Mammon category archive
Flint-Hearted, Reprise 0
After listing what he considers the five most idiotic things said about the poisoning of Flint, Michigan, (follow the link for the list), Dick Polman has the unmitigated gall to wonder about priorities:
Care to guess the salary of Jim Harbaugh, the University of Michigan football coach? What he pulls down, over two years, in public money? $14 million.
Flint-Hearted 0
Emails reveal the poisonous callousness of Rick Snyder and his Republican cohorts to the poisoning of the people of Flint, Michigan.
What did come through, however, was the Snyder administration’s callous dismissal of complaints from the people of Flint, who had been complaining of foul-smelling, brownish water for some time—water that turned out to contain high levels of dangerous, poisonous lead, coliform and even fecal bacteria—saying they were overly concerned with “aesthetics.”
A Sept. 25, 2015, email from Snyder’s Chief of Staff, Dennis Muchmore, to the governor is perhaps most damning, accusing the people of Flint of using their children’s lead exposure as a “political football.”
Follow the link, but, mind you, you’ll have trouble reading it all the way through.
Everybody Must Get Fracked 0
Did fracking open a wellspring of methane?
State regulators don’t seem to know what caused the leak, or how to stop it. But newly uncovered documents show that hydraulic fracturing was commonly used in the Aliso Canyon gas storage wells – including a well less than a half-mile from the leak.
Follow the link. Get the fracks.
Nor Any Drop To Drink 0
One of the biggest scams in the United States is bottled water. I don’t mean the big bottles in your office water cooler.
I mean the little bottles in your grocery bag.
In a country with the safest tap water in the world (unless Republicans get their way), corporations have convinced persons to buy water in plastic bottles because, well, it’s in plastic bottles with pretty pictures on the labels.
Indeed, many times, that water is simple tap water, put in plastic bottles, loaded on a train, then a truck, taken to a store, and sold to some bozo who thinks it’s somehow safer than his own damn tap water because it’s, well, in a plastic bottle.
In other words, you are drinking from what is little more than a store-bought disposable canteen (don’t forget the “disposable” part–more “disposables” means a stronger recycling industry!) with bonus extra packaging and transportation costs.
Have you ever wondered where the water in that store-bought disposable canteen comes from?
It comes from somebody else’s well.
How Stuff Works, Pickpocket Dept. 0
Keep in mind that every lawyer’s a crook until you need one.
TPPing the Economy’s Front Yard 0
The president of the Maine Nurses Association speaks out against the TPP and it’s protection of the corporacracy. A snippet:
Monopoly pricing protections for giant pharmaceutical firms in the Trans-Pacific Partnership could be a death sentence for countless patients in need of affordable medications around the world.
(snip)
This agreement is an all out assault on not only health and safety but also on the democratic rights of the American people to pass public protections. It’s another reminder that the pharmaceutical industry and other corporate lobbyists, who wrote many of these provisions, continue to dominate and corrupt our political system.
No Place To Hide 0
The EFF reports on Senator Al Franken’s attempt to investigate Google’s business practice, in particular their tracking of school students’ activities on Chromebooks. Here’s a bit from the story. Read the rest, then you can join the EFF at the link on the sidebar, over there.————————————>
Yet without parental consent the company tracks and records students’ online activity in certain Google services and feeds it into an ad profile attached to the students’ educational accounts. Is there an educational purpose in that practice? Senator Franken has asked Google to explain why it collects this information, and as we raise in our FTC complaint, whether “Google [has] ever used this kind of data for its own business purposes.”
No Place To Hide 0
You will be are being assimilated.
The boxes, sold by OccupEye as a way to monitor how long staff are at their desks without relying “on coffee cups and coats on chairs,” were installed in the offices of The Daily Telegraph. Staff weren’t told anything about the installation and soon kicked up a storm of protest.
The devices were installed under the desks of journalism, advertising, and other commercial departments. There’s no word if HR got them too.
The Fee Hand of the Market 0
John Naughton takes on the neoliberal con that the market is not just everything, that it is the only thing. A nugget:
The crassness of neoliberalism lies in its insistence that markets represent the only way of making them. Hence the belief that one can make organisations such as the NHS or the BBC more “efficient” by introducing “internal markets” of the kind that John Birt tried in the BBC during his tenure as director general, with results that were sometimes beyond parody.
In that sense, the evangelical neoliberal is like the mythical tradesman who only possesses a hammer and is therefore condemned to treating everything as if it were a nail.
“A Well-Ordered Militia” 0
Nancy Liebrecht tackles the myth. A snippet:
The idea that anybody who had a gun was in the militia is a modern construct derived from aggressive promotion by gun advocates in the last thirty-five years and reinforced by series of recent court decisions.
As the debate about gun regulation continues, we should remember that the Second Amendment exists is because in 1787 the country needed an organized militia under government control to fight an insurrection. Personal protection or hunting had nothing to do with it. The Second Amendment was interpreted quite differently in 1791 than gun advocates interpret it today.
She left out the bit, which some dispute, about the slave-catchers.
Chartering a Course for Disaster 0
Today’s assignment, class, is to write a three-page essay on the topic, “What else can they do to make the scam more obvious?”