Injection Well Linked to Destructive Earthquake in Oklahoma, Confirming New Fracking Fears

Friday, 29 March 2013
By Mike Ludwig, Truthout


A team of federal and university geologists have linked a series of unusual earthquakes, including a destructive 5.7-magnitude shocker, to oil-drilling wastewater-injection wells in Oklahoma.

The earthquakes occurred near Prague, Oklahoma, in 2010. The largest quake left two people injured, destroyed 14 homes, damaged a federal highway and was felt as far away as Milwaukee, according to a Columbia University release.

Columbia geologists partnered with the US Geological Survey to produce the report, which revealed a "potential" link between drilling wastewater injection and the massive earthquake.

The wells suspected of causing the earthquakes were in operation for at least 18 years, and the seismic events indicate that there can be decades-long lags between drilling wastewater injection and seismic events, according to the report.

The injection-well operations linked to the earthquakes were relatively small and involved filling oil wells with waste fluids, but over the years, pressure in the wells increased and eventually lubricated a known seismic fault.

"There's something important about getting unexpectedly large earthquakes out of small systems that we have discovered here," said Geoffrey Abers, a co-author of the study.

Abers said the team's observations indicate that the risk of humans inducing large earthquakes from even small injection activities is "probably higher" than previously thought.

The findings come at a time when geologists are reporting an uptick in minor earthquakes across the country linked to unconventional hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." Fracking has facilitated an oil- and gas-drilling boom across the country, and the process produces large amounts of liquid waste that is most often injected into underground wells for disposal.

In the last four years, the number of earthquakes in the central United States spiked by 11 times compared with three decades prior, the authors of the Oklahoma study estimate.

The wells suspected of causing the massive quake in Oklahoma were not disposing of unconventional fracking waste, but the report raises new concerns about the long-term impacts of underground drilling-waste disposal.

Oklahoma state officials have not officially determined the source of the earthquakes. In response to the report, a state geologist said the findings could link the wells to earthquakes, but the Oklahoma Geological Survey still suspects that they were naturally occurring, according to the Columbia University release. Well operations continue at the site.

Every day, the oil and gas industry injects two billion gallons of liquid waste into any number of 144,000 underground wells, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Earthquakes related to wastewater injection are rare, but in recent years, fracking-waste-injection wells have been linked to earthquakes in several states, including Ohio, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas and California.

Between the spring of 2011 and early 2012, a fracking-waste-injection well caused more than a dozen minor earthquakes near Youngstown, Ohio, including one 4.0 magnitude earthquake that was felt for miles.

A Truthout investigation found that Ohio regulators permitted operators of the Ohio well to raise its maximum injection pressure twice, once shortly before and once again after the well-caused two initial earthquakes on March 17, 2011.

The Ohio well has been shut down and state regulators have worked to reform their injection-well policies.

Obama Signs 'Monsanto the devil Protection Act' Into Law - More 'Corporate Welfare'

Thursday, March 28, 2013 by Common Dreams
Just signed provision prevents federal courts from stopping the planting of genetically engineered crops, despite health, environmental consequences
- Andrea Germanos, staff writer

“In this hidden backroom deal, Senator Mikulski turned her back on consumer, environmental, and farmer protection in favor of corporate welfare for biotech companies such as Monsanto the devil,” said Andrew Kimbrell of the Center for Food Safety.

President Obama signed what has been dubbed the "Monsanto the devil Protection Act" on Tuesday, legislation critics say amounts to "corporate welfare" for biotechnology corporations like Monsanto the devil, and puts farmers and the environment in jeopardy.

Summing up the provision in H.R. 933: Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, Eric Darier, a senior campaigner on sustainable agriculture at Greenpeace International explains that it will effectively bar US federal courts from being able to halt the sale or planting of genetically modified (GMO) crops even if they failed to be approved by the government's own weak approval process and no matter what the health or environmental consequences might be.

The rider from H.R. 933 reads:

Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, writes that the rider presents a "threat to farmers and the environment," and that while the rider's language indicates that steps will be taken “…to mitigate or minimize potential adverse environmental effects…,” historical evidence shows that there are indeed risks. In 2006, for example, unapproved GMO rice owned by Bayer, probably originating from a small, short-term controlled field trial in Arkansas, was found to have contaminated the U.S. rice supply. That little incident resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in lost rice exports and farmer lawsuits that continued for years. [...]

A similar threat exists to the environment in the form of gene flow—the transfer of genes from one organism to another—from crops to wild cousins, or from poorly domesticated cultivated plants like forest trees or grasses grown for lumber, pulp, or biofuel.

In fact, gene flow of glyphosate herbicide-resistant creeping bentgrass has already occurred…twice. This also happened from temporary field trials that were conducted in Central Oregon and nearby Idaho specifically to prevent gene flow! USDA mandated an isolation zone of 900 feet around the trial, but gene flow occurred up to 13 miles from the Oregon site.

There could be "long-lasting and serious consequences" from the rider, writes Appetite for Profit author Michele Simon. "This list of pending petitions to USDA to approve genetically-modified crops includes new versions of corn, soybean, canola, and cotton. Once these crops get planted, it will be too late to do much about it."

The Center for Food Safety writes that it was Senator Barbara Mikulski, the Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee (D-MD), who allowed the legislation to move forward without hearings and without bringing it in front of the Agriculture or Judiciary Committees.

“In this hidden backroom deal, Senator Mikulski turned her back on consumer, environmental, and farmer protection in favor of corporate welfare for biotech companies such as Monsanto the devil,” Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director of the Center for Food Safety, said in a statement.

This is the kind of deal biotechnology corporations have been hoping for, according to Food Democracy Now!, a group that has been campaigning against the GMO rider. "Since losing a court case in 2010 to Center for Food Safety for the unlawful planting of GMO sugar beets, Monsanto the devil and other biotech companies have been desperate to find a way around court mandated environmental impact statements required as a result of a U.S. district court’s ruling," the group writes.

Gurian-Sherman writes that the rider has biotechnology corporations' fingerprints all over it:

It was introduced anonymously, without accountability. But let me stick my neck out and say that it is highly likely that the biotech industry influenced the introduction and passing of this rider. Monsanto the devil spends more money influencing our government than any other agriculture company. It spent millions, more than any other firm, to defeat the efforts in California to label engineered foods.

In her post titled "Monsanto the devil Teams up with Congress to Shred the Constitution," Simon adds that this is "such a big deal" because

The court system is often our last hope, with Congress, the White House, and regulatory agencies deep inside industry’s pocket. Several legal challenges have resulted in court decisions overturning USDA’s approval of new GMO crops, for example, sugar beets.

So the biotech industry, unable to make its case to a judge, figured why not just rewrite the Constitution instead...

Darier concludes that the 'Monsanto the devil Protection Act' ultimately shows the power corporations wield at the expense of democracy:

This should also be a reminder to all of us across the world of the ability of some corporations like Monsanto the devil to influence policymakers to adopt measures that are against sustainable agriculture, farmers, consumers and the environment. And let's add now to this list: independent judicial review! A very sad day for democracy and the future of our food.

How Big Corporations are Unpatriotic

Welcome to Globalization
by RALPH NADER


Many giant profitable U.S. corporations are increasingly abandoning America while draining it at the same time.

General Electric, for example, has paid no federal income taxes for a decade while becoming a net job exporter and fighting its hard-pressed workers who want collective bargaining through unions like the United Electrical Workers Union (UE). GE’s boss, Jeffrey Immelt, makes about $12,400 an hour on an 8-hour day, plus benefits and perks, presiding over this global corporate empire.

Telling by their behavior, these big companies think patriotism toward the country where they were created and prospered is for chumps. Their antennae point to places where taxes are very low, labor is wage slavery, independent unions are non-existent, governments have their hands out, and equal justice under the rule of law does not exist. China, for example, has fit that description for over 25 years.

Other than profiteering from selling Washington very expensive weapons of mass destruction, many multinational firms have little sense of true national security.

Did you know that about 80 percent of the ingredients in medicines Americans take now come from China and India where visits by FDA inspectors are infrequent and inadequate?

The lucrative U.S. drug industry – coddled with tax credits, free transfer of almost-ready-to-market drugs developed with U.S. taxpayer dollars via the National Institutes of Health – charges Americans the highest prices for drugs in the world and still wants more profits. Drug companies no longer produce many necessary medicines like penicillin in the U.S., preferring to pay slave wages abroad to import drugs back into the U.S.

Absence of patriotism has exposed our country to dependency on foreign suppliers for crucial medicines, and these foreign suppliers may not be so friendly in the future.

Giant U.S. companies are strip-mining America in numerous ways, starting with the corporate tax base. By shifting more of their profits abroad to “tax-haven” countries (like the Cayman Islands) through transfer pricing and other gimmicks, and by lobbying many other tax escapes through Congress, they can report record profits in the U.S. with diminishing tax payments. Yet they are benefitting from the public services, special privileges, and protection by our armed forces because they are U.S. corporations.

On March 27, 2013, the Washington Post reported that compared to forty years ago, big companies that “routinely cited U.S. federal tax expenses that were 25 to 50 percent of their worldwide profits,” are now reporting less than half that share. For instance, Proctor and Gamble was paying 40 percent of its total profits in taxes in 1969; today it pays 15 percent in federal taxes. Other corporations pay less or no federal income taxes.
Welcome to globalization. It induces dependency on instabilities in tiny Greece and Cyprus that shock stock investments by large domestic pension and mutual funds here in the U.S. Plus huge annual U.S. trade deficits, which signals the exporting of millions of jobs.

The corporate law firms for these big corporations were the architects of global trade agreements that make it easy and profitable to ship jobs and industries to fascist and communist regimes abroad while hollowing out U.S. communities and throwing their loyal American workers overboard. It’s not enough that large corporations are paying millions of American workers less than workers were paid in 1968, adjusted for inflation.

Corporate bosses can’t say they’re just keeping up with the competition; they muscled through the trade system that pulls down on our country’s relatively higher labor, consumer and environmental standards.

Corporate executives, when confronted with charges that show little respect for the country, its workers and its taxpayers who made possible their profits and subsidized their mismanagement, claim they must maximize their profits for their shareholders and their worker pension obligations.

Their shareholders? Is that why they’re stashing $1.7 trillion overseas in tax havens instead of paying dividends to their rightful shareholder-owners, which would stimulate our economy? Shareholders? Are those the people who have been stripped of their rights as owners and prohibited from even keeping a lid on staggeringly sky-high executive salaries ranging from $5,000 to $20,000 an hour or more, plus perks?

Why these corporate bosses can’t even abide one democratically-run shareholders’ meeting a year without gaveling down their owners and cutting time short. To get away from as many of their shareholder-owners as possible, AT&T is holding its annual meeting on April 26 in remote Cheyenne, Wyoming!

Pension obligations for their workers? The award-winning reporter for the Wall Street Journal Ellen E. Shultz demonstrates otherwise. In her gripping book Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers, she shows how by “exploiting loopholes, ambiguous regulations and new accounting rules,” companies deceptively tricked employees and turned their pension plans into piggy banks, tax shelters and profit centers.

Recently, I wrote to the CEOs of the 20 largest U.S. corporations, asking if they would stand up at their annual shareholders’ meetings and on behalf of their U.S. chartered corporation (not on behalf of their boards of directors), and pledge allegiance to the flag ending with those glorious words “with liberty and justice for all.” Nineteen of the CEOs have not yet replied. One, Chevron, declined the pledge request but said their patriotism was demonstrated creating jobs and sparking economic activity in the U.S.

But when corporate lobbyists try to destroy our right of trial by jury for wrongful injuries – misnamed tort reform – when they destroy our freedom of contract – through all that brazenly one-sided fine print – when they corrupt our constitutional elections with money and unaccountable power, when they commercialize our education and patent our genes, and outsource jobs to other countries, the question of arrogantly rejected patriotism better be front-and-center for discussion by the American people.

How Corporate Power Seized the Internet

Digital Grab
by NORMAN SOLOMON


If your daily routine took you from one homegrown organic garden to another, bypassing vast fields choked with pesticides, you might feel pretty good about the current state of agriculture.

If your daily routine takes you from one noncommercial progressive website to another, you might feel pretty good about the current state of the Internet.

But while mass media have supplied endless raptures about a digital revolution, corporate power has seized the Internet — and the anti-democratic grip is tightening every day.

“Most assessments of the Internet fail to ground it in political economy; they fail to understand the importance of capitalism in shaping and, for lack of a better term, domesticating the Internet,” says Robert W. McChesney in his illuminating new book, Digital Disconnect.
Plenty of commentators loudly celebrate the Internet. Some are vocal skeptics. “Both camps, with a few exceptions, have a single, deep, and often fatal flaw that severely compromises the value of their work,” McChesney writes. “That flaw, simply put, is ignorance about really existing capitalism and an underappreciation of how capitalism dominates social life. . . . Both camps miss the way capitalism defines our times and sets the terms for understanding not only the Internet, but most everything else of a social nature, including politics, in our society.”

And he adds: “The profit motive, commercialism, public relations, marketing, and advertising — all defining features of contemporary corporate capitalism — are foundational to any assessment of how the Internet has developed and is likely to develop.”

Concerns about the online world often fixate on cutting-edge digital tech. But, as McChesney points out, “the criticism of out-of-control technology is in large part a critique of out-of-control commercialism. The loneliness, alienation, and unhappiness sometimes ascribed to the Internet are also associated with a marketplace gone wild.”

Discourse about the Internet often proceeds as if digital technology has some kind of mind or will of its own. It does not.

For the most part, what has gone terribly wrong in digital realms is not about the technology. I often think of what Herbert Marcuse wrote in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man: 

“The traditional notion of the ‘neutrality’ of technology can no longer be maintained. Technology as such cannot be isolated from the use to which it is put; the technological society is a system of domination which operates already in the concept and construction of techniques.”

Marcuse saw the technological as fully enmeshed with the political in advanced industrial society, “the latest stage in the realization of a specific historical project – namely, the experience, transformation, and organization of nature as the mere stuff of domination.” He warned that the system’s productivity and growth potential contained “technical progress within the framework of domination.”

Fifty years later, McChesney’s book points out:

“The Internet and the broader digital revolution are not inexorably determined by technology; they are shaped by how society elects to develop them. . . . In really existing capitalism, the kind Americans actually experience, wealthy individuals and large corporations have immense political power that undermines the principles of democracy. Nowhere is this truer than in communication policy making.”

Huge corporations are now running roughshod over the Internet. At the illusion-shattering core of Digital Disconnect are a pair of chapters on what corporate power has already done to the Internet — the relentless commercialism that stalks every human online, gathering massive amounts of information to target people with ads; the decimation of privacy; the data mining and surveillance; the direct cooperation of Internet service providers, search engine companies, telecomm firms and other money-driven behemoths with the U.S. military and “national security” state; the ruthless insatiable drive, led by Apple, Google, Microsoft and other digital giants, to maximize profits.

In his new book, McChesney cogently lays out grim Internet realities. (Full disclosure: he’s on the board of directors of an organization I founded, the Institute for Public Accuracy.) Compared to Digital Disconnect, the standard media critiques of the Internet are fairy tales.

Blowing away the corporate-fueled smoke, McChesney breaks through with insights like these:

• “The corporate media sector has spent much of the past 15 years doing everything in its immense power to limit the openness and egalitarianism of the Internet. Its survival and prosperity hinge upon making the system as closed and proprietary as possible, encouraging corporate and state surreptitious monitoring of Internet users and opening the floodgates of commercialism.”
• “It is supremely ironic that the Internet, the much-ballyhooed champion of increased consumer power and cutthroat competition, has become one of the greatest generators of monopoly in economic history. Digital market concentration has proceeded far more furiously than in the traditional pattern found in other areas. . . As ‘killer applications’ have emerged, new digital industries have gone from competitive to oligopolistic to monopolistic at breakneck speeds.”
• “Today, the Internet as a social medium and information system is the domain of a handful of colossal firms.”
• “It is true that with the advent of the Internet many of the successful giants — Apple and Google come to mind — were begun by idealists who may have been uncertain whether they really wanted to be old-fashioned capitalists. The system in short order has whipped them into shape. Any qualms about privacy, commercialism, avoiding taxes, or paying low wages to Third World factory workers were quickly forgotten. It is not that the managers are particularly bad and greedy people — indeed their individual moral makeup is mostly irrelevant — but rather that the system sharply rewards some types of behavior and penalizes other types of behavior so that people either get with the program and internalize the necessary values or they fail.”
• “The tremendous promise of the digital revolution has been compromised by capitalist appropriation and development of the Internet. In the great conflict between openness and a closed system of corporate profitability, the forces of capital have triumphed whenever an issue mattered to them. The Internet has been subjected to the capital-accumulation process, which has a clear logic of its own, inimical to much of the democratic potential of digital communication.”
• “What seemed to be an increasingly open public sphere, removed from the world of commodity exchange, seems to be morphing into a private sphere of increasingly closed, proprietary, even monopolistic markets. The extent of this capitalist colonization of the Internet has not been as obtrusive as it might have been, because the vast reaches of cyberspace have continued to permit noncommercial utilization, although increasingly on the margins.”
• “If the Internet is worth its salt, if it is to achieve the promise of its most euphoric celebrants and assuage the concerns of its most troubled skeptics, it has to be a force for raising the tide of democracy. That means it must help arrest the forces that promote inequality, monopoly, hypercommercialism, corruption, depoliticization, and stagnation.”
• “Digital technologies may bring to a head, once and for all, the discrepancy between what a society could produce and what it actually does produce under capitalism. The Internet is the ultimate public good and is ideally suited for broad social development. It obliterates scarcity and is profoundly disposed toward democracy. And it is more than that. The new technologies are in the process of truly revolutionizing manufacturing, for example, making far less expensive, more efficient, environmentally sound, decentralized production possible. Under really existing capitalism, however, few of the prospective benefits may be developed — not to mention spread widely. The corporate system will try to limit the technology to what best serves its purposes.”

The huge imbalance of digital power now afflicting the Internet is a crucial subset of what afflicts the entirety of economic relations and political power in the United States. We have a profound, far-reaching fight on our hands, at a crossroads leading toward democracy or corporate monopoly. The future of humanity is at stake.

Ex-White House Official Joins Group Fighting "Excessive" Online Privacy Laws

Daniel Weitzner helped write the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. Now privacy experts worry he'll help Facebook and Google control your data.

—By Dana Liebelson | Fri Mar. 29, 2013

As the Obama administration and tech company lobbyists chip away at the European Union's attempts to protect online privacy, a new pro-industry coalition has popped up to join the fray. Not quite two weeks ago, the Coalition for Privacy and Free Trade announced its existence. The group's senior academic adviser is Daniel Weitzner, who, less than two years ago, was working as the White House's deputy chief technology officer for internet policy.

Weitzner tells Mother Jones that he joined the coalition because he wants to strengthen privacy laws while ensuring the free flow of information. He worked for the administration from March 2011 to August 2012, leading the development of the much-lauded Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, a blueprint that asserts Americans' right to control what happens to their online data. Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, calls the document "a significant achievement" and says that "Danny deserves a fair amount of credit for it." But, he adds, "the critical question is whether it will be enacted into law." For now, its recommendations are voluntary.

Some privacy experts are concerned that Weitzner and the Coalition for Privacy and Free Trade will help companies like Facebook and Google continue to have free rein over their users' personal information. "This coalition appears to be a well-oiled campaign driven by the special interests of tech companies," says Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. "The use of a former, now revolving-door, White House official is also disturbing, because it gives them influence to win major concessions." Joe McNamee, the EU advocacy coordinator at European Digital Rights, a coalition of privacy groups, notes, "There is a fundamental concern whenever high-level staff or politicians take a corporate position."

"It's true that I worked on privacy in the administration and I continue to work on privacy issues," Weitzner says. "But I believe really strongly that privacy tends to make progress when there are broad coalitions." He says he is not lobbying the Obama administration in any way.

Weitzner is currently the director and cofounder of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory's Decentralized Information Group. He has also worked as the policy director of the World Wide Web Consortium (which has been criticized for emphasizing voluntary regulation over privacy laws) and cofounded the Center for Democracy and Technology.

"This coalition appears to be a well-oiled campaign driven by the special interests of tech companies."

The Coalition for Privacy and Free Trade was launched on March 18 by Hogan Lovells, an international law firm that has worked with corporations like Apple, IBM, and Amazon, as well as various governments. The coalition's members include legal experts, a former EU ambassador to the United States, and Reagan-era trade representative Clayton Yeutter. Christopher Wolf, director of Hogan Lovells' privacy and information management practice group, says that the coalition is not intended to be comprised solely of tech companies, but instead, "we welcome all companies that collect, use, and transfer personal data." Wolf says the coalition is not ready to announce its members, but will soon.

The coalition plans to participate in the upcoming Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement negotiations, pushing for laws that provide privacy protections like those found in Obama's consumer privacy bill, while also making sure that "excessive" regulations don't inhibit economic growth. Earlier this month, Wolf testified before the US International Trade Commission that one of the big differences between the US and the EU proposals is that the United States still intends to rely on "self-regulation" and won't require companies to report data breaches within 24 hours.

Companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay have been spending millions of dollars lobbying against the European Union's attempt to protect internet users' personal information. In January, the EU proposed requiring its member states to let users opt out of targeted advertising and web tracking (similar to what the struggling "Do Not Track" bill proposed by West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller would do). It also proposed giving users the right to erase any of their personal information from the web, meaning that you could ask Facebook to stop holding on to your information even after you delete your profile (Facebook tends to hang on for dear life to your info) or, more controversially, ask Google to remove information from its search results that you plain just don't like.

It's not just tech companies that are trying to weaken the EU proposals: The Department of Commerce is also lobbying the European Parliament. "The Obama administration has been very destructive in the EU privacy discussions so far," says McNamee of European Digital Rights. "It intervened even before the draft regulation was published and put sufficient pressure on the European Commission to have entire swaths of text deleted."

McNamee thinks that the Obama administration will have better luck influencing the EU Commission through the upcoming free-trade negotiations. In a letter the Department of Commerce sent to the Center for Digital Democracy on March 12, Lawrence E. Strickling, assistant secretary for communications and information, acknowledged that discussions about the privacy regulations were taking place between the US government and European governments, but said that they "are not intended to limit the protections that the European law would provide its citizens. Our primary focus is to achieve interoperability between our systems."

Interoperability is the big, snazzy word in these discussions, but what does it mean? Weitzner explains, "I think there's a real opportunity to improve privacy standards both in the US and Europe and do so in a way that keeps the free flow of information on the internet…I want to make sure that we don't end up with a privacy law only because people think a law sounds nice." In other words, interoperability is about finding a way for different privacy frameworks to work together—be it in China or the EU—without necessarily changing the way US corporations do business.

Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, notes this could lead to a scenario where "interoperability becomes this race to the bottom, where the weaker protections of the American system are exported to Europe and the world."

But Weitzner says some of the proposals the EU is suggesting, like the "right to be forgotten," could be "very damaging for the right to free expression around the world" because anyone could have the right to erase information from the web that makes them unhappy. He also says that the United States "has a lot of very good, strong privacy practices that US companies are held legally accountable for by the Federal Trade Commission." Wolf agrees: "Tech companies generally know their practices are subject to extreme strict scrutiny by regulators, including the FTC and state attorneys general."

Wizner concurs that the FTC has been "admirably aggressive in enforcing its mandate" but points out that "the FTC mandate is limited—they can only police outright deceit and unfairness. There is no basic privacy law that governs whether those companies can collect information, what information they can collect, and how long they can store it."

Rotenberg, who supervised Weitzner as an intern when they both worked for the Washington, DC, office of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, calls the concerns about the Coalition for Privacy and Free Trade "legitimate" but says that "Danny Weitzner should be working to ensure that the White House makes good on its commitment to establish privacy legislation…The fact that the president has made clear his support for stronger privacy laws is very important. I tend to be an optimist."

Explosive Texas ‘fracking’ accident could have been much worse

7 Nasty Effects of BPA

BPA – The Plastic Chemical

by Mike Barrett
March 26th, 2013


Bisphenol A (BPA) is the widely used chemical found in many plastics, food can linings, and even on US dollars and receipts. Known as an endocrine-disrupting chemical that mimics the hormone estrogen, BPA has been linked to numerous negative health effects in countless studies. The worst part? While the Food and Drug Administration considered banning the chemical in March of 2012, the ban was denied, and BPA continues to be ubiquitous. So what exactly does mean? It means the entire U.S. is still subjected to the chemical’s negative effects.
Here are 7 nasty effects of BPA.

1. Breast Cancer

Breast cancer is slowly becoming one of the many well-known negative outcomes induced by BPA exposure. In fact, over 130 studies have confirmed the link between bisphenol A and to ailments like breast cancer, obesity, and reproductive problems. Ironically, the popular nonprofit Susan G. Komen for the Cure partners with many bottled water companies for their ‘For the Cure’ races across the nation. The problem, obviously, is that most of these plastic bottles contain BPA.

2. Early Puberty

While girls typically enter into puberty (or have in the past, at least) at just over ten years of age, studies show that this age has fallen by more than a year within only one generation. Some girls are even seeing breasts at 7 years old. Although there are other factors to consider, BPA may be to blame as well.

After examining 1,151 girls between the ages of 6 and 8 in the United States over a two year period, researchers found that multiple chemical classes were detected at high levels within the girls’ urine. About one-third of the girls went through puberty prematurely.

“Our research shows a connection between chemicals that girls are exposed to on a daily basis and either delayed or early development. While more research is needed, these data are an important first step in evaluating the impact of these common environmental agents in putting girls at risk,” lead researchers Dr Mary Wolff said.

3. Heart Disease

Some research has linked both BPA and phthalates to a disorder known as atherosclerosis. This disorder, which is the hardening of the arteries through the buildup of plaques, negatively impacts blood flow and ultimately increases your risk of heart disease. Shocking, the research is not the first of its kind. One team also found that individuals with higher levels of bisphenol-a in their urine were more than twice as likely to suffer from coronary heart disease than those with lower levels.

4. and 5. Infertility in Males and Females

Bisphenol a has been found to be adversely affecting male genital development, subsequently leading to compromised fertility health. One study examined the effects of BPA on the distance between the genitalia and the anus in males, known as the Anogenital distance (AGD). AGD is very important biologically for a number of reasons, and plays a prominent role in the health of one’s fertility. Researchers found that parental exposure to BPA during pregnancy was associated with shortened AGD in male offspring. In other words, high level BPA exposure led to offspring with AGD defects.

AGD has been linked to fertility in males, making BPA’s negative impact on the male reproductive system noteworthy. Men with an AGD lower than the median, which sits around 52 mm (2 in), have seven times the chance of being sub-fertile as compared to those with a longer AGD.

But males aren’t the only one’s suffering; BPA has been linked to reproductive issues in women as well. In one study, researchers found that BPA caused reproductive problems that can affect women, including abnormal egg development. The eggs of fetuses exposed to BPA had difficulty forming follicles, which ultimately increases the risk of eggs dying before maturation. Additionally, the researchers observed other abnormalities, showing signs that they would carry too many chromosomes as a result of not dividing during development. This could lead to miscarriages or disorders like Down Syndrome.

6. Sparks Multiple Negative Brain Alterations

Further adding on to BPAs long list of negative effects, some research has also found that the chemical disrupts a gene responsible for proper nerve cell function, ultimately leading to compromised brain development. Researchers of the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, discovered that BPA could damage central nervous system development by disrupting a gene called Kcc2.


“Our study found that BPA may impair the development of the central nervous system, and raises the question as to whether exposure could predispose animals and humans to neurodevelopmental disorders,” study researcher Dr. Wolfgang Liedtke, M.D., Ph.D., said.

Another study found that exposure to bisphenol-A early in life can spark changes in gene expression. The changes occur in a part of the brain called the amygdala, which can lead to increased levels of anxiety.

The study abstract states:


“Early life exposure to Bisphenol A (BPA), a component of polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins, alters sociosexual behavior in numerous species including humans. The present study focused on the ontogeny of these behavioral effects beginning in adolescence and assessed the underlying molecular changes in the amygdala.”

7. Obesity

Last, but certainly not least, BPA may be one of many factors responsible for the obesity epidemic. One study found that high BPA exposure is associated with obesity in the general adult population in the U.S.

Another study, examining BPA concentrations in the urine of kids aged 6 to 19, found that obese children made up 22% of individuals with the highest BPA levels in their urine. About 10% of kids who had the lowest BPA concentration in their urine were obese.

Blamed for Bee Collapse, Monsanto the devil Buys Leading Bee Research Firm

by Anthony Gucciardi
Natural Society - 11/17/2012


Monsanto the devil, the massive biotechnology company being blamed for contributing to the dwindling bee population, has bought up one of the leading bee collapse research organizations. Recently banned from Poland with one of the primary reasons being that the company’s genetically modified corn may be devastating the dying bee population, it is evident that Monsanto the devil is under serious fire for their role in the downfall of the vital insects. It is therefore quite apparent why Monsanto the devil bought one of the largest bee research firms on the planet.

It can be found in public company reports hosted on mainstream media that Monsanto the devil scooped up the Beeologics firm back in September 2011. During this time the correlation between Monsanto the devil’s GMO crops and the bee decline was not explored in the mainstream, and in fact it was hardly touched upon until Polish officials addressed the serious concern amid the monumental ban. Owning a major organization that focuses heavily on the bee collapse and is recognized by the USDA for their mission statement of “restoring bee health and protecting the future of insect pollination” could be very advantageous for Monsanto the devil.

In fact, Beelogics’ company information states that the primary goal of the firm is to study the very collapse disorder that is thought to be a result — at least in part — of Monsanto the devil’s own creations. Their website stated (at the time of writing this article):

While its primary goal is to control the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) infection crises, Beeologics’ mission is to become the guardian of bee health worldwide.

What’s more, Beelogics is recognized by the USDA, the USDA-ARS, the media, and ‘leading entomologists’ worldwide. The USDA, of course, has a great relationship with Monsanto the devil. The government agency has gone to great lengths to ensure that Monsanto the devil’s financial gains continue to soar, going as far as to give the company special speed approval for their newest genetically engineered seed varieties. It turns out that Monsanto the devil was not getting quick enough approval for their crops, which have been linked to severe organ damage and other significant health concerns.

Steve Censky, chief executive officer of the American Soybean Association, states it quite plainly. It was a move to help Monsanto the devil and other biotechnology giants squash competition and make profits. After all, who cares about public health?

“It is a concern from a competition standpoint,” Censky said in a telephone interview.

It appears that when Monsanto the devil cannot answer for their environmental devastation, they buy up a company that may potentially be their ‘experts’ in denying any such link between their crops and the bee decline.

The '147 People' Destroying the US Economy

Tuesday, March 26, 2013 by Campaign for America's Future Blog
by Richard Eskow



Can 147 people perpetuate economic injustice – and make it even worse? Can they subvert the workings of democracy, both abroad and here in the United States? Can 147 people hijack the global economy, plunder the environment, build a world for themselves that serves the few and deprives the many?

There must be some explanation for last week’s economic madness. Take a look:

Cyprus: The European Union acted destructively – and self-destructively – when it tried to seize a portion of the insured savings accounts of the citizens of Cyprus. They were telling anyone with a savings account in the financially troubled nations of the Eurozone: Forget your guaranteed deposits. If we need your money in order to bail out the big banks – banks which have already gambled recklessly with it – we’ll take it.

That didn’t just create a political firestorm in Cyprus. It threatened the European Union’s banking system, and perhaps the Union itself. The fact that the tax on deposits has been partially retracted doesn’t change the basic question: What were they thinking?

The Grand Bargain: The President and Congressional Republicans reportedly moved closer to a deal that would cut Social Security and Medicare while raising taxes – mostly on the middle class – without doing more to create jobs. A “Grand Bargain” like that would run counter to both public opinion and informed economic judgement.

Who would impose more economy-killing austerity when there’s so much evidence of the harm it does? Why would the White House want to become the face of a deal to cut Social Security, killing its own party’s political prospects for a generation?

There’s more:

Him again: Washington reporters once again sought the opinion of Ex-Wyoming senator Alan Simpson, a vitriolic blowhard with no discernible knowledge of either economics or social insurance, and then wrote up his opinions on those topics in flattering pieces like this one.

Derivatives, the Sequel: Four short years after too-big-to-fail banks nearly destroyed the world economy, as the nation continues to suffer the after-effects of the crisis they created, a Congressional committee moved to undo the already-insufficient safeguards in the Dodd/Frank law.

Within days of a Senate Report which outlined the mendacity, extreme risk, and potentiality criminality surrounding JPMorgan Chase’s “London Whale” fiasco, the House Agriculture Committee approved new bills that would legalize trades like the “London Whale.”

Above the Law: The Attorney General of the United States remained silent as the controversy continued over his recent admission that banks like Dimon’s were too big to face prosecution. And yet there were no moves to change either Holder’s policy or the size of these institutions. Politico, the Washington insiders’ tip sheet, ran a piece entitled “Why Washington won’t break up the big banks.”

Dimon Unbound: The Senate report also provided evidence that JPMorgan Chase’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, failed to manage his bank’s risk and concealed information about its losses from regulators. We learned last week that regulators lowered their rating of Dimon’s bank after chastising the bank’s leadership for management failures that included inadequate safeguards against money-laundering, poor risk management, and failure to separate the banks’ own investments from those of its customers.

Illegalities during Dimon’s tenure as CEO have cost his shareholders billions in settlements and fines. Poor risk management (and additional potential illegalities) cost it another $6.2 billion in Whale-related losses. And yet last week Dimon’s own Board “strongly endorsed” his dual role as CEO and Board Chair, an unusual concentration of power at what is (by some measurements) the world’s largest bank, and commended itself in a proxy filing for the “strength and independence” of its oversight, adding: “The Firm has had strong performance through the cycle since Mr. Dimon became Chairman and CEO.”

All this, in just seven days. Has the world gone insane? What is everybody thinking?

That’s where the number “147″ comes in.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar tried to find out how many people the typical person “really knows.” He compared primate brains to social groups and published his findings in papers with titles like “Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates.”

Dunbar concluded that the optimum number for a network of human acquaintances was 147.5, a figure which was then rounded up to 150 and became known as “Dunbar’s Number.” He found groups of 150-200 in all sorts of places: Hutterite settlements. Roman army units. Academic sub-specialties. Dunbar concluded that “there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships.”

Around 150 or 200 people form a human being’s social universe. They shape his or her world view, his or her world.

That means that 147 people can change the course of history. Not necessarily the same 147 people, of course. But the small social groups which surround our world’s leaders have extraordinary power.

Economist Simon Johnson mentioned Dunbar’s Number last week in a column about incoming Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and the new SEC chair, Mary Jo White. “The issue is not so much their track record,” Johnson wrote, “because neither has worked directly on financial-sector policy issues; it is much more about whom they know.”

“If most financial experts you know work at, for example, Citigroup,” added Johnson, “then you are more likely to see the financial world through their eyes.”

Lew is a former Citigroup executive. That mismanaged megabank is also the former corporate home of ex-Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and the current home of Peter Orszag, formerly President Obama’s OMB Director. For her part, White went from prosecuting criminals to defending Wall Street bankers. That was also Attorney General Eric Holder’s profession before he was appointed to his current position.

These are the people who surround our President, our Senators, our Representatives. They talk to them every day. They say, This is how the world works. They say, Everybody knows these things.

Their European counterparts saw the effects of austerity on the economies of their Union: Unemployment up. Gross domestic product down. Even the deficits, which austerity was meant to reduce, have been rising as the result of these unwise cuts.

But, they say, we know Angela Merkel. We know George Osborne and Christine Lagarde. We trust their judgement. How did the predictably disastrous plan to tax guaranteed savings accounts in Cyprus get approved? It’s not hard to imagine: “Everybody we know” thought it was a great idea.

That’s how it works here in the US, too. Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin were spectacularly wrong about everything: deregulation, the housing bubble, government spending, everything. But we know them.

Nobel Prize-winning economists like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz keep explaining why more stimulus spending is needed. But we don’t know them – not the way we know Larry, Alan, and Bob. Same for Simon Johnson, or William K. Black Jr., or Robert Johnson, or any of the other economists we don’t know very well.

And when we don’t know someone very well, their criticisms make us uncomfortable.

Bill Clinton’s “Third Way” triangulation led to welfare “reform” that’s proven disastrous. His Wall Street deregulation ruined the economy, and his brand of old-fashioned pseudo-centrism is out of touch with today’s political and economic realities. But we know him.

Bill Clinton doesn’t make us uncomfortable at all.

Investigate Jamie Dimon, or Lloyd Blankfein, or Robert Rubin? But they were our clients, and will be again once we leave government. Investigate them? We know them.

Dimon’s Board of Directors is a case study in Dunbar’s Number. It includes Honeywell CEO David Cote, who was a member of the Simpson Bowles Commission. There’s a retired senior executive with another big defense contractor, Boeing. Together with Dimon, that makes three CEOs who earn their money from government largesse.

The CEO of Comcast is on Dimon’s Board, too. (The media’s leaders are always among the 147.) One seat belongs to the head of one of the accounting groups that overlooked massive bank fraud when signing off on their annual statements. Another belongs to the former CEO of Exxon Mobil.

The “147″ run companies. They also hold fundraisers for politicians – in both parties.

When Senator Obama became President Obama, during the gravest unemployment crisis since the Great Depression, one of his first acts was to create a “Deficit Commission” instead of a “Jobs Commission.” Why? Because “147 people” thought that was the right priority. Then he appointed the dyspeptic, unlikable, and uninformed Sen. Simpson to co-chair it.

You see, the “147 people” in Washington’s political and media circles like Alan Simpson. To them he’s not an embarrassment to his President, a paid pitchman for billionaire Pete Peterson’s anti-Social Security jihad. (We know Pete!) To them Simpson’s not an ill-informed and misogynistic bully who taunts women with comments about “310 million tits.” To them he’s Al. They know him. They say he’s a lot of fun when you get to know him.

They really say that.

Then there are the news anchors and journalists who say things like this: Everybody knows that we need to cut Social Security. Everybody knows the deficit is our most urgent problem.
Everybody knew that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, too.

Everybody understands that the right-wing, anti-government Simpson Bowles plan represents the “political center,” although it’s far to the right of public opinion – even of Republican or Tea Party voters’ opinion – on issues that range from job creation to increasing Social Security benefits.

You can’t fit millions of frustrated voters into a social group of 147 people.

When Teddy Roosevelt became President, J.P. Morgan (the person, not the bank) suggested he “send your man to my man and they can fix it up.” He was shocked that the new President chose instead to operate outside the Circle in order to create real change. And when Franklin D. Roosevelt became President he brought in new faces, new voices, new ideas. He broke the social circle that had paralyzed government and the economy.

But the circle of right-wing Republicans and corporatist Clintonite Democrats is still intact. That means Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders will keep on promoting the right-wing agenda known as Simpson Bowles until their party loses all its political power at the polls.

It also means that Republican extremism will still be reported with straight-faced gravity.Congressional committees will keep deregulating big banks, the Justice Department will avoid prosecuting them, and their Boards of Directors will keep rewarding their executives. They’ll all keep doing exactly what they’re doing – until the economy blows up again, perhaps with far worse consequences than the last time.

And when the next crisis comes, “147 people” will react to it exactly the same way they reacted to the last one. You can almost hear them now, can’t you? You can’t blame us, they’ll say. Nobody could’ve seen this coming. How do we know that?

Because we asked everybody we know.

Energy Nominee Ernest Moniz Criticized for Backing Fracking & Nuclear Power; Ties to BP, GE, Saudis

Tuesday, March 26, 2013 by Democracy Now!

President Obama’s pick to become the nation’s next secretary of energy is drawing criticism for his deep ties to the fossil fuel, fracking and nuclear industries. MIT nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz has served on advisory boards for oil giant BP and General Electric, and was a trustee of the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center, a Saudi Aramco-backed nonprofit organization.

In 2011, Moniz was the chief author of an influential study for MIT on the future of natural gas. According to a new report by the Public Accountability Initiative, Moniz failed to disclose that he had taken a lucrative position at a pro-drilling firm called ICF International just days before a key natural gas "fracking" study was released. Reaction to his nomination has split the environmental community. Advocacy groups such as Public Citizen and Food & Water Watch are campaigning against Moniz’s nomination, but the Natural Resources Defense Council has praised his work on advancing clean energy based on efficiency and renewable power. We speak to Kevin Connor of the Public Accountability Initiative and ProPublica reporter Justin Elliott, who have both authored investigations into Moniz’s ties to industry.

The Corporate Buyout of America’s Public Schools

"What are we teaching our youth about democracy?"
by PETER RUGH


Boos and hisses fill the auditorium of Brooklyn Technical High as the governing board for New York City’s public schools, the Panel on Education Policy, takes the stage. It’s March 11 and the PEP is meeting to consider a proposal from Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott to close nearly two dozen schools.

Parent after parent, teacher after teacher, student after student takes the microphone and pleads for their school to remain open.

Similar scenarios are consistently playing out in many parts of the country. Officials in Chicago last week announced plans to eliminate fifty-four schools next year in one swoop. The city’s mayor, former Obama White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, was on vacation at the time of the announcement and could not be reached for comment.

Earlier this month twenty-three schools got the axe in Philadelphia, about ten percent of the city’s total. Nineteen protestors, including American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten, were arrested for attempting to block the entrance to the building where Philly’s education reform committee dished out the guillotine treatment.

In New York, these PEP meetings have become a tired ritual. Everybody knows what to expect, and this evening’s turnout is not what it has been in the past. Last year, a group calling itself Occupy the DOE – Department of Education – held an alternative, and louder, meeting while the panel was in session; the voices of parents, students and educators frequently drowned out those who sat on stage with microphones at their lips.

Tonight, there’s a significant crowd on hand but it falls far short of years before. The United Teachers Federation, which represents educators in New York, hasn’t even bothered to mobilize its members, apparently preferring to bide its time until the mayoral election in November when, presumably, someone more amenable than billionaire Michael Bloomberg will be in office.

Following in the footsteps of many who came before him, Bloomberg systematically underfunded the city’s institutions of learning. Simultaneously, his Department of Ed has ramped up standardized testing — a cash cow for giant publishing houses like Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt and Pearson, who design the tests used to measure whether schools are making the grade or whether the DOE will toss them overboard.

“We have a responsibility not to react to emotions,” said School’s Chancellor Dennis Walcott, whose responses to reporters’ questions before the hearing rolled off his tongue with robotic speed and efficiency. “We have a responsibility to act to facts. The facts are that schools are not doing well.”

The mayor, whom Walcott answers to, has the ability to appoint a supermajority of members to the PEP. He’s used his power to bolt-up 140 schools that weren’t “doing well” during his decade-plus reign. In Brooklyn Tech’s auditorium this evening, that number reached 162.

Meanwhile, for approximately every public school the DOE has crossed off its books, a charter school has opened up. Charter’s are frequently non-union. They receive public funding but are privately run, sometimes by for-profit educational management firms.
In New York, hedge funds have lobbed large sums of money into charters and often sit on their boards. “Hedge fund executives,” The New York Times has noted, are developing into a “significant political counterweight” to teachers unions and other advocates of public education.

When it comes to an increased emphasis on testing, charters have a key advantage over traditional public schools: they can cross students off their grading sheets if they’re not meeting their academic standards. Often that means students with learning disabilities get shown the door.

By contrast, public schools have to take everybody. Public school teachers attest that students with learning disabilities, behavioral problems, or who speak English as a second language commonly enter their classrooms well after semesters have started.

The roots of the charter model, which is gradually phasing out and replacing traditional public institutions in New York and nationwide, go back to ideological experiments implemented abroad — specifically, under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet who seized power in Chile in 1971.

“The first iteration of this project to privatize education, to control what people thought was under Pinochet,” says Dr. Lois Weiner who has written extensively on the decline of America’s public education system. The model was crafted by the World Bank, she says, which used Chile as a neoliberal petri dish in the 1970s.

From there the privatization project spread throughout Latin America where a number of dictators backed by the U.S. and international financiers ruled the roost. Out of Latin America, neoliberal education crossed oceans to Asia and Africa, chasing troubled economies like fire through dry brush.

Weiner says the scenario typically went something like this: “’Oh, you want money to build a bridge?’ That means modernizing your education system. And what do they mean by modernize? They mean standardized tests, they mean charter schools, they mean dismantling teachers unions.”

Britain’s Margaret Thatcher brought the privatized model to Europe, where it later spread to countries in the former Eastern Block still dizzy from the fall of the Soviet empire.

Charter-friendly legislation passed by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s helped the neoliberal education model grow roots in the U.S. In the following decade, President’s George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” bill, followed by Obama’s “Race to the Top” program, tied school funding to test results, further facilitating the dismantling of public education.

Arne Duncan, the current Education Secretary, has bragged of his ambition to continue on a federal scale what he accomplished as head of Chicago schools: mass school shutterings and the propagation of charters.

The emphasis on standardized tests to measure student achievement goes back much farther, however, and is laced with racism. Harvard President James Bryant Conant, a firm believer that an intellectual elite must govern the unwashed masses, laid the ground for the modern standardized testing system in the 1930s when he enlisted Princeton psychology professor Carl Brigham to design an aptitude test for students seeking college admission.

Brigham was an ardent member of the eugenics movement, whose adherents claimed physical traits such as skin color could serve as moral and intellectual indicators. Brigham developed what would later serve as a pathfinder example of standardized testing: the SAT, or Scholastic Aptitude Test, which is still widely used as a benchmark for college admissions.

At the PEP hearing in Brooklyn, the racist elitism pioneered by Brigham and Conant was alive and well, with test results serving as a justification to shut the city’s working class, black and brown youth out of their schools. An ongoing lawsuit from the UFT accuses the Department of Ed of violating chapter six of the 1964 Civil Rights Act barring discrimination from programs accepting federal dollars, since the majority of those impacted by the closings hail from communities of color.

Yet while the city’s Department of Ed has used test results to qualify the closings, they have likewise resisted testing classrooms for Polychlorinated biphenyl, or PCBs. The once widely used, highly toxic electrical coolant pioneered by Monsanto the devil was banned by Congress in 1979. Advocates with New York Lawyers for Public Interest have identified 1,200 city schools either contaminated or potentially contaminated with PCBs. But the DOE refuses to test the air in classrooms for traces of the toxin, despite warnings from the Environmental Protection Agency. “Our kids are essentially being poisoned,” said Noah Gotbaum, a parent of three children in the school system. “The DOE says, ‘No, don’t worry.’”

Gotbaum was elected to serve on his local Community Education Council in Harlem, a body meant to give parents a voice in the schooling of their children. But he says the “tin-pan dictatorship” of the PEP are the ones pulling the strings, regardless of input from parents.

In one example, last December, Gotbaum says he and other parents learned from a three-line advertisement in Crain’s New York that a triad of public schools in Manhattan were slated for demolition, to be replaced by high-income housing. In testimony before the PEP on Mar 11, Gotbaum complained that “the borough president was not told. Parents were not told. I’ll tell you who was told: the developers. You are rushing to destroy our schools.”

Like the UFT, Gotbaum is hoping New York’s next mayoral administration will place a higher value on democracy than the Bloomberg administration. Other’s think a fresh approach is needed.

The Movement of Rank-and-File Educators, or MORE, is attempting to take over the teachers union in elections slated for April. They want to push the UFT more toward a social justice approach. “What MORE would do differently,” says Julie Cavanagh, a Brooklyn school teacher and MORE candidate for the UFT’s presidency, “is change the philosophy and ideology of how the union functions.” That means building “real organic partnerships with the communities that we serve.”

MORE has modeled itself on the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, which took over the Chicago teachers union in 2010 and led a strike that fought back attempts to cut teacher pay last June. They attribute their success cooperation from the community. Parents and students joined the Chicago teachers on the picket-line. The strike was seen as being about more than a contract, but about the systemic racism within the city’s underfunded public schools.

Decked in red t-shirts, members of MORE were out in force at the PEP hearing, standing by parents and students where the UFT leadership was absent. Their hope is that those with a mutual stake in preserving public education can band together to beat back the privatization of learning and build a quality school environment for all.

Those wondering what the scenario would look like, should schooling go the opposite way, might examine Louisiana where Hurricane Katrina has provided an impetus for the overhaul the state’s education system. Legislation approved by lawmakers in 2011 gives corporations the ability to govern charter schools and decide who gets in and who doesn’t — provided, of course, that they are the ones subsidizing the school.

Asked what would happen should a porno shop, strip club or gambling establishment enter into this quid-pro-quo arrangement, Louisiana State Senator Julie Quinn replied: “I think we would welcome a business, casino or otherwise.”

Up north, bodies young and old shuffled out of Brooklyn Tech late on the evening of the 11th. On the stage behind the panel members appointed by the mayor had executed 22 schools simply by raising their arms when it came time to vote. A number of specialty schools were among those given the boot, including the Law, Government and Community Service High School in Queens.

Watching the proceedings, Noah Gotbaum wondered aloud, “What are we teaching our youth about democracy?”

Americans’ Economic Prospects And Civil Liberties Have Been Stolen

March 24, 2013 |  — Paul Craig Roberts


My latest book, The Failure Of Laissez Faire Capitalism And Economic Dissolution of the West, is available as an ebook in English as of March 2013. My book is endorsed by Michael Hudson and Nomi Prims and has a 5 star rating from Amazon reviewers (as of March 23, 2013). Pam Martens’ review at Wall Street On Parade is available here.

Libertarians who have not read the book have had an ideological knee-jerk reaction to the title. They demand to know how can I call the present system of crony capitalism laissez faire. I don’t. The current system of government supported crony capitalism is the end result of a 25-year process of deregulation. Deregulation did not produce libertarian nirvana. It produced economic concentration and crony capitalism.

Below is my Introduction to my book.

Not only has your economy been stolen from you but also your civil liberties. My coauthor Lawrence Stratton and I provide the scary details of the entire story in The Tyranny of Good Intentions. In the US law is no longer a shield of the people against arbitrary government. Instead, law has been transformed into a weapon in the hands of the government.

Josie Appleton documents that in England also law has been turned into a weapon against the people. Anglo-American law, the foundation of liberty and one of the greatest human achievements, lies in ruins.

Libertarians think that liberty is a natural right, and some Christians think that it is a God-given right. In fact, liberty is a human achievement, fought for by Englishmen over the centuries. In the late 17th century, the achievement of the Glorious Revolution was to hold the British government accountable to law. William Blackstone heralded the achievement in his famous Commentaries On The Laws Of England, a bestseller in pre-revolutionary America and the foundation of the US Constitution.
In the late 20th century and early 21st century, governments in the US and Great Britain chafed under the requirement that government, like the people, is ruled by law and took steps to free government from accountability to law.

Appleton says that the result is a “tectonic shift in the relationship between the state and the citizen.” Citizens of the US and UK are once again without the protection of law and subject to arbitrary arrests and indictments or to indefinite detention in the absence of indictments.

In the US, citizens can be detained indefinitely and even executed without due process of law. There is no basis in the US Constitution for these asserted powers. The unconstitutional powers exist only because Congress, the judiciary and the American people have accepted the lie that the loss of civil liberty is the price paid for protection against terrorists.

In a very short time the raw power of the state has been resurrected. Most Americans are oblivious to this outcome. As long as government is imprisoning and killing without trials demonized individuals whom Americans have been propagandized to fear, Americans approve. Americans do not understand that a point is reached when demonization becomes unnecessary and that precedents have been established that revoke the Bill of Rights.

Introduction to The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic
Dissolution of the West: Towards a New Economics for a Full World
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the rise of the high speed Internet have proved to be the economic and political undoing of the West. “The End Of History” caused socialist India and communist China to join the winning side and to open their economies and underutilized labor forces to Western capital and technology. Pushed by Wall Street and large retailers, such as Wal-Mart, American corporations began offshoring the production of goods and services for their domestic markets. Americans ceased to be employed in the manufacture of goods that they consume as corporate executives maximized shareholder earnings and their performance bonuses by substituting cheaper foreign labor for American labor. Many American professional occupations, such as software engineering and Information Technology, also declined as corporations moved this work abroad and brought in foreigners at lower renumeration for many of the jobs that remained domestically. Design and research jobs followed manufacturing abroad, and employment in middle class professional occupations ceased to grow. By taking the lead in offshoring production for domestic markets, US corporations force the same practice on Europe. The demise of First World employment and of Third World agricultural communities, which are supplanted by large scale monoculture, is known as Globalism.

For most Americans income has stagnated and declined for the past two decades. Much of what Americans lost in wages and salaries as their jobs were moved offshore came back to shareholders and executives in the form of capital gains and performance bonuses from the higher profits that flowed from lower foreign labor costs. The distribution of income worsened dramatically with the mega-rich capturing the gains, while the middle class ladders of upward mobility were dismantled. University graduates unable to find employment returned to live with their parents.

The absence of growth in real consumer incomes resulted in the Federal Reserve expanding credit in order to keep consumer demand growing. The growth of consumer debt was substituted for the missing growth in consumer income. The Federal Reserve’s policy of extremely low interest rates fueled a real estate boom. Housing prices rose dramatically, permitting homeowners to monetize the rising equity in their homes by refinancing their mortgages.

Consumers kept the economy alive by assuming larger mortgages and spending the equity in their homes and by accumulating large credit card balances. The explosion of debt was securitized, given fraudulent investment grade ratings, and sold to unsuspecting investors at home and abroad.

Financial deregulation, which began in the Clinton years and leaped forward in the George W. Bush regime, unleashed greed and debt leverage. Brooksley Born, head of the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, was prevented from regulating over-the-counter derivatives by the chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The financial stability of the world was sacrificed to the ideology of these three stooges that “markets are self-regulating.” Insurance companies sold credit default swaps against junk financial instruments without establishing reserves, and financial institutions leveraged every dollar of equity with $30 dollars of debt.

When the bubble burst, the former bankers running the US Treasury provided massive bailouts at taxpayer expense for the irresponsible gambles made by banks that they formerly headed. The Federal Reserve joined the rescue operation. An audit of the Federal Reserve released in July, 2011, revealed that the Federal Reserve had provided $16 trillion–a sum larger than US GDP or the US public debt–in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks, while doing nothing to aid the millions of American families being foreclosed out of their homes. Political accountability disappeared as all public assistance was directed to the mega-rich, whose greed had produced the financial crisis.

The financial crisis and plight of the banksters took center stage and prevented recognition that the crisis sprang not only from the financial deregulation but also from the expansion of debt that was used to substitute for the lack of growth in consumer income. As more and more jobs were offshored, Americans were deprived of incomes from employment. To maintain their consumption, Americans went deeper into debt.

The fact that millions of jobs have been moved offshore is the reason why the most expansionary monetary and fiscal policies in US history have had no success in reducing the unemployment rate. In post-World War II 20th century recessions, laid-off workers were called back to work as expansionary monetary and fiscal policies stimulated consumer demand. However, 21st century unemployment is different. The jobs have been moved abroad and no longer exist. Therefore, workers cannot be called back to factories and to professional service jobs that have been moved abroad.

Economists have failed to recognize the threat that jobs offshoring poses to economies and to economic theory itself, because economists confuse offshoring with free trade, which they believe is mutually beneficial. I will show that offshoring is the antithesis of free trade and that the doctrine of free trade itself is found to be incorrect by the latest work in trade theory. Indeed, as we reach toward a new economics, cherished assumptions and comforting theoretical conclusions will be shown to be erroneous.

This book is organized into three sections. The first section explains successes and failures of economic theory and the erosion of the efficacy of economic policy by globalism. Globalism and financial concentration have destroyed the justifications of market capitalism. Corporations that have become “too big to fail” are sustained by public subsidies, thus destroying capitalism’s claim to be an efficient allocator of resources. Profits no longer are a measure of social welfare when they are obtained by creating unemployment and declining living standards in the home country.

The second section documents how jobs offshoring or globalism and financial deregulation wrecked the US economy, producing high rates of unemployment, poverty and a distribution of income and wealth extremely skewed toward a tiny minority at the top. These severe problems cannot be corrected within a system of globalism.

The third section addresses the European debt crisis and how it is being used both to subvert national sovereignty and to protect bankers from losses by imposing austerity and bailout costs on citizens of the member countries of the European Union.

I will suggest that it is in Germany’s interest to leave the EU, revive the mark, and enter into an economic partnership with Russia. German industry, technology, and economic and financial rectitude, combined with Russian energy and raw materials, would pull all of Eastern Europe into a new economic union, with each country retaining its own currency and budgetary and tax authority. This would break up NATO, which has become an instrument for world oppression and is forcing Europeans to assume burdens of the American Empire.

Sixty-seven years after the end of World War II, twenty-two years after the reunification of Germany, and twenty-one years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Germany is still occupied by US troops. Do Europeans desire a future as puppet states of a collapsing empire, or do they desire a more promising future of their own?

The Day That TV News Died

Monday, March 25, 2013 by TruthDig.com 
by Chris Hedges

I am not sure exactly when the death of television news took place.

The descent was gradual—a slide into the tawdry, the trivial and the inane, into the charade on cable news channels such as Fox and MSNBC in which hosts hold up corporate political puppets to laud or ridicule, and treat celebrity foibles as legitimate news. But if I had to pick a date when commercial television decided amassing corporate money and providing entertainment were its central mission, when it consciously chose to become a carnival act, it would probably be Feb. 25, 2003, when MSNBC took Phil Donahue off the air because of his opposition to the calls for war in Iraq. Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC for espousing anti-war views before the start of the conflict in March of 2003.

Donahue and Bill Moyers, the last honest men on national television, were the only two major TV news personalities who presented the viewpoints of those of us who challenged the rush to war in Iraq. General Electric and Microsoft—MSNBC’s founders and defense contractors that went on to make tremendous profits from the war—were not about to tolerate a dissenting voice. Donahue was fired, and at PBS Moyers was subjected to tremendous pressure. An internal MSNBC memo leaked to the press stated that Donahue was hurting the image of the network. He would be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war,” the memo read. Donahue never returned to the airwaves.

The celebrity trolls who currently reign on commercial television, who bill themselves as liberal or conservative, read from the same corporate script. They spin the same court gossip. They ignore what the corporate state wants ignored. They champion what the corporate state wants championed. They do not challenge or acknowledge the structures of corporate power. Their role is to funnel viewer energy back into our dead political system—to make us believe that Democrats or Republicans are not corporate pawns. The cable shows, whose hyperbolic hosts work to make us afraid self-identified liberals or self-identified conservatives, are part of a rigged political system, one in which it is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, General Electric or ExxonMobil. These corporations, in return for the fear-based propaganda, pay the lavish salaries of celebrity news people, usually in the millions of dollars. They make their shows profitable. And when there is war these news personalities assume their “patriotic” roles as cheerleaders, as Chris Matthews—who makes an estimated $5 million a year—did, along with the other MSNBC and Fox hosts.

It does not matter that these celebrities and their guests, usually retired generals or government officials, got the war terribly wrong. Just as it does not matter that Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman were wrong on the wonders of unfettered corporate capitalism and globalization. What mattered then and what matters now is likability—known in television and advertising as the Q score—not honesty and truth. Television news celebrities are in the business of sales, not journalism. They peddle the ideology of the corporate state. And too many of us are buying.

The lie of omission is still a lie. It is what these news celebrities do not mention that exposes their complicity with corporate power. They do not speak about Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, a provision that allows the government to use the military to hold U.S. citizens and strip them of due process. They do not decry the trashing of our most basic civil liberties, allowing acts such as warrantless wiretapping and executive orders for the assassination of U.S. citizens. They do not devote significant time to climate scientists to explain the crisis that is enveloping our planet. They do not confront the reckless assault of the fossil fuel industry on the ecosystem. They very rarely produce long-form documentaries or news reports on our urban and rural poor, who have been rendered invisible, or on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or on corporate corruption on Wall Street. That is not why they are paid. They are paid to stymie meaningful debate. They are paid to discredit or ignore the nation’s most astute critics of corporatism, among them Cornel West, Medea Benjamin, Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky. They are paid to chatter mindlessly, hour after hour, filling our heads with the theater of the absurd. They play clips of their television rivals ridiculing them and ridicule their rivals in return. Television news looks as if it was lifted from Rudyard Kipling’s portrait of the Bandar-log monkeys in “The Jungle Book.” The Bandar-log, considered insane by the other animals in the jungle because of their complete self-absorption, lack of discipline and outsized vanity, chant in unison: “We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true.”

When I reached him by phone recently in New York, Donahue said of the pressure the network put on him near the end, “It evolved into an absurdity.” He continued: “We were told we had to have two conservatives for every liberal on the show. I was considered a liberal. I could have Richard Perle on alone but not Dennis Kucinich. You felt the tremendous fear corporate media had for being on an unpopular side during the ramp-up for a war. And let’s not forget that General Electric’s biggest customer at the time was Donald Rumsfeld [then the secretary of defense]. Elite media features elite power. No other voices are heard.”

Donahue spent four years after leaving MSNBC making the movie documentary “Body of War” with fellow director/producer Ellen Spiro, about the paralyzed Iraq War veteran Tomas Young. The film, which Donahue funded himself, began when he accompanied Nader to visit Young in the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

“Here is this kid lying there whacked on morphine,” Donahue said. “His mother, as we are standing by the bed looking down, explained his injuries. ‘He is a T-4. The bullet came through the collarbone and exited between the shoulder blades. He is paralyzed from the nipples down.’ He was emaciated. His cheekbones were sticking out. He was as white as the sheets he was lying on. He was 24 years old. … I thought, ‘People should see this. This is awful.’ ”

Donahue noted that only a very small percentage of Americans have a close relative who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan and an even smaller number make the personal sacrifice of a Tomas Young. “Nobody sees the pain,” he said. “The war is sanitized.”

“I said, ‘Tomas, I want to make a movie that shows the pain, I want to make a movie that shows up close what war really means, but I can’t do it without your permission,’ ” Donahue remembered. “Tomas said, ‘I do too.’ ”

But once again Donahue ran into the corporate monolith: Commercial distributors proved reluctant to pick up the film. Donahue was told that the film, although it had received great critical acclaim, was too depressing and not uplifting. Distributors asked him who would go to see a film about someone in a wheelchair. Donahue managed to get openings in Chicago, Seattle, Palm Springs, New York, Washington and Boston, but the runs were painfully brief.

“I didn’t have the money to run full-page ads,” he said. “Hollywood often spends more on promotion than it does on the movie. And so we died. What happens now is that peace groups are showing it. We opened the Veterans for Peace convention in Miami. Failure is not unfamiliar to me. And yet, I am stunned at how many Americans stand mute.”