Now That's Reassuring!

Like many of you, I'm on quite a few email lists. I particularly like me daily updates from alternative news feeds (TruthOut, AlterNet & Common Dreams). Anytime I feel the need to wallow in a little self pity, I can easily snap myself out of it by scanning the headlines. Yes, me and the wife might be having a rough go of it, but our economic woes pale in comparison to...

Politics of the Plate: The Price of Tomatoes
If you have eaten a tomato this winter, chances are very good that it was picked by a person who lives in virtual slavery.

Working at breakneck speed, you might be able to pick a ton of tomatoes on a good day, netting about $50 at 45 cents per 32-pound basket. But a lot can go wrong.

Driving from Naples, Florida, the nation's second-wealthiest metropolitan area, to Immokalee takes less than an hour on a straight road. You pass houses that sell for an average of $1.4 million, shopping malls anchored by Tiffany's and Saks Fifth Avenue, manicured golf courses. Eventually, gated communities with names like Monaco Beach Club and Imperial Golf Estates give way to modest ranches, and the highway shrivels from six lanes to two. Through the scruffy palmettos, you glimpse flat, sandy tomato fields shimmering in the broiling sun. Rounding a long curve, you enter Immokalee. The heart of town is a nine-block grid of dusty, potholed streets lined by boarded-up bars and bodegas, peeling shacks, and sagging, mildew-streaked house trailers. Mongrel dogs snooze in the shade, scrawny chickens peck in yards. Just off the main drag, vultures squabble over roadkill. Immokalee's population is 70 percent Latino. Per capita income is only $8,500 a year. One third of the families in this city of nearly 25,000 live below the poverty line. Over one third of the children drop out before graduating from high school.

Immokalee is the tomato capital of the United States. Between December and May, as much as 90 percent of the fresh domestic tomatoes we eat come from south Florida, and Immokalee is home to one of the area's largest communities of farmworkers. According to Douglas Molloy, the chief assistant U.S. attorney based in Fort Myers, Immokalee has another claim to fame: It is "ground zero for modern slavery."...

One in Every 31 Adults in Prison; Prison Spending Outpaces All but Medicaid
One in every 31 adults, or 7.3 million Americans, is in prison, on parole or probation, at a cost to the states of $47 billion in 2008, according to a new study.

Correction spending is outpacing budget growth in education, transportation and public assistance, based on state and federal data.

Only Medicaid spending grew faster than state corrections spending, which quadrupled in the past two decades, according to the report today by the Pew Center on the States, the first breakdown of spending in confinement and supervision in the past seven years.

The increases in the number of people in some form of correctional control occurred even as crime rates sharply declined, by about 25 percent in the past two decades.

At a time when states are facing huge budget shortfalls, prisons, which hold 1.5 million adults and cost far more per convict than community supervision, are driving the cost increases.

Yet states have shown a preference for prison spending even though it is cheaper to monitor convicts in community programs, including probation and parole, which require offenders to check in regularly with law enforcement officers.

Over all, two-thirds of offenders, or about 5.1 million people in 2008 were on probation or parole...

Everyday Products Are Filled With Toxins -- And We're Not Doing a Thing About It
Is your lipstick laden with lead? Is your baby's bottle toxic? The American Chemistry Council assures us that "we make the products that help keep you safe and healthy." But U.S. consumers are actually exposed to a vast array of harmful chemicals and additives embedded in toys, cosmetics, plastic water bottles and countless other products. U.S. chemical and manufacturing industries have fought regulation, while Europe moves ahead with strict prohibitions against the most harmful toxins. The European Union says regulation is good for business, inspiring consumer confidence and saving money over the long term.

Most people would be surprised to learn that the cosmetics industry in the United States is largely unregulated. Investigative journalist Mark Schapiro is the author of "Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power." In the absence of oversight, researchers and journalists like Schapiro and grass-roots organizations have stepped into the breach...

AIG Bailed Out Again, but Endless Fire-Drills Don't Put Out Fires
Note to Washington: Take Finance 101 -- STAT!

How many Washingtonians does it take to screw in a light bulb? All of them. And, they'd still be in the dark. Indeed, murkiness is a preferred bipartisan state on the Hill. That's the only explanation for consistently doing the wrong thing regarding the financial crisis, every step of the way and losing obscene sums of our money in the process.

Piecemeal fire drills don't put out fires.

One of the first things you learn as a trader is buy the rumor, sell the news. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner missed that lesson. His latest blindfolded shoot-a-dart, save-a-bank move came on Feb. 27. That was followed by today's confirmation to dump $30 billion more into AIG, a private insurance company whose claim to public funds is that it backed Wall Street's lousy credit bets, a cry that got bipartisan belief.

Last week, after leaking the Citi stock idea for a few days (giving spec-traders time to scoop up shares to later dump), the government then announced it would convert its preferred shares in Citigroup to common stock, increasing its ownership stake in the firm to 40 percent. (A note on the structure of a bank: common shareholders have no claims to repayment, preferred ones have some. If it was my money (which it kind of is), I'd shy away from that conversion trade.)

The great part of the plan supposedly? No extra public money required! Except that Citi's stock dropped nearly 40 percent, which equates to a $5 billion, or so, market loss. In solidarity, Bank of America's stock dropped a mere 30 percent; Wells Fargo was down 16 percent. I'd have wanted to opt out of the next government investment round, into AIG's coffers this week...