"Joshua Frank" - Death By Pollution -- How the Obama Administration Just Put Thousands of Lives at Risk

By Joshua Frank, AlterNet
Posted on June 3, 2011, Printed on June 5, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151154/death_by_pollution%3A_how_the_obama_administration_just_put_thousands_of_lives_at_risk

It must be election season. Like other prominent Democrats, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson has been making the rounds. Two weeks ago she popped up on Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" and explained that regulating toxins like mercury from coal burners across the country would prevent thousands of deaths and create jobs. She even rallied people to action.

"Environmentalism is not a spectator sport," Jackson told Stewart, as if she was encouraging viewers to turn off their televisions and get busy. "You actually have to stand up and demand that we be vigilant in protecting our air and water."

It was certainly a boisterous display of support for stronger environmental statues, something Jackson happens to know a little bit about. However, just one week after Jackson's Comedy Central performance the EPA indefinitely delayed essential health protections designed to reduce public exposure to airborne toxins such as mercury, arsenic, lead, and acid gases by thousands of tons per year.

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"Arthur Max" - Going Backwards --Greenhouse Gas Emissions Hitting Record Highs

Published on Sunday, June 5, 2011 by the Associated Press

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/05-3

 

by Arthur Max

AMSTERDAM – Despite 20 years of effort, greenhouse gas emissions are going up instead of down, hitting record highs as climate negotiators gather to debate a new global warming accord.

The new report by the International Energy Agency showing high emissions from fossil fuels is one of several pieces of bad news facing delegates from about 180 countries heading to Bonn, Germany, for two weeks of talks beginning Monday.

Another: The tsunami-triggered nuclear disaster in March apparently has sidelined Japan's aggressive policies to combat climate change.

"Japan's energy future is in limbo," says analyst Endre Tvinnereim of the consultancy firm Point Carbon. The fallout from the catastrophe has "put climate policy further down the priority list," and the short-term effect in Japan — one of the world's most carbon-efficient countries — will be more burning of fossil fuels, he said.

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"Johann Hari" - It's Not Just Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF Itself Should Be on Trial

By Johann Hari, Independent UK
Posted on June 3, 2011, Printed on June 5, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151187/it%27s_not_just_dominique_strauss-kahn%2C_the_imf_itself_should_be_on_trial

Sometimes, the most revealing aspect of the shrieking babble of the 24/7 news agenda is the silence. Often the most important facts are hiding beneath the noise, unmentioned and undiscussed.

So the fact that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is facing trial for allegedly raping a maid in a New York hotel room is – rightly – big news. But imagine a prominent figure was charged not with raping a maid, but starving her to death, along with her children, her parents, and thousands of other people. That is what the IMF has done to innocent people in the recent past. That is what it will do again, unless we transform it beyond all recognition. But that is left in the silence.

To understand this story, you have to reel back to the birth of the IMF. In 1944, the countries that were poised to win the Second World War gathered in a hotel in rural New Hampshire to divvy up the spoils. With a few honorable exceptions, like the great British economist John Maynard Keynes, the negotiators were determined to do one thing. They wanted to build a global financial system that ensured the money and resources of the planet were forever hoovered towards them. They set up a series of institutions designed for that purpose – and so the IMF was delivered into the world.

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"David Schwartz" - The Rise of the Second-String Psychopaths

Published on Sunday, June 5, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/05-1

 
by David Schwartz

The great writer Kurt Vonnegut titled his final book A Man without a Country. He was the man; the country was the United States of America. Vonnegut felt that his country had disappeared right under his – and the Constitution’s – feet, through what he called “the sleaziest, low-comedy Keystone Cops-style coup d’état imaginable.” He was talking about the Bush administration. Were Vonnegut still alive in the post-Bush era, he would not have felt that his country had returned.

How had our country disappeared? Vonnegut proposed that among the contributing factors was that it had been invaded – as if by the Martians – by people with a particularly frightening mental illness. People with this illness were termed psychopaths. (The term nowadays is anti-social personality disorder.) These are terms for people who are smart, personable, and engaging, but who have no consciences. They are not guided by a sense of right or wrong. They seem to be unaffected by the feelings of others, including feelings of distress caused by their actions. Straying from a decent way of treating people, or violating ethical codes causes no anxiety, the anxiety which is what causes the rest of us to moderate our more greedy impulses. If most children feel anxiety when they are pilfering the forbidden cookie jar, psychopaths feel just fine. They can devour the cookies, shatter the jar as evidence and stuff it in the trash can. When accused, they can argue with apparent sincerity that the cookie jar has been missing for at least a week. There suffer no remorse, no guilt, no shame. They are free to do anything, no matter how harmful.

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"Molly O'Toole" - Major International Leaders Plead for the US and the World to Get Smart and Stop the War on Drugs

By Molly O'Toole, AlterNet
Posted on June 4, 2011, Printed on June 5, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151197/major_international_leaders_plead_for_the_us_and_the_world_to_get_smart_and_stop_the_war_on_drugs

The Waldorf Astoria may be worlds away from the blood-spotted streets of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, where the "drug war" has taken over 35,000 lives; the fiefdom-like favelas of Rio, Brazil, where even the police don't go; or Pakistan, one of the lowest-ranking on human development in the world, and neighbor to its largest opium producer. But members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy came to the famed New York hotel Friday to bring together leading thinkers and call for an end to the global "war on drugs," whose failed policies have claimed thousands of victims around the world over the last five decades.

The Commission on Drug Policy released a report Thursday outlining these failures and recommending reforms, among them a shift from criminalization to public health and from incarceration to consideration of a full range of alternatives, from decriminalization to legalization and regulation.

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"Ralph Nader" - Open Letter to President Barack Obama from E.coli 0104:H4

Published on Saturday, June 4, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/04-0

by Ralph Nader

June 3, 2011

Dear President Obama:

My name is E.coli 0104:H4. I am being detained in a German Laboratory in Baveria, charged with being "a highly virulent strain of bacteria." Together with many others like me, the police have accused us of causing about 20 deaths and nearly five hundred cases of kidney failure--so far. Massive publicity and panic all around.

You can't see me, but your scientists can. They are examining me and I know my days are numbered. I hear them calling me a "biological terrorist," an unusual combination of two different E.coli bacteria cells. One even referred to me as a "conspiracy of mutants".

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"Robert Borosage" - It Takes a Movement

Published on Friday, June 3, 2011 by Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-borosage/it-takes-a-movement_b_870950.html

 
by Robert Borosage

This is a classic "small d" democratic moment. The economy is in deep trouble -- immediate and long term. Washington is oblivious, compromised by moneyed interests, knotted by ideological divides. It will take an angry and aroused citizens' movement to demand the debate worthy of a great nation in deep trouble.

The dismal jobs numbers only punctuate the reality of an economy that isn't producing sufficient jobs. The crisis is both immediate and long-term. The so-called recovery hasn't begun to recover the jobs lost in the Great Recession. 25 million people are in need of full time work. Home values continue to fall. 25 percent of 17- to 25-year-old high school graduates not in college are out of work. Much of a generation is at risk.

The immediate is only an expression of more profound problems. The middle class was losing ground before the Great Recession. Good jobs are being shipped abroad. Wages aren't keeping up with the costs of basics. The broad middle class that made America exceptional is disappearing. The American dream seems ever more like a nostalgic memory. The nation continues to run unsustainable trade deficits, and must dig out of a mountain of debt -- both public and private. For the first time, an increasing majority of Americans fear their kids won't fare as well as they have.

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"USA Today" - Study: Climate Change to Hike Ozone-Related Illnesses

Published on Friday, June 3, 2011 by USA Today

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2011/06/climate-change-ozone-health-impacts/1

 

USA Today

WASHINGTON - Left unchecked, climate change could increase breathing problems and health costs by exacerbating ground-level ozone, warns a report Thursday by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Higher ozone levels could trigger 2.8 million additional serious respiratory illnesses and 944,000 extra missed school days in the United States in 2020 that could cost $5.4 billion, according to the peer-reviewed report by the Cambridge, Mass.-based environmental group.

"Even a small increase in ozone due to a warmer climate would have a significant impact on public health," said report co-author and UCS public health expert Liz Perera in announcing the findings. "It would mean more asthma attacks, respiratory illnesses, emergency room trips and premature deaths."

The most vulnerable U.S. states? The study used a mapping model by the Environmental Protection Agency to calculate national impacts and rank the 10 states most likely to be harmed in 2020.

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"James Hansen" - Silence Is Deadly I’m Speaking Out Against Canada-U.S. Tar Sands Pipeline

Published on Saturday, June 4, 2011 by ClimateStorytellers.org

http://www.climatestorytellers.org/stories/james-hansen-silence-is-deadly/

 by James Hansen

The U.S. Department of State seems likely to approve a huge pipeline, known as Keystone XL to carry tar sands oil (about 830,000 barrels per day) to Texas refineries unless sufficient objections are raised. The scientific community needs to get involved in this fray now. If this project gains approval, it will become exceedingly difficult to control the tar sands monster. The environmental impacts of tar sands development include: irreversible effects on biodiversity and the natural environment, reduced water quality, destruction of fragile pristine Boreal Forest and associated wetlands, aquatic and watershed mismanagement, habitat fragmentation, habitat loss, disruption to life cycles of endemic wildlife particularly bird and Caribou migration, fish deformities and negative impacts on the human health in downstream communities. Although there are multiple objections to tar sands development and the pipeline, including destruction of the environment in Canada, and the likelihood of spills along the pipeline’s pathway, such objections, by themselves, are very unlikely to stop the project.

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"Dr. Jeanne Bramhall" - The "Me-Too" Drug Rip-Off

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Me-Too-Drug-Rip-Off-by-Dr-Stuart-Jeanne-B-110514-761.html

June 6, 2011

By Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall

In addition to the billions of health care dollars drug companies waste on disease mongering -- convincing the public that everyday human problems are actually illnesses requiring treatment -- billions more are wasted on developing and marketing hundreds of "me-too" drugs. By definition, a "me-too" or "copycat" drug is a very slight variation of an existing drug that is already on the market. The main downside of me-too drugs is that they are a primary factor in skyrocketing health care costs, which in turn, are the main reason hundreds of thousands of Americans can't afford to see a doctor when they are ill. Other drawbacks of Big Pharma's fixation with copycat drugs include the neglect of hundreds of untreatable fatal and disabling illnesses and hundreds of cases of premature death and/or permanent disability related to inadequate safety profiling. Nearly all the major drug recalls in the last few years have involved copycat drugs that were assumed safe because they were chemically similar to medications already on the market.

An Issue First Raised by Ralph Nader

I first learned about me-too drugs when Ralph Nader raised the issue in his 2000 presidential campaign. Dr Marcia Angell, Harvard Senior Lecturer in Social Medicine covers the subject extensively in The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It (2004) and in "Excess in the pharmaceutical industry" in the Canadian Medical Association Journal http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/171/12/1451

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