Category: Economy

Robbie Kenner didn’t mean to make a horror film when he started working on Food, Inc.. But you can’t shine a light on our food chain without exposing some ugly truths. As Michael Pollan says in the opening of the film:

The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000, but the image that’s used to sell the food…you go into the supermarket and you see pictures of farmers. The picket fence and the silo and the 1930s farmhouse and the green grass. The reality is, it’s not a farm, it’s a factory.

I remember the morning of September 11, 2001 well. I was sitting in a study hall at my high school in Teaneck, New Jersey, listening to a radio host announce that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. Three friends and I hopped in a car and sped down the Jersey Turnpike. We pulled over in the Vince Lombardi rest area just in time to watch the towers fall from across the Hudson River.

Okay, this has been a heckuva interesting ride the last week or so and handful of articles – and very timely too, as I’ve been making similar observations of late. It seems like there’s a lively debate on where political and art-inspired graffiti fits into the general urban landscape.

Ten of America’s largest financial institutions today were cleared to return $68 billion in bailout funds received from the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), after successfully completing a government-administered stress test and raising capital from private sources if it was deemed more was necessary (more on that later).

by Mary E Mann

For weeks, starting in he beginning of May, I was getting up early and taking walks around Ocean Beach. I was looking for the groups of kids (teens and twenty-something’s mostly), who I have heard described as “Pier Kids”, “Anarchist Kids”, “Street Kids”, “Kids with backpacks”, and “Those kids who wear a lot of brown and have dogs, and sometimes cats on leashes”. I will refer to them here as The Kids. The Kids are, in fact, the young and the homeless.

By OB Rag Staffer

Our US employer-based corporate healthcare insurance system is a nightmarish maze of rules and expenses and deadlines. It keeps many patients from receiving the medical care they need. It provides easy access to medical care to those who need it the least, and denies it to those who need it the most.

It provides a lavish, luxurious lifestyle for the corporate executives who reap its financial benefits (and who fight to keep it that way).

One in nine Americans are using federal food stamps to help buy groceries as the country’s deep recession forced another 591,000 people onto the federal anti-hunger program at latest count.

The unemployment rate raced to 9.4 percent, the highest since a matching rate in July 1983, from 8.9 percent in April. This reading beat the peak in the jobless rate during the 1973-1975 recession that lasted 16 months.

AHIP (America’s Health Insurance Plans) is having their annual meeting in San Diego this week. Nurses from the California Nurses Association and allies from groups like Physicians for a National Health Program and Progressive Democrats of America will be there to greet them – of course!

by Michael Moore

General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled. …

It is with sad irony that the company which invented “planned obsolescence” — has now made itself obsolete.

by JEC

Once upon a time, in the State of Nebraska, the citizens, excited from voting out the State Income Tax, decided to follow up with eliminating the State’s last source of revenue, the 2.75% Sales Tax.

And then it snowed. It was a blizzard….

Dear Superior Court Judge Yuri Hofmann,

As a US Citizen residing here in San Diego, I would like to thank you and applaud your efforts to disperse the seals at the “Children’s Pool” beach in La Jolla. I hope to see these actions succeed, and the beach be returned to the hands of its true owners, the people of San Diego.

Often dumbfounded by the countless trespassing violations and blockages of public right-of-way by the members of the “animal kingdom,” …

Despite his admission that California is ungovernable, the Governor soldiered on today, announcing the full slate of revised budget cuts to replace his proposed borrowing, since scrapped, and to fill the even larger deficit estimated by the Legislative Analyst. …