LA Timesreports Cracker Barrel has heeded to an old adage: The customer is always right.Late Sunday, the Tennessee-based restaurant chain, which has 625 locations in 42 states, reversed course and said it would resume selling "Duck Dynasty" merchandise.Customer outcry, the company said, forced it to reevaluate its decision to stop carrying merchandise from the popular reality TV show after controversial comments made by the show's star in a recent magazine interview."You told us we made a mistake," the company said on its Facebook page. "And, you weren't shy about it. You wrote, you called and you took to social media to express your thoughts and feelings. You flat out told us we were wrong. We listened. Today, we are putting all our Duck Dynasty products back in our stores."The company had previously said it would stop carrying "Duck Dynasty" merchandise after Phil Robertson, 67, the show's patriarch, was suspended from the series for remarks he made about gay people and blacks.In an interview with GQ, Robertson called gay people "homosexual offenders" and equated gay sex with bestiality. He also said that he "never" saw blacks mistreated in the pre-civil-rights era. "No one was singing the blues," he said.Cracker Barrel's reversal came just two days after the company announced it had removed selected items that might “offend” some guests. That sparked the barrage of protests from some restaurant customers.More here
NBC Los Angeles reports as police continued to search on Monday for the killer of a new father shot to death as he walked home, residents talked about reaching out to gang shot callers to try and foster peace.Duarte residents met at a community center in Duarte as the sheriff's department increased patrols in and around Duarte in the aftermath of two shootings on Sunday, including one that killed a young father.The fatal shooting was reported at 12:30 a.m. Sunday in the 2000 block of Broderick Avenue, said sheriff's Deputy Benjamin Grubb.
Malcolm Mency was gunned down as he walked home after working a shift at the nearby Sonic Drive-In, according to family members who said he worked two jobs and was the father of a 1-month-old son."Looking at my baby everyday ... What am I going to tell him when he asks where his dad is at?" said Mency's girlfriend, Lebreonna Moore.Though police said no information on a suspect was available, family members believe Mency was the victim of racial profiling."He had been complaining about this for so long and nobody (did anything)," Mency's sister said of his hopes to end racism.More here
NBC Connecticutreports the city of Hartford recognized two teens for their heroic actions after they saved their families from a raging house fire.“You're a blessing to our city," said Mayor Pedro Segarra. "I want to thank you."That was the message he personal delivered to 17-year-old Antwanna Tulley and 16-year-old Christopher Brown.“We don't often tell our people that we love you… but we love you,” Segarra added.He honored their bravery at City Hall on Monday night. The fire ripped through their multi-family home on Edgewood Street last Wednesday. The teens woke up to the place engulfed in flames.“It’s overwhelming… I think I’m being honored for something I was supposed to do,” explained Brown.He was on the second floor unit and got his sister out first. Then he went back into the burning building to save his mother who is partially paralyzed.His neighbor Lamont Coleman, who was also recognized by the city, then carried her to his place across the street.“She had to slide down on her bottom down the stairs on the second floor I was with her I could see the smoke coming,” Brown explained.“I was sleeping I saw a yellow light on the side of me I woke up there was fire on the bed,” said Antwanna Tulley.Her space heater on the first floor sparked the fire. She picked up her seven younger siblings and carried them out of her window to safety, before she rescued her mother.“I wasn't thinking I just knew I had to get my brothers and sisters out,” Tulley explained.More here
Excerpt from CEPR - In his speech on inequality earlier this month President Obama proclaimed that the government could not be a bystander in the effort to reduce inequality, which he described as the defining moral issue of our time. This left millions convinced that Obama would do nothing to lessen inequality. The problem is that President Obama wants the public to believe that inequality is something that just happened. It turns out that the forces of technology, globalization, and whatever else simply made some people very rich and left others working for low wages or out of work altogether. The president and other like-minded people feel a moral compulsion to reverse the resulting inequality. This story is 180 degrees at odds with the reality. Inequality did not just happen, it was deliberately engineered through a whole range of policies intended to redistribute income upward.More under the fold.
Trade is probably the best place to start just because it is so obvious. Trade deals like NAFTA were quite explicitly designed to place our manufacturing workers in direct competition with the lowest paid workers in the world. The text was written after consulting with top executives at major companies like General Electric. Our negotiators asked these executives what changes in Mexico’s law would make it easier for them to set up factories in Mexico. The text was written accordingly.
When we saw factory workers losing their jobs to imports from Mexico and other developing countries, this was not an accident. In economic theory, the gains from these trade deals are the result of getting lower priced products due to lower cost labor. The loss of jobs in the United States and the downward pressure on the jobs that remain is a predicted outcome of the deal.
There is nothing about the globalization process that necessitated this result. Doctors work for much less money in Mexico and elsewhere in the developing world than in the United States. In fact, they work for much less money in Europe and Canada than in the United States. If we had structured the trade deals to facilitate the entry of qualified foreign doctors into the country it would have placed downward pressure on the wages of doctors (many of whom are in the top one percent of the income distribution), while saving consumers tens of billions a year in health care costs.
