Recycling shredded automobiles in China

The Atlantic has an eye-opening set of articles by Adam Minter detailing how other countries recycle scrap material, including much of the "waste" from the U.S.  Pictured above are the "metal sorters of Shanghai," who are sorting shredded automobiles:

[Shredded automobiles go] to a place where raw material demand is high, labor is low-cost and well-trained human hands can sort the parts of a shredded automobile with precision that no technology can come close to matching. People outside of the scrap industry tend to assume that cheap labor is the more important factor in this process, but the reality is that there are plenty of countries with cheaper labor than China, but nowhere that needs as much as aluminum as China. It goes to Shanghai because that's where the demand is...

Shredded automobiles go to China in greater numbers -- millions of tons per year -- than anywhere else, where they're sorted by teams of women (conventional scrap industry wisdom says that women are more precise) who are practiced, and highly trained... hand-sorters who can and must prove that they can accurately sort several tons of this stuff -- the industry term for this particular grade is 'zorba' -- in a day. It's not an easy job, but it's not so bad, either, as manual-labor goes: to prevent fatigue most zorba sorters work eight-hour days, five-day weeks, and enjoy income far in excess of recent Chinese university grads...

Companion articles discuss the metal sorters in Mumbai -

- and the plastic shredders of China:

...consider, then, those baskets, imported from Thailand (originally, with fruit in them). They are perfectly re-usable, and likely would have been thirty years ago. But China, now the world's second largest plastics consumer, is home of the world's largest recycled plastics industry... fulfilling the near endless demand for plastics from Chinese manufacturers of phones, computers, cars, and other products exported to developed countries and, increasingly, purchased in China. Demand is so high, in fact, that China must import large volumes of scrap plastics from abroad (900,000 tons from the U.S. in 2009) to keep the businesses running, and the plastics flowing into all those iPhones, car tail lights, and flat-screen monitors.

And that's why, in part, this couple, once farmers, were shredding a small mountain of plastic fruit baskets: a consumer electronics company (you'd know the name) guaranteed (with money) that destroying the fruit baskets (destruction is the first step in recycling anything) would be more economically rewarding than re-using them. That's an odd, new way of thinking among China's peasants, and increasingly, across the developing world.

There are seven articles in the series.

BTW, if you're curious about industrial-grade shredders that can chew up a car, watch this video of a shredder being fed automobile engine blocks.

Why does no one from Wall Street go to jail ?

Excerpts from Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone most excellent essay Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?  Very thought-provoking and well-written.

"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people...

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted...

Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice...

Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration. "You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once."

But that hasn't happened. Because the entire system set up to monitor and regulate Wall Street is fucked up...

...But a veritable mountain of evidence indicates that when it comes to Wall Street, the justice system not only sucks at punishing financial criminals, it has actually evolved into a highly effective mechanism for protecting financial criminals. This institutional reality has absolutely nothing to do with politics or ideology — it takes place no matter who's in office or which party's in power...

Over and over, even the most obvious cases of fraud and insider dealing got gummed up in the works, and high-ranking executives were almost never prosecuted for their crimes. In 2003, Freddie Mac coughed up $125 million after it was caught misreporting its earnings by $5 billion; nobody went to jail. In 2006, Fannie Mae was fined $400 million, but executives who had overseen phony accounting techniques to jack up their bonuses faced no criminal charges. That same year, AIG paid $1.6 billion after it was caught in a major accounting scandal that would indirectly lead to its collapse two years later, but no executives at the insurance giant were prosecuted...

In the end, of course, it wasn't just the executives of Lehman and AIGFP who got passes. Virtually every one of the major players on Wall Street was similarly embroiled in scandal, yet their executives skated off into the sunset, uncharged and unfined. Goldman Sachs paid $550 million last year when it was caught defrauding investors with crappy mortgages, but no executive has been fined or jailed...

Criminal justice, as it pertains to the Goldmans and Morgan Stanleys of the world, is not adversarial combat, with cops and crooks duking it out in interrogation rooms and courthouses. Instead, it's a cocktail party between friends and colleagues who from month to month and year to year are constantly switching sides and trading hats... The Revolving Door isn't just a footnote in financial law enforcement; over the past decade, more than a dozen high-ranking SEC officials have gone on to lucrative jobs at Wall Street banks or white-shoe law firms, where partnerships are worth millions...

As for President Obama, what is there to be said? Goldman Sachs was his number-one private campaign contributor. He put a Citigroup executive in charge of his economic transition team, and he just named an executive of JP Morgan Chase, the proud owner of $7.7 million in Chase stock, his new chief of staff...

Which is not to say that the Obama era has meant an end to law enforcement. On the contrary: In the past few years, the administration has allocated massive amounts of federal resources to catching wrongdoers — of a certain type. Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a cost of $5 billion. Since 2007, felony immigration prosecutions along the Mexican border have surged 77 percent; nonfelony prosecutions by 259 percent. In Ohio last month, a single mother was caught lying about where she lived to put her kids into a better school district; the judge in the case tried to sentence her to 10 days in jail for fraud, declaring that letting her go free would "demean the seriousness" of the offenses.

So there you have it. Illegal immigrants: 393,000. Lying moms: one. Bankers: zero. The math makes sense only because the politics are so obvious. You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It's not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they're sorry, and move on. Oh, wait — let's not even make them say they're sorry...

They're crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let's steal whatever we can...

Much more at the link.

Remembering the words of Ronald Reagan

The photo above shows Madison resident Philippa Bergman writing her words of protest on the pavement near the capitol.  For "paint" she is cleverly using mud, which will be washed away with the next rain. Here is her text:

"These are the values inspiring those brave workers in Poland ... They remind us that where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost." - Ronald Reagan

The words come from Reagan's 1980 Labor Day speech, during which he reminded listeners that he was president of his union (the Screen Actors Guild).

Photo credit Nataraj Hauser, in eyeDance - an excellent Madison blog for monitoring the activities of the legislature and the protests.  Lots of great pix.

Huge public sector pensions

These aren't severance bonuses; these are annual pension payments.  Grist for the mill in the current debate re union salaries and benefits, from SF Weekly.  The discussion at the link focuses on Police Chief Heather Fong:

According to the San Francisco Employee Retirement System (SFERS), Fong actually earns two city pensions: One of $566 per month for her (brief) time as a miscellaneous-class employee and a second of $22,572 per month for her 30-plus years as a safety worker. Doing the simple math that's $23,138 per month or $277,656 per year.

Top lawyer fees exceed $1,000 per hour

Excerpts from an article in the Wall Street Journal:

Leading attorneys in the U.S. are asking as much as $1,250 an hour, significantly more than in previous years, taking advantage of big clients' willingness to pay top dollar for certain types of services.

A few pioneers had raised their fees to more than $1,000 an hour about five years ago, at the peak of the economic boom. But after the recession hit, many of the rest of the industry's elite were hesitant, until recently, to charge more than $990 an hour...

Harvey Miller, a bankruptcy partner at New York-based Weil, Gotshal & Manges, said his firm had an "artificial constraint" limiting top partners' hourly fee because "$1,000 an hour is a lot of money." It got rid of the cap after studying filings that showed other lawyers surpassing that barrier by about $50.

Today Mr. Miller and some other lawyers at Weil Gotshal ask as much as $1,045 an hour. "The underlying principle is if you can get it, get it," he said...

Such rates are contributing to inflation across the $100 billion-a-year global corporate-law industry as the slow economic recovery has left many law firms struggling to finance the hefty pay packages they award their stars. Since most law partners bill roughly 2,000 hours, those asking $1,100 hourly will bring in $2.2 million, a few million short of the $3 million or $4 million in annual compensation star attorneys get at many big firms.

To help fill the gap, the firms rely on the profit they often reap on the work of junior attorneys, or associates. Dozens of associates at a time can work on a single case, and some firms bill as much as $700 an hour for their time, according to Valeo Partners, a Washington consulting firm that maintains a database of hourly legal rates in fields such as litigation, corporate law and intellectual property.

More at the link.

"The underlying principle is if you can get it, get it."

The union for union-bashers

A comment from The People's Republic of Moronia:

...And in the ulti­mate irony, Rush Lim­baugh, who called union work­ers “bottom-​​feeding free­load­ers,” Glenn Beck, who mirac­u­lously linked trade union­ism with Com­mu­nists, social­ists, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, and the United Nations, and numer­ous other con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tors are all mem­bers of the Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Tele­vi­sion and Radio Artists (AFTRA), an AFL-​​CIO union.

SWEDOW explained

From Huffington Post:

On a recent family trip to Africa, spotting locals wearing T-shirts and baseball caps bearing obvious American brands or slogans became something of a parlor game... Were they gifts sent by a U.S. charity? Was this the ultimate destination for old T-shirts and hats donated to Midwestern clothing drives? Or did the Africans wearing them choose them from the small mountains of clothing -- some of it new, most of it used -- piled on tables and tarps at every market we visited along our journey?

In the parlance of foreign assistance, such donated clothing and other items is known as SWEDOW, which roughly translates to Stuff We Don't Want. The latest SWEDOW dump came in the form of a massive donation from the NFL to the behemoth Christian relief group World Vision...

After the Pittsburgh Steelers lost the Super Bowl to the Green Bay Packers, the NFL was stuck with thousands of pre-printed T-shirts heralding the Steelers as Super Bowl champs. The league donated them to World Vision, which in turn plans to ship them to poor folks in Armenia, Nicaragua, Romania and the African nation of Zambia. ..

Some critics called a foul on the NFL/World Vision play, saying that while 100,000 brand new T-shirts to needy people abroad sounds like a lovely idea, it actually does more harm than good.

The NFL has valued the shirts at $20 apiece, despite claims from critics that the shirts are basically unsellable and therefore essentially worthless... "  This partnership is a win-win for both World Vision and the merchandisers. The merchandisers get to print 100,000 unneeded T-shirts every year without having to shoulder the full cost, and World Vision gets $2,000,000 worth of 'program costs' to improve their expense ratios. And they both get free PR with photos and news stories of happy people receiving the unsellable T-shirts."..

The NFL donation will flood local marketplaces with unneeded... goods, driving down the prices at which local merchants can viably sell their wares.

And it's not discussed in the article, but I'll bet the manufacturers of the worthless t-shirts claim a hefty income tax deduction for their "charitable gift."

Cosmetics for tweens

Excerpts from an article at Ecosalon:

...a company named Pacific World Brand has partnered with Walmart to bring us a new cosmetics line for tweens called Geo Girl, launching in March. This isn’t bubblegum flavored lip balm. This is mascara, blush, lipstick, the works. The product line’s 69 offerings even include anti-aging products like antioxidant-loaded exfoliants for extra smooth and healthy skin.

The big sell is that Geo Girl is an eco-friendly and therefore healthy brand for children who just happen to wear makeup. Unlike other real makeup that may irritate babyfat with regular use, Geo Girl is real makeup that won’t irritate anything except people with a moral compass...

Refinery29 notes the products will be named after texting abbreviations:

1. SPF 15 Lip Balm—J4G
2. Cleanser—T2G
3. Mineral Blush—QTPi
4. Liquid2Powder Shadow—iCU
5. Body Mist—TiSC
6. Feather Lash Mascara—FYEO
7. Lipshine—GR8
8. FaceShimmer—URA*

The lip balm is "just for grins," the faceShimmer is "you are a star."  Others decoded at the link.

The epidemic of requiring "licensing"

Excerpts from an interesting article at The Wall Street Journal:

Amid calls for shrinking government, lawmakers across the country are vowing to cut regulations that crimp economic growth. President Barack Obama recently said it's time to root out laws that "are just plain dumb."

Tell that to the cat groomers, tattoo artists, tree trimmers and about a dozen other specialists across the country who are clamoring for more rules governing small businesses.

They're asking to become state-licensed professionals, which would mean anyone wanting to be, say, a music therapist or a locksmith, would have to pay fees, apply for a license and in some cases, take classes and pass exams. The hope is that regulation will boost the prestige of their professions, provide oversight and protect consumers from shoddy work...

While some states have long required licensing for workers who handle food or touch others—caterers and hair stylists, for example—economists say such regulation is spreading to more states for more industries. The most recent study, from 2008, found 23% of U.S. workers were required to obtain state licenses, up from just 5% in 1950...

Texas, for instance, requires hair-salon "shampoo specialists" to take 150 hours of classes, 100 of them on the "theory and practice" of shampooing, before they can sit for a licensing exam... California requires barbers to study full-time for nearly a year, a curriculum that costs $12,000...

And here's a key point -

When a trade group does succeed in getting a licensing law passed, it sometimes exempts existing workers from the testing requirements. In Michigan, for instance, it will soon be a felony to practice massage without a license. Newcomers to the field must take 500 hours of classes and pass an exam to get that license. But a grandfather clause exempts most current massage therapists, including those who may never have taken a class at an accredited school.

Much more at the link, via Yglesias.

A single snowdrop bulb has sold for £357

North London Today provides these details:

The flower, named EA Bowles after the horticulturalist Edward Augustus Bowles who used to own Myddleton House, has had gardeners scrambling to buy it because its six petals are all exactly the same length and are pure white on both sides...

Andrew Turvey, Myddleton House head gardener, said: “We have a number of
snowdrops and this one grew through natural cross-pollination. It has taken us to this point to get a saleable bulb. One was produced in 2008 that sold for £265, then we managed to produce 19 this year...

The Telegraph offers some context:

The lust for snowdrops, however, speaks to something rather more obsessive. Soldiers returning from the Crimean war brought home the first G plicatus, and the Victorians rapidly fell in love, seeing them as emblems of purity. The first snowdrop conference was held in 1891, the forerunner of an annual gala...

Joe Sharman, who sold the £357 “E. A. Bowles”, dates it to 2008, when a single bulb of Galanthus “Flocon de Neige” made £265 at auction. (It’s a double version of the ordinary snowdrop that grows wild in woods and churchyards – such variants can crop up anywhere, but you need to be tremendously knowledgeable to spot them.)

Absurdly filthy rich

You can access all the NonSequitur comics here.

Some tips about online shopping

Most people who shop online are aware of these things, but a Slate article provides a nice summary:

In its most brazen form, it works like this: Retailers read the cookies kept on your browser or glean information from your past purchase history when you are logged into a site. That gives them a sense of what you search for and buy, how much you paid for it, and whether you might be willing and able to spend more. They alter their prices or offers accordingly...

Sellers of time-sensitive, highly price-variable goods (think airline tickets, hotel rooms, or car rentals) do it all the time, somewhat openly. If you have ever had the annoying experience of buying a plane ticket through a portal like Kayak, then seeing the final price jump $10 or $40 at check out, you have probably found yourself on the receiving end of dynamic pricing...

This August, the Wall Street Journal reported on a company that helps Capital One determine what credit-card deals to offer customers when they land at the site. The deals change depending not on any credit-rating or salary information given to the firm by the customer—just on information skimmed off of their computer before the page loads. More recently, bloggers caught the bank offering different deals to users using different browsers...

Researchers conducted a 1,500-person survey and found about two in three respondents did not know it is legal "for an online store to charge different people different prices at the same time of day." About 70 percent did not realize it is also legal for bricks-and-mortar stores to do so. But yes, as long as stores do not discriminate based on age, sex, location, or a few other characteristics, stores can price as capriciously as they want.

More at the link.

Commodity price inflation

I've written about this topic a number of times in the blog, but  two interesting articles just appeared this week.  One in the Wall Street Journal explains how the increases jump across categories:

It's getting pricier to throw some ribs and burgers on the grill. And you can blame the surging price of corn. That's because much of the corn grown in the U.S. is used as animal feed. And "we're using $6 corn to feed hogs right now," up from about $4 last year... So if you "want barbecue ribs," he adds, "you're going to have an extra $10 attached to it."...

The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization's monthly Food Price Index, which monitors the monthly change in a basket of commodities including meat, dairy and sugar, rose for the sixth straight month in December to its highest level since 1990....

In some cases, prices may not rise, but you will see fewer discounts or get less for your money. For instance, because of sugar prices' 30-year high in late December, packages are expected to shrink to a four-pound bag, from a five-pound bag, Mr. Swanson says. "You're getting 20% less" for the same price, he says....

Cotton futures prices skyrocketed 92% in 2010, thanks to growing demand as well as floods in Pakistan and heavy rains in China that damaged crops... Retail prices of jeans are expected to increase this year by 4.3%, socks 2.7%, sweatshirts and sweatpants 2.4%, polo shirts 2% and T-shirts 1.8%, according to industry group Cotton Inc.

Mens' clothes, in particular, are expected to get a bigger price bump because more of the garments contain cotton (compared with apparel for women and children) and they're a heavier weight with a higher cotton content....

And an article at the Guardian suggests that it's not just bad weather and increased demand that increases commodity prices. There is also pressure generated by speculators:

The same banks, hedge funds and financiers whose speculation on the global money markets caused the sub-prime mortgage crisis are thought to be causing food prices to yo-yo and inflate. The charge against them is that by taking advantage of the deregulation of global commodity markets they are making billions from speculating on food...

When this process of "hedging" was tightly regulated, it worked well enough. The price of real food on the real world market was still set by the real forces of supply and demand. But all that changed in the mid-1990s. Then, following heavy lobbying by banks, hedge funds and free market politicians in the US and Britain, the regulations on commodity markets were steadily abolished. Contracts to buy and sell foods were turned into "derivatives" that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. In effect a new, unreal market in "food speculation" was born...

...the markets are now heavily distorted by investment banks: "Let's say news comes about bad crops and rain somewhere. Normally the price would rise about $1 [a bushel]. [But] when you have a 70-80% speculative market it goes up $2-3 to account for the extra costs...

Last year, London hedge fund Armajaro bought 240,000 tonnes, or more than 7%, of the world's stocks of cocoa beans, helping to drive chocolate to its highest price in 33 years. Meanwhile, the price of coffee shot up 20% in just three days as a direct result of hedge funds betting on the price of coffee falling...

More at the link.  Sounds like the plot of a Frank Norris novel I read in college.

The Vermont legislature tackles "corporate personhood"

A year ago today, the Supreme Court issued its bizarre Citizens United decision, allowing unlimited corporate spending in elections as a form of “free speech” for the corporate “person.”...

In Vermont, state senator Virginia Lyons earlier today presented an anti-corporate personhood resolution for passage in the Vermont legislature. The resolution, the first of its kind, proposes "an amendment to the United States Constitution ... which provides that corporations are not persons under the laws of the United States." Sources in the state house say it has a good chance of passing...

The resolution goes on to note that "large corporations own most of America's mass media and employ those media to loudly express the corporate political agenda and to convince Americans that the primary role of human beings is that of consumer rather than sovereign citizens with democratic rights and responsibilities."

Denouncing this situation as an "intolerable societal reality," the document concludes that the "only way" toward a solution is the amendment of the Constitution "to define persons as human beings.”...

There is a groundswell of support: 76 percent of Americans, according to a recent ABC News poll, said they opposed the Citizens United decision.

Excerpted from an article at AlterNet.

Legally mandated holidays and vacation leave

Posted because in my pre-blogging, prime employment years, I had to go to work on most of the federally-recognized "holidays."

Found via Reddit, where there is some relevant discussion.

Placebo power bands

From a report at the BBC about a new trend among celebrities and athletes:

It's a Power Balance bracelet - a silicone band with a hologram. They are an increasingly common sight on the golf course, and away from sport both Robert De Niro and Kate Middleton have been spotted wearing them...

The bracelet's distributors in Australia have just had to apologise and change their marketing and advertising text after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission took action. The commission said that the local distributors had claimed the bands would "improve balance, strength and flexibility". They also criticised the slogan "Performance Technology". The distributors admitted no credible scientific basis for the claims, the commission said.

On the US website of Power Balance it explains the bands thus: "Power Balance is based on the idea of optimising the body's natural energy flow, similar to concepts behind many Eastern philosophies. The hologram in Power Balance is designed to resonate with and respond to the natural energy field of the body."..

John Porcari, a professor in the department of exercise and sport science at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, recently tested 42 student athletes in an experiment. Balance, flexibility, strength and vertical jump were tested, while the athletes wore either a Power Balance band or a generic rubber band. Both the athletes and the testers did not know which was being worn while the experiment was conducted.

There was no difference between the bands, but there was a marked improvement in tests which were being done by an athlete for the second time. This suggests that once people know what is coming, they prepare themselves and perform better in the test. And that's without even considering the possible placebo effect, the idea that the psychological boost of believing in the bands can improve performance...

"I was really impressed by the marketing. They have managed to get away without deceiving anyone in the sense of an overt lie. There are no claims on the packaging itself. "They don't make any reference at all to any health outcomes. They leave that as an inference that most people will draw."

Even the £30 cost may help with the psychological effect of a band. "There is some evidence to show that the more expensive a placebo is, the more of a placebo effect it has."

I don't believe the cricketers and golfers and celebrities believe in the power of the band. They are well paid to wear it, just like the logos on their clothes.

The revolving door for retired military generals

From a detailed report at the Boston Globe:

The Globe analyzed the career paths of 750 of the highest ranking generals and admirals who retired during the last two decades and found that, for most, moving into what many in Washington call the “rent-a-general’’ business is all but irresistible.

From 2004 through 2008, 80 percent of retiring three- and four-star officers went to work as consultants or defense executives, according to the Globe analysis. That compares with less than 50 percent who followed that path a decade earlier, from 1994 to 1998.

In some years, the move from general staff to industry is a virtual clean sweep. Thirty-four out of 39 three- and four-star generals and admirals who retired in 2007 are now working in defense roles — nearly 90 percent...

■ Dozens of retired generals employed by defense firms maintain Pentagon advisory roles, giving them unparalleled levels of influence and access to inside information on Department of Defense procurement plans.

■ The generals are, in many cases, recruited for private sector roles well before they retire, raising questions about their independence and judgment while still in uniform. The Pentagon is aware and even supports this practice...

■ When a general-turned-businessman arrives at the Pentagon, he is often treated with extraordinary deference — as if still in uniform — which can greatly increase his effectiveness as a rainmaker for industry...

The rest of the story is at the Boston.com link, via The Atlantic.

Large corporations masquerade as small businesses

A column at Counterpunch cites the example of California's wine industry:

These activities are capital-intensive. For those with enough pre-existing wealth to shoulder the heavy up-front costs, the profits can be enormous... ownership of the industry has grown increasingly concentrated. Most vineyard acreage in the region is ruled by a small collection of massive multi-national corporate conglomerates, which typically boast annual revenues greater than a billion dollars.

To hear the patriarchs of the wine industry tell it, by contrast, the typical area wine-making operation is a “bucolic,” family-owned business...

In reality, while there remain some area vineyards that possibly fit the Wine Commission web site characterization, a huge portion of Mendo's vineyard acreage is owned by corporate conglomerates that belong to the billion-dollar-a-year set. Most of the other wine-grape plantations are remotely controlled by decidedly non-local corporations with revenues of at least $50 million a year...

Over the years, wine industry robber-baron Jess Jackson has gone to perhaps the most absurd lengths of all to garb his company in a rustic wine-maker mystique. The company no longer refers to itself as Kendall-Jackson, but rather as Jackson Family Wines... “Little Guy” Jackson landed in the upper half of Fortune magazine's 2003 ranking of the world's 500 richest people, with personal wealth of $1.8 billion...

More to the point, the profits generated by local vineyards accrue almost entirely to the wine industry big boys. Just seven global wine conglomerates purchase the vast majority of wine grapes grown in the United States. The majority of these are grown in California. These companies produce 82 percent of all wine sold throughout the country. The majority of these enormous companies are integrated with other units of Big Alcohol; namely, spirits and beer.

The upshot? Regardless of who runs the actual grape production side, it's the large multi-nationals that ultimately reap the benefits of the local wine-growing economy – just as with virtually every other sector of America's agribusiness enterprise – at the expense of just about everyone and everything else...

As Wendell Berry has written regarding the corporate agribusiness model in general, “To put the bounty and health of our land, our only commonwealth, into the hands of people who do not live on it and share its fate will always be an error. Whatever determines the fortune of the land determines also the fortune of the people. If history has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that.”

More at the link, and more articles coming on this topic.

Cinematic product placement, 1951

A hat tip to Peter Osgood, who posted the following item at a board discussing the King William's College quiz:

In John Huston's The African Queen (1951), Gordon's was the brand of choice for Charlie Allnut, the hard-drinking riverboat captain, played by Humphrey Bogart.  The Gordon's label is clearly shown in a pivotal scene in which Katharine Hepburn's teetotaling character, Rose Sayer, tosses crates of the beverage into the river.  The appearance of Gordon's gin in The African Queen is frequently cited as one of the first examples of movie product placement.

Photo from Poster Art.  It looks more like a publicity still than a movie screencap.

Are bookstores becoming "showrooms for books" ??

A report in the StarTribune details the declining number of independent bookstores in the Twin Cities:

In a shakeout inducing shivers to rival a suspense novel, one local independent bookseller after another is closing up shop... "We have lost a lot of regular customers to the e-book revolution," said owner Charlie Leonard.

Booksellers are calling the shift a "Gutenberg moment" for the entire publishing industry, likening it to Johannes Gutenberg's game-changing invention of movable type almost 600 years ago.

E-books aren't the only adversary, of course; people are buying fewer books in general. Still, dusting bookshelves in the digital age is starting to feel a bit quaint...

Lately, she said, more customers are browsing to decide which books to download at home. "We're really now a showroom for books.''

The number of independent bookstores has been declining for some time, from about 6,000 in the early 1990s to about 2,200 today, according to the American Booksellers Association...

"I used to have Boy Scouts who would go to garage sales and buy a book for 50 cents and sell it to me for $2," Cummings said. "They don't need me anymore. They can do it themselves" online.