Jonathan Latham at FAIR provides a devastating report on the hype surrounding various genetically-modified foods. And it's not just golden rice (which even Scientific American has lately flogged) -- Mr. Latham also delves into "fakethroughs" like disease-resistant Xa21 rice, virus-resistant sweet potatoes, and edible vaccines, and concludes, in a model of understatement, that "(t)hese misreports of biotechnology are endlessly useful to the industry." You want to believe in miracle foods that end hunger, but it sure seems like they just suck money into corporate CEO bank accounts instead.
Shawn Musgrave at BetaBoston writes about the "vast hidden surveillance network" propagated by repo corporations. That's right, repo corporations, in their effort to find cars in need of repossessing, take billions of license plate scans, which essentially amount to geolocation data for almost everyone in America at some point in time -- and that data can be sold to other corporations looking to make a buck. See, it's not just our government we have to worry about when we worry about privacy!
Bloomberg informs us that Washington state, which enacted the highest minimum wage in America back in 1998, has added jobs and lowered poverty faster than America as a whole has done for the past 15 years. You don't need to believe these two things are related to refute right-wing horsedoodle, since right-wing horsedoodle insists that all these things simply cannot happen together at all. In a related story, the Center for American Progress finds that raising the minimum wage to $10.10/hour would cut food stamp spending by $4 billion a year -- since, you know, all those people would be making more money and thus would be better able to pay their grocery bills. Why, that almost sounds like a conservative case for hiking the minimum wage!
Jesse Eisenger at ProPublica describes some of the recent bankster-dramas over federal regulation. Main theme: when banksters really want to fight a rule overseeing, say, collateralized loan obligations, they proclaim it'll hurt smaller banks, even if only three banks own over two-thirds of all collateralized loan obligations. You wonder how they can sleep at night, until you realize that they probably sleep in great comfort -- or they stay up at night worrying about the wrong things.
Finally, Media Matters has created the "Mythopedia" (you can find the site here, with a video how-to here) so that you might refute right-wing garbage with only a few touches on your computer or cellphone. Of course, right-wingers will make fun of you for not knowing every single thing in the world off the top of your head, but you're not necessarily trying to reach them; you're trying to reach those who might listen to them. (It's not available as a cellphone app as of yet -- you'll have to enter the website address into your cell's browser.)
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