Sunday, September 14th, 2014
TIFFANY STECKER, - E & E Publishing
Stephan: This is the latest in the bee crisis. It is so shameless and greedy it is breath-taking. Monsanto, Syngenta. These are evil corporations.
Please contact the EPA and let them know you are opposed to this. The decision will directly effect your life.
Seed and crop management company Syngenta Crop Protection LLC has petitioned U.S. EPA to increase the legal tolerance for a neonicotinoid pesticide residue in several crops — in one case increasing the acceptable level by 400 times, according to a notice in today’s Federal Register.
Syngenta, one of the biggest manufacturers of pesticides, wants to increase the allowable threshold for residues of thiamethoxam, a pesticide that has been linked to the decline of honeybees and other pollinators over the past several decades.
The petition would apply to alfalfa, barley, corn and wheat, both the crop itself and the straw and stover left over after cultivation. Syngenta is seeking to increase the levels from as low as 1.5 times for stover from sweet corn to as much as 400 times for hay from wheat.
Neonicotinoid pesticides are one of many factors that scientists say have caused a dramatic decline in pollinators, insects and animals that help crop production by carrying pollen from one plant to another. The United States has lost more than half its managed honeybee colonies in the last 10 years, according to the Pollinator Partnership, a nonprofit dedicated to the protection of pollinators and their ecosystems.
Scientists say neonicotinoids can suppress bees’ […]
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Sunday, September 14th, 2014
LYDIA SAAD, - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: This is our social temperature and it is not good. How would you define a country where better than three out of four people living the country are unhappy and unsatisfied. And the trend is downwards. I don't know what it is going to take, but we are building up to an explosion. It would be desirable if this could be channeled into the 2014 elections in which the House majority is reduced, the Democrats retain the Senate. And, as long as I am wishing, that a Supreme Court vacancy occurs in the Rightist wing during Obama's tenure. Unfortunately that isn't what the polls say will happen. But it could if people would vote.
Click through to see the graphs.
GALLUP
PRINCETON, NJ — It is not the worst of times, but it is far from the best of times when it comes to Americans’ perceptions on how things are going in the country. Just shy of one in four Americans, 23%, are currently satisfied with the direction of the country, while 76% are dissatisfied. This marks the 10th consecutive month that satisfaction has fallen between 23% and 25% — a remarkably narrow range in a measure that has reached as high as 70% and as low as 7% since 2000.
Percentage Satisfied With Direction of the U.S.
The latest results are from the 2014 Gallup Poll Social Series: Governance survey, conducted Sept. 4-7.
This month’s rating also matches the average so far in 2014, which is down slightly from an average 24% in 2013, but up from 17% in 2011. The main difference between satisfaction in 2014 and those prior years is the stability seen this year.
From a longer-term perspective, however, Americans’ satisfaction with the way things are going has been relatively stable over the past four years […]
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Saturday, September 13th, 2014
EMILY ATKIN, - Think Progress
Stephan: If you live near a Fracking operation pay close attention to this report, and act occordingly. I am not surprised at its findings. Just another example of how corporate profits trump wellness. It is the hallmark of our culture.
CREDIT: AP PHOTO/MATT ROURKE
People living close to natural gas wells in southwestern Pennsylvania are more than twice as likely to report respiratory illnesses and skin problems than those living farther away, according to a new study from Yale University.
Dr. Peter Rabinowitz, a former Yale School of Medicine professor who now teaches at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health, got the results by randomly surveying 180 households with 492 people in Washington County, Pennsylvania. Washington County is in the heart of the Marcellus Shale, one of one of America’s fracking hotspots – and arguably the epicenter of fracking-related pollution complaints and industrial accidents.
Of those surveyed, Rabinowitz found that 39 percent of people living less than 0.6 miles from a gas well reported upper-respiratory problems like sinus infections and nosebleeds, compared to just 18 percent of people living more than 1.2 miles away. For skin problems like rashes, 13 percent living close to the wells reported irritation, compared to only 3 percent living further away who said the same.
Rabinowitz said […]
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Saturday, September 13th, 2014
Stephan: This is how completely out of whack the American educational system has become at the college level. Student debt now exceeds credit card debt.
The rising cost of higher education is dogging Americans into retirement, with people aged 65 and older still carrying some $18.2 billion in unpaid student loans, according to a federal report released on Wednesday.
While the Government Accountability Office report noted that relatively few U.S. households headed by people 65 or over are carrying student loans, the value of the unpaid debt had spiked from $2.8 billion in 2005, before the financial crisis.
That debt is concentrated in a small number of homes. Just 4 percent of households headed by someone 65 or older carried student loan debt as of 2010, up from 1 percent in 2004.
“Some may think of student loan debt as a just a young person’s problem,” said U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, who heads a Senate committee on aging and held a hearing on the findings on Wednesday. “As it turns out, that’s increasingly not the case.”
The $18.2 billion figure includes loans related to both the holders’ education, often for those who have returned to school later in life, and their children’s education, the report found.
Across the United States, about 40 million Americans are paying back some $1.1 trillion in student loan debt.
Student loans are a particular concern because […]
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Saturday, September 13th, 2014
PAUL KRUGMAN, - The New York Times
Stephan: Paul Krugman has made some errors as all economists do occasionally, but day to day, pound for pound, he and Joseph Stiglitz are correct consistently more than anyone else. The point he is making is absolutely on the mark. Inflation hysteria is nonsense, yet I read it and hear it every day. Krugman is an outlier. Corporate media generally don't seem to have the courage to call out the Inflationists as the frauds they are.
Wish I’d said that! Earlier this week, Jesse Eisinger of ProPublica, writing on The Times’s DealBook blog, compared people who keep predicting runaway inflation to ‘true believers whose faith in a predicted apocalypse persists even after it fails to materialize.” Indeed.
Economic forecasters are often wrong. Me, too! If an economist never makes an incorrect prediction, he or she isn’t taking enough risks. But it’s less common for supposed experts to keep making the same wrong prediction year after year, never admitting or trying to explain their past errors. And the remarkable thing is that these always-wrong, never-in-doubt pundits continue to have large public and political influence.
There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear. But as regular readers know, I’ve been trying to figure it out, because I think it’s important to understand the persistence and power of the inflation cult.
Whom are we talking about? Not just the shouting heads on CNBC, although they’re certainly part of it. Rick Santelli, famous for his 2009 Tea Party rant, also spent much of that year yelling that runaway inflation was coming. It wasn’t, but his line never changed. Just two months ago, he told viewers that the Federal Reserve is ‘preparing […]
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