Category Archives: Issues

GMOs don’t merit protection

Mark Bittman writes: Genetic engineering in agriculture has disappointed many people who once had hopes for it. Excluding, of course, those who’ve made money from it, appropriately represented in the public’s mind by Monsanto. That corporation, or at least its friends, recently managed to have an outrageous rider slipped into the 587-page funding bill Congress sent to President Obama.

The rider essentially prohibits the Department of Agriculture from stopping production of any genetically engineered crop once it’s in the ground, even if there is evidence that it is harmful.

That’s a pre-emptive Congressional override of the judicial system, since it is the courts that are most likely to ask the U.S.D.A. to halt planting or harvest of a particular crop. President Obama signed the bill last week (he kind of had to, to prevent a government shutdown) without mentioning the offensive rider (he might have), despite the gathering of more than 250,000 signatures protesting the rider by the organization Food Democracy Now!

The override is unnecessary as well as disgraceful, because the U.S.D.A. is already overly supportive of genetically engineered crops. When a court tried to stop the planting of genetically engineered beets a couple of years ago pending adequate study, the U.S.D.A. allowed it. And the secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack – who, in fairness, does not seem happy about the rider but was powerless to stop it – was quoted in this (excellent) Politico piece as saying, “With the seed genetics today that we’re seeing, miracles are occurring every single growing season.”

True enough. But “seed genetics” refers not only to genetically engineered seeds but to seeds whose genetics have been altered by conventional means, like classical breeding. In fact, as I said up top, genetic engineering, or, more properly, transgenic engineering – in which a gene, usually from another species of plant, bacterium or animal, is inserted into a plant in the hope of positively changing its nature – has been disappointing.

In the nearly 20 years of applied use of G.E. in agriculture there have been two notable “successes,” along with a few less notable ones. These are crops resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide (Monsanto develops both the seeds and the herbicide to which they’re resistant) and crops that contain their own insecticide. The first have already failed, as so-called superweeds have developed resistance to Roundup, and the second are showing signs of failing, as insects are able to develop resistance to the inserted Bt toxin — originally a bacterial toxin — faster than new crop variations can be generated.

Nothing else in the world of agricultural genetic engineering even comes close to the “success” of these two not-entirely-successful creations. Furthermore, at least in these cases, their pattern of success (and high profits) followed by failure was inevitable.

Don’t take my word for it. Let me summarize extensive conversations I’ve recently had with Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist and plant pathologist at the Union of Concerned Scientists: Roundup Ready seeds allowed farmers to spend less time and energy controlling weeds. But the temporary nature of the gains was predictable: “There was no better way to create weeds tolerant to glyphosate (Roundup) than to spray all of them intensively for a few years,” Gurian-Sherman told me. “And that’s what was done.”

The result is that the biggest crisis in monocrop agriculture – something like 90 percent of all soybeans and 70 percent of corn is grown using Roundup Ready seed – lies in glyphosate’s inability to any longer provide total or even predictable control, because around a dozen weed species have developed resistance to it. “Any ecologist would have predicted this, and many did,” Gurian-Sherman said. [Continue reading…]

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Diversity programs fabricate the appearance of corporate fairness

Science Daily: Diversity training programs lead people to believe that work environments are fair even when given evidence of hiring, promotion or salary inequities, according to new findings by psychologists at the University of Washington and other universities.

The study also revealed that participants, all of whom were white, were less likely to take discrimination complaints seriously against companies who had diversity programs.

Workplace diversity programs are usually developed by human resource departments to foster a more inclusive environment for employees, but aren’t typically tested for their effectiveness. Nonetheless, their existence has been used in courtrooms as evidence that companies treat employees fairly.

“Our fear is that companies may prematurely stop thinking about diversity among their workers because they’ve credentialed themselves with these programs,” said Cheryl Kaiser, lead author and a UW associate professor of psychology. “Our findings suggest that diversity programs can be window dressing — even those that do very little to increase diversity may still be perceived as effective.”

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How Israel helped apartheid South Africa build nuclear weapons

Derek Leebaert writes: There have been rumors since the late 1970s of Israeli cooperation in South Africa’s effort to become a nuclear power. A double flash over the Indian Ocean detected by a U.S. satellite in 1979, for example, was suspected (but never confirmed) to be a joint, low-yield Israeli-South African nuclear test.

South African documents that appeared to show Israel offering to sell nuclear weapons were refuted by Israeli President Shimon Peres, in 2010, as “selective interpretation.” Here we show what really occurred — and how.

According to new CIA evidence, Israel proved “absolutely vital” to South Africa’s apartheid regime 30 years ago in building six Hiroshima-size bombs. New details about this collaboration arose in a series of interviews I conducted with Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of CIA covert operations in Europe and, at the time of the events described here, a clandestine officer serving in Pretoria, South Africa. The interviews were conducted in Washington, D.C., in 2010.

Drumheller is an unusually credible and outspoken man. In his book, On the Brink: An Insider’s Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence and in interviews with the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” he was the most senior of former CIA officials to tell the truth about faulty intelligence in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

He showed how the Bush-Cheney White House had promoted intelligence it liked on Iraq — and specifically on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction — while ignoring intelligence it didn’t like.

Having begun his career in the unusually risky role of “NOC” (non-official cover) in Asia, Drumheller’s operational abilities remain legendary within the CIA’s Clandestine Service.

During our interviews, he reflected on earlier experiences in his career. In 1980, “we had 11 case officers in South Africa, four of them with deep cover.” They had penetrated the apartheid regime’s “Project Circle,” which was already within reach of perfecting a usable, deliverable atomic bomb.

“We were regularly able to obtain swipe samples from its enrichment facilities. We could monitor progress,” Drumheller told me.

They also monitored the deep cover “black station” of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad. Drumheller said this was a front company called TamCo. The Israelis had no idea they were under such close U.S. scrutiny.

Washington had tried to impede Pretoria’s effort by embargoing the shipment of a VAX computer from Massachusetts-based Digital Equipment Corporation. “Project Circle needed that VAX” to complete the project, Drumheller said.

The CIA station in Pretoria learned that South Africa was able to get around the embargo by having the computer — the same powerful VAX model — transshipped from the United States. “It came via the Israelis and TamCo,” Drumheller said.

Israel contributed another vital piece to Project Circle’s success by supplying the tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen that is manufactured in nuclear reactors, for the bombs’ triggering mechanisms. In addition, Israel provided Pretoria with an essential avionics package that would allow the bombs to be dropped by South African Air Force jets.

The CIA was able to obtain these and other details about the Israeli-South African collusion, Drumheller explained, from a stellar agent that the CIA had placed within Project Circle.

The CIA station in Pretoria was tracking full-scale government-to-government collaboration that was taking place despite a UN Security Council resolution that had imposed a mandatory arms embargo against the white supremacist state in 1977.

Washington, meanwhile, had enough on its hands with Israel during this period. Strains in relations included Israel’s 1982 Operation Peace for Galilee invasion of Lebanon. The extent of the invasion’s civilian carnage led President Ronald Reagan (choosing his words carefully, as is known from his diary) to denounce the bombing and shelling of civilians to Israel’s prime minister as “a holocaust.”

In any event, Pretoria finally took it upon itself to dismantle its jointly developed bombs in 1989, two years before signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. All of this happened in the apartheid regime’s dying days, before its complete collapse in 1994.

Are these collusions historical bygones? Too long ago to matter today? Certainly not, given what’s now underway with regard to U.S policy on Iran.

The key question now is how Washington will act, or react, regarding the Iranian nuclear challenge. To judge from comments by figures in leading U.S. foreign policy circles outside the government, no one in Washington has a clue as to what Tehran intends to do with its nuclear program.

What is apparent, however, is the influence of Israeli fears, or bluster: If Washington doesn’t prevent Iran from getting the bomb, it is assumed, then Israel will.

Even so, Israel’s own nuclear capabilities are almost never discussed. And, quite conveniently, Israel’s record of proliferation is barely known or, rather, swept under the carpet. [Continue reading…]

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The inner syntax of Palestinian stone-throwing

Amira Hass writes: Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule. Throwing stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance. Persecution of stone-throwers, including 8-year-old children, is an inseparable part − though it’s not always spelled out − of the job requirements of the foreign ruler, no less than shooting, torture, land theft, restrictions on movement, and the unequal distribution of water sources.

The violence of 19-year-old soldiers, their 45-year-old commanders, and the bureaucrats, jurists and lawyers is dictated by reality. Their job is to protect the fruits of violence instilled in foreign occupation − resources, profits, power and privileges.

Steadfastness (Sumud) and resistance against the physical, and even more so the systemic, institutionalized violence, is the core sentence in the inner syntax of Palestinians in this land. This is reflected every day, every hour, every moment, without pause. Unfortunately, this is true not only in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza, but also within Israel’s recognized borders, although the violence and the resistance to it are expressed differently. But on both sides of the Green Line, the levels of distress, suffocation, bitterness, anxiety and wrath are continually on the rise, as is the astonishment at Israelis’ blindness in believing that their violence can remain in control forever.

Often hurling stones is borne of boredom, excessive hormones, mimicry, boastfulness and competition. But in the inner syntax of the relationship between the occupier and the occupied, stone-throwing is the adjective attached to the subject of “We’ve had enough of you, occupiers.”

After all, teenagers could find other ways to give vent to their hormones without risking arrests, fines, injuries and death.

Even if it is a right and duty, various forms of steadfastness and resisting the foreign regime, as well as its rules and limitations, should be taught and developed. Limitations could include the distinction between civilians and those who carry arms, between children and those in uniform, as well as the failures and narrowness of using weapons.

It would make sense for Palestinian schools to introduce basic classes in resistance: how to build multiple “tower and stockade” villages in Area C; how to behave when army troops enter your homes; comparing different struggles against colonialism in different countries; how to use a video camera to document the violence of the regime’s representatives; methods to exhaust the military system and its representatives; a weekly day of work in the lands beyond the separation barrier; how to remember identifying details of soldiers who flung you handcuffed to the floor of the jeep, in order to submit a complaint; the rights of detainees and how to insist on them in real time; how to overcome fear of interrogators; and mass efforts to realize the right of movement. Come to think of it, Palestinian adults could also make use of these lessons, perhaps in place of their drills, training in dispersing protests, and practice in spying on Facebook posts.

When high school students were drafted two years ago for the campaign of boycotting settlement products, it seemed like a move in the right direction. But it stopped there, without going further, without broadening the context. Such lessons would have been perfectly in tune with the tactics of appealing to the United Nations − civil disobedience on the ground and defiance of power in diplomacy.

So why are such classes absent from the Palestinian curriculum? Part of the explanation lies with the opposition of the donor states and Israel’s punitive measures. But it is also due to inertia, laziness, flawed reasoning, misunderstanding and the personal gains of some parts of society. In fact the rationale for the existence of the Palestinian Authority engendered one basic rule in the last two decades − adaptation to the existing situation. Thus, a contradiction and a clash have been created between the inner syntax of the Palestinian Authority and that of the Palestinian people.

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How most of the dead in Iraq disappeared

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: ‘So many’, wrote TS Eliot, reflecting on the waste land left by the First World War. “I had not thought death had undone so many.”

This notion is unlikely to cross the minds of those surveying the devastation left by the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The most frequently quoted fatality figure – about 115,000 Iraqis killed – is shocking. But compared to major conflicts of the past century, it is a relatively modest toll. The 1916 battle of the Somme alone killed three times as many. More than that were killed by a single atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during the Second World War.

Former British prime minster Tony Blair, and then-US vice president Dick Cheney, were perhaps conscious of this when they expressed “no regrets” on the 10th anniversary of the war last month.

That the perpetrators of an aggressive war should accept the lowest costs for their folly is unsurprising. What is less explicable is why so many supposed critics of the war are crediting the same estimate. Brown University’s Costs of War project and the Centre for American Progress’s Iraq War Ledger use it as their main source.

This is particularly puzzling when there are two peer-reviewed epidemiological surveys that give a far more comprehensive accounting of the war’s human cost. A Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Survey published in the Lancet, and the Iraq Public Health Survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine, gave figures of 655,000 and 400,000 excess deaths respectively. (Both were concluded in June 2006, a month before the violence peaked, suggesting the actual toll is even higher).

It is odder still that when epidemiological surveys have come to be accepted as the standard method for estimating conflict fatalities – the method has been used without controversy in Congo, Bosnia and Darfur – an exception is made in the case of Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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Scientific racism, militarism, and the new atheists

After briefly reviewing the history of scientific racism, Murtaza Hussain writes: In the present atmosphere, characterised by conflict with Muslim-majority nations, a new class of individuals have stepped in to give a veneer of scientific respectability to today’s politically-useful bigotry.

At the forefront of this modern scientific racism have been those prominently known as the “new atheist” scientists and philosophers. While they attempt to couch their language in the terms of pure critique of religious thought, in practice they exhibit many of the same tendencies toward generalisation and ethno-racial condescension as did their predecessors – particularly in their descriptions of Muslims.

To be utterly clear, Islam itself does not denote a race, and Muslims themselves come from every racial and ethnic grouping in the world. However, in their ostensibly impartial critiques of “religion” – and through the impartation of ethno-cultural attributes onto members of a religious group – the most prominent new atheists slide with ease into the most virulent racism imaginable.

That this usefully dovetails with government policies promoting the military subjugation of Muslim-majority countries is telling with regard to what purpose these contemporary scientist-philosophers serve.

While one could cite Richard Dawkins’ descriptions of “Islamic barbarians” and Christopher Hitchens’ outright bloodlust towards Muslims – including lamentations of the ostensibly too-low death toll in the Battle of Fallujah and his satisfied account of cluster bombs tearing through the flesh of Iraqis – these have been widely discussed and are in any case not the most representative of this modern phenomena.

Indeed, the most illustrative demonstration of the new brand of scientific racism must be said to come from the popular author and neuroscientist Sam Harris. Among the most publicly visible of the new atheists, in the case of Muslims Harris has publicly stated his support for torture, pre-emptive nuclear weapons strikes, and the security profiling of not just Muslims themselves, but in his own words “anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim”. [Continue reading…]

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New York needs the NYPD to stop stop-and-frisk — and stop it now

John Liu writes: The numbers don’t lie: New York City police have conducted 5m “stop-and-frisk” searches since 2002. More than 86% of individuals targeted were black or Hispanic, and 88% were innocent of any crime. The stop-and-frisk tactic is clearly discriminatory, often humiliating, and totally ineffective. It must be abolished.

Just as astonishing as the raw numbers were the stories from my series of stop-and-frisk” town hall meetings last month in Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. Young men and less-young men, black and brown, came to church halls and community rooms to tell of how, time and time again, they had been verbally abused by police, pushed up against walls, made to stand spreadeagled, and forced to empty their pockets – all for doing nothing wrong and while passers-by watched.

Rather than making the city safer, stop-and-frisk instils fear and undermines trust. If anything, this tactic is serving to deepen the chasm between communities and police – a relationship that is vital to maintaining a safe and secure city for all New Yorkers.

The policy is also a potential financial issue for the City and its taxpayers. As it is, claim settlements and judgments – including those involving civil rights actions – brought against the New York Police Department have risen from $74.1m in fiscal year 2002 to $185.6m in fiscal year 2011, according to numbers compiled by my office (pdf). Amidst this environment, stop-and-frisk has so angered communities that it is now at the heart of three federal lawsuits, one of them the class action case Floyd v the City of New York. [Continue reading…]

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Iran and world powers should focus on action steps for short-term agreement

Ali Vaez writes: Something changed in the nuclear talks between Iran and world powers last month in Almaty, Kazakhstan. For the first time, the two sides negotiated in earnest.

Gone were the preconditions and meandering lectures of the past. Instead of maximalist upfront demands in return for nebulous future rewards, the envoys discussed explicit quid-pro-quo options. Both sides described the meetings with adjectives ranging from “useful” to “pivotal”.

Yet the follow-up 13.5-hour meeting in Istanbul between the parties’ arms control officials revealed that a great gulf remains in expectations. It was a sobering reminder that the diplomatic process is as fragile as the prospect of an agreement is elusive. Misperception and brinkmanship might yet make this opening another instance of what historian G.M. Tevelyan called “the turning point at which history fails to turn.”

As negotiators prepare for the next meeting in Kazakhstan on April 5-6, their focus should be on what is politically as well as logistically achievable at this stage. [Continue reading…]

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The treason of the intellectuals

Chris Hedges writes: The rewriting of history by the power elite was painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed they had opposed the war when they had not. Others among “Bush’s useful idiots” argued that they had merely acted in good faith on the information available; if they had known then what they know now, they assured us, they would have acted differently. This, of course, is false. The war boosters, especially the “liberal hawks” — who included Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken and John Kerry, along with academics, writers and journalists such as Bill Keller, Michael Ignatieff, Nicholas Kristof, David Remnick, Fareed Zakaria, Michael Walzer, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, George Packer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kanan Makiya and the late Christopher Hitchens — did what they always have done: engage in acts of self-preservation. To oppose the war would have been a career killer. And they knew it.

These apologists, however, acted not only as cheerleaders for war; in most cases they ridiculed and attempted to discredit anyone who questioned the call to invade Iraq. Kristof, in The New York Times, attacked the filmmaker Michael Moore as a conspiracy theorist and wrote that anti-war voices were only polarizing what he termed “the political cesspool.” Hitchens said that those who opposed the attack on Iraq “do not think that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy at all.” He called the typical anti-war protester a “blithering ex-flower child or ranting neo-Stalinist.” The halfhearted mea culpas by many of these courtiers a decade later always fail to mention the most pernicious and fundamental role they played in the buildup to the war—shutting down public debate. Those of us who spoke out against the war, faced with the onslaught of right-wing “patriots” and their liberal apologists, became pariahs. In my case it did not matter that I was an Arabic speaker. It did not matter that I had spent seven years in the Middle East, including months in Iraq, as a foreign correspondent. It did not matter that I knew the instrument of war. The critique that I and other opponents of war delivered, no matter how well grounded in fact and experience, turned us into objects of scorn by a liberal elite that cravenly wanted to demonstrate its own “patriotism” and “realism” about national security. The liberal class fueled a rabid, irrational hatred of all war critics. Many of us received death threats and lost our jobs, for me one at The New York Times. These liberal warmongers, 10 years later, remain both clueless about their moral bankruptcy and cloyingly sanctimonious. They have the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents on their hands.

The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again. [Continue reading…]

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Ratko Mladic on the run: the full story of how the general evaded capture

The Guardian reports: The men and women who helped hide Ratko Mladic through his many years as a fugitive saw him as a Serb hero. But just in case their loyalty should waver, they were presented with a gift: photographs of their children. The implication was clear: if we can shoot them with a camera, we can shoot them by other means as well.

The Bosnian Serb general, now on trial in The Hague for genocide and other crimes against humanity, eluded capture for 14 years, with the help of the Serbian military, then his wartime lieutenants, then his family. But the common factor throughout was fear.

The stocky, ruddy-faced, ex-artillery officer made a career out of terror. He oversaw the three years of the Sarajevo siege and the daily attrition of its residents by shelling and sniping. He was also at the Muslim enclave in Srebrenica in July 1995, reassuring panicked women captives their loved ones would be safe, while his men were rounding up and slaughtering 8,000 men and boys. It was the worst atrocity Europe has witnessed since the Nazi era.

After the war, Mladic withdrew to Han Pijesak in eastern Bosnia, where the communists had built a reinforced bunker to resist invasion. But in 1997 when Nato troops finally began looking for war criminals, he slipped across the river Drina from the separatist Bosnian Serb republic to Serbia proper, where President Slobodan Milosevic, the mastermind behind the “ethnic cleansing” of non-Serbs, was ready to offer shelter. But Mladic’s days as a wanted man had only just begun.

From interviews with relatives, court records as well as the accounts of Serbian and international investigators who ultimately tracked Mladic down in 2011, the Guardian has been able to piece together a detailed picture of the general’s years in hiding.

While the ability to evade his pursuers for so long burnished his folk-hero image among nationalists as a Serbian Scarlet Pimpernel, the reality was more mundane and brutal. He stayed free by trusting fewer and fewer people, living in increasing isolation and squalor, ensuring silence with the threat of force. [Continue reading…]

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The Peace Process was always a process of subjugation

Amira Hass writes: “I didn’t know you were such an empiricist,” a friend told me impatiently, a veteran peace activist with a doctorate, when I insisted at some meeting on specifying the prohibitions on the movement of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

That was in 1995, and he thought I didn’t see the big picture, the positive direction, the vision, the beat of the wings of history, and instead was merely insisting on going into detail, into temporary malfunctions. He wasn’t alone in thinking that. One of my editors at the time told me I lacked perspective because I lived in Gaza, and so my reports looked the way they did. In short, wearisome.

The signs were there right from the start − signs that the so much talked-about Peace Process was a process of subjugation; signs that Israel intended to impose on the other side an agreement whose terms were far from the Palestinian minimum, and far from what many countries in the world envisioned as a two-state solution.

But it was hard for these signs to infiltrate public awareness ‏(as well as the Israeli and international media‏) through the powerful interest in seeing the outward manifestations of something that you believe exists: in Gazans bathing in the sea; in the head of the Israeli Shin Bet security service meeting with the head of the Palestinian security service; in Shimon Peres visiting Gaza; in joint security patrols; and in our soldiers no longer patrolling in the heart of the Palestinian towns.

From the supposedly narrow perspective of the Strip, though, the reality of incarceration was, looked and felt like the complete opposite of a peace process.

The chronology is important here − I’ve repeated it countless times and will repeat it countless more times − because local readers like to think that the blanket prohibitions on Palestinian mobility were a response to the suicide attacks from 1994 on. That is not the case.

It began in January 1991, on the eve of the Gulf War. The Israel Defense Forces GOC Central and Southern Commands then revoked an earlier order, from the 1970s, of a “general exit permit to Israel” − in other words, one that allowed the Palestinian residents of the occupied territory to enter Israel, and move freely within its borders and between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Initially, the revocation was interpreted as something temporary, a preventive measure during the unclear period of wartime. But after a lengthy curfew, the residents of the Strip woke up to a new reality. If up until 1991 Israel had respected ‏(for reasons of its own‏) the right to freedom of movement for all Palestinians, but withheld it from a few people, after 1991 the situation was reversed: Israel denied all Palestinians ‏(those in the West Bank as well‏) the right to freedom of movement, aside from a few groups and numbers that it determined. [Continue reading…]

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How Monsanto is killing off the monarch butterfly

Yale Environment 360: University of Kansas insect ecologist Orley R. “Chip” Taylor has been observing the fragile populations of monarch butterflies for decades, but he says he has never been more concerned about their future.

Monarchs are beloved for their spectacular migration across Canada and the United States to overwintering sites in central Mexico — and back again. But a new census taken at the monarchs’ wintering grounds found their population had declined 59 percent over the previous year and was at the lowest level ever measured.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360 contributor Richard Conniff, Taylor — founder and director of Monarch Watch, a conservation and outreach program — talked about the factors that have led to the sharp drop in the monarch population. Among them, Taylor said, is the increased planting of genetically modified corn in the U.S. Midwest, which has led to greater use of herbicides, which in turn kills the milkweed that is a prime food source for the butterflies.

“What we’re seeing here in the United States,” he said, “is a very precipitous decline of monarchs that’s coincident with the adoption of Roundup-ready corn and soybeans.” [Continue reading…]

Meanwhile, thanks to its lackeys in the Senate, just a few days ago Monsanto (the manufacturer of Roundup and Roundup-ready GMO crops) got a legal waiver that effectively bypasses consideration of the safety of its products.

Take Part: When the Senate passed a budget resolution last Wednesday that appears to prevent some of the potential damage from sequestration, the Continuing Resolution included several food- and agriculture-related earmarks.

But one inclusion in particular is especially controversial. The “biotech rider” would require the USDA to approve the harvest and sale of crops from genetically modified seed even if a court has ruled the environmental studies on the crop were inadequate. This aspect of the bill infuriated many sustainable food and agriculture groups, who nicknamed the bill the “Monsanto Protection Act.”

If signed into law by President Obama, here’s what the Monsanto Protection Act would do: It will allow farmers to plant, harvest and sell genetically engineered plants even if the crops have been ruled upon unfavorably in court. A Center for Food Safety statement called the rider “an unprecedented attack on U.S. judicial review of agency actions” and “ a major violation of the separation of powers.”

But perhaps more frightening, other critics say, is that the Monsanto Protection Act threatens the health and wellbeing of the public by undermining the federal courts’ ability to protect farmers and the environment from potentially hazardous genetically engineered (GE) crops.

The Monsanto Protection Act was slipped into the bill while it sat in the Senate Appropriations Committee, chaired by Maryland Democrat Barbara Mikulski. According to the Center for Food Safety, the committee held no hearings on this controversial biotech rider and many Democrats were unaware of its presence in the larger bill.

To understand why many people regard Monsanto as the corporate embodiment of pure evil, watch “The World According to Monsanto”:

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The tar sands disaster

Thomas Homer-Dixon writes: If President Obama blocks the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all, he’ll do Canada a favor.

Canada’s tar sands formations, landlocked in northern Alberta, are a giant reserve of carbon-saturated energy — a mixture of sand, clay and a viscous low-grade petroleum called bitumen. Pipelines are the best way to get this resource to market, but existing pipelines to the United States are almost full. So tar sands companies, and the Alberta and Canadian governments, are desperately searching for export routes via new pipelines.

Canadians don’t universally support construction of the pipeline. A poll by Nanos Research in February 2012 found that nearly 42 percent of Canadians were opposed. Many of us, in fact, want to see the tar sands industry wound down and eventually stopped, even though it pumps tens of billions of dollars annually into our economy.

The most obvious reason is that tar sands production is one of the world’s most environmentally damaging activities. It wrecks vast areas of boreal forest through surface mining and subsurface production. It sucks up huge quantities of water from local rivers, turns it into toxic waste and dumps the contaminated water into tailing ponds that now cover nearly 70 square miles.

Also, bitumen is junk energy. A joule, or unit of energy, invested in extracting and processing bitumen returns only four to six joules in the form of crude oil. In contrast, conventional oil production in North America returns about 15 joules. Because almost all of the input energy in tar sands production comes from fossil fuels, the process generates significantly more carbon dioxide than conventional oil production.

There is a less obvious but no less important reason many Canadians want the industry stopped: it is relentlessly twisting our society into something we don’t like. Canada is beginning to exhibit the economic and political characteristics of a petro-state. [Continue reading…]

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While Wall Street crooks walk free, others end up jailed for life just for shoplifting

Matt Taibbi writes: On July 15th, 1995, in the quiet Southern California city of Whittier, a 33-year-old black man named Curtis Wilkerson got up from a booth at McDonald’s, walked into a nearby mall and, within the space of two hours, turned himself into the unluckiest man on Earth. “I was supposed to be waiting there while my girlfriend was at the beauty salon,” he says.

So he waited. And waited. After a while, he paged her. “She was like, ‘I need another hour,'” he says. “So I was like, ‘Baby, I’m going to the mall.'”

Having grown up with no father and a mother hooked on barbiturates, Wilkerson, who says he still boasts a Reggie Miller jumper, began to spend more time on the streets. After his mother died when he was 16, he fell in with a bad crowd, and in 1981 he served as a lookout in a series of robberies. He was quickly caught and sentenced to six years in prison. After he got out, he found work as a forklift operator, and distanced himself from his old life.

But that day in the mall, something came over him. He wandered from store to store, bought a few things, still shaking his head about his girlfriend’s hair appointment. After a while, he drifted into a department store called Mervyn’s. Your typical chain store, full of mannequins and dress racks; they’re out of business today. Suddenly, a pair of socks caught his eye. He grabbed them and slipped them into a shopping bag.

What kind of socks were they, that they were worth taking the risk?

“They were million-dollar socks with gold on ’em,” he says now, laughing almost uncontrollably, as he tells the story 18 years later, from a telephone in a correctional facility in Soledad, California.

Really, they were that special?

“No, they were ordinary white socks,” he says, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. “Didn’t even have any stripes.”

Wilkerson never made it out of the store. At the exit, he was, shall we say, over­enthusiastically apprehended by two security officers. They took him to the store security office, where the guards started to argue with each other over whether or not to call the police. One guard wanted to let him pay for the socks and go, but the other guard was more of a hardass and called the cops, having no idea he was about to write himself a part in one of the most absurd scripts to ever hit Southern California.

Thanks to a brand-new, get-tough-on-crime state law, Wilkerson would soon be sentenced to life in prison for stealing a pair of plain white tube socks worth $2.50. [Continue reading…]

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Women make better corporate leaders than men, study finds

Healthline News: Women have more than a “good head for business.” Researchers find they actually have a different cognitive approach to corporate decision making, which may help the bottom line.
Female Directors

“Vive la différence,” as the French are fond of saying. A new study published in the International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics builds on the established correlation between female board representation and better business performance.

The study, “Why women make better directors,” was conducted by Chris Bart, professor of strategic management at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University in Ontario, and Gregory McQueen, a McMaster graduate and senior executive associate dean at the A.T. Still University School of Osteopathic Medicine in Arizona.

Bart and McQueen began their “moral reasoning” psychological study in the aftermath of scandals at major companies such as Enron, Arthur Anderson, and ALO Time Warner. Bart says that people at the time were asking, “Where were the directors and why did they allow this to happen?”

Over the course of nine years, they surveyed 624 directors using an established survey instrument called the Defined Issues Test (DIT). Approximately 75 percent of the survey participants were men and 25 percent were women.

Nearly all of the companies represented in the study were Canadian, and included large publicly traded and nonprofit entities. According to the authors, theirs is the largest-known moral reasoning study of board directors.

“We’ve known for some time that companies with more women on their boards have better results,” explained Bart in a press announcement. “We set out to find out why.”

Unlike in the U.S., where boards must only protect shareholder interests, Canadian directors are compelled to act in the company’s best interest while taking into account how their decisions will affect the interests of all stakeholders. [Continue reading…]

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It turns out, real nuclear weapons are more dangerous than imaginery ones

The Wall Street Journal reports: The twin nuclear crises the Obama administration faces in Asia and the Middle East underline a harsh reality for U.S. strategists: North Korea’s weapons capabilities are far more advanced than Iran’s.

Pyongyang, as a result of decades of covert atomic work, is close to mastering the technology to mount one of its estimated dozen nuclear warheads atop medium-range missiles that are capable of striking U.S. allies South Korea and Japan, American officials and international nuclear experts believe.

Iran, by comparison, has no atomic bombs in its military arsenal, nor the ability to deliver them, say U.S. and United Nations experts. Iran says its nuclear program is strictly for civilian purposes, although the Obama administration has charged Tehran with trying to develop nuclear weapons.

“By many estimates, North Korea will have the ability to deliver nuclear weapons using long-range ballistic missiles to distant targets within four to five years,” said Evans Revere, a former senior State Department official who follows Korean affairs at the Brookings Institution. “This will drastically change the security environment in Asia.”

North Korea also is able to produce dozens more nuclear bombs by employing two separate programs to create weapons-grade fuel—plutonium and highly enriched uranium, said U.S. and U.N. officials.

Iran has so far only developed uranium-enrichment technology. The U.N. is concerned, though, that Tehran could begin separating plutonium from spent fuel produced by a nuclear reactor Iran is building in Arak.

This gap between North Korea and Iran, which is widely recognized in Washington, is exposing what many Western diplomats and security analysts believe has been the U.S.’s muted response to Pyongyang’s nuclear advances in recent years, as compared with Iran’s.

The Obama administration has been reluctant to engage diplomatically with North Korea because Pyongyang has backed out of previous disarmament deals and because it wants to avoid a direct confrontation with North Korean ally China, officials say. Congress has also been more aggressive against Iran, partly in response to Israel’s concerns.

But these officials said the U.S. position risked signaling to Tehran that Washington will take a tougher line on countries that are developing nuclear weapons capabilities, rather than those that have actually acquired them. [Continue reading…]

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