"Enviroment News Service"-House Republicans Chop Clean Water, Air, Wildlife Funding

WASHINGTON - The Republican-led House Appropriations Committee has approved a restrictive spending bill for Fiscal Year 2012 that allows uranium mining on public lands adjacent to the Grand Canyon, prohibits funding for the U.S. EPA to set greenhouse gas standards, and exempts oil and utility companies from the Clean Air Act.

The EPA's budget would be cut by $1.5 billion and the Interior Department would take a $715 million hit under the bill passed by the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday.

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"FDA" - Senate Wants Food Makers Jailed for Ten Years We Must Stop This Bill from Passing in the House

Despite protests from health freedom activists, the Senate passed a bill that enables the FDA to put food makers in jail for ten years!

If enacted by the House of Representatives, this bill would empower the FDA to imprison food makers if they quote findings from peer-reviewed published scientific studies on their websites.

This draconian proposal is concealed in a bill titled the Food Safety Accountability Act (S.216). This bill passed the Senate because it inflicts harsh jail sentences against anyone who knowingly contaminates food for sale. But there already are strong laws to punish anyone who commits this crime, so this bill instead serves the purpose of enriching pharmaceutical interests by censoring what healthy food makers can say about their products.

Drug companies now want to convince your representative that this overreaching law needs to be enacted to further empower the FDA.

The problem is the FDA can proclaim a food as “misbranded” even if the best science in the world is used to describe its biological effects in the body. The fear is the FDA will use the term “misbranded” in the same way it defines “adulterated” in order to jail food makers under the guise that they are selling contaminated food.

The big issue is that if this bill is passed in the House, it gives the FDA legal authority to threaten and coerce small companies into signing crippling consent decrees that will deny consumers access to truthful non-misleading information about natural approaches to protect against age-related disease.

Please tell your representative to OPPOSE the Food Safety Accountability Act (S.216) in its present form. You can do this in a few minutes on our convenient Legislative Action Center on our website.



"Dean Baker" - Stealing from Social Security Is NOT a Debt Solution -- Why Do the Media Promote This Dangerous Myth?

By Dean Baker, The Guardian
Posted on July 11, 2011, Printed on July 13, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151601/stealing_from_social_security_is_not_a_debt_solution_--_why_do_the_media_promote_this_dangerous_myth

The conventional wisdom among the current generation of school reformers is that bad teachers are to blame for the failure of many of our children to learn. Applying this logic to the current debates over the budget and the economy, we should be pointing a big finger of blame at the media.

As survey after survey shows, the vast majority of the public are incredibly ignorant of the most basic facts about the budget and the economy. If we treated their teachers in the media the way the educational reformers treat public school teachers, few economics and budget reporters would have jobs.

One needs only to pick up a newspaper or turn on the television to get examples of thoroughly awful reporting. When we hear pledges to reduce the projected deficits over the next 12 years by $2tn or $4tn, how many people have any clue how large these reductions – on which the current debt ceiling talks between President Obama and House speaker John Boehner turn – are, relative to projected spending or projected GDP over this period? (The $4tn figure is 8.7% of projected spending and 3.7% of GDP.)

How about that $14.3tn figure for the debt ceiling? That's a really big number, really scary. So is just about every number connected with the United States budget. We are a huge country with a huge economy. Competent reporters would focus on this being about 90% of US GDP.

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"Zachary Newkirk" - God's Lobbyists -- The Hidden Realm of Religious Influence

Published on Wednesday, July 13, 2011 by Open Secrets Blog

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2011/07/gods-lobbyists.html

by Zachary Newkirk

On the first day, according to the Book of Genesis, the Lord said, “Let there be light.”

But when it comes to the government lobbying efforts of most religious institutions, their activities are notably shrouded in darkness, even as representatives of numerous faiths routinely pressure federal lawmakers on issues ranging from health care to international relations, poverty to abortion rights.

This is largely by government design. In 1995, when Congress passed the Lobbying Disclosure Act in 1995, it provided for a few exceptions, including lobbying communications made by a “church, its integrated auxiliary or a convention or association of churches that is exempt from filing a federal income tax return," as well as a "religious order."

The only instances in which a church must disclose their lobbying is if spends a “substantial” amount of money on lobbying, if more than 20 percent of its lobbyist’s income is from direct lobbying on behalf of the church or if it hires an outside lobbying firm. Then, the hired firm is required to disclose that it has lobbied on behalf of a religious institution. The “substantial” test is a murky one, with little enforcement of it, and as is the 20 percent rule, unless attention is drawn to the organization.

People of faith are divided on whether this lobbying disclosure exception is appropriate.

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" Joshua Frank" - Why the Biggest Energy Suck in Your House May Have to do With Your TV

By Joshua Frank, AlterNet
Posted on July 13, 2011, Printed on July 14, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151595/why_the_biggest_energy_suck_in_your_house_may_have_to_do_with_your_tv

Note to TV-loving couch potatoes: That little box sitting atop your television set that transforms a signal into your favorite show is likely the largest single source of electrical waste in your entire household. These so-called set-top boxes are bigger electrical suckers than new refrigerators. Who knew such a small box could be such a huge power drain?  

In the United States alone there are over 160 million set-top boxes perched inside entertainment centers and on television sets. That's one for every two people in the country or 80 percent of U.S. households. The problem is largely due to the fact that modern set-top boxes operate at near full power even when nobody is even watching or recording a program. A new study reports that consumers in this country alone spend over $2 billion in electricity per year to run these little machines. 

"The average new cable high-definition digital video recorder (HD-DVR) consumes more than half the energy of an average new refrigerator and more than an average new flat-panel television," reports the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Ecos in a new report called Better Viewing, Lower Energy Bills, and Less Pollution. "Even more troubling, when not displaying or recording video content, U.S. boxes draw nearly as much power as they do when in use."  

To put it in perspective, U.S. set-top boxes require as much energy to operate as the annual electricity consumption of all the households in the state of Maryland. That's 16 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions from boxes owned and installed by service providers like Comcast, Time Warner, DISH Network, Verizon, DirecTV and the like.  

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"Adele M. Stan" - Senators Call for Murdoch Investigations Amid Allegations of 9/11 Victim Phone-Hacking

By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet
Posted on July 14, 2011, Printed on July 14, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151632/senators_call_for_murdoch_investigations_amid_allegations_of_9_11_victim_phone-hacking

Rupert Murdoch probably didn't think his week could get much worse. Then, three U.S. senators called upon federal agencies to investigate the actions of his News Corporation, which owns, among a number of media entities, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. Senators Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., sent a joint letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, asking for a Justice Department investigation of possible phone-hacking by News Corp outlets in the U.S., and to Mary Schapiro, chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission, asking her to investigate News Corp for possible violations of U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., sent his own letter to Holder and Schapiro requesting the same.

Meanwhile, Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., asked FBI Director Robert Mueller to conduct his own investigation.

These actions have given hope to News Corp critics who have long lamented the timidity of both Democrats and most of the mainstream news establishment in the face of the blatant political organizing, race-baiting, opponent-smearing and outright disinformation promulgated by Murdoch's U.S. news outlets. But given the influence of Murdoch ally David Koch on the U.S. Congress -- many of whose members the billionaire helped to elect, both through direct donations and the organizing of Americans for Prosperity, the astroturf group he founded -- Murdoch may currently enjoy even greater insulation in Congress than he once did in the British Parliament.

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"Farah Stockman" - Obama, US Viewed Less Favorably in Arab World, Poll Shows

Published on Wednesday, July 13, 2011 by The Boston Globe

http://www.boston.com/Boston/politicalintelligence/2011/07/obama-viewed-less-favorably-arab-world-poll-shows/yIVn6f6PueWbdhZutglhoJ/index.html

“It’s because expectations were created that were not met”

by Farah Stockman

The United States is viewed less favorably in much of the Arab world today than it was during the final year of the Bush administration, and President Obama is less popular in the region than Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to a poll released today by the Arab American Institute, a nonpartisan research and advocacy group.

Attitudes towards the US president and the United States as a whole have been growing increasingly negative over the past ten years due to the invasion of Iraq, outrage over Guantanamo Bay, and continued frustration over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, which has been tracking attitudes for a decade.

But the current poll is striking in that is illustrates how far Obama’s favorability has fallen in the region, after an initial optimistic spike when he took office.

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"Karl Grossman" - Rupert Murdoch Media Empire -- A Journalistic Travesty

Published on Wednesday, July 13, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/13-1

by Karl Grossman

The scandal shaking Rupert Murdoch’s media holdings in Britain could be expected of a global media empire intoxicated with power and lacking any ethical base

What is unfolding -- revelations of bribery and massive phone-hacking -- could go down as the greatest press scandal in the English-speaking world. Overarching it is a media machine built by Murdoch that is the most dishonest, unprincipled and corrupt of any media empire in the history of the English-speaking world (against stiff competition). And it is gargantuan, the largest media empire ever.

“If Rupert Murdoch were the Angel Gabriel, you still wouldn’t want him owning the sun, the moon, and the stars. That’s too much real estate for even the pure in heart,” commented Bill Moyers in 2007. “But Rupert Murdoch is no saint. He is to propriety what the Marquis de Sade was to chastity.”

Murdoch has made a travesty of what journalism is supposed to be about. And he has institutionalized this on a global level. He has taken what was the distinguished paper of record of the English-speaking world, The Times of London, and degraded it making it not a watchdog of power, what the press should be, but an instrument to aid those in power whom he favors. He took what had been New York City’s paper-of-the-people, the oldest continuously published daily in the U.S., the New York Post, and with his obsession for titillation and sensation, made it a disgrace. With his Fox News Channel, exactly the opposite of the “fair and balanced” outlet it claims to be, he and Republican political operative Roger Ailes have developed what is no more than an unbridled propaganda organ for the GOP.

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"Anthony DiMaggio" - Obama's Political Suicide – Debt Reduction Will End His Presidency

By ANTHONY DiMAGGIO

http://counterpunch.org/dimaggio07132011.html

The Obama administration is committing political suicide with its debt negotiations, and it’s not entirely clear that there should be much of a protest from the American people.  Obama’s center-right attempts to “compromise” by seeking major cuts to Social Security (a program that is currently not in financial trouble, but in fact running a surplus) and Medicare (in which hundreds of billion in cuts are being sought) will inevitably harm the American middle and working classes.  Obama claims that the “sacrifices” (which he will not be forced to endure) are necessary in order to come to an agreement with Republicans over deficit reduction.  He is wrong.  If he continues to push this agenda, we should organize around an alternative, progressive candidate for 2012. 

Obama’s proposed cuts concede far too much to the Republicans.  He supports ending tax loopholes for the rich and reducing the Bush tax cuts (for the wealthy) in a package that would see less than $1 trillion in total revenue savings from these sources.  Compare that to the additional $3 trillion in cuts he’s seeking over ten years – much of which will come from popular social programs – and one begins to see that he really is “bending over backwards” to placate Republicans’ elitist agenda, as he complained in his recent national address.  Such cuts go far beyond the compromise supported by Democrats, in which sacrifices by the masses would equal half of the total revenue increases, and the closing of tax cuts for the wealthy would include another half.  Obama’s proposed cuts even go beyond those cuts pushed by Republicans, as they had not originally mentioned Social Security payment reductions as part of their demands.

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"Suzanne Goldenberg" - US Solution to Oil Crisis Simulation: Drill More

Published on Thursday, July 14, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/14/us-oil-crisis-simulation-oil-shockwave

Former White House officials take part in Oil ShockWave war game to determine US response to a terrorist attack on Saudi oil supplies

by Suzanne Goldenberg

November 17, 2011: A helicopter gunship attack, possibly by al-Qaida militants, has disabled the world's largest crude processing facility in Saudi Arabia, turning the sky a bright fiery orange and knocking out a significant chunk of global oil supply.

In Washington, the national security team assembles to advise the president on how best to reassure the public and stop the US sliding back into recession. Their solution? Drill more American oil.

One month on, the crisis intensifies. Iran and Venezuela threaten to choke off oil supplies, pushing oil prices to $200 a barrel. The reaction once again: drill more American oil.

Oil ShockWave, a crisis war game, which took place on Wednesday in the Ritz-Carlton ballroom about a mile from the real White House, included George Bush's former national security adviser, a former Carter administration official and former Shell chief executive . Playing fictional cabinet officials, they acknowledged America had become hostage to its need for oil – and yet they couldn't quite seem to break away.

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