Thursday, September 15th, 2011
TOM PHILPOTT, - Mother Jones
Stephan: The Obama administration has been helping Monsanto spread the gospel of GMO, to the corporation's considerable profit. And doing this even as countervailing research keeps emerging. This story for instance strikes me as self-evident. Nature has been maneuvering around obstacles for billions of years, how could anyone imagine that superinsects would not emerge, particularly given the history of superbugs emerging to bypass all known antibiotics. That Monsanto purports to believe otherwise strikes me as an almost surreal level of hubris. However I don't think they have any illusions. Smart people, they are just buying time until they can develop the next round. Its is the side-effects that are occurring as the result of this ill-conceived hopscotch that are doing the damage. All life is interconnected and interdependent, so there are always unintended consequences. We don't know enough yet to manipulate whole species like this.
As the summer growing season draws to a close, 2011 is emerging as the year of the superinsect-the year pests officially developed resistance to Monsanto’s genetically engineered (ostensibly) bug-killing corn.
While the revelation has given rise to alarming headlines, neither Monsanto nor the EPA, which regulates pesticides and pesticide-infused crops, can credibly claim surprise. Scientists have been warning that the EPA’s rules for planting the crop were too lax to prevent resistance since before the agency approved the crop in 2003. And in 2008, research funded by Monsanto itself showed that resistance was an obvious danger.
And now those unheeded warnings are proving prescient. In late July, as I reported recently, scientists in Iowa documented the existence of corn rootworms (a ravenous pest that attacks the roots of corn plants) that can happily devour corn plants that were genetically tweaked specifically to kill them. Monsanto’s corn, engineered to express a toxic gene from a bacterial insecticide called Bt, now accounts for 65 percent of the corn planted in the US.
The superinsect scourge has also arisen in Illinois and Minnesota. ‘Monsanto Co. (MON)’s insect-killing corn is toppling over in northwestern Illinois fields, a sign that rootworms outside of Iowa may have developed resistance […]
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Thursday, September 15th, 2011
JOHN RONDY, DAVID BAILEY and CYNTHIA JOHNSTON, - Reuters/Raw Story
Stephan: This arises because of the collapse of the family farm economy, migration out of rural areas by the young, the general destruction of the middle class, and the failure of the illness profit system to provide real healthcare. Rural poverty in some areas of the country is beginning to look like the Depression era.
MILWAUKEE — Conventional wisdom might suggest living in the country would be healthier than the city, but that is not necessarily so, according to a study comparing relative health across cities, suburbs and rural areas.
‘Some of these rural areas are quite depressed, impoverished, with poor social and economic factors, and they have bad health outcomes,’ Patrick Remington of the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute said on Thursday.
Remington, who expanded the institute’s annual statewide study to a national study in 2010, said that some of the least healthy places in Wisconsin were small rural areas.
The County Health Rankings takes a snapshot of an area’s health using rates of premature death, low birth weight, disease and risk factors such as smoking, obesity, drinking and crime along with education and employment rates.
One of the main goals of the rankings is to raise community awareness. This year’s study concluded that 48 percent of the healthiest counties were urban or suburban, while 84 percent of the unhealthiest counties were rural.
Suburban counties tended to have the best health outcomes, Remington said.
‘Some cities have better health outcomes than what you would expect,’ Remington added, pointing to some densely populated boroughs of New York as ranking well.
Not […]
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Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
BARBARA EHRENREICH, - Mother Jones
Stephan: This is how to create social revolution.
I completed the manuscript for Nickel and Dimed in a time of seemingly boundless prosperity. Technology innovators and venture capitalists were acquiring sudden fortunes, buying up McMansions like the ones I had cleaned in Maine and much larger. Even secretaries in some high-tech firms were striking it rich with their stock options. There was loose talk about a permanent conquest of the business cycle, and a sassy new spirit infecting American capitalism. In San Francisco, a billboard for an e-trading firm proclaimed, ‘Make love not war,’ and then-down at the bottom-’Screw it, just make money.’
When Nickel and Dimed was published in May 2001, cracks were appearing in the dot-com bubble and the stock market had begun to falter, but the book still evidently came as a surprise, even a revelation, to many. Again and again, in that first year or two after publication, people came up to me and opened with the words, ‘I never thought
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Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
ADAM SERWER, - Mother Jones
Stephan: This is how effective the disinformation campaign on the Right has become. This truly is a parallel universe.
Two-thirds of viewers who say Fox News is the news source they trust most believe discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against minority groups, according to a study released Tuesday by the Brookings Institution and the Public Religion Research Institute. The number, 68 percent, is an exact reversal of the percentage of black people in the same poll who say that discrimination against whites is not as big a problem as discrimination against minorities. The study was based on polling conducted by PRRI.*
The Brookings/PRRI study uses ‘reverse discrimination’-an unfortunate term that suggests a difference in kind, not in degree-to describe anti-white discrimination. Nevertheless, the revelations about the views of consumers who most trust Fox News are disturbing:
Among Americans who say they most trust Fox News, 26 percent say reverse discrimination is a critical issue, nearly twice as many as say discrimination against minority groups is a critical issue (14 percent). At the other end of the spectrum, only 8 percent of Americans who most trust public television say reverse discrimination is a critical issue, compared to 27 percent who say discrimination against minorities is a critical issue.
The financial crisis wiped out 20 […]
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Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
Stephan: This is the hard evidence of the increasingly desperate plight of the American middle-class.
College graduates represent the fastest growing demographic of consumers who have filed for bankruptcy over the past five years, according to a new report out Tuesday.
Wait, really? Our high school guidance counselors always told us that a college degree guaranteed financial success down the road.
Not necessarily so, according to the survey by the Institute for Financial Literacy, which found that wealthier, more educated households are driving the recent spike in bankruptcy filings.
‘We’re told that if you do go and get advanced education, you’re going to be almost guaranteed this economic success,
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