I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
Amazon’s best selling wholesales have long accused the company of mining
their sales data to discover which products are most profitable; then
Amazon clones the product and offers it for sale at a lower price than
the wholesales can afford (because Amazon doesn’t have to worry about a
wholesale-retail markup when it’s both wholesaler and retailer at once)
and tweaks its search and recommendation system to drive sales to its private-label versions of its partners’ products.
This is the kind of thing that US antitrust regulators have turned a blind eye to for 40+ years, since University of Chicago economists dripped poison in Ronald Reagan’s ear,
shifting antitrust enforcement to the “public harm” standard, in which
companies are only punished for monopolistic activities that raise
prices, not those that limit competition.
But the EU is emerging from this “public harm” standard to a more robust
antitrust framework, driven by the crusading trustbuster Margrethe Vestager, who has capitalized on the EU’s delight at a covert trade war with the US to visit stonking great fines upon US Big Tech.
Now the European Commission has announced that it will subject Amazon’s
predatory private-label practices (say that six times fast!) to
antitrust investigations, relying in part on insider/whistleblower
confirmation that the Amazon’s suppliers’ theories are correct.
Given the multibillion-dollar fines the Commission has smacked other US
companies with, this is a pretty significant announcement.
This antitrust announcement pairs very well with Stacy Mitchell’s analysis of how Amazon’s #HQ2 search process
resulted in the company amassing mountains of useful market
intelligence on the plans cities have made for their futures, which the
company can use to outmaneuver its competitors, even in cities where it isn’t going to build a new headquarters.
George writes, “AntiPolygraph.org has released the 5th edition of its free ebook, The Lie Behind the Lie Detector, which provides a thorough debunking of the pseudoscience of polygraphy and explains how to pass or beat a polygraph test.”
Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has followed up his scorching condemnation of US poverty
with an even more damning report on poverty in the UK, which he calls a
“political choice” brought on by a decade of austerity at the hands of
the Conservative Party.
Alston characterised the findings from his two-week fact-finding tour as
“a disgrace…a social calamity and an economic disaster.” He described
the country’s policies as so bad for women that “if you got a group of
misogynists in a room and said how can we make this system work for men
and not for women they would not have come up with too many ideas that
are not already in place.”
He predicted further declines in the lives of middle class people, who
will “find themselves living in an increasingly hostile and unwelcoming
society because community roots are being broken.”
He condemned homelessness, child poverty, the rise of food banks, the
sell-off of public assets, the closure of youth centres, the rise of
sex-work and gang affiliation among the most vulnerable people, and said
that the sole bright spot – communities pitching in to help their
neighbours – “resembled the sort of activity you might expect for a
natural disaster or health epidemic.”
Conservative politicians insisted that Alston didn’t understand how
austerity worked and that everyone was much better off due to a decade
of cuts.
Activists from the group Extinction Rebellion, which protests climate
change, blocked the private jet terminal at Geneva airport on Saturday.
The group says they want to draw attention to private jets as an absurd
form of transport for the rich that causes massive harm to the
environment.
Geneva is a major private jet hub. The world’s 0.001% head to
Switzerland to enjoy skiing in the Alps, plus privacy-minded banking,
auction houses, hospitals and United Nations offices.
An Italian council was flooded immediately after rejecting new
measures to address the climate crisis that threatens to sink the city,
and wreak havoc throughout the world.
The regional council of Veneto is situated on Venice’s Grand Canal.
On Tuesday night, the office flooded for the first time in its history,
right after rejecting measures to fight climate change.
I love this guy… the guy in the hat is my husband Bob Jonkman, the 2019 Green Party of Canada Candidate in Brantford—Brant, Ontario. As Canada uses an archaic Winner-Take-All voting system (similar to the US, UK and Australia) he didn’t win. This time.
I love this song. It was a tiny tune created by my favorite contemporary musician, the talented Josh Woodward. Everything Josh creates is released with a Creative Commons Attribution license. This video is likewise CC-By.
What this means is that any Green Party can use it. Free of charge.
Liner Notes:
For those of you who aren’t up on the Canadian Greens, I’ll give you a little background.
The video is bookended by the GPC’s awesome leader, Elizabeth May. She’s been the leader for 13 years, and the fact our Green Party is doing as well as it is has a lot to do with that.
• Our Green Party’s “Green New Deal” was called “Mission: Possible,” and the opening line is something she said at the Kitchener GPC campaign launch. • The minnows are swimming in Cypress Lake, at a favorite camping spot, in Bruce Peninsula National Park near Tobermory. • The Tree planting footage was recorded in the spring in Paris, Ontario. • The CC-By temperature visualization was created by Antti Lipponen from data provided by Berkeley Earth/Robert Rohde http://berkeleyearth.org/ • The sign waving was in Brantford. • The footage of Bob talking to people was at the Brant Greens booth at the Paris Fair. In the background, some of our volunteers are helping kids make their own buttons, a bit of gratis outreach we make as part of our community involvement. • The Circle Dance was at a Rise for Climate event in Waterloo • Bob joined Cambridge candidate Michele Braniff and friends at the Cambridge for for the first “Green Wave” segment • for “the mountains” I used a clip of Paul Manly, recorded at the 2016 GPC Special General Meeting, before he became the second elected Canadian Green, now the re-elected Member of Parliament for the Nanaimo-Ladysmith Electoral District • for “to the seaway” I used footage of the second elected PEI Greens MLA, Hannah Bell, speaking at the 2018 Green Party of Ontario convention in Guelph (alongside PEI Greens leader Peter Bevan-Baker) • The second “Green Wave” begins with GPO leader Mike Schreiner “mainstreeting” in Kitchener with the 2018 provincial election with the five Waterloo Region Greens candidates (Bob Jonkman, Michele Braniff, David Weber, Stacey Danckert and Zdravko Gunjevic) … • … then cuts to Milton candidate Eleanor Hayward and friends at Elizabeth May’s “Community Matters” town hall in Guelph • Guelph candidate Steve Dyck speaking to the crowd at the 2019 Platform Release in Guelph • “Together” takes us back in Kitchener, where southern Ontario GPC Green Candidates Steve Dyck, Michele Braniff, David Weber, Kristin Wright, Collan Simmons, Stephanie Goertz, Bob Jonkman and Nicholas Wendler join GPC leader Elizabeth May and GPO leader Mike Schreiner in support of the Mike Morrice campaign launch • Elizabeth May’s back again, tying it all up at the end with a punch line that was part of her answer to a question posed by the youngest Green Party member at the “Community Matters” event in Guelph
