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/