The FDA Forbids Labelling Non-GM Salmon
Liberty Beacon Staff
Iowa Bill Would Jail Raped Women for ‘Murder’ of Single-cell Zygotes
DAVID EDWARDS – The Raw Story
America Is Far From #1
ERIC ZUESSE – AlterNet (U.S.)
SchwartzReport: When Corruption Rules — Three Examples
01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, 06 Family, 07 Health, 09 Justice, 11 Society, 12 Water, Commerce, Corruption, Government, IneptitudeIn the endless blather by the Right about the debt, which is meaningless in the short-term, but which has captured the media, the issues covered in this report rarely get attention. They should. This is the real crisis.
Solve the Real Problems – Poverty Retirement and Health Insecurity – and the Economy Will Recover
KEVIN ZEESE and MARGARET FLOWERS – Truthout.org
When we confront the crises of poverty retirement and health insecurity, we discover that Social Security and Medicare are not the problems; they are the solutions.
We have endless money for war, and we subsidize Big Oil to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, even as their profits soar to empyrean levels. Yet the basic infrastructure of the country is slowly coming apart in front of us, as this report shows. Millions of jobs could be created if we took our future seriously. But we don't.
America’s Maritime Infrastructure: Crying Out for Dollars
The Economist (U.K.)
NEW ORLEANS — THE Industrial Canal Lock in New Orleans connects two of America’s highest-tonnage waterways: the Mississippi River-which handles more than 6,000 ocean vessels, 150,000 barges and 500m tonnes of cargo each year, as well as much of its grain, corn and soyabean production-and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, which runs from refinery-rich south-eastern Texas to Florida. Ships pass from one to the other via a lock that was built in 1921, and is 600 usable feet long, or half the length of a modern lock. Its replacement was authorised in 1956. Construction on the replacement was authorised in 1998, and then stalled by lawsuits. The most optimistic predictions of the Army Corps of Engineers, which maintains America’s inland waterways, see the new lock being completed in 2030.
Superbugs, superweeds. There is an inherent problem with an approach to nature that is predicated on dominance as opposed to cooperation. Whether it is antibiotics or herbicides that approach never gets all the “bugs” in a hospital, or the weeds in a farm field. The result: the survivors mutate and become resistant, so strong antibiotics, and stronger poisons are required in a future round until, eventually, the d! rugs and poisons no matter how strong just stop working. That's where we are in our hospitals, and now where we are in our fields. You'd think this progression would be obvious. But the corporate greed for short-term profit just overwhelms good sense.
Nearly Half of All US Farms Now Have Superweeds
TOM PHILPOTT – Mother Jones
But of course there's another way. In a 2012 study I'll never tire of citing, Iowa State University researchers found that if farmers simply diversified their crop rotations, which typically consist of corn one year and soy the next, year after year, to include a “small grain” crop (e.g. oats) as well as offseason cover crops, weeds (including Roundup-resistant ones) can be suppressed with dramatically less fertilizer use-a factor of between 6 and 10 less. And much less herbicide means much less poison entering streams-“potential aquatic toxicity was 200 times less in the longer rotations” than in the regular corn-soy regime, the study authors note. So, despite what the seed giants and the conventional weed specialists insist, there are other ways to respond to the accelerating scourge of “superweeds” than throwing more-and ever-more toxic-chemicals at them.
Chuck Spinney: From Palestine to Syria to Jordan — The True Cost of Western Ignorance & Arrogance
08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Government, Ineptitude
Below is a two-part series of reports by Nicolas Pelham on the increasingly precarious situation in Jordan.
The proximate causes of Jordan's growing potential for instability and revolution derive from the spillover effects of the Syrian Civil War. But these effects are amplifying deeper demographic tensions that were already causing serious problems. As Pelham show, these deeper tensions are rooted in instabilities caused by (1) the growing demographic imbalances between native Jordanians (mostly tribal Bedouins — now a minority in their own country) and majority of Jordanians of Palestinian origin including almost two million who are still classified as refugees (of which almost 340,000 remain housed in impoverished refugee camps left over from the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars), (2) the general spillover of expectations created by the Arab Spring, and (3) King Abdullah's reluctance to embrace the growing pressure for democratic reforms. Now, waves of refugees from Syria are hyping Jordan's incipient crisis and making Jordan more vulnerable to radical Sunni Islamists trying to destabilize the existing order. Ironically, some of the ‘Syrian' refugees entering Jordan are Palestinians who have been forced to leave squalid Palestinian refugee camps in Syria (which may be a result of a strategic decision made by the embattled Assad regime in increase pressure on its neighbors who are supporting the Syrian insurgents). Large numbers of Syria refugees are also flooding into Turkey and Lebanon.
The last thing the Middle East needs is another set of permanent concentration camps. The attached articles provide a useful background on a growing problem that is yet another instability related to the West's failure to seriously address the Palestinian Question, a connection, I might add, Pelham studiously ignores.
Part I: Jordan’s Syria Problem
EXTRACT
As Syria’s civil war worsens, Jordanian officials say they fear a far larger exodus to come. The collapse of the single power station supplying 10 million Syrians in the south, they warn, could precipitate a mass rush to the border. Fighting has already enveloped the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus’ southern suburbs, home to 150,000 Palestinians and a million Syrians. Syrian airstrikes on rebel positions have made refugees of the camp’s population yet again, killing twenty-five of them inside a mosque where they had sought refuge .Tens of thousands who had fled the camp returned after an agreement between rival factions of Palestinians in Syria. But on January 7, said Palestinians in Yarmouk, shelling and sniper fire killed five people on the main road through the camp. Palestinians are fleeing again.
For Jordan’s indigenous East Bankers, the prospect of another wave of Palestinian refugees, following the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who arrived in previous decades, threatens to continue the process that over six decades has eroded their own status and turned them into a minority in their own country. Determined to keep out the Palestinians even after the bombardment of Daraa and Yarmouk camps, Jordan has allowed in only 2,000 of them, refusing entry to all the rest, including the widow’s husband, a rebel commander, who was sent back to his death in Syria after the rest of his Syrian unit was allowed in.
SchwartzReport: Student Loan Bubble, Prisons Owning People
03 Economy, 04 Education, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, GovernmentIt is in the interest of a nation that kids capable of doing so should be educated as far as they can go, without financial considerations. The GI Bill literally created America's post-war prosperity, and made us the envy of the world. That whole trend has now been perverted and, as this report shows, students are now just another group to milk for the benefit of the few. The damage this does will haunt ! us for generations.
Student Loans: The Next Housing Bubble
PAUL CAMPOS, Professor of Law – University of Colorado – Boulder – Salon
EXTRACT
In effect, the system allows any 22-year-old American University chooses to admit to borrow a sum equal to the average home mortgage, but without a single one of the actuarial controls that are supposed to minimize the risk that homeowners will borrow too much money.
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Yet more on the growing New American Slavery trend. This is a really unhealthy vector for a democracy, and it is markedly racist.
The Legacy of Chattel Slavery: Private Prisons Blur the Line Between Real People and Real Estate
CHRISTOPHER PETRELLA – Truthout.org
EXTRACT
Although many criminal justice activists are quick to denounce the most egregious race-based expressions of prison privatization, ranging from involuntary prison labor to racially disparate sentencing policies, few, if any, have attended to the deeply racialized, yet somewhat arcane, relationship developing between the private prison industry and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Curiously, one of the best ways to understand exactly how the private prison industry views itself and its fundamental mission is to analyze changes in the IRS corporate filing status of private prison companies.
In July 2012, the GEO Group – the nation's second-largest private prison operator behind Corrections Corporation of America – sent a letter to the IRS requesting a conversion from a typical “class-c” corporation to a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT).
Owl: Irresponsible Government = Death by Vaccine –Thank You Bill Gates — Meanwhile $75 Billion a Year on Secret Intelligence Protects No One, Informs No One….
07 Health, 10 Security, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Ineptitude
The Danger of Vaccines: More Proof
Which vaccines contain human protein and DNA?
Would you object to taking vaccines on moral, philosophical, scientific or religious grounds knowing you are consuming human material? The FDA itself admits in its “Vaccine Ingredients Calculator” that's what you are receiving in a vaccine. “A recent CBS News Investigates article quotes a former senior scientist at a pharmaceutical firm who claims that human tissue is currently used in 23 vaccines; however, we adhere strictly to the vaccine package inserts from the FDA as our ingredient data source and cannot confirm nor deny this claim.
Tetanus Vaccine Causes New Disease: New Vaccines Worse?
Does the doctor who cheerfully injects you with tetanus vaccine warn you about this?
“The tetanus vaccine causes a new disease known both as Hughes syndrome and antiphospholipid syndrome (APS). It’s an autoimmune condition that can attack any part of the body, though is best noted for heart attacks and killing fetuses. It’s likely that APS will become more common with the new generation of vaccine adjuvants now being produced. The sufferers of (APS) are mostly women, and its diagnosis is often made as a result of multiple pregnancy losses. As is typical of new diseases, research is focused on finding a genetic cause, in spite of the fact that the connection with vaccines is well known and documented.”
Pierre Cloutier: Rodrigue Tremblay on Congressional Abdication, US Financial Default — Lies, Fears, and The Chicago Plan Option — Save the Country, Screw the Banks
Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Law Enforcement
The U.S. Congress: From One Crisis to Another
Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay
GlobalResearch, 5 February 2013
One crisis averted, three to come! Indeed, that’s what can be said after the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation on January 23, 2013, to suspend the government’s statutory borrowing limit for three months.
In fact, the cycle of artificially created crises will go on and on in Washington D.C. Now, the next crises are scheduled for March 1s, for March 27th and for May 19th. Stay tuned. On March 1st, automatic sequester cuts agreed by Congress in 2012 will take effect, causing an immediate cut of $69 billion in public discretionary spending. Then, on March 27, the U.S. government’s ability to fund itself (the “continuing resolution”) will run out. And, of course, come May 19, the melodrama of raising the debt ceiling will be back again in force.
Ever since Republicans took control of the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives in 2010, a fiscal drama with the White House and the U.S. Senate has been replayed time and again. One of the political gimmick is called the “raising of the country’s debt limit.”
Why so many artificial crises in the current American political system? Extreme political polarization seems to be the answer.
Steven Aftergood: Keeping Secrets from Congress — and Report on CIA’s Global (54 Country) Rendition and Torture Program
07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Ethics, Government, IO Impotency
When government information is classified or otherwise withheld from release, the possibility of government accountability to the public is undermined. But when the executive branch withholds crucial information from Congress, that may pose an even more fundamental challenge to democratic governance.
A Report on CIA Detention and Rendition Programs
In the absence of an official public account of post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorism programs, Americans (and others) must rely on unofficial accounts.
“Globalizing Torture” is a new report from the Open Society Justice Initiative, authored by Amrit Singh. It is said to provide “the most comprehensive account yet assembled of the human rights abuses associated with CIA secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations. It details for the first time what was done to the 136 known victims, and lists the 54 foreign governments that participated in these operations. It shows that responsibility for the abuses lies not only with the United States but with dozens of foreign governments that were complicit.”
It was reported in “Report Says 54 Countries Helped CIA After 9/11″ by Scott Shane, New York Times, February 4.
