Tag Archives: trade

Senate passes GMO-labeling bill

by ZCFAlphons Posted on July 6, 2016

Senate passes GMO-labeling bill

By on Jul 6, 2016Share

The Senate just voted to usher in nationwide mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods.

The bill, passed Wednesday with strong Republican support, requires food companies to tell consumers if there are any genetically engineered ingredients in their products. Companies wouldn’t necessarily need to do that by writing “contains GMOs” on the package — they could provide that information with a scannable QR code and small businesses could comply by simply providing a phone number or website. More details here.

Republicans did most of the heavy lifting: 47 voted for the measure along with 18 Democrats, giving it enough votes to withstand a filibuster.

Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who brokered the deal to get the bill passed, called it a victory for farmers and consumers. “I worked to ensure that any agreement would recognize the scientific consensus that biotechnology is safe, while also making sure consumers have the right to know what is in their food,” Stabenow said, in a statement. “I also wanted a bill that prevents a confusing patchwork of 50 different rules in each state.”

The bill is a compromise, so of course people from both sides of the debate have attacked it. Senator Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) voted against the measure because he believes mandatory labels should be reserved for products that have been shown to harm health. “I fear that this approach puts us on a path that will ultimately hurt Nebraskans by putting a liberal agenda ahead of sound science,” he told the Lincoln Journal Star.

On the other side, Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted that the bill was “confusing, misleading and unenforceable.”

Sanders opposes the bill in part because it would pre-empt a law passed in his home state of Vermont that requires a written label instead of a scannable code.

So, both pro and anti-GMO partisans oppose the bill, but there are a lot of folks in the middle that support it, including everyone from the Organic Trade Association to the generally conservative American Farm Bureau Federation.

The House has already passed a GMO-labeling bill, one that calls for voluntary, rather than mandatory, labeling. The two are different enough that they can’t be reconciled, so that means the House will have to pass yet another bill before this Senate bill could become law.

There’s a pretty good chance that the House will pass a carbon copy of the Senate bill soon. I expect the majority of representatives will eventually come around to the compromise, because the alternative — having labeling rules that vary from state to state — would cause trouble for companies selling food across state lines.

Some companies have already decided not to sell in Vermont, and others have slapped GMO-labels on their products no matter where they are sold. The Vermont law went into effect July 1, but the state won’t begin enforcing it until the end of the year.

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Here’s How To Do Free Trade Right

by Dieter25Fczq Posted on July 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jared Bernstein says that Donald Trump has a legitimate point about the problems with American trade agreements:

The process by which they’re negotiated is undemocratic, they uplift investor rights over sovereign rights, they reverse the order in which certain challenges should be tackled, and they fail to deal with currency issues. But globalization cannot nor should not be stopped. Done right, it delivers great benefits to advanced countries through the increased supply of goods, and it helps improve the living standards of workers in developing countries through profits made from trade with wealthier nations. Trump’s tariffs would undermine all of that.

Most liberals agree with this criticism. Until Trump, in fact, opposition to trade deals was mostly limited to liberals—and still is, judging by the number of Republicans who oppose Trump’s trade agenda. But as Bernstein says, international trade is basically a good thing. So what should we do to make it fairer? Tariffs and trade wars aren’t the answer. Here are Bernstein’s five recommendations:

Take action against those who suppress the value of their currencies relative to the dollar.

Change the sequencing of labor and environmental rights. Any benefits to partners in terms of market access must be preceded by confirmation that labor and environmental rights are enforced. That means that countries we enter trade agreements with must offer sustained evidence that conditions on the ground have improved, and that we withdraw trade benefits when there’s evidence of backsliding.

Relocate risk in investor disputes. The current Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) process is set up in such a way that investors in countries that are signatories to trade deals can, through non-elected tribunals, override the sovereign laws of developing countries….The answer to this problem is to shift this risk away from the broader public and back to the investors themselves. The way to accomplish this is by taking ISDS out of future trade agreements and insisting that investors privately insure themselves against investment losses.

Take a public welfare stance toward patent and copyright protections. Trade agreements should not increase protectionism. They should not extend patents or limit the competition that reduces prices and increases access to needed medicines.

Sunlight disinfects trade agreements. The trade agreement process is uniquely secretive and exclusive — and as a result non-representative of the views of millions of people affected by the deal….This level of secrecy must end. We’re not talking about nuclear codes but about the formulation of policies that will affect the everyday economic lives of every American. US-proposed text and then the texts of agreements after each negotiating round ought to be made publicly available.

Personally, I think the second point is the most important. We talk endlessly about protecting labor in these agreements, but nothing much ever really happens. The only way it will is to insist that labor rights come first, before markets are opened up.

Conversely, I’ve never been convinced that ISDS is quite the villain it’s made out to be. I’m open to argument on this score, but trade agreements always need some kind of enforcement authority outside the nation states themselves, and ISDS is one of them. It’s been around for a long time, and really doesn’t seem to have done any harm to US interests.

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Here’s How To Do Free Trade Right

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Organic industry sales put Monsanto’s to shame

by ChesterAviles02 Posted on May 19, 2016

Organic industry sales put Monsanto’s to shame

By on May 19, 2016Share

If there was some stock index fund that covered organic food businesses, I’d want to invest my savings in it. In the United States organic food sales have grown steadily at around 10 percent a year since the Great Recession (and at higher rates before that), which puts the stock market to shame.

In 2015 organic product sales revenue grew 11 percent, while the rest of the food market grew at a rate of 3 percent, according to the Organic Trade Association’s annual survey of the industry. Total sales reached $43.3 billion, which makes the organic industry a force to be reckoned with. For comparison, Monsanto brought in just under $15 billion in revenue last year, and Whole Foods brought a little over $15 billion.

When people have the disposable income they’re pretty quick to take a step up the price ladder from commodity food. Organic food still only amounts to five percent of the U.S. market, which suggests that there’s room for more growth.

The term organic doesn’t automatically mean the food is produced with the best environmental practices, or that it’s healthier and tastier, but it often is: The higher prices provide farmers with bigger margins, and that gives them a greater ability to attend to quality and stewardship.

Here’s our explainer on what organic signifies.

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Organic industry sales put Monsanto’s to shame

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9/11 Commissioner Says Saudi Government Members Supported the Attack

by goopwppvt Posted on May 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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A former member of the 9/11 Commission says Saudi government officials offered support to the hijackers, and he joined the growing chorus calling for the government to release 28 classified pages of the commission’s report that may detail the roles those Saudi officials played.

John Lehman, a former Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, told the Guardian, “There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government.” Details of their involvement are found in the 28 classified pages of the 9/11 Commission report, he said. The Obama administration says it may release those pages soon.

The original report found “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization,” and the commission’s leaders wrote an op-ed last month saying that the 28 classified pages should not be released. Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the 9/11 Commission’s chairman and vice-chairman, argued that “the 28 pages were based almost entirely on raw, unvetted material that came to the FBI” and were more akin to “preliminary law enforcement notes,” not solid evidence.

But Lehman says the report was too lenient on the Saudis, and that the commission saw “an awful lot of circumstantial evidence” that Saudi officials, likely members of the kingdom’s Islamic affairs ministry, were involved. “Our report should never have been read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia,” he said during his Guardian interview.

Saudi Arabian officials have a long history of backing armed fundamentalist movements, from anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan during the 1980s to Islamist rebel groups in the Syrian civil war. The kingdom is also a frequent target of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, who believe the US government helped cover up high-level Saudi complicity in the attacks. Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump has suggested the same thing on the campaign trail. “Who blew up the World Trade Center?” he said during an appearance on Fox News in February. “It wasn’t the Iraqis, it was Saudi—take a look at Saudi Arabia, open the documents.”

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9/11 Commissioner Says Saudi Government Members Supported the Attack

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Donald Trump Blames George W. Bush for 9/11

by LucioBland Posted on February 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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During the CBS debate in South Carolina on Saturday, GOP front-runner Donald Trump blamed former President George W. Bush for the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

After Florida senator Marco Rubio said that Bush had “kept us safe,” Donald Trump shot back: “How did he keep us safe when the World Trade Center came down?”

“I lost hundreds of friends, the World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush,” Trump said, while the crowd’s boos nearly drowned him out. “That is not safe, Marco, that is not safe,”

Trump has made this claim before, but this time Bush’s brother Jeb pushed back. “This is a man who insults his way to the nomination,” he said. “I am sick and tired of him going after my family.”

Watch the clash between the real estate mogul and Jeb Bush here:

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Donald Trump Blames George W. Bush for 9/11

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Trump Says He Predicted Osama Bin Laden. He Didn’t.

by LeiaBaltes Posted on December 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday afternoon, Donald Trump, the GOP presidential front-runner, appeared on the internet-based talk show of Alex Jones, a so-called 9/11 truther who promulgates a wide variety of wild conspiracy theories. Jones heaped praise on Trump for being a modern-day George Washington who could save this nation before it falls into utter ruin in the next few years, and he begged Trump to vow that he will not pull out of the race (even under pressure from dark globalist forces). Trump, for his part, also heaped praise on Trump.

In touting his own national security credentials, Trump pointed to a book he published in 2000 called The America We Deserve. He noted that in this work, he brilliantly foresaw the threat posed by Osama bin Laden:

I said in that book that we better be careful with this guy named Osama bin Laden. I mean I really study this stuff. I really find it very interesting, even though I am a businessman…I said we better be careful with Osama bin Laden. There’s a guy named Osama bin Laden. Nobody really knew who he was. But he was nasty. He was saying really nasty things about our country and what he wants to do to it. And I wrote in the book in 2000—two sic years before the World Trade Center came down—I talked to you about Osama bin Laden, you better take him out. I said he’s going to crawl under a rock. You better take him out. And now people are seeing that, they’re saying, “You know, Trump predicted Osama bin Laden.” Which actually is true.

Really? Trump, in a 2000 book, fingered bin Laden as a primary threat who had to be neutralized, and he did this before others saw the Al Qaeda leader as a danger?

Okay, by now you know where this is heading. In the Kindle version of this book, there is no index. But according to the search function, there is only one—yes, just one—brief reference to Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda in the entire book. Here it is:

Instead of one looming crisis hanging over us, we face a bewildering series of smaller crises, flash points, standoffs, and hot spots. We’re not playing the chess game to end all chess games anymore. We’re playing tournament chess—one master against many rivals. One day we’re all assured that Iraq is under control, the UN inspectors have done their work, everything’s fine, not to worry. The next day the bombing begins. One day we’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is public enemy number one, and U.S. jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan. He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.”

That’s it. Nothing prescient. Nothing that was not known publicly at the time. Nothing about putting bin Laden on the top of the national security to-do list. In the book’s opening chapter, Trump did note, “I really am convinced we’re in danger of the sort of terrorist attacks that will make the 1993 bombing of the Trade Center look like kids playing with firecrackers.” But he did not connect this to bin Laden. And in the book’s short chapter on terrorism, Trump had no mention of bin Laden or Al Qaeda. He focused instead on the terrorist threat—such as a “biobomb”—posed by the governments of Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea. And he proposed “The (Trump) National Security Lottery,” which “would sell tickets just like in a Powerball Lottery, but dedicate every cent to funding an anti-terrorism campaign.”

So Trump is wrong. In this book, he did not predict the rise of bin Laden. He and his co-writer were simply riffing off the clips of the day.

Not surprisingly, Jones did not call out Trump on this. Instead, he cheered on the tycoon and said Trump’s campaign is “epic.” Trump repaid the compliment. As the segment was ending, he told Jones, “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.”

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Trump Says He Predicted Osama Bin Laden. He Didn’t.

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Carson Joins Trump Idiocy About Jersey City, Then Backs Away

by DorcasScrymgeour Posted on November 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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The latest from la-la land:

Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson joined GOP rival Donald Trump in claiming that he, too, saw news footage of Muslim-Americans cheering as the World Trade Center towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001 — despite the fact that no such footage has turned up yet. “I saw the film of it, yes,” Carson told reporters at a Monday campaign event, adding that it was documented by “newsreels.”

Newsreels? What is this? 1943? But wait. We have breaking news via Twitter from Jon Karl of ABC News:

@RealBenCarson spox Doug Watts: Carson was mistaken when he said he saw film of Muslims celebrating on 9/11 in Jersey City….”He doesn’t stand behind his comments on New Jersey and American Muslims,” Watts told ABC’s @KFaulders….”He was rather thinking of the protests going on in the Middle East and some of the demonstrations” there on 9/11.

This is nuts. These guys are trying to put the Onion out of business for real. “We have investigated and discovered that East Jerusalem is not on the Hudson River after all.” But hell, at least Carson is willing to admit his error. One brownie point for that—though it does raise some questions about his vaunted memory. Trump will continue to insist forever that he saw it, and his supporters will continue to believe him because you can never trust the mainstream media, can you? They’re always covering up for Jersey City’s Muslim community.

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Carson Joins Trump Idiocy About Jersey City, Then Backs Away

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Father Coughlin Is Alive and Well in Today’s GOP

by AlonzoPrinsep20 Posted on November 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Let’s see. Over the past few days and weeks, Donald Trump has said:

The Obama administration is deliberately sending Syrian refugees only to red states as an act of political retribution.
Obama wants to take in 200,000 Syrian refugees, despite being told repeatedly that he’s off by a factor of ten or twenty.
If you’re a Christian refugee from Syria, the Obama administration won’t let you in. Obama only wants Muslim refugees.
We should have tight surveillance on mosques and might need to close some down.
We may have to think about creating a government registry of all Muslims.
On 9/11, there were thousands of people in Arab sections of Jersey City cheering when the World Trade Center went down.

More generally, Trump has said that we’re going to have to do things that were “unthinkable” a year ago. Considering the list of things he apparently believes are perfectly thinkable right now, that sends chills down your spine. And yet, this man continues to lead the GOP race and appears to be gaining momentum from his Father Coughlinesque brand of xenophobia and fearmongering.

How does this happen? A big part of it is because other high-profile Republicans are too cowardly to fight back. Nearly every Republican governor has jumped on the vile, big-talking bandwagon of refusing to allow any Syrian refugees to settle in their states. Every Republican presidential candidate favors a ban on accepting further Muslim Syrian refugees. Jeb Bush thinks we should only accept Christian refugees from Syria. Ted Cruz isn’t a fan of “government registries” but otherwise thinks Trump is great. Straight-talking Chris Christie dodges when he’s asked if existing Syrian refugees should be kicked out of New Jersey. Marco Rubio dodges when he’s asked if we might have to close down mosques.

Overall, with the semi-honorable exception of Jeb Bush, no Republican candidate has been willing to seriously push back on either Trump’s old Mexican demagoguery or his shiny new Muslim demagoguery. All this despite the fact that Mexican immigration is down and the United States hasn’t suffered a significant attack from overseas terrorists in over a decade. All it took to wake this latent hysteria was some terrorist activity in other countries. God help us.

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Father Coughlin Is Alive and Well in Today’s GOP

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25 sneaky names for palm oil

by JanisWhatley Posted on November 10, 2015

green4us

Collections of fairy tales Vietnam – Nguyen Luan

“THE LEGEND OF THE MILKY WAY THE SANDALWOOD MAIDEN THE HUNDRED-KNOT BAMBOO THE STORY OF TAM AND CAM THACH SANH – LY THONG SUE GOD FOR RAIN STORY OF KITCHEN GODS THE MOON BOY (CUOI) DRAGON'S CHILDREN, FAIRY'S GRAND CHILDREN THANH GIONG STORY OF WATER MELON HOUSE OF THE RISIN' SUN”

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The Art of Raising a Puppy (Revised Edition) – Monks of New Skete

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The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo – A 15-minute Summary & Analysis – Instaread

PLEASE NOTE: This is a  summary and analysis  of the book and NOT the original book.  The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo – A 15-minute Summary & Analysis   Inside this Instaread: Summary of entire book, Introduction to the important people in the book, Key Takeaways and Analysis of the Key Takeaways. […]

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Codex: Tau Empire (Enhanced Edition) – Games Workshop

A dynamic race whose technology eclipses anything their foes can muster, the tau use speed, strategy and overwhelming firepower to win their battles. Guided by the mysterious Ethereal caste, all tau strive for the Greater Good of their empire, forging ever onward into the stars to assimilate or annihilate everything that stands in their path. […]

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White Dwarf Issue 93: 07th November 2015 (Tablet Edition) – White Dwarf

White Dwarf 93 arrives and the Heresy begins! The brand-new Betrayal at Calth boxed game brings us the first ever plastic Space Marine miniatures for the Horus Heresy and we take a look, with New Releases, Paint Splatter, a play-through the game in ‘The Wrath of Veridia’ and a special background feature in ‘The Seeds […]

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Projects for Kids – Authors and Editors of Instructables

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The Cannabis Grow Bible – Greg Green

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

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25 sneaky names for palm oil

Posted in bamboo, cannabis, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, growing marijuana, horticulture, Jason, LAI, LG, Monterey, ONA, OXO, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 25 sneaky names for palm oil

The Shiny New "Sharing Economy" Is Sure Starting to Seem Awfully Old-Fashioned

by GertieFarfan Posted on September 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Brian Fung writes today about Amazon’s new package delivery scheme:

Flex, Amazon’s new on-demand delivery service, promises to get your packages to you even sooner by hiring independent drivers to bring them to your house. As a lot of reports have pointed out, Flex is basically Uber for Amazon packages.

But, speaking of Uber, how will Amazon’s leap into on-demand logistics affect the rest of the sharing economy?

….Amazon Flex says it will pay its delivery drivers $18 to $25 per hour. They can elect to drive for two-, four-, or eight-hour shifts. In exchange, they need to supply your own car, a driver’s license and an Android phone so that they can install Amazon’s driver app….Compare that to ridesharing services whose drivers get to maximize their flexibility but whose income is more variable. For some, this trade-off may be worth it.

….Amazon Flex is betting that as the economy improves, there will still be people who are willing to work in the sharing economy rather than returning to full-time jobs….Research from PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts the sharing economy will become a $335 billion business by 2025 — up from $15 billion a year today.

Let’s slow down here. What exactly is the “sharing economy”? Originally it was sort of like renting. Time rhapsodized about it in 2011: “The true innovative spirit of collaborative consumption can be found in start-ups like Brooklyn-based SnapGoods, which helps people rent goods via the Internet. Or Airbnb, which allows people to rent their homes to travelers.”

Then it morphed into “Uber for ____” companies. Uber, of course, doesn’t really allow you to share your car with other people. It’s your car and you’re the only one who drives it. Rather, Uber provides infrastructure and scale that allows you to become an on-demand taxicab whenever your schedule allows it.

Now it’s apparently morphed even further. In some sense, Uber allows you to “share” your car with your passengers. That’s a stretch, but Flex doesn’t even provide that. The only thing you’re doing is “sharing” your car with the packages you’re delivering. By that standard, all of us are part of the sharing economy, since we “share” our bodies and brains with employers in order to accomplish tasks that our employer gives us.

In this case, Amazon is doing nothing more than hiring drivers as independent contractors so that it doesn’t have to pay benefits and doesn’t have to pay them if there aren’t any packages to deliver. (You can pick your own shift, but only if a shift is available.) The only real innovation here is that Flex might1 allow you to work odd hours here and there, which is convenient if you have other commitments that prevent you from working a normal schedule. Mostly, though, it’s just Amazon taking the 21st century mania for scheduling workers on a day-to-day basis and instead scheduling them hour-to-hour.

In any case, it now seems as though the “sharing economy” is any job that’s somehow related to a scheduling app and provides workers only with odd bits and pieces of work at the employer’s whim. In other words, sort of like manual laborers in the Victorian era, but with smartphones and better pay. No wonder PricewaterhouseCoopers thinks it will grow to $335 billion over the next decade. By that standard, I’d be surprised if it didn’t break $1 trillion.

1I say “might” because it all depends. Maybe jobs really are first-come-first-serve. Or maybe Amazon will start to favor workers who regularly take as long a shift as Amazon wants them to take. Or perhaps Amazon will start to push offers out to workers, and downrate those who don’t accept them frequently enough. Who knows?

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The Shiny New "Sharing Economy" Is Sure Starting to Seem Awfully Old-Fashioned

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