An opportunity to take the time to make a statement about our lives and what matters rather than playing cards at a senior citizen center
Ellen Goodman: "In little over a century, Americans have gone from a life expectancy of 47 to one of 78. By 2025 there will be 66 million Americans over 65. The decisions that we make individually and collectively about how to spend this gift of time will reshape the country.... This narrative of older age redefines senior citizenship as less a list of entitlements than a worksheet of contributions. And it fits a popular image of our generation."
_____________________________________
Silent Spring would be buried by the doubting cable commentators and never get published today
Carson's survey of the research on pesticides opens in a most unscientific fashion with a tale about an American town that has suffered a series of plagues. At chapter's end, Carson acknowledges that the town is an imaginary one, but lest the tale be dismissed as mere fantasy, she hastens to add that each of the catastrophes it catalogs ‘‘has actually happened somewhere, and many real communities have already suffered a substantial number of them.’’
________________________________________
Corruption at the heart of democracy
"Bill Hartung’s Prophets of War is a searing indictment of the collusion between Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon, and Congress to boost the company’s profits at the expense of the American taxpayer, making the country on occasion less, rather than more, secure. He documents the company’s shameful corporate history at the apex of the military-industrial complex in meticulous detail. With dry humour he reveals the pork-barrel politics that have sustained Lockheed Martin but that undermine America’s democracy. A must-read for anyone concerned about the health of that democracy and the folly of so much of the national security discourse that underpins it."
—Andrew Feinstein, former ANC Member of Parliament and author of After the Party: Corruption, the ANC and South Africa's Uncertain Future
____________________________________________
The worlds of Aldus Huxley and George Orwell
Bob Burnett, Huffington Post: "There was one 2010 event that, in terms of its long-term impact, loomed above the others, the Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court Decision.... We've entered a new phase of American history, the Corporatist period where multinational corporations have unbridled political influence. This movement started before the Citizens United decision, but the Roberts' Supreme Court has accelerated the pace and thereby profoundly weakened our democracy."
______________________________________
We’re drowning in optimism and our heads are stuck in the sand
Randall Amster, Foreign Policy in Focus: "For the coming year, rather than short-term resolutions, I'm issuing an ongoing challenge that is at once personal and political.... I believe that 2011 will be the year that the majority of people in the world demonstrably turn away from the brink of destruction and embrace a spirit of positive innovation and creative intervention in their communities.... The task of unearthing the positive news in our midst is truly a great challenge that will thoroughly engage our searching minds. In that spirit, I sincerely wish you all a very happy new year – and I look forward to creating it together."
_______________________________________________\
Perpetual war
Michael True, Truthout: "At the beginning of the new year, consequences of 'life at war' stare us in the face: the victimization of military and civilian populations and a huge national debt, including an annual military budget that is larger than all military budgets in the world combined and includes $5 billion that remains unaccounted for in Iraq, as well as aid to Pakistan that has wound up in the hands of the Taliban.... Any responsible citizen acknowledges this painful history in the hope of redirecting US foreign policy in the future. The purpose of reclaiming it is not to open old wounds, but to encourage legislative and direct action committed to peacemaking. It is a call to critique the policies and competence of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the national security apparatus responsible for these disasters."
_________________________________________________
Government, protecting the people or protecting the corporations. Sanjay Gupta about Toxic Towns on CNN
Since 1998, the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) – which is a division of the Centers for Disease Control – has conducted an Exposure Investigation of dioxins in Mossville, Louisiana, an historic African American community located next to the city of Lake Charles.
The Exposure Investigation, a collaborative effort involving the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),documents that Mossville residents have an average level of dioxins that is 3 times higher than the average level of dioxins in the general U.S. population. However, the Exposure Investigation entirely fails to identify the sources of the dioxins harming the health and environment of residents. Dioxins are the most toxic chemicals known to science, and scientists have determined that there is no safe level of dioxin compounds. Dioxins can cause cancer, reproductive damage, and extensive harm to fetal and child development. Dioxin compounds build up in the human body where they are stored in fatty tissues, such as breast milk, and can be passed on to the unborn during pregnancy and lactation.
Mossville residents are surrounded by 14 toxic industrial facilities, several of which routinely release dioxins into the air, water, and land. Residents have long complained about health problems that a university health study has linked to industrial pollution. However, governmental agencies continue to issue permits which allow the industrial facilities to increase the amount of toxic pollution, including dioxins, that they release into the Mossville community.
Notwithstanding ATSDR’s and EPA’s obligation to protect human health and the environment, and
Mossville residents’ repeated demands that these agencies identify and eliminate the sources of the dioxin exposures, ATSDR and EPA have never attempted to investigate any link between the local industrial dioxin emissions and the dioxins detected in the blood and environment of Mossville residents.
This report presents an analysis of the data collected by these very same agencies, which these agencies could have, but failed to analyze. As discussed in this report, the following local industrial facilities are the sources of the elevated dioxin levels in the Mossville community:
Conoco Phillips oil refi nery
Entergy Roy S. Nelson coal-fi red power plant
Georgia Gulf vinyl manufacturing facility
Lyondell chemical manufacturing facility
PPG Industries vinyl manufacturing facility
Sasol chemical manufacturing facility.
http://www.ehumanrights.org/docs/REVISED%20MOSSVILLE%20REPORT%20(PRESS,%20FULL).pdf
"...an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society - cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian." -Howard Zinn,
No comments:
Post a Comment