28 years have passed since the EPA’s last chemical risk review

Tens of thousands of chemicals have not been reviewed by the EPA, and people are starting to ask questions

June 27, 2014    Al Jazeera

by Peter Moskowitz @ptrmsk 

This week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hit a major milestone that some people, including leaders at the agency itself, think shouldn’t be celebrated.

On Wednesday, the agency released a final risk assessment for trichloroethylene (TCE), an industrial solvent used by artists, car mechanics, dry cleaners and others. The EPA’s in-depth report, released after a two-year analysis, shows that long-term exposure to TCE can cause cancer and other health issues, and recommends that workers take serious precautions if they must use TCE.

But in its press release, the EPA acknowledged there was something wrong — not with the risk assessment itself — but with its timeline: It was the first final risk assessment for a chemical issued by the EPA since 1986.

“The American public shouldn’t have to wait 28 years between … chemical risk assessments,” wrote Jim Jones, EPA assistant administrator of chemical safety….. read full article here

The United States Of Cruelty

By Charles P. Pierce,  June 24, 2014    Esquire

……We cheer for cruelty and say that we are asking for personal responsibility among those people who are not us, because the people who are not us do not deserve the same benefits of the political commonwealth that we have. In our politics, we have become masters of camouflage. We practice fiscal cruelty and call it an economy. We practice legal cruelty and call it justice. We practice environmental cruelty and call it opportunity. We practice vicarious cruelty and call it entertainment. We practice rhetorical cruelty and call it debate. We set the best instincts of ourselves in conflict with each other until they tear each other to ribbons, and until they are no longer our best instincts but something dark and bitter and corroborate with itself. And then it fights all the institutions that our best instincts once supported, all the elements of the political commonwealth that we once thought permanent, all the arguments that we once thought settled — until there is a terrible kind of moral self-destruction that touches those institutions and leaves them soft and fragile and, eventually, evanescent. We do all these things, cruelty running through them like hot blood, and we call it our politics…..

read full article here

Hazards of GMOs: Nucleic Acid Invaders from Food Confirmed

Dr Mae-Wan Ho  Institute of Science in Society  June 11, 3014

New research confirms that DNA fragments derived from meals, large enough to carry complete genes, can escape degradation and enter the human circulatory system, and so can RNA, raising serious concerns over new nucleic acids introduced into the human food chain via genetically modified organisms.

Food RNA gets into blood and so does DNA

We have alerted readers to research showing how tiny RNA molecules in food eaten can circulate in the bloodstream and turn genes off in the body [1], raising concerns over the safety of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which introduce many novel and synthetic nucleic acids into the human food chain ([2] How Food Affects Genes, SiS 53). New research shows that pieces of DNA large enough to code for complete genes can also escape degradation in the gut and enter the human circulatory system, and the presence of circulating RNA from food is much more extensive and widespread.

Gerry Spence: Speaking to Each Other as Slaves

Gerry Spence has been a trial attorney for more than six decades and                         Gerry Spence’s Blog
proudly represents “the little people.” He has fought and won for the family
of Karen Silkwood, defended Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, and represented
hundreds of others in some of the most notable trials of our time.

Yes, all of us, the living, are indentured in some form of slavery.  A few slaves are better off than most.  In the slavery of the old South the house slaves lived closest to the master and shared some of his comforts not known to the wretched slaves who labored in the fields.  The field foreman, who were also slaves, wielded whips they laid on the backs of fellow slaves.  But slavery, not poverty, is the universal life-taking force that is suffered by the rich and the poor, by the boss and the CEO  who, as slaves, lay their economic and emotional whips on the backs of the worker slaves.

The master, the corporate power structure, has an insidious, built-in guarantee against reform, one that preserves the master’s perpetual power.  The rich slave exploits the poor slave.  The rich slave often accumulates hundreds, even thousands of times more wealth than the poor slave — usually from the sweat and toil of the poor slave.  To justify his excesses, the rich slave proclaims he has worked harder and is self-made, while the poor slave is said to be irresponsible, lazy or stupid and entitled to what he earns which is often a mere pittance.  By reason of his self interest, the rich slave refuses to recognize and renounce his own slavery and to join the poor slave in a mutual quest for freedom.  Instead, the rich slave will fight for the master, the said corporate power structure, against his poorer brothers and sisters.  But a few rich slaves are beginning to realize that riches do not provide freedom.  Riches create only a different genre of slavery.

You can launch a #whistleblower movement — now

A direct call for whistleblowing is now half a block from the State Department.

“Don’t wait until a new war has started,” says a billboard quoting Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg — “don’t wait until thousands more have died, before you tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or crimes…”

Right now, you can help put that billboard in other key locations, reaching thousands of employees at places like the NSA, Pentagon and CIA every day. To do that, click here.