It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown Won’t Air on Broadcast TV But Will Stream on AppleTV+ for Free

Good grief — the Charlie Brown holiday specials have found a new home!

Instead of airing on broadcast television, the Peanuts animated classics will be streaming on AppleTV+ as part of an expanded partnership with WildBrain, Peanuts Worldwide and Lee Mendelson Film Productions, according to a press release.

It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and A Charlie Brown Christmas will be offered on the streaming platform for free for certain dates this fall and winter.

This breaks my heart … 🚫 🎃 📺

#peanuts #corporatedollars #apple

💰🙄 #corporatedollars

Mattress Firm, largest US mattress retailer, files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection

The largest U.S. mattress retailer, Mattress Firm, said Friday it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, as its corporate parent battles an accounting scandal and the retailer grapples with an onerous store footprint.

The retailer has 3,500 stores across the U.S., reflecting a time when the economics of mattress retailers was such that more was better. The stores are relatively cheap to run and faced little price competition. With new entrants like online retailer Casper now selling mattresses with little to no markup, that pricing umbrella has begun to collapse.

Could this maybe having something to do with the MF having stores on every street corner?

My god, they’re every where.

#meanwhile #corporatedollars

Monsanto to ditch its infamous name after sale to Bayer

Friends of the Earth has run a long campaign to try to prevent the takeover, which it warned would “increase control over farmers and cut out competitors, and allow it to become the dominant ‘Facebook of farming’.”

In May, dozens of people demonstrated against the takeover outside Bayer’s AGM in Bonn.

“This merger will create the world’s biggest and most powerful agribusiness corporation, which will try to force its genetically modified seeds and toxic pesticides into our food and countryside,” Bebb said. “The coming together of these two is a marriage made in hell – bad for farmers, bad for consumers and bad for our countryside.”

Bayer won approval for the takeover from US and European regulators after agreeing to sell $9bn worth of assets to reduce the combined companies’ dominance of the global seeds market.

“The acquisition of Monsanto is a strategic milestone in strengthening our portfolio of leading businesses in health and nutrition,” Baumann said. “We will double the size of our agriculture business and create a leading innovation engine in agriculture, positioning us to better serve our customers and unlock the long-term growth potential in the sector.”

Now we get GMO foodies and patented seeds worldwide, kids!

#corporatedollars #monsanto

Not this.

I ❤️ Neil deGrasse Tyson as much as the next astrophysicist…but $271 for one ticket = 🙄

#neildegrassetyson #corporatedollars

Crime In The Fields: How Monsanto And Scofflaw Farmers Hurt Soybeans In Arkansas

Monsanto created dicamba-resistant soybeans (and cotton) in an effort to stay a step ahead of the weeds. The strategy of planting Roundup-resistant crops and spraying Roundup to kill weeds isn’t working so well anymore, because weeds have evolved resistance to glyphosate. Adding genes for dicamba resistance, so the thinking went, would give farmers the option of spraying dicamba as well, which would clear out the weeds that survive glyphosate.

There was just one hitch in the plan. A very big hitch, as it turned out. The Environmental Protection Agency has not yet approved the new dicamba weedkiller that Monsanto created for farmers to spray on its new dicamba-resistant crops. That new formulation of dicamba, according to Monsanto, has been formulated so that it won’t vaporize as easily, and won’t be as likely to harm neighboring crops. If the EPA approves the new weedkiller, it may impose restrictions on how and when the chemical may be used.

But, Monsanto went ahead and started selling its dicamba-resistant soybeans before this herbicide was approved. It gave farmers a new weed-killing tool that they couldn’t legally use.

I can understand not wanting to wait for approval but Monsanto is so big, it just does what it wants.

#monsanto #corporatedollars

Stop Drinking Bottled Water

Boycotting bottled water means you support the idea that public access to clean, safe water is not only a basic human right, but that it’s a goddamn technological triumph worth protecting. It means you believe that ensuring public access to this resource is the only way to guarantee it will be around in a few more years.

Clean, safe drinking water that flows freely out of our faucets is a feat of engineering that humans have been been perfecting for two millennia. It is a cornerstone of civilization. It is what our cities are built upon. And over the years the scientists and hydrologists and technicians who help get water to our houses have also become our environmental stewards, our infrastructural watchdogs, our urban visionaries. Drinking the water these people supply to our homes is the best possible way to protect future access to water worldwide.

Companies that package water in a single-use bottle are not concerned with the future. They are not invested in the long-term effects of climate change on an endangered watershed, nor are they working to prepare a megacity for an inevitable natural disaster. What they are interested in is their bottom line: Marketing a “healthy” product to compensate for the fact that people are buying less of their other products that are known to case obesity and diabetes—and selling it for at prices that are 240 to 10,000 times higher than what you pay for tap water.

Drinking municipal tap water means connecting yourself to your local water system, where the goals are to think holistically about the conservation of natural resources, replenish local aquifers, and build a resilient infrastructure to distribute water to the public.

Drinking bottled water means colluding with a corporation which is not required to release any public information about how it plans to cut costs, exploit workers, dig wells, or employ a fossil-fueled supply chain in its quest to get a bottle of overpriced water into your hands.

We drank so much bottled water when we were at Great America last Saturday. $4 for a 16 ounce bottle. They also searched my backpack for weapons and food items before we could enter.

#corporatedollars #foodies #positivechange

FYI: On Friday afternoon I stop paying attention to work email about 2:45pm.

#corporatedollars

Wendy’s Franchise Cuts Employee Hours To Part-Time To Avoid Obamacare

Not long after the owner of the Olive Garden and Red Lobster chains admitted their anti-Obamacare campaigns hurt more than helped, the owner of a Wendy’s franchise in Omaha, Nebraska plans to cut 300 employees’ hours to part-time to avoid providing them health care coverage.

By moving workers to part-time status in order to avoid paying for their health benefits, the Wendy’s franchise would shift the costs of insurance coverage onto hundreds of employees[…]

Those darn square hamburgers.

#corporatedollars

Intel will end support for Oregon Boy Scouts over Scouts’ policy on gays

Boy Scouts in Oregon have few benefactors more generous than Intel, which has awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars to Boy Scout troops and Cub Scout packs over the past few years.

It’s not that Intel has a particular affinity for Scouting; its employees do. By volunteering as scoutmasters and in other roles, they trigger a $10 corporate donation for each hour spent helping a troop.

And with close to 17,000 employees in the state, those hours — and dollars — really add up. In 2010 alone they came to $180,000, according to the Intel Foundation’s most recent tax filings.

The donations, though, are now drying up.

A “lightning rod for controversy” indeed.

#corporatedollars #LGBT