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Starbucks Wants You to Feel Good About Drinking Up California’s Precious Water

by Jason05Smtpyej Posted on April 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ethos Water was supposed to help fix the global water crisis: Founded in 2002 in Southern California, the bottled-water company promised that for every unit it sold, it would donate a small amount of money to water charity projects in the developing world.

Other popular bottled water brands like Aquafina and Dasani also source from catastrophically dry regions.

The idea quickly took off. In 2005, Ethos was acquired by Starbucks. Now, for every $1.95 bottle of Ethos water it sells, Starbucks makes a 5-cent donation to the Ethos Water Fund, part of the Starbucks Foundation. “When our customers choose to buy Ethos Water, they’re improving the lives of people who lack vital resources,” Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said in 2008.

Some of the biggest celebrities in Hollywood have lent their names to Starbucks’ Ethos brand. Matt Damon starred in an ad campaign, and Starbucks partnered with a company that drives celebrities to the Oscars and filled the cars with Ethos bottles, “so Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz walked into the awards carrying Ethos Water,” as Ethos cofounder Peter Thum explained. In 2011, Ethos’ other cofounder, Jonathan Greenblatt, became special assistant to the president and head of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. Obama himself lauded Greenblatt last fall for his “innovative solutions to America’s challenges.”

Starbucks says that its partnership with Ethos has raised more than $12.3 million for water charity projects to date.

So far, media coverage has focused on Starbucks’ goal to quench the thirst of the world’s parched masses; the story behind the bottled water it sells here in the United States has been a nonissue. But now, as California’s historic drought wears on, Starbucks is facing a water crisis of its own.

The bottling plant that Starbucks uses for its Ethos customers in the western United States is located in Merced, California, which is currently ranked in the “exceptional drought” category by the US Drought Monitor. Its residents face steep water cuts in their homes, and surface water for the region’s many farms is drying up.

On April 16, the Merced Sun-Star reported that residents were complaining about a private water bottler, owned and operated by the grocery chain Safeway, that ships the increasingly scarce groundwater out for profit. In addition to its own bottled water, the plant also produces Starbucks’ Ethos water. No one knows exactly how much water the plant is using—the city of Merced considers that information confidential. (Starbucks uses a water source in Pennsylvania for the Ethos bottles sold in its locations in the eastern United States.)

The Starbucks water bottled at the plant comes from private springs in Baxter, a small unincorporated community in Placer County, a few hours north of Merced in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The spring water comes free of charge—in California, water companies typically don’t have to pay for the groundwater they use.

Like Merced, Baxter is located in “exceptional drought” territory. In a story about the water shortage last year, the New York Times pointed to a community near Baxter, quoting a rancher as saying that the drought was “as bad as I have ever experienced.”

When I asked a Starbucks spokesman about the company’s reaction to concerns about bottlers’ use of increasingly scarce water, he told me that Starbucks uses “a private spring source that is not used for municipal water for any communities.” But Mary Scruggs, a supervising engineering geologist with California’s Department of Water Resources, notes that communities can be affected by the use of surrounding springs “if you capture and pull it out before it ever makes it” to downstream users.

Bottling companies are trusted to monitor the health of their springs and the recharge rate, though in California the regulation and monitoring of bottled water extraction and its environmental impacts is notoriously opaque. Unlike in other states, well logs are kept confidential and reviewing such data requires permission from the well owner.

In addition to the spring water it bottles, Starbucks also uses Merced city water to manufacture its bottled water product. A report commissioned by the International Bottled Water Association found that it takes on average 1.32 liters of water to make a liter of bottled water, though critics argue that it can take several times more than that once all the packaging is accounted for.

In March, Merced County passed an ordinance that will place new permitting restrictions on some groundwater use, though whether this will affect the Starbucks bottling plant remains to be seen. “We’re cautious about setting precedents,” says Ron Rowe, director of the Division of Environmental Health for Merced County, adding that his agency hasn’t yet issued permits for any company under the new ordinance.

Starbucks declined to provide sales figures for Ethos Water, but the company’s estimate of $12.3 million given to charity works out to about 246 million bottles sold. Given the original price of $1.80 a bottle, by my calculation, that’s more than $442 million in sales.

While bottled water accounts for just a small fraction of California’s total water use, some residents are nonetheless fed up with bottling plants that profit off their dwindling water supply. Protesters have begun staging events at Nestlé’s bottling facility in nearby Sacramento.

Starbucks, with its mission to bring water to the world’s thirstiest regions, has so far escaped the kind of scrutiny that Nestlé and others have endured. But as a Merced area resident recently noted during a city council meeting about the bottling plant that Starbucks uses, “You might think that in the midst of a drought emergency, diverting public fresh water supplies to bottle and selling them would be frowned upon.”

This article was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, with support from the Puffin Foundation.

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Starbucks Wants You to Feel Good About Drinking Up California’s Precious Water

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Native American Actors Walk Off Set of New Adam Sandler Movie Over Racist Jokes

by GRTCollett Posted on April 24, 2015

Mother Jones

About a dozen Native American actors quit the set of a new Adam Sandler film, produced by Netflix, to protest the script’s portrayal of Apache culture and what the actors claim are racist jokes about native women and elders.

According to a report by Indian Country, the actors of “The Ridiculous Six,” a spoof of the classic western flick “The Magnificent Seven,” complained to producers about the offensive stereotypes, which include the naming of female characters as Beaver’s Breath and No Bra. One scene also has a native woman “squatting and urinating while smoking a peace pipe.”

Allison Young, a Navajo Nation tribal member and student, said the actors talked to the producers and told them what they found offensive. “They just told us, ‘If you guys are so sensitive, you should leave,'”she said. “I didn’t want to cry but the feeling just came over me. This is supposed to be a comedy that makes you laugh. A film like this should not make someone feel this way.”

Loren Anthony, another tribal member and actor, told Indian Country that while he initially had reservations about appearing in the film, producers had assured him the jokes would not be racist. But from the very beginning, he said, things “started getting weird” and what were supposed to be jokes were simply offensive.

On set, going to brawl out with Nick Nolte. #TheRidiculousSix #NickNolte #NMfilm #NM #film #SAGfilm #LasVegasNM #movies #NativeActor #Acting #Actor #hollywood #Comedy #NativePride #NativeAmerican

A photo posted by Loren Anthony (@lorenanthony) on Apr 21, 2015 at 7:31am PDT

Netflix defends the film as a supposed satire. “The movie has ‘ridiculous’ in the title for a reason: because it is ridiculous,” the company said in a statement. “It is a broad satire of Western movies and the stereotypes they popularized, featuring a diverse cast that is not only part of—but in on—the joke.”

“The Ridiculous Six” follows a string of flops for Sandler, whose recent films include the 2012 movie “Jack and Jill,” which succeeded in winning every single category at the Razzies that year. His latest production stars Nick Nolte, Steve Buscemi, Will Forte, and Vanilla Ice. A preview of what that looks like below:

Awesome time with all my fellow Native’s – Navajo, Apache, Comanche, Choctaw. Cherokee.

A photo posted by Vanilla Ice â&#156;… (@vanillaiceofficial) on Apr 23, 2015 at 8:14pm PDT

“Nothing has changed,” Young says. “We are still just Hollywood Indians.”

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Native American Actors Walk Off Set of New Adam Sandler Movie Over Racist Jokes

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Arkansas Governor Asks For Changes to Religious Freedom Bill

by Eleanor59W Posted on April 1, 2015

Mother Jones

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson called for changes in the state’s controversial religious freedom bill on Wednesday, amid mounting criticism from businesses, local leaders, gay rights advocates, and even members of his own family.

Hutchinson said in a press conference that he would not sign the bill as presented to his desk and asked state lawmakers to change the bill’s language to “mirror” the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. Twenty other states, including Indiana, have similar religious freedom legislation.

“This is a bill that in ordinary times would not be controversial,” Hutchinson told reporters. “But these are not ordinary times.”

In a press conference on Tuesday, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, whose state has also faced a barrage of criticism from businesses, celebrities and athletes alike, called on lawmakers to clarify Indiana’s religious freedom bill that “makes it clear that this law does not give businesses a right to deny services to anyone.”

Though Hutchinson had once said he would approve the bill with amendments, the governor shifted his stance after receiving backlash from local leaders and businesses, including Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, who called on the governor to veto the bill.

“Today’s passage of HB1228 threatens to undermine the spirit of inclusion present throughout the state of Arkansas and does not reflect the values we proudly uphold,” McMillon said in a statement. “For these reasons, we are asking Governor Hutchinson to veto this legislation.”

Hutchinson told reporters that the controversial legislation, which critics say would allow individuals and businesses to discriminate against gay men and lesbians, hit home. His son, Seth, a labor organizer with the Texas State Employees Union, asked him to veto the legislation. “I love my dad, and we have a good, close relationship,” Hutchinson’s son told the New York Times. “But we disagree a lot on political issues. This is just another one, but a lot of families disagree politically. But we stay close.”

“The issue has become divisive because our nation remains split on how to balance the diversity of our culture with the traditions and firmly held religious convictions,” Hutchinson said. “It has divided families, and there is clearly a generational gap on this issue.”

The Arkansas General Assembly has not yet agreed to recall and amend the bill. The governor declined to say whether he would veto the bill if it returned to his desk unchanged.

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Arkansas Governor Asks For Changes to Religious Freedom Bill

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The Navajo Nation Will Soon Have the Country’s First-Ever Junk-Food Tax

by AdalbertoCocker Posted on March 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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A version of this piece was originally published by Civil Eats.

Next month, after three years of legislative tug-of-war, the Navajo Nation will become the first place in the United States to impose a tax on junk food. The Healthy DineÌ&#129; Nation Act of 2014, signed into law by Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly last November, mandates a 2 percent sales tax on pastries, chips, soda, desserts, fried foods, sweetened beverages, and other products with “minimal-to-no-nutritional value” sold within the borders of the nation’s largest reservation.

Authored by the Diné Community Advocacy Alliance (DCAA), a grassroots organization of community volunteers, the legislation was modeled on existing taxes on tobacco and alcohol, as well as other fat and sugar tax initiatives outside the United States. The act follows on the heels of a spring 2014 amendment that removed a 5 percent tribal sales tax on fresh fruits and vegetables.

The sales tax will generate an estimated $1 million a year in 110 tribal chapters for wellness projects—greenhouses, food processing and storage facilities, traditional foods cooking classes, community gardens, farmers’ markets, and more.

Those who advocate for a return to a more traditional diet hail the law as a positive change: The Navajo Nation, a 27,000-square-mile area that straddles three states, has a 42 percent unemployment rate. Nearly half of those over the age of 25 live under the federal poverty line. The USDA has identified nearly all of the Navajo Nation as a food desert, meaning heavily processed foods are more available than fresh produce and fruit.

According to a 2014 report from the Diné Policy Institute there are just 10 full-service grocery stores on the entire Navajo reservation, a territory about the size of West Virginia that straddles parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. As a result, many people rely on food stamps to stretch grocery dollars with the inexpensive processed, fried, and sugary foods commonly found in gas stations or convenience stores.

But even having a grocery store nearby doesn’t guarantee access to healthy food. A DCAA survey of one major grocer in the town of Kayenta found approximately 80 percent of the store’s inventory qualified, in the group’s definition, as junk food. Compounding the issue is the continued popularity at family gatherings, flea-markets, and ceremonial gatherings of lard-drenched frybread—whose dubious origins have been traced back to the “Long Walk,” the federal government’s forced removal of Navajos to a military fort in New Mexico 300 miles away from ancestral land in Arizona.

The heavy consumption of soda, fat, and processed foods has taken its toll. According to the Indian Health Service, an estimated 25,000 of the Navajo Nation’s 300,000 members have type-2 diabetes and another 75,000 are pre-diabetic. The tribe has some of the worst health outcomes in the United States, with rampant hypertension and cardiovascular disease. According to data collected between 1999 and 2009 by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) overall death rates for American Indians and Alaska Natives were nearly 50 percent greater than those of non-Hispanic whites.

These stark health statistics drove the DCAA to lobby for a consumer tax—despite strong opposition at the start from Shelly and some council delegates. Navajo Nation Council Delegate Jonathan Nez was a co-sponsor of the Healthy Diné Nation Act. He says there was “overwhelming support” for the initiative in his region, a large rural area on the Utah and Arizona border, but he did hear misgivings amongst the general population and some of the other delegates.

“Some people thought: ‘A two-percent sales tax is going to hit my wallet,'” says Nez. The legislation was vetoed three times by Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly, because of questions about how the tax would be regulated. He also cited concerns about how the tax would be enacted along with its potential impact on small business owners. Other opponents said the bill would place undue burden on consumers and drive desperately needed revenue off the reservation and into surrounding cities. After multiple revisions, the tax gained support from a majority of the council, with the added concession of a 2020 expiration date.

While this is the first “junk-food tax” in the United States, the movement to slow the consumption of unhealthy foods gained momentum last November after residents of Berkeley, California voted to tax soda and other sweetened beverages. According to the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, which supports a national sugar-sweetened Beverage (SSB) Tax, studies show a correlation between added excise taxes and lower consumption rates. One 2011 study published in Preventive Medicine showed that a penny-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages nationally could generate nearly $16 billion a year in revenue between 2010 and 2015 while cutting consumption by 24 percent.

It’s still too soon to evaluate the tax’s effect on consumption habits in the Navajo Nation, but Nez says it has already opened a discussion “about how to take better care of yourself, how to return back to the way we used to live, with fresh produce, vegetables, and fruit along with our own traditional unprocessed foods.”

Denisa Livingston, a community health advocate with the DCAA, has been leading grocery store tours in Window Rock, Arizona to educate government officials and community members about how the layout and inventory of local markets affects buying patterns. “I’ve been telling the councils, food can either empower us and make us strong, or it can kill us,” she says. “Healthy food is not just our tradition, it’s our identity. This is the start of a return to food sovereignty.”

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From the Howard Zinn Archive: Fighting Respectability Politics at Spelman College

by MarianaTrujillo Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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The excerpt, from a longer 1960 piece by Howard Zinn and a 2015 Paula Giddings article, are from the Nation magazine’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue on newsstands in April. They come to us from the TomDispatch website.

Finishing School for Pickets

By Howard Zinn (August 6, 1960)

One afternoon some weeks ago, with the dogwood on the Spelman College campus newly bloomed and the grass close-cropped and fragrant, an attractive, tawny-skinned girl crossed the lawn to her dormitory to put a notice on the bulletin board. It read: Young Ladies Who Can Picket Please Sign Below.

The notice revealed, in its own quaint language, that within the dramatic revolt of Negro college students in the South today another phenomenon has been developing. This is the upsurge of the young, educated Negro woman against the generations-old advice of her elders: be nice, be well-mannered and ladylike, don’t speak loudly, and don’t get into trouble. On the campus of the nation’s leading college for Negro young women—pious, sedate, encrusted with the traditions of gentility and moderation—these exhortations, for the first time, are being firmly rejected.

Spelman College girls are still “nice,” but not enough to keep them from walking up and down, carrying picket signs, in front of supermarkets in the heart of Atlanta. They are well-mannered, but this is somewhat tempered by a recent declaration that they will use every method short of violence to end segregation. As for staying out of trouble, they were doing fine until this spring, when fourteen of them were arrested and jailed by Atlanta police. The staid New England women missionaries who helped found Spelman College back in the 1880s would probably be distressed at this turn of events, and present-day conservatives in the administration and faculty are rather upset. But respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today.

“You can always tell a Spelman girl,” alumni and friends of the college have boasted for years. The “Spelman girl” walked gracefully, talked properly, went to church every Sunday, poured tea elegantly, and had all the attributes of the product of a fine finishing school. If intellect and talent and social consciousness happened to develop also, they were, to an alarming extent, byproducts.

This is changing. It would be an exaggeration to say: “You can always tell a Spelman girl—she’s under arrest.” But the statement has a measure of truth.

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) wrote for The Nation from 1960 to 2008. Those articles are collected in Some Truths Are Not Self-Evident: Essays in The Nation on Civil Rights, Vietnam and the “War on Terror.” (eBookNation, 2014).

Learning Insubordination

By Paula J. Giddings (March 2015)

In the current age of “lean-in” feminism at one end of the spectrum and an “anti-respectability” discourse at the other, the late Howard Zinn’s essay reminds us of an earlier meaning of women’s liberation.

Zinn was of Russian-Jewish heritage, an influential historian and, in 1960, a beloved professor at Spelman College, the historically black women’s institution in the then-segregated city of Atlanta. The attribution of “finishing school” in the title was well-earned: Spelman girls, whose acceptance letters included requests to bring white gloves and girdles with them to campus, were molded to honor the virtues of “true-womanhood”: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness.

Nevertheless, by 1960, Zinn’s students had morphed from “nice, well-mannered and ladylike” paragons of politesse to determined demonstrators who picketed, organized sit-ins, and were sometimes arrested and jailed for their efforts. “Respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today,” Zinn concluded.

These young girls were born in the 1940s, and whatever the background of their parents (who might be sharecroppers, teachers, or doctors), their generation was destined to belong to a new stratum of Americans: the “Black Bourgeoisie,” as the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier called it. An economic class that was literally wedged in the “middle” between a small black elite and the black masses, this group emerged in no small part because of the unprecedented number of educated women who, historically excluded from pink-collar positions, now had access not only to the elite professions, but to mainstream administrative, clerical, and civil-service jobs.

For black women, burdened by stereotypes of hypersexuality, this development meant more than a triumph of simple social mobility. With education, more girls could now escape the domestic and personal service work that subjected them to the sexual exploitation of employers and others. To be able to avoid such a soul-killing future was the dream of generations of mothers for their daughters—one that I often heard from my own grandmother, who had migrated north so that my mother could be the first in the family to attain a college education. The stakes in taking advantage of these newer opportunities were indeed high and brimmed with profound meaning and emotion.

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From the Howard Zinn Archive: Fighting Respectability Politics at Spelman College

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8 Crazy Quotes In Support of Celebrating Robert E. Lee on MLK Day

by CortezSKMsqtt Posted on January 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama are the only three states in the country that celebrate Robert E. Lee on the same day as the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday. Their reasoning for the combo celebration is that the two have birthdays just a few days apart—never mind the, uh, conflict of interest.

Today, Arkansas’ elected officials had the opportunity to pass a bill seeking to separate the two commemorations. By doing so, Arkansas would join Georgia, Florida, and Virginia, which honor Lee—but not on MLK Day.

But this morning, Arkansas representatives struck down the bill with a chorus of nays. Below are a few choice quotes from opponents of the bill explaining why:

1. “Everyone in this room owes Robert E. Lee a debt.”

2. “You’ve got MLK parades all over the nation, but no one celebrates Lee! Well, a lot of people do, a very large crowd.”

3. “This bill is out to change our constitution.”

4. “It’s called American history.”

5. “I really wish we could all celebrate a non-separate, but equal holiday.”

6. “You wouldn’t celebrate Christmas in July!”

7. “Why are we doing this? We are chasing a non-problem.”

8. “Separate is not equal.”

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8 Crazy Quotes In Support of Celebrating Robert E. Lee on MLK Day

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Breathing Air Shouldn’t Be This Dangerous

by MarcoMcAlroy Posted on January 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Looking at China’s recent surge of toxic smog, it’s clear the nation’s air pollution crisis isn’t going away any time soon. Now we have some fresh statistics that reveal the extent of the problem.

New rankings released today by Greenpeace reveal that 90 percent of Chinese cities that report their air pollution levels are failing to meet China’s own national standards—the latest indication of the monumental challenges facing the Chinese government in cleaning up the air breathed by tens of millions of people. It’s a worry that has become a political thorn in the side of the Communist Party, intent on maintaining its power in the face of growing public restlessness over environmental degradation.

The analysis comes at a time when large swaths of the country suffer under thick layers of toxic smog—usually worse in winter, as demand for central heating increases coal-fired power production. The smog persists despite the government’s self-declared “war on pollution” in 2014, which includes measures to curtail coal use in big cities like Beijing, and limit heavy industries.

The statistics, derived from China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, measure a city’s yearly average concentration of PM2.5, shorthand for the toxic airborne particles from coal burning and industrial exhaust. In 2014, just 18 cities out of a total 190 met what’s known as China’s “Class II” standard of 35 micrograms per cubic meter of air, considered within the healthy range. (The US standard is about half that number). A quarter of the cities recorded levels more than double the national standard.

The most polluted places are among the most populous. Of the 10 cities with the worst PM2.5 air pollution, seven of them were in Hebei, the coal belt province neighboring Beijing. In the top five worst offenders is heavy industry hub Baoding (ironically home to the world’s largest solar manufacturing plant, which is trying to wean the country off coal) and the notoriously polluted Shijiazhuang, where, last year a local man attempted to sue the local government over air pollution. Both cities recorded average levels more than 3.6 times China’s limit, which came into effect in 2012. Life spans in China’s north, where coal plants are ubiquitous, are thought to be five years shorter than those in the south of the country, according to a 2013 study.

Average rates of pollution, of course, don’t provide a clear picture of the off-the-charts spikes experienced regularly across major cities, such as in mid-January this year, when concentration of PM2.5 exceeded 500, according to the US Embassy in Beijing, or in 2013, when some instruments recorded levels of over 1000 in the northern city of Harbin.

Greenpeace’s latest campaign is accompanied by the release of a short film by famous Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke, the critically acclaimed director of 2013’s “A Touch of Sin“. The film shows scenes from daily life in China, under the pall of smog:

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Breathing Air Shouldn’t Be This Dangerous

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Jim Webb Is the Democrats’ Rand Paul

by GabrielMercier Posted on January 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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One of the most hyped potential candidates of the 2016 presidential campaign has clashed frequently with his party’s higher-ups. He is known for his outspoken views on the surveillance state, his opposition to overseas entanglements, his warnings about the broken criminal-justice system, his desire to expand the party’s tent to include voters otherwise alienated by identity politics—and for the Confederate-flag-waving supporters who’d follow him anywhere.

Unfortunately for Jim Webb, I’m talking about Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

Since launching a presidential exploratory committee last month, the former one-term Virginia senator, author, Navy secretary, and Vietnam vet has spent the first weeks of his nascent campaign drawing a contrast with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the party’s most likely nominee. The little-touted candidacy of Webb, who was floated as a running mate during President Barack Obama’s first campaign, is a reminder of how far the ground has shifted since his first run for office nine years ago. Two years after leaving the Senate, Webb’s ideas are finally ascendant—but under a different banner.

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Jim Webb Is the Democrats’ Rand Paul

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This Is Why You’re So Damn Cold Right Now

by BradlyRizzo Posted on January 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in CityLab and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

To get an idea why wind chills will plummet to 45 degrees below zero in the US this week, look no farther than this unreal image of a colossal polar system cutting through the country like the icy scythe of a rancorous Norse god.

A NOAA satellite caught the coast-to-coast eyeball-freezer on Tuesday as it was revving up for an icy romp across America. Writes the agency:

The weather pattern over the next few days will feature a massive surface high settling southward from Canada to the Great Plains on Wednesday, following by another large surface high by the end of the week. Both of these features are of Arctic origin, and will bring bitterly cold weather from the western High Plains to the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast US In addition to the frigid temperatures, the cold air advection over the Great Lakes along with upper-level shortwave energy moving over the region is expected to produce significant lake effect snow downwind from the Great Lakes through midweek.

Areas east of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario are predicted to get the worst of the accumulations, which must be a comfort to Buffalo residents who are probably almost finished digging out from the last winter storm. NOAA says these regions will be served with snowfalls that “will easily exceed one foot.”

As for the other weather misery afflicting the nation, take a peek at these expected wind chills. It’s not a great time to be outside in the northern states, where the government is advising travelers to pack winter-survival kits.

NOAA

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This Is Why You’re So Damn Cold Right Now

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Hollywood Backstabbing Over "The Interview" Now in Full Swing

by AthenaRucker Posted on December 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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We all heard yesterday that Sony Pictures made a last-minute decision to release The Interview on Christmas after all, thanks to pleas from a couple hundred independent theaters that agreed at the last minute to defy Kim Jong-un and show it. So the honor of Western civilization is saved and everyone is happy. Right?

The film’s limited release drives a further wedge between Sony and the nation’s largest theater owners, who blame the studio for yanking away a potential hit. It was supposed to open on 3,000 screens before Sony and theater chains shelved the movie.

Theater owners are also upset that Sony is negotiating to release the movie simultaneously on a video-on-demand platform….“They could have a full theatrical release. Instead they have a token,” said one theater executive who asked not to be identified because it could harm his relationship with the studio.

Wait. What? I thought this whole fiasco had been driven in the first place by the refusal of big theater chains to show the movie amid fears of terrorist retaliation. So what are they all griping about?

The disagreement over a digital release played into larger tensions between Sony and theater owners after hackers last week threatened physical harm on moviegoers who saw “The Interview.”….Worried about a potential threat, Sony said it canceled the movie after large chains backed away from the film.

But theater owners have been pointing the finger at the studio for originally giving them the OK to not run the film amid the threats. Then Sony blamed the nation’s four big theater chains for forcing the studio to cancel the original release….Representatives of Regal, AMC, Cinemark and Carmike declined to comment on the matter.

OK, I guess I’m officially confused. Did Sony cancel the Christmas release date of The Interview because malls and theater chains were desperate to back out of showing it? Or did malls and theater chains back out because Sony had implicitly urged them to do so when it gave the chains permission to break their contractual commitments to show the movie? Or are both sides now just furiously trying to shift blame after being called out for cowardice by everyone from George Clooney to President Obama?

The latter, I suppose. In any case, now I know what I want for Christmas: A country that doesn’t spin into a damn tizzy over every little thing. From Ebola to ISIS to the Sony hack, you’d think we were all at risk of losing our lives to outside forces every time we step off our front porches. In the immortal words of Aaron Rodgers, can we all please R-E-L-A-X?

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Hollywood Backstabbing Over "The Interview" Now in Full Swing

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