Eli Clifton and Joshua Holland at Slate suggest that Bernie Sanders squandered a huge chunk of his $200 million-plus mostly-small-donor campaign haul on "ads, consultants, and a dispiritingly conventional campaign." "Every dollar that went into broadcast ads, digital strategizing, or Democratic consultants’ pockets was one less for local campaign staff or get-out-the-vote efforts," they write, and I bet that sure sounds familiar to you. The rest is a cautionary tale about mainstreaming your revolution -- getting folks with "establishment" connections also means, in the words of one commenter, "redistribut(ing) income up, from working and middle class Americans to upper middle class consultants and ad makers."
From Chris Morran at The Consumerist we learn that the GMO "labeling" bill Congress rammed through last week is even worse than we thought. For example: "(t)he bill also says that an item is only to be labeled as genetically modified if the modification could not have occurred through 'conventional breeding,'" which suggests that big ag corporations won't label genetically-modified foods they could have raised conventionally but didn't. And the Rev. Jackson also reminds us that if you do have a smartphone, but live where internet connections aren't reliable, you still won't be able to read that damn QR code.
Corporations are starting to push back against the Treasury Department's anti-corporate tax inversion rules. I'll summarize for you: whine whine whine affects our business whine whine whine unintended consequences whine whine whine substantial disruption whine whine whine huge impact whine whine whine time-consuming. Our Best and Boldest Entrepreneurs, Ladies and Gentlemen! (Seriously, though -- if "decades of settled law" have resulted in corporations avoiding their tax obligations on this scale, then some "disruption" is absolutely necessary.)
Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post's WonkBlog covers the recent finding that states that have legalized medicinal marijuana are seeing drops in Medicare spending on drugs. Dig this flatugasm from a corporation manufacturing synthetic THC, insisting that moving marijuana (which, as you know, contains natural THC) from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3 (where it'd still be illegal, but more available for research) would increase "the abuse potential in terms of the need to grow and cultivate substantial crops of marijuana in the United States." Setting aside this corporation's naked self-interest: seriously? More research would increase the potential for abuse? Why, you'd never know that knowledge came from research!
Benjamin Balthaser at In These Times interviews an organizer from a labor union comprising both Israeli and Palestinian citizens. Organizing in the settlements, of course, is extremely difficult, when employers can "fire" you simply by canceling your permit to get into the West Bank, or get rid of "troublemakers" just by calling them terrorists. Still, the rule of law can be of great help even when law enforcement isn't -- a 2008 court decision gave Palestinian workers access to better pay and benefits if they work for an Israeli corporation, which opened the way to organizing the Zarafty Garage.
Finally, Hanna Rosin at NPR describes how the town of Aarhus, in Denmark, "Helped Turn Young Muslims Away from ISIS." Instead of shutting down mosques or revoking passports, Aarhus told the Danish citizens who had gone to Syria to join ISIS that "they were welcome to come home, and that when they did, they would receive help" in re-integrating into Danish society. But I guess right-wingers would call this sort of thing "weakling work," as if the Aarhus principles hadn't already been used successfully by King and Gandhi -- and, more to the point, as if dancing around telling everyone how tough you are all the time, the way right-wingers do, isn't weak.
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