Loved this opinion piece on Cuba & US reconciling their differences after decades. It essentially explains, in a short summary, how Cuba will end up being a loser, once again, with the thawing of its relationship with business-minded imperialist America.
Couple of paragraphs beautifully summarize American control, direct & indirect, of other so-called sovereign nations, & how American foreign policy is geared towards causing internal strife, if & when, a particular country tries to not toe the American line.
First of these paragraphs is the 4th one in the article below that how Cuba's gangster past & violent history were a product of US government policies, to help make sure that Cuba was continually beset by violence. This feature of American foreign policy can easily be attributed to it when considering violence in Middle Eastern, African, South Asian, South East Asian, & Latin American countries. As I have pointed out in my blog posts multiple times that this violence helps Western developed countries (North American & European) with getting cheap labour (immigration), exorbitant debt loads on developing countries (hence, no investment in education, infrastructure, technology, healthcare etc.), arms & weapons exports (also helps in increasing debt load on developing countries), & of course, keeping the western developed countries as the patrons with whom developing countries will always look towards for any help.
On top of all that, foreign American, Canadian, & European companies get access to the inordinate amounts of riches developing countries have under them; namely, precious metals (diamonds, copper, gold etc.) & fossil fuels (oil & gas). Since, the developing countries are constantly involved in internal & external strife (as explained above & in the 4th paragraph in the article below), they are unable to invest in the development of infrastructure to fully exploit their own riches for their national advantage, & hence, these foreign companies come in & strike deals, which deprive the host nation of its riches for mere pennies in return. Human rights abuses by these companies in their host nations are another matter, which I won't discuss here, but a mere mention should be sufficient for now.
Another paragraph (last one in the article below) is essentially the summary of the opinion piece. It very nicely summarizes that the system of neoliberal plunder that has become the American trademark all over the world could easily be described as organised crime. The aggressive military policies of America ensures that this "system of neoliberal plunder" or "wealth" remains in the hands of a few elites at the top, who in turn, not only listen & follow their American masters, but keep their citizens in line, with the help of strict internal controls.
Countries, which decide to take the route of non-compliance with American demands are relegated to the Stone Age, with the help of American might (political, military, or media) & American friend, the UN. The recent history of past few decades is littered with countries which tried to defy America & how American media (which is pretty much all over the world) successfully did a smear campaign against those countries; Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Soviet Union, North Korea, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile & of course, Cuba. One after another, each of these countries either fell to American might or will in the near future, & when the dust settled, the civilian population of each of these countries, suffered the most. Millions died or have been displaced in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Chile, Vietnam, North Korea, & even in Cuba. So, as the opinion piece correctly surmises that Cuba, & its people, will end up being the loser after it becomes another conquest of America.
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In a recent blog post for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a prominent American membership organisation & think-tank, research associate Valerie Wirtschafter assesses the course of the "Cuban Renaissance" that is apparently now under way thanks to domestic reforms & the diplomatic thaw with the US.
Based on her own mid-Renaissance visit to Cuba earlier this year, Wirtschafter remarks on some counterintuitive aspects of the expanding tourism industry on the born-again island.
"The hotel industry in particular - including the State run Hotel Nacional in Havana - seems to glorify the country's gangster past, a violent history that partially spurred popular support for Fidel Castro's Revolution."
...
Nowhere does the article mention a certain - perhaps far more bewildering - fact: that Cuba's "gangster past" & "violent history" were largely a product of US government policies & machinations by the American Mafia. In the wake of Castro's triumph, both entities continued to help ensure that Cuba was continually beset by counter-revolutionary violence.
Gambling colony, gangster state
Historian Jack Colhoun documented the evolution of the nexus between the American state & organised crime in his exhaustively researched book "Gangsterismo: The United States, Cuba and the Mafia, 1933 to 1966".
Cuba's debut as what Colhoun called a "neocolony" of the US took place at the end of the 19th century when the latter intervened in the Cuban war of independence from Spain, effectively nipping the whole "independence" option in the bud & appointing itself Cuba's new master.
The arrangement led to the US appropriation of Cuban territory for a naval base-cum-future-torture-centre at Guantanamo Bay, along with other goodies. By the mid-20th century, Colhoun wrote, Cuba had become "a virtual economic appendage" of the US, with Americans controlling many of its sugar mills, railways, & utilities, & inundating the island with US brands.
The author detailed how the establishment of a "mafia gambling colony" in Cuba starting in the 1930s was facilitated by a special relationship between North American mobsters & Fulgencio Batista, two-time Cuban ruler & one-time dictator. Batista received a cut of the profits from mafia operations & oversaw the conversion of Cuba into a "full-fledged gangster state".
The casinos provided money-laundering opportunities for other lucrative businesses, as well. In 1946, the mafia-run Hotel Nacional hosted a summit of US underworld leaders to lay the foundations for converting the island into a heroin trafficking hub.
No beard, no revolution
When the Cuban revolution brought down the curtain on the gangster state, Colhoun explained, the mobsters regrouped with their corrupt political allies in the Cuban exile movement in the US, where they "squared the circle of gangsterismo" by plotting with the CIA to assassinate Castro.
The CIA also considered less terminal methods for dealing with the Cuban leader ... .
Both the CIA & the mafia sponsored commando raids & sabotage operations in Cuba, the 1961 CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion being merely one of the better known efforts on account of its grandiose failure.
As Colhoun demonstrated, the US joint chiefs of staff even pondered the option of shooting down a civilian airliner & blaming Cuba to serve as a pretext for military intervention. Another proposal entailed staging a "terror campaign" against Cuban exiles, for the same purpose.
Who needs conspiracy theorists when you've got the US government?
Of course, the US could not come right out & say what the real problem with Cuba was: that the revolution had killed the cash cow.
In order to justify its hostile approach to the island, the US instead cast it as an existential threat - over which it was apparently worth risking nuclear armageddon.
Towards a reconquest?
When the two nations finally began patching things up in December of last year, the BBC News observed that, "in Cuba, limited economic reforms carried out by [President] Raul Castro have begun to relax the tight grip of the state and pique the interest of American business".
But while the neoliberals salivate away about business prospects in Cuba, what are the prospects for the average Cuban?
For starters, as Wirtschafter acknowledged in her CFR post, Cuba's current healthcare system "actually provides for the people". That's one thing that can only go downhill in the event of a US economic reconquest of the island. After all, there are loads of profits to be made off of sick people. Ditto for education.
And while the White House claims that its efforts in Cuba are "aimed at promoting the independence of the Cuban people so they do not need to rely on the Cuban state", it is difficult to see how popular independence might be achieved via imperial meddling in a country that already offers universal access to food, shelter, medicine, & other basic rights.
Wirtschafter also noted that opening up the private sector in Cuba "has increased inequality" & that "as Cuban Americans begin to buy properties in Havana and elsewhere in the coming years, they will further exacerbate [socioeconomic] divisions." In other words, we'll be back to where we started.
All of this would no doubt be music to the ears of the American Mafia bosses who connived for years to terminate the Cuban revolution & its leaders.
But the gangsters aren't the only ones deserving flak. The system of neoliberal plunder that has become the US trademark worldwide - requiring aggressive military policies to ensure that the wealth remains in the hands of a few at the expense of the rest - could just as easily be described as organised crime.
Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine.
So, while the residents of the developing world thinks that corruption is non-existent in developed world, the bastion of democracy & honest government in the developed world (US) keeps showing to the world that how much it is a corrupt country.
US unilaterally invades countries & wages wars for one reason only; military & defence industries need more money. Wars in Afghanistan & Iraq, financially helped high-ranking military officials, defence contractors, large businesses involved in defence & military (Raytheon, Lockheed Martin etc.), & of course, all those politicians who not only receive huge sums of money from defence lobbyists, but they also may have personal financial interests with those companies.
Who loses out in these wars? Common foot soldiers who lose their lives, & if not dead, then suffer horrific physical & mental injuries, & of course, the common citizen; the taxpayer.
Common foot soldiers have always been considered expendable by the rich elites, who use them to achieve their own objective; horde more wealth. Romans use to invade neighbouring villages & force the men of those villages to join the Roman army. British & American did the same thing during multiple invasions around the world & Civil War etc., where Indians or African-Americans were forced to fight in wars.
Now, American military uses more sophisticated approach, but the real result is the same. Education is so expensive that poor students think that a few tours of war zones is worth the risk of a free education & boarding. Those poor kids are usually have a non-American background, for example, Latinos or South Asians. They enlist in the army, get trained, go to a foreign country, commit heinous crimes, die or suffer horrific injuries, & come back to America (dead or alive). If alive, American government leaves them alone, to fend for themselves on their own, & all the while, rich elites got their oil & gas contracts (like Halliburton's contracts in Iraq), construction contracts (to build useless facilities like the one profiled in this article), & military & defence contracts to build more weapons or to provide more security to government officials.
The rich business & political elites also don't pay or pay minimal taxes, anyway. Since, they always find some loopholes to get out of paying the government their fair share of being a citizen, somebody else has to pick up the tab. Come the common & poor citizen; the single mother who works multiple shifts to earn enough to support her young family, the hardworking & poor student who works & studies in the hopes of earning a degree one day & making his/her future a bright one, the young couple who tries to earn enough by working multiple shift jobs & seldom seeing each other, just so they can provide all they can to their little family.
Government very regularly, & with strict punctuality, takes taxes from these poor souls, all in the name of providing social benefits to them. But, social benefits are continuously being cut. Those poor citizens don't benefit from those taxes. Those taxes are used as subsidies to large, international businesses to extract more fossil fuels from the ground, to build more weapons for useless wars, & to pay continuously increasing salary packets of career politicians.
Imagine how much American citizens would have benefited from these $36 Millions of their own taxes being used on them as social benefits; how many homeless would've gotten social housing, how many poor kids would've gotten healthy meals with government subsidies, how many poor families would've been able to buy healthy, organic foods for themselves with government subsidies to lower the costs of organic foods, how many poor students would've gotten some help in reducing their education loan (if not completely eliminating those loans) etc.
After all this, the world still thinks American government thinks of its people, first, & then someone else. The world still thinks American government is honest, fair, & free of corruption. The world still thinks America is a land of equality & justice. What America has definitely accomplished is that the world thinks of only great things about America. As someone wise once said that "the Devil's greatest accomplishment was convincing the world that he didn't exist."
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John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), issued a report ... on the construction of the 64,000-square-foot command-&-control facility at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand Province, Afghanistan in 2010. The need to build the facility was justified under plans by President Barack Obama’s administration to increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan.
The building was completed in April 2013, despite requests from some senior Pentagon officials to halt construction. According to the investigators, who visited the site, the facility was “well built” & equipped with new furniture.
However, by that time the US had already begun to withdraw its troops – so there was no need for it. "Ultimately, construction of the building was not completed until long after the surge was over, & the building was never used," the report said.
“The building was never occupied & on Oct. 29, 2014, Camp Leatherneck, including the … building, was closed by the US & transferred to the Afghan government,” the Washington Times quoted the report as saying. “In the end, $36 million in US taxpayer funds was spent on a building the US never used.”
The Afghan Army, which has taken over security duties from US-led forces, is not currently using the building. There were various proposals for the facility, including transforming it into a movie theater & fitness club.
Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, the top-ranking Democrat on the US Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, who first inquired about the case, said: “This is one of the most outrageous, deliberate, & wasteful misuses of taxpayer dollars in Afghanistan we’ve ever seen.”
Sopko, the special inspector general, published a letter calling for an inquiry into the case in July 2013. The Department of Defense conducted two investigations, accusing those responsible for the project of corruption, as the facility allegedly cost $25 million, instead of $36 million. But nothing followed the inquiry.
“When it was clear this building wouldn’t be used, & when 3 commanders requested its cancellation, the Army not only built it anyway but completely failed to hold any officials accountable after all the facts came to light — so I’ll now be fully expecting answers from the Army,” McCaskill said, McClatchy DC reported.
SIGAR recommends holding to account 3 US officers: General-Lieutenant Peter M. Vangjel “in light of his decision to construct…building over the objections of commanders in the field, resulting in the waste of $36 million,” Army Major General James Richardson because of his “failure to carry out a fulsome investigation” & Army Colonel Norman F. Allen for his attempt to "discourage full cooperation" with the report.
Wars in Iraq & Afghanistan have witnessed many cases of misuse of money by the military. For instance, a police base in an Afghan village built, which cost $500,000 from the US military budget, fell apart 4 months after completion because of faulty construction.
The US has the largest military budget in the world – in 2016 it plans to spend more than $600 billion, & some experts believe that even this figure is underestimated.
So, after killing thousands upon thousands of Iraqis & leaving their country in a mess, American leadership is essentially saying, "oops, my bad."
When every sane person from Alaska to Australia & Russia to Chile was uttering the same mantra that attacking Iraq is a huge mistake, American leadership not only turned a deaf ear & blind eye to those sane voices, but they forced / incentivize their allies to join them in this non-sense of a war. Did those sane people had any more intelligence about Iraq than American CIA & British MI6 & all those other spying agencies US has around the world?
As I posted a picture & quote from the 2012 movie, Emperor, recently in my blog, in which a friend of Emperor Hirohito of Japan summarizes the past 100 or so years of international land occupation & warfare, to General Fellers (Matthew Fox). He said that Japan took the Singapore & Malaya from British, & Philippines from the Americans, who themselves took it from the Spanish. Britain & Portugal had long ago occupied Chinese territory (Hong Kong & Macao). But nobody ever tried to convict French, Dutch, British, & American leadership for their wartime transgressions, but Japan does the same thing (which was wrong, of course) once (in World War 2), & Americans are looking very intently in trying to punish the Japanese leaders.
Fast forward a few more decades & Iraq invades Kuwait & Russia annexes parts of Ukraine & US & its allies start talking about illegal land grabs & defending the freedoms of Kuwaitis & Ukrainians. But did Americans think about the Iraqi freedoms when they attacked Iraq & killed thousands of innocent civilians & turned that country in a mess, & all based on lies & deceptions?
Even if we forget about Iraqis for a minute, then what about all those American taxpayers who dutifully paid taxes, while living on meagre incomes themselves, & their own government leaders threw away their taxes, amounting to in the billions, in foreign lands, in international wars, from which US gained nothing, except, perhaps, creating more lone-wolf terrorists & terrorist organizations (ISIS)? What about those almost 5,000 American soldiers who died in Iraq fighting a war based on lies & with no positive results?
All those billions of dollars would've reduced education costs for Americans. All those billions of dollars would've reduced / eliminated healthcare costs for Americans. All those billions of dollars would've created millions of jobs for Americans. All those billions of dollars would've helped American businesses in raising minimum wages (while American government would've reduce the burden of mandatory increased wages through subsidies etc.). All those billions of dollars would've made the lifestyle of Americans much better, all the while creating no terrorists in foreign lands.
In America, the common perception is that a victim doesn't get justice until the criminal is punished, in whatever way punishment befits the crime. In American corporate culture, when an employee makes such a huge mistake where billions of $$$ are sunk in a venture & receives no benefit whatsoever out of that venture, he/she is summarily fired from his/her job.
It seems to me that the rules of life for American leaders is quite different than American public. While one gets punished for a small mistake, the other goes scot-free for killing thousands of Iraqis & Americans, throwing away billions of its own citizens' hard-earned money, & helped in creating a much bigger menace in such terrorist organizations as ISIS & lone-wolf terrorists. This is American democracy & freedom hard at work.
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A dozen years later, American politics has reached a rough consensus about the Iraq War: It was a mistake.
Politicians hoping to be president rarely run ahead of public opinion. So it’s a revealing moment when the major contenders for president in both parties find it best to say that 4,491 Americans & countless Iraqis lost their lives in a war that shouldn’t have been waged.
Many people have been saying that for years, of course. Polls show most of the public have judged the war a failure by now. Over time, more & more Republican politicians have allowed that the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq undermined Republican President George W. Bush’s rationale for the 2003 invasion.
It hasn’t been an easy evolution for those such as Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, now favoured to win her party’s nomination, who voted for the war in 2002 while serving in the Senate. That vote, & her refusal to fully disavow it, cost her during her 2008 primary loss to Barack Obama, who wasn’t in the Senate in 2002 but had opposed the war.
In her memoir last year, Clinton wrote that she had voted based on the information available at the time, but “I got it wrong. Plain & simple.”
What might seem a hard truth for a nation to acknowledge has become the safest thing for an American politician to say — even Bush’s brother.
The fact that Jeb Bush, a likely candidate for the Republican nomination in 2016, was pressured ... into rejecting, in hindsight, his brother’s war “is an indication that the received wisdom, that which we work from right now, is that this was a mistake,” said Evan Cornog, a historian & dean of the Hofstra University school of communication.
Or as Rick Santorum, another potential Republican candidate, put it: “Everybody accepts that now.”
Santorum didn’t always see the war that way. He voted for the invasion as a senator & continued to support if for years. ...
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, as a Republican candidate in 2008, said invading Iraq had been “the right decision.” But on his way to winning the 2012 Republican nomination, Romney said the war never would have happened if US & world leaders had realised Iraq didn’t have the weapons of mass destruction.
It’s an easier question for presidential hopefuls who aren’t bound by family ties or their own congressional vote for the war, who have the luxury of judging it in hindsight, knowing full well the terrible price Americans paid & the continuing bloodshed in Iraq today.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio & Texas Sen. Ted Cruz weren’t in Congress in 2002 & so didn’t have to make a real-time decision with imperfect knowledge. Neither was New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who served an earlier stint in Congress.
All these Republicans said last week that, in hindsight, they would not have invaded Iraq with what’s now known about the faulty intelligence that wrongly indicated Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.
They didn’t go as far, however, as war critics such as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a declared Republican candidate, who says it would have been a mistake even if Saddam were hiding such weapons. ...
Former President George W. Bush & his vice-president, Dick Cheney, still maintain that ousting a brutal & unpredictable dictator made the world safer.
In his 2010 memoir, Decision Points, Bush said he got a “sickening feeling” every time he thought about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction & he knew that would “transform public perception of the war.”
But he stands by his decision.
The war remains a painful topic that politicians must approach with some care.
Jeb Bush, explaining his reluctance to clarify his position on the war’s start, said “going back in time and talking about hypotheticals,” the would-haves & the should-haves, does a disservice to the families of soldiers who gave their lives.
When he finished withdrawing US troops in December 2011, Obama predicted a stable, self-reliant Iraqi government would take hold. Instead, turmoil & terrorism overtook Iraq & American leaders & would-be presidents are struggling with what to do next. The US now has 3,040 troops in Iraq as trainers & advisers & to provide security for American personnel & equipment.
For the most part, the public & the military — like the politicians — are focused less on decisions of the past than on the events of today & how to stop the Daesh militants who have overrun a swathe of Iraq & inspired terrorist attacks in the West.
“The greater amount of angst in the military is from seeing the manifest positive results of the surge in 2007 & 2008 go to waste by misguided policies in the aftermath,” said retired US Army Col. Peter Monsoor, a top assistant to Gen. David Petraeus in Baghdad during that increase of US troops in Iraq.
“Those mistakes were huge & compounded the original error of going into Iraq in the first place,” said Monsoor, now a professor of military history at Ohio State University. “There’s plenty of blame to go around. What we need is not so much blame as to figure out what happened & use that knowledge to make better decisions going forward.”
There's a misconception that obesity happens because people just like to constantly stuff their faces with junk foods. Not necessarily. Obesity is rising all over the world, & poor people are usually more obese or unhealthy than their rich counterparts; be it in the same country / geographical region or thousands of miles apart.
One big factor is processed foods, which is unhealthy causing obesity, diabetes, cholesterol etc., is much cheaper than healthy, organic alternatives. Dairy, poultry, meat, fruits, & vegetables grown / injected with harmful hormones to grow them quicker are also the same chemicals which interfere with humans' internal hormones & organs, to the point that those people become sick by ingesting those harmful chemicals over time.
Since, the income levels of large section of the populace, around the world, is not increasing, & in many cases, actually decreasing (due to joblessness, homelessness, other factors like medical & education expenses etc.), people are forced to buy unhealthy processed foods / produce, even when they know that it's unhealthy & organic alternatives are healthy.
Although, this article gives a nice alternative to government for helping the public with reducing obesity & other related health problems, by taxing processed foods & using those tax proceeds as subsidies towards the organic foods, it also concedes that taxing junk foods has been a disastrous experiment. Although, Mexico is trying this experiment right now, we don't know how it will fare. I'd add on top of that conclusion that politicians need a very strong will to enact such policies, since, processed foods lobbies are very strong & pay very generously to politicians to support processed foods over organics.
As the article points out that the report's co-author, Steve Wiggins, said that almost 6,000 people prematurely died in UK due to unhealthy foods, my suggestion to resolve this crisis would be stop warfare. One may ask how is warfare linked to stopping obesity crisis?
Considering that US & UK invaded Afghanistan & Iraq, when only 3,000 people died in World Trade Center attacks (which was horrible & I'm not belittling those deaths), & then spent billions upon billions, for a decade, in both wars & then in some infrastructure building, & then all that work amounting to nothing (Taliban are back in Afghanistan & it's again become a poppy-growing haven, Iraq is a mess & that mess has helped the rise of ISIS), what if only a fraction of all that money would've spent, domestically, as subsidies on organics & healthier food alternatives?
The amazing thing is time has not passed, yet. Governments all over the world still have time to reverse climate change & obesity in their populations, by taking money out of military-industrial complexes (which are only fuelling insurgencies & terrorism, instead of killing them) & spend that money on their own people, in terms of improving healthcare access, lowering the costs of healthier foods, reducing the costs of post-secondary education, helping in building of more innovative industries & companies (e.g. green industries), which will in turn provide jobs, helping those companies in raising minimum wages, which will in turn help their own public buy cheaper, but healthier, foods.
Being selfish by spending money on your own population help your own public, & also help the world, when unnecessary wars don't create terrorist groups. Killing multiple birds (terrorism, health crisis, climate change etc.) by one stone. Wow, what a common sense & not-such-a-novel idea.
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The decades-long trend for “unhealthy” foods to get cheaper while fruit & vegetables become more expensive is fuelling the global obesity crisis, according to the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) thinktank in London.
It says relative prices for fruit & veg in Brazil, China, Korea & Mexico soared by up to 91% between 1990 & 2012 while prices of some processed foods such as ready meals fell by up to 20% in the same period.
In the UK, the price of an ice cream halved between 1980 & 2012, while that of fresh veg tripled, said the ODI, which suggested that taxes on unhealthy foods matched by subsidies on healthier alternatives could reverse trends resulting in growing proportions of obese & overweight people.
Mexico has imposed taxes on junk food & the ODI said other countries would be closely watching whether this worked.
Its study, covering the four “newly rich” countries as well as the UK & the US, looked at staples such as cereals, root crops & legumes, fruit & veg, “minimally processed” meat, fish & dairy, vegetable oils & fats, animal fats & sugars, & industrially processed foods.
In Mexico, where 7 in 10 adults are overweight or obese, ready meals had become cheaper as the cost of green veg rose, the report says. In Brazil, obesity soared as crisps, biscuits, energy bars & sugary drinks became more widely eaten.
In China, green vegetables became twice as expensive over 2 decades, & in Korea, the price of cabbage, used in many dishes including kimchi, rose by 20%.
Steve Wiggins, one of the report’s co-authors, said: “In Brazil, the consumption of ‘ultra-processed’ ready-to-eat food has risen from 80kg per person per year in 1990 to around 110kg per person per year by 2013. Using the weight of the food as a measure, this is equivalent to each person eating an extra 140 Big Macs a year”, he added.
Wiggins said: “Research in the UK in 2009 predicted that imposing a VAT-style 17.5% tax on less healthy food & using the proceeds to subsidise fruit & vegetables would save between 3,600 & 6,400 premature deaths a year from diet-related disease.
“Even the lower estimate (3,600) is more than twice as many as the amount of people that die on the roads in the UK & a huge effort is put into road safety.”
Previous attempts by countries to introduce taxes on unhealthy foods have proved controversial. Denmark quickly abandoned a 2011 fat tax after a change of government & Conservatives in the UK prefer to rely on voluntary agreements with the food industry to bring about dietary change.
But Wiggins said he did not believe other countries, including in South America, would be deterred by “cultural cringe” or a sense of inferiority to more industrialised states.
Last week, the World Health Organisation & the UK Health Forum told a conference in Prague that almost 75% of men & 67% of women in the UK would be overweight or obese in 15 years time, part of a Europe-wide health crisis that they said could only be averted by decisive action to prevent & tackle obesity by all its governments.
Other research presented to the same conference suggested that any move to introduce taxes on unhealthy foods in the UK & US would not be supported by most people.
Millions are being spent on self-promotion & self-advertisement by Canadian government, but nobody sees this before complaining that taxpayer money is always misappropriated in only the corrupt "developing" countries. "Developed" countries are seemingly all free of corruption & clean. Remember that what you see externally in developed countries is completely different to what is actually happening inside.
Social services are being cut, education budget is being reduced, health budget is constantly decreasing ... all because of not enough of taxpayers' money being in the governments' coffers to spend on the taxpayers' welfare, but there's definitely enough for self-promotion & advertising how great the government is doing.
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What is the proper word? Is it brazen? Shameless? Unprincipled? Immoral? Choose the word that you think best suits the Harper government’s unprecedented use of public money for self-promotion.
Let’s not be precious, of course. Other federal governments have promoted themselves using what the Harper government jokingly calls “hard-working taxpayers’ ” money. None, however, has done it so openly, lavishly, frequently & unashamedly.
With just six months between the budget & October’s federal election, the sluice gate of advertising spending will be open wide. The money will come from taxpayers & from the party itself.
Recently, the government had to report the amount it spent on advertising. It was $75-million a year for 2013-14, up from $69-million the previous year. This being an election year, the figure will likely be higher still. We already know that the government has allocated $7.5-million for spending to tout the budget’s virtues.
That means anyone who watches the forthcoming Stanley Cup playoffs can expect a deluge of advertising, because the government prefers to use hard-working taxpayers’ money in the most expensive time slots: hockey playoffs, Super Bowl, Academy Awards.
The explanation given for this spending is shameless, the kind of explanation that gives politicians a bad name everywhere as systematic liars. We need to spend the money, the government says, in order to explain how taxpayers’ money is being spent. Yet anyone who has watched the Harper government’s advertisements knows they are there for promotion, not information.
They use government websites, too. Check out the Fisheries and Oceans one, for example. There, you will find advertisements for the government’s recent announcement of millions of spending for harbours & ports across the country.
Recently, the Conservative Party sent an urgent letter to its supporters asking for money. After the budget, it said, the party needs money to promote the document’s low-tax, pro-growth policies in the face of what the letter described as the “Liberal” media that always deforms Conservative accomplishments.
The letter conceded briefly that there were a few pro-Conservative voices in the media, but insisted the bulk of the media is systematically hostile. This media-baiting is typical of all Conservative cash appeals: The party is surrounded on all sides by enemies, elites & hostile media voices. Only if supporters give generously can the party’s message be communicated.
Which is ridiculous, of course, since the Liberal media argument flies in the face of AM talk radio, the Sun Media chain (whose leader, Paul Godfrey, is a strident pro-Conservative voice), the National Post, plenty of private television & many other columnists & editorialists across the country. But “them against us” is a proven money-earner for the Conservatives, so they will stick with it.
Before the election writ is issued, parties can spend what they want of their own money. Since the Conservatives have more of it than the Liberals & New Democrats, they will spend this advantage & marry it with the government advertising.
The use of public money to promote the government has been much commented upon, usually negatively. But the Conservatives don’t care about such criticism, believing that their supporters like seeing & hearing positive things about the government. They also believe that many Canadians don’t know where the money comes from for the ads, or they don’t care, having been conditioned to think that all politicians will do just about anything to get re-elected.
Who can blame voters for being cynical?
Obviously, who suffers the most with air pollution & its related illnesses: the poor. And thanks to the government's cutting of the healthcare budgets, those poor can't even get proper healthcare. It's like a double whammy.
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Since the US Clean Air Act’s passage in the 1970s, there have been a steady stream of reports correlating exposure to air pollutants with a variety of health impacts. But in the early days, much of that information was too rudimentary to be of much use. Monitoring technology has improved in the decades since, & state air-quality boards have amassed volumes of actionable data about air pollution.
The increase in available data coupled with advances in chemistry & 3D modeling over the past few years has enabled scientists to identify new particle systems within air pollution. Researchers are now able to determine all the various chemicals & particles that air pollution includes, & to study precisely how these various elements interact with, & in some cases fundamentally change, the human body.
Those advances have led to a rapid increase in published studies about air pollution over the past year, as researchers have focused their work on the interaction between pollution particles & human health. Multiple long-term studies of human health are beginning to produce results, as are ongoing studies of air pollution. 3 studies published just last week illustrate the state of rapidly advancing science around air pollution today.
In one study, Louisiana State University researcher Stephania Cormier reported that a particular type of free radicals (called environmentally persistent free radicals, or EPFRs), formed within the particulate matter emitted by cooking stoves, cars, factories, waste incinerators, wood fires, & cigarettes, can damage human cells.
The findings could have broad implications for businesses, considering that the Supreme Court is currently wrestling with how to interpret the Clean Air Act.
Cormier & her team divided a population of mice into 2 groups, exposing one to EPFRs & the other to no pollution. They then infected both groups with a flu virus.
The pollution-exposed mice were rendered virtually defenseless to the virus: 20% more of them died from the flu. Instead of fighting off the disease, their bodies reacted by triggering an anti-inflammatory signal, Interleukin-10, & switching on both an immune-regulating protein called aryl hydrocarbon receptor & immune cells called regulatory T cells, both of which turn off the body’s defenses against infection.
The researchers also found that the EPFRs caused oxidative stress, an imbalance between the production of free radicals & the ability of the body to counteract or detoxify their harmful effects.
What that means for similarly exposed communities is that asthma & the flu will be more severe for vulnerable members, like infants & the elderly.
More & worse allergies
Another study, published on 22 March by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany, found that common traffic-related air pollutants may make allergies more severe.
The study’s authors conducted lab tests & computer simulations to study the effect of ozone & nitrogen dioxide on a primary birch pollen, Bet v1, & found that both pollutants affected how proteins in the pollen bound together, potentially creating a more potent allergen.
“Our research is showing that chemical modifications of allergenic proteins may play an important role in the increasing prevalence of allergies worldwide,” Christopher Kampf, one of the study’s authors, said in a statement.
Impact on the brain
Yet another study released last week, this one a collaborative effort between researchers at the Institute for the Developing Mind at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles & at Columbia University’s Center for Children’s Environmental Health, found a connection between common pollutants found in a wide range of emissions & cognitive & behavioral impairment.
The study looked at the effects of airborne polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH), a molecule prevalent in emissions from motor vehicles, oil & coal burning, wildfires & agricultural burning, hazardous waste sites, & tobacco smoke as well as charred foods.
The research team selected 40 minority youth, born to Latina or African American women, that Columbia researchers have been following from birth, & used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure their brains.
The Columbia researchers had previously reported that PAH exposure during gestation in this group was associated with multiple neurodevelopmental disturbances, including development delay by age 3, reduced verbal IQ at age 5, & symptoms of anxiety & depression at age 7.
In the group of 40 studied in the MRI test, the researchers found a loss of the brain’s white matter surface, which correlates to slower processing of information & severe behavioral problems, including ADHD & aggression.
Postnatal PAH exposure – measured at age 5 – was found to contribute to additional disturbances in development of white matter in a separate area of the brain, one associated with concentration, reasoning, judgment, & problem-solving ability.
“This sample of 40 was quite ‘pure,’ in that their exposure to other known neurotoxicants was minimal, so we have more confidence in being able to attribute the brain abnormalities to the effects of prenatal & early childhood exposure to PAH,” Peterson said.
While the study group was small, Peterson said these results emphasize what we already know about the harmful effects of tobacco & add to the growing base of knowledge about the impacts of other sources of air pollution. Given the mounting evidence, he said, clinicians should educate prospective parents about these risks, especially in early pregnancy.
Peterson said that in less urban areas, exposure to pollutants from wildfires, agricultural burning & hazardous waste sites might be more relevant, & that women & children should remain indoors & use air conditioners as much as possible to avoid the airborne products of these fires.
“As the link between air-borne pollutants & adverse brain changes is linear & seems not to have any threshold that defines safe & unsafe exposure, any reduction in exposure during the most active periods of brain development – in fetal life & in early childhood – will be helpful.”
Translating research into action
According to the most recent American Lung Association State of the Air report, more than half of Americans live in areas with dangerously high levels of air pollution.
Children are the most severely impacted by air pollution, both in utero & in early childhood.
Air pollution also remains an issue of class & race. The dominant sources of pollution – traffic, industrial emissions, energy-related emissions (from oil refineries & coal plants), & hazardous waste – all disproportionately affect low-income & minority communities.
The quickest way to improve the air quality of all communities is increased state & federal regulation of the sources of air pollution. To that end, the US Supreme Court is due to address 2 major Environmental Protection Agency rules this summer, one that aims to regulate cross-state air pollution & one that would require better pollution controls on coal power plants.
Both have been criticized for being expensive & onerous to implement, but Supreme Court justices in favor of the rules have pointed to the EPA’s obligation to protect public health, not private profits.
Judge Judith W Rogers wrote as much in the majority opinion on the EPA’s mercury rule, which would require coal power plants to install scrubbers that would limit mercury emissions, costing them $9.6bn a year. Rogers said the EPA’s focus on “factors relating to public health hazards, & not industry’s objections that emission controls are costly” should motivate Congress to make appropriate & necessary regulatory rules.
Moreover, because the scrubbers required would also reduce other air pollutants, the EPA has estimated that the rule would save $26bn to $89bn per year in healthcare costs. The latest batch of air pollution research helps support that claim.
Like the world didn't have enough ways to discriminate against our fellow human beings, that now we have "genoism" ... discriminate based on one's genetics. Besides discrimination, companies now can exploit your DNA info for their own nefarious purposes, like they didn't have enough of our personal info, already.
“This is being marketed as a fun thing to do,” says Bev Heim-Myers, chair of the Canadian Coalition For Genetic Fairness, an organization advocating for legislation banning discrimination based on genetic test results. “But it can go from fun to devastating. This information can then be shared & used against the person. Until we have laws protecting genetic information, this is a dangerous thing.”
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On a midweek morning last month, Tim Cottee clicked shut his office door, woke his computer & girded himself for a piece of life-changing news. Weeks earlier, the 42-year-old executive at a Winnipeg financial services company had signed up with 23andMe, a California-based company that provides DNA testing & health information to Canadians over the web. His results were now in ... & he was feeling a mix of excitement & dread: 6 years ago, his mother had died at 69 of Alzheimer’s disease, & these results would reveal whether Cottee was carrying a mutation of the APOE gene known as the e4 variant, the strongest hereditary risk factor for Alzheimer’s.
Cottee is not the first person to suspect a Trojan horse is lurking in his DNA. The atavistic fear of flaws in our biological coding is an inescapable feature of the genetic era, going back to the mapping of the human genome in 2003. What’s changed is the ease with which we can put those misgivings to the test. Cottee is one of about 20,000 in this country who have swallowed hard & clicked on their 23andMe health results since the firm took advantage of a gap in Canadian laws 5 months ago & began offering its health profiles to members living north of the border. For $199, the company couriers its members a “collection kit”—essentially, a test tube into which you spit—which goes back to the company’s laboratories in the US for genotyping. Within weeks, members can log on to the company’s website to view a raft of information ranging from the amusing (are you predisposed to hate cilantro?) to the soul-crushing (are you predisposed to Parkinson’s disease?).
Not everyone is psychologically prepared—especially those who had been tested so they could trace their genealogy, the other arm of 23andMe’s thriving online enterprise. “I had a bit of a cry,” said Candace, a 47-year-old mother of two from Brantford, Ont., who learned she has one copy of the e4 variant (she asked that her identity be withheld). “It’s like, whoa, I didn’t know this was in me. Oh my god, what if I pass it on? It’s very jarring, at first.” So weighty are the findings, & so challenging to place in proper perspective, that in November 2013, the US Food & Drug Administration sent a letter to 23andMe asking it to stop providing health results to its American members. The service amounts to a medical diagnostic device that the FDA had not yet approved for marketing, the letter said. 23andMe quickly complied.
The company has faced no such roadblock in Canada. Here, direct-to-consumer DNA testing has fallen through the yawning chasm known as the constitutional division of powers. Health Canada says the service falls under the jurisdiction of the provinces, while the provinces show little interest in regulating testing that is done outside their borders (a spokesman for the Ontario ministry of health said they don’t consider it their jurisdiction). No surprise, then, that 23andMe has ramped up efforts to market its genetic health service north of the border since the FDA clipped its wings. Canada, in the meantime, remains the only G8 country without some sort of law governing how genetic test results can be used by insurers & employers, despite warnings that people who receive bad news could face discrimination when they try to obtain coverage or get jobs.
All of which suggests the country is no more ready for the new era of genetic health testing than the thousands of Canadians on whom 23andMe has been dropping eye-opening &, in some cases, heartbreaking information. “This is being marketed as a fun thing to do,” says Bev Heim-Myers, chair of the Canadian Coalition For Genetic Fairness, an organization advocating for legislation banning discrimination based on genetic test results. “But it can go from fun to devastating. This information can then be shared & used against the person. Until we have laws protecting genetic information, this is a dangerous thing.”
We can’t say we weren’t warned. Long before the Human Genome Project charted almost all of the three billion base pairs of human DNA, ethicists & futurists sounded alarms about the potential misuse of genetic information, as testing became cheaper & more widely available. The term “genoism”—unethical discrimination based on genetics—was coined by Andrew Niccol, director of Gattaca, a 1997 movie that portrayed a society driven by eugenics rather than merit. The film’s foresight, alas, proved greater than its cultural impact. Canada, for one, has been drifting for years toward the world it depicted.
The plunging price & ready availability of genetic testing is a key part of that new reality. The price to fully sequence all three billion base pairs has been driven down to about $2,000, from the billions spent on the Human Genome Project. But the real game-changer has been Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google billionaire Sergey Brin (the two are now separated), who realized the true value of genetic testing lay in aggregated data that could, in turn, be sold for medical research & development. In 2006, she founded 23andMe with her partner, Susan Avery, naming the company after the 23 pairs of chromosomes in a human cell. The following year, they began offering $999 genotyping—a process that identifies about 750,000 of the genome’s DNA base pairs. By late 2012, the firm was offering $99 tests to its American members, while asking them for consent to share their genetic data, stripped of identifying personal information & lumped in with hundreds of thousands of others’, for the purposes of medical & pharmaceutical research.
The company has since shared that information with partners ranging from pharmaceutical giant Pfizer & the US National Institutes of Health, to advance research into everything from obesity to Parkinson’s disease. Last week, the firm announced it is launching its own research division to develop drug therapies.
The company’s growth is part of a gold rush occurring at the nexus of big data & Big Pharma, with Silicon Valley players such as Apple developing apps that encourage customers to self-report personal health information in the name of advancing medical research. And it’s not as though 23andMe, which is financially backed by Google, keeps its real line of business a secret. The firm notifies its members about every new collaboration, while encouraging them to participate in online surveys about their traits, tastes & histories. The customers, meanwhile, receive a downloadable file containing their raw DNA data, which they are free to share with doctors or genetic counsellors, along with a report of 110 traits, inherited conditions, drug responses & genetic health risk factors.
Reading the report can be a strangely out-of-body experience—like learning secrets about a friend you thought you knew well.
Of greater concern to genetic experts, though, are the heavyweight indicators such as those for Alzheimer’s, breast cancer & Parkinson’s. Before disclosing them, the 23andMe site requires members to open a printed primer explaining the results & their limitations. In the case of the Alzheimer’s APOE variants, they can also watch a video presentation by a Harvard Medical School doctor, Robert Green, who assures members he’s not being paid for his appearance. “Finding you are at somewhat higher risk might cause distress,” Green acknowledges in the clip. “So give it some thought. If you think this information might distress you, you can simply decide not to view it. Or feel free to discuss it with a doctor or a genetic counsellor before you unlock & view your results.”
Such notes of caution litter the site. But critics complain they aren’t enough, because the thought of revelatory news a couple of clicks away is too tempting for most people to pass up. Adverse findings can trigger panic, while an absence of indicators provides false reassurance, warns Allie Janson Hazell, president-elect of the Canadian Association of Genetic Counsellors. Furthermore, putting the information in perspective requires expert understanding of the limitations of a genetic test, as well as a person’s family history, she says. Janson Hazell points to 23andMe’s tests for 3 mutations associated with breast cancer, which are most prevalent in people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. “If I, a person of non-Ashkenazi ancestry, get a normal result back, I might feel reassured, even if there’s lots of breast cancer in my family,” she says. “This is where the potential for harm comes in.”
As you might expect, what is framed in Canada as “potential for harm” takes the form of direct accusation in the US. Less than a month after the FDA fired off its warning letter to 23andMe, the company was fending off a class-action lawsuit alleging that its health reports were scientifically meaningless marketing tools allowing it to build up its inventory of saleable gene data. One commentator on Forbes.com warned that quality control is an issue at 23andMe, accusing the company of extrapolating from “a few reports about specific populations.”
Emily Drabant Conley, 23andMe’s director of business development, brushes aside the knocks, saying the company strives to strike a balance, presenting scientifically accurate information in a way that non-experts can understand. “We’re seeing with our customers that they do understand the information, & they do find it relevant,” she says from 23andMe’s offices in Mountain View, Calif. At the root of the model, she adds, is an individual’s right to obtain information about himself so he can make healthy adjustments to his lifestyle. “There are many cases where this information really changes the trajectory of someone’s health,” says Drabant Conley, who has a doctorate in neuroscience. “He or she can find out a piece of information he or she didn’t know, that you could really only ascertain through genetics.”
Company officials are also quick to note that the FDA recently eased its stance on 23andMe’s marketing, allowing it to advise customers whether they have markers for Bloom’s syndrome, a rare condition associated with short stature, sun sensitivity & increased cancer risk.
Whatever the criticisms, direct-to-consumer DNA test results appear to be good enough for the insurance industry. 5 years ago, knowing that many Canadians would soon be able to afford the tests, the association representing the country’s life & health insurers issued a statement claiming the right to ask applicants if they’d had genetic testing done. If so, they’d ask for the information before agreeing to a policy, they said, just as they would demand disclosure of other medical records.
The point, says Frank Zinatelli, vice-president of the Canadian Life & Health Insurance Association, was to ensure equal footing between insurer & client: Insurers don’t demand genetic testing from anybody who hasn’t already had it done, he stresses; nor can they reopen existing policies based on newly discovered adverse results. But people who knew they had genetic indicators for degenerative diseases like Huntington’s could conceivably rush out to buy policies, Zinatelli argues, upsetting actuarial calculations & ultimately costing everyone. “Let’s remember the definition of insurance,” he says. “It is financial protection against unanticipated loss”. [emphasis his]
Maybe. But that hasn’t stopped critics from citing the insurers’ position as proof that Canada is hurtling toward a Gattaca-like society, where the genetically flawed live diminished lives, cut off from important opportunities or benefits. In 2009, researchers at the University of British Columbia published a survey in which 40% of 233 people with family histories of Huntington’s disease reported they’d experienced some sort of discrimination based on their risk of developing the devastating hereditary brain disorder—especially when it came to getting insurance. Fully 29% said insurers had rejected them, increased premiums or asked them to take genetic tests. (The highly predictive Huntington’s mutation, it should be noted, is not part of 23andMe’s health results package.)
And doctors warn that fears of discrimination are discouraging people from obtaining genetic tests that could head off life-threatening diseases. At a Senate committee hearing last fall, Dr. Ronald Cohn, chief of clinical & metabolic genetics at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, told the story of a 12-year-old girl whose parents delayed getting her tested for a hereditary connective-tissue disorder because of concerns about the entire family’s insurability if the results became known. The girl could have one of two conditions, Cohn said, for which the treatments are vastly different. Without the test, “I can’t manage the child’s care,” he added. “I have her come back frequently for echocardiograms to make sure everything is in place, until the family moves forward and I know which disease I’m going to deal with.”
Disturbing as their anecdotes are, advocates such as Cohn & Bev Heim-Myers have had a hard time getting attention on Parliament Hill. In 2013, James Cowan, a Liberal senator from Nova Scotia, tabled a private member’s bill in the upper chamber prohibiting anyone from demanding a genetic test, or the results of a genetic test, as a condition of providing goods or services. Bill S-201 would have amended the Canadian Labour Code to stop employers from requiring workers to take or disclose the results of genetic tests, while adding genetic characteristics to the Canadian Human Rights Act as a prohibited ground of discrimination. It carried the power of criminal law, with fines as high as $1 million & prison terms as long as 5 years.
23andMe counted among the bill’s most enthusiastic supporters. But the law’s key provisions were voted down in February by the Conservative majority in the Senate—in part because the Harper government promised in its 2013 Throne Speech its own legislation against genetic discrimination. A spokeswoman for Justice Minister Peter MacKay said in an email last week that the government still intends to act on the file, but she did not specify when. And the fear factor is running high. When Cohn & the staff at Sick Kids recently offered free full-genome sequencing to 330 children in care at the hospital as part of a study, more than 100 of the families refused, citing concern about genetic discrimination.
Curiously, few of 23andMe’s Canadian members seem to share those qualms. Several contacted over the past few weeks told Maclean’s they welcomed the health results, & some bristled at the idea of government interference in the service. “I’m fine with the Canadian lack of regulation here,” said Davis Simpson, a 45-year-old Calgarian who signed up to do genealogical searches & regards the health findings provided later as a bonus. “I strongly oppose any action to deny me access to my own health information.”
Most, including Simpson, saw the need for some control of genetic discrimination, but they tended to view the issue mostly as a matter of personal choice. “No one has a right to my body, with or without my explicit consent,” said Nancy, a member from Minden, Ont., who asked that her identity be withheld. “Logically, that includes my personal genome.”
Still, even savvy users like Cottee admit that opening the results unleashes a flood of unforeseen implications, raising as many questions as it answers. After drawing a breath & clicking through to his APOE findings, Cottee was stunned to find that he carried neither copy of the e4 variant. He then took his raw data & loaded it onto a website that screens it for 15 other, less reliable genetic mutations connected to Alzheimer’s. Again, nothing.
“It was a weird thing, because I didn’t actually feel the sense of relief I thought I was going to,” Cottee recalls. “I’d had this feeling of inevitability all along. So why wasn’t I feeling more positive?” It was then that the limitations—or was it the value?—of his tests hit home. Alzheimer’s is a multi-factoral disease, he knew, linked to everything from genetic mutations to obesity. If, for example, his mother never had the APOE gene, then something else had made her vulnerable to Alzheimer’s. She was overweight, & her unhealthy lifestyle had led to diabetes, he notes. But Cottee has already taken steps to avoid those risk factors, which leaves him in the same boat as the rest of us at the onset of the genetic era: awash in information, yet woefully short on certainty—& a little afraid of what he might learn next.
Now, imagine what will or, perhaps, currently happening to public's health when they are directly or indirectly drinking this chemical-laden water or food grown through the use of this water.
If you are thinking that municipalities all over North America have very efficient & effective filtration systems & water agencies to clean all this water for drinking purposes, then you are sorely mistaken. Those water agencies / filtration plants were never built to clean thousands of new chemicals ground water is currently filled with.
Coupling this article with the BBC article about chemicals in our food & consumer products adversely affecting our hormones, you can imagine how many chemicals we are constantly ingesting on a daily basis. In a 2012 documentary, "Last Call at the Oasis," it was told that about 80,000 different kinds of chemicals go into our water system, through ground water, aquifers, pesticides, fertilizers, drugs & pills flushed in our toilets, industrial & domestic chemical products flushed from our industries & homes etc.
Now, if you say that well, let's all start drinking bottled water, then it raises 1 very important question:
What will happen to the poor of our society?
As clean, drinking water keep increasing in demand, its price will also increase. Rich won't have any problem buying those clean spring water but what will happen to the poor of our society.
I put up a picture with the Andy Garcia's line from the movie, "A Dark Truth," a few weeks back on this blog that today we are selling water & tomorrow we will be selling air. Where will poor go? Eventually, they will rebel against the society. Right now, their health is deteriorating much faster than rich folks, due to both their food & water being contaminated, & it's costing billions to our healthcare systems, besides the unnecessary strain it puts on the system. Eventually, governments will give up, since their coffers are empty, & hand it over to private healthcare systems to take care of all these people. They obviously won't, since it's not their mandate or objective. End result: a very serious social upheaval.
Another revelation was made in the documentary I mentioned above that almost 50% of bottled water being sold in the market is actually mere tap water.
On top of that, bottled water causes a lot of environmental damage with plastic bottles in our environment & making that plastic bottle itself requires a lot of water, too.
Further to all these problems, another 2011 documentary, "Pink Ribbons, Inc." explored the marketing of breast cancer. Experts & doctors continuously said in the documentary that we are still "slashing & burning" (surgery & chemotherapy) the breast cancer, like we used to do decades ago. Billions have been donated to this cause over the decades, but still no "eureka" moment where we'd know why breast cancer, or, in fact, any type of cancer, happen. Documentary did point out one research about one pesticide but I'd say all these cancers (there are so many of them) are happening because of all these contaminants in our food & water.
It seems like that the developed world is slowly, but surely, regressing back to that "uncivilized" & "barbaric" developing world. Bottled water is a big thing in Pakistan & India, for instance. I have seen in Pakistan, with my own eyes, how poor is drinking the dirty water, whereas, the rich is buying Nestle's water bottles by the gallons.
One last point to make here is that which is more dangerous to an American; a terrorist threatening to kill a few hundred Americans, at most, or millions of Americans, all over US, slowly killing themselves by ingesting harmful, cancerous chemicals, on a daily basis? Which death is more painful & agonizing, not only for the individual but also for the whole family & the community; getting killed by a terrorist in an instant or suffering from cancers for years?
So, why spend billions on wars, on foreign lands, which also has its own long-term, adverse consequences, when millions of American lives are in grave danger from their food & water? Wouldn't those billion $$$ help tremendously, at home, by reducing the effects of poverty or subsidizing organic foods for the poor? Billions in healthcare costs will be saved, too. As an added bonus, it will also greatly help in reducing radicalization of the populace of those foreign lands & them threatening to kill Americans.
It's like resolving multiple problems, instantly. Heck, it may even make US a utopian society where people have jobs in a thriving green economy, where, everyone is healthy & government is saving billions, too. Ironically, this dream is not so far-fetched or even figment of an active imagination. It is definitely achievable.
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Disclosures in California revealed this week that a bevy of toxic, cancer-linked chemicals in fracking wastewater are routinely injected back into the ground. State regulators of the oil & gas industry, meanwhile, admitted to substandard oversight.
More than a year after California’s unprecedented law requiring transparency over contents of hydraulic fracturing -- or fracking -- wastewater, a new report by the Environmental Working Group showed that the state has allowed a variety of carcinogenic chemicals to be pumped back into the ground after use, thereby freeing oil & gas deposits.
The group said that “more than a dozen hazardous chemicals & metals as well as radiation were detected in the wastewater, some at average levels that are hundreds or thousands of times higher than the state’s drinking water standards or public health goals.”
The report – ‘Toxic Stew: What’s in Fracking Wastewater’ – stemmed from the state’s 2013 disclosure law which mandates the comprehensive testing & public release of the chemicals in drilling wastewater. The oil & gas industry has fought hard – with cover from government regulators like the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) & California’s own Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal Resources – to obfuscate & conceal what it injects into the Earth.
“Petroleum chemicals, heavy metals & radioactive elements, plus high levels of dissolved solids, are among the pollutants found in fracking wastewater samples tested under the new disclosure program,” the Environmental Working Group wrote.
“They include benzene, chromium-6, lead & arsenic – all listed under California’s Proposition 65 as causes of cancer or reproductive harm. Nearly every one of the 293 samples tested contained benzene at levels ranging from twice to more than 7,000 times the state drinking water standard. The wastewater also carried, on average, thousands of times more radioactive radium than the state’s public health goals consider safe, as well as elevated levels of potentially harmful ions such as nitrate & chloride.”
State officials have said there is “no evidence to date that California aquifers currently used for drinking water have been contaminated by fracking chemicals,” the Environmental Working Group wrote.
Yet, in October, the state found that the oil & gas industry had illegally injected about 3 billion gallons of fracking wastewater into central California drinking water & farm irrigation aquifers.
Last week, the state ordered a halt to drilling at 12 wastewater injection wells in California’s Central Valley "out of an abundance of caution for public health,” said Steve Bohlen, head of the state Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal Resources. The state has shut down 23 of the hundreds of injection wells located in aquifers that are not approved for wastewater, the Los Angeles Times reported.
To unleash oil or natural gas from shale or other areas, the fracking process requires blasting large volumes of highly pressurized water, sand, & other chemicals into layers of rock.
Once used, toxic fracking wastewater is then either stored in deep underground wells, disposed of in open pits for evaporation, sprayed into waste fields, or used over again.
Fracking has been linked to groundwater contamination, heightened earthquake activity, exacerbation of drought conditions, & a variety of health concerns for humans & the local environment.
Oil & gas companies are under increasingly intense pressure nationwide to respond over increased transparency of chemicals used in the fracking process. As RT has reported, industry has avoided divulging -- often under the cover of official regulatory agencies -- just what chemicals are involved in their toxic injection fluids. Yet drillers insist the chemicals do not endanger human health, contradicting findings by scientists & environmentalists.
Critics -- including the US Government Accountability Office -- have long contended that the EPA has been soft on the industry because they believe the agency is reluctant to stand in the way of what has quickly become a very profitable business model amid the oil & gas boom in North America.
"There has been a serious imbalance between the role regulating the oil & gas industry & the role of protecting the public," said Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson of Santa Barbara, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Officials from the Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) admitted that the agency had for years allowed for the breaking of federal law when companies injected fracking & other wastewater into hundreds of disposal wells within protected aquifers.
The DOGGR officials blamed past errors on inconsistent record-keeping & outdated data collection.
In its new report, the Environmental Working Group noted that “the mandated [fracking chemical] disclosure data on the state’s website is still incomplete & confusing,” & that “California allows drillers to request permission to keep the exact recipe of their fracking fluid off the publicly accessible website.”
Last month, it was reported that California officials permitted oil & gas companies to dispose of waste & other fluids into aquifers containing drinking & irrigation water more than 2,500 times. Significantly, 46% of these permits were authorized within the last 4 years – the same timeframe during which the EPA warned California that regulators were not sufficiently protecting underground water reserves in the drought-stricken state.
State regulators subsequently offered the EPA a new plan that detailed how California would change its permit approval process. The plan also addresses how the state would confront contamination risks. Steve Bohlen, the head of DOGGR, said last month that 140 of the affected injection sites were actively pumping waste into aquifers holding good quality water.
Despite popular support, a moratorium on fracking in the state was killed in the California Senate last May. The oil industry spent nearly US $1.5 million in 3 months fighting the bill.
California is the third-largest oil producing state in the US, but it’s also in its fourth year of a severe drought, highlighting the need to keep its water reserves safe.
