USDA Approves Non-GMO Label for Meat, Eggs for U.S. Use

Sweet corn/Fairfax County

Advocates for non-GMO foods have done their work with a different regulatory agency than the FDA, the USDA, in order to get labeling approved for meats and eggs that also indicates if the animals were fed GM food, signaling a small but important success in the fight for a transparent food industry. See for full story, the Nation of Change website, and a previous post Why Label Genetically Engineerde Food, the New York Times Wonders?

eBooks and Barnes and Noble CEO Resigns (part 2)

(goXunuReviews/Flickr)

A few weeks ago the Barnes & Noble CEO resigned due to disappointing results at its Nook eBook division. At that time the pundits believed that this was another nail in the B&N coffin. Recently James Surowiecki writes in the New Yorker that the situation may not be that dire for B&N, because eBooks are maybe not as important as everyone seems to believe. In his article E-Book vs. P-Book he makes some useful observations, which bring some reality to the perceptions of "declining" book business:

"To begin with, B. & N.’s retail business still makes good money, and, though its sales fell last year, its profits actually rose. ..........B. & N., which still has more than six hundred retail stores (and six hundred and eighty-six college bookstores), also retains considerable leverage with publishers. As a recent report from the Codex Group showed, browsing in stores is still a far more common way of finding new books than either online search or social media. So publishers have a stake in B. & N.’s survival.....

John F. Kennedy's Assassination Revisited

This coming November we will witness the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination. But after all these 50 years, the theories about what actually happened and who really was behind this killing of the most promising U.S. President of the 20th century still continue.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that this fall, "a TV network will take another look at the killing in a docudrama that suggests a Secret Service agent accidentally fired one of the bullets that felled Kennedy.....
 
"ReelzChannel's "JFK: The Smoking Gun" is based on the work of retired Australian police Detective Colin McLaren and the book "Mortal Error: The Shot that Killed JFK" by Bonar Menninger. McLaren spent four years combing through evidence from Kennedy's death on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas. He and Menninger also relied on ballistics evidence from an earlier book by Howard Donahue. The two-hour docudrama airs Nov. 3 in the U.S., Canada and Australia. It suggests that agent George Hickey fired (..accidentally...) one of the bullets that hit Kennedy. Hickey, who is now dead, was riding in the car behind Kennedy's limo that day."

It's quite astonishing that the theories, books and movies about John F. Kennedy's assassination keep coming, but it shows how

Journalist Chris Hedges on Current Economic & Political Affairs

(Tropic-7's photostream/Flickr)

With the abundance of TV channels from the U.S. networks, cable TV channels, and even the public broadcasting system, it still is not easy to find programming that delves into serious and newsworthy subjects, or lengthier programming  dedicated to people who usually do not show up at the 6 o'clock news. Luckily, the Internet often compensates for this lack of diverse news, and one such online venue is the Real News Network, a television news and documentary network focused on providing independent and uncompromising journalism." It is  viewer supported and does not accept advertising, government or corporate funding." Its senior editor, Paul Jay, recently interviewed the journalist Chris Hedges in a seven-part series on his show Reality Asserts Itself.  Hedges is a journalist and author with quite a unique background: he spent two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, the Balkans and Africa, working for the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio.  In 2002, when at the New York Times, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He currently is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and writes a column for Truthdig. Also interesting to note,  Hedges is a socialist, not something which you hear often in U.S. media.

The following seven-part interview (approx. 15 minutes each) will cover Hedges' background; the state of journalism in the U.S.; how he was pushed out of The New York Times after a controversial commencement speech against the Iraq War; the bleak economic and environmental situation; whether there will be a mass movement against the current government's policies; how the liberal class is missing in action; and what people should do now in dealing with current challenges and corporate policies. Whether one agrees with everything Hedges says or not, and sometimes his views seem too bleak, it still is refreshing to hear important issues to be discussed in a thorough and open manner. It is a shame that no U.S. politician of name is able to acknowledge and articulate the challenges facing the U.S. and to a large extent the rest of the world. Have a look at this interview:

                              Part 1/7 - Introduction                              

Detroit Bankruptcy: Spectacular Failure or Good for Tax Payers?

Ian Ransley Design/Flickr

Since Detroit filed for bankruptcy last week, comments and opinions are pouring in from many corners, laying the blame for this fiasco with different economic players. As I mentioned in my previous blg post Detroit Files for Bankruptcy, here we witness the first consequences of this bankruptcy filing, the blame-game is on:

Come See Detroit, America's Future, is today's New York Times op-ed by Charlie LeDuff, a reporter at the TV station WJBK and author of “Detroit: An American Autopsy” who offers a very bleak view and who blames local government, labor unions,  and management of the car companies:

"........So we went broke, bust, bankrupt. We’ve known that in Detroit for years. Only now it is official with a Chapter 9 filing last week. The biggest municipal default in United States history — at least $18 billion. Suddenly, America gives a rip. How did it get this way, I’m asked? After all, it was just 99 years ago that Henry Ford offered the workingman $5 a day and profit-sharing. How, in less than a century, did it come to this? 

Detroit Files for Bankruptcy

Ian Ransley Design/Flickr

Like all the media, The New York Times reported that the city of Detroit has filed for bankruptcy:

"Detroit, the cradle of America’s automobile industry and once the nation’s fourth-most-populous city, filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, the largest American city ever to take such a course........... 

Not everyone agrees how much Detroit owes, but Kevyn D. Orr, the emergency manager, has said the debt is likely to be $18 billion and perhaps as much as $20 billion..............

Detroit expanded at a stunning rate in the first half of the 20th century with the arrival of the automobile industry, and then shrank away in recent decades at a similarly remarkable pace. A city of 1.8 million in 1950, it is now home to 700,000 people, as well as to tens of thousands of abandoned buildings, vacant lots and unlit streets. From here, there is no road map for Detroit’s recovery, not least of all because municipal bankruptcies are rare. State officials said ordinary city business would carry on as before, even as city leaders take their case to a judge, first to prove that the city is so financially troubled as to be eligible for bankruptcy, and later to argue that Detroit’s creditors and representatives of city workers and municipal retirees ought to settle for less than they once expected."

A Safe and Effective Dutch Drug Policy?

The Open Society released a surprisingly positive report on the history and effectiveness of Dutch drug policy, Coffee Shops and Compromise: Separated Illicit Drug Markets in the Netherlands

Just to highlight a few of its conclusions:

- Far fewer arrests for minor drug offenses occur. 
While it was recently reported that someone is arrested for marijuana possession in the U.S. every 42 seconds, Dutch citizens have generally been spared the burden of criminal records for minor, nonviolent offenses. According to one comparison, in 2005 there were 269 marijuana possession arrests for every 100,000 citizens in the United States, 206 in the United Kingdom, 225 in France, and just 19 in the Netherlands."

- Lighter enforcement did not lead to more drug use. 
About 25.7 percent of Dutch citizens reported having used marijuana at least once, which is on par with the European average. In the comparatively strict United Kingdom, the rate is 30.2 percent and in the United States it is a whopping 41.9 percent."

I have to say that this resembles my personal experience. Whenever I speak with American friends, drugs seem to have been part of their high-school/college experience, while I can't say the same of my Dutch friends or myself: drugs just were not part of our universe. 

The report continues:

Why Don't Americans Follow the Brazilians on the Barricades?

Election Day by John Lewis Krimmel 1815

Marty Kaplan,  Professor of Media, Entertainment and Society  and the founding director of the Norman Lear Center for the study of the impact of entertainment on society, at the
USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism recently wrote an article Let's Be Brazil  in the Huffington Post about last month's massive protests in Brazil, and was wondering why Brazilians went to the streets and why it seems nearly impossible within the U.S.  to organize similar protests "even though millions of Americans below the poverty line can't make a living wage, and millions more are barely hanging on by their fingernails." Kaplan continues:

"..There are, of course, plenty of dissimilarities between the U.S. and Brazil, a developing nation ruled by military dictatorship until 1985, but there are also plenty of all-too-close analogies between what's pissing off Brazilians and what ought to piss off Americans.

• Income inequality. Brazil is in the world's bottom 10 percent on income inequality, ranking 121st out of 133 countries. But the U.S. ranks 80th, just below Sri Lanka, Mauritania and Nicaragua.
• Wealth distribution. There are only six countries in the world whose wealth distribution -- accumulated holdings, not annual funds earned -- is more unequal than Brazil. But the U.S. is one of those six.
• Education. The annual rate of growth in student achievement in math, reading and science in Brazil is 4 percent of a standard deviation. But U.S. educational achievement is growing at less than half that rate: 1.6 percent, just below Iran.
• Corruption. Brazil ranks 121 in public trust in the ethical standards of politicians, out of 144 countries. But the U.S. comes in only at 54, just above Gabon.
• Infrastructure. The quality of Brazil's infrastructure puts it at a dismal 107, out of 144 countries. But the U.S. ranks 25th -- below most other advanced industrial countries and even behind some developing nations, like Oman and Barbados.
• Health care. Brazil's health care system ranks 125th out of 190 countries. But the U.S., jingoistic rhetoric notwithstanding, is only 38th. Among our peer nations -- wealthy democracies -- we're dead last, and it's only gotten worse over the past several decades.

So why aren't Americans at the barricades?

Capitalism in Crisis? - part 2

Communist Manifesto

A few day ago, I blogged about whether not just the financial sector but rather capitalism is in crisis (see Capitalism in Crisis?, covering a panel of a experts - from OECD and the private sector to a varied group of economists -, and then showing what left-leaning American economist Richard D. Wolff had to say.) The panel seemed inconclusive about the state of capitalism, while Wolff cleary stated that capitalism as a system by definition creates crises and is actually a system itself in crisis. The discussion about capitalism seems to be in the air or at least in the media, as I just read an interesting post, What Marx Got Right by Charles Hugh Smith on his blog oftwominds.com. This is how he starts his article:

"That Marx's prescription for a socialist/Communist alternative to capitalism failed does not necessarily negate his critique of capitalism. (!) Marx spent hundreds of pages analyzing capital and capitalism and relatively few sketching out a pie-in-the-sky alternative that was not grounded in historical examples or working models......

Marx got a number of things right, one of which appears to be playing out on a global scale. You probably know that Marx expected capitalism to experience a series of ever-larger boom-bust cycles that would eventually precipitate revolution and overthrow of the existing financial-political order....

The competition to outproduce industrial rivals with cheaper per-unit production costs and labor's competition for jobs both generate a structural crisis in capitalism: as production of goods rises, both the cost per unit and the number of workers earning enough to buy the goods declines.......

The Random Penguin Publishing Merger

(goXunuReviews/Flickr)

“IT’S official,” Alfred A. Knopf Sr. tweeted last week. “We’re now #PenguinRandomHouse.”  (By the way, mr. Knopf Sr. died in 1984.)That's the start of an op-ed article, Book Publishing's Big Gamble in the New York Times about the recent merger between Penguin and Random House (“the world’s first truly global trade book publishing company”)

 "This merger ........shrinks the Big Six, which publish about two-thirds of books in the United States, down to the Big Five........... This creation  is partly a response to unprecedented pressures on these “legacy” publishers — especially from Amazon, which came out on the winning end of an antitrust lawsuit over the setting of e-book prices. It is also a way to gain leverage and capital in an industry that has been turned upside down. This endgame may be inevitable, but its consequences can’t be ignored."

 

The writer Boris Kachka, a contributing editor at New York Magazine and an author,  continues..........

 

eBooks and Barnes and Noble CEO Resigns

(goXunuReviews/Flickr)

Turmoil in the U.S. book industry continues with the latest announcement of the resignation of William Lynch, as CEO of Barnes and Noble, the largest, not to say, only bookstore chain in the U.S. Reason for the resignation is most likely the flop of the Nook. This reader was supposed to save Barnes and Noble and offer some direct competition to Amazon's Kindle. Well, even with Microsoft's $650 million dollar investment last year in Nook's development, Nook sales have been declining this year.

The New York Times technology columnist David Pogue had this to say:

"So the bottom line is all bad news. People who bought e-books from Barnes & Noble may wind up with libraries they can’t read. Amazon no longer has a competitor to keep it on its toes (and its prices low). The future of Barnes & Noble’s e-book business now looks murky, which means that even more customers will stay away, creating a vicious cycle of declining sales.

In the end, it may be that all we can salvage from this smoking mess is a lesson or two — although what they might be escapes me at the moment." Hear, hear.

Crisis, Economics and the Emperor's Clothes

Serge Melki/Wikimedia Commons

Recently I've been in contact with Frans Doorman, an international development aid consultant with decades of experience in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, and author of Crisis, Economics and the Emperor's Clothes (also freely available as a pdf. ) His book's aim is to offer a critique on mainstream economics, and offers "a Fourth Way alternative to right wing ideology, left wing ideology, and the Third Way: the combination of right-wing economic and left-wing social policies that gathered momentum in the 1990s in many European social democratic parties." In essence this book is part of a growing trend showing a deep dissatisfaction with main stream economics, and its failure in finding solutions to the ongoing economic slump. Let me quote from this book's preface, that explains its rationale eloquently:

 "This book is a pamphlet: a call to action. Its origin is frustration, reflected in a simple question: Why aren’t we doing better? More elaborately: Why, in spite of enormous advances in science and technology, do society’s economic, social, and environmental problems appear to get worse rather than better? Why haven’t those advances led to more wealth, wellbeing and a brighter outlook for humanity? These questions apply in different measure to different types of problems and groups of people. Let’s focus.

One: why do close to half the world’s citizens, more than three billion people, continue to live in poverty, among them half the world’s 2.2 billion children?

Two: why, in the rich countries, are most lower and middle income earners and their families worse off financially than they were in the 1970s? And why, in the wake of the economic and financial crisis that started in 2007, are things getting worse rather than better, with millions of people having lost or loosing their jobs, homes, or both, and with tens of millions of young people unable to find employment?

Three: why does society appear unable to deal effectively....

Essential Wall Street Summer Reading List

Andrew Ross Sorkin, journalist and financial columnist at the New York Times, has come up with his list of essential readings about Wall Street and business. Although you might not think of it, many of these books are great reads even during the long hot summer days. Let me list his recommendations and add a few of mine to round off your  financial and business "reading education" during this summer:

World's Shortest Work Week

The Dutch workforce works the least among the world's industrialized nations: it averages 29 hours a week - according to the OECD - with an average annual income of $47,000.

CNN reports that Americans work 38 hours a week at an average annual income of $54,000.

Besides Holland, the other nine countries with shorter work hours than the U.S. are: Denmark (33 hours, $46,000); Norway (33 hours, $44,000); Ireland (34 hours, $51,000); Germany (35 hours, $40,000); Switzerland (35 hours, $50,000); Belgium (35 hours, $44,000);Sweden (36 hours, $38,000); Australia (36 hours, $45,000) and Italy (36 hours, $34,000.) 

It's interesting to follow the ensuing conversation on CNN's website with its usual cliche-driven remarks, such as:

"And then "smart" Americans claim socialism doesn't work! People in these countries all work less, make more and have all kinds of benefits and these are countries doing great economically as well. Let me live in the land of the free, work 60hrs a week for low wages, no vacation and no benefits while being watched by my government. " (by Mbane)

and

"we work a few more hours, yet make substantially more before taxes and a ton more after taxes. yet, somehow a country with a population of Los Angeles is 'better' because they make significantly SIGNIFICANTLY less money than we do on average? what?" (by Virtually Real)

and ""People in these countries are healthier, live longer, live in far better housing,

CrowdRoaming: Roaming Innovation from Holland

Bfishadow/Flickr

The European Union just mandated that roaming charges will be lowered for Europeans traveling within Europe (per megabyte of data transfer from 70 euro cents down to 45 cents with a further drop scheduled in July 2014 to push it down to 20 cents; and the cost of calls for both made and received calls, will be going down from 29 cents and 8 cents per minute respectively to 24 cents and 7 cents. Calls from July 1st 2014 will go down to 19 cents per minute outbound, and 5 cents per minute inbound.) 

While this is the result of an interesting mix of deregulation and bureaucratic arm wrestling, in the meanwhile a Dutch start-up, CrowdRoaming, just launched a free Android app, which will enable travellers to tap into local CrowdRoaming users’ smartphone WiFi and surf without costs. This offers the latest example of bringing the sharing economy to consumers. In the end what is more appealing, paying 20 euro cents per megabyte or absolutely zero? The odds are that this Dutch innovation will be beating European Union deregulation.

 

Click here for video

Capitalism in Crisis?

TaxCredit/Flickr

As the Euro crisis, high unemployment and recessions seem to continue in the Western world, six years after the start of the financial crisis, some experts wonder whether this is truly a financial crisis or a sign of capitalism itself in crisis. Before showing you what the "experts" say, let's first describe capitalism, and what its proponents and opponents believe- according to Wikipedia -:
 
"Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital assets and goods. In a capitalist economy, investors are free to buy, sell, produce, and distribute goods and services with at most limited government control, at prices determined primarily by a competition for profit in a free market.Central elements of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, and a price system.....

.......Many theorists and policymakers in predominantly capitalist nations have emphasized capitalism's ability to promote economic growth, as measured by GDP.....Proponents argue that increasing GDP (per capita) is empirically shown to bring about improved standards of living, such as better availability of food, housing, clothing, and health care.The decrease in the number of hours worked per week and the decreased participation of children and the elderly in the workforce have been attributed to capitalism. Proponents also believe that a capitalist economy offers far more opportunities for individuals to raise their income through new professions or business ventures than do other economic forms. To their thinking, this potential is much greater than in either traditional feudal or tribal societies or in socialist societies......

......Critics of capitalism associate it with

The No-Recovery Recovery

Serge Melki/Wikimedia Commons

The U.S. Economic Recovery: Long, Slow, but Still Going (Bloomberg Businessweek); Steady Job Gains could Further U.S. Economic Recovery (Daily Finance);
The Current U.S. Economy: Text and Subtext (NY Times);
Housing Recovery to accelerate U.S. economy: Summers (Reuters), and the list of relatively positive descriptions of the U.S. economic recovery continues. But is there a real recovery going on, or just in some specific areas (financial markets, real estate etc.)?

Earlier this week, I was listening to one of my favorite radio hosts Richard Martin, who hosts a show called Wake Up Call about economic issues on the Progressive Radio Network, (a non-commercial internet radio station.) Martin is a financial executive, a Brit who has lived in many different countries, including the U.S. and now based in Singapore, and who is opinionated and passionate about how the current economy is managed or should I say mismanaged by the powers to be from the central bankers, to the politicians and the leading commercial and investment bankers. Anyway, this week's show about the No-Recovery Recovery, I think is worth listening to, in order to put all the other mainstream financial news into perspective. In this week's show Martin shows, "raw statistics simply show no growth at all in employment. Stimulus has done nothing to alleviate the situation..... Adding debt to debt did not, cannot and will not work, either. The situation is unthinkably grim – and getting worse by the day..." Have a listen and see what you think about Richard Martin's take on the economy, and its supposed recovery. 

Debt a Great Invention?

Serge Melki/Wikimedia Commons

One of the great things about the Internet is that you find things, you were not looking for, but which can be very interesting. Case in point is a short four-part series about debt by Dutch Associate Professor economics at the University of Groningen, Dirk Bezemer, who is also affiliated with the Institute for New Economic Thinking in New York. The first episode is about how money and debt systems developed over the years into the financial system we have today, a system that can create great wealth. The second episode is about bubbles, basically caused by lending for non-productive purposes, mainly in asset markets.The third episode explains why crises occur, i.e. after the bust of an asset bubble debt reduction will have an impact on the real economy. The fourth and last episode tries to answer the question whether we can have an economic system that does not produce bubbles and crises. Bezemer mentions restructuring unsustainable debt, redirecting bank lending to productive purposes, and reducing the banking sector as solutions to the current crisis, but doesn't answer his own question. He hints that it may take some time before economics can come up with a "better' system. Also, this series gives a good overview of the current crisis, and shows in simple terms why austerity as it's currently practiced in Europe and possibly the U.S. doesn't work. Bezemer explains that the important number to keep in mind is not total debt, but the debt burden,  the ratio between

Green Germans Lost Trust in Obama

German Green Party executive and candidate for the German Bundestag in September's elections, Malte Spitz, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, Germans Loved Obama. Now We Don’t Trust Him.

Spitz talks about his own experiences with T-Mobile in Germany storing his cell phone records, and shows how much the German people for historical reasons value privacy over corporate or government surveillance. In 2009, Spitz filed a lawsuit against T-Mobile in Germany to release the data of his cell phone use, that T-Mobile had collected and stored. The reason at that time this kind of information had been preserved for six months was because of an implementation of a 2006 European Union directive. After huge protests by Germans, the German Constitutional Court ruled that the implementation of the European Union directive was unconstitutional. 

When Spitz won his case against T-Mobile, he received in 2010 the 35,830 pieces of metadata collected by T-Mobile in those six months. He was so shocked to see a trail of his own life based on just "records" of his phone calls, that he decided to make these records visually available with the German newspaper Die Zeit.

Spitz describes this story to show how concerned Germans are about their privacy. He says:

Dutch iPad Schools Seek to Transform Education

"Plenty of schools use iPads. But what if the entire education experience were offered via tablet computer? That is what several new schools in the Netherlands plan to do. There will be no blackboards or schedules. Is this the end of the classroom?" The German weekly Der Spiegel reports on this phenomenon, stating:

"There will be no blackboards, chalk or classrooms, homeroom teachers, formal classes, lesson plans, seating charts, pens, teachers teaching from the front of the room, schedules, parent-teacher meetings, grades, recess bells, fixed school days and school vacations. If a child would rather play on his or her iPad instead of learning, it'll be okay. And the children will choose what they wish to learn based on what they happen to be curious about." The initiator of these iPad schools is Maurice de Hond, a well-known Dutch pollster and digital entrepreneur.

Pandora's Box of NSA Spying Program Now Moves to Europe

(Pandora by Dante Rosetti)

Who had heard a month ago of Edward Snowden? Who knew a month ago, what  the consequences would be of publishing articles in a newspaper with Snowden's disclosures about NSA's Prism spying program? Well, it's a month later since Snowden opened Pandora's box and here are a number of quotes by European top officials in today's New York Times article Outrage in Europe Grows Over Spying Disclosures :"we cannot accept this kind of behavior between partners and allies" (French President Hollande, who also suggested to delay any new trade talks with the U.S.); "the spying has reached dimensions that I did not think were possible for a democratic country.... the U.S. has lost all balance - George Orwell is nothing by comparison" (Elmar Brok, the German chairman of the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee); "I'm deeply worried and shocked."  (Martin Schultz, the German President of the European Parliament.)

I'm adding a quote by the Dutch minister of Interior Affairs, Ronald Plasterk, who while stating that this matter is for the European Union rather than the Dutch, to take up with the U.S. , also said: "these kind of actions by the U.S. would not be acceptable for the Dutch intelligence agencies as this is contrary to Dutch law."

What has caused all this European outrage? Over the  weekend, the German magazine Der Spiegel reported in How the NSA targets Germany and Europe on further revelations by Snowden , specifically that the U.S. has been spying on Germany, and on European Union diplomats and officials. Because Der Spiegel article is so all-encompassing, I will quote extensively from this article:

" The documents prove that Germany played a central role in the NSA's global surveillance network -- and how the Germans have also become targets of US attacks. Each month, the US intelligence service saves data from around half a billion communications connections from Germany.......

No one is safe from this mass spying -- at least almost no one. Only one handpicked group of nations is excluded -- countries that the NSA has defined as close friends, or "2nd party," as one internal document indicates. They include the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. A document classified as "top secret" states that, 'The NSA does NOT target its 2nd party partners, nor request that 2nd parties do anything that is inherently illegal for NSA to do.' "