Exposed: Chevron’s Cover-up of Gross Environmental Abuses in Ecuador
From Alternet:
What is a lost culture? Is it just some intangible time before? Is it an economy? Can you inventory a lost culture in the number of lives lost or rivers polluted?
Those questions haunt the lawsuit brought by Ecuadorian indigenous groups against the U.S. oil giant, Chevron, for environmental destruction it allegedly wrought as Texaco in the Amazon rainforest of eastern Ecuador. On paper, the suit asks Chevron (which acquired Texaco in 2001) to pay for the environmental cleanup of an area three times the size of Manhattan, pocked with open oil pits and steeped in 18 billion gallons of dumped industrial wastewater. The damages in the case — calculated by a court-appointed expert at a record $27 billion — would also establish a health fund to pay for the…
Wal-Mart Fires Associate Of Year, Cancer Patient, For Medical Marijuana Use
Steve Elliott writes on Toke of the Town:
Despite medical marijuana being legal in Michigan, WalMart has fired a cancer patient and former employee of the year who tested positive for the drug, which was recommended by his doctor.
“I was terminated because I failed a drug screening,” ex-WalMart employee Joseph Casias told WZZM-13.
In 2008, Casias was Associate of the Year at the WalMart store in Battle Creek, Mich., despite suffering from sinus cancer and an inoperable brain tumor. At his doctor’s recommendation, Casias legally uses medical marijuana to ease his pain.
“It helps tremendously,” Casias said. “I only use it to stop the pain. To make me feel more comfortable and active as a person.”
Casias said he went to work every day during his five years at WalMart. “I gave them everything,”…
Why Google Is A Hungry Beast (Video)
Wow, if Google was making its money in the defense industry (could be) instead of advertising, it would be Skynet. Don’t be evil, right guys?
Great video from the Hungry Beast. If you’re in Oz you can watch here, otherwise see below:
NYC Schools Prohibit Sale of Home-Made Food and Allow Junk for Fundraising?!?
From NYC Green Schools:
Regulation A-812 prohibits home-baked foods from being sold at school fundraisers, while permitting Doritos and Pop-Tarts instead! Yes, this regulation mandates that if we want to raise money for our schools, we have to buy and sell junk food to our children!
VOICE YOUR OPPOSITION TO REGULATION A-812!
— Our schools cannot become venues for big food corporations, like Pepsi Cola and Kellogg’s to advertise and sell their processed foods to our children!
— Our children must not receive the message that junk food is healthier for them than foods cooked at home!
— We, as parents, must be allowed to participate in the discussion about our children’s health and nutrition!
Coca-Cola and Water Use in India: “Good Till the Last Drop”
From ScienceBlogs.com:
The marketing executive who came up with Coca-Cola’s popular slogan in 1908 most likely never expected it would be taken so literally. However, a hundred years ago there probably weren’t many who imagined a term like “water wars” could exist in a region that experiences annual monsoons.
On February 25 a complaint was filed in the New York Supreme Court against the The Coca-Cola Company alleging that they knew about and sought to cover up human rights abuses in Guatemala. While that trial gets started, the company’s controversial practices in India continue involving the over-exploitation of limited water resources and the contamination of groundwater supplies. In response to public outcry the soft drink company is now championing itself as a longtime environmental leader and the business community is eager to advertise…
The Government Can Take Your House and Land, Then Sell Them to Private Corporations
Here is another chapter from Russ Kick’s classic bite-size Disinformation book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.
For more on Russ Kick, check out his website, The Memory Hole.
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It’s not an issue that gets much attention, but the government has the right to seize your house, business, and/or land, forcing you into the street. This mighty power, called “eminent domain,” is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment: “… nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.” Every single state constitution also stipulates that a person whose property is taken must be justly compensated and that the property must be put to public use. This should mean that if your house is smack-dab in the middle of a proposed highway, the government can take…
Working For Walmart
Outside the Wal-Mart in Orland Hills, IL, by Clean Wal-Mart.
Kevin Robinson writes on Chicagoist:
As part of our on-going coverage of Wal-Mart’s attempt to break into the Chicago retail market, we take a look this week at the company’s employment practices in the Chicago metropolitan area. Chicagoist met up with three Wal-Mart employees to talk to them about their jobs, company policy, and why they work there.
Roslyn Lindfair also knows what it’s like to be hurt on the job at Wal-Mart. She worked at the Cary, Illinois store for five years as a cashier before she was fired after her arm got caught in a turnstile.
“It was maybe about 7:30, I was ringing up a customer, and she was turning the turnstile one way, and I was turning another way. And…
Why Jeff Bridges is Really ‘The Dude’
As one of the millions of people affected by the ABC-Cablevision pow-wow on Sunday night, yes it is actually true…
The Dude Abides.
Here is evidence why Jeff Bridges is actually “The Dude”… as The Big Lebowski showed us — the viewing audience — in this Dude’s heart, the man behind the character, said in his own words raising his statuette to the heavens he said:
I want to thank my mum and dad for turning me on to such a groovy profession. My mum and dad loved showbiz so much. This is honoring them as much as it is me.
Corporate Spies Like Us: A Peek Into a Shadowy World
From Daily Finance:
Some social critics say companies that lay off employees are doing permanent damage to themselves. After all, they’ve spent years training the workers they’re casting aside. Moreover, they may be abruptly discarding a great deal of institutional memory.
It turns out there’s another cause for concern: Laid-off workers could be a valuable source of information to corporate spies. Such spooks have been known to stage fake job interviews to ferret out information about a former employer’s ways and future plans. Even still-employed workers “can be surprisingly candid about their own company when they think they’re interviewing for a job,” writes Politico correspondent Eamon Javers.
At its best, Javers’s uneven, intermittently absorbing new book, Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage, exposes a little-known world of black ops, eavesdropping, and corporate skullduggery. But the book is marred by an elastic definition of corporate espionage, stretched to include everything from routine financial investigations to ordinary detective work conducted by Kroll Associates. Worse, the volume’s historical chapters are poorly researched and larded with extraneous detail…
“Retail Terrorists” Strike Brooklyn American Apparel Store
Has the iconic/ironic hipster mecca finally reached the tipping point?
via freewilliamsburg:
Somebody threw rocks through the windows of Williamsburg’s American Apparel last night, in what looks to be a bout of “retail terrorism.”
I called up the store to ask just what happened, and was told that yes, indeed, someone threw rocks inside the store but then they were caught by the police. I asked if they think the leggings assassins were acting maliciously, or just drunks, and they said, “Yea, they wrote that on their blog. They have blogs. Someone took pictures and put them up on a blog.” I asked which blog that was, but they didn’t know.
Update 1-1:44 pm: Heard from a tipster who knows an employee at a nearby establishment. That person’s report from the scene makes it sounds a heck of a lot scarier than just a few kids throwing rocks! Per his recollection, there were about 50 guys dressed all in black, wearing masks, and “causing total mayhem” all along No. 6th St, “dumping out trash dumpsters and setting everything on fire in the streets, and then smashing all the windows of the american apparel.”
Hurricane Katrina Victims to Sue Oil Companies over Global Warming
Via the Telegraph:
Victims of Hurricane Katrina are seeking to sue carbon gas-emitting multinationals for helping fuel global warming and boosting the 2005 storm.
The class action suit brought by residents from southern Mississippi, which was ravaged by hurricane-force winds and driving rains, was first filed just weeks after the August 2005 storm hit.
“The plaintiffs allege that defendants’ operation of energy, fossil fuels, and chemical industries in the United States caused the emission of greenhouse gasses that contributed to global warming,” say the documents seen by the AFP news agency.
The increase in global surface air and water temperatures “in turn caused a rise in sea levels and added to the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina, which combined to destroy the plaintiffs’ private property, as well as public property useful to them.”
Mapping The American Burger Wars
The excellent WeatherSealed by Stephen Von Worley graphically illustrates the battle for dominance in the American fast food stakes:
Imagine, if you will, the burger force – a field of energy that radiates from every freshly-cooked patty, earth-penetrating and inverse-squared with distance, compelling the hungry carnivore to seek out and devour the well-done ground beef at the source.
Now, wrap that concept in a Star Wars motif – set in the present day, with the second-tier burger chains as the rebels – each, by themselves, without mutual aid, battling the 12,000-plus restaurant McEmpire. The situation is most dire, for the upstarts control but a few significant islands of territory amid the overwhelming and darkly-rendered influence of the McForce:
Territory controlled by the eight largest U.S. burger chains.
In this and the following graphic, each individual restaurant location has equal power. The…
Weight Watchers Endorses McDonalds
How to destroy your brand fast! As reported in the Guardian:
McDonald’s is hardly an ideal dining location for anyone struggling to stay slim. But the fast food chain scored a PR coup today when Weight Watchers agreed to endorse some of its products in New Zealand – a move met with outrage by nutritionists and obesity experts.
As part of the deal, which the company says is the first of its kind in the world, McDonald’s will use the Weight Watchers logo on its menu boards and Weight Watchers will promote McDonald’s to dieters.
The link-up is the fast-food chain’s latest attempt to improve its reputation by securing endorsements. In January, to the horror of gastronomes, Italy’s agriculture minister, Luca Zaia, helped launch the McItaly range of burgers. For a representative of…
What Disinfo.com Readers Are Saying About This Universal Healthcare Map
Just to help put things in perspective, via Wikipedia:
Public universal health care around the world (as of December 2009).
BLUE = Single-payer universal health care (16)
GREEN = Public universal health care through other means (51)
GRAY = No universal health care or no data
Have You Ever Been Billed $1,000 For a Toothbrush in a Hospital?
From CNN, a medical billing advocate shows Elizabeth Cohen some of the wasteful charges she’s seen in bills:
Kraft Foods Employees Sell Millions of Molded Tomato Products For Bribes
His name was Robert Watson. (There are three others.) WILLIAM NEUMAN reports in the New York Times:
Robert Watson, a top ingredient buyer for Kraft Foods, needed $20,000 to pay his taxes. So he called a broker for a California tomato processor that for years had been paying him bribes to get its products into Kraft’s plants.
The check would soon be in the mail, the broker promised. “We’ll have to deduct it out of your commissions as we move forward,” he said, using a euphemism for bribes.
Days later, federal agents descended on Kraft’s offices near Chicago and confronted Mr. Watson. He admitted his role in a bribery scheme that has laid bare a startling vein of corruption in the food industry. And because the scheme also involved millions of pounds of tomato…
“Take ‘Er Down”: The American Dream Turned Nightmare
Not sure how I feel about this very American expression of homeowner rage:
from death+taxes
It’s undeniable that the recession has unleashed anger across the nation. And that anger’s rapidly devolving into madness. From Joe Stack’s flight into an IRS building to Terry Hoskins, the man who bulldozed his house ahead of foreclosure, seemingly average Americans are lashing out in crazy ways. While Stack’s attack qualifies as the most dramatic outburst, the Hoskins incident, hardly isolated, provides a far more telling glimpse into the ways the economic crisis has soured, and scorched, the American dream.
Owning a home once ranked as the primary goal in the American experience. It was the pinnacle of national striving and homes were icons. Now, as millions face foreclosure, that dream has turned into a nightmare. At his wit’s end about a potential foreclosure, and undoubtedly angry with the bank, Ohio man Terry Hoskins decided to take matters into his own hands and destroy his home. “When I see I owe $160,000 on a home valued at $350,000, and someone decides they want to take it — no, I wasn’t going to stand for that, so I took it down,” explained Hoskins. It’s a compelling tale, one that gives a face to universal public frustration. It’s also turned Hoskins into something of a hero.
Scores of people are praising Hoskins’ middle finger to big business. That’s not surprising. It was, after all, a somewhat charming way to get back at the bank. Rush Limbaugh called his and Stack’s actions “defiance.” Neighbors and sympathizers have started a website to collect donations for Hoskins, who still owes the bank and IRS hundreds of thousands, and may lose his business. Local businesses are showing their support by selling t-shirts and hats that depict a bulldozer and read “Take ‘Er Down.” It’s unclear if “‘er” means the banks, the government, or just foreclosed homes. A sympathetic singer, meanwhile, has written a ballad about Hoskins.
It doesn’t matter to many that Hoskins insists he didn’t do it to “stick it to the man.” He unwittingly embodies public anger, and the public likes to see a mirror image. Though Hoskins gained widespread exposure for his antics, he’s hardly the only American taking drastic steps to avoid foreclosure. He’s just the most flamboyant and, therefore, spellbinding.
‘Toyota Defense’ Might Free Jailed Minnesota Man
Koua Fong Lee
STEVE KARNOWSKI writes on the AP via Yahoo News:
LINO LAKES, Minn. – Ever since his 1996 Toyota Camry shot up an interstate ramp, plowing into the back of an Oldsmobile in a horrific crash that killed three people, Koua Fong Lee insisted he had done everything he could to stop the car.
A jury didn’t believe him, and a judge sentenced him to eight years in prison. But now, new revelations of safety problems with Toyotas have Lee pressing to get his case reopened and his freedom restored. Relatives of the victims — who condemned Lee at his sentencing three years ago — now believe he is innocent and are planning to sue Toyota. The prosecutor who sent Lee to prison said he thinks the case merits another look.
“I know…
The New York Times on Its ‘Kill More Civilians’ Op-Ed Writer
Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon:
Last week, I wrote about the mysterious Op-Ed writer, Lara M. Dadkhah, published by the New York Times, who urged that the U.S. be less restrained about slaughtering Afghan civilians with air attacks (when Dadkhar reads things like this from today — “Airstrike kills dozens in Afghanistan … Ground forces at the scene found women and children among the casualties” — she presumably thinks: “yes, that’s exactly what we need more of”).
As I noted, beyond how deranged the argument was, virtually no information was disclosed about Dadkhah herself, who was allowed to tout her work for a “defense consulting company” without even specifying who it was. The Hillman Foundation’s Charles Kaiser asked NYT Op-Ed Page Editor David Shipley about this strange matter and received this reply:
