We can all talk the talk about eating local, but can we walk the walk? Justin Yu thinks so. Chef Yu, who up until recently ran the popular Whole Ox Deli on Oahu, preached his passion for using the whole animal in restaurant settings to a group of culinary students at the Taste of the Hawaiian Range event on the Big Island.
Justin Yu speaking to culinary stude千花网
While Yu stressed that fine dining will most likely never be whole animal focused due to the demand for specialized cuts of meat, other food stops like plate lunch places, drive-ins, hamburger joints, and diners could potentially all be using whole animal practices. The reason to change our ways is shear waste and the environmental impact of raising more meat than we actually consume. When consumers (yes, all of us) only eat certain parts, what happens to the rest of the animal? Yu is asking us as food professionals and consumers to consider the irresponsibility of this kind of waste.
And Yu is realistic. He knows from experience that purchasing whole animal is expensive, for example one 600-pound cow is only about a 55 percent yield when all the non-edible parts are removed. He had to use strategies like raising the price of his hamburgers to urge customers to try his other sandwiches made with less familiar cuts of meat. Amazingly, this strategy worked.
Although anyone was welcome to attend his seminar, it was clear that his words were meant to impact the culinary students — the new generation of chefs who will soon be making these tough decisions in their own workplaces. Yu emphasized the importance of exposure to the customer base, by communicating with customers about where their products come from and by urging customers to try different cuts of meat. Customers don’t know what they don’t know, so ch上海419黄浦
Speaking of exposure, did you know there is only one USDA-approved pig farm left on Oahu? Did you know most farmers are nearing, or are far past, retirement age? Did you know that pastrami comes from only about a five-pound cut of an entire cow? It’s time to think about where meat comes from. It’s time to decrease waste. It’s time that all of us, not just chefs, make those tough food choices everyday. As Yu pointed out, with all the buzz out there about organic, hormone free, sustainable food, we need to focus first on buying and eating locally, and the rest will come.
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The End of Polish Rules and Election Day Bribery?
The increased Democratic margin in the Senate has important implications far beyond an additional vote or two for key legislation. It has empowered the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, to publicly commit to reform of the Senate Rules.
Reid will not end the filibuster — he’s too much of a Senate traditionalist for that — but he wants to restore its historic role as an occasional safety valve, not a routine road-block. So he’s likely to make changes like eliminating the filibuster-before-the filibuster, on the “motion to proceed”, get rid of anonymous holds, and force those who wish to filibuster to stand up and do so — instead of being able to simply stop the Senate by withholding unanimous consent.
Reid had earlier said that his 2010 decision not to change the rules had been a mistake. But his ability to correct that mistake depended on the size of his margin as Majority Leader, since not all Democrats are enthusiastic about reform. And the effective 55 vote caucus that came out of Tuesday’s election enabled Reid to make a public commitment: “I think the rules have been abused, and we are going to work to change them. We will not do away with the filibuster, but we will make the senate a more meaningful place. We are going to make it so we can get things done.”
While some speculated that there were Republican senators who might join, in the belief that if they recapture the Senate after 2014 they too will need the ability to make the Senate work, the hard right immediately try to filibuster the decision about rules for the filibuster! They did begin to frame simple majority rule in adopting Senate procedures at the beginning of a Congress as “the nuclear option.” Their argument is that whatever the Constitution says, the procedural vote by the Senate decades ago that closing off debate requires 60 votes is a permanent change which can only be modified by — 60 votes — even at the beginning of a new Senate. The decision about this question however, will, in fact, be made by a simple majority — and the Senate will still be standing and not a white more radioactive than it is today. But the deep hostility of the hard right to majority rule — reflected in their affection for voter suppression and unlimited influence for wealthy donors — comes through here as well.
Changing the Senate rules as Reid proposes is not just a procedural tweak — it makes a fundamental difference in the relative power of the Senate and House, and means that if House Tea Party Caucus members continue to pass legislation that will not stand the scrutiny of public debate, Reid can put more popular alternatives on the Senate floor and make Republicans choose, instead of hiding behind unanimous consent. It’s a major step forward to restoring a functional Congress, and ending the threat I have written about previously — that like 18th century Poland, the United States would be brought to its knee by allowing a tiny majority to veto critical legislative decisions.
But it’s only one of two procedural changes this Congress needs to make to begin restoring a vital democracy. The other is to tame the flood of bribery flowing into politics in the guise of independent campaign expenditures. Here there is no single fix, no moment in which the Senate (or even the Senate and the House) will vote and solve the problem — because it is rooted in irrational Supreme Court rulings that campaign spending does not create corruption or undue influence on the political process, but is instead simply speech.
In the light of these decisions, particularly those in Citizens United which made corporations voters in their contribution privileges, and another ruling called Speech First allowing unlimited campaign expenditures by independent groups with only the barest fig leaf separating them from a candidate’s campaign, America had its first $6 billion election. The bulks of this week’s reporting is on how much of that money seemed to be wasted, because the candidates on whose behalf it was spent lost anyway. The NRA, for example, didn’t win a single one of the elections on which it spent a total of $17 million. And indeed, once campaigns reach a certain level of funding, additional dollars have only a modest impact on the voters and the outcome.
But that ignores the more important result of unlimited big money in politics — it may not influence the voters, but it surely influences the politicians. The NRA may have lost all 上海桑拿论坛千花网
But the Court is not ready yet to back down. So fixing this problem will require time, and a wave of smaller reforms. One, of course, is to require disclosure of the sources of all this campaign money. In California at the end of the campaign it turned out that the Koch Brothers were deliberately concealing its role in funding a number of political campaigns. And Chevron pumped $2.3 million into a Super PAC that then went after a number of environmental members of Congress, with ads that nowhere disclosed that big oil was behind them.
A second opportunity exists in the pending reform of corporate taxes. Non-profit corporations that participate in politics give up some of their tax benefits. Why not apply that rule to for-profit corporations that choose to make campaign expenditures. Indeed, even after Citizens United Chevron’s spending was unusual among Fortune 500 public companies — only four others made such 千花网论坛
The third, and toughest road, is to pass a comprehensive challenge to the Supreme Court’s “anything goes”. This can be done most completely through a constitutional amendment — and President Obama has recently spoken out in favor of one. A campaign for an amendment — even before the amendment passes — may well change both the congressional politics and future Supreme Court ruling. (As the 19th-century humorist, Peter Finley Dunne wrote, ” th’ Supreme Court follows th’ election returns” and it also follows challenges to its jurisprudence by the public.
But reformers need not confine themselves to the amendment pathway. Comprehensive legislation could also be passed, designed to respond to the Court’s repeated distinctions between fair elections — not an allowable reason for spending and giving limits — and corruption — which is permissible. Indeed, former FEC Commissioner Trevor Potter has repeatedly made the point recently that by opening the flood gates so wide, the Supreme Court has actually authorized the kind of corruption that it promised its rulings would prevent. After all, as long ago as the 1930s, famed reformer Lincoln Steffens recounted how the big city machine bosses he interviewed as a journalist were all utterly clear that campaign contributions were, functionally, bribes. So while legislation limiting campaign spending for fair election purposes may not withstand court scrutiny, a tougher definition of corruption and bribery may.
And this is one issue on which, if we want bipartisan agreement, it’s there to be had. In Montana and Colorado, 75 percent of the public voted for ballot measures calling for the repeal of Citizens United. An Election Day national poll showed that “more than three quarters (78 percent) say there is too much money spent on campaigns and there need to be reasonable limits” and found no distinctions between the attitudes of Democrats and Republicans.
So this year’s election results are not just important for who won — they are important because they could set the stage, with leadership from Tuesday’s winners, for the healthier, more vibrant democracy America will need to solve its problems.
A veteran leader in the environmental movement, Carl Pope is the former executive director and chairman of the Sierra Club. Mr. Pope is co-author — along with Paul Rauber — of Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress, which the New York Review of Books called “a splendidly fierce book.”
China Air Pollution: Government Announces Plan To Combat Smog And Haze
BEIJING, July 25 (Reuters) – China plans to invest 1.7 南京桑拿网蒲友交流
The money is to be spent primarily in regions that have heavy air pollution and high levels of PM 2.5, the state-run China Daily newspaper quoted Wang Jinnan, vice-president of the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning as saying. Wang helped draft the plan.
Tiny floating particles, measuring 2.5 micrometres or less in diameter, are especially hazardous because they can settle in the lungs and cause respiratory problems and other illnesses.
The new plan specifically targets northern China, particularly Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei province, where air pollution is especially serious, the newspaper said.
“The thick smog and haze that covered large areas of the country in January has focused public attention on this issue,” Zhao Hualin, a senior official at the Ministry of Environmental Protection, told the newspaper.
China’s State Council, its cabinet, approved the plan in June, Zhao said.
The newspaper said it was China’s “most comprehensive and toughest plan to control and in some regions reduce air pollution by the year 2017”.
The government plans to issue two more plans to address water pollution and improvements to the rural environment over the next five years, the report said.
In December 2012, China said it would spend 350 billion yuan ($56 billion) by 2015 to curb air pollution in major cities. The newspaper quoted Chai Fahe, vice-president of the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, as saying that China’s leaders realised, after releasing the plan in 2012, that a tougher approach against air pollution was needed.
Smog over northern cities in January generated widespread public anger as did the discovery of the rotting corpses of thousands of pigs in March in a river that supplies Shanghai’s water.
Social unrest over environmental complaints is becoming common across China, to the government’s alarm. Authorities have tried to assuage anger with measures that included empowering courts to mete out the death penalty in serious pollution cases.
But results have been mixed. Enforcement has been a problem at the local level, where governments often rely on tax receipts from polluting industries under their jurisdiction. ($1 = 6.1360 Chinese yuan) (Reporting by Sui-Lee Wee; Editing by Ron Popeski)
Chevron Banks on Profitable Political Agenda
With 43 lobbyists and a federal influence-peddling budget of at least $35 million this past election cycle, Chevron must have an ambitious agenda for the politicians in Washington, DC.
The company just paid $4.3 billion to acquire Atlas Energy and its extensive holdings in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale so first and foremost on the company’s agenda will be fighting any efforts to have the federal government regulate hydraulic fracturing. Second, 爱上海同城论坛手机版
Chevron’s lobbyists are a Who’s Who of former government officials. DC’s rule of thumb: corporations ensure better access to lawmakers when they put their former colleagues from government on their payroll. Chevron pays the Breaux Lott Leadership Group of the law firm Patton Boggs $135,000 every three months to lobby members of Congress. That means former Senators John Breaux and Trent Lott hobnob with their Senate contemporaries, and ask whatever Chevron tells them to ask for. Chevron has lobbyist Richard Hohlt on retainer, close friend of Karl Rove, and the kingmaker of a monthly gathering of GOP leaders inside DC called the “Off the Record Club.” Chevron pays the law firm Akin Gump $90,000 every three months to take advantage of the firm’s Democratic stars, including Al From, and former top staffers to Senator Max Baucus and Rahm Emanuel.
Chevron hires the bipartisan Dow Lohnes Government Strategies for $80,000 every quarter, with Stephen Sayle (former Counsel to Representative Joe Barton) and Rick Kessler (former chief of staff to Representative John Dingell) the revolving door highlights. The lobbying firm TwinLogic Strategies is retained at a price of $40,000 every three months to take advantage of two former senior staff members for Representative Bob Goodlatte and former Representative Rich Boucher. Timothy J. Keeler — Chief of Staff in the office of U.S. Trade Representative under President George W. Bush and now a lobbyist with the law firm Mayer Brown — is paid by Chevron to work on trade agreements. The lobbying firm Ogilvy Government Relations features GOP heavyweight Wayne Berman, former Tom DeLay staffer Drew Maloney, and former Dick Gephardt staffer Moses Mercado.
Chevron was the fourth largest federal campaign contributor from the oil and gas sector during 2009-10, giving 82 percent of its nearly $940,000 in contributions to Republican candidates.
In addition to direct contributions to politicians, Chevron funds groups empowered by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision (see www.democracy爱上海419
So why does Chevron bother spending this kind of money on the political system? Because, dollar for dollar, nothing provides a better financial return than investing in politicians. With environmentalists pushing to hold oil companies accountable for their pollution, corporations like Chevron would be forced to spend millions of dollars to make their oil and natural gas drilling operations and oil refineries cleaner and safer. Sure, doing so would improve the standard of living for millions of Americans and help ensure we all have access to cleaner air and water — but Chevron’s political activities clearly show the company’s priority is profit — not saving the planet.
Read the entire True Cost of Chevron report where this essay is featured.
Tyson Slocum is the director of Public Citizen’s energy program. You can follow him on Twitter @TysonSlocum.