There Is An Alternative [feedly]

Change "Labour" to "Democratic" and Cameron to Obama and it's pretty much usable as-is.

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There Is An Alternative
// Monbiot.com

The great political question of our age is what to do about corporate power. It's time we answered it.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 8th December 2014

Does this sometimes feel like a country under enemy occupation? Do you wonder why the demands of so much of the electorate seldom translate into policy? Why the Labour Party, like other former parties of the left, seems incapable of offering effective opposition to market fundamentalism, let alone proposing coherent alternatives? Do you wonder why those who want a kind and decent and just world, in which both human beings and other living creatures are protected, so often appear to find themselves confronting the entire political establishment?

If so, you have already encountered corporate power. It is the corrupting influence that prevents parties from connecting with the public, distorts spending and tax decisions and limits the scope of democracy. It helps to explain the otherwise inexplicable: the creeping privatisation of health and education, hated by almost all voters; the private finance initiative, which has left public services with unpayable debts(1,2); the replacement of the civil service with companies distinguished only by their incompetence(3); the failure to re-regulate the banks and to collect tax; the war on the natural world; the scrapping of the safeguards that protect us from exploitation; above all the severe limitation of political choice in a nation crying out for alternatives.

There are many ways in which it operates, but perhaps the most obvious is through our unreformed political funding system, which permits big business and multimillionaires effectively to buy political parties. Once a party is obliged to them, it needs little reminder of where its interests lie. Fear and favour rule.

And if they fail? Well, there are other means. Before the last election, a radical firebrand said this about the lobbying industry(4): "It is the next big scandal waiting to happen … an issue that exposes the far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money. … secret corporate lobbying, like the expenses scandal, goes to the heart of why people are so fed up with politics." That, of course, was David Cameron, and he's since ensured that the scandal continues. His lobbying act restricts the activities of charities and trade unions, but imposes no meaningful restraint on corporations(5).

Ministers and civil servants know that if they keep faith with corporations while in office they will be assured of lucrative directorships in retirement. Dave Hartnett, who, as head of the government's tax collection agency HMRC, oversaw some highly controversial deals with companies like Vodafone and Goldman Sachs(6,7), apparently excusing them from much of the tax they seemed to owe, now works for Deloitte, which advises companies like Vodafone on their tax affairs(8). As head of HMRC he met one Deloitte partner 48 times(9).

Corporations have also been empowered by the globalisation of decision-making. As powers but not representation shift to the global level, multinational business and its lobbyists fill the political gap. When everything has been globalised except our consent, we are vulnerable to decisions made outside the democratic sphere.

The key political question of our age, by which you can judge the intent of all political parties, is what to do about corporate power. This is the question, perennially neglected within both politics and the media, that this week's series of articles will attempt to address. I think there are some obvious first steps.

A sound political funding system would be based on membership fees. Each party would be able to charge the same fixed fee for annual membership (perhaps £30 or £50). It would receive matching funding from the state as a multiple of its membership receipts. No other sources of income would be permitted. As well as getting the dirty money out of politics, this would force political parties to reconnect with the people, to raise their membership. It will cost less than the money wasted on corporate welfare every day.

All lobbying should be transparent. Any meeting between those who are paid to influence opinion (this could include political commentators like myself) and ministers, advisers or civil servants in government should be recorded, and the transcript made publicly available. The corporate lobby groups that pose as thinktanks should be obliged to reveal who funds them before appearing on the broadcast media(10,11), and if the identity of one of their funders is relevant to the issue they are discussing, it should be mentioned on air.

Any company supplying public services would be subject to freedom of information laws (there would be an exception for matters deemed commercially confidential by the information commissioner). Gagging contracts would be made illegal, in the private as well as the public sector (with the same exemption for commercial confidentiality). Ministers and top officials should be forbidden from taking jobs in the sectors they were charged with regulating.

But we should also think of digging deeper. Is it not time we reviewed the remarkable gift we have granted to companies in the form of limited liability? It socialises the risks which would otherwise be carried by a company's owners and directors, exempting them from the costs of the debts they incur or the disasters they cause, and encouraging them to engage in the kind of reckless behaviour that caused the financial crisis. Should the wealthy authors of the crisis, like Fred Goodwin or Matt Ridley, not have incurred a financial penalty of their own?

We should look at how we might democratise the undemocratic institutions of global governance, as I outlined in my book The Age of Consent(12). This could involve the dismantling of the World Bank and the IMF, which are governed without a semblance of democracy, and cause more crises than they solve, and their replacement with a body rather like the international clearing union designed by John Maynard Keynes in the 1940s, whose purpose was to prevent excessive trade surpluses and deficits from forming, and therefore international debt from accumulating.

Instead of treaties brokered in opaque meetings between diplomats and transnational capital (of the kind now working towards a Transatlantic Trade and Investment partnership), which threaten democracy, the sovereignty of parliaments and the principle of equality before the law, we should demand a set of global fair trade rules, to which multinational companies would be subject, losing their licence to trade if they break them. Above all perhaps, we need a directly elected world parliament, whose purpose would be to hold other global bodies to account. In other words, instead of only responding to an agenda set by corporations, we must propose an agenda of our own.

This is not only about politicians, it is also about us. Corporate power has shut down our imagination, persuading us that there is no alternative to market fundamentalism, and that "market" is a reasonable description of a state-endorsed corporate oligarchy. We have been persuaded that we have power only as consumers, that citizenship is an anachronism, that changing the world is either impossible or best effected by buying a different brand of biscuits.

Corporate power now lives within us. Confronting it means shaking off the manacles it has imposed on our minds.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.dropnhsdebt.org.uk/

2. http://www.monbiot.com/2010/11/22/the-uks-odious-debts/

3. http://www.monbiot.com/2014/05/05/land-of-impunity-2/

4. https://tompride.wordpress.com/2014/10/13/lobbying-camerons-deleted-speech-and-his-jaw-dropping-hypocrisy/

5. http://www.lobbyingtransparency.org/

6. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/22/vodafone-tax-case-leaves-sour-taste

7. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/oct/11/goldman-sachs-interest-tax-avoidance

8. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/may/27/deloitte-appoints-dave-hartnett-tax

9. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/may/27/deloitte-appoints-dave-hartnett-tax

10. http://www.monbiot.com/2013/11/29/hidden-interests/

11. http://www.monbiot.com/2011/10/17/show-me-the-money/

12. http://www.monbiot.com/books/the-age-of-consent/

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My year without Amazon

My year without Amazon
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-12-06/my-year-without-amazon#

One of two Seattle Giants to shun, the other being Starbucks, which has gotten in bed with Monsanto to fight against honest food labeling. Amazon and Starbucks together are the dynamic duo of corporatized community destruction.

Every place in America -- including truck stops in the absolute middle of nowhere -- offer great coffee these days, and Amazon only offers low prices and "free" shipping by stealing from you by not paying fair wages to workers and by avoiding taxes, both of which cause the rest of us to pay more for everything.  

Support your local book shops and, if you can't find a book there near you, choose Powells.com, a great Oregon institution, a union bookstore.

Neil Young starts Starbucks boycott over GMO suit

Rolling Stone - Neil Young is seeking a new source for his daily latte. The rocker announced on his website this week that he's boycotting Starbucks over the coffee company's involvement in a lawsuit against the state of Vermont's new requirements to label genetically modified ingredients.

"I used to line up and get my latte everyday, but yesterday was my last one," Young wrote. "Starbucks has teamed up with Monsanto to sue Vermont, and stop accurate food labeling."

Vermont passed a law last spring that requires all food products containing GMOs to be labeled as such by July 1, 2016, with the exception of dairy products, meat, alcohol and food served in restaurants. Shortly afterward, four food industry organizations filed a lawsuit against the state that challenged the law's constitutionality...

"Monsanto might not care what we think -- but as a public-facing company, Starbucks does," Young wrote. "If we can generate enough attention, we can push Starbucks to withdraw its support for the lawsuit, and then pressure other companies to do the same."

"Considering that Starbucks has been progressive on LGBT and labor issues in the past, it's disappointing that it is working with the biggest villain of them all, Monsanto," he continued.

"There's much more at stake here than just whether GMO foods will be labeled in a single U.S. state. Vermont is the very first state in the U.S. to require labeling. Dozens of other states have said that they will follow this path -- in order to encourage this, we need to ensure that Vermont's law stands strong."

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City Unintentionally Destroys Own Parking Meter Argument

Going by the official City of Salem website, what is the ONE MOST IMPORTANT THING about downtown in terms of luring shoppers? See headline below for your answer:

Celebrate the Holiday Season in Downtown Salem - FREE Customer Parking
// City of Salem

There are lots of views on parking charges, but one thing that everyone who criticizes the downtown merchants (afraid of what meters will do to them) ought to admit is that those merchants are just accepting what the city itself emphasizes time and time again: that people in Salem are irrationally welded to "free" parking and make decisions about where to shop and recreate based on the presence or absence of visible parking charges.

Want more proof that the city talks with forked tongue on parking meters? 

Ask the city why the meters in the city parking ramp next to the library are all charging half of what all the other city meters are. The library staff were adamant that they would see a big drop off in library use if people had to pay the same rate at the library as at other city meters. 

Maybe, maybe not.

But if public employees are so sure that parking charges drive away business, then it's hard to criticize business owners -- most of whom rent their storefronts, paying under leases that were negotiated without meters -- for being believing them, or for being concerned about how meters will affect their livelihood. 

Downtown is a complex puzzle, and insisting that we should simply put in meters and that they are the solution to downtown's troubles --- well, if you believe that, you all very likely not someone with any economic stake in the downtown, and you won't miss any meals if your theory turns out to have been wrong.

We need to step-back, focus on the bigger picture, and stop insisting that the only element needing to be addressed is meters, yes or no. For one thing, Salem needs to stop undermining downtown by threatening to bypass it to please Chuck Sides and the Chamber of the 1% by building the proposed Third Bridge (Bridgasaurus Boondogglus), which could very well turn Salem's downtown into a downtown like those in Eastern Rust Belt cities.

"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."

The push for the Salem Third Bridge Explained

This is why folksinger U.U. Phillips used to say that the most radical thing in America is a long memory -- the scams of the rich and powerful to fleece the rest of us never change. An insurance broker in Moses's New York, a mall developer in Keizer ... A rich grifter for every place in every era. The money quote is on top, but the whole thing is fascinating.

JOHN R. MACARTHUR: Imagine trying to do the book without those carbons.

CARO: It wasn't only those papers. There are other collections of papers. I found a memo that showed how Moses used public works to create and wield power. To us, a public work—a bridge, let's say—is a transportation device. To Robert Moses, a bridge was also a source of power. Every aspect of it was a source of power. For example, there was no terrorism then; the Triborough Bridge was not going to fall down. There's no risk. Whoever got to write the insurance policies on the structure would make a lot of money. So Moses would parcel out the policies to politicians who were insurance brokers on the basis of how many votes they controlled in Albany. I found memos in the Moses file that said just that: Jim Roe [a Democratic boss in Queens] has twelve votes in Albany. Give him 18 percent of the insurance premiums. So-and-so controls three votes. Give him 4 percent of the premiums. That sort of thing.

I read this Harper's Magazine article on Zinio and would like to share it with you!

Reading Revolutionized.
Go digital at www.zinio.com

[Reminiscence] CARBON FOOTPRINT

From a conversation between Robert Caro and John R. MacArthur, marking the fortieth anniversary of the publication of The Power Broker, Caro's biography of Robert Moses, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Caro is also the author of the multivolume biography The Years of Lyndon Johnson. MacArthur is the publisher of Harper's Magazine. A first edition of The Power Broker, annotated by Caro, will be included in PEN America's First Editions/Second Thoughts auction on December 2.

ROBERT CARO: By the time I started the book, Robert Moses had been in power for almost half a century. Moses's people said to me: "He'll never talk to you. His family will never talk to you. His friends will never talk to you. Anyone who ever wants a contract from this city or state will never talk to you."

Worse, they said I could never see any of his papers. Moses had seen to it that they had been closed to the public and the press for forty years. So I was never going to get to see them. This was an even bigger handicap. It's hard to do the kind of book I wanted to do—a book that would explain Moses's methods of getting and using power—without written documentation.

One day I got a call from a wonderful journalist named Mary Perot Nichols, who had been an editor at the Village Voice and was then the director of communications for Thomas Hoving, one of Moses's successors as parks commissioner. She called me out of nowhere. We'd met maybe two or three times, when we were both covering the New York World's Fair in 1964–65. But apparently—she told me this later—she'd been watching my work at Newsday.

"I hear you're doing a book on Robert Moses," she said. "And I hear you can't see his papers." I told her that was right. She said, "Well, he forgot about the carbon copies."

Moses had been parks commissioner for almost thirty years. The commissioner's office is at the Arsenal in Central Park, but Moses hated to go there because there was no private entrance. When he was going upstairs to his office, the other employees could talk to him, and he really didn't like people talking to him. So he ran the Parks Department from his real office, which was on Randall's Island. There's a building underneath the toll plaza of the Triborough Bridge, and that was his headquarters. No one could talk to him there unless he wanted to talk to them.

He ran the Parks Department by communiqué, and he would send carbon copies of the communiqués to the Arsenal. He went to a lot of trouble to make sure other caches of his papers were brought to Randall's Island, but he forgot about the carbon copies. Mary said, "I know where they are, and I can get you a key."

If you go to the 79th Street Boat Basin—I think it's two levels down, but I haven't been there in so long—there is an area that had been designed as a parking garage. As I remember it, it was a huge empty white space. When I went there the first time, I turned the key and tugged the door open, and it's a huge garage. But there are no trucks. I turned on the light—they had just a couple of bare bulbs—and there against the far wall was this entire row of four-drawer file cabinets containing not just carbons but thirty years of memos, orders, and directives from Robert Moses to the Parks Department.

Ina [Caro's wife and his only researcher on the book] and I spent several months going through those papers. This was the era before Xerox. We had a primitive copying machine. It was heavy. So Ina and I would park in a lot by the river, and we'd go down to this garage every day carrying this copying machine together. I would take notes, and when I wanted something copied, Ina and I would copy it.

Now, the parkies—these guys in their green Parks Department uniforms, we called them parkies then—they didn't know what I was doing there, exactly, but they vaguely knew it was something that the commissioner, as they all still referred to him, wouldn't like. So whenever we went out—if we went for lunch, or if we both went out to the bathroom or something—they would unscrew the lightbulbs. It would be pitch-black when we got back. After a while Ina and I would arrive in the morning, and I'd have a packet of four light bulbs in my attaché case.

JOHN R. MACARTHUR: Imagine trying to do the book without those carbons.

CARO: It wasn't only those papers. There are other collections of papers. I found a memo that showed how Moses used public works to create and wield power. To us, a public work—a bridge, let's say—is a transportation device. To Robert Moses, a bridge was also a source of power. Every aspect of it was a source of power. For example, there was no terrorism then; the Triborough Bridge was not going to fall down. There's no risk. Whoever got to write the insurance policies on the structure would make a lot of money. So Moses would parcel out the policies to politicians who were insurance brokers on the basis of how many votes they controlled in Albany. I found memos in the Moses file that said just that: Jim Roe [a Democratic boss in Queens] has twelve votes in Albany. Give him 18 percent of the insurance premiums. So-and-so controls three votes. Give him 4 percent of the premiums. That sort of thing.

MACARTHUR: And you couldn't have written that without those memos?

CARO: I'd been told about his method of using every aspect of a public works for power. But it would have been very hard to prove. I wouldn't have used it in the book unless I had something in writing. People ask why these books take so long. Over and over you hear about some collection of written documents, and you have to try to find them. You know, you put it together from so many different places. But you always needed something in writing.

In the latter chapters of the book, I write about how Moses threw people out of their homes to build his highways. I was able to get a pretty good conservative figure: about 250,000 people. He threw out about the same number for his "urban renewal" slumclearance projects. So he threw about half a million people out of their homes. But it was hard to document. It wasn't so hard to document for the highways, because the federal government required some sort of documentation. But for the slum clearance, the federal government didn't require anything.

Moses would just take a site, like the area between Central Park West and Amsterdam Avenue between 97th and 100th Streets. He called it a slum, but it wasn't even a slum. It was a mostly poor but vibrant, bustling black and Puerto Rican neighborhood. And he simply threw the people out.

That was in the Fifties. I wrote the book in the Seventies, and the people were gone. It was really hard to find them. And when you ask people about things that happened a long time ago, their memories are bad, they exaggerate. But I found that there was in fact a written record. I kept finding references to the Women's City Club, whose members had interviewed people as they were losing their homes. Volunteers would do interviews with the people who lived in these apartments, and they would go back to the office and type them up.

Because of those interviews, I was really able to paint a picture. What I found out was that Moses's guys would just tack a piece of paper on the door that looked like a court notice, saying you had thirty days to get out. It wasn't a court notice, but it was designed to look like one. People who had lived in these apartments for years and had no money to move were suddenly told they had thirty days to get out. Then there would be successive notices. You have two weeks, ten days, whatever, to get out. They thought these were official. Once I had these interviews, with their contemporaneous impressions, I could track down these people and go to them and say, "Tell me more."

"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."

Whatever Happened to Overtime? - Nick Hanauer - POLITICO Magazine

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/11/overtime-pay-obama-congress-112954_Page3.html#ixzz3KkQ4HTj8

"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."

Corporate racketeers use bought-and-sold politicians to defeat honest food labeling laws

	Congress Is Hearing Monsanto's "Dream Bill" Next Week Tell Your Members of Congress to Stop the Bill That Kills GMO Labeling! We Deserve the Right to Know What We Are Eating Email Congress: Stop the Monsanto Dream Bill to Kill GMO Labels! Next week, a U.S. House committee will hold a hearing on Rep. Mike Pompeo's (R-KS) bill that would kill labels for genetically engineered foods — even at the state level! Tell your Members of Congress to reject Monsanto's "Dream Bill"! The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), with about 300 member companies like Monsanto, Coca-Cola, Nestlé and Smithfield, represents the largest food, beverage and biotech companies — and now on behalf of all these companies, they've gotten Rep. Pompeo to sponsor a bill that will prohibit states from creating their own laws on labeling genetically engineered (GMO) foods, while also making it illegal to create "mandatory" labeling at the federal level. The GMA member companies have spent more than $90 million to defeat ballot initiatives on labeling genetically engineered foods in California, Washington, Oregon and Colorado. Instead of taking this fight state by state, the GMA would like to pass its bill through Congress to stop all genetically engineered food labels nation wide. Even Vermont, Connecticut and Maine, which have already passed legislation to require labels on GMO foods, would not be allowed to enact their own laws if this passes! We know that more than 90% of people want labeling on foods that contain genetically engineered ingredients, and right now the Oregon ballot initiative to label genetically engineered foods is in a recount because the vote is so close. In 2014 alone, more than 20 states have considered their own labeling laws, but the GMA's anti-labeling bill would nullify all of these efforts! By genetically engineering food, these big companies are changing plants and animals in a way that could never happen in nature. Most of these crops are engineered to withstand heavy chemical applications or to produce their own pesticides. And these GMO crops are untested, unlabeled and could be unsafe, which is why we believe everyone has a right to know if their food has been genetically engineered. The GMA bill already has 37 co-sponsors, and if your elected officials don't hear from you, they could be swayed by the GMA's deep pockets. What we need is for you and your friends, family and neighbors to speak out. Send an email to your U.S. Representative to let them know where you stand. Your lawmakers need to hear from you right away.  Thanks for taking action, Sarah Alexander Deputy Organizing Director Food & Water Watch act(at)fwwatch(dot)org P.S. Our friends and allies from all over the country will be coming to DC next week to show opposition to this bill. Find out how you can get involved: http://orgcns.org/1qyIMuh

"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."

REALLY outrageous example of forced arbitration

http://bit.ly/1AuyX0Q

 

To have a sense of just how unfair the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions relating to forced arbitration are, THIS is a powerful example.  

An 88 year old consumer goes to a Rent-A-Center to rent a refrigerator.  One of their employees comes to his house, in uniform, and severely beats him, leaving him to be found three days later.  But he can't go to court, because all his legal rights are tossed into forced arbitration.  

Who would ever expect that signing a consumer agreement about a refrigerator would mean that you've lost your rights if someone invades your home and savagely beats you?

"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."

Public Involvement This Good Doesn't Come Cheap

The team running the Bridgeasaurus Boondogglus shows their dedication to facilitating public involvement with the Calendar of activities for the project, taken 30 minutes before the first of two workshops today, Wednesday, 3 December.

"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."

Fight GIGO! Take the Fantasy Funding Survey

GIGO is the old wisdom from early computer days, a reminder that no process is better than its inputs, so garbage in gets you garbage out.

The gangsters running the 3d Bridge scam have resorted to Survey Monkey surveys on Salem's willingness to spend imaginary money for an imaginary benefit with no alternative uses for the money considered in the mix. It's pure garbage of the rankest kind.

An unscientific funding survey is a particularly deep crock of GIGO because we actually know quite a bit about how to identify preferences for spending -- there's nothing more well studied in America than how to know what people are willing to pay for things (which is often quite different from what people will tell you, or that they even realize themselves).

So the only reason for this little joke of a survey is to allow the con men (CH2M-Hill) running this very cushy racket through their obedient pets at ODOT ($60k/month corporate welfare for the last seven years, with millions more in the pipeline) to collect some propaganda nuggets they can try to use to sell their product to the rubes ... Which is to say, us, the people of Salem.

The deep, abiding cynicism of Salem's Bridgasaurus Boondogglus Crew is a marvel to behold. It's our own little version of life as it is lived in many little banana republics and African barely-nations, where the gangsters on the top ignore the needs of the people and instead build themselves massive, useless projects funded by debt that ends up bankrupting the people and lashing them to debt for generations.

It's the oldest story in public administration -- one of the reasons the poor are always with us is that the capture of the people's representatives by the well-heeled few, the Chamber of the 1%, is almost always with us too.

> ODOT is fielding an unscientific Survey Monkey survey to enable anyone to voice their opinion on how to fund the 3rd Bridge:
>
> https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SYJMC9J
>
> Questions 14-20 ask about the four identified funding methods: property tax, gas tax, vehicle registration tax and tolls on all bridges (Marion, Center and the 3rd Bridge).
>
> We urge you to take the survey and indicate that you "strongly oppose" all four methods of bridge funding.
>
> You can also indicate on Question 12 that "the project should not be built."
>
> Do it now!
>
> Forward this to your friends and ask them to take the survey. This is a great opportunity to send a strong message that we don't want a 3rd Bridge and we don't want to pay for it.

Tuesday, 12/2, 6 p.m. Salem Police Facility Task Force Meeting, change of location

"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."

>
> The Police Facility Task force is meeting Tomorrow, Tues, Dec. 2 from 6 to 8 pm at Courthouse Square (Transit building) on Court St., in the 5th Floor Boardroom. Consultants will be present to discuss the design of the proposed facility. The public is invited to come and observe the meeting and to comment as well. I really hope that some of you will attend. Thanks.