"Bradley Keoun & Craig Torres" - Foreign Banks Tapped Fed’s Secret Lifeline Most at Crisis Peak

By Bradley Keoun and Craig Torres - Apr 1, 2011   Bloomberg News.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-01/foreign-banks-tapped-fed-s-lifeline-most-as-bernanke-kept-borrowers-secret.html

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s two-year fight to shield crisis-squeezed banks from the stigma of revealing their public loans protected a lender to local governments in Belgium, a Japanese fishing-cooperative financier and a company part-owned by the Central Bank of Libya.

Dexia SA (DEXB), based in Brussels and Paris, borrowed as much as $33.5 billion through its New York branch from the Fed’s “discount window” lending program, according to Fed documents released yesterday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Dublin-based Depfa Bank Plc, taken over in 2007 by a German real-estate lender later seized by the German government, drew $24.5 billion.

The biggest borrowers from the 97-year-old discount window as the program reached its crisis-era peak were foreign banks, accounting for at least 70 percent of the $110.7 billion borrowed during the week in October 2008 when use of the program surged to a record. The disclosures may stoke a reexamination of the risks posed to U.S. taxpayers by the central bank’s role in global financial markets.

Click to read more ...

"Julie Deardorff" - Do synthetic food colors cause hyperactivity?

Critics blame the additives for triggering behavioral problems in youngsters

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-01-01/health/ct-met-food-dyes-20110101_1_food-dyes-food-colors-food-ingredients

Julie Deardorff, Chicago Tribune

Food coloring is the reason glace cherries are red rather than beige and that children's tongues sometimes appear freakishly blue. But man-made dyes may do more than make processed food look vibrant and whimsical. Some blame the additives for triggering behavioral problems in youngsters.

Acting on research published in the Lancet, the European Parliament last year began requiring products containing synthetic food colors to carry warning labels saying that "consumption may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children."

Click to read more ...

"SD" - Whale and Dolphin Death Toll During Deepwater Disaster May Have Been Greatly Underestimated

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110330094006.htm

ScienceDaily (Apr. 1, 2011) — The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 devastated the Gulf of Mexico ecologically and economically. However, a new study published in Conservation Letters reveals that the true impact of the disaster on wildlife may be gravely underestimated. The study argues that fatality figures based on the number of recovered animal carcasses will not give a true death toll, which may be 50 times higher than believed.

"The Deepwater oil spill was the largest in US history, however, the recorded impact on wildlife was relatively low, leading to suggestions that the environmental damage of the disaster was actually modest," said lead author Dr Rob Williams from the University of British Columbia."This is because reports have implied that the number of carcasses recovered, 101, equals the number of animals killed by the spill."

Click to read more ...

"Chris Hedges" - This Is What Resistance Looks Like

Published on Monday, April 4, 2011 by TruthDig.com

http://www.truthdig.com/

by Chris Hedges

The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil Disobedience is the only tool we have left.

We will not halt the laying off of teachers and other public employees, the slashing of unemployment benefits, the closing of public libraries, the reduction of student loans, the foreclosures, the gutting of public education and early childhood programs or the dismantling of basic social services such as heating assistance for the elderly until we start to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the financial institutions responsible for our debacle. The banks and Wall Street, which have erected the corporate state to serve their interests at our expense, caused the financial crisis. The bankers and their lobbyists crafted tax havens that account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade. They rewrote tax laws so the nation’s most profitable corporations, including Bank of America, could avoid paying any federal taxes. They engaged in massive fraud and deception that wiped out an estimated $40 trillion in global wealth. The banks are the ones that should be made to pay for the financial collapse. Not us. And for this reason at 11 a.m. April 15 I will join protesters in Union Square in New York City in front of the Bank of America.

“The political process no longer works,” Kevin Zeese, the director of Prosperity Agenda and one of the organizers of the April 15 event, told me. “The economy is controlled by a handful of economic elites. The necessities of most Americans are no longer being met. The only way to change this is to shift the power to a culture of resistance. This will be the first in a series of events we will organize to help give people control of their economic and political life.”

Click to read more ...

"Chris Ketcham" - Intellectual Prostitution and the Myth of Objectivity

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/intellectual_prostitution_and_the_myth_of_objectivity_20110403/

Posted on Apr 3, 2011

By Christopher Ketcham

In this rotten business of freelance magazine writing there’s almost no assignment in which the issue of objectivity fails to rise up like the miasma it is. Any writer who puts his mind on the matter knows that no human being is objective, which is the reason writers sit down at the page in the first place. The writer, an inherently subjective force, will not be divorced from the writing, though God knows there are quacks in the news business who are trying. Computers might achieve this end. Also, certain types of house cats are objective: They know exactly what the truth is, and it is them.

Click to read more ...

Mitchell J. Rabin (progressiveradionetwork.com Host - Monday 6pm (est)

Follow us!

Listen to A Better World Radio with Mitchell J. Rabin Live
on Progressive Radio Network Mondays, 6pm EST

To Listen, Tune in Every Monday at 6PM EST at www.abetterworld.net
Past shows can also be found there too.

Click to read more ...

New Report: Toxic Chemicals in Consumer Products Increasingly Linked to Public Health Problems

http://www.uspirg.org/

New Report: Toxic Chemicals in Consumer Products Increasingly Linked to Public Health Problems

WASHINGTON - April 1 - Serious health problems – including premature birth, learning disabilities, behavioral disorders, asthma and allergies, early puberty, obesity, diabetes, reduced fertility, and some types of cancer – are increasingly linked with exposure to chemicals that can interfere with the process of growth and development, according to Growing Up Toxic– a new report released today by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

The new report reviews data from more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers in detailing the effects that toxic chemicals can have on the development of children from before birth to adulthood. Over and over again, new toxic chemical compounds have been introduced into commerce, with their health effects discovered only later. The report also points out the barriers built into the U.S. chemical regulatory systems that prevent meaningful action to protect the public.

“From before they are born, kids are exposed repeatedly to toxic chemicals -- in the toys they play with, the carpets they learn to crawl on and the food they eat,” said U.S. PIRG Public Health Advocate Liz Hitchcock. “Our homes should not be hazardous to our health.  We need common sense laws that require thorough testing before harmful products and toxic chemicals are on the market instead of waiting until the evidence is overwhelming that they're accumulating at toxic levels in our bodies.”

U.S. PIRG calls for reform of U.S. chemicals policy thattakes immediate action on the most dangerous chemicals, holds manufacturers responsible for ensuring the safety of their chemicals and products before they are on the market, and uses the best science to protect public health.

“We could reduce the incidence of childhood cancers, breast cancer, and asthma dramatically by taking common-sense steps, like giving the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to step in quickly when it has reason to believe a chemical is unsafe,” said Hitchcock. “Congress must put public health priorities ahead of the special interests of the chemical lobby.”

###

U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), stands up to powerful special interests on behalf of the American public, working to win concrete results for our health and our well-being.



"Bill McKibben" - Natural Disasters?

Published on Saturday, April 2, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/02/natural-disasters-floods-earthquakes-landslides

 
Floods, earthquakes, landslides: 2011 is a year of disasters. Bill McKibben asks: are we to blame? Plus, survivors tell their tales

by Bill McKibben

At least since Noah, and likely long before, we've stared in horror at catastrophe and tried to suss out deeper meaning – it was but weeks ago that the Tokyo governor, Shintaro Ishihara, declared that the earthquake/tsunami/ reactor tripleheader was "divine punishment" for excess consumerism. This line of reasoning usually fails to persuade these days (why are Las Vegas and Dubai unscathed by anything except the housing meltdown?) but it's persistent. We need some explanation for why our stable world is suddenly cracked in half or under water. Still, over time we've become less superstitious, since science can explain these cataclysms. Angry gods or plate tectonics? We're definitely moving towards natural explanation of crises.

Click to read more ...

"Jonathan Owen" - More Than One in 10 Nuclear Power Plants at Risk From Earthquakes

Published on Sunday, April 3, 2011 by The Independent/UK

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/more-than-one-in-10-nuclear-power-plants-at-risk-from-earthquakes-2260817.html

Many stations are in countries that would be less able than Japan to cope with disasters

by Jonathan Owen

Scores of nuclear power plants worldwide are at risk from tsunamis or earthquakes similar to the natural disasters that crippled Japan's Fukushima reactors, according to new research. Many at-risk plants are in countries less able to cope with a disaster than Japan, experts have warned.

Seventy-six operating power stations in Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea, India, Pakistan and the US are located in areas close to coastlines deemed vulnerable to tsunamis.

Click to read more ...

"Sarah Posner" - Welcome to the Shari'ah Conspiracy Theory Industry

By Sarah Posner, Religion Dispatches
Posted on April 1, 2011, Printed on April 3, 2011
http://www.religiondispatches.org/

At February’s Conservative Political Action Conference, a student from the group Youth for Western Civilization at Liberty University asked members of a panel titled “The Shari'ah Challenge to the West”: “Are we going to see a rise of Islamic Europe, and America just sits there on its own... are we actually going to win?” Another audience member asked, “what recourse does America have as a country... to deal with that problem with a completely won Islamist population? What recourse do we have at home and abroad?”

That these questions were treated as legitimate lines of inquiry at a conference that serves as a dog and pony show for Republican presidential candidates demonstrates the success of a cottage industry of anti-Muslim fearmongers (politicians, religious groups, ministers, self-styled national security experts, former government officials, retired military officers, pundits, and writers) who have cultivated a wide-ranging conspiracy theory that totalitarian Islamic radicals are bent on infiltrating America, displacing the Constitution, and subverting Western-style democracy in the U.S. and around the globe.

Click to read more ...