Was at one time a big sponsor of PBS news. Not sure if they still are but PBS has fallen especially low of late. As far as I'm concerned they have outed themselves as tools of the deep state.

BTW I'm no Hannity fan, but yesterday he was railing against republicans for failing to press Clinton corruption among other things and talked about the Awan bros. He had previously been called off the Seth Rich and Awan stories by his handlers. But yesterday he said he was gonna keep talking. "They're going to have to drag me outta here!" He was also talking about the deep state.

That was on radio. Don't have access to his tv show so if anyone can let me know what he's saying on tv I'd appreciate it.

Thanks for this info on how precarious our food supply is, Nastarena. The link to Monsanto is especially disturbing. You think about buying organic veggies but I've not considered such basics as grains and oils. You can't wash flour or oil! I wonder if these are even supposed to be tested by FDA.

Great article!

And yet, the four giant transnationals that dominate the raw materials of the global food system have largely stayed below the radar of European consumers. Known as the ABCD group for the alphabetic convenience of their initials, ADM, Bunge, Cargill and (Louis) Dreyfus, account for between 75% and 90% of the global grain trade, according to estimates. Figures cannot be given with confidence, however, because two of the companies are privately owned and do not give out market shares.

And:

To add to the concentration, Cargill, ADM, and Bunge have strategic alliances and joint ventures with the seed and agrochemical companies that dominate the agricultural inputs part of the global food system. In seeds four firms, Monsanto (incorporated in Delaware, HQ in Missouri), Dupont (incorporated and HQ in Delaware), Syngenta (incorporated and HQ in Switzerland) and Limagrain, a French-based international co-operative, account for over 50% of global seed sales.

In agrochemicals six firms, DuPont, Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow (incorporated in Delaware, HQ in Michigan), and the two German chemical giants Bayer and BASF, control 75% of the market.

But monopolies are good investments!

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-next-7-american-monopolies-2010-11?op...

From Alternet in 2015, we are in a new Gilded Age:

"America’s already huge corporations are combining like nobody’s business,” wrote Harold Meyerson, in a column for the American Prospect and Washington Post. “In recent months, Walgreens bought Rite Aid, uniting two of the nation’s three largest drugstore chains; in beerland, Molson Coors is buying Miller; mega-health insurers Aetna and Anthem, respectively, bought mega-health insurers Humana and Cigna; Heinz bought Kraft, good news for those who take ketchup with their cheese; and American Airlines completed its absorption of US Airways, reducing the number of major U.S. airlines to four, which now control 70 percent of the air travel market. On Wall Street, the five biggest commercial banks hold nearly half of the nation’s bank assets; in 1990, the five biggest held just 10 percent.”

http://www.alternet.org/economy/us-economy-increasingly-dominated-monopo...

If we could just get those damn Berniebros and Dirtbag Lefties to STFU everything would be just fine! Honest! Would an American president lie?

about the Ukrainian coup. It was, indeed, part of the Neoliberal project intended to put Ukrainian resources into the hands of "Western" corporations. Why does the "West" want to vilify Putin ? Here's one possible reason.

from the Guardian on the global food crisis: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/datablog/2011/jun/07/risi...

A crisis being worsened right now with crops in the field here in the US as president's order against immingrants means the people who do this indispensable work aren't appearing but staying away, afraid to seek work for fear of breaking up their families.