Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
The founder and CEO of Papa John’s Pizza, John Schnatter said during a shareholders conference call last week that if the Affordable Care Act wasn’t repealed it would add up to 14 cents onto the cost of a pizza. It’s good too know that Papa John thinks 14 cents is far more important than affordable health care for his minimum wage workers.
There has been a lot of ink and electrons spent about the controversy over Chick-fil-A and its CEO supporting anti-gay groups and causes. I’ve known for a couple of years that Chick-fil-A was not a friend of the LGBT community and have chosen not to spend my money at any of their stores. There has been the typical conservative backlash. My feeling is if you support LGBTs then don’t spend money that will be used to hurt them.
The controversy got started earlier in the month when owner Dan Cathy made public statements against gay marriage which also brought out the fact that the company donated millions of dollars to anti-gay groups. The public relations dust up caused the Jim Henson company to pull out of a kids meal promotion and the outrage overflowed onto many articles in print and on the Internet from the LGBT community and its allies.
Republicans went apoplectic when President Obama stated July 13th that people don’t build businesses in a vacuum. He said the government and indirectly all Americans help build those businesses. That idea isn’t a new one. Back in 2011 Elizabeth Warren expressed the same thoughts and it seems that even founding father Thomas Paine stated that idea in a pamphlet published in 1795.
As a reminder here is what President Obama actually said on July 13th:
Vandana Shiva was on Moyers & Company on July 13th talking about her fight against genetically modified (GM) seeds and other attempts by industrial agriculture companies, like Monsanto, to monopolize the production of food not only in her native India but also here in the US. It’s a great interview and gives a basic overview about our broken our food system. GM seeds and industrial agriculture is making us all sick and less able to afford healthy food while the corporations game the system and rake in huge profits and tax subsidies.
In the first part of the interview Shiva talks about the control of the food system by the big corporations who gain profit from it but show little to no concern for the people who have to buy the food or the small farmers who grow the food who are forced to buy seed from the big corporations:
On June 7th the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) reaffirmed their policy to deny membership to LGBT people. There was a chance they would reconsider but the consensus of a secret committee decided it was “absolutely the best policy” for the organization. Once again religious right bigotry trumps the actual American values that the BSA claims it is teaching to the boys.