As I say, I will always love Hillary Clinton for how hard she fought to get dental care covered in her failed health care plan. Nothing more depressing than losing your teeth simply because you can’t afford to take care of them. From the report: One-quarter of adults aged 65 and older have lost ALL their teeth.
Thank you, Baby Jesus, for Monsanto – which successfully lobbied the Vatican to get the pope’s approval by insisting that the company feeds the world’s hungry. (No, I am not making this up.) And now, we won’t even have to wait for their latest Frankenfoods to be tested!
If you thought Monsanto’s lack of testing on their current GMO crops was bad before, prepare to now be blown away by the latest statement by the USDA. Despite links to organ damage and mutated insects, the USDA says that it is changing the rules so thatgenetically modified seed companies like Monsanto will get ‘speedier regulatory reviews’. With the faster reviews, there will be even less time spent on evaluating the potential dangers. Why? Because Monsanto is losing sales with longer approval terms.
The changes are expected to take full effect in March when they’re published in the Federal Register. The USDA’s goal is to cut the approval time for GMO crops in half in order to speedily implement them into the global food supply. The current USDA process takes longer than they would like due to ‘public interest, legal challenges, and the challenges associated with the advent of national organic food standards‘ says USDA deputy administrator Michael Gregoire.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, problems like public interest (activist groups attempting to bring the dangers of GMO crops to light), legal challenges (farmers suing Monsanto over genetic contamination), and national food standards are all getting in the way of their prime goal — to helpMonsanto unleash their latest untested GMO creation. In fact, the concern is that Monsanto may be losing cash flow as nations like Brazil speed genetically modified seeds through laughable approval processes.
Steve Censky, chief executive officer of the American Soybean Association, states it quite plainly. This is a move to help Monsanto and other biotechnology giants squash competition and make profits. After all, who cares about public health?
Maybe we can add this to the studies showing the upper classes don’t have empathy for poor people and arrive at some kind of explanation for our present plight. Because I just keep scatching my head over how poisoning the air, land, water, economy and media dialogue makes sense to our political elites:
Maybe, as the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested, the rich really are different. They’re more likely to behave badly, according to seven experiments that weighed the ethics of hundreds of people.
The “upper class,” as defined by the study, were more likely to break the law while driving, take candy from children, lie in negotiation, cheat to increase their odds of winning a prize and endorse unethical behavior at work, researchers reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Taken together, the experiments suggest at least some wealthier people “perceive greed as positive and beneficial,” probably as a result of education, personal independence and the resources they have to deal with potentially negative consequences, the authors wrote.
While the tests measured only “minor infractions,” that factor made the results “even more surprising,” said Paul Piff, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a study author.
One experiment invited 195 adults recruited using Craigslist to play a game in which a computer “rolled dice” for a chance to win a $50 gift certificate. The numbers each participant rolled were the same; anyone self reporting a total higher than 12 was lying about their score. Those in wealthier classes were found to be more likely to fib, Piff said.
“A $50 prize is a measly sum to people who make $250,000 a year,” he said in a telephone interview. “So why are they more inclined to cheat? For a person with lower socioeconomic status, that $50 would get you more, and the risks are small.”
Poorer participants may be less likely to cheat because they must rely more on their community to get by, and thus are more likely adhere to community standards, Piff said. By comparison, “upper-class individuals are more self-focused, they privilege themselves over others, and they engage in self- interested patterns of behavior,” he said.
I was in an elevator with Walter Mosley several years ago in D.C., and told him I was a big fan of his novels. At the time, I wasn’t even aware of his political writing, although I’ve made up for it since then:
Today in a Black History Month special, we spend the hour with the award-winning author Walter Mosley, who many people were introduced to when Bill Clinton praised his book while running for president. Mosley has published 37 books, including a series of bestselling mysteries featuring the private investigator Easy Rawlins. The first novel in this series, set in 1948 and called “Devil in a Blue Dress,” was made into a film starring Denzel Washington. Mosley has been hailed for his use of the popular detective novel as a vehicle for confronting racism across multiple decades. “When I started writing Easy Rawlins … I was trying to talk about my father’s generation, black men and women who moved from the deep South to different parts of the world,” Mosley says. “Here’s these wonderful stories about these people who have moved here and who make a big difference here. Let’s include them in the literature.” Mosley’s latest novel, “All I Did Was Shoot My Man,” follows the modern-day private eye Leonid McGill as he navigates a world filled with corporate wealth, armed assassins and family drama. His writing has spanned many genres, from young adult to science fiction, but he is less known for his non-fiction works that address the pressing political issues of our time. Mosley’s most recent work of non-fiction, “Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation,” starts on a deeply personal note, then expands to a call of action for people to organize against wealth inequality. Regarding his continued support of President Barack Obama, Mosley notes, “We can’t blame a guy who, you know, got elected, and he’s sitting there alone in the White House… I agree, he has a lot of power, but he doesn’t have enough power without us.”
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett says that it’s a “myth” that high taxes are “strangling” U.S. corporations.
In a Monday op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum called for the corporate tax rate to be halved from 35 percent to 17.5 percent to “[r]estore America’s competitiveness.”
CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Buffet what he thought the highest rate should be.
“What the rate should be are rates that bring in about 18.5 or so percent of GDP [gross domestic product] as revenue,” the Oracle of Omaha explained. “The interesting thing about the corporate rate is that corporate profits, as a percentage of GDP last year were the highest or just about the highest in the last 50 years. They were 10 and a fraction percent of GDP. That’s higher than we’ve seen in 50 years.”
He continued: “The corporate taxes as a percentage of GDP were 1.2 percent, $180 billion. That’s just about the lowest we’ve seen. So our corporate tax rate last year, effectively, in terms of taxes paid for the United States, was around 12 percent, which is well below those existing in most of the industrialized countries around the world.”
“So it is a myth that American corporations are paying 35 percent or anything like it. Incidentally, 1.2 percent of GDP or 12 or so percent of corporate profits actually paid, that is a rate far, far, far below what we’ve seen in the United States. … Corporate taxes are not strangling American competitiveness.”
UPDATE: Oh, here’s a good one:
Growing concerns over Iran’s nuclear facilities may prove to be all for naught. Officials from the global intelligence company Stratfor allegedly discussed that Israel may have already destroyed the Iranian nuclear facility, according to one of the emails released by Wikileaks Monday.
In one of the over five million emails leaked, the conversation centered on Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak praising the news of deadly munitions blasts at a base of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards.
“I think this is a diversion. The Israelis already destroyed all the Iranian nuclear infrastructure on the ground weeks ago,” one intelligence official wrote in an email dated November 14, 2011. “The current ‘let’s bomb Iran’ campaign was ordered by the EU leaders to divert the public attention from their at home financial problems. It plays also well for the US since Pakistan, Russia and N. Korea are mentioned in the report. ”
One other Stratfor official allegedly indicated a similar finding.
“Israeli commandos in collaboration with Kurd forces destroyed few underground facilities mainly used for the Iranian defense and nuclear research projects,” he wrote on November 13, 2011. “Even if the Israelis have the capabilities and are ready to attack by air, sea and land, there is no need to attack the nuclear program at this point after the commandos destroyed a significant part of it.”
Some pretty interesting stuff coming out of the Stratfor emails released today, like this one from 2010:
From: George Friedman
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 09:41:03 -0600
To: Secure List
Subject: Insight–for internal use only–On pain of agony
Internal use onlySome nuggets from meeting:
Kissinger believes that the Israelis are in a panic and will attack Iran. Erdogan has made it clear to him that he plans to break with Israel at some point and reorient toward the Islamic world. He intends to be their leader. Paul Volcker regards the Greek crisis as potentially a mortal blow for the EU. He would
like to see an IMF tranche. He also said that Nicholas Brady is behind both this and the Volcker principles Obama adopted. When I asked Brady how he expects to get the the U.S. to go along with an IMF bailout, he shrugged and said they won’t, but that’s the only choice. Volcker is now doubtful the Euro can survive.
Brady is convinced it will. Kissinger thinks Volcker and Brady are missing the real crisis which is in Iran and potentially Russia. Volcker also says that the Bank of England and the French will go along with the Volcker rules on an international basis–that is returning to a variety of Glass-Steagal. The Japanese will do whatever is said, and in Germany only Deutsche Bank really makes decisions. Sarkozy told him he would come in.So there may be an international convention on restructuring banks under way–Volcker is pretty careful in what he says and doesn’t promote himself more than the average bear, so this may be the case. Nick Brady thinks so too.
Total confusion on situation in China, but more on Obama. They don’t understand who is running China policy. The decision to meet with the Dalia Lama strikes them as particularly bizarre. But China is the least of the discussion. It is about Greece and Iran. China is kind of an afterthought.
I asked Tim Reed who ran Resolution Trust Corporation during the S&L crisis under Nick Brady whether a new RTC would have been better as a supplement to TARP and he agreed but said that Paulsen was so panicked he wasn’t thinking and Bernaecke and he were just responding.
One sense I’m getting here is that the American elite, along with Europe’s, China’s and just about everyone but Russia’s his suffering from three problems: First, none are really aware of the political pressures on other elites. Second, they completely misunderstand the alienation of the publics, three, except for Volcker, they think this can be handled by the elites among themselves. We have a crisis of the elites, in my view.
I get to hold forth in an hour or so, and I’m going to argue that Iran is going out of control because of the elite crisis. No decision making is going on and the decisions that are being made won’t be supported in the public. The only country that is acting decisively and can do so is Russia.
This is for our own internal use. This must not be published or discussed outside Stratfor.
–
George Friedman
Founder and CEO
Stratfor
700 Lavaca Street
Suite 900
Austin, Texas 78701
Phone 512-744-4319
Fax 512-744-4334–
Jennifer Richmond
China Director, Stratfor
US Mobile: (512) 422-9335
China Mobile: (86) 15801890731
Email: richmond@stratfor.com
www.stratfor.com
Mac McClelland at Mother Jones has another great undercover piece:
“Leave your pride and your personal life at the door,” the lady at the chamber of commerce says, if I want to last as an online warehouse worker.
[...] Speed-walking back to the electro-trauma of the books sector, I wince when I unintentionally imagine the types of Christmas lore that will prevail around my future household. I feel genuinely sorry for any child I might have who ever asks me for anything for Christmas, only to be informed that every time a “Place Order” button rings, a poor person takes four Advil and gets told they suck at their job.
I suppose this is what they were talking about in the radio ad I heard on the way to work, the one that was paid for by a coalition of local businesses, gently begging citizens to buy from them instead of off the internet and warning about the importance of supporting local shops. But if my coworker Brian wants to feed his new baby any of these 24-packs of Plum Organics Apple & Carrot baby food I’ve been picking, he should probably buy them from Amazon, where they cost only $31.16. In my locally owned grocery store, that’s $47.76 worth of sustenance. Even if he finds the time to get in the car to go buy it at a brick-and-mortar Target, where it’d be less convenient but cost about the same as on Amazon, that’d be before sales tax, which physical stores, unlike Amazon, are legally required to charge to help pay for the roads on which Brian’s truck, and more to the point Amazon’s trucks, drive.
How did we sink to where less than 12 percent of workers are represented by unions? To where the corporate media allows perversely false phrases such as “right to work” to enter the language? More here.
Last week, while working on a documentary about hunger in Michigan, Russ Russell had an experience that left him speechless.
“I was visiting with this family and one of the little boys said he wasn’t going to eat,” said Russell, development director for Forgotten Harvest, a Detroit-based nonprofit that rescues and redistributes fresh food. “He said, ‘Oh, I’m not eating dinner because it’s my brother’s turn tonight. Tomorrow is my night.’”
On Wednesday, state officials charged with helping to meet the needs of Michigan’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens publicly told a much different story. Maura Corrigan, director of Michigan’s Department of Human Services, assured lawmakers that changes to a core social safety-net program — cash welfare assistance — aren’t producing the kind of wide-scale woe critics predicted.
“There hasn’t been an uptick in the food banks; there hasn’t been an uptick in the homeless shelters,” Corrigan told the state’s House Appropriations subcommittee on human services, the Detroit Free Press reported Thursday. “It’s a dog that didn’t bite, as far as we’re concerned.”
Three months after implementing a plan to push many long-term welfare recipients off the state’s rolls, Michigan is deeply divided about its impact. It’s as if Russell and Corrigan are talking about different states.
[...] “You have to wonder if they are asking the right questions, really looking in the right places or if it’s just too early for the problems to show clearly,” said Gilda Jacobs, president and CEO of the Michigan League for Human Services, about Corrigan’s testimony and the impact of the changes to the welfare rolls. “I’m certainly hearing stories.”
Food banks and other agencies that help the needy are reporting a rise in those seeking help. Some of the more than 200 agencies to which Forgotten Harvest, a nonprofit that distributes fresh food, now have 30- to 45-day wait-lists for access to their food programs, Russell said. Forgotten Harvest provided the food for 12 million meals in 2008; if trends from the first two months of this year continue, the agency expects it will need to provide 36- to 40 million meals.
At the Gleaner’s Community Food Bank in Detroit, the agency distributed 22 percent more food between October and January than it did during the same period one year ago
, staff said. But it’s unclear how much of the increase can be attributed to safety net program cuts.
I don’t think this only applies to environmental groups, but okay, good place to start:
A searing new report says the environmental movement is not winning and lays the blame squarely on the failed policies of environmental funders. The movement hasn’t won any “significant policy changes at the federal level in the United States since the 1980s” because funders have favored top-down elite strategies and have neglected to support a robust grassroots infrastructure. Environmental funders spent a whopping $10 billion between 2000 and 2009 but achieved relatively little because they failed to underwrite grassroots groups that are essential for any large-scale change, the report says. Released in late February by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, Cultivating the Grassroots was written by Sarah Hansen, who served as executive director of the Environmental Grantmakers Association from 1998 to 2005.
Environmental funders mainly support large, professionalized environmental organizations instead of the scrappy community-based groups that are most heavily impacted by environmental harms. Organizations with annual budgets greater than $5 million make up only 2 percent of all environmental groups, yet receive more than half of all environmental grants and donations.
The report makes the simple but profound argument that the current environmental funding strategy is not working and that, without targeting philanthropy at communities most impacted by environmental harms, the movement will continue to fail. “Our funding strategy is misaligned with the great perils our planet and environment face,” Hansen writes.
Phil Ochs has been dead for decades, but he has Barack Obama's number
How much longer are Robert Reich and other commentators going to pretend to be stunned by this spineless purveyor of false hope and empty promises? Right up till the election, no doubt. More here.
[I posted this one again because I didn't link it correctly the first time. Sorry about that.]
Recent Comments