… you don’t just have to go to the Environmental Working Group to see how damaging the stuff the “scientists” put into food, air, water, soil, babies!
I want to remember Rachel Carson’s spirit. I want it to be both fierce and compassionate at once. I want to carry a sense of indignation inside to shatter the complacency that has seeped into our society. Call it a sacred rage, a rage that is grounded in the knowledge that all life is intertwined. I want to know the grace of wild things that sustains hope.
—Terry Tempest Williams, “The Moral Courage of Rachel Carson”
Read all about it: DRAFT NTP Monograph on the State of the Science Concerning Fluoride Exposure and Neurodevelopmental and Cognitive Health Effects: A Systematic Review
A team of pro-fluoride researchers led by California’s dental director intentionally omitted data from a study seeking to undermine the forthcoming National Toxicology Program (NTP) report linking fluoride exposure to neurodevelopmental damage in children, according to documents released last week.
The documents — obtained through a California public records search and posted in a press release by the Fluoride Action Network — show that the team, led by Dr. Jayanth V. Kumar, a dental surgeon, conducted a meta-analysis of the scientific literature on fluoride’s neurotoxicity and found a link between fluoride exposure and lowered IQ in children at low levels of exposure.
However, they omitted the data and wrote a paper concluding there was no evidence of a link.
Four rounds of peer review rejected Kumar’s manuscript as “poorly researched,” “internally inconsistent” and committing “unashamed exaggeration” before the journal Public Health finally published the study last month. (source)
If this is not monster-like, disgusting, perverse, then, you are lobotomized: So many popular baby food brands contain dangerous levels of mercury, lead, cadmium and arsenic, according to a new investigation by a House of Representatives oversight committee. Exposure to these toxic heavy metals can be harmful to babies, since they can slow growth and development, increase cancer risk and potentially lead to behavioral and learning issues.
Heavy metals in baby food:
- Abbott Laboratories. Abbott Nutrition. 3300 Stelzer Road. …
- Mead Johnson. Mead Johnson Nutritionals. …
- Nestle, USA. Nestle Infant Nutrition. …
- Nutricia North America (formerly Scientific Hospital Supplies (SHS) North America) Nutricia North America. …
- PBM Nutritionals. PBM Nutritionals, LLC. …
- Prolacta Bioscience. Prolacta Bioscience.
On every level, they (sic) determine what we die from. Same side of the coin, Dems or Repubs:
Yesterday, The New York Times exposed the Trump administration for bullying governments into weakening international safeguards that protect mothers and newborn babies from the infant formula industry’s deadly marketing. Kudos to our allies like Baby Milk Action for shining a light on this story.
Ahh, sort of like Exoplanets, no, these Xenobiotics? Toxins that are foreign to the body such as drugs, pesticides, and carcinogens.
So, in Capitalism and in this buyer beware dog eat dog world, in this litigation nightmware for activists and individuals attempting to put feet to the fire those evil deeds in this chemical toxin industrial complex, we take one step forward (in our minds), while leaping a hundreds backwards.
Pure theater: But, yes, the film takes its basis from real events – with Nathaniel Rich’s New York Times article The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare serving as the source material for the script.
Oh, of course these highly-paid actors and film crews, all about a one-trick pony.
Think Monsanto: “Problem fixer Michael Clayton is brought in to clean up the mess after one of his law firm’s top litigators suffers a breakdown while representing a corrupt chemical corporation in a multi-billion dollar legal suit. Under pressure to appease the firm’s clients, Clayton finds himself torn between his desire to do the right thing and a pressing need to pay off spiralling personal debts.”
But just because these Holly-Dirt pimps and prostitutes get scripts going and act in these “social justice”-themed flicks, do not expect Capitalists in the biz to be anything but this — overpaid, money hoarding, dream hoarders that they are, too rich to shit properly.
Ahh, which rotten billionaire and rotten family do you want to see portrayed on TV?
Which robber barons do you want to read about?
New or old guilded age?
A couple of decades after the Civil War, the United States entered an era dubbed “The Gilded Age.” It was Samuel Clemens—Mark Twain—who gave us the term. In an 1873 novel, co-written with his friend Charles Dudley Warner, the duo satirized the economic excesses, personal greed and political corruption of the time. The novel’s title, “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today,” was an inspired choice of words.
In Twain’s telling, the era wasn’t a “golden” age—something pure and solid like a bar of gold—rather is was a “gilded” age. To “gild” is to cover something of lesser value with a coat of gold to make it look like what it is not. In Twain’s telling, the era was one in which such a superficial covering disguised a more base reality.
The Gilded Age was a time in which technological innovation drove wonderful new industrial products that improved individual lives, while at the same time creating great wealth and accompanying economic inequality. It was a period of market dominating companies and citizen and journalistic revolts against their control. It was also a period marked by claims of “fake news” and by the election of two presidents who failed to win the popular vote. (Hayes in 1876 and Harrison in 1888.) [source]
Gilding is covering up the crimes, and today, we have so many more criminals in this robber baron-gilded age mafia:
[Photo: Members of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the body charged with oversight of unfair or deceptive business practices.]
These people ARE the enemy, and always has been:
UPDATE, MAY 25, 2023: The Supreme Court (9 to 0) issued its ruling on Sackett v. EPA on May 25, 2023, stripping out key protections from the Clean Water Act, weakening the law, and narrowing its ability to defend the quality of the nation’s waterways. “This decision will cause incalculable harm. Communities across the country will pay the price,” says NRDC President & CEO Manish Bapna. “What’s important now is to repair the damage. The government must enforce the remaining provisions of law that protect the clean water we all rely on for drinking, swimming, fishing, irrigation and more. States should quickly strengthen their own laws. Congress needs to act to restore protections for all our waters.” (source)
It wouldn’t be hyperbole to call it the most important water-related U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) case to come along in a generation. Indeed, the outcome of Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the first case to be heard in the court’s 2022–2023 term, will determine the future efficacy of the Clean Water Act by deciding whether wetlands are—or aren’t—deserving of federal protection.
Given the close relationship between wetlands and the larger system of streams, rivers, and tributaries to which they belong, the court’s ruling is certain to have a profound impact on the health and quality of all of America’s waterways.
Headline after headline: The new Gilded Age: 2,750 people have more wealth than half the planet (2021)
versus
[Photo: Political cartoon from the Chicago Labor Newspaper in 1894 criticizing the Pullman Company]
Although middle-class philanthropists and technocratic politicians gave voice to policies that began to curtail inequality, they did not generate the conditions that made such policies either politically possible or effective. That took decades of widespread, sustained, and explicit anti-capitalist organizing from working people — in labor unions, youth groups, radical political parties, and coalitions of mass protest — from the 1870s through the 1940s. Cold War liberalism’s backlash against such radicalism was fierce and helped fuel the rise of the right.
Progressives and New Dealers also achieved their reforms by reaffirming the Gilded Age’s ideological and legal commitments to white supremacy, imperialism, and xenophobia. The mainstream labor movement marginalized radicals and underwrote imperial nationalism. Signature New Deal legislation — the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act — discriminated against women and African Americans by excluding domestic and agricultural workers, valorizing the white male family wage earner.
The “solutions” that ended Gilded Age inequality, in other words, became a crucial seedbed for our own era’s historically distinct expressions of inequality. (source)
From corner to corner, the capitalists and their academics and their law schools and business schools and all those marketing departments, all the psychological warfare practitioners, all of those prostitutes called Senators and Congressmen, all of them, from top to bottom, they are the reason flouride is in the water, brothers and sisters, and that “a little of poison is permitable” ethos is all about CAPITALISM. Oh, they know how to parse the rhetoric and deploy the barristers and legal eagles — “There is no solid proof this or that industrial concoction can cause cancer.” You know the trick.
Try as you may, Counterpunch writer: “What are our options? The most discussed are expanding the court to allow the appointment of several liberal justices, mandating term limits for justices, and impeaching justices. (Clarence Thomas, we’re coming for you first!) But none of those are likely in the foreseeable future. So, here’s the real bottom line on last week’s terrible, duplicitous, irresponsible, environment-destroying, climate-warming decision by the Supreme Court: It’s on us. We need to fight back. That means organize ourselves, our neighbors, and our communities to prevent local and state governments from paving what little paradise remains. It means protesting, boycotting, and otherwise blocking developers, by whatever means necessary, from destroying wetlands and the many species – including humans – that depend on them.” (Supreme Duplicity)
Hit that Silent Spring Institute for more on the cancerous capitalists:
Abstract
Consumer products are important sources of exposure to harmful chemicals. Product composition is often a mystery to users, however, due to gaps in the laws governing ingredient disclosure. A unique data set that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) uses to determine how volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) from consumer products affect smog formation holds a partial solution. By analyzing CARB data on VOCs in consumer products, we identified and quantified emissions of volatile chemicals regulated under the California Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act (“Prop 65”). We here highlight individual chemicals as well as consumer product categories that people are likely to be exposed to as individual consumers, in the workplace, and at the population level. Of the 33 Prop 65-listed chemicals that appear in the CARB emissions inventory, we classified 18 as “top tier priorities for elimination”. Among these, methylene chloride and N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone were most prevalent in products across all three population groups. Of 172 consumer product categories, 105 contained Prop 65-listed chemicals. Although these chemicals are known carcinogens and reproductive/developmental toxicants, they remain in widespread use. Manufacturers and regulators should prioritize product categories containing Prop 65-listed chemicals for reformulation or redesign to reduce human exposures and associated health risks. (source: More than 5,000 tons of toxic chemicals released from consumer products every year inside homes and workplaces)
We can’t leave this up to a non-profit or the US Chamber of Commerce or Industry Lobby Groups:
A brief look at Rachel Carson and Silent Spring: Introduction, A Noisy Half Century
SCOTUS and then, Flouride . . . what defining bookends for Capitalism;
[Photo: John M. Lee, “‘Silent Spring’ is Now Noisy Summer,” New York Times, 22 July 1962, 86.]
Paul Haeder, Author 