1.) Union-busting. Pritzker’s family businesses have often engaged in anti-union practices. She is a director of the Hyatt Hotels, which fired and then replaced long-time room cleaners in its Boston hotels with non-union subcontracted workers. Hyatt has refused to settle several contract disputes with UNITE HERE, some lasting nearly four years, on terms similar to those accepted by other big hoteliers.

2) Conflicts of interest. The family’s $20 billion empire was built on a diverse base of businesses, including Hyatt, Marmon (an industrial conglomerate), the TransUnion credit rating agency, and many others in industries such as container leasing, insurance and travel....

3) Shady business dealings. The Pritzkers have a long history of business malfeasance at the expense of people of modest means. In one notable case, Congress passed legislation in 2003 to address issues raised by widespread charges that the Pritzker’s credit rating agency, TransUnion, had made serious flaws in its credit reports on individuals—and then failed to correct them upon discovery....

Imagine two different pictures to characterize our energy choice. The one we have now is reliance on importing energy into neighborhoods, sometimes from hundreds of miles away, while we export dollars and jobs. The other picture is to generate energy from within our neighborhoods from homes, apartments, businesses, covering parking lots and other developed lands, literally pushing energy out from within along the powerlines located on our public right of way while importing and capturing dollars and jobs.

So, I just published a long article on the most hilarious statement from a new Fox News segment on solar power — the idea that Germany has “lots more” sun than the US.

I also tackled another key topic from the segment in that article — the reasons why solar power is so much cheaper in Germany than in the US.

But one of the other key claims about US solar power that Fox & Friends spewed out of their completely confused or completely ignoble mouths was the absurd claim that US subsidies for solar haven’t had any effect and that solar compares unfavorably with fossil fuels on the matter of subsidies. Completely insane.

Luckily, I just wrote a couple posts on US coal, oil, and gas subsidies, which make solar subsidies look like pennies in comparison. For more details on those, check out:

Clean Technica (http://s.tt/1zxIe)
Read more at http://cleantechnica.com/2013/02/08/fox-news-fails-big-time-on-solar-subsidies/#7817hbSki67e2lZp.99

An Unfinished Debt: Agent Orange

During the ten years (1961-1971) of aerial chemical warfare in Vietnam, US warplanes sprayed more than 20 million gallons of herbicide defoliants in an operation code-named Ranch Hand to destroy enemy plant cover and crops, and to clear vegetation around US bases. Agent Orange, the dioxin-contaminated and exceedingly toxic herbicide manufactured by seven chemical companies for the US Department of Defense, constituted about 61 percent of the total herbicides sprayed in the war.

By the end of the war, nearly five million Vietnamese had been exposed to Agent Orange, an exposure that has resulted in "400,000 deaths and disabilities and a half-million children born with birth defects," according to the 2008-2009 President's Cancer Panel Report. Agent Orange was so extensively sprayed that all of the two million Americans who served in Vietnam are presumed exposed. The Veterans Administration now associates a multitude of cancers, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, neuropathy, Parkinson's disease, and birth defects - including spina bifida - suffered by veterans and their children with Agent Orange exposure.

However, it took veterans' advocates, their lawyers and concerned scientists decades of confronting inept and corrupt government health studies to overcome expedient myths and achieve this governmental acknowledgment of the human health harm of Agent Orange. Vietnam veterans continue to eke out needed health services from a reluctant government, which still contends it used the deadly chemicals to protect the soldiers and refuses to accept any responsibility for multi-generations of Agent Orange victims in Vietnam.

The war persists in the dioxin residues accumulated in the Vietnamese environment and food chain and in the pollution of millions of human bodies, by now transmitted to three generations of Vietnamese. Despite compelling science on the harm of dioxin exposure, the Vietnamese victims have received nothing by way of compensation, cleanup or services from the US government or Agent Orange manufacturers. That is, until 2007 when the US Congress appropriated $9 million for cleanup of contaminated sites and health-related activities. In 2011, US AID joined the Vietnamese government in the first phase of a $32 million dioxin-contaminated soil removal program at a former US air base in Da Nang. "It's a big step," said Ngo Quang Xuan, a former Vietnamese ambassador to the United Nations. "But in the eyes of those who suffered the consequences, it's not enough."
Not nearly enough, given more than three million victims of chemical poisoning and more than two dozen contaminated sites in need of remediation.