Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Wheel of Misfortune

Wheel of Misfortune

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Big Pharma Set to Take Over Medical Marijuana Market

Meanwhile, state-licensed medical marijuana dispensaries that provide relief for thousands of Americans are under attack by other federal agencies.
April 21, 2011  |  
 
 
Just as the federal government is clamping down on medical marijuana dispensaries, the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) may be set to give Big Pharma the clearance to take over the market.
In 2007, GW Pharmaceuticals announced that it partnered with Otsuka to bring "Sativex" -- or liquefied marijuana -- to the U.S. The companies recently completed Phase II efficacy and safety trials testing and began discussion with the FDA for Phase III testing. Phase III is generally thought to be the final step before the drug can be marketed in the U.S.
"GW Pharmaceuticals plc (AIM: GWP) today announces the initiation of the Phase III clinical trials programme of Sativex in the treatment of pain in patients with advanced cancer, who experience inadequate analgesia during optimized chronic opioid therapy," GW said in a statement. "This indication represents the initial target indication for Sativex in the United States."
Sativex is the brand name for a drug derived from cannabis sativa. It's an extract from the whole plant cannabis, not a synthetic compound. Even GW defines the drug (.pdf) as marijuana.
Yet as the FDA is poised to approve the drug for Big Pharma, state-licensed medical marijuana dispensaries that provide relief for thousands of Americans are under attack by other federal agencies.
Lynette Shaw, the owner and founder of Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana (MAMM) in Fairfax, California, was stunned when the IRS audited her 2008 and 2009 tax returns and disallowed the foundation's business deductions, then demanded millions of dollars in back taxes.
The IRS pursued her under § 280E of the federal tax code, which states that no business deductions will be allowed for companies "trafficking in controlled substances".
Shaw is now suing the IRS to prevent them from destroying the entire medical marijuana industry.
Last week, the Justice Department even threatened to prosecute state employees who license medical marijuana dispensaries.
As a result, Washington state Gov. Chris Gregoire (D) said she would veto a bill that would have allowed the state to license growers.
In February, marijuana advocacy group NORML warned that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) intended to legalize marijuana for Big Pharma only.
"The DEA's intent is to expand the federal government's schedule III listing to include pharmaceutical products containing naturally derived formations of THC while simultaneously maintain existing criminal prohibitions on the plant itself," Paul Armentano, the deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), wrote at AlterNet.

The Deadly Toll of the BP Disaster, One Year Later

One year ago today, these men were killed in the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig:

  1. Jason Anderson, 35
  2. Aaron Dale Burkeen, 37
  3. Donald Clark, 49
  4. Stephen Curtis, 39
  5. Roy Wyatt Kemp, 27
  6. Karl Kleppinger, 38
  7. Gordon Jones, 28
  8. Blair Manuel, 56
  9. Dewey Revette, 48
  10. Shane Roshto, 22
  11. Adam Weise, 24


As calculated by Tierra Curry at the Center for Biological Diversity, the gusher also harmed or killed 10 times as much wildlife as U.S. government tallies claim during the year since the gusher:
• 82,000 birds in 102 species, including black skimmers, brown pelicans, clapper rails, common loons, laughing gulls, northern gannets and several species of terns.
• 6000 sea turtles in five species—green, Kemp’s ridley, hawksbill, leatherback and loggerhead—that are all on the endangered list.
• 25,900 marine mammals, including bottlenose dolphins, spinner dolphins, melon-headed whales and sperm whales. "The oil spill could impair marine mammal reproduction in the Gulf for decades, as some orca whales that were exposed to the Exxon Valdez oil spill have not been able to reproduce since that spill in 1989."

• Innumerable fish of 500 species. "The BP disaster particularly threatens species that are already at risk of extinction such as Atlantic bluefin tuna, Gulf sturgeon, smalltooth sawfish and the dwarf seahorse. The oil spill occurred during the peak spawning months for the bluefin tuna, pushing this severely overfished species closer to the brink of extinction."
• Vast numbers of invertebrates such as corals, lobsters, crabs, oysters, clams, zooplankton, starfish and sand-dwelling organisms.
• Unknown numbers of land-based animals such as federally protected beach mice.
• Damage to mangroves, sea grasses and wetland vegetation.
Personnel costs at BP:
• CEO Tony Hayward got "his life back" in exile at BP's affiliate in Russia. COO Doug Suttles, senior vice president Kent Wells and former head of exploration and production Andy Inglis left the company.
Economic costs to BP:
• $40 billion to $60 billion, perhaps higher depending on the disposition of lawsuits. The fine that the Environmental Protection Agency eventually levies on BP ranges from $1100 to $4300 per barrel depending on how negligent the company is determined to have been. At its worst, that fine could be $21 billion.
• The $20 billion compensation fund set up by BP at the insistence of President Obama has so far only paid out $3.8 billion to 176,000 claimants who suffered economic damage from the gusher. Most of the final claims already settled, 116,000, have been for quick, flat payments of $5000 for individuals and $25,000 for businesses. The idea behind this is to get those out of the way before tackling the bigger claims and the hundreds of now-consolidated lawsuits. The trouble with that approach is that shenanigans are putting pressure on some claimants:

Jackie Jackson of Metairie, a longtime waitress at Carmine's Restaurant in Metairie, was laid off last year. After sending her documentation to the claims facility no fewer than six times, she was three months behind on rent and about to be evicted. Last week, she took the $5,000 quick payment so she could pay her landlord and cover two more months of bills while she looked for a new job. She believes a full settlement would have covered about $19,000 in lost earnings.
"I signed the waiver, but I sent in a paper stating I signed it under duress," she said. "If I could have had more time, it would have worked much better."
If BP has been as concerned with safety as it claimed to be and taken its time on April 20, 2010, things might have worked out much better for everyone, including 11 men who would still be alive.

BP and Other Oil Giants Plotted For Iraq Reserves Prior to Invasion

The biggest oil companies in the world plotted with the Tony Blair-helmed British government for a year prior to the Iraq invasion to gain control of the country's oil reserves, the Independent reported today. A series of minutes from secret meetings between oil company heads and ministers also revealed that then-Trade Minister Baroness Symons agreed to lobby President Bush on behalf of BP Oil five months before the March 2003 invasion 'because the oil giant feared it was being "locked out" of deals that Washington was quietly striking with US, French and Russian governments and their energy firms.'
The Foreign Office invited BP in on 6 November 2002 to talk about opportunities in Iraq "post regime change". Its minutes state: "Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity."
After another meeting, this one in October 2002, the Foreign Office's Middle East director at the time, Edward Chaplin, noted: "Shell and BP could not afford not to have a stake in [Iraq] for the sake of their long-term future... We were determined to get a fair slice of the action for UK companies in a post-Saddam Iraq."
Whereas BP was insisting in public that it had "no strategic interest" in Iraq, in private it told the Foreign Office that Iraq was "more important than anything we've seen for a long time".
Similar to the US, the UK involvement in the Iraq War was sold to its Parliament and its people as a preventative action against weapons of mass destruction – which we now know Saddam Hussein never possessed. And while none of these revelations are particularly shocking surrounding a war built on lies contrived by overreaching governments and huge corporations, the feeling of disgust, anger and revulsion are as fresh as the day they were born. Read the rest at the Independent.

Friday, April 8, 2011

The Dirty Truth Behind America's Obsession With Shrimp

Most Americans don't know the ugly backstory of the shrimp on their plates: destroyed mangrove forests, toxic sludge, and displaced lives.

Shrimp and mangroves. Mangroves and shrimp. The two are intertwined, ecologically and economically. They are like a pair of orbiting stars, though one shines at the expense of the other. The bitter irony is that without mangroves, there would be no shrimp. Mangroves are the natural nurseries of the shrimp species that are farmed commercially, just as they are for so many other marine creatures. In the wild, shrimp begin their lives in offshore waters, where the adults spawn. Then, carried inshore by currents, and perhaps aided by their own swimming, the larvae take up residence in sheltered inshore habitats where mangroves flourish. There, living and feeding in the shelter of the tangled limbs of the mangrove forest, they grow and molt until they are ready to migrate back out to sea.

Technology has short-circuited this ecological connection. Industrial shrimp hatcheries have taken the place of mangrove nurseries. From the viewpoint of commercial shrimp farming, mangroves are superfluous. And that is exactly what they have become on the ground. In most developing countries, it is not possible to visit mangroves without seeing the hobnailed bootprint of a rapacious industry. How did aquaculture come to be such a destructive force, and shrimp the mangroves' nemesis?
Let's go back to the origins of the industry. The oldest known guide to aquaculture was written in 475 BC and consists of advice from a Chinese administrator named Fan-Li to the ruler of a neighboring kingdom on how to get rich by culturing carp. The document contains information about pond size, stocking rates, nutrition, and predator control. (To ward off fish-stealing birds, writes Fan-Li, turtles should be deployed as "heavenly guards.") Follow his instructions, Fan-Li tells the king, and by the third year "the increase in income is countless." Aquaculture is pitched as a get-rich-quick scheme--just as it is today.

Remarkably, by the time Fan-Li's paean to piscicultural profits came to be written the Chinese had already been practicing aquaculture for 2,000 years, and today China is the world leader, responsible for two-thirds of global production. The industry has come a long way from the rearing of carp in ornamental ponds. Now dozens of freshwater and marine species are farmed, from tilapia to tuna, scallops to seahorses. Geneticists produce superhybrid varieties that are disease-resistant and have faster growth rates, higher nutritional value, shorter life cycles (in the case of shellfish), and longer harvest periods (in the case of edible seaweeds) than their wild progenitors. Oceanographers scour the seas for microbes with potential for use as feedstocks, and aquaculture entrepreneurs design multistory "pondominiums" -- whole cities of sea creatures.


Shrimp aquaculture (more accurately called mariculture, because most farmed shrimp are marine species) has a somewhat shorter history. It was not until the early 1960s that Japanese ichthyologist Motosaku Fujinaga, after 30 years of painstaking research and experimentation, succeeded in raising commercial quantities of the esteemed kuruma sushi shrimp, Penaeus japonicus, in captivity. Word of the breakthrough spread quickly, and Fujinaga's success was followed by further breakthroughs in hatchery techniques, feeding, and disease control. By the 1970s, farmed shrimp -- "pink gold" -- was the star of the Blue Revolution, the anticipated great leap forward in aquatic productivity that many hoped would rival the Green Revolution's surge in grain yields in the 1950s.


That dream has been realized. From contributing 8 percent of the world's seafood harvest in 1975, aquaculture now provides more than half. "Aquaculture ranks as a phenomenal story in global food production," says Jurgenne Primavera, a Filipino fisheries scientist who was named one of Time magazine's "heroes of the environment" in 2008.

Part of the commercial success of shrimp aquaculture arises from Primavera's own work on Penaeus monodon, the giant tiger shrimp, largest of the world's 2,000-some shrimp species, which attains lengths of more than 30 centimeters (12 inches) and a body weight of more than half a kilogram. In the 1970s, Primavera's groundbreaking studies on the growth and survival of tiger shrimp in the Philippines helped make P. monodon the most widely cultivated shrimp in the world.

It was only later that she realized she had a tiger by the tail. The industry she helped foster has bitten her own country hard, wreaking destruction on the mangroves that are a source of food and livelihood for millions of coastal dwellers. Between 1950 and 1990 the Philippines lost 66 percent of its mangrove forests. More than half of the losses were through conversion to shrimp ponds. A similar trail of destruction followed shrimp farming in Thailand and Vietnam.

"All across Southeast and South Asia, residential, agricultural and forest lands are being converted into shrimp farms," Primavera wrote in 2005. "Indian fishing communities who once were called pattapuraja, meaning kings of the coastline, now find themselves refugees of aquaculture development."
The damage didn't stop in Asia. As developing countries in the Americas and Africa staked their claim in the pink-gold bonanza, the mangrove decline accelerated. In 2001, it was estimated that aquaculture had been responsible for 52 percent of global mangrove loss, with shrimp farming alone accounting for 38 percent of the destruction.
The conflict between mangroves and shrimp farming arose from a simple geographical fact: prime pond location was in the shore zone occupied by mangroves. In its simplest form, shrimp farming involves building ponds in the upper intertidal zone, where mangroves live, and letting the tide fill them with water. This was the style of shrimp farming I witnessed in the Sundarbans. 
With the moon as a pump and the sea as a hatchery, there is little cost involved, but productivity is low.

As aquafarmers ratchet up the intensity, stocking their ponds with hatchery-spawned larvae, growing them with high-energy feeds and supplements, filtering, circulating, and aerating the water, and countering disease outbreaks with antibiotics, proximity to the sea, though not essential, is still an asset. Seawater can be pumped into the ponds from a short distance away, and transport of feeds and harvested shrimp by boat is practical and economical.


For the pioneering shrimp farmers of Asia and Latin America, there was an even more attractive reason to site ponds in mangroves: the land was available and cheap to lease. In most countries, tidal lands are state owned and cannot be bought or sold. Shrimp entrepreneurs found that governments were willing to grant them concessionary use of this land for peppercorn rentals. Governments were keen on shrimp because they were a desirable export commodity that brought in valuable foreign exchange. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund promoted aquaculture because it helped developing nations diversify their exports and spread risk, and it kept the wheels of debt repayment turning. During the 1980s and '90s the World Bank, IMF, and other international lenders were enthusiastic backers of shrimp farming in the Third World.

The fact that mangroves occupied the preferred shrimp zone was inconvenient but of no great concern. The land was considered underutilized, and mangroves were easily removed. Predictably, any concerns about environmental damage were quickly overwhelmed by the irresistible force of commerce. The situation wasn't helped by the fact that jurisdiction over mangroves was often held by two or more government agencies with differing agendas. In the Philippines, for example, the mandate of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources was to protect and manage mangroves, while that of the Department of Agriculture was to promote aquaculture -- at the expense of mangroves.

And so began two decades of concerted deforestation. Mangroves fell to ax, match and bulldozer at a rate of between 1 and 2 percent per year -- the same rate at which inland rainforests were being felled to make way for cattle and soybeans. It was a devastating double whammy for the forests of the Third World: slash-and-burn agriculture in the terrestrial rainforests, bulldoze-and-fill aquaculture in the mangroves. But while rainforest destruction quickly attracted urgent and vociferous opposition, the removal of mangroves was off the public radar. For most people, it still is.
Perhaps the most ecologically grotesque aspect of the shrimp industry in its early days was the practice of farmers abandoning their ponds after a few years and moving to new sites. A pond dug on a freshly felled mangrove forest receives a built-in nutrient subsidy in the form of organic matter stored in the soil. The nutrients boost plankton growth and increase pond productivity. But after a few years, the nutrients are exhausted and productivity declines. 

Wastes, chemical treatments, and unconsumed shrimp feed build up a contaminating sludge on the bottom of ponds, and if a viral disease should break out, future crops will be at risk in the affected ponds. Such problems can be solved with careful pond management, but with mangrove land undervalued, concessions cheap, and governments supportive or compliant, many shrimp farmers found it easier to cut and run than to stay and manage.
Pond abandonment is a double tragedy for the environment. Not only are additional mangroves sacrificed in the construction of new ponds, but the old pond land, rather than becoming available for agriculture or for replanting in mangroves, often ends up a toxic dead-end. Ponds can be successfully rehabilitated, but it takes time and money. So far, the shrimp industry has shown little inclination to address, let alone repair, past damages.

Aquaculture is often linked to the issue of human food security, and rightly so. As capture fisheries continue to decline, aquaculture has the potential to meet the shortfall. This has always been one of the tenets of the Blue Revolution. But shrimp aquaculture has never been about food security. Farmed shrimp is a gourmet product, not a dietary staple. It is, as Elaine Corets remarked to me in Brazil, "an exotic species farmed in ponds created by destroying local ecosystems and exported to wealthy countries for the consumption of overweight people who don't need any more protein or cholesterol in their diet." In the places where shrimp is farmed, food security does not increase, it decreases.

Shrimp-farm expansion in the developing world has been driven by a burgeoning appetite for shrimp in the West. Shrimp consumption in the United States nearly tripled between 1980 and 2005, while the price halved. Those decades saw a seafood delicacy unknown to the majority of diners become a ubiquitous item on fast-food restaurant menus and in suburban kitchens. Cheap price, availability, perceived health benefits, and high culinary status all contributed to shrimp's popularity. In 2002, shrimp elbowed aside tuna as the number-one seafood in the United States, and has held that position ever since. Americans now eat roughly four pounds of shrimp per person per year.

What most American consumers don't realize is that almost 90 percent of shrimp is imported, and two-thirds is farmed product, mostly from Asia. Diners, sitting down to a platter of grilled, battered, or breaded shrimp, wouldn't be aware that what they're eating is most likely a farmed commodity rather than wild fare harvested by shrimpers in the South Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico. They wouldn't know that U.S. shrimp-netting operations have been commercially kneecapped in recent years, unable to compete with the cheap influx of pond-raised product from abroad. And they certainly wouldn't know the backstory of shrimp aquaculture: the lost forests, the displaced lives. Advocacy groups are beginning to bring those stories to the fore, as they are with the entire industrial food chain, encouraging consumers to consider the provenance of their food as well as its quality and price. As Michael Pollan writes in his best-selling book The Omnivore's Dilemma, the questions we need to be asking are "What am I eating? And where in the world did it come from?"

 Keep reading

Why We Must Raise Taxes on the Rich, ASAP!

 
 
 
It’s tax time. It’s also a time when right-wing Republicans are setting the agenda for massive spending cuts that will hurt most Americans.
Here’s the truth: The only way America can reduce the long-term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and Medicare, invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich.
Even if we got rid of corporate welfare subsidies for big oil, big agriculture, and big Pharma – even if we cut back on our bloated defense budget – it wouldn’t be nearly enough.
The vast majority of Americans can’t afford to pay more. Despite an economy that’s twice as large as it was thirty years ago, the bottom 90 percent are still stuck in the mud. If they’re employed they’re earning on average only about $280 more a year than thirty years ago, adjusted for inflation. That’s less than a 1 percent gain over more than a third of a century. (Families are doing somewhat better but that’s only because so many families now have to rely on two incomes.)

Yet even as their share of the nation’s total income has withered, the tax burden on the middle has grown. Today’s working and middle-class taxpayers are shelling out a bigger chunk of income in payroll taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes than thirty years ago.

It’s just the opposite for super rich.
The top 1 percent’s share of national income has doubled over the past three decades (from 10 percent in 1981 to well over 20 percent now). The richest one-tenth of 1 percent’s share has tripled. And they’re doing better than ever. According to a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal, total compensation and benefits at publicly-traded Wall Street banks and securities firms hit a record in 2010 — $135 billion. That’s up 5.7 percent from 2009.

Yet, remarkably, taxes on the top have plummeted. From the 1940s until 1980, the top tax income tax rate on the highest earners in America was at least 70 percent. In the 1950s, it was 91 percent. Now it’s 35 percent. Even if you include deductions and credits, the rich are now paying a far lower share of their incomes in taxes than at any time since World War II.

The estate tax (which only hits the top 2 percent) has also been slashed. In 2000 it was 55 percent and kicked in after $1 million. Today it’s 35 percent and kicks in at $5 million. Capital gains – comprising most of the income of the super-rich – were taxed at 35 percent in the late 1980s. They’re now taxed at 15 percent.
If the rich were taxed at the same rates they were half a century ago, they’d be paying in over $350 billion more this year alone, which translates into trillions over the next decade. That’s enough to accomplish everything the nation needs while also reducing future deficits.

If we also cut what we don’t need (corporate welfare and bloated defense), taxes could be reduced for everyone earning under $80,000, too. And with a single payer health-care system – Medicare for all – instead of a gaggle of for-profit providers, the nation could save billions more.

Yes, the rich will find ways to avoid paying more taxes courtesy of clever accountants and tax attorneys. But this has always been the case regardless of where the tax rate is set. That’s why the government should aim high. (During the 1950s, when the top rate was 91 percent, the rich exploited loopholes and deductions that as a practical matter reduced the effective top rate 50 to 60 percent – still substantial by today’s standards.)

And yes, some of the super rich will move their money to the Cayman Islands and other tax shelters. But paying taxes is a central obligation of citizenship, and those who take their money abroad in an effort to avoid paying American taxes should lose their American citizenship.
But don’t the super-rich have enough political power to kill any attempt to get them to pay their fair share? Only if we let them. Here’s the issue around which Progressives, populists on the right and left, unionized workers, and all other working people who are just plain fed up ought to be able to unite.
Besides, the reason we have a Democrat in the White House – indeed, the reason we have a Democratic Party at all – is to try to rebalance the economy exactly this way.

All the President has to do is connect the dots – the explosion of income and wealth among America’s super-rich, the dramatic drop in their tax rates, the consequential devastating budget squeezes in Washington and in state capitals, and the slashing of vital public services for the middle class and the poor.
This shouldn’t be difficult. Most Americans are on the receiving end. By now they know trickle-down economics is a lie. And they sense the dice are loaded in favor of the multi-millionaires and billionaires, and their corporations, now paying a relative pittance in taxes. 
Besides, the President has the bully pulpit. But will he use it?


Thursday, April 7, 2011

Top Ten Reasons Clean Coal is Dirty

#1: "Clean" Coal Increases Rates of Disease

The United States burns more than a billion tons of coal each year – that’s 20 pounds of coal for every person in the country, every day. According to the American Lung Association, 24,000 people a year die prematurely because of pollution from coal-fired power plants. And every year 38,000 heart attacks, 12,000 hospital admissions and an additional 550,000 asthma attacks result from power plant pollution.



#2: "Clean" Coal Kills Jobs

Despite coal industry claims that coal mining creates lots of jobs, the truth is that coal mining employment has been declining for decades, due to increased use of machinery instead of manpower. In West Virginia alone, coal mining employment has plummeted from 126,000 miners in 1948 (who produced 168 million tons of coal), to just 15,000 miners employed in 2005 (who, with the help of machinery, produced 128 million tons of coal).


#3: Burning "Clean" Coal Emits Mercury

Coal-fired power plants are the largest source of human-generated mercury pollution in the U.S. Mercury emissions from electrical generation continues to rise.
Mercury in mothers' blood and breast milk can interfere with the development of babies' brains and neurological systems and can lead to learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, problems with coordination, lowered IQ and even mental retardation.


#4: Burning "Clean" Coal is Fuel for Global Warming

The U.S. produces about 25 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. Burning coal contributes 40 percent of U.S. CO2 emissions. Coal is the most carbon intensive fossil fuel. According to the United Nations Environment Program, coal emits around 1.7 times as much carbon per unit of energy when burned as does natural gas and 1.25 times as much as oil.


#5: "Clean" Coal Kills Miners

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that 12,000 coal miners died from black lung disease between 1992 and 2002.  


#6: "Clean" Coal Wastes Huge Quantities of Water

Coal mining requires an estimated 70 to 260 million gallons of water every day.  


#7: "Clean" Coal Pollutes Seafood and Freshwater Fish

49 U.S. states have issued fish consumption advisories due to high mercury concentrations in freshwater bodies throughout the country.

Coal-fired power plants are the largest source of human-generated mercury pollution in the U.S.


#8: "Clean" Coal Destroys Mountains

Instead of traditional mining, many coal companies now use mountaintop removal to extract coal.
Coal companies are increasingly using this method because it allows for almost complete recovery of coal seams while reducing the number of workers required to a fraction of what conventional methods require.

Mountaintop removal involves clear cutting native hardwood forests, using dynamite to blast away as much as 800-1000 feet of mountaintop, and then dumping the waste into nearby valleys, often burying streams.

 

#9: "Clean" Coal Kills Freshwater Streams

More than 1,200 miles of Appalachian streams have been buried or damaged by mountaintop removal mining. At least 724 miles of streams were completely buried by valley fills from Appalachian mountaintop removal between 1985 and 2001.
400,000 acres of rich and diverse temperate forests have been destroyed during the same time period as a result of mountaintop mining in Appalachia.


#10: "Clean" Coal Costs Billions in Taxpayer Subsidies

The U.S. government continues to aggressively fund coal-related projects despite all that is known about coal’s impacts on health, climate and the economy.
The Department of Energy is currently seeking $648 million for “clean coal” projects in its 2009 budget request, “representing the largest budget request for coal RD&D in over 25 years.”

Want to do more?

Check out our section on how you can fight "clean coal" in your community and online.

Help us promote our "Best Clean Coal" site ever. Email to your friends for a good laugh.

 

If not coal, then what?

Check out "There is a Better Way" on how renewable energy technology can power America.

 
 
 

Sunday, April 3, 2011

How Disney Invaded American Childhood to Shill Worthless Crap to Our Kids

Disney is a major source of the potentially harmful gender and race myths proffered to girls today.
 
 
 
 
From the outside, Peggy Orenstein epitomizes feminist success. She’s an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in such distinguished publications as the New Yorker, Elle, Vogue, Discover, Mother Jones, and O: The Oprah Magazine. But her work itself is dedicated to asserting the ways in which “having it all” -- or trying to -- in a world built to the measure of men can have profound effects on women and girls.
Orenstein’s first book, the 1994 study Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap, explored the adolescent roots and gendered nature of the crippling self-doubt that plagues so many adult women. Her second, 2000’s Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, & Life in a Half-Changed World, examined the systemic biases and roadblocks women face in creating lives that balance personal and professional demands. And in 2007, Orenstein published a memoir, Waiting for Daisy, which recounted the challenges -- infertility, cancer, and many more -- she faced in becoming a mother.

Throughout her career, Orenstein has observed at close range how the media and popular culture have colluded to serve up distorted visions of womanhood to girls. And given everything she’s seen, she’d be the first to say that being female in what’s still a “half-changed world” is no fairy tale. So perhaps it’s fitting that Orenstein’s new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, takes on the Disneyfication of American girlhood, and the princess narratives sold hand over fist to girls like her own 7-year-old, Daisy Tomoko.
Disney princess narratives have long been a staple of modern girlhood. But Cinderella Ate My Daughter emphasizes that princess culture is a 21st-century phenomenon, the result of marketing executives seeking some consumer magic to boost the corporation’s limp product sales. In 2001, the revenue generated by such Disney-branded princess paraphernalia as dolls, costumes, and room decor was about $300 million. Eight years later, that number had risen to a whopping $4 billion. Little girls are no longer consumers of Disneyfied fairy tales; in the new millennium, they have become the consumed.
And predatory marketing is only one of the problems inherent in princess culture, which Orenstein also believes is a major source -- if not the major source -- of the potentially harmful gender and race myths proffered to girls today. Even more insidiously, Disney princesses also prepare young girls to become consumers of a whole host of cultural products -- from Bratz dolls to Miley Cyrus to toddler beauty pageants -- that promote, and ultimately normalize, manipulatively sexualized girlhoods.

Orenstein’s passion for her work as a “girl advocate” is evident not only in her writing, but also in how she talks about girlhood issues. She spoke to Bitch at length about what it means to be in the trenches of the commercial battle to capture the hearts and minds of young girls -- and the dollars of those who care for and about them.
How did the writing of Cinderella Ate My Daughter confirm or alter any of the ideas you had about “princess culture”?
When I went into it, I approached it in an exploratory way. We live in a time when girls are doing really well in a lot of realms. They’re doing really well in school, they’re going to college at a higher rate than boys, they’re doing great on the sports field, they’re in leadership roles. Yet, at the same time there’s a resurgence -- [or] more like just a “surgence” -- of pink and pretty. Is this a positive thing that shows that we can now indulge girls in that without any kind of repercussions? Or is [it] an indication that girls are still being defined by how they look and urged to get their sense of self through external validation? I came out feeling that the latter was true. And it starts pretty much in infancy.

[The] insistence on defining girls and women by how we look and how we relate sexually is not only a way to keep [us] in our place, but a way we keep ourselves there. Obsessing over our appearance is the way we assure ourselves and others around us that even if we’re really successful, we’re not really threatening. [T]he pressures on women to look good from womb to tomb have become more intense and confusing [in part] because we have made so much progress. And the consequences for girls of being prematurely sexualized can be precisely the things we’re trying to avoid, such as negative body image, eating disorders, or depression. One of the things [I found] that surprised me was the relationship between sexualization and disconnection from authentic sexuality: Girls who are sexualized early are more likely to see sexuality as a performance, not as something that they feel internally.

So it’s like from the time girls are very young, they’re always on stage somehow, whether culturally or socially.
When girls play dolls today, the fantasy that’s offered them is that they should grow up to be a rock star or movie star. That was absolutely not true when we were girls. And even the beloved Dora the Explorer -- they split Dora into two because they wanted to keep the audience, and the audience was aging out younger and younger. So they made a tween Dora. [Original] Dora is very sturdy and just neutral: She has short hair, a straight-cut shirt, a backpack, and a map. [Tween Dora] got flirty clothes and pretty hair, and the map and backpack are gone. Her fantasies are about being a rock star performing a benefit concert.
So much of what girls are presented with is essentially about performance. [And] here’s Dora, in this new incarnation, giving a soft-pedaled version of the same lesson. If it were in isolation, that might be one thing. But it’s just constant. That’s what girls are told [to aspire to] -- high-school student by day, rock star by night. It’s about the importance of this surface self.
It’s a constructionist view of identity, taken to an extreme degree.
I’ve been thinking a lot more about the way girl power has been contorted into pro-narcissism. My daughter, Daisy, got a make-your-own messenger bag kit for her seventh birthday -- [it’s] a messenger bag that you decorate with iron-on transfers. [Most of] the transfers were pink and orange and purple, hearts and flowers and stars and all the stuff that you would typically expect. But that was not what we noticed. One of the transfers said “spoiled,” another one said “pampered princess,” and a third one said “brat.” And [Daisy] looked at them and said, “Mom, why do they want you to put that on your purse? Isn’t that kind of braggy?” -- which is the worst thing you can say if you’re seven. And I said, “Yeah, I think you’re right. It is kind of braggy.” Somehow the idea of creating a strong sense of self in girls has been distorted by the culture into announcing you’re a spoiled, narcissistic brat -- like that is what signifies confidence. But it’s that sexualized, manipulative femininity.
If you asked what we want for our daughters, we’d want very wonderful, positive, thoughtful things: strong internal sense of self, self-direction and compassion and potential and all of that. And then [we] undercut that with what they’re playing with. The two don’t add up.
From what you say, it seems that well-meaning parents unwittingly cause split-identity problems in girls.


And that well-meaning part is really key. I mean, when you walk into Pottery Barn Kids, it’s like apartheid in there. For girls, it’s hearts and flowers and hula girls -- and the boys have sailboats, trucks, sports. I know somebody who was writing the [Pottery Barn] catalog, who said, “We’ve tried to make more gender-neutral items. And they just don’t sell.” We ended up with sea-creature sheets. So that was sort of neutral. [B]ut eventually your daughter may go, “Uh-uh. I don’t want this.” And if you keep disallowing it, giving her things from the boys’ side of the store, she’ll think you believe the stuff for girls is bad -- and maybe even that being a girl is bad. And that’s a problem, too.

Traces of Radiation from Japan Nuclear Plant Found in US Rain

Traces of radioactivity from damaged nuclear power facilities in Japan have been detected in rainwater in the northeast United States.

WASHINGTON — Traces of radioactivity from damaged nuclear power facilities in Japan have been detected in rainwater in the northeast United States, but pose no health risks, officials said.
The Environmental Protection Agency, in an update Sunday, said it had received reports of "elevated levels of radiation in recent precipitation events" in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and that it was "reviewing this data."

The EPA has been monitoring radiation from the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, and had previously detected "very low levels of radioactive material" in the United States, while saying that these "were expected" and that "the levels detected are far below levels of public health concern."
"Elevated levels of radioactive material in rainwater have been expected as a result of the nuclear incident after the events in Japan since radiation is known to travel in the atmosphere," the EPA added.
The agency has stepped up its monitoring of precipitation, drinking water, and other potential exposure routes for radiation as a precaution.
Last week, EPA cited "minuscule levels of an isotope that were consistent with the Japanese nuclear incident," that also posed no "concern for human health."

Time for Plan B: Our Civilization Is on the Edge of a Systemic Breakdown

Lester Brown talks about whether our civilization can survive the mounting global stresses of rising pollution, starvation, food prices, water shortages and failed states.
 
 
"How many failing states before we have a failing global civilization?" asks environmental pioneer Lester Brown in Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, premiering March 30 on PBS as part of its continuing Journey to Planet Earth series. It's a Gordian knot of a question with no simple answer and nothing but complex, demanding solutions, fearsomely put forth as the fate of humanity totters in the balance.
Based on Brown's book of the same name, Plan B is likely the scariest horror film that was ever disguised as a documentary, despite its calm narration from superstar Matt Damon. That's because the acclaimed environmentalist has deeply studied the variety of environmental and geopolitical tipping points we are fast approaching, and found that we're headed for a seriously dark dystopia if we don't turn civilization as we know it around, and fast. A catastrophic confluence of food and water shortages, overpopulation and pollution, collapsed governments and communities and more natural disasters than Roland Emmerich can dream up await us on the other side of Plan A, which Brown calls "business of usual."
"Environmentalists have been talking for decades about saving the planet, but the planet is going to be around for some time to come," Brown told AlterNet by phone from his Washington D.C. office at the Earth Policy Institute, which he founded at the turn of the century after decades of public and private service in the name of sustainability. "The question is will civilization as we know it be around for some time to come? Can it survive the mounting global stresses of rising pollution, starvation, food prices, water shortages and failed states? 

These are the real threats to our security now, but we're not responding to them."
In a sense, we are without knowing it. Japan's bungled response to a mounting nuclear crisis, thanks to one of Earth’s most destabilizing earthquakes and tsunamis, has in a cosmological eyeblink reset the entire world's nuclear ambition. Uprisings in hotspots like Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and more, compounded by America's continuing quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, are squarely knitting together civilization's crappy experiments like preemptive war, biofuels and light-speed financial stratagems into one titanic mess that is demanding new theories of cleanup.
It's no longer intellectually feasible to consider any of these events as separate, because they, like the warming climate, are interconnected nightmares that are keeping us more awake than ever, whether we like it or not. And no matter how we spin them, Plan B argues, we're eventually all going to have to work together to survive what is without a doubt an existential crisis of historical proportions. Only the depth and vigor of our mutual efforts and understanding separate us and every other failed civilization in the planet's incomprehensibly expansive history.
But after 77 years spent on Earth, most of them trying to educate its inhabitants on the dangers of taking its astronomically singular bounty for granted, the soft-spoken Brown remains a cautious optimist. That's a comforting sign for those of us at our wits' end and wondering when the rest of civilization will get its ass in gear to forestall what passes for a collective execution.
"Change comes very quickly and unexpectedly sometimes," Brown said. "The question is whether we can turn things around quickly enough. But I don't think we have a lot of time. Time is our scarcest resource."
I picked Brown's deeply experienced brain on geopolitical and environmental change, Japan's nuclear crisis, China's powerhouse green economy, food and water scarcity, technological bandaids like desalination and lab-grown meat and much more. Taken together with Plan B's accessible yet apocalyptic programming, it points the way forward for a civilization on the edge of a systemic breakdown.

Lester Brown: Plan A belongs to another age. There was a time when the market could set prices pretty well and guide the direction of economic development. But in recent decades, and particularly recent years, we have come to realize that many of the indirect costs have not been included in the prices that the market sets. The market is good at setting direct costs. For example, when you buy a gallon of gas, the market includes the costs of pumping, refining and distribution of that gas to your local service station. But the market is not very good at treating the indirect costs of treating respiratory illnesses from breathing polluted air, and certainly not the cost of climate change. The problem with Plan A's system, which worked pretty well a century ago when the world economy was only a twentieth of what it is now, is that these indirect costs are now far larger than the direct ones. So we're being guided by the market, but it's not telling us the truth about the prices or costs. In a nutshell, that's the big challenge we're facing in the world today.
ST: Plan B is arguing that we need to save not the planet, but ourselves.
LB: Environmentalists have been talking for decades about saving the planet, but the planet is going to be around for some time to come. The question is will civilization as we know it be around for some time to come? Can it survive the mounting global stresses of rising pollution, starvation, food prices, water shortages and failed states? These are the real threats to our security now, but we're not responding to them.
ST: Do you think that's because losing civilization is beyond the comprehension of civilization itself?
LB: That's quite possible, when you look at the trends of earlier civilizations whose archaeology we study now. More often that not, food shortages were responsible for their decline and eventual demise. For a long time, I had rejected the idea that food shortages could be the weak link in our modern 21st-century economy. But in fact, I think it is the weak link, and I think that's where the wake-up call is going to come from. Rising prices spreading a hunger to more and more failing states are the manifestations of our mounting stresses. That requires a mindset that's very different than we've had up until now.
ST: This is not encouraging, given our current geopolitical and environmental nightmares.
LB: Well, the other thing I'd like to add is that change comes very quickly and unexpectedly sometimes. I can remember the Berlin Wall coming down, which was the visual manifestation of a political revolution that changed the form of every government in Eastern Europe. Or the collapse and breakup of the Soviet Union, which I had assumed was going to be with us forever. But suddenly, it wasn't there anymore. Right now, we're watching a political phenomenon in Africa and the Middle East that not many of us had anticipated, a grassroots political fervor strong enough to unseat the despots that have been ruling that part of the world for decades. It's interesting because this is not the part of the world where I would have looked for political revolutions, if you will. But they're happening, and on a scale that would have been unimaginable months ago. So these tipping points come every once in a while in places and forms that are new and different. We can probably explain some of this through social networking and the Internet, but nonetheless these are radical changes occurring in a number of countries at the same time.
ST: Many of these despots were assisted into power by the United States in order to keep Plan A alive. Are our current interventions in Africa and the Middle East geostrategic capitalizations on these grassroots revolutions for access to what's left of Earth's fossil fuels? Or are we helping wipe away the 20th century's regimes so we can focus on beating climate change, which is the mammoth task of our new century? 


There's Nothing Natural About Natural Gas

It's not a choice between coal and natural gas. We are facing a choice between a truly clean energy future or more of the same. Natural gas is just a bridge to nowhere.
 
 
“Natural gas: the bridge to a clean energy future!” Nice sound bite. But the reality is that natural gas is nothing but a bridge to more natural gas -- and with it more water contamination, air pollution, global warming, and fractured communities.
The natural gas industry, joined in good faith by some environmentalists, touts natural gas as a “bridge fuel,” cleaner burning than coal and less destructive to extract, a way to transition to a renewable energy economy. But communities across America -- from the Rocky Mountains to Texas, Pennsylvania, and New York -- know this is a false choice. Just like coal, the drilling, processing, and transport of natural gas is dirty and dangerous. And new research calls into question natural gas’s advantage over coal in terms of global warming pollution when the full life cycle (from extraction to transport to use) is considered.


Due to advances in “hydraulic fracturing” (commonly known as “fracking”), America’s gas fields are no longer “somewhere else”: They’re right next door. Chances are good they’re right upstream from you.
And thanks in part to fluids used in fracking, America’s water is being poisoned with dozens of toxic drilling chemicals including benzene and toluene. Residents are being forced from their homes by air emissions, which are neither measured nor mitigated in any consistent fashion. Gas wells are surrounding peoples’ homes, with drill rigs within 150 feet of residences in some areas. In many cases, drilling is moving forward without the consent of the landowners and communities that are directly affected.
If the natural gas industry wants to be “clean,” it should embrace policies that mean no pollution of groundwater, drinking water, or surface waters; stringent controls on air pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions; protection for no-go zones, like drinking watersheds and sacred and wild lands; and respect for landowner rights, including the right to say no to drilling on their property.
But the natural gas industry resists such proposals. This makes no sense: With better planning and smarter use of technology, the natural gas industry could avoid many of these impacts and cure a major public relations headache as well.


Across the nation, local and state agencies, from first responders and road builders to regulators, are struggling to protect the public -- to keep up with natural gas-related accidents, heavy truck use, and monitoring and oversight. All the while, industry resists federal regulation, saying it prefers a state-by-state patchwork of rules … even as it fights every state effort to improve its practices and every municipality that tries to protect itself.
In addition to local environmental and public health concerns, there are also global consequences to increasing our reliance on natural gas. Both carbon dioxide and methane are major causes of global warming. While the burning of natural gas releases less carbon dioxide than coal, large volumes of methane are released during natural gas drilling and production, and through leaky pipelines. 


This is a problem because methane, the major constituent of natural gas, is 20 to 30 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. With an estimated 600,000 gas wells across America, the climate impacts are enormous.
Independent testing of emissions from natural gas facilities reveals extraordinary releases of methane. But there is no systematic monitoring or collection of this information. Without such data, we have no idea how much we are putting our climate at risk by advocating natural gas as a bridge fuel.

Those who promote natural gas as a solution to climate change must embrace a commitment to monitor and eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from every stage of the natural gas development process. Many natural gas advocates point out that emissions in the gas fields may be much easier to clean up than emissions from coal-fired power plants. We invite them to join us in the urgent fight to curb emissions in the field and to push for stronger regulation and monitoring of emissions at all stages of gas development.
Environmentalists and social justice advocates are rising up in record numbers to stop coal. At the same time, the twenty-first-century clean energy revolution -- solar and wind power and energy efficiency -- is gathering pace. What lies in between? Is replacing coal with natural gas going to “bridge” us to clean energy?

The answer is “no.” Every dollar spent on new natural gas wells, pipelines, processing and infrastructure does not bring us closer to wind, solar, and energy efficiency. Quite the opposite: It is taking us in the wrong direction by delaying the transition. The large-scale conversion to clean energy demands new thinking, new consumption patterns, new delivery mechanisms, new industries, new financial incentives. Burning more natural gas simply puts energy from a different source into the same system now used for coal. To stabilize the climate at 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, we simply can’t afford to invest in any new infrastructure that continues to increase greenhouse gases. A natural gas burning power plant that operates for the next 50 years means five more decades of burning fossil fuel that could instead be capturing energy from efficiency, wind, or the sun.
It is true that we are faced with an energy choice. It’s a choice that immediately impacts our communities’ air and water as well as the stability of Earth’s climate. But it’s not a choice between coal and natural gas. We are facing a choice between a truly clean energy future or more of the same. As currently pursued, natural gas is not a short, narrow, clean bridge. It’s bridge to nowhere: one that is long, exacts very high tolls, and has no clear end.