Recent Posts
Recent Posts Tagged With 'corporate issues'
Damming the Forest: New Dam in Forest Preserve in Southern Belize
One year ago, in December 2008, the Prime Minister of Belize signed an agreement with the US engineering company, Hydro Maya, to begin research into a potential dam project on the border of the Bladen Reserve in the southern-most district in the coun...
A Cornucopia of Consumption on Thanksgiving
Three things for our readers this Thanksgiving Day.First, it's somehow befitting of Thanksgiving's origins that the cornucopia on many tables of today consists of food that would be virtually unrecognizable 100 years ago, let alone 400. Turkeys nowad...
Death-Dealing: Giroux\'s Zombie Politics
In seeking to understand the contradictory, regressive, oftentimes nonsensical, sometimes outright false, skewed perception of the impact of big corporations and their non-values on people -- both those who are "othered" and those who traditionally a...
Too Many Corporations in My Food
That the food supply is contaminated with corporate politics and chemicals, we know. That advertising is often deceitful, especially when it comes to the faddish "natural," we know. Why, then, was it so disappointing to read a recent article from the...
Against the Grain: The World Seed Conference
Early last week, the 2nd annual World Seed Conference convened in Rome, Italy, with the seemingly innocuous aim of addressing agricultural challenges in the context of increasing populations, climate change, energy consumption, and scarcity of land. ...
Chipotle Rewards Tomato Pickers
Back in July we posted about the film Food Inc., wherein we criticized Chipotle for not signing on to an agreement to pay tomato pickers in Florida an additional 1 penny per pound. Companies like Whole Foods and Bon Appetit had signed on to the agree...
An Unsuccessful Marriage: Monsanto and the Drug War
A little over a month ago, we talked about the recent failure of Monsanto corn to go to seed on South African farms. Another Monsanto crisis is unfolding on another continent, as laid out by Meg White on Buzzflash. This time the trouble is in South A...
Giroux: A Culture of Cruelty
If you have wondered why violence is often glorified in media, or what this might have to do with anti-healthcare reform crusaders and hate crimes, read Henry Giroux' excellent article "Living in a Culture of Cruelty." Part of the problem, he argues,...
Green Energy Technology: An Indigenous Approach
Over the years we have posted numerous times on the value of indigenous knowledge and traditional ways of being, knowing and doing. As an anthropologist, one of my core interests lies in bridging the gap that exists between indigenous knowledge and w...
Insert Your Headline Here
Will newspapers survive the economic downturn? This question has plagued the industry for awhile now -- the consensus seems to be that if they quit relying on an outdated business model, there is still hope. Two alternatives that have surfaced are re...
Recipe for Change: Tomatoes, Chipotle and Food, Inc.
The issue of profit-over-people in the food industry is moving into the national spotlight with the movie Food, Inc. and its exposure 0f the policies and corporations that have corrupted the food supply and people's perspective on health.One of the s...
Monsanto Seed Failure in South Africa
South African farmers are experiencing what is being called a disaster, as upwards of 80% of the corn crop planted this year has failed to go to seed. Three varieties of Monsanto created corn have failed on over 82,000 hectares of farmland, resulting...
The Minimum Wage, Bananas, and Coups
In an interview with journalist Nikolas Kozloff, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now exposes some interesting insights into the ousting of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya. While still in office, Zelaya raised the minimum wage in Honduras. According to Hond...
Less Stuff, More Meaning
Continuing in the same vein as our previous post, a nice essay on the relationship between production and consumption, by editor Don Fitz, came through Znet this week. In the essay, Fitz lays out a counteroffer to the common cry for "Consume Less!" -...
Spend Your Money Before it Rots: An Interview with Douglas Rushkoff
In a recent interview by new media artist Peggy Nelson, posted on Reality Sandwich, media ecologist Douglas Rushkoff talks about his new book, Beyond Life Inc. Starting with the origin of the "corporation" way back in the Middle Ages -- not as dark a...
Bridging Borders Against Coal Mining
In Kentucky and Colombia, local activists are challenging the devastating practices of coal corporations, and in the process, unsettling the forces of globalization and illuminating the connection between cultural identity and land.Through a project ...
An Unprecedented Illusion: Fashion and Consumerism
"Delusional consumerism" is a good way to describe the fruitless endeavors of the economically privileged to stay fashionable with trends that exist solely from the physically, ecologically, and mentally toxic practices of corporations.Charty Durrant...
More Oil in the News
Last year, we talked about Exxon's legal troubles stemming from oil spills and their acceleration of global warming. This year, it looks like another oil giant, Texaco/Chevron, will learn whether it must pay damages for irreparably polluting the Amaz...
Chomsky on Health Care
Below is a snippet from a lecture by Noam Chomsky. He discusses why health care reform has taken so long in the U.S., despite documented public support for a nationalized system.He argues that support has been suppressed for decades because the issue...
Giroux: Commodifying Kids
A recent essay by Henry Giroux, "Commodifying Kids: The Forgotten Crisis," dovetails nicely with our previous post and follows another article by him that we posted back in February about the criminalization of today's youth. In this most recent essa...
The State of U.S. Higher Education
An interesting article came through on Alternet this weekend discussing the the corporatization of university education in the United States. Author Chris Hedges discusses not a corporate takeover per se, but instead how the knowledge and morals of t...
Off the Record: The Collapse of Traditional Journalism?
"...the Industrial Revolution didn't totally revolutionize life. So perhaps the Communications Revolution, though possibly even more sweeping, might not, after all, fundamentally alter human nature, what Faulkner called 'the old truths of the human h...
Foiled: Sustainable Food
Even a brief perusal of news headlines, magazine articles, academic databases, etc. will tell you that food has moved to the forefront of many social and theoretical conversations. The local and organic food movements have also gained a foothold -- i...
Video on Florida Slavery
Thanks to Iowa Public Television......
Protesting the Commercialization of Life
From Balem, Brazil, and the Inter Press Service comes news of the efforts taken by indigenous peoples to send a message to the 2009 World Social Forum (WSF), being held in northern Brazil. The Coordinating Committee of Indigenous Organizations of the...
Edward S. Herman on Latin America
At the end of December, Upside Down World interviewed Wharton School of Business professor emeritus Edward S. Herman about the United States' influence on Latin America in the past and in the currently shifting climate.The introduction to the intervi...
Learning from South American Social Movements
The editor of Upside Down World, Benjamin Dangl, recently suggested ways the U.S. could pull through its economic crisis by looking at certain social movements in South America. Comparing the Chicago factory occupation with Argentina worker coops, he...
Food, Finance & Climate
Vandana Shiva's article on ZSpace, "Food, Finance & Climate: Triple Crisis, A Three-Fold Opportunity," explores the interconnectedness of the financial, food and climate crises and of their solutions. The financial crisis, the food crisis, the cl...
Virginity Pacts: Saving the Amazon Rainforest
Returning to Resurgence Magazine once again, this time to the latest issue, which focused on food, we find this uplifting news about the Amazon, reported by Paul Kingsnorth:SAVING THE AMAZON – the world’s largest rainforest – from destruction i...
Cooperation as Rebellion: Creating Sustainable Agriculture in Paraguay
"In Paraguay, where 1 percent of the population owns 77 percent of all arable land, corrupt agrarian reform and the booming soybean industry is leading the country towards an industrial agricultural export model that leaves no room for small food pro...
