"ANDREW POLLACK" - In Midwest, Flutters May Be Far Fewer - Roundup Pesticide Killing Butterfly Habitats

ANDREW POLLACK
New York Times, July 11 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/science/12butterfly.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

As recently as a decade ago, farms in the Midwest were commonly marred — at least as a farmer would view it — by unruly patches of milkweed amid the neat rows of emerging corn or soybeans.

Not anymore. Fields are now planted with genetically modified corn and soybeans resistant to the herbicide Roundup, allowing farmers to spray the chemical to eradicate weeds, including milkweed.

And while that sounds like good news for the farmers, a growing number of scientists fear it is imperiling the monarch butterfly, whose spectacular migrations make it one of the most beloved of insects — "the Bambi of the insect world," as an entomologist once put it.

Monarchs lay their eggs on milkweed, and their larvae eat it. While the evidence is still preliminary and disputed, experts like Chip Taylor say the growing use of genetically modified crops is threatening the orange-and-black butterfly by depriving it of habitat.

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Tom Engelhardt: Obama’s Bush-League World

Is the Obama National Security Team a Pilotless Drone?
By Tom Engelhardt

Posted on July 12, 2011, Printed on July 12, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175416/

George W. who?  I mean, the guy is so over.  He turned the big six-five the other day and it was barely a footnote in the news.  And Dick Cheney, tick-tick-tick.  Condoleezza Rice?  She’s already onto her next memoir, and yet it's as if she's been wiped from history, too?  As for Donald Rumsfeld, he published his memoir in February and it hit the bestseller lists, but a few months later, where is he?

And can anyone be surprised?  They were wrong about Afghanistan.  They were wrong about Iraq.  They were wrong about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.  They were wrong about what the U.S. military was capable of doing.  The country imploded economically while they were at the helm.  Geopolitically speaking, they headed the car of state for the nearest cliff.  In fact, when it comes to pure wrongness, what weren’t they wrong about? 

Americans do seem to have turned the page on Bush and his cronies.  (President Obama called it looking forward, not backward.)  Still, glance over your shoulder and, if you’re being honest, you'll have to admit that one thing didn’t happen: they didn’t turn the page on us.

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Linh Dinh: Poor Richards Rise

Published on Tuesday, July 12, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/12-2

by Linh Dinh

July 4th, I wandered down to Independence Hall. There were soldiers in dress and battle uniforms, a high school marching band, many beefy bikers and a handful of svelte beauty queens, including Miss America, Teresa Scanlan. In front of the National Museum of American Jewish History, more than thirty Falun Dafa drummers, all female, performed a measured dance. Nearby, Sri Chinmoy followers sat under a portrait of their God stand-in, with these words emblazoned on their float:  

America, America, America!
Great you are, good you are,
Brave you are, kind you are.
O my America, America,
Your Heaven-Freedom
Is earth’s aspiration-choice.
With you, in you
Is God-Hour’s Victory-Voice 

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"Steve Conner" - Climate Change Could Kill One in 10 Species by End of the Century

Published on Tuesday, July 12, 2011 by The Independent/UK

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/climate-change-could-kill-one-in-10-species-by-end-of-the-century-2312114.html

by Steve Conner, Science Editor

Climate change is speeding up the rate at which animals and plants are becoming extinct. By the end of the century, one in 10 species could be on the verge of extinction because of the effects of global warming, a study has found.

The findings support the view that the earth is currently experiencing a global mass extinction where the rate at which species are being lost is many times greater than the historical extinction rate. It is the sixth great mass extinction in the history of life on earth. Scientists said that previous predictions of how fast species are being lost because of climate change match the actual observed losses. They calculate that around 10 per cent of species alive today could be facing extinction by 2100.

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Henry Giroux: Trickle-Down Cruelty and the Politics of Austerity

Monday 11 July 2011

by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/trickle-down-cruelty-and-politics-austerity/1310134880

There is a certain irony in the fact that the party of debt has now become a flock of austerity hawks. This is the same Republican Party that gave us two wars, an increase in military spending and whopping loss of tax revenues due to tax breaks for mega-rich corporations and the wealthy Americans. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman raises the question of what happened to the federal government budget surplus of 2000 and insists that the answer is, "three main things. First, there were the Bush tax cuts, which added roughly $2 trillion to the national debt over the last decade. Second, there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which added an additional $1.1 trillion or so. And third was the Great Recession, which led both to a collapse in revenue and to a sharp rise in spending on unemployment insurance and other safety-net programs."(1) All told, President George W. Bush added $4 trillion to the national debt - and there was no debate about raising the debt ceiling at that time, which was raised seven times.(2) What is often missed in these discussions is that deficits have always been the objectives of hard right-wing Republicans and some equally conservative democrats who see them as an excuse for cutting social benefits and generating massive amounts of inequality that benefit the rich.(3) Michael Tomasky further legitimizes this claim with the charge that "the Republican Party cares nothing about the public debt. In fact, it wants more ...

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"Washington's Blog" - Geithner: "It's Going to Feel Very Hard, Harder than Anything They've Experienced in Their Lifetime, For a Long Time to Come"

By Washington's Blog

Global Research, July 11, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25580

AP notes:

Many Americans will face hard times for a long time to come.

***

Geithner says will be some time before many people feel like the country is recovering.

Geithner tells NBC's "Meet the Press" that it's a very tough economy. He says that for a lot of people "it's going to feel very hard, harder than anything they've experienced in their lifetime now, for a long time to come."

Of course, Geithner is a large part of the reason that it will be so hard.

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Jack A Smith: The True Costs of America's Wars

By Jack A. Smith

Global Research, July 11, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25589

During his speech on Afghanistan June 22, President Obama revealed that "Over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war." He knew this was a deceptive understatement, as did everyone who keeps close watch on the Bush-Obama wars all these years.

Few Americans , however, have closely followed Washington's 21^st century wars of choice, so a trillion probably sounds right to them, but that amount in 10 years — when the annual cost of air conditioning alone for the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq amounts to $20.2 billion a year — is  way off base.

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"Progressive Radio Network Host Bhavani Jaroff, Wednesday's @ 5pm iEat Green Newsletter

iEat Green with Bhavani on The Progressive Radio Network

 Hello Everyone,

I just spent a delightful weekend in Vermont with my family and friends. What a gift it is, to watch our children grow up with life long family friends, enjoying the outdoors, and sharing the Slow Food Life!

Last week, I started a program with the children from The River Fund Food Pantry, introducing them to the wonders of gardening, harvesting vegetables, cooking a healthy lunch and playing in the pool. What fun!!!

Please join me tomorrow on my radio show. My guest this week will be Deb Taft, the organizer of Crop Mob NYC, and a newly developed chapter called, Lower Hudson Crop Mob. Crop Mob is a group of individuals, many with no agricultural experience at all, who come together to build and empower communities by working side by side to strengthen our foodshed. Crop Mob’s serves farms by providing groups of volunteers for special projects or tasks. There are different Crob Mob chapters across the country. To find one near you, visit their website at http://cropmob.org

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Paul Krugman: No, We Can’t? Or Won’t?

New York Times, July 10, 2011

By PAUL KRUGMAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/11/opinion/11krugman.html?_r=1

If you were shocked by Friday’s job report, if you thought we were doing well and were taken aback by the bad news, you haven’t been paying attention. The fact is, the United States economy has been stuck in a rut for a year and a half.

Yet a destructive passivity has overtaken our discourse. Turn on your TV and you’ll see some self-satisfied pundit declaring that nothing much can be done about the economy’s short-run problems (reminder: this “short run” is now in its fourth year), that we should focus on the long run instead.

This gets things exactly wrong. The truth is that creating jobs in a depressed economy is something government could and should be doing. Yes, there are huge political obstacles to action — notably, the fact that the House is controlled by a party that benefits from the economy’s weakness. But political gridlock should not be conflated with economic reality.

Our failure to create jobs is a choice, not a necessity — a choice rationalized by an ever-shifting set of excuses.

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Ralph Nader: Corporate Tax Escapees and You

Published on Monday, July 11, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/11-14

by Ralph Nader

The all-consuming Washington, D.C. wrangling over debts and deficits, spending and taxing is excluding a large reality of how these financial problems can sensibly and fairly be addressed. These blinders in Congress and the White House come from fact-starved ideologies--mostly from the Republicans--and fear-fed meekness--mostly from the Democrats. Both are furiously dialing for commercial campaign cash.

Take the gigantic world of corporate tax avoidance. Ronald Reagan signed the Tax Reform Act of 1986 that was designed to increase corporate tax revenues by over 30 percent. Today, President Obama wants to diminish or delete some tax loopholes (technically called tax expenditures) for large corporations, but let most of the revenues be cancelled out by lowering the corporate tax rates. How the world changes.

Obama's mild approach is unacceptable to the big business lobbies and their Republican mascots in Congress.

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