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Thursday, June 13, 2013

Call in the B Team




Schumpeter

 

Call in the B Team

Richard Branson’s big idea for building a better version of capitalism




SLOWING down seems to be the last thing on Sir Richard Branson’s mind. Since turning 62 in July, the bearded British entrepreneur has as usual been making headlines around the world. On October 3rd he celebrated victory in a campaign to overturn the British government’s decision to strip Virgin Trains, of which his Virgin Group owns 51%, of the West Coast main-line rail franchise. The government now admits it got its sums wrong, as Sir Richard had claimed, and the bidding process will be rerun (see article). Recently Sir Richard has also been in the news for (among other things) urging Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to end America’s war on drugs; declaring his intention to visit Mars; and parking a mock-up of the new Upper Class bar from his transatlantic aircraft outside the New York Stock Exchange. From there he promoted his latest book (“Like A Virgin: Secrets They Won’t Teach You at Business School”) and led a discussion with his Twitter followers. The subject under discussion was: “How can business change the world for the better?”

This last topic has become increasingly central to Brand Branson in the past few years—although social activism has been part of Sir Richard’s repertoire since he opened advice centres for students in the 1960s. Under Virgin Unite, its charitable arm, his corporate empire has become a leader in the booming business of “cause marketing” (aligning brands with charities). Sir Richard has even updated his old creed of “have fun and the money will come” to “do good, have fun and the money will come.” He has also launched a couple of much bigger ideas. One, the result of conversations he had with Nelson Mandela and Peter Gabriel, is the Elders, a group of veteran statesmen (including Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson) who work together to provide advice to today’s politicians. The second is the Carbon War Room, an attempt to bring business leaders together to find profitable ways to reduce fossil-fuel use in the most carbon-intensive industries, including Sir Richard’s beloved airline business. On October 3rd, a few hours after his win against the British government, Sir Richard began to roll out a third initiative, which he has christened the B Team.

Experienced watchers of Sir Richard may suspect that the B is for Branson, but Schumpeter is informed that it refers both to business and to the need for a “Plan B” for capitalism. The idea is to form a small group of business leaders who will campaign for reforms to make capitalism more oriented to the long term and socially more responsible. Needless to say, they will bear no resemblance to the A-Team, whom fans of 1980s television will recall as a bunch of mercenaries who everyone assumed were in it for themselves but in fact wanted to save the world.
 
 

If you have a problem, if no one else can help…


The B Team will have two co-chairmen: Sir Richard and Jochen Zeitz, who as boss of Puma, a German sporting-goods firm, introduced a celebrated ethical programme based on being “fair, honest, positive and creative”. Other members are being recruited, from both rich and developing countries, before a formal launch early next year. The idea is that each member will champion a particular reform and work with the others to get all the reforms adopted. A consultation exercise is already under way to find which reforms are ripe to be pushed through. Proper accounting for environmental impact, an end to quarterly reporting of results and the phasing-out of fossil-fuel subsidies are likely to be near the top of the list.

Though popular for a businessman, Sir Richard also has plenty of critics, especially at home in Britain, where relentless self-promotion is still frowned on. They will no doubt regard this new campaign as the latest example of his hubris. Despite the beard and his fondness for woolly jumpers, he is no cuddly capitalist. Nor is he yet a great philanthropist: his pledge to leave 10% of his estate to charity pales beside the promise to give away most of their wealth made by signatories of the Giving Pledge for American billionaires launched by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Yet you do not have to be a saint to be an effective reformer, and a striking thing about Sir Richard’s recent do-gooding initiatives is that they have been grounded in an acute understanding of the practicalities of how to make change happen.

After a slow start, the Elders have started to show that with the right back-office support, a group of political big beasts can work effectively together, whether behind the scenes (peacemaking in Cyprus, Kenya and Sudan, for instance) or publicly, with their campaign against child marriage. The B Team will likewise have independent financing and a strong support staff, although it will not be quite the direct replica, the Business Elders, that Sir Richard envisaged at first. There were too few candidates from the business world of sufficiently unimpeachable character, it seems, and, more positively, some members of the B Team are likely to be relatively young. Instead, the plan is for the B Team to consist of people who have done business in a way that fits the guiding principles, such as Mr Zeitz, perhaps Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream) or Paul Polman, who is trying to double Unilever’s revenues while halving its environmental footprint.

The B Team will also share the Carbon War Room’s focus on promoting only those changes that have both a big potential impact and a good chance of being achieved. The War Room, for instance, quickly identified $50 billion in potential savings in the shipping industry from better energy use: those savings are now being sought by leading firms. One reason to be optimistic is that many of these reforms have strong support from the generation of leaders now rising to the top of the corporate world, who are often deeply unhappy with the practices and norms bequeathed by their elders—other than Sir Richard, of course.


Economist.com/blogs/schumpeter


The B Team Launches: Nonprofit Group Aims To Build Better Version Of Capitalism

impact


The B Team Launches: Nonprofit Group Aims To Build Better Version Of Capitalism (VIDEO)

Posted:   |  Updated: 06/13/2013 6:55 am EDT






The B Team

Sir Richard Branson, founder and chairman of Virgin Group, and Jochen Zeitz, chairman of Puma, launched a nonprofit group called The B Team on Thursday, Business Green reported.

The B Team aims to build a better version of capitalism, one that prioritizes people and planet over profit. By joining forces with business leaders from across the globe, the group will campaign for reforms that will make businesses more socially responsible, The Economist reported.

"Today we want to start a global conversation on a 'Plan B' for business," Branson said in a statement. "We are working with government agencies, the social sector and business leaders to help get on top of some of the world's seemingly intractable challenges. We are keen to listen, learn and share with others to build businesses that do what's right for people and the planet."
Joining Branson and Zeitz are:
  • Arianna Huffington, Chair, President & Editor In Chief, The Huffington Post Media Group
  • Shari Arison, Owner, Arison Group
  • Kathy Calvin, President and CEO, United Nations Foundation
  • Mo Ibrahim, Founder, Celtel
  • Guilherme Leal, Founder & Co-Chairman, Natura
  • Strive Masiyiwa, Founder & Chairman, Econet Wireless
  • Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Government of Nigeria
  • François-Henri Pinault, CEO & Chairman, Kering
  • Paul Polman, CEO, Unilever
  • Ratan Tata, Chairman Emeritus, Tata Group
  • Zhang Yue, Founder and Chairman, Broad Group
  • Professor Muhammad Yunus, Chairman, Yunus Centre
  • Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, Deputy Chair, The Elders (Honorary Leader)
  • Mary Robinson, Secretary, The Elders and President, Mary Robinson Foundation - Climate Justice (Honorary Leader)
During a live online broadcast, the B Team Leaders also issued a joint declaration: "We, the undersigned, believe that the world is at a critical crossroads. Global-business leaders need to come together to advance the wellbeing of people and the planet. In fact, we think business has to think this way in order to thrive."
Click here to read Arianna's vision for The B Team.



People, Planet, Profit: Introducing the B Team

Posted: 06/12/2013 10:50 pm
 
 

If you are one of the many of people who believe that Plan A of the way business is managed -- aka the status quo -- is not working, this is a good day for you. Because I'm happy to announce the launch of the B Team, whose mission is to introduce a Plan B. As one of 14 inaugural members of the B Team, I've been inspired by the way that over the last few months -- in meetings and on email threads -- the co-founders of the team, Richard Branson and Jochen Zeitz, and the other inaugural leaders, have been determined to change the values that drive businesses, to "prioritize people and planet alongside profit" and to move beyond our obsession with quarterly earnings and short-term growth. Plan A -- the pursuit of short-term profit at the exclusion of everything else -- isn't working for anyone. It's not working for businesses' long-term sustainability, and it's not working for employees' well-being. And at a time when so many governments are gridlocked and paralyzed and unable or unwilling to pursue big, bold, far-sighted goals, the private sector has a responsibility and a unique opportunity to become a catalyst for fundamental change.

Many of my fellow B Team members are gathering today in London for our kick-off event. They come from all over the world and include microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus, Unilever CEO Paul Polman, Indian businessman Ratan Tata, Kering CEO Francois-Henri Pinault, United Nations Foundation CEO Kathy Calvin, Sudanese-British telecommunications entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim, Brazilian social entrepreneur Guilherme Leal, Zimbabwean businessman Strive Masiyiwa, the Arison Group's Shari Arison, Broad Group China Chairman and Founder Zhang Yue, and Nigeria's Coordinating Minister of the Economy and Minister of Finance Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

We share a belief that a future focused on people, planet and profit is within reach, and that in the long run, what is good for our planet, for individuals and for communities, is good for our businesses' bottom lines as well. As Richard and Jochen write, we want to define "new rules and models for the future of business -- not incremental 'change as usual.'"

We also want to start conversations on how current and future leaders, by adhering to the Plan B principles, can avoid the missteps that have led to so many of our current self-inflicted crises. On an individual level, people are burning out. On a company level, we are at the mercy of quarterly earnings and beating the expectations game. And on a collective level, we're burning up the planet. We need leaders who are committed to strategic plans centered on an agenda of people, planet and profit -- and not just token gestures to sustainability and short-term goals.

And those of us in the media have to do a much better job at putting the spotlight on what is working. There is a real danger that by focusing exclusively on what is not working and what is dysfunctional, we are missing out on spotlighting the leaders and organizations already taking steps to change the way we do business around the world.

This is a moment of great possibility and opportunity for all of us to play our part in course-correcting, and leveraging the best parts of the spirit of business and entrepreneurship to bring about fundamental changes to the ways we do business -- for the benefit of individuals, communities, and companies.
So please join the B Team and help us accelerate that shift by putting the spotlight on business leaders at the forefront of this movement and connecting them with each other. And as always, use the comments section to let us know what you think.

Sunday, June 9, 2013

Bernie Sanders Proposes Youth Jobs Act That Would Create Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs

PoliticusUSA

Real Liberal Politics


more from Jason Easley







Sen. Bernie Sanders announced today that he will be proposing a youth jobs bill in the Senate that will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs for the nation’s young unemployed.

In a statement Sen. Sanders said, “At a time when the youth unemployment rate is over 16 percent, and the teen unemployment rate is over 24 percent, we have got to do everything we can to make sure that young Americans have the jobs they need to pay for a college education and to move up the economic ladder.”

Sanders’ bill is modeled after the stimulus, and President Obama’s American Jobs Act. The Youth Jobs Act would provide $3 billion to create hundreds of thousands of jobs for the country’s low income and economically disadvantaged young people. The legislation would also provide skills and job training. The Department of Labor would provide $1.5 billion in grants to states to provide job opportunities. States could also use the money to identify employment opportunities in emerging occupations, or occupations that will help their own communities through the public or non-profit sector. Another $1.5 billion in grants would be given to state and local communities to provide job training and apprenticeship programs. All states would receive a minimum of $15 million for summer and year round jobs. The rest of the funding would be used to target areas of high youth unemployment and poverty.

By making the program a grant instead of a mandate, Sen. Sanders’ plan should appeal to some red states, because they can use the funding as they wish to create programs that will lower youth unemployment. The problem will be the far right extremists in the Senate who will do their best to kill the legislation with claims that the nation can’t afford it. (The same Republicans who killed a jobs program for veterans that was already paid for will likely oppose the Youth Jobs Act for the exact same reason.)
Unlike the Republican plan of growing the economy through tax cuts, Sen. Sanders’ plan is based on things that have been proven to work. Sanders isn’t giving unemployed young people a government job, or a check. He is handing the states the resources that they need to innovate and create new opportunities for the future.

His plan is a great idea, but Republicans have made killing great ideas their top priority.

Congressional Republicans don’t want to do anything to help the economy, and the people suffering through it. Any program that would create jobs is viewed through the partisan prism of giving President Obama a victory, and Obama success is something that Republicans have sworn to block at every turn. Sen. Sanders has given Democrats and the left something to fight for. A weapon to use against the mindless automated obstruction championed by the Republican Party.

Bernie Sanders is providing a ray of hope that there are still people in Washington who want to do the right thing for us. Sen. Sanders is fighting for the nation’s tomorrow. He is giving a voice to our hope for the future, and battling those who rejoice in the economic darkness of the recent past.
Bernie Sanders Proposes Youth Jobs Act That Would Create Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs was written by Jason Easley for PoliticusUSA.

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Get Rid of Your Cable TV Package Now!... I'll Bet You Can't. But Here's How!



Media  


I was afraid, too. Then I cut the cord, saved a ton and can still watch whatever I want. Here's how to do it.

 
 
 
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Aigars Reinholds
 
 

For those of you sick of paying ever-higher cable bills, two huge pieces of news in the last week should encourage you to take action.

First came news that two previously cable-only channels, TBS and TNT, “are about to become the first national entertainment networks in the industry to stream on-air content live across multiple platforms,” likely positioning the stations to eventually (though not yet) sell their content direct to consumers on an à la carte online basis, rather than only through traditional cable TV packages. Then yesterday came word that CNN and BuzzFeed are partnering to create a YouTube channel, allowing anyone with an Internet connection — but not necessarily a costly cable subscription — to view the new content.

The action this (and other similar news in the television world) should prompt, of course, is cutting your cable TV cord — or at least considering it.

Now, sure, your initial reaction to that idea might be apprehension or sheer fright. I get it. That was my first reaction, too. Cable TV became so common and seemingly mandatory in the pre-Internet age that it started to seem less like a luxury than a necessary utility you paid for along with water and electricity. But after decades of living in cable TV households, we finally decided to become one of the 3 to 5 million Americans who have cut the cord. Though we kept our Internet connection with our service provider, we terminated cable service — and I have no regrets. Not even close.

Two big factors — one of them related to this week’s news — finally pushed us to end our cable subscription.

First and foremost, there was the cost savings of about $100 a month. That’s a lot of money in our annual family budget and a boatload of cash over a lifetime. Indeed, one estimate found that when you factor in inflation, the monthly ongoing expenditure on cable and what you could additionally be earning off that expenditure if you were investing it, cable TV over your lifetime could cost between $634,000 and $4.2 million.

But cost wasn’t the only consideration. There was also our simultaneous hate and love of cable television content.

On the hate side, I can’t stand most of today’s cable TV news programming. It is loud, grating, infuriatingly vapid and, at times, unnecessarily terrifying. I’ve become particularly aware of — and disgusted by — the latter quality as more and more “news” content is now just a bunch of talking heads opining while ever more horrifying disaster porn fills the screen.

Getting basic information about disasters is certainly important, but being exposed to the disaster porn imagery that dominates cable television simply isn’t healthy. Just as scientific research suggested that seeing images of the World Trade Center collapsing a zillion times created a kind of virtual PTSD for everyone glued to their TV a decade ago, so too do many experts believe that being televisually force-fed repeated images of a bombing or a fertilizer plant explosion or a dude with a bloody meat cleaver can have serious psychological consequences.

Yet, even though I was coming to deeply despise cable news programming, when it was easily available on my television, I often found myself uncontrollably drawn to it. That meant time unnecessarily wasted and, worse, me finding myself in a bad or angry mood. So cutting the cord thankfully removed the frictionless availability of the unwanted noise and terror, while the Internet still, for the most part, lets me find the clips and video content I truly want.

That “want” part is the love side — and the part related to this week’s news about yet more video content going online. Yes, there is some select content (including news content) available on cable TV that I do want. But, as alluded to, much of it is available in some form on the Internet. The news stuff I need for work, for instance, is available if not as video then as text, and that’s fine by me because it’s news. Likewise, the entertainment stuff I want — documentary-based shows, scripted programs, etc. — is mostly available in video form. And I’m not a huge sports watcher, so I don’t feel like I’m missing anything by losing the expensive sports stations that disproportionately weigh down the typical cable bill.

Of course, despite these compelling reasons, it took us a while to actually cut the cord. The inertia was a product of fear and laziness: Basically, I knew there were many other decisions and moves required if we were going to both cut the cord and still get most of the content we really wanted. The possible labor intensity and complexity of getting to my desired content nirvana created paralysis — the kind that cable television providers rely on. That’s right, they are banking on us seeing the ease and simplicity of plug-and-play cable TV — and the perceived hassle of getting content some other way — as a justification to just keep paying the cable bill.

But a few weeks into our cable-free life, I’m here to tell you that cutting the cord and still getting the content you desire isn’t such a hassle, and is well worth the effort. Assuming you aren’t really into sports (yes, cable TV is probably still the only way to satisfy sports junkies), you can probably rid your life of the content you don’t want and get most of what you do want on your existing television screen, that is, as long as you adhere to a some guidelines. Here are a few of those I developed through trial and error while preparing to cut the cord.

1. Get an HD antenna: While it may be difficult to remember, it’s true: Before the advent of cable, there was no such thing as pay TV. Back then, people paid for a television and antenna, and then received the content for free over the airwaves.
Now here’s the good news that may surprise you if you can’t remember that pre-cable era: A solid amount of TV content remains free over the airwaves. And guess what? If you have a decent television and the right antenna, a lot of that content is high-def.

For many, the HD TV and HD antenna is a simple plug-and-play conduit for lots of channels (in our case here in Denver, more than 50). That includes HD versions of live local and national programming from major networks like NBC, CBS and ABC.

The complicating catch, though, can be signal; with some antennas and locations it is easy to get, but with others, not so much. In our home here in Denver, it was the latter, which meant I spent a week going back and forth to Best Buy purchasing indoor HD antennas and then returning them because they weren’t delivering the promised image quality. Despondent, my last-ditch attempt to get this bundle of free content was going online to purchase the much-vaunted Mohu Leaf Ultimate. And guess what? It delivered, leading me to believe that in most population centers you will be able to find an antenna that will work for your situation.

2. Apple TV, another Airplay-esque device, or the right computer-to-TV cord: I don’t mind watching short videos on my computer. However, the computer is my work machine, and because of location issues (it’s in my office) and work-life balance issues, I just don’t want my work computer to be my main television. Yet, having cut the cord, Internet-based content is my television content. How, then, could do I get that computer content onto my couch-positioned television?
Enter the Apple TV. This $99 item is Apple’s conduit to get you to purchase content from the Apple Store (more on that in a second), but it is also a way to stream anything on your properly equipped computer or smartphone onto your regular television. As long as your computer or smartphone has Airplay or Airplay-like capabilities, you can use the Apple TV to mirror the video and audio from your computer or smartphone screen onto your television.

In practice, this puts great YouTube programming like, say, The Young Turks right on your television. Additionally, it opens up a whole world of cable TV content — but for free. You want to see Rachel Maddow’s latest takedown of the GOP? You want to watch the latest “Frontline”? You want any of the programs available for no cost on demand at the free version of Hulu? And you want to do all of this on your cable-less television? No problem; pull up the corresponding websites on your laptop or smartphone and then Airplay it over to your TV.

If you happen to be Apple-averse, or if you just don’t want to buy an Apple TV, the workaround is to just plug your computer or smartphone directly into your TV with a device-to-HDMI cord. It’s a different method with more cords, but it achieves the same result: more content you want on your regular television.
3. You can legally mooch a premium channel off a family member: So far, I’m giving you suggestions for using your Internet connection to get totally free content. The gray area between free and paid content is the mooch.
I’ve written before about the moral dilemmas involved in bumming HBO Go off a family member. Wherever you come down on those questions, the fact remains that, according to the New York Times, that HBO Go “allows subscribers to have three separate accounts so that family members can watch different shows at the same time.”

In practice, this means that if you happen to know a family member who is already paying for HBO, you are allowed to use their account to stream HBO content to your computer or smartphone. Using the aforementioned techniques to mirror those devices onto your TV, you can easily get that content on your regular television screen making your situation, content-wise, no different than someone paying for HBO to come through their TV.

Now the reason I said this is a gray area is because someone (read: a family member) is paying to get you your HBO content. So it’s not totally free. That said, if a family member is already paying for HBO because they really want it integrated into their cable TV landscape, they aren’t paying any extra to let you use their HBO Go account, so that’s at least sort of free … right?

4a. Pay for the stuff you want, part 1: If all the aforementioned free content isn’t enough for you — and it isn’t for me — the next step is to get comfortable with paying for the programming you do want because for most people, that will still be less than what you’d pay when you subscribe to cable.

In terms of dollars spent for sheer volume of programming, the most consumer-friendly ratio in the pay-for-content world is a subscription to a service like Netflix and/or Hulu Plus.

Netflix, for instance, gives you access to movies, documentaries and — most important to making a seamless transition to a cable-free household — many TV series. The catch here is that, unless it is a Netflix original like “House of Cards,” you don’t get those series right when they are released. Instead, you typically have to wait up to a year to be able to stream them (if they are available at all). For people who don’t care about being completely up to date on a TV series, this is a perfect option.

For those who want to be up to date, though, Hulu Plus might be a preferable option (or, better yet, a good compliment to Netflix). Assuming it has the programs you want, Hulu typically provides those programs with a delay of only a few hours or days.

Netflix streaming service (as distinct from its DVD-by-mail service) and Hulu Plus are each$7.99 a month. That’s not nothing – but again, it’s probably way less than you will spend on even basic cable TV service.
4b. Pay for the stuff you want, part 2: OK, so let’s say that, like me, you are a “Mad Men” fan. Let’s also say that, like me, you are willing to wait a year for a lot of shows to get to Netflix, but that you aren’t willing to wait a year or more for this particular show. You want it, and you want it now. Are you out of luck because the show isn’t on Hulu Plus?

Nope. Just buy the season from the Apple Store, and don’t feel like doing that means cutting the cord was a bad idea.

Look, full seasons of current series aren’t cheap; “Mad Men,” for instance, costs $34.99. But again, most TV watchers will spend way more on cable TV than they will buying seasons of the relatively few shows that A) they don’t want to wait to get to Netflix and B) aren’t available on Hulu Plus (or anywhere else). Just do the math: If you save $75 a month by cutting the cord, at the “Mad Men” rate, you’d have to be buying more than two full seasons every month of premium for-pay content to make cutting the cord not worth it. Most likely, you aren’t going to be buying nearly that many full seasons.

5. Powerline Adapter/Wired House: One of the appealing things about cable TV is not just its plug and play simplicity but also its reliability. You turn on the TV and most of the time, you get a decent picture and don’t have to worry about it cutting out.

Streaming video can be a bit different. Especially if you are relying on wireless connectivity, your viewing experience can be plagued by buffering delays — or, as we call it in our household, the spinning wheel of death.

Don’t fret, though; the simple solution is to follow these easy steps to strengthen your home network. When it comes specifically to video, just make sure your streaming content comes through a high-speed connection. You can do this by hard-wiring your Apple TV to an Ethernet cord. If that’s not feasible, then get a powerline adapter that turns your outlets into an Ethernet-like connection.
Sure, you still may see the buffer sign or the spinning wheel every now and again, but you won’t see it all that often. On the occasions that you do, remember: It’s a tiny price for not having to pay that absurd cable bill anymore.

David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books Hostile Takeover and The Uprising. He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Capitalism Could Use Some Tweaking Unless You Love Starving Children




























hungry-child



Doggone if this ain’t a great time to be rich and powerful. ‘Course you can’t be one without the other. So for you “blessed” 2%, whatta time to be alive and a God-fearing, patriotic ‘Merican’ (‘er, white ‘Merican).

In just the last few days, in reading and observing the print, electronic and Online media, one example after another surfaced that, jobless rate, starving children, people without health insurance, stagnant wages, a couple of festering wars, an incendiary middle east, few new revenues, massive services cuts, an idiotically recalcitrant Republican party notwithstanding, none of these “conditions” have seemed to impact the wealthy corporations or individuals in the least.

Take the local financial page headline that caught my eye. “U.S. banks’ earnings skyrocket.” How’s that for rewarding probably the sleaziest business sector in all the land for serial mortgage cheating and lawbreaking during the housing bubble that nearly brought down the U.S. economy. So while you’re yelling “2 Big Macs to go” just after moving out of your foreclosed home, the bank big-wig who caused you the misery of losing your home, is doubtless dining at a 3-star Michelin Red Guide restaurant in some glamorous European destination instead of sharing a prison cell with a heavily tattooed gang-banger. One final thought. A former Federal Reserve Counsel observed, “The divide between the bigs and everybody else is just enormous.”

“Am proud to be an ‘Merican (‘er, white ‘Merican).”
And for all that talk from low paid Tea Party goobers about how we overtax the rich, this little two-paragrapher from the financial page: Wealthier households benefit significantly more than lower earners from big tax breaks for such deductions as mortgage interest and charitable giving according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Of the 10 major tax breaks, the top one-fifth of the wealthiest U.S. households get half of them. Another stat, the top 1% of earners rake in 17% of these breaks. “Am proud to be an ‘Merican (‘er, white ‘Merican).”

Looking at non-’Mericans, who should pop up than the Chinese. Smithfield Foods Inc. a biggie U.S. pork producer has received a $4.72 billion purchase overture (pending federal review) from Shuanghui Holdings Ltd. The majority shareholder of China’s largest meat processor, Shuanghui, that has been in the food safety doghouse since 2011 when it sold pork containing clenbuterol, a chemical that can harm humans. It’s an odd deal really. Smithfield insists it’s not about importing the tainted reputation of Shuanghui Chinese pork, but about exporting. “Yeah, that’s the ticket, we’ll just be exporting; exporting I tell yuh!”
Smithfield is a beautiful fit with the Chinese, with its infamous history of fines and questionable business practices. The consumer friendly site, Food and Water Watch profiled Smithfield a few years ago. It was a greedy acquisition machine that also sought cheap labor in Poland and Romania. It is currently the largest hog producer and processor in the world. At its Utah subsidiary, 500,000 hogs produce 8 times more excrement waste than the entire metro area of Salt Lake City. At nearly 1,500 owned or contracted farm facilities in North Carolina (40% of all state hog farmers) millions of gallons of waste have contaminated area rivers and streams. On many farms, Hogs are kept in the most inhumane conditions imaginable. They’re housed in brutal and harmful gestation crates and huge warehouse buildings where the animals never see the sun and most cannot even turn around.
It should come as no surprise that Smithfield was fined $12.6 million in 1997 for violation of the Clean Water Act and another $5.4 in 2004. There have been other fines levied and a recently settled 15-year labor war. Degradation of the environment, animals and humans is just another cost of doing business with this outfit.

In 2006, Smithfield attempted to purchase its largest competitor, Premium Standard Farms. To his credit, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley objected on antitrust grounds. The antitrust division of the G.W. Bush Justice Department took up the question. Predictably, the fact that the new acquisition would make Smithfield larger than the next 8 hog producers combined was of little concern to the corporate-owned administration. In 2007, Smithfield was given the green light with no limitations, although the Obama DOJ ultimately did levy a $900,000 penalty for the action.

Here’s another corporate headline worthy of our attention.To wit: “Plastics company picks Upstate.” There are about 280,000 solid citizens in the 807 square mile county of my residence. Over 16% live below the poverty line and the average per capita wage is in the neighborhood of $22,000. The first line of the local newspaper account was “A California-based plastics company is creating jobs in County.” Well, yes; about 22 jobs over the next four years. And a plastics manufacturing company? The company, headquartered in California, is investing a piddling million bucks in the facility. That’s not much for a manufacturing concern. I wonder how much taxpayer money went for incentives?

Environmental Health News (EHN) has a wonderful report on the potential dangers to humans and various species wrought from our huge reliance on plastics.

EHN’s reports on outcomes of various human and animal studies of plastic conducted worldwide are concerning. Among the findings is the unalterable fact that chemicals added to plastics are absorbed by human bodies and some of these chemicals are nothing to mess with.

Quoting EHN: “Evidence is mounting that the chemical building blocks that make plastics so versatile are the same components that might harm people and the environment. And its production and disposal contribute to an array of environmental problems, too. Plastic buried deep in landfills can leach harmful chemicals that spread into groundwater.”

About 93% of you have detectable rates of the chemical bisphenol (BPA) found in linings of food and beverage cans. BPA can lead to increases in heart disease and diabetes according to studies cited by EHN. Other chemicals in the plastic process can bring incalculable harm to people (especially infants) and the environment. Of course the goobers could give a s**t less until they’re hooked up to Oxygen and sucking in 30 meds a day.

Not to worry, goobers; right-wing corporate-worshiping Republican legislators will see to it that nothing happens to lessen the chemical threats to the population from the plastics industry.

And finally, one more link in the endless chain of corporate obscenities. Exxon CEO, Rex Tillerson (who made $35 million in 2011), sneered at environmental activists who recently requested that the company reduce emissions from its products. A later shareholder vote reinforced the CEO’s “let ‘em breathe polluted air” mindset by rejecting the activist’s environment and people-friendly proposal by a 3-1 vote.

There was another 4-1 vote that made the shareholders look like even grander fools, but I don’t want to embarrass my fellow humans by making it public.
And the beat of greedy, irresponsible and indifferent capitalists goes on!


Capitalism Could Use Some Tweaking Unless You Love Starving Children was written by Dennis S for PoliticusUSA.
© PoliticusUSA, Jun. 1st, 2013. All Rights Reserved

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Make Biochar — This Ancient Technique Will Improve Your Soil





Charcoal made from brush can increase your soil’s fertility and help slow climate change. 

 
By Barbara Pleasant
February/March 2009


Burn barrel
You can make biochar in a burn barrel. Just watch the smoke. When it thins, pop the lid onto the barrel to slow combustion.


ELAYNE SEARS



Last year, I committed one of the great sins of gardening: I let weeds go to seed. Cleaning up in fall, I faced down a ton of seed-bearing foxtail, burdock and crabgrass. Sure, I could compost it hot to steam the weed seeds to death, but instead I decided to try something different. I dug a ditch, added the weeds and lots of woody prunings, and burned it into biochar, thus practicing a “new” soil-building technique that’s at least 3,000 years old.

What’s biochar? Basically, it’s organic matter that is burned slowly, with a restricted flow of oxygen, and then the fire is stopped when the material reaches the charcoal stage. Unlike tiny tidbits of ash, coarse lumps of charcoal are full of crevices and holes, which help them serve as life rafts to soil microorganisms. The carbon compounds in charcoal form loose chemical bonds with soluble plant nutrients so they are not as readily washed away by rain and irrigation. Biochar alone added to poor soil has little benefit to plants, but when used in combination with compost and organic fertilizers, it can dramatically improve plant growth while helping retain nutrients in the soil.

Amazonian Dark Earths

The idea of biochar comes from the Amazonian rain forests of Brazil, where a civilization thrived for 2,000 years, from about 500 B.C. until Spanish and Portuguese explorers introduced devastating European diseases in the mid-1500s. Using only their hands, sticks and stone axes, Amazonian tribes grew cassava, corn and numerous tree fruits in soil made rich with compost, mulch and smoldered plant matter.

Amazingly, these “dark earths” persist today as a testament to an ancient soil-building method you can use in your garden. Scientists disagree on whether the soils were created on purpose, in order to grow more food, or if they were an accidental byproduct of the biochar and compost generated in day-to-day village life along the banks of the Earth’s biggest river. However they came to be, there is no doubt that Amazonian dark earths (often called terra preta) hold plant nutrients, including nitrogen, phosphorous, calcium and magnesium, much more efficiently than unimproved soil. Even after 500 years of tropical temperatures and rainfall that averages 80 inches a year, the dark earths remain remarkably fertile.

Scientists around the world are working in labs and field trial plots to better understand how biochar works, and to unravel the many mysteries of terra preta. At Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., microbiologists have discovered bacteria in terra preta soils that are similar to strains that are active in hot compost piles. Overall populations of fungi and bacteria are high in terra preta soils, too, but the presence of abundant carbon makes the microorganisms live and reproduce at a slowed pace. The result is a reduction in the turnover rate of organic matter in the soil, so composts and other soil-enriching forms of organic matter last longer.

In field trials with corn, rice and many other crops, biochar has increased productivity by making nutrients already present in the soil better available to plants. Results are especially dramatic when biochar is added to good soil that contains ample minerals and plant nutrients. Research continues (track it at The International Biochar Initiative), but at this point it appears that biochar gives both organic matter and microorganisms in organically enriched soil enhanced staying power. Digging in nuggets of biochar — or adding them to compost as it is set aside to cure — can slow the leaching away of nutrients and help organically enriched soil retain nutrients for decades rather than for a couple of seasons.

Finding Free Biochar

Biochar’s soil building talents may change the way you clean your woodstove. In addition to gathering ashes (and keeping them in a dry metal can until you’re ready to use them as a phosphorus-rich soil amendment, applied in light dustings), make a habit of gathering the charred remains of logs. Take them to your garden, give them a good smack with the back of a shovel and you have biochar.

If you live close to a campground, you may have access to an unlimited supply of garden-worthy biochar from the remains of partially burned campfires. The small fires burned in chimineas often produce biochar, too, so you may need to look no further than your neighbor’s deck for a steady supply.
Charcoal briquettes used in grilling are probably not a good choice. Those designed to light fast often include paraffin or other hydrocarbon solvents that have no place in an organic garden. Plain charred weeds, wood or cow pies are better materials for using this promising soil-building technique based on ancient gardening wisdom.

How to Make Biochar

To make biochar right in your gardens, start by digging a trench in a bed. (Use a fork to loosen the soil in the bottom of the trench and you’ll get the added benefits of this “double-digging” technique.) Then pile brush into the trench and light it. You want to have a fire that starts out hot, but is quickly slowed down by reducing the oxygen supply. The best way to tell what’s going on in a biochar fire is to watch the smoke. The white smoke, produced early on, is mostly water vapor. As the smoke turns yellow, resins and sugars in the material are being burned. When the smoke thins and turns grayish blue, dampen down the fire by covering it with about an inch of soil to reduce the air supply, and leave it to smolder. Then, after the organic matter has smoldered into charcoal chunks, use water to put out the fire. Another option would be to make charcoal from wood scraps in metal barrels. (For details, go to Twin Oaks Forge.)

I’m part of the Smokey-the-Bear generation, raised on phrases like “learn not to burn,” so it took me a while to warm up to the idea of using semi-open burning as a soil-building technique. Unrestrained open burning releases 95 percent or more of the carbon in the wood, weeds or whatever else that goes up in smoke. However, low-temperature controlled burning to create biochar, called pyrolysis, retains much more carbon (about 50 percent) in the initial burning phase. Carbon release is cut even more when the biochar becomes part of the soil, where it may reduce the production of greenhouse gases including methane and nitrous oxide. This charcoal releases its carbon 10 to 100 times slower than rotting organic matter. As long as it is done correctly, controlled charring of weeds, pruned limbs and other hard-to-compost forms of organic matter, and then using the biochar as a soil or compost amendment, can result in a zero emission carbon cycling system.

Burning responsibly requires simple common sense. Check with your local fire department to make sure you have any necessary permits, wait as long as you must to get damp, windless weather, and monitor the fire until it’s dead.

The Bigger Picture

If global warming is to be slowed, we must find ways to reduce the loss of carbon into the atmosphere. In the dark earths of the Amazon, and in million-year-old charcoal deposits beneath the Pacific Ocean, charcoal has proven its ability to bring carbon release almost to a standstill. If each of one million farmers around the globe incorporated biochar into 160 acres of land, the amount of carbon locked away in the Earth’s soil would increase five-fold.

But there’s more. What if you generate energy by burning a renewable biomass crop (like wood, corn, peanut hulls, bamboo, willow or whatever), while also producing biochar that is then stashed away by using it as a soil amendment? (For an example, see the Archive article, Mother’s Woodburning Truck, about wood-gas generators.) The carbon recovery numbers in such a system make it the only biomass model found thus far that can produce energy without a net release of carbon. Research teams around the world are scrambling to work out the details of these elegantly Earth-based systems.

Much remains to be known about how biochar systems should tick, but some may be as simple as on-farm set ups that transform manure and other wastes into nuggets of black carbon that help fertilizer go farther while holding carbon in the soil.

As gardeners, it is up to us to find ways to adapt this new knowledge to the needs of our land. To make the most of my bonfire of weeds, I staged the burn in a trench dug in my garden, and then used the excavated soil to smother the fire. A layer of biochar now rests buried in the soil. Hundreds of years from now, it will still be holding carbon while energizing the soil food web. This simple melding of soil and fire, first discovered by ancient people in the Amazon, may be a “new” key to feeding ourselves while restoring the health of our planet.
To learn more about this fascinating topic, read Amazonian Dark Earths by Johannes Lehmann. And click here for more articles on biochar research.


Contributing editor Barbara Pleasant gardens in southwest Virginia, where she grows vegetables, herbs, fruits, flowers and a few lucky chickens. Contact Barbara by visiting her website or finding her on .

Saturday, June 1, 2013

Back to the Land is Back in Vogue, and It Could Make You Happier







 

Radical homemakers have become a touchstone of the growing “homesteading” movement, which takes today’s ethos of frugality, self-sufficiency, and domestic DIY to its ultimate extreme.

 
 
 
 
From Homeward Bound by Emily Matchar. Copyright © 2013 by Emily Matchar. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.


The idea of going back to basics is nothing new. And the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s didn’t invent the concept, either. It’s much, much older than that.

Thoreau went to Walden Pond to “live deliberately” back in 1845, and Helen and Scott Nearing promoted “the good life” from their rustic New England farmhouse in the 1930s, influencing a generation of idealistic young Americans to take up woodworking and gardening. The back-to- the-land movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s had young people poring over the Whole Earth Catalog and flocking to rural communes, hoping to build a simpler, better world away from the constraints of what they saw as a sick mainstream society.
Perhaps it was the drugs, perhaps it was the overly idealistic nature of some of these communes (“free love” tended to create commune-destroying jealousy; poverty was rampant), perhaps it was just the natural cycle of things, but the movement didn’t last long and had pretty much petered out by the end of the 1970s.

“As the 1979 energy crisis waned in the following years, so too would the accompanying desire to live more simply,” writes Melissa Coleman, the daughter of 1970s homesteaders, in her memoir, This Life Is in Your Hands. “By the 1980s oil glut, jobs and opportunities would become so plentiful in the cities that few could resist the pull to return.”

The past few decades have been solidly urban, consumerist, and technology oriented, and the idea of “back to nature” seemed passé and laughable to many, a patchouli-scented relic of a foolishly naive era. But then, starting around the early 2000s, fears about food safety and climate change began to drive a new interest in DIY food cultivation. The recession, with its subsequent reevaluation of the American Dream, helped all these trends begin to gel into something larger.

Hayes calls it radical homemaking. Others call it “simple living,” “intentional living,” “sustainable living,” “slow living,” “voluntary simplicity,” or “downshifting,” all terms that have entered or reentered the lexicon in the past few years. But “homesteading” seems to have emerged as the modern term of choice for this new kind of self-sufficient, home- focused, frugal, slowed-down lifestyle.

It’s difficult to say exactly when the word “homesteading” started to be thrown around in its current form. By looking at Google Trends, you can see that the word was practically never used in searches before 2007, but it really took off in 2008, the year the recession started and the Institute of Urban Homesteading was founded in Oakland. Around this time, a parade of neo-homesteading books began to pour into bookstores, from Abigail Gehring’s Homesteading: A Back to Basics Guide to: Growing Your Own Food, Canning, Keeping Chickens, Generating Your Own Energy, Crafting, Herbal Medicine, and More(2009) to Carleen Madigan’s The Backyard Homestead: Produce All the Food You Need on Just a Quarter Acre! (2009) and dozens more—my local Barnes & Noble has an entire shelf dedicated to these books (and their resultant memoirs), nearly all published between 2009 and the present. In 2010 a Pasadena family trademarked the term “urban homesteading” and began to send cease- and-desist letters to bloggers, setting off a firestorm in the now-robust homesteading community. Around that time, major media outlets like theNew York Times began to pick up on the phenomenon: “‘Urban homesteaders’ are farming in San Francisco,” reported the paper in April 2010. “I went back to the land to feed my family,” proclaimed a Brooklyn writer-slash-urban-homesteader in a 2011 New York Times op-ed. The movement, it seemed, had arrived.

In my town, it is completely normal to keep chickens in your backyard. I frequently see a pair of goats wandering up the road near my old apartment, just around the corner from the Harris Teeter supermarket and the CVS pharmacy. If you’re not familiar with downtown Chapel Hill, this is not the kind of place where you expect to see goats while you’re walking home with your groceries. Drunk UNC students stumbling around holding giant red Solo cups, yes. Goats, not so much. But this is our new normal. Since 2008, we’ve even had an “urban farm tour,” where you can wander around your neighbors’ backyards inspecting their coops and doing workshops on composting and honey harvesting.

Tim Kasser, a psychologist at Knox College, studies this kind of “downshifting.” According to his studies, about a quarter of Americans have at some point voluntarily simplified their lives by taking a pay cut or cutting home spending, while perhaps 10 to 15 percent of the population practices hard-core types of voluntary simplicity such as homesteading. And it’s not just us. A study in Australia showed that nearly a quarter of Aussies have “downshifted,” defined as “those people who make a voluntary, long-term lifestyle change that involves accepting significantly less income and consuming less.” According to one study, over a quarter of British adults ages thirty to fifty-nine have voluntarily moved to lower- paid jobs to spend more time with their families. The author of this study says these people are part of an entirely new social class who “consciously reject consumerism and material aspirations.”
“This isn’t a fringe thing anymore,” simple-living guru Wanda Urbanska toldO, the Oprah Magazine. “There is a shift going on. When I first started talking about this in 1992, I was seen as a wacko zealot. Now simple living is fashionable.”
The movement is not only fashionable. According to research by Kasser and others, it may in fact produce happier people. According to psychology research, voluntary simplifiers earned $15,000 less than their fellow citizens (about $26,000 compared to $41,000) but were found to be “significantly happier.” The same study showed that more than a quarter of Americans had already taken voluntary income cuts in favor of lifestyle.

“Not only were the voluntary simplifiers living in a more eco- sustainable way than mainstream Americans,” Kasser tells me. “The voluntary simplifiers were happier than the mainstream population."

Emily Matchar is the author of the forthcoming book Homeward Bound: The New Cult of Domesticity.