Monday, January 16th, 2012
DAVID ATKINS, - Hullabaloo
Stephan: This qualifies as a huge deal. Of the 100 plant species that provide food 70 depend on bee pollination. If the bees completely collapse our lives are going to change dramatically. And this crisis is almost certainly the result of industrial agriculture, and the pesticides and insecticides upon which it depends.
We are literally allowing a small group of corporations to enrich themselves by putting all of humanity on the line. A very bad bargain it seems to me. There is, of course, not a word of this in our political discourse taken up as it is by Biblical fanaticism about loving but same sex marriages, and the war on women. Our values are absolutely wrong side up.
That the panicked news stories about it have died down doesn’t mean that the honeybee die-offs due to ‘colony collapse disorder’ have gone away. It’s still happening with a vengeance, and it’s almost certain that pesticides are to blame:
Although news about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has died down, commercial beekeepers have seen average population losses of about 30 percent each year since 2006, said Paul Towers, of the Pesticide Action Network. Towers was one of the organizers of a conference that brought together beekeepers and environmental groups this week to tackle the challenges facing the beekeeping industry and the agricultural economy by proxy.
‘We are inching our way toward a critical tipping point,’ said Steve Ellis, secretary of the National Honey Bee Advisory Board (NHBAB) and a beekeeper for 35 years. Last year he had so many abnormal bee die-offs that he’ll qualify for disaster relief from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
In addition to continued reports of CCD — a still somewhat mysterious phenomenon in which entire bee colonies literally disappear, alien-abduction style, leaving not even their dead bodies behind — bee populations are suffering poor health in […]
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Monday, January 16th, 2012
RUPERET SHEPHERD, - Medical News Today
Stephan: I have had this story for a few days, and probably should have run it on the 10th, when it came out, but other things just took precedence. In any case, it is just more proof of the madness of the War on Drugs. The assault on the medical marijuana dispensaries, as several readers have written me, has had two main effects: to make suffering people suffer more, and to drive them into illegal dealings.
Journal of the American Medical Association put a dent in the arguments against Marijuana smoking today, with release of a new report showing casual pot smokers might even have stronger lungs than non smokers.
Researchers say that there is good evidence that occasional marijuana use can cause an increase in lung airflow rates and lung volume. Volume is measured as the total amount of air a person can blow out after taking the deepest breath they can.
The study, which was carried out by The University of California, San Francisco, and The University of Alabama at Birmingham, spans over more than two decades and involves more than 5000 men and women, in four American cities : Birmingham, Chicago, Oakland, Calif., and Minneapolis.
One of the study’s co-authors, Stefan Kertesz commented :
‘At levels of marijuana exposure commonly seen in Americans, occasional marijuana use was associated with increases in lung air flow rates and increases in lung capacity … With marijuana use increasing and large numbers of people who have been and continue to be exposed, knowing whether it causes lasting damage to lung function is important for public-health messaging and medical use of marijuana.’
He continues that even at daily usage levels of one joint […]
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Sunday, January 15th, 2012
ELLEN BROWN, - Truthout.org
Stephan: Losing a national government run post office would have terrible and long lasting social consequences.
The Post Office troubles constitute an entirely artificial crisis arising from the conservative drive to break government up and privatize it. Here are some alternatives.
Neither rain nor sleet nor snow may have stopped the Pony Express, but the nation’s oldest and second-largest employer is now under attack. Claiming the United States Postal Service (USPS) is bankrupt, critics are pushing legislation that would defuse the postal crisis by breaking the backs of the postal workers’ unions and mandating widespread layoffs. But the ‘crisis’ is an artificial one, created by Congress itself.
In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), which forced the USPS to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees, many of whom hadn’t even been hired yet. Over a mere ten-year period, the USPS was required to pre-fund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years, something no other government or private corporation is required to do. As consumer advocate Ralph Nader observed, if PAEA had never been enacted, USPS would now be facing a $1.5 billion surplus.
The USPS is a profitable, self-funded venture that is not supported by the taxpayers. It is funded with postage stamps – one of the last vestiges of government-issued money. Stamps are fungible and can be traded at par, […]
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Sunday, January 15th, 2012
LUKE JOHNSON, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: This class issue is a sign of the breakdown of the social structure in the U.S.. There is a tip point where enough people feel they are not getting their fair share, and have no reasonable expectation of ever getting it. When that happens they become alienated from social stability, since it offers them so little. Social change and revolutions often follow.
Significantly more Americans see ‘very strong’ or ‘strong’ class conflict between the rich and poor, according to a survey released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center. The results show that Americans think that conflicts between the rich and poor are stronger than immigrant and native born, black and white and young and old.
In 2009, 47 percent of respondents said there were ‘very strong’ or ‘strong’ conflicts between the rich and poor. In 2011, 66 percent saw the same, possibly signaling that the ‘We are the 99 percent’ rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street has had an impact. The ongoing economic recession also may have magnified class differences as income inequality has risen, continuing a trend occurring in American society since at least the 1970s.
Democrats in general — and President Barack Obama in specific — have also spoken out about income inequality. ‘Now, this kind of inequality — a level that we haven’t seen since the Great Depression — hurts us all,’ Obama said in a December speech in Kansas. The GOP front-runner for the presidency, Mitt Romney, has in turn charged Obama with promulgating the ‘politics of envy’ and said that discussions over the distribution of wealth were ‘fine’ to talk […]
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Sunday, January 15th, 2012
CHERYL CLARK, Senior Editor - Health Leaders Media
Stephan: Yet more evidence of the failure of the Illness Profit System. This imbalance makes sense if one is running healthcare with profit as the first priority. If national wellness were the primary goal this would not be happening.
In 2009, 1% of the nation’s civilian population required healthcare spending that was slightly greater than in 2008, an increase from 20.2% to 21.8% of $1.26 trillion in treatment dollars, according to the latest Statistical Brief from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
That indicates that more than $1 in every $5 healthcare dollars went to treat one out of every 100 people. The annual mean expenditure was $90,061 for those in that 1%.
But over time, there has been ‘some decrease in this concentration at the upper tail of the expenditure distribution,’ according to AHRQ research experts, Steven B. Cohen and William Yu. In the 1996 version of this report, 1% of the population accounted for 28% of the total healthcare expenditures.
The periodic brief captures trend information that helps planners identify the biggest drivers of healthcare costs ‘and the characteristics of the individuals who incur them,’ the brief says.
The top 5% accounted for half of all healthcare expenditures, indicating that focusing on that segment may yield the biggest savings. On the other hand, according to the report, the bottom 50% of the U.S. population, those requiring the lowest amounts of healthcare spending, accounted for only 2.9% of healthcare dollars […]
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