On TMI, we like to feature the success of good people, and not just the dire things we need to be mindful of. Raven Albrecht is one of the good ones. She started Ravenworks as a web-based business, opening her first brick-and-mortar store in early 2008. Most retail businesses that took that step that year are now gone, but Raven found her special mix of holding community events and continually finding ways to interact with her clientele in store and out allowed Ravenworks to not only survive but thrive! We’ll talk with her about that, and preview the upcoming Stonefield Wild West Steampunk event.
Then: thanks to the nature of GMO foods, there can be no solid basis to say if the practice is good or bad at its core. However, we can safely say that the way giant agricultural corporations like Monsanto are using GMO tech is good for virtually nothing but their profits. We’ll look at how GMO foods are not only being designed for commercial value first and nutritional value second, but how they are allowing these corporations to own the world’s food supply.
Finally, imagine that you’ve worked a steady job for decades, and that instead of getting paid more during that time, you deferred some of that into a pension fund so you would have money when you retire – money you earned. Lately, more and more pressure has been put by big corporations on public employers (cities, states, etc) to raid those pension funds to pay for completely unrelated expenses. While you might look to the judiciary to be unbiased in these cases, big players like Exxon/Mobil, Google and the Koch Brothers are inviting judges, all-expenses-paid, to a conference on how to “reform” these pensions to the benefit of their interests, not the interests of the workers. Weirdly, the secretive way these pensions are written may allow just that.
All that and more on today’s TMI, airing live at noon Central on WSUM FM (91.7 in Madison or http://wsum.org/ anywhere) – tune in for your Cure for the Common Media.