Author Archives: CarolNXGmes

This GOP Congressman’s Solution to Homelessness Involves Getting Eaten By Wolves

by CarolNXGmes Posted on March 6, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Homelessness is a very serious problem. Nearly 600,000 Americans don’t have a home, including one in every 30 children. Recently, we’ve reported on some innovative solutions, including tiny houses and free, no-strings-attached apartments.

Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) has a different idea. It involves wolves. Specifically, releasing grey wolves into the districts of 79 of his peers in Congress who had recently called for greater protections for the endangered species.

From the Washington Post:

“How many of you have got wolves in your district?” he asked. “None. None. Not one.”

“They haven’t got a damn wolf in their whole district,” Young continued. “I’d like to introduce them in your district. If I introduced them in your district, you wouldn’t have a homeless problem anymore.”

Wow.

If you’re unfamiliar with Don Young, he is renowned for his outlandish antics, mostly about animals, like that time he brandished an 18-inch walrus penis bone on the House floor or the time he called climate change the “biggest scam since Teapot Dome” (a major bribery scandal in the 1920s involving the Harding administration).

A Young spokesperson told the Post that the comment was “purposely hyperbolic.”

Source:  

This GOP Congressman’s Solution to Homelessness Involves Getting Eaten By Wolves

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This GOP Congressman’s Solution to Homelessness Involves Getting Eaten By Wolves

Maybe Cable Bundling Is OK, But We Should Unbundle Sports

by CarolNXGmes Posted on May 15, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Josh Barro makes the case today that unbundling cable channels and offering them a la carte wouldn’t really benefit consumers. This point has now been made so many times that I don’t think it counts as counterintuitive anymore, but Barro makes one additional point that represents my real gripe with channel bundling:

Not everyone would lose out. For example, if you never watch sports, you might be better off not having to pay for ESPN, which charges the highest carriage fee of any basic cable channel. But Mr. Byzalov estimates that sports channel carriage fees would more than triple under unbundling, as most subscribers opt out and only die-hard sports fans buy in. Consumers who don’t care about sports at all would be better off, but casual sports fans would be worse off: They wouldn’t find it worth paying $37 for an unbundled cluster of sports channels, even if they would have paid the roughly $9 that it costs to get those channels as part of a bundled package.

Most people don’t know just how much sports channels cost them, but they can account for nearly half of your average cable bill in some areas. Not everywhere, mind you, but the explosion of sports channels (Fox Sports 1, the NFL channel, the Golf channel, the NBC Sports Channel, etc.) and rise of dedicated team channels (the Lakers channel, the Dodgers channel, the Pac-12 channel, etc.) have steadily pushed the price of sports skyward in big media markets like Southern California. You don’t pay $9 for that collection. Carriage fees are a closely guarded secret, so it’s hard to say how much you do pay, but it’s probably something like $25 or more.

This doesn’t hurt me, since I watch enough sports to (mostly) make this worthwhile. And the fact that all you non-sports watchers have to pay for this stuff basically subsidizes my habit. So thanks! But honestly, I don’t think you should have to. When Time Warner demands that the Dodgers channel be part of basic cable—my latest hobbyhorse—it basically amounts to a Dodgers tax on every family in the LA area. But I’m afraid I don’t really see why Time Warner should be allowed to levy a tax on every family in the LA area.

So go ahead and keep bundling. Maybe it’s more efficient in the end, and doesn’t really cost most of us very much money. But unbundle sports. It’s a big expense, and those of us who are sports junkies ought to be the ones paying it. Plus there’s this: if we all paid the true cost, instead of forcing everyone to subsidize the rest of us, it might finally provoke some serious pushback—and maybe the astronomical and absurd upward spiral of sports rights would finally abate. If this means the Dodgers are worth only $1.7 billion instead of $2 billion, that’s OK with me.

Continue at source:  

Maybe Cable Bundling Is OK, But We Should Unbundle Sports

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Maybe Cable Bundling Is OK, But We Should Unbundle Sports

Farm Workers Win an Extra Penny from the Ultimate Penny Pincher, Walmart

by CarolNXGmes Posted on January 18, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Before fast-food workers began agitating for a liveable wage, before Walmart employees began holding public demonstrations to demand better pay from the largest US private employer, there was the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida’s vast tomato fields.

Living in dire conditions, disempowered by their status as undocumented migrants from points south, making sub-poverty wages, subjected to often-violent repression and sometimes outright slavery—all depicted in detail in Barry Estrabrook’s Tomatoland—the workers rolled out an ambitious and quixotic-seeming strategy to improve their lot in the mid-2000s. Rather than continuing to knock their heads against Florida’s entrenched tomato barons directly, CIW instead brought battle to their case to the growers’ customers: massive fast-food chains.

Using boycotts and partnering with college-student activists, CIW demanded that the chains pay an extra penny per pound for their tomatoes, which would then be passed on directly to the workers. A penny per pound would represent the first major pay raise in years for the workers, and a minor dip in profits for massive chains like McDonalds. Yet the chains fought back, sometimes voraciously.

And then, one by one, they fell: first YUM Brands (Taco Bell) signed the penny-a-pound pledge, then McDonalds, then Burger King, and finally, after a long battle, Chipotle Grill. After that, CIW turned its attention to retailers, signing agreements with Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s.

Late Thursday, CIW netted the biggest fish of all: Walmart, by far the largest private food buyer in the US. A company that muscled its way to the top of the US corporate heap by pinching pennies—squeezing suppliers and its own workers relentlessly—has now agreed to shell out an extra penny per pound for tomatoes.

CIW has shown yet again that scrappy workers, sufficiently organized, can win concessions from even the most ruthless companies. Barry Estabrook has more.

Visit site:

Farm Workers Win an Extra Penny from the Ultimate Penny Pincher, Walmart

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Farm Workers Win an Extra Penny from the Ultimate Penny Pincher, Walmart