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Link Biscuits: 1 March 2010

Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Mon, 03/01/2010 - 21:52
  • Steven Greenhouse, Plan to Seek Use of U.S. Contracts as a Wage Lever: "The Obama administration is planning to use the government’s enormous buying power to prod private companies to improve wages and benefits for millions of workers, according to White House officials and several interest groups briefed on the plan. By altering how it awards $500 billion in contracts each year, the government would disqualify more companies with labor, environmental or other violations and give an edge to companies that offer better levels of pay, health coverage, pensions and other benefits, the officials said. ... One federal official said the proposed policy would encourage procurement officers to favor companies with better compensation packages only if choosing them did not add substantially to contract costs. As an example, he said, if two companies each bid $10 million for a contract, and one had considerably better wages and pensions than the other, that company would be favored."
  • Pavan Trivedi, Borough President Stringer Provides a "Blueprint" for the Creation of a Truly Sustainable Food System in NYC : "In response to an increasing global interest in food sustainability, and to the lack of all-inclusive, tangible, local governmental initiatives in the field, Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer has released “FoodNYC: A Blueprint for a Sustainable Food System.” The first of its kind, it serves as the most comprehensive effort to unify and reform New York City’s policies regarding the production, distribution, consumption, and disposal of food."
  • Noah Kazis, Fun Facts About the Sad State of American Parking Policy: "If you haven't checked out the ITDP parking report we covered yesterday, it's a highly readable piece of research, walking you through parking policy's checkered past and potentially brighter future. In addition to describing six cases of innovative parking strategies, the authors draw from a wide-ranging body of evidence about the woeful state of most current parking policy, marshaling revealing facts and figures. We culled some of the ones that leap out the most. ... Parking typically represents a full 10 percent of development costs. What's more, the people who actually park only pay 5 percent of the cost of non-residential parking, meaning that public subsidies and developer capital pay for the rest. In San Francisco, parking requirements have reduced the number of affordable housing units nonprofit developers can build by 20 percent, with each residence costing 20 percent more to build than it would have without parking."
  • Jim Sleeper, A Truth that Barely Speaks Its Name: "Alexander Hamilton hoped that "reflection and choice" would grow in what we now call the public sphere, a place that could be noisy but luminous, with constellations of respected seers focusing us on key decisions. Instead we're in outer space, every speaker a shooting star amid whirling swarms of asteroids. Our political universe seems increasingly incoherent and amnesiac, lurching ever more frighteningly toward "accident and force." But something very orderly explains it, too: the taboo against serious criticism of business and finance capital. It keeps Tea Partiers from seeing that corporate 'speech' and corporate welfare are dissolving the public sphere and their freedom. Michael Moore's movie Capitalism tried to show it. But the taboo held. Why?"