Chemistry Council trying to lobby Washington to cut off funding for research on carcinogens

Every two years, the National Toxicology Program (NTP), which operates under the banner of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), releases a congressionally-mandated report entitled the "Report on Carcinogens" (RoC) that identifies various agents, substances, mixtures, or exposures that are known to cause cancer. But the American Chemical Society (ACS), which represents many of the biggest names in the cancer-causing chemical industry, is currently trying to lobby Congress to stop the publishing of this important document.

Because the latest RoC lists formaldehyde, a chemical commonly used in both consumer and industrial products, as a definitive cause of cancer, and styrene, another common household chemical, as a suspected carcinogen, the chemical industry is up in arms about its potential profit losses. So in the spirit of Big Tobacco's approach to dealing with inconvenient science, the chemical industry is now desperately trying to muddle the scientific process by paying off Congress to not only withhold the truth about these and other deadly chemicals, but also to prevent the public from accessing this information by blocking funding for future publishings of the RoC.

"The way the free market is supposed to work is that you have information," Lynn Goldman, Dean of the School of Public Health at George Washington University (GWU), is quoted as saying by the New York Times (NYT) about the importance of the RoC report. "They're (thechemical companies) trying to squelch that information."

Similar stall tactics were used by the chemical industry back in the 1930s when the safety of asbestos was first called into question. Just like today, industry lobbyists at that time denied all the emerging science about the serious dangers of asbestos, insisting that it was all "ill-informed and exaggerated" bunk, according to the NYT. The chemical was eventually exposed and banned in the 1980s, of course, but by this point, millions of people had already been needlessly exposed to asbestos, with roughly 10,000 of them now die every year as a result of asbestos-related disease.

"The industrial chemical formaldehyde and a botanical known as aristolochic acids are listed as known human carcinogens," says a National Institutes of Health (NIH) announcement about the eight new substances added to the 2011 RoC, which the chemical industry is trying to keep under wraps. "Six other substances -- captafol, cobalt-tungsten carbide (in powder or hard metal form), certain inhalable glass wool fibers, o-nitrotoluene, riddelliine, and styrene -- are added as substances that are reasonably anticipated to be human carcinogens." (http://www.niehs.nih.gov/news/newsroom/releases/2011/june10/)

You can read the full 2011 RoC here:
http://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/?objectid=03C9AF75-E1BF-FF40-DBA9EC0928DF8B15

http://www.naturalnews.com/037724_Chemistry_Council_lobbying_carcinogens.html

Bankster Fraud Has Driven 100 Million Into Poverty, Killing Many

Fraud caused the Great Depression and the current financial crisis, and the economy will never recover until fraud is prosecuted.

Fraud is the business model adopted by the giant banks. See this.

The Obama administration has made it official policy not to prosecute fraud.  Indeed, the “watchdogs” in D.C. are so corrupt that they are as easily bribed as a policeman in a third world banana republic.

The mouthpieces in Wall Street and D.C.  pretend that financial  fraud (like Libor) is a “victimless crime“.

But the World Bank notes that the financial crisis  – you know, the one caused by financial fraud – has driven between 64 and  100 million people into destitution.

Some estimate the figure to be much higher. For example, one 2009 study estimated that 140 million people would be driven into poverty in Asia alone.

This is not just a matter of having less money for entertainment or luxury goods.  Increased poverty leads to earlier deaths.

As the Los Angeles times notes:

Poverty appears to trump smoking, obesity and education as a health burden, potentially causing a loss of 8.2 years of perfect health.

This is not an abstract concept. A lot of kids will die due to Wall Street fraud:

The global financial crisis sweeping through Wall Street and the European banking sector will touch the lives of the world’s most vulnerable, pushing millions into deeper poverty and leading to the deaths of thousands of children, according to a new United Nations study.

Read More:

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/08/bankster-fraud-is-not-a-victimless-crime-it-has-driven-100-million-into-poverty-killing-millions.html

Ben and Jerry’s Co-founder: Time to Occupy Dollar Bills

Yahoo! News reports that Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, is teaming up with Move to Amend to “distribute rubber stamps with anti-corporate election spending messages so that the politically-minded can mark their dollar bills.”

Cohen plans to put a giant stamping machine on a national tour in August to encourage "thousands of people to buy rubber stamps and stamp any currency that comes into their possession."

Slogans like “Corporations are not people,” “Money is not speech” and “Not to be used for bribing politicians,” will now adorn currency in an Occupy cash campaign.

The goal of Move to Amend is to secure a constitutional amendment that says “corporations do not enjoy the same protected rights as individuals and that money is not a form of speech.”

Cohen’s attorney says that as long as the bills are still legible, it is legal to put the stamps on them.

Yahoo! News' Lookout reports:

Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry's ice cream and one of the deep pockets behind the Occupy movement, says he is helping launch a campaign this summer to highlight the influence of corporate money in American politics.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/06/04-3

John Cavanagh and Robin Broad - What Comes Next?: Building on Occupy and the 99% Spring

Where does the Occupy movement turn next? Can social movements build on its momentum? Will protest and new forms of mobilization create change to transform the economy to one that works for people and the planet?

When would-be Occupiers pitched the first tents in New York’s Zuccotti Park eight months ago, hand-written signs declaring “we are the 99%” grabbed the public imagination. This 99 percent reality—millions of young people saddled with student debt joining the jobless and homeless to confront an increasingly vulnerable and bleak future—suddenly had a face and a voice that resonated across the nation and around the world. 

So too were observers struck by the novelty and creativity of Occupiers able to make decisions by consensus, posing a stark contrast to a U.S. Congress where decisions seemed increasingly to be bought and sold by and for the one percent. Across the United States, thousands of encampments echoed the core message: a healthy society was a more equal society and Wall Street’s lock on our economy and our politics had to be broken. 

In dozens of cities, actions reinforced this message as the victims of this unjust system started to fight back with verve and effectiveness. In some cities, occupiers stood guard in front of foreclosed homes to block banks from evicting inhabitants. In others, occupiers urged people to “move their money” from Wall Street banks to locally-rooted credit unions and community development financial institutions. From Washington, D.C., a 22-year-old, indebted college graduate named Molly Katchpole catalyzed such an outcry against outrageous bank fees that some banks retreated and cancelled the fees. Even as mayors and university administrators closed down encampments, Occupiers found new spaces to continue their general assemblies and plan local actions.

Read More:

http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/john-cavanagh-and-robin-broad/what-comes-next-building-on-occupy-and-99-spring?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+yes%2Fmost-recent-articles+%28Most+Recent+Articles+and+Blogs+-+YES%21+magazine%29

Andy Borowitz - A Message about Facebook

The following letter to Facebook users was issued today by Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg:

Dear Facebook User,

Hi, it’s Mark.

As you may have heard, our IPO last week didn’t go quite as well as expected.  How badly did it go, exactly?  If you live in a major city, you’ve probably seen homeless guys huddled around bonfires of Facebook stock.  More ominously, I just received a call from my attorney telling me that I probably didn’t need a prenup after all.

Read More:

http://www.borowitzreport.com/2012/05/25/a-message-about-facebook/

Mike Whitney - CRASH ALERT: The Stock Market is Falling like a Stone

As you might have noticed, the stock market is falling like a stone. As of 9 AM PST, the Dow Jones has dropped 172 points while all the other indices are down sharply. German 2-year debt (bund) has dipped below 0% this morning at auction, signalling an acceleration in the bank run taking place in southern Europe. Depositors in Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, etc would rather take a loss on their investment, then risk not their money back at all. The European Central Bank (ECB) does not guarantee deposits, so people are withdrawing their money en masse and getting out of Dodge pronto. What we're seeing is a real-time panic.

The ostensible trigger for the panic is known, but you won't read about it in the financial media where the news is dumbed down to the point of incoherence. What's really going on is that the German central bank (The Bundesbank) has indicated that it's ready to pull the plug on Greece which means that future bailouts will probably not be forthcoming. That's bad. It means that Greece will run out of money some time in June; their banking system will implode, and the "birthplace of democracy" will be reduced to 3rd world status overnight. Here's a blurb from the Bundesbank's communique:

"Current developments in Greece are extremely worrying. Greece is threatening not to implement the reform and consolidation measures that were agreed in return for the large-scale aid programmes.

Read More:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31027

Taylor Lincoln - Wall Street Wants Congress To Roll Back Financial Derivatives Regulations

Revisiting the lessons from deregulating derivatives is particularly important right now because Congress seems to have forgotten them. A report we just issued provides a road map of how derivatives wrecked the economy in 2008 and could do so again if Wall Street gets its way.

Nine bills that would roll back the derivatives reforms created in the wake of the financial crisis are moving in Congress. These proposals, most of which have already passed in committee, have been put forth in the name of furthering the competitiveness of U.S. companies and creating jobs for Main Street. These are quite brazen claims, since deregulating derivatives arguably did more to harm economic competitiveness and job creation than anything Congress has done for a very long time.

Here is the history, in brief: At the end of the Clinton administration, financial derivatives were relatively new and sat in a regulatory netherworld. In practice, they were not regulated. But they bore all the hallmarks of traditional futures, which by law must be traded on regulated exchanges.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and successive Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers (a trio Time magazine dubbed The Committee to Save the World) argued that financial derivatives investors were too “sophisticated” to require oversight. Regulating derivatives would “cause the worst financial crisis since World War II,” Summers claimed.

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/155528/wall_street_wants_congress_to_roll_back_financial_derivatives_regulations

Richard (RJ) Eskow - 10 Reasons You Should be Suspicious of Wall Street's Facebook Fiasco

Three of Wall Street biggest and best-known financial institutions handled the Facebook IPO, so why were people immediately suspicious when the stock soared and then promptly tanked? Easy answer: Because three of Wall Street biggest and best-known financial institutions handled the Facebook IPO.

Each of them - Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase - has a history of exactly the kinds of unethical and/or illegal behavior that might, just might, explain what happened with Facebook.

Mark Gongloff offers a good overview of Mr. Zuckerberg's Wild Ride, in which a stock that was offered at an IPO price of $38 soared to $45 and then plunged to its current (as of this writing) price of $31. A lot of people lost money - which means a lot of people made money, too.

Zuckerberg promptly sold his 30.2 million shares, netting a quick billion dollars and change. That tells you what he thinks of this investment.

Here are ten reasons why it makes sense to be suspicious of the Facebook IPO, starting with the fact that any overview of the three institutions which handled it might best be described as "rounding up the usual suspects":

1. Morgan Stanley has a history - and a culture - of tricking their own clients into making lousy investments.

It was Morgan Stanley's brokers who, in one notorious account, loved to brag "I ripped his face off!" after convincing one of the firm's own clients to buy a stock that the firm knew was lousy. (See Frank Portnoy's account in Fiasco.)

Read More:

http://ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2012052122/10-reasons-facebook-ipo-looks-very-suspicious-3-them-are-named-goldman-sachs-m

Richard (RJ) Eskow - JPMorgan Chase: Break Up The Big Banks Now. Here’s How.

When Jamie Dimon revealed that JPMorgan Chase had lost billions through risky and legally questionable trading, he said the losses would be about $2 billion and maybe more. Apparently it is more - a lot more. People in a position to know are saying the real figure is probably in the $5-7 billion range.

The JPMorgan Chase scandal - and yes, it is a scandal - shows us why we need to break up the big banks as quickly as possible.

But that won't happen unless we can get our hands around the real scope of the problem, which is probably far greater than we're being told. That means cutting through the enveloping shroud of jargon, euphemisms and double talk - "crap," if you will - that keeps us from seeing the situation as it really is.

Here's why we need to do it, and here's how.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/jpmorgan-chase-break-big-banks-now-here-s-how-1337698419

Dean Baker - Mortgage and Securitization Fraud: Where Is the Task Force?

It was almost four years ago that Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Henry Paul Paulson, and then New York Fed Bank President Timothy Geithner ran to Congress warning that the end of the world was near. They told members of Congress that the banks were drowning in bad debt and without a massive bailout they would soon be forced into bankruptcy. Congress quickly coughed up the money in the form of $700 billion in TARP loans. The Fed contributed trillions more.

Undoubtedly most of the bad debt was due to stupidity, which does not seem to be in short supply on Wall Street despite the high paychecks. The folks running the major banks somehow could not see the largest asset bubble in the history of the world. The fact that house prices had risen by more than 70 percent above their trend level, with no plausible explanation in the fundamentals of the housing market, did not trouble these high-flyers.

But there was more than just stupidity involved here. There was an epidemic of mortgage fraud that was identified by the FBI as early as 2004. The general story was that the big subprime issuers were pushing their agents to issue as many mortgages as possible, because they knew that they could sell almost any mortgage the next day in the secondary market. As a result, many mortgage agents put down information that they knew to be false, often changing information provided by applicants to allow borrowers to get mortgages for which they were not actually qualified.

Read More:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Mortgage-and-Securitizatio-by-Dean-Baker-120522-871.html