Taco Bell's "Beef"

           It turns out that Taco Bell’s “beef” is really a gross mixture called “Taco Meat Filling” as shown on the container’s label. Parts of the ingredients include: autolyzed yeast extract, silicon dioxide (anti-caking agent), maltodextrin and with a slew of other compounds that could only have possibly been discovered in a lab. According to the Alabama law firm suing Taco Bell, only 36% of the “Taco Meat Filling” is actual beef. The other 64% is a concoction of “tasteless fibers, various industrial additives and some flavoring and coloring.” This “filling” is called beef, looks like beef and is advertised as beef but is not actually “beef”. Beef is defined as “flesh of cattle” by the USDA. It shall not contain more than 30 percent fat, and shall not contain added water, phosphates, binders, or extenders. The law firm suing Taco Bell demands they correctly label it as “taco meat filling” in all advertising and packing, as the USDA mandates.

            This is how Taco Bell can offer tacos for 99 cents, the author then goes on to claim there is nothing wrong with the mixture apart from being gross. What is wrong is that the consumers think they are getting beef when in fact they are getting a “taco meat filling” taco. What is even more intriguing about all of this is that “meat taco filling” should at least have 40% fresh meat. Taco Bell responded with a statement claiming the law firm accused without asking questions and their information is wrong. They are taking no responsibility for any of these claims.

            I picked this article because of its relevance to the “Food and Agriculture” section of the class. Many of this was talked about in Food, Inc. and by Michael Pollen in “Omnivore’s Dilemma”. Americans don’t have very many clues of where their food actually comes from and everything that goes into it while it is being processing.

            I find the “taco meat filling” disgusting. When I read this article at the beginning of January, I vowed to never eat at Taco Bell. I have upheld that vow to this day. Anything has is so processed that it is  not anywhere near natural then it is not fit for consumption by any living thing.

            I didn’t find the article was biased at all. The author did sympathize with Taco Bell, saying they have every right to sell their product but to just change the labeling. 

 http://gizmodo.com/#!5742413/this-is-what-really-hides-in-taco-bells-beef

http://gizmodo.com/#!5743332/taco-bells-angry-because-false-statements-are-being-made-about-its-food

Mortgage Crisis Hits Las Vegas

            This article focuses on the effects of the housing crisis on Las Vegas, Nevada. Las Vegas was found to be the foreclosure capital of America, according to RealtyTrac, a property-listings firm. In some of the poorer suburbs the foreclosure rate is one in every five houses. Some of the people have managed to hold on to their homes though. This may seem like a good thing but with property prices around 60% below the peak of 2006, this leaves 70% of the homeowners owing more than what their property is worth.

            Cheap and abundant credit was rampant in the Sunbelt over the recent decades. The ten cities with the highest foreclosure rates are in Arizona, California, and Nevada. Of the other 7 only one, Michigan, lies outside the Southwest.

            Las Vegas’s outside suburbs are “eerily quiet”, due to the amount of unsold and foreclosed homes. In North Las Vegas, every second house has a “For Rent” sign, offering absurdly low prices to rent. Some of have been abandoned and boarded up. The main “strip” of Vegas is even littered with abandoned construction sites that had been started during the boom.

            The high concentration of foreclosures in an area creates a domino effect. The foreclosed properties drive down the price of others and the homeowners re deeper in negative equity; they have mortgages worth more than their house. Many who suffer from foreclosure do so by choice.

 Local governments get their money from property taxes which they figure will lose a fifth of their income over the next few years. This ripple effect even trickles down to the local economy. Many who have kept their houses are worried they will not have enough when this occurs again so they are very frugal. Car sales are down in the Vegas area. Losing your house has many social effects on the communities as well. Children do worse in school; drug and alcohol abuse; and marriages being broken.

I decided to connect this to “Rethinking the American Economy” theme in class. We thoroughly discussed the subprime mortgage crisis in class. This article shows how it affects so many people even if it does not affect you directly. It goes to show that the system of credit we were and currently are using is flawed and can cause many issues.

This article offered many different effects of the subprime mortgage crisis. Foreclosures do not just affect the person foreclosing. They affect the communities, local governments, and local economies. The risky lending by the banks has shown to be a much more disastrous decision than I had thought of.

 The article did not have any biases at all. It was very thorough with its information and no ulterior motives for the view point were present.

http://www.economist.com/node/18440791

Moore's Speech Critiqued

            This article criticizes Michael Moore’s speech, “America is NOT Broke”, given to Wisconsin workers back in March. Michael mentions an astonishing statistic, “…just 400 Americans, 400, have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.” Moore goes on to say these 400 benefited from the 2008 bailout given to them in expense to the taxpayers. The author goes on to legitimize Moore’s claim about the wealth concentration. Forbes’s top 400 do indeed have ‘more than’, concerning wealth, the bottom 50% of the population. For clarification on what Moore and the author define “wealth” as the author states, “the Federal Reserve defines wealth as all financial and nonfinancial assets, including bank accounts, investments, houses, cars and debt.” It is Moore’s other claim that the top 400 benefitted from the bailouts and the gap between rich and poor is getting larger from these bailouts as well. Moore portrays that this gap is new or that this gap is somehow connected to the bailouts. The author goes on to say the wealth shares of the rich have not diverged since the 1980s. His closing question is, “Do you think America could or should rebalance the wealth of the Forbes listers and the bottom halfers?”

            I chose to connect this article to the “Poverty and Human Development” section of the course. We discussed in class the bailouts and the cause of the bailouts. This article touches on this a little bit. It also discusses how the richer are getting richer whereas the poorer are getting poorer. The main question in End of Poverty? is why is wealth increasing but more and more people are left without the essentials of life? This is what the author is questioning in his closing statement. Should America rebalance the wealth so more have more wealth?

I completely agree with the author of this article. Moore has a really valid point but correlation does not mean causation. The concentration of wealth has been reserved to the top 1% of the population since the late 1980s. The government bailouts may have helped these guys out a bit with their companies but did little to their bank accounts; although, it is not just their bank accounts that were taking into consideration when talking about wealth.

This article did not have any biases. The author sympathized with Moore on one of his claims but critiqued the other. The author was not presenting an opinioned based claim; he took some facts into consideration to question Moore’s claim. 

http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2011/03/07/billionaires-own-as-much-as-the-bottom-half-of-americans/

FCC Approves Comcast/NBC Merger

The Federal Communications Commission and the U.S Justice Department approved a $28 billion merger of Comcast and NBC Universal as stated in an article on NPR’s website. The FCC approved of the deal with conditions to protect consumers and the developing online video industry. Comcast is the largest cable and internet company; NBC Universal is a key producer of TV and cable content and movies. There is a lot of power concentrated in one company now. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps critiqued the merger saying it would result in less diversity and fewer programming choices on the air. He was the only commissioner, out of five, to vote against the merger. In the conditions Comcast must make affordable broadband available and that it won’t prevent rival internet companies that want to use Comcast lines to reach consumer.

                I chose this article due to its relevance to what we discussed in class about “Media and Democracy”. We talked about how most of what we watch, read, and listen to is controlled by the “Big Six”. Two of these big six were Comcast and NBC Universal so now it is just the Big Four. We also read an article on freepress.net about media consolidation and it effects. Some of the dangers that are presented now are fewer voices and viewpoints, less diversity in ownership and programming, less coverage of local issues that matter to communities, and less unbiased reporting.

                I am completely shocked that the FCC approved this merger. These two companies now control so much of the media that we consume. A lot of the media now will have to go through Comcast for approval and many of what we see will be whatever Comcast wants us to see. It is also taking away from the public realm of reporting. The government will subsidize and pay more attention to this huge monopoly of a corporation than any small publicly or independently owned companies (NPR, Al Jazeera, or PBS). There is an article that was recently published wanted to restrict or cut funding to NPR and PBS.

                This article did not offer much viewpoint from the perspective of Comcast or NBC universal but I highly doubt either of the companies wanted to publicly speak of the merger. They probably left that job up to people like Michael Copps. The article was not biased for or against the merger though. The conditions that the deal was signed on were very fair and did not favor nor disfavor the companies.

http://www.npr.org/search/index.php?searchinput=comcast+nbc+merger

Climate Change and El Salvador

In an article published by Al Jazeera, it discusses El Salvador’s stance on Climate Change and Climate Change’s effects that the world is currently facing. Last year on July 20^th, the President of El Salvador put Climate Change as the number one issue for the region, Central America. El Salvador’s position is due to the fact scientists have done studies to show anthropogenic  forces on the climate is impacting the planet more than ever and predict it to worsen. 2010 was tied for the hottest year ever and was the wettest year ever.

Huge floods across the world and record-breaking heat wave, and severe die-offs of coral reefs show the acceleration of the global trends in Climate Change. Nine out of the 10 warmest years ever recorded have occurred since 2001 due to what scientists say is the 40 percent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the Industrial Revolution. El Salvador, like every other country in the region, has been recently plagued by heavy rain falls resulting in flooding.

Measurements taken from over 6,000 weather stations around the word show us that anthropogenic heating of the planet has already made rainfall more intense across the globe. Warmer air contains more moisture which attributes to more precipitation. El Salvador believes climate change is already a reality and is not something to expect but something to cope with. They have recently aligned themselves with Group 77 which is an intergovernmental panel of more than 130 countries. This group believes, “Climate Change poses serious risks and challenges to particularly developing countries and, therefore, demands urgent global action and response.”

The article goes on into detail about more of the effects of Climate Change and the ignorance of some of the counter-scientists. They mistaken the long-term patterns of climate change with the short-term variations of weather, and ignore the region variation in climate change impacts. El Salvadorian officials then go on to say if carbon emissions are not reduced in developed countries, like the United States then migration from country to country is a concern.

This directly links to the Climate Change aspect that we have not yet discussed in class but it is spelled out in the article that this is an issue and it much be taken into consideration. Climate Change is happening around us and it has a significant effect on developing countries more so than developed countries. Even though the developed countries are fueling this change.

I agree with this article entirely. I took a Global Climate Change class last semester and everything that we discussed in class was also covered in the article. Climate Change is occurring right not. It is not so much can we expect it? It is what should we be doing about it? It is in the present, not the future. If the developed world does not level out its carbon emissions than the world’s ice caps will melt by 2050. The world’s entire climate will be different by 2050 if the emissions are not cut. That is within my lifetime and I don’t want to see that happen. I think that a lot has to be done within the policies of our government and it can only start in grass root organizations.

I noticed in the article they did not provide much climate skepticism. There are plenty of theories that support the climate is not changing due to anthropogenic forces. It was entirely sided with the fact humans are causing this warming and change in the climate. If there were more sides to the story, I think the article could have been more legitimate.

Chevron Must Pay!

In an article published by the New York Times it state that the huge oil conglomerate Chevron was found to be responsible for polluting remote tracts of Ecuadorean jungle by Judge Nicolas Zambrano in Lago Agrio. Lago Agrio was a town founded as an oil camp in the 1960s. The judge ordered the company to pay more than $9 billion in damages. This is one of the largest environmental awards ever. The legal battle of forest tribes and villagers against one of the largest American corporation has dragged out in courts in Ecuador and the United States for 17 years. Chevron may have to pay double the amount of $8.6 billion if it fails to publicly apologize for its actions within 15 days of the ruling. The corporation must also pay $860 million, or 10 percent, to the Amazon Defense Coalition, that group that represented the plaintiffs.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers want to appeal the case because they think that the damages awarded are “not enough”. They are seeking to increase the damages from $8.6 billion to $113 billion. Chevron is currently refusing to pay for the damages, calling the decision “illegitimate and unenforceable” and seek to appeal the case. Chevron reported to have made a net profit of $19 billion dollars last year.

The origins of the case date back to the 1970s, before Texaco was bought out by Chevron in 2001. Villagers sued in 1993 for the fact, as they claimed that Texaco had left an environmental mess that was causing illnesses. Chevron later filed suit against dozens of representatives of the plaintiffs, charging they were trying to extort $113 billion by making up evidence and trying to manipulate the Ecuadorean legal system.

 This incident connects to the "Environmental Justice" them that we have discussed in class. In what we saw "The Corporation", we know that corporations consider themselves to have the same rights as people. As this was argued after the passage of the 14th amendment in 1864 which gave African Americans equal protection under the law and citizenship. Since they have these rights they are treated like an individual in court and must pay the damages they caused to the indigenous people's land and waters. Chevron does not accept these responsibilities. As noted int he article this is the largest "environmental award" in history. If Chevron's appeal does not go through then this will be the biggest win and a huge step forward in the justice for environmental equality. It has been too long that the "rights of businesses", as Hawken acknowledged, have taken precedent over the rights of humans.

This story is personally encouraging to me. It gives me hope that corporations will start to take responsibility for their action. Corporations have been getting small slaps on the wrist in the United States for too long. Hypothetical situation: If Chevron were a child his name would be Chevrono Profiticus. His parents would be the United State's government named  Bob and Shirley (I couldn't think of anything creative for their names. Bob and Shirley will have to do). Chevrono gets caught smoking cigarettes inside the house. He gets a slap on the wrist by Bob and Shirley and they tell him, "don't do it in the house again." This does not encourage Chevrono to quit smoking but to not smoke inside the house. He continues to participate in the disgusting act with his parents looking away. Apply this to Chevron in real life, Chevron does not pollute its own country (Chevrono's house) and the United States just looks away as long as Chevron is bringing in oil and money to stimulate the economy. 

I did not find any biases in this article. The information presented was very informative and offered both sides of the story.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/world/americas/15ecuador.html