Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) - Lawsuit to Halt GE Crops in All Midwest Refuges

CONTACT: Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER)

Kathryn Douglass [PEER]http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2011/11/02-8

Genetically Engineered Agriculture on 54 Refuges in 8 States Targeted as Illegal

WASHINGTON - November 2 - A lawsuit filed today in federal court seeks to end cultivation of genetically engineered (GE) crops on fifty-four national wildlife refuges across the Midwest.  The suit is the latest in a series of successful lawsuits by public interest groups to stop planting of GE crops on wildlife refuges.  

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by the Center for Food Safety (CFS), Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), and Beyond Pesticides, this federal lawsuit charges that the Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) unlawfully entered into cooperative farming agreements and approved planting of GE crops in eight Midwestern states (IL, IA, IN, MI, MN, MO, OH, and WI) without the environmental review required by the National Environmental Policy Act  and in violation of the National Wildlife Refuge System Administration Act and FWS’s own policy. 

This is the fourth lawsuit filed by CFS and PEER challenging FWS permitting GE crops on wildlife refuges.  Previously, the two groups successfully challenged approval of GE plantings on two wildlife refuges in Delaware, which forced FWS to end GE planting in the entire 12-state Northeastern Region.  Earlier this year, CFS, PEER and Beyond Pesticides filed suit to block planting GE crops on twenty-five refuges across eight states in the Southeast. 

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Jill Richardson - Why Is the State Department Using Our Money to Pimp for Monsanto?

By Jill Richardson, AlterNet

Posted on October 31, 2011, Printed on November 3, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152921/why_is_the_state_department_using_our_money_to_pimp_for_monsanto

People in India are up in arms about eggplant. Not just any eggplant -- the fight, which is also raging in the Philippines, is over Monsanto's Bt eggplant. Even as increasing scientific evidence concludes that biotechnology and its arsenal of genetically modified crops may be doing more harm than good, companies like Monsanto are still pushing them hard and they are getting help from the U.S.

The State Department is using taxpayer money to help push the agenda of Monsanto and its friends all across the world. Here's a recent example: Assistant Secretary of State Jose W. Fernandez, addressing an event of high-level government officials from around the world, agribusiness CEOs, leaders from international organizations, and anti-hunger groups said, "Without agricultural biotechnology, our world would look vastly different. One of our challenges is how to grow more crops on the same land. This is where biotechnology plays a role."

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Zaid Jilani - New Report Finds Vermont Could Save As Much As $1.8 Billion By 2020 From Shifting To Single Payer

By Zaid Jilani on Nov 2, 2011 at 1:20 pm

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2011/11/02/359157/vermont-save-billion-by-2020-single-payer/

Yesterday, the Vermont Legislative Joint Fiscal Office and the Department of Banking, Insurance, Securities and Health Care Administration released a new report estimating the savings the state could experience if it successfully enacts the single payer system it began designing earlier this year.

Using both a low and high estimate, the report concludes that the state would save between $553 million to $1.8 billion by the year 2020 by shifting to a single payer health care system and enacting other reforms along with it. The following chart from the report shows that these savings come from reductions in payer and provider administration, investments, clinical reforms, and fraud reduction:

In May, Gov. Peter Shumlin (D-VT) signed a groundbreaking law that seeks to implement a single payer system. But to enact the system, the state needs a waiver from the Affordable Care Act health reform law. Currently, the federal government will start handing out state waivers in 2017 — three years after Vermont wants to implement its system. Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) has introduced an amendment that would move the waiver date up to 2014. Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Scott Brown (R-MA) have introduced a companion bill in the Senate. President Obama has endorsed the idea of moving the waiver date forward.

Dave Zweifel - Health Care Solution is Simple: Single-Payer

Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by The Capital Times (Wisconsin)

by Dave Zweifel

The answer to the nation’s health care crisis is staring everyone in the face, yet as a country we continue to refuse to come to grips with it.

Late last month, the Wisconsin secretary of health services, Dennis Smith, held hearings to let people sound off about planned cuts to Wisconsin’s BadgerCare and Family Care programs. The state says it needs to reduce health care spending by some $554 million over the next two years, which is likely to leave tens of thousands of Wisconsin low-income citizens without health care coverage once again.

At around the same time Smith was holding his hearings, former Wisconsin governor and U.S. health secretary Tommy Thompson was telling a WisPolitics.com luncheon audience that American companies often find themselves at a competitive disadvantage because their health insurance costs are so much higher than those of companies in other countries.

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Science Daily - Health Risk from Eating Well-Done Meat May Be Underestimated

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111101125945.htm

ScienceDaily (Nov. 1, 2011) — Mice are often used to test whether substances in food are harmful to humans. This requires that mice and humans metabolise substances in the same way. Humans have certain enzymes in more parts of the body than mice. The health risk associated with harmful substances in food may therefore be underestimated.

Researchers at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health have adopted a mouse type where human enzymes have been inserted to examine whether people may be more sensitive to certain carcinogenic substances from heat-treated foods. They have obtained a better model to assess negative health effects in humans from substances in food using these mice.

The results show that the incidence of intestinal tumours increased from 31 per cent to 80 per cent in "human-like" mice who consumed substances from meat crust (i.e. the surface formed during heat-treatment).

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Wenonah Hauter - Factory Farming, Not Just on Land Anymore

Published on Tuesday, November 1, 2011 by Civil Eats

http://civileats.com/2011/11/01/factory-farming-not-just-on-land-anymore/

by Wenonah Hauter

When most people think of factory farming they typically think of feedlots, hog factories or chicken operations–not massive open net pens growing millions of fish in our oceans. However, factory fish farming will soon pose many of the same threats to the environment and to consumers as its land-based counterparts.

Growing fish in a crowded environment in open net pens or cages and giving them antibiotic-laced feed inevitably leads to pollution. The waste, which includes excess feed, antibiotics and the chemicals used to treat the cages, flows directly into the ocean and, ultimately, on to our plates.

Food & Water Watch’s new report reveals that if the government used factory fish farming to reach its stated goal of offsetting the U.S. seafood trade deficit (that is, importing less seafood than it exports), 200 million of these fish would need to be produced in ocean cages off U.S. coasts each year. Calculations show that this could result in the discharge of as much nitrogenous waste as the untreated sewage from a city nearly nine times more populous than Los Angeles.

The environmental issues don’t end there. Escapes from open ocean pens are common, and when farmed fish escape they can compete or interbreed with wild fish, altering natural behavior and weakening important genetic traits. They can also spread disease to wild fish. Washington State and California, for example, are now dealing with a highly contagious disease that is linked to factory fish farms and is threatening to wipe out their wild salmon populations.

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Robert Scheer and Chris Hedges - on Class Struggle

http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/chris_hedges_and_robert_scheer_on_class_struggle_20111101/

Posted on Nov 1, 2011

Robert Scheer: I’m talking to Chris Hedges ... I want to say, you’ve played an incredible role in getting people to not focus so much on the electoral possibilities, the leading party, and to take their concern to the street. And long before there was any of this Occupy L.A. or New York or any other movement, Wall Street, somebody else who did it—and it really impressed me, I reread his article—is Joseph Stiglitz. Back in April, in Vanity Fair of all places, [he] had a statement. I’d just like to begin by reading something he wrote then, because people say oh, where did this come from, and it came from this website, or something—and quoting Stiglitz, he said: “The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.” Are we at that moment now?

Chris Hedges: Yeah. We are.

Robert Scheer: And are they getting the message, or is it just too late?

Chris Hedges: No.

Robert Scheer: No.

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Noam Chomsky - Speaks to Occupy: If We Want a Chance at a Decent Future, the Movement Here and Around the World Must Grow

By Noam Chomsky, AlterNet

Posted on November 1, 2011, Printed on November 2, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152933/noam_chomsky_speaks_to_occupy%3A_if_we_want_a_chance_at_a_decent_future%2C_the_movement_here_and_around_the_world_must_grow

It's a little hard to give a Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture at an Occupy meeting. There are mixed feelings that go along with it. First of all, regret that Howard is not here to take part and invigorate it in his particular way, something that would have been the dream of his life, and secondly, excitement that the dream is actually being fulfilled. It’s a dream for which he laid a lot of the groundwork. It would have been the fulfillment of a dream for him to be here with you.

The Occupy movement really is an exciting development. In fact, it's spectacular. It's unprecedented; there's never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations that are being established at these remarkable events can be sustained through a long, hard period ahead -- because victories don't come quickly-- this could turn out to be a very significant moment in American history.

The fact that the demonstrations are unprecedented is quite appropriate. It is an unprecedented era -- not just this moment -- but actually since the 1970s. The 1970s began a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society with ups and downs. But the general progress was toward wealth and industrialization and development -- even in dark and hope -- there was a pretty constant expectation that it's going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.

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Mira Luna - Local Money Creates Wealth Outside the Bubble

Published on Tuesday, November 1, 2011 by Shareable.net

http://shareable.net/blog/local-money-creates-real-wealth-outside-the-bubble

by Mira Luna

Ever since the crash several years ago, Americans have felt precarious about the nation's economy and the value of its currency. Money seems to take inconceivable, abstract, and even magical forms, traveling around the world at lightening speed with little oversight and obvious mismanagement

We have little control over it — the value of our currency is tied to conditions well beyond our control. It moves in directions that most of us are vehemently opposed to. We trusted that the banks, Congress, the Federal Reserve, corporations and Wall Street are managing money responsibly on our behalf, particularly with retirement funds and mortgages, but lately that trust has been broken. In response, local currencies have drawn interest from Occupy and other economic resistance groups to create an alternative to state-controlled money.

Since the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 there has been a relative monopoly on money issuance by private banks through the Federal Reserve, which has drawn criticism from groups like the Monetary Reform Institute. For most of America's history, citizens used local currencies to meet their needs through local business, which often produced their own money. Before the Civil War, there were thousands of local currencies, and during the Great Depression they made a comeback, with hundreds of currencies used by the unemployed in particular.

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Dean Baker - Occupy the European Central Bank

The European Central Bank is responsible for the wreckage that has overtaken the Eurozone, economist says.

Dean Baker

Al-Jazeera, 01 Nov 2011 09:04

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011111815133102.html

In the last month, people from around the country and around the world have picked up on the Occupy Wall Street theme of retaking the country from the wealthy. Insofar as this sentiment gathers force in Europe, there is probably no place better for people to plant themselves than on the steps of the European Central Bank (ECB).

More than any other institution, the ECB is responsible for the economic wreckage that has overtaken the European economy. In the years when housing bubbles were building across the much of the eurozone and the United States, the ECB looked the other way. Its position at the time was that these bubbles and the huge imbalances they created were not its concern. Its concern was keeping the inflation rate at two per cent.

This single-minded obsession with the inflation rate, at a time when the economies of the eurozone and the world were on the edge of disaster, is akin to Kodak insisting that its business line was photographic film at a time when digital photography was exploding. Competent business people adjust their business plans when the world changes. In the same vein, competent central bankers reorder their priorities when the economic situation requires changes.

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