Internet freedom under corporate assault again

 Click on each image to enlarge.

The problem with talking about "corporate corruption" is that it's like accusing a skunk or an outhouse of having a bad smell -- corporations aren't corrupt or non-corrupt, they're just being corporations.

Corporations aren't people, they're inhuman machines that are designed for one and one thing only: seeking and grabbing more profits. 

They're like sharks, which are designed for one and one thing only, finding and consuming prey.

Like sharks, corporations are efficient and relentless. They're fine in their place -- but that place is NOT in policy making roles, because their amoral nature means that the only thing they can see or think about is more profits.

Corporations cannot recognize values of fairness and access any more than a shark can recognize the value of a great painting.

Take action, before the telecomm sharks eat us alive.

http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=8799039

Debunking another big lie from Big Ag

(From Wood Prairie Farm's newsletter)

Buying Influence.
Biotech's war of disinformation heats up.

Prop 37: Biotech and the Stanford Sell Out.

Early this week all the telltale signs were there. Biotech's $25 million massively funded propaganda campaign of disinformation - orchestrated by former tobacco lobbyists - aimed at confusing California voters into voting against their own interests: CA Prop 37, the peoples' Right-To-Know GMO Labeling referendum.

Then, a coordinated, national tsunami-like blanket coverage of suffocating proportions by the traditional media - down to the smallest hamlet including our local country radio station - of a 'new' Stanford compilation study which at once trashed organic, ignored biotech crops and held a no-questions-asked-assumption that the government's chemical-industry-friendly official pesticide tolerance levels were somehow scientifically-based and bulls eye accurate. The subject: under the lens of a narrow 'nutritional comparison,' a calculated unwieldy meta-analysis of 17 human studies and 223 laboratory studies of how does organic compare to conventional.

Within twenty four hours, the cracks in the processional's armor started to appear.

Noted Activist Post: "From Stanford Center for Health Policy's own website it is admitted that 'national' and international foundations and corporations' fund its research and 'outreach activities.' This confirms the suspicions of an increasingly aware public who saw the 'study' as biased, contradictory of both logic and ethics, and the result of insidious corporate-funding.

According to FSI's 2011 Annual Report Agricultural giant Cargill, British Petroleum (BP), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, Goldman Sachs, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and many other corporate-financier, Fortune 500 special interests."

Agricultural giant Cargill is in fact in direct partnership with Stanford University. Specifically it has donated at least 5 million dollars for the creation of a Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE). The center is allegedly 'committed to helping feed a growing population while preserving the planet's natural resources.' This will presumably be done through the use of patented Cargill biotechnology, have nothing to do with actually 'helping feed' anything but Cargill's bottom line and corporate-financier domination of the global food supply, while Stanford simply leverages its reputation and credibility to give cover and badly needed legitimacy to Cargill's methods and agenda. Stanford's most recent "study" is essentially the university "giving back" to Cargill and others."

Two lessons come to mind which are pertinent to this Stanford news story.

1. Franklin D. Roosevelt: "in politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."
   
   
2. Mythically attributed to Watergate's Deep Throat: "Follow the money."

It is no coincidence that the corporations behind this propaganda coup are the biggest contributors to the biotech disinformation campaign deployed to defeat California Prop 37.

Below are links to some of the more pithy articles exposing the false 'journalism' and study critiques which expose Stanford's embarrassing complicity.

Jim

• 5 Ways the Stanford Study Sells Organic Short.
• Cargill and Others Behind anti-Organic "Stanford Study."
• Why the News is Wrong: We Need to Eat Organic.
• Fruit and Soil Quality of Organic and Conventional Strawberry Agrosystems.

The big lie: Don't Worry, There's Plenty of Oil!

The Silence on Global Warming | Common Dreams

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/07/09-0

People talk about how no one particular weather event can be tied to climate disruption as if admitting the limits of our understanding means that there IS no connection, rather than that our tools for discernment are weak in the face of such vast complexity. Smarter people than us would tread carefully in the face of such complexity, rather than acting like two year olds who assume that what they don't know can't hurt them.

Heat Stress Alert -- Do NOT fry your pet or kid

OK, people, all that summer you've been crying for is slated to arrive. In one day. That's tomorrow.

Remember, it's a crime to leave an animal or a child in a car. Also insanely cruel. A car, even with the windows cracked quite a bit, can get to be an oven in amazingly short order.

And make sure your pets have ready access to shade and plenty of water.

More on the Disaster in the Making (vaccination refusals)

From Bob Park:

1. VACCINATION: THERE IS NO INOCULATION AGAINST INCOMPETENCE.
Vaccination programs prevent more human suffering than any other branch of medicine. Their success depends on public confidence in their safety. But according to a report released last Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Health, spot checks by the Office of the Inspector General finds that free vaccines, provided under the nationwide Vaccines for Children program, are often stored at the wrong temperature, which can render them ineffective.

The first generation to receive MMR vaccinations are now parents. They have been spared not only the direct misery of the illness, but also serious side effects that can show up many years later. They should be the first to demand strict standards of safety and effectiveness in administering vaccines. Someday perhaps, eradication of pathogenic diseases will be routine, but were not there yet. What prevents it?

2. ERADICATION: FIRST WE MUST CURE THE WORLD OF ITS SUPERSTITIONS.
In 1977, smallpox, the most deadly and persistent human pathogenic disease, was eradicated from Earth by the World Health Organization following an unprecedented agreement allowing quick-response teams to freely cross every a border to administer vaccine in case of an outbreak. It was a moving demonstration of what can be achieved by world cooperation, and was quickly followed by calls to eradicate poliomyelitis. Polio eradication was undertaken by WHO in 1988 with help from private organizations, but although the number of polio cases diagnosed each year has plummeted, final eradication remains elusive. Opposition by Muslim fundamentalists is said to be the major factor in the failure of polio immunization programs. In Pakistan and Afghanistan the Taliban issued fatwa opposing vaccination as an attempt to avert Allah's will, while others saw it as an American plot to sterilize Muslims. Some conservative Christian groups oppose vaccination for diseases that are transmitted spread by sexual contact, arguing that the possibility of disease deters risky sexual contact. It doesn’t.

Bob should have mentioned the damage done by bogus vaccination programs, such as the US used to get intel on Bin-Ladin in his hideout. Like planting CIA agents among journalists and Peace Corps volunteers, getting intel from agents disguised as vaccination program staff does serious long-term damage to the program being used as cover. Every journalist, medical aid worker, and vaccination program is endangered by such efforts.

Coal is the enemy of the human race, the slow "screw the future" suicide system

This is an excellent post by Cliff Mass, UW meteorologist on his weather blog, on why coal trains are a REALLY BAD IDEA for the environment & human health.

Also, Professor Dan Jaffe, of UW Bothell, has documented the substantial contribution of Asian pollution to our background pollution levels (see here for one story on this). This is really scary stuff!

Here are some highlights. Want to see the coal dust blowing off a coal train? Click on this image to see a video of a coal train in British Columbia...you will see HUGE amounts of dust blowing off into a scenic river basin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jixOquzgNqk

Even worse...once the coal gets to China they burn it, producing all sorts of particulates and gases that then moves across the Pacific to worsen regional air quality problems here in the Northwest. In fact, Professor Dan Jaffe, of UW Bothell, has documented the substantial contribution of Asian pollution to our background pollution levels (see here for one story on this).

Oil addiction generates denial | Energy Bulletin

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-05-25/oil-addiction-generates-denial

A choice bit:

Little time left to deal with our addiction

Rising gasoline prices should ideally be welcomed as a warning of what is soon to come. One of the keenest observers of the geopolitics of oil and the precarious nature of our U.S. oil dependence is Michael Klare.

Because the American economy is so closely tied to oil, it is especially vulnerable to oil’s growing scarcity, price volatility, and the relative paucity of its suppliers. Consider this: at present, the United States obtains about 40% of its total energy supply from oil, far more than any other major economic power.

We will now have to prepare for major economic changes and high gas prices. Oil and politically sensitive gasoline prices have receded in price the last month, but this is in no way a sign that our lives can return to the cheap oil era of the past. We are busily preparing to fight Iran. The energy wars are heating up globally . The hour is getting late.
Klare now calls on Obama to be honest about the true gravity of our current situation.

President Obama has to be honest with the public. There is no solution to high prices, other than a change in the behavior of our energy use, because there is no cheap oil left on the planet. We have to begin a process of converting to alternative forms of energy or alternative forms of transportation. And he has to be honest.

Goodbye to Bad Knowledge (Post-Peak-Oil Health Care)

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-05-31/goodbye-bad-knowledge

The other major system crash that's coming, besides education, is in our sickness care "system," which is shot through and through with total dependency on economic growth fueled by the now-gone cheap energy.

In one sense, the end of cheap energy will mean better overall health.  America's obesity epidemic is really just a marker of how many energy slaves we all command.  Now that the once-per-planetary-lifetime cheap energy extravaganza is drawing to a close, so too will we see the end of the bad habits it produced, which all boil down to having machines do everything for us. 

BUT, there's a very rough transition ahead between now, when we have a huge overhang of people with bodies made sick by decades of dietary mistreatment and avoidance of exercise, and our future, when we won't be able to afford a sickness care system that continually spends a huge fraction of its total budget on people in their waning days, which ignoring the basic health needs of a giant and growing underclass of people.

Ultimately we are going to have to recognize that organizing access to health care through employment is a gigantic blunder, and that allowing the entire sickness care system to be structured around the profit motive is a recipe not just for lots more sickness and lots more profits, but essentially for making America a third-world country.   Given that Salem Hospital is laying off skilled workers even as people in Salem are increasingly shut out of affordable health care, the contradictions built into the system are soon going to be too great to ignore.

A must-read warning

As Salem ponders pouring hundreds of million$ down the drain on a pointless third auto bridge, here's a bracing reminder of what a foolish blunder this is from Dmitry Orlov, who observed the collapse of the USSR in frequent visits to his native land.

What does tend to change rather suddenly is commerce. If you have enough financial and political shenanigans, high-level corruption and rule of law going by the wayside, daily life goes on just like before, for a while—until suddenly it doesn’t. In St. Petersburg, Russia, the difference between the summers of 1989 and 1990 was quite striking, because by the summer of 1990 commerce ground to a halt. There were empty shelves in shops, many of which were closed. People were refusing to accept money as payment. Imports dried up, and the only way to procure sought-after items like shampoo was from somebody who had traveled abroad, in exchange for jewelry or other items of value. And that occurred in spite of the fact that the USSR had a better overall business plan: theirs was: “Sell oil and gas, buy everything.” Whereas the business plan of the US has come down to: “Print money, use it to buy everything” (most consumer products, plus ¾ of the oil used for moving them and everything else around). The imported oil is, of course, the Achilles’ heel of US commerce. The US economy was built around the principle that transportation costs don’t matter. Everything travels large distances all the time, mostly on rubber wheels, fueled by gasoline or diesel: people commute to work, drive to go shopping, taxi their children to and from various activities; goods move to stores in trucks; and the end product of all this activity—trash—gets trucked long distances as well. All of these transportation costs are no longer negligible; rather, they are fast becoming a major constraint on economic activity. The recurring pattern of the recent years is an oil price spike, followed by another round of recession. You might think that this pattern could continue ad infinitum, but then you’d just be extrapolating. More importantly, there is a reason to think that this pattern comes to a rather sudden end.

WORD: Tom Murphy: Time to be honest with ourselves about our looming energy risks | Energy Bulletin

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-05-15/tom-murphy-time-be-honest-ourselves-about-our-looming-energy-risks-0

More on schools and their willful blindness to the impending changes

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-04-04/education-post-carbon-world

Imagine the world decades from now, during an era of collapse to a post-carbon world with a new and changing climate, with former fossil-fuel addicts thrashing around trying to find food and water and other stuff, but not understanding who/what caused all this pain and suffering or what to do about it.  That's a world in which the education system has failed miserably to do its most important job:  prepare people for the future based on a factual understanding of the past, combined with tools for the real (not virtual) future.  The author of this article is one of the damn few educators who gets it.
cheers anyway,
Tooj 

Even after bankruptcy, trapped by student debt

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/04/25/4441598/even-after-bankruptcy-trapped.html?source=Patrick.net

This is ultimately going to be what forces schools to change from top to bottom -- that the universities and colleges are producing thousands of people who are not prepared to grapple with any of the significant problems and challenges facing their own society, much less the plight of people in less advantaged places. 

Eventually word gets out, and the market for overpriced degrees collapses, at which point the absurdity of making high-school nothing but a college-test-prep program will be evident for all to see.

Our Fiendish Predicament Summed Up in a Single Graph

What fossil fuels made possible, the inexorable end of fossil fuels will make impossible to continue

More on our predicament: Business trying to silence the warnings on climate

http://jonathanturley.org/2012/02/18/cyberbulling-scientists-using-threats-in-an-effort-to-silence-the-discussion-on-climate-change/

Cyberbullying Scientists: Using Threats in an Effort to Silence the Discussion on Climate Change « JONATHAN TURLEY

The Great Train Robbery ... By the Trainsters at Union Pacific, trying to hold US up!

House Bill 4028A: Oregon’s Union Pacific Gravy Train

 “If their tracks need repairs, it’s their job as a business, not ours as taxpayers, to fix them.” Jody Wiser, Tax Fairness Oregon, Willamette Week, Feb. 8, 2012.

 
 “Gravy Train,” the recent Willamette Week story by Kara Wilbeck, notesthat last year, Union Pacific Railroad had profits of $3.3 billion. Yet since 2006, under a law stating that Oregon should subsidize transportation businesses that “lack capital,” the state has already handed out $24.7 million tax dollars to this corporate giant.

The current legislative session in Salem is slashing school budgets and senior services, potentially closing a jail and counting every penny. ButHB 4028A is trying to add another $10 million to the $40 million already in the fund called “ConnectOregon,” for gifts to businesses and to public entities for multi-model (non-highway) transportation projects.

Of the 69 grant applications – most ask the public to do most of the spending
·       48 are for grants where the project owner will pay 25% or less of the project cost.  Thus the public through ConnectOregon will be covering 75% or more of the cost. 

·       11 applicants will cover 25% to 50% of cost.

·       10 applicants will cover 51% to 75% of the cost.

Of course there may be other grants or loans coming to the project owners from other sources, which would further reduce their own contributions. 
 
Of that additional $10 million for ConnectOregon, $8.2 million could go to UP. The gravy train just keeps rolling along.

Why is UP once again seeking Oregon subsidies? The corporate giant’s mouthpiece Aaron Hunt answers in discredited terms that should make taxpayers grab for their wallets: the corporation just “wanted to partner with the public” and create “trickle down throughout the economy.”

This is the type of taxpayer rip-off that giant corporations like to arrange behind the scenes, even as their mouthpieces are complaining about “big government.” 

In this short session, the next decision point in the state legislature is coming right away in the Capital Construction Sub-Committee of the Ways and Means Committee. Legislators there could add the extra $10 million--but passing out more cash to corporations is not acceptable. 

Please phone or email one (or more) of the committee members now and say “NO” to the $10 million ConnectOregon allotment in HB 4028A. Tell them to use our tax dollars to pay teachers to teach, not to pay for corporate-owned railroad tracks. Thank you.

Click here for talking points and the phone numbers and e-mail addresses of committee members.

Tax Fairness Oregon

Use your First Amendment freedom to demand labels on gene-tampered phoods

Image via WikipediaThe FDA is on the brink of approving genetically TAMPERED [correct term, not "engineered"] salmon for human consumption. This would be the first genetically TAMPERED animal on supermarket shelves in the United States. The salmon is engineered to produce growth hormones year-round that cause the fish to grow at twice the normal rate. The government already requires labels to tell us if fish is wild-caught or farm-raised – don't we also have a right to know if our salmon is genetically TAMPERED? Without labels, we'll never know.

More than forty countries, including Russia and China, already require labels on genetically TAMPERED foods. As an American, I firmly believe that we deserve the same right to know what we are eating.

That's why I signed a petition to U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which says:

"Commissioner Hamburg, we urge the FDA to require the mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods. We have a right to know about the food we eat and what we feed our families, but under current FDA regulations, we don’t have that ability when it comes to genetically engineered foods.

Polls show that more than 90% of Americans support mandatory labeling. Such near-unanimity in public opinion is rare. Please listen to the American public and mandate labeling of genetically engineered foods."

Will you sign this petition? Click here

Thanks!

Must-read: why we need to massively overhaul school and public health funding priorities

This piece from the NY Times (and native Oregonian) Bill Kristof two Sundays ago is a guaranteed finalist as one of the most important op-eds of 2012 already.  As the states and cities like Salem find themselves increasingly bankrupted by physical constraints making growth economics a distant memory, never to return, we need to spend more and more (of the less and less we can afford) on kids at the most important years for brain development.  Essentially, the sooner the better.

Instead our politics is driving us exactly away from this strategy ... So we kill elementary school librarians and the highest performing elementary schools to preserve the funding for sports at the comprehensive mega high schools, despite the fact that we get a much greater return on the limited dollars the earlier they are spent in helping kids.  We employ battalions of people to squander their energies on exhorting the children damaged by poverty to act like the children of the upper middle class.  We ignore mounting evidence about the crucial roles of play and physical activity and turn early grades into mini college test prep centers.

Kristof:

Perhaps the most widespread peril children face isn't guns, swimming pools or speeding cars. Rather, scientists are suggesting that it may be "toxic stress" early in life, or even before birth.

This month, the American Academy of Pediatrics is issuing a landmark warning that this toxic stress can harm children for life. I'm as skeptical as anyone of headlines from new medical studies (Coffee is good for you! Coffee is bad for you!), but that's not what this is.

Rather, this is a "policy statement" from the premier association of pediatricians, based on two decades of scientific research. This has revolutionary implications for medicine and for how we can more effectively chip away at poverty and crime.

Toxic stress might arise from parental abuse of alcohol or drugs. It could occur in a home where children are threatened and beaten. It might derive from chronic neglect — a child cries without being cuddled. Affection seems to defuse toxic stress — keep those hugs and lullabies coming! — suggesting that the stress emerges when a child senses persistent threats but no protector.

Cues of a hostile or indifferent environment flood an infant, or even a fetus, with stress hormones like cortisol in ways that can disrupt the body's metabolism or the architecture of the brain.

The upshot is that children are sometimes permanently undermined. Even many years later, as adults, they aremore likely to suffer heart disease, obesity, diabetes and other physical ailments. They are also more likely to struggle in school, have short tempers and tangle with the law.

The crucial period seems to be from conception through early childhood. After that, the brain is less pliable and has trouble being remolded.

"You can modify behavior later, but you can't rewire disrupted brain circuits," notes Jack P. Shonkoff, a Harvard pediatrician who has been a leader in this field. "We're beginning to get a pretty compelling biological model of why kids who have experienced adversity have trouble learning."

This new research addresses an uncomfortable truth: Poverty is difficult to overcome partly because of self-destructive behaviors. Children from poor homes often shine, but others may skip school, abuse narcotics, break the law, and have trouble settling down in a marriage and a job. Then their children may replicate this pattern.

Liberals sometimes ignore these self-destructive pathologies. Conservatives sometimes rely on them to blame poverty on the poor.

The research suggests that the roots of impairment and underachievement are biologically embedded, but preventable. "This is the biology of social class disparities," Dr. Shonkoff said. "Early experiences are literally built into our bodies."

The implication is that the most cost-effective window to bring about change isn't high school or even kindergarten — although much greater efforts are needed in schools as well — but in the early years of life, or even before birth.

"Protecting young children from adversity is a promising, science-based strategy to address many of the most persistent and costly problems facing contemporary society, including limited educational achievement, diminished economic productivity, criminality, and disparities in health," the pediatrics academy said in its policy statement.

One successful example of early intervention is home visitation by childcare experts, like those from the Nurse-Family Partnership. This organization sends nurses to visit poor, vulnerable women who are pregnant for the first time. The nurse warns against smoking and alcohol and drug abuse, and later encourages breast-feeding and good nutrition, while coaxing mothers to cuddle their children and read to them. This program continues until the child is 2.

At age 6, studies have found, these children are only one-third as likely to have behavioral or intellectual problems as others who weren't enrolled. At age 15, the children are less than half as likely to have been arrested.

Evidence of the importance of early experiences has been mounting like snowflakes in a blizzard. For example, several studies examined Dutch men and women who had been in utero during a brief famine at the end of World War II. Decades later, those "famine babies" had more trouble concentrating and more heart disease than those born before or after.

Other scholars examined children who had been badly neglected in Romanian orphanages. Those who spent more time in the orphanages had shorter telomeres, a change in chromosomes that's a marker of accelerated aging. Their brain scans also looked different.

The science is still accumulating. But a compelling message from biology is that if we want to chip away at poverty and improve educational and health outcomes, we have to start earlier. For many children, damage has been suffered before the first day of school.

As Frederick Douglass noted, "It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."

Related articles

• A Poverty Solution That Starts With a Hug (nytimes.com)
• Poverty-related stress affects readiness for school (eurekalert.org)

For those wondering why Salem's budget is crunching

Our Finite World's excellent Gail the Actuary explains:

Economic Expansion vs. Economic Contraction

     It is easy to assume that economic contraction is similar to economic expansion, just with the sign reversed, but anyone who has lived through the last few years knows that this is not the case.

     For example, on the way up, it appears that the size of the current economic system easily “scales” upward, as the economy grows. The number of available workers gradually rises, as does the number of job openings, and the amount of goods and services produced. Everything rises together, and the system “works.”

     On the way down, there is a good deal more “stickiness” to the system. There are now seven billion people on the planet, and they all would like to eat on a regular basis. There are perhaps two-thirds as many potential workers, and most of them would like to have jobs, even if the economy is contracting, and their particular job is disappearing.

     Another issue is that we have built millions of miles of electrical transmission, oil and gas pipelines, water and sewer pipelines, and roads. It becomes difficult to abandon parts of these systems, even if total resources for maintaining the system are constricted. If we think of the situation in terms of tax dollars (or charges by utility companies), it becomes increasingly difficult to collect enough tax dollars (or utility charges) to pay for the inflated cost of replacing worn out roads, pipelines, and electrical transmission, as the rising price of oil makes these costs rise much more rapidly than salaries.

Figure 2. Repaying loans is easy in a growing economy, but much more difficult in a shrinking economy.

     Another issue is debt repayment (Figure 2). We are used to an ever-expanding economy, where future goods and services produced will always be greater than those produced this year. As long as this growth pattern persists, our system of long-term financing of major expenditures, even if the expenditures are not really income producing, can continue. For example, we are able to buy homes with 20 or 30 year loans, and governments are able to continue borrowing, claiming that they will have more funds to repay loans (with interest) in the future. Once the situation changes to a shrinking economy, it becomes much more difficult to repay loans, and the financial system quickly reaches the risk of collapsing, due to multiple debt defaults.

     A related issue is that of financing a new or expanding company. If the economy continues to grow, investment in a new company is likely to make sense because the value of the company can be expected to grow as the demand for products of the type it sells continues to grow. But if it becomes clear that the economy is on a path of long-term contraction, the possibility of failure within a few years rises, so new investment makes much less sense. . . .

By the way: there is no "away" where pollution goes

Image by subadei via Flickr

Probably the most insight you get by serving aboard a nuclear submarine that travels submerged for months at a time is that there is no place called "away" where you can throw things.  You have to have a plan for each and every item you bring aboard, because everything you discharge, you discharge into the ocean where you are drawing your water.

Then you realize that Earth is just a large submarine with a tiny habitable living quarters and a whole hell of a lot of passengers.  There is no "away" here either:

Women's use of contraceptive pill may be linked to men's prostate cancer risk.

HealthDay (11/14, Reinberg) reported, "With the vast increase in the use of the contraceptive pill over the past 40 years, the amount of estrogen entering the water supply may be partly responsible for the increased incidence of prostate cancer around the world," according to research published in BMJ Open. Researchers looked at "data from the International Agency for Research on Cancer and the United Nations World Contraceptive Use report to identify the rates of prostate cancer and prostate cancer deaths as well as the proportion of women using contraceptive pills." The investigators "looked at some 100 countries and found that where the use of oral contraceptives was high, so was the rate of prostate cancer."