?
“The food and retail industries have become highly concentrated and globalized in recent decades,” Lawrence writes for the Guardian:
“A handful of key players dominate the beef processing and supermarket sectors across Europe. They have developed very long supply chains, particularly for their economy lines, which enable them to buy the ingredients for processed foods from wherever they are cheapest at any point, depending on exchange rates and prices on the global commodity markets. Networks of brokers, cold stores operators and subcontracted meat cutting plants have emerged to supply rapidly fluctuating orders ‘just in time.’ Management consultants KPMG estimate there are around 450 points at which the integrity of the chain can break down.”
That’s worth repeating — there are 450 places where something could go wrong before your food gets into your hands.
If there was ever a reason to eat more locally produced food and to know where your food comes from and who grows and processes it, this would be a damn good one because this extends far beyond just meat products, and far beyond Europe.
Tue, 02/19/2013 – 12:20
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The GOP has plans for a comeback. But it may cost you a lot. The idea is to capitalize on recent Republican state takeovers to conduct an austerity experiment known as the new “red-state model” and prove that faulty policies can be turned into gold.
There will be smoke. There will be mirrors. And there will be a lot of ordinary people suffering needlessly in the wake of this ideological train wreck.
We already have a red-state model, and it’s called Mississippi. Or Texas. Or any number of states characterized by low public investment, worker abuse, environmental degradation, educational backwardness, high rates of unwanted pregnancy, poor health, and so on.
Now the GOP is determined to bring that horrible model to the rest of America.
In Kansas, the Wall Street Journal reports that Governor Sam Brownback is aiming to up his profile “by turning Kansas into what he calls Exhibit A for how sharp cuts in taxes and government spending can generate jobs, wean residents off public aid and spur economic growth.” In remarks quoted in the same article, Brownback announced that “My focus is to create a red-state model that allows the Republican ticket to say, "See, we"ve got a different way, and it works.’ “
Brownback’s economic inspiration is Reagan-era supply-side economist Arthur Laffer and the folks at Americans for Prosperity, the conservative outfit backed by the deep coffers of the Koch brothers.
This new austerity talk focused on “fiscal innovations” is emboldening Republicans in other states that have been gerrymandered into submission to the GOP, including Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, and alas, my home state of North Carolina.
Republications have been eyeing the Tar Heel state with interest due to its recent swing status in presidential elections. The state was also the target of a gerrymandering strategy that worked out wonderfully for the Republicans, but not so well for democracy. Sam Wang, the founder of the Princeton Election Consortium, wrote recently in the New York Times about how Republican redistricting thwarted Democratic voters:
“Although gerrymandering is usually thought of as a bipartisan offense, the rather asymmetrical results may surprise you….I have developed approaches to detect such shenanigans by looking only at election returns. To see how the sleuthing works, start with the naïve standard that the party that wins more than half the votes should get at least half the seats. In November, five states failed to clear even this low bar: Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. … In North Carolina, where the two-party House vote was 51 percent Democratic, 49 percent Republican, the average simulated delegation was seven Democrats and six Republicans. The actual outcome? Four Democrats, nine Republicans — a split that occurred in less than 1 percent of simulations. If districts were drawn fairly, this lopsided discrepancy would hardly ever occur.”
The lesson of North Carolina tells you that the GOP red-state model is based, first and foremost, on efforts to flagrantly disregard the will of the people. NC’s discount-store mogul Art Pope, a longtime GOP donor and champion of free-market fundamentalism, has been appointed state budget director by the new Republican governor, Pat McCrory. In an incredible display of money buying political influence, Pope has gone well beyond his donor-counterparts in other states. Instead of just funding the politicians he wants, he has gone for direct rule by occupying government himself. Tax repeal is the centerpiece of his announced plans, but his hatred of public investment means he has much more than that in store for one of the most progressive states in the South. Pope is said to be more powerful than the governor, giving rise to the term “Pope administration” to describe the new political reality.
GOP pols are vying to out-do each other in extreme red-state programming. NC state senator Bob Rucho is pushing a plan to eliminate the state"s income taxes altogether. Such plans go hand-in-hand with calls for increasing the sales tax. Because low-income people pay a higher proportion of their income in sales taxes, abolishing income taxes and raising sales taxes shoves tax burdens onto them. Obviously, the Republicans will not give up on their passionate desire to cut taxes on the wealthy and stick it to the poor and the middle class.
Pope’s ideological opposition to public investment is ringing alarm bells. North Carolina, a state where progressives have fought conservative forces tooth and nail to achieve an enviable university system and a reputation for high-tech and research, is now in danger of being thrown into a period of regressive darkness. University of North Carolina sociologist Andrew Perrin put it this way: “Public investment is part of what has set North Carolina apart from our neighbors in the South.”
But Pope is hell-bent on turning North Carolina into Mississippi.
The GOP economic plans not only subvert common sense and the lessons of history (being played out right now in places like the U.K., where austerity has failed dramatically), they also flip a giant middle finger at the American voter. Unable to win support at the national level for their foolhardy economic programs, Republicans have turned their attention to state-level action because that’s where gerrymandering really works wonders.
Red-state model proponents claim that their maneuvers will spark economic growth. But that was basically what George W. Bush had in mind when he supported a similar program for cutting taxes on the rich. That didn’t work out so well, and increased the very deficits Republicans decry.
But here’s the really scary part. Slashing taxes, squeezing workers and throwing out environmental protections can indeed lure businesses to states where they won’t have to pay their fair share and can get away with all sorts of abuse. If a state like North Carolina promotes such policies, businesses from nearby states like Virginia may indeed move their operations down the road. Unless you believe in the “Confidence Fairy,” as Paul Krugman calls the naïve GOP faith that making everybody poorer is the way to become rich, then you know that what results is simply trade diversion, not genuine growth. In other words, one state’s gain is another state’s loss. The result is a headlong race-to-the-bottom whereby the states losing business will be pressured to slash their taxes and burden their workers and ordinary citizens, too. Nobody wins in that game — except the 1 percent.
The blue-state model, evident in high-income states like Massachusetts, has long been associated with high levels of state investments in education, transportation and other public goods. And guess what? It"s also associated with economic strength. The red-state model, on the other hand, is linked to backwardness, second-rate educational systems and economic weakness.
What the GOP wants to do is create an image-problem for blue states where taxes have been raised to balance budgets and continue vital services and jobs by crying “Look, Ma! No taxes!” in the states where they’ve taken control.
They’ll soon be able to say, “Look, Ma! No economy.”
Mon, 02/11/2013 (All day)
