Politics & Globalization
International trade agreements force the U.S. and other participting countries to "harmonize" food and envrironmental safety standards to the lowest common denominator. Often these agreements are negotiated behind closed doors, shutting out Congress and the public, while granting corporations and trade associations a seat at the table. It's no surprise that these agreements give transnational corporations "special rights", allowing companies to challenge individual countries' environmental, worker and food safety laws and regulations.
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Rose and Ronnie· Joe volunteer© 2008
Corporate lobbyists have no shame. Neither does Congress. Or the Trump administration.
They’re using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to shovel taxpayer dollars into corporate coffers and
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I’m going to tell you the single worst story I’ve heard in these past few horrid months, a story that combines naked greed, political influence peddling, a willingness to endanger innocent human beings, utter blindness to one of the greatest calamities in human history and a complete disregard for the next crisis aiming for our planet.
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Yaak Pabst for the German socialist magazine Marx21 spoke to evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu (Monthly Review Press, 2016) about the dangers of Covid-19, the responsibility of agribusiness and sustainable solutions to combat infectious diseases. Marx21 released the interview in advance of its scheduled March 30 publication date.
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For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?
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In mid-March, as the reality of how COVID-19 would upend daily life became real for people across the U.S. and Europe, Katja Bartholmess went out for provisions in her Berlin neighborhood. At the REWE supermarket, she found long lines and emptied shelves, apart from the odd box of pasta. By contrast, the Boxi (Boxhagener Platz) farmers market was “well visited but well stocked.”
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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a sweeping suspension of its enforcement of environmental laws Thursday, telling companies they would not need to meet environmental standards during the coronavirus outbreak.
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The novel coronavirus has laid bare many societal problems that have accreted over previous decades: chasms of inequality, the use of virtual debt to paper over physical world problems, ecological ignorance, addiction, obesity, fragile supply chains, fractured political governance, all in service of the growth.
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As healthcare providers across the U.S. desperately attempt to treat a rapidly growing number of patients with the coronavirus, a pharmaceutical company with ties to the Trump administration has been granted exclusive status for a drug it is developing to treat the illness—a potential windfall for the company that could put the medication out of reach for many Americans.
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Trump wants a $500 billion slush fund to bail out his favorite corporations—including his own—that would be doled out in secret.
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McDonald's is pushing for changes to a coronavirus relief bill that would require its restaurants across the US — 95% which are owned by franchisees — to give workers two weeks of paid sick leave, describing it as an effort to protect franchisees' financials.
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