Saturday, March 18th, 2017
Reynard Loki , - Alternet
Stephan: Monsanto is, in my view, an evil corporation, anti-life, anti-wellbeing. Don't buy anything made by a Monsanto owned company and urge family and friends to do the same. Here is a list of those corporations. Print it out and take it with you when you go shopping.
Credit: Sustainablepulse.com
Monsanto suffered a major setback Tuesday when a federal judge in San Francisco unsealed documents that call into question the agrichemical giant’s research practices and the safety of its best-selling herbicide, RoundUp, the world’s most-produced weedkiller. The documents counter industry-funded research that has long asserted Monsanto’s flagship product—used by home gardeners, public park gardeners and farmers, and applied to hundreds of crops—is relatively safe. (emphasis added)
According to the New York Times:
The court documents included Monsanto’s internal emails and email traffic between the company and federal regulators. The records suggested that Monsanto had ghostwritten research that was later attributed to academics and indicated that a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency had worked to quash a review of Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, that was to have been conducted by the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
One of the documents unsealed by Judge Vince Chhabria was an email written by William F. Heydens, a Monsanto executive, giving his colleagues the green light to ghostwrite glyphosate research and then hire academics to put their names on the papers. […]
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Saturday, March 18th, 2017
Peter York, - Politico Magazine
Stephan: When I was quite a young boy the main thing that impressed me about Nazism, was the vulgar grandiosity of the homes and architecture of Hitler and his little band of monsters. I would lie on our library floor and look at the pictures in Life Magazine, Time, and Saturday Evening Post and stare at the pictures and wonder what kind of people lived like that? All the gold, the big statues, the enormous rooms. Even as a child I understood there was something strange about the people who created and chose to live in such spaces.
Trump has always seemed to me notable for his vulgarity and nouveau riche ostentation, but it wasn't until I read this piece, and thought back to my boyhood that I really comprehended that this is a style and like open seeping syphilitic facial cankers it should be seen as an alarm that something is seriously not right.
Trump in his Penthouse, a stunning example of Dictator Chic
Credit:
dictator-chic-lede.jpeg
Ben Baker/Redux
Every good brand needs a theme and an aesthetic, and President Donald Trump has spent decades cultivating both. The theme is success, wealth, winning, and the aesthetic is bright, brassy, loud—or, depending whom you ask, gaudy and fake. In person, the Trump look is that distinctive hair, oversize suits (apparently from the expensive Italian clothier Brioni) and long, shiny red ties. Architecturally, it’s gilt and mirrors, as in his famous marble-and-gold Trump Tower apartment, photographed many times over the years, with its canopy beds, fresco-style ceilings and colossal chandeliers.
Trump’s design aesthetic is fascinatingly out of line with America’s past and present. If you doubt it, note that the interiors of the apartments his company actually sells bear no resemblance to the one he lives in. But that doesn’t mean his taste comes from nowhere. At one level, it’s aspirational, meant to project the wealth so many citizens can only dream of. But it also has […]
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Saturday, March 18th, 2017
Corky Siemaszko, Staff Writer - NBC News
Stephan: In addition to the insanity of guns, an epidemic that is currently killing 33,000 people a year in the U.S. at great profit to the arms industry, we now have a second epidemic also killing 33,000 people a year -- opioids. And once again it is all about profit. The pharmaceutical companies, the distribution companies, the local pharmacies all know what is going on, but they are making so much money and are so morally bankrupt they don't care. Just like the gun makers. In America profit is the only social priority. 66,000 people are dying? So what.
It has gotten so bad the morgues in little towns aren't big enough to store all the bodies. You think I'm exaggerating? Read this report.
Rick Walters, investigator with the Stark County coroner’s office, shows the temporary morgue trailer on loan by the Ohio Department of Health to assist the filled-to-capacity coroner’s morgue.
Credit: Lori Monsewicz / The Canton Repository
CANTON, OHIO — It’s mute testimony to the opioid addiction plague that has been ravaging Ohio — a 20-foot-long air conditioned trailer with room for 18 bodies.
The Stark County coroner in Canton had a “cold storage mass casualty trailer” trucked-in on Saturday because the morgue was overflowing with bodies, nearly half of them victims of drug overdoses.
Their facility in the county jail complex on Atlantic Boulevard holds about a dozen bodies, Stark County investigator Rick Walters told NBC News. Four more arrived unexpectedly at the close of business Friday.
It wasn’t just suspected drug overdoses,” he said. “There were several traffic fatalities. Our problems were multi-faceted.”
But drug overdoses, Walter said, “is clearly a problem.”
“We’re up 20 percent this year,” he said. “Our suicide rate is also up. The drug problem is costing us a significant amount of money. We’re […]
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Stephan: The cuts that are in the Trump budget will not be as proposed. But consider this: Whatever happens to the Trump Budget in the end, in the beginning, where we stand now, it is the expressed moral vision Donald Trump and Mike Pence propose for America.
Mustafa Ali
Mustafa Ali — who helped found the office in 1992 under George H. W. Bush — resigned as the head of the environmental justice program in a letter dated March 7, 2017.
The justice program was created to ensure all people had equal access to a clean and healthy environment, regardless of race, national origin, or income. However, a recent budget proposal from the Trump administration would cut the EPA’s funding by a quarter overall and get rid of the justice program altogether.
“I never saw in the past a concerted effort to roll back the positive steps that many, many people have worked on … I can’t be a part of anything that would hurt those [disadvantaged] communities. I just couldn’t sign off on those types of things,” the Washington Post quoted Ali as saying.
But before he left, Ali penned a letter to the EPA’s new administrator, Scott Pruitt, imploring Pruitt to think before slashing funds. The full text of Ali’s letter was tweeted by Emily Atkin, […]
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Stephan: As I said in the first piece, a budget is a moral document; it is a statement of priorities and humanity. A national budget reveals the first priority around which the society is organized. Is it designed to foster wellbeing? Is it conceived in order to create profit even when wellbing is sacrificed?
This is the Trump-Pence vision.
Credit: Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg
President Donald Trump’s debut budget proposal is a stark declaration of war on the future of the American economy that substitutes a curious mix of ideology and blind nostalgia for any effort to think critically about the actual needs of a 21st-century nation.
The war starts with reducing spending — even though an aging population, plus the government’s role in inherently labor-intensive activities like education and long-term care, militates overwhelmingly in favor of a somewhat larger role for the state. But it continues with the priorities Trump set for where the remaining cash gets spent.
The picture that emerges is overwhelmingly one of nostalgia — more money for men with guns, less money for education, caring, and pointy-headed science. But nostalgia is not memory. The midcentury economy Trump yearns for was, almost by definition, less technologically advanced and educationally intensive than today’s.
But it was an extraordinarily forward-looking time. Propelled by the imperatives of Cold War competition, the United States made […]
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