You've probably seen headlines the past few days saying, essentially, that organic food is worthless. The headline on a Reuters report is typical. It says that a study finds "Organic food not healthier." The headline suggests that a study found that there are no health benefits to growing and eating organic food on any level. It suggests we are wasting our money by paying more for it.
But did the study really reach that result? And if it did has it proved what the news stories suggest?
You may have heard the stories a couple days ago that Aetna Insurance lost a lot of money . . . because of having to pay out more than expected in employee claims. You may have turned the page or also been puzzled, but I got a bit curious about the dynamic.
In Orwell's Nineteen eighty-four, Winston Smith works in the Ministry of Truth ('Minitrue') rewriting past pronouncements to fit the facts to the party's doctrine and to efface any traces of potentially embarrassing statements. If he were in DC today, Smith might be working instead for the Washington Post.
Over at the outstanding health-care reform blog of Physicians for a National Health Program, Dr. Don McCanne has caught the Post rewriting one of its stories seemingly in order to eliminate information embarrassing to Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA). The original version of the story pointed out that BCBSA had commissioned a study by the Lewin Group research firm but, since BCBSA was dissatisfied with the results, the study never was released to the public. Later the WaPo revised the story and posted the new version on line – without however noting that it had been altered. The revised story completely eliminated the information about the suppressed BCBSA study.
Two years ago Friday the financial crisis started.
Most financial media pundits and politicians didn't recognize that we had a problem until Lehman Brothers went under on September 15, 2008. The official start of the recession is marked at December 2007.
But the real start of the financial crisis was July 31, 2007, when Bear Stearns filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy protection on its two major hedge funds (High-Grade Structured Credit Fund and High-Grade Structured Credit Enhanced Leveraged Fund).
And yet 24 months later, after all the job and capital losses, after all the heartbreak and stress on the average Americans, the financial media, the politicians, Wall Street, and most of the blogosphere still refuses to even acknowledge, much less address the root causes of our economic problems.
The list of signers and members of that class may be found here.
You will see that some that class and the signatories certainly made their mark, although not in the way advertised.
Now it turns out that one of the biggest spenders - in terms of staff - is a new representative from a rural district and a man who claims to be an uber-fiscal conservative - Pennsylvania Congressman Glenn Thompson.
The healthcare talk this week is turning to the plight of small businesses. Obama signaled this focus during his press conference last week when he said that small businesses are at a market disadvantage compared to larger employers. In plain terms, small businesses have to pay more to provide health insurance coverage compared to larger businesses.
OK, probably true, and an attractive argument because it uses market speak, but there is a far more important issue that is a problem for all employers, because it is a problem for their current and potential employees.
Yesterday’s mail brought a receipt for a donation to the local foodbank. The letter thanked me for helping them stay afloat amidst rising demand for their services. This morning’s encounter with some rabbits hopping across the lawn got me thinking that some selfhelp may be in order.
Paul Krugman argues that those who believe the competition of the marketplace will be able to provide the best possible health care are fantasizing because there is no free market in the normal sense. That basic point should be where any serious discussion of health care reform starts. Yet it has been excluded from the one-sided debate going on in Washington. That's because most of the politicians and their corporate buddies don't intend to allow actual health care reform. Instead they're proposing to tweak the for-profit health insurance industry, though nearly all agree it's a large part of the problem.
One of the key political battlegrounds these days is science. There has been much in the news on skirmishes on evolution v. creationism and women's control over their reproductive capacity (including state constitutional amendments that define the moment of conception as the beginning of life), just to name two big and ongoing battles. While these two areas have had serious engagement and vigilance, a far more important battle has been left to the know-nothing crowd. It was a battle we saw throughout the presidential campaign last year. And it will not go away.
The swine flu pandemic provides a useful way to discuss this issue. There, the battle can be easily defined as Your money or your life.
Guest commentary by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship. Reprinted with permission.
Push finally came to shove in Washington this week as the battle for health care escalated from scattered sniper fire into all-out combat. If it all seems to be getting more and more confusing, join the club. It's hard to see what's happening through all the gun smoke.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
- Hunter S. Thompson
When you live in interesting times it is sometimes hard to distinguish the real news from the fake news. For instance, I read this today.
WASHINGTON—A new report has revealed that when it comes to the important matter of owing large sums of money, Americans display a level of expertise and proficiency unrivaled throughout the world.
The Treasury Department said Thursday that it will sell a record total of $115 billion in new notes next week, more than market participants had expected.
They both look like the could be real news, don't they?
For nearly two years now, there has been a state-by-state battle over whether states forbid letting you know how your milk was produced. Without labeling information, you cannot know whether your milk was produced with the artificial hormone rBST / rBGH. Unbossed has carried many stories on this issue during this time, and these stories may be found here.
The news out today told a story of Americans going back to their puritan fiscal roots.
Americans Pay Back Debts Most Since ‘52 as Jobless Spur Savings
(Bloomberg) -- For the first time since Harry S. Truman was in the White House, Americans are paying back their debts, a phenomenon that just might help keep interest rates low as the Treasury sells a record $2 trillion of bonds and rising unemployment increases U.S. savings.
The stable rock of the American citizen, repairing his balance sheet so that the Great American Economy can recharge with a clean slate, healthy and ready to take on the world. American Capitalism in action, continuing to work in the same way it has worked for hundreds of years.
At least that is what the first paragraph implies. Once you scratch the surface the story isn't nearly so pretty.
The recently released inspectors general report on Bush's warrantless surveillance programs had almost nothing positive to say about them or John Yoo, who provided specious legal justifications for those programs on demand. Today Yoo lashes back at the inspectors in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. His matrix of illogic is so dense that the piece appears to be intended to make your eyes bleed. In the interest of public welfare, I'll supply a summary:
Shorter John Yoo: I don't understand the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. And neither do you.
There are so many deplorable gaps and misstatements (as with his many Bush-era OLC opinions) that the question naturally arises: Can John Yoo read?
Any post with a title such as that probably should be an ongoing series.
Today the right-wing nuts hostile to health care reform have seized upon and uncritically parroted a frivolous accusation made by the hyper-right-wing Investor's Business Daily. Their absurd claim is that the House Democrats' health care bill would outlaw private health insurance. The evidence? A single sentence snatched out of context from a document of more than 1,000 pages.
I usually comment on issues off the radar screen, but occasionally I have to weigh in on an issue at the center of discussion. So today, as we are on day 2 of Senate hearings for the confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, let me say something on the statement that appears to be the core of the attack on her - maybe not just the core but the only basis for attack.
The full quote is:
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived this life.”
Counting and accounting for costs is always a very weak link in policy decisions. Take electrical energy, for example. Solar, coal, wind, petroleum, biofuels, wave, oil shale, geothermal, natural gas . . . Unless you can take all the costs of production for each source of power into account, you can't make wise decisions.
When Anita Hill was set to testify at Clarence Thomas' Senate confirmation hearings in 1991, reactionaries feared that her comments would be unhelpful to Thomas and promised to demonize her. For example, here was GOP Senator Alan Simpson:
"She will be injured and destroyed and belittled and hounded and harassed, real harassment, different from the sexual kind, just plain old Washington variety harassment."
Now many self-styled 'liberals' appear intent on demonizing an upcoming witness in Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings, firefighter Frank Ricci. The reason again this time is that the testimony might be unhelpful to the nominee.
A guest commentary by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship. Reprinted with permission.
If you want to know what really matters in Washington, don't go to Capitol Hill for one of those hearings, or pay attention to those staged White House "town meetings." They're just for show. What really happens — the serious business of Washington — happens in the shadows, out of sight, off the record. Only occasionally - and usually only because someone high up stumbles — do we get a glimpse of just how pervasive the corruption has become.
The shameful FISA 'modernization' law passed by Congress last July, which retroactively legalized the egregiously illegal (and still mysterious) electronic surveillance of Americans instituted by George Bush, had at least one modestly useful provision: It required the inspectors general of the DoD, DoJ, NSA, CIA, and ODNI to produce a report on the history and scope of the secret Bush surveillance. The unclassified version of the IG report has now been made public (PDF).
It tells us few details about the surveillance programs and its conclusions are so tame as to be risible. On the other hand, it does contain some food for thought.
The GAO issued two reports yesterday afternoon that compare safety regulations on bottled versus tap water. The bottom line is that if you are drinking bottled water when you could drink tap water, you are spending a lot more and drinking water that has less health protections. And that's just the water. There is also the state of the water as it sits in the plastic bottles, experiencing heat and more, conditions that can lead to chemicals leaching from the plastic into the water. And that's just your health, not to mention where we put all those empty bottles.
It's not often that we get to combine snark, Monsanto, revolving door Washington, food safety, health, outing people, sloth, and recycling, but this is certainly one of them.
BizJournals reports that a revolving door Monsanto VP is now perched as adviser to the US Food and Drug Administration.
Former Attorney General and White House Counsel, Alberto Gonzales, helped to preside over a great many crimes as a flunky in the Bush administration. Who'd have thought, that scandalous record along with his scrumptiously perforated memory eventually made Gonzales nearly unemployable after he was pushed out of office in 2007. The best he's been able to turn up have been very small, temporary jobs.
Now he's found another temporary employer, Texas Tech. Despite Karen Tumulty, it appears pretty obvious that the University is less than eager to draw attention to its association with Gonzales.
Originally posted at RH Reality Check.org - News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice. Crossposted with permission.
A new and far more insidious anti-abortion movement effort to push constitutional rights for zygotes could also entangle reproductive health care, people with disabilities and those who seek end-of-life care.
"Personhood" advocates are planning to push constitutional amendments and legislative action in 17 states in 2010. The primary goal is to challenge Roe v Wade on 14th Amendment grounds while also outlawing a host of reproductive health care services.
Except the new ballot language has much more sweeping connotations than has been reported to date.
The WARN Act has been described as an “enigma”, a “puzzle”, and confusing. It sure is a hard read with complex definitions upon complex definitions just to know whether it applies. And, to boot, its benefit to laid off workers are on the stingy side. Not the best conditions for a law whose full name is the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, 29 USC §§ 2101-2109. And not so great for stressed our workers at any time, but especially during a recession.
Well now S1374, the Forewarn Act bill, has been introduced in the Senate, bringing some major improvements so, I assume, Forewarned is Forearmed.
I could hardly believe it when I saw this poll come out.
It's a testament to effective public relations that a majority of people believe that they will be better off next summer than they are right now. If perception was all that mattered then the mission of fixing the economy has already been accomplished.
Unfortunately for all of us, actual facts mean more than managing perception. Just ask Baghdad Bob.
With that in mind, let's look at those pesky inconvenient facts.
A lot of virtual ink has been spilled over the on-going economic crisis in California. Lost in the uproar is the fact that 6 other states are also having budget crisis of their own.
Most ideas for solving California's fiscal situation involve draconian cuts and higher taxes. Both are unavoidable at this late date.
However, in every crisis there is opportunity for more radical, progressive, long-term ideas. I would now like to present an idea for comment.
It was the morning of January 22, 1932, in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood of the Bronx. A crowd was gathering in front of 2302 Olinville Avenue, near the Bronx Park.
City Marshals and Police had moved in to evict 17 tenants who were on a "rent strike". A crowd of 4,000 had gathered nearby.
When the marshals moved into the building and the first stick of furniture appeared on the street, the crowd charged the police and began pummeling them with fists, stones, and sticks, while the "non-combatants urged the belligerents to greater fury with anathemas for capitalism, the police and landlords." The outnumbered police barely held their lines until reinforcements arrived.
Every single reserve police officer in the Bronx had to be called in to prevent being routed by the rioters.
A paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that the virus responsible for the ongoing H1N1 "swine flu" pandemic is the result of a laboratory accident that occurred around 1977, "possibly somewhere in Asia or the Soviet Union." Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh noticed that the H1N1 strain responsible for the devastating 1918 pandemic continued to circulate, human to human, until 1957. For the next twenty years, the H1N1 strain seemingly disappeared as other flu strains took its place. Then, in 1977, H1N1 re-emerged in China, Hong Kong and the USSR. (Telegraph, June 30, 2009)
The authors concluded that the strain responsible for the 1977 outbreak "had been preserved since 1950." The likely cause of its re-emergence was "an accidental release from a laboratory source in the setting of waning population immunity to H1 and N1 antigens."
Unbossed was founded in 1897 by poor, but honest, immigrants. It flourished during the turn of the century -- marching with the suffragists and helping organize labor unions -- only to wither during the Great Depression.
