Special coverage in the Trump Era

From Public Citizen's Corporate Presidency site: "44 Trump administration officials have close ties to the Koch brothers and their network of political groups, particularly Vice President Mike Pence, White House Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and White House budget director Mick Mulvaney."

Dark Money author Jane Mayer on The Dangers of President Pence, New Yorker, Oct. 23 issue on-line

Can Time Inc. Survive the Kochs? November 28, 2017 By
..."This year, among the Kochs’ aims is to spend a projected four hundred million dollars in contributions from themselves and a small group of allied conservative donors they have assembled, to insure Republican victories in the 2018 midterm elections. Ordinarily, political reporters for Time magazine would chronicle this blatant attempt by the Kochs and their allies to buy political influence in the coming election cycle. Will they feel as free to do so now?"...

"Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America" see: our site, and George Monbiot's essay on this key book by historian Nancy MacLean.

Full interview with The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer March 29, 2017, Democracy Now! about her article, "The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency: How Robert Mercer Exploited America’s Populist Insurgency."

Democracy Now! Special Broadcast from the Women's March on Washington

The Economics of Happiness -- shorter version

Local Futures offers a free 19-minute abridged version  of its award-winning documentary film The Economics of Happiness. It "brings us voices of hope of in a time of crisis." www.localfutures.org.

What's New?

July 26, 2012

Chemistry Lessons: Living With Rachel Carson's Legacy

"Today, one study after another repeats the same cautions Carson raised decades ago, including how the tiniest chemical exposures can lead to long-term harm, especially to children."

"As you read this, a menagerie of chemical pollutants is coursing through your body. What you do and how you live doesn't matter. You have inhaled them, you've eaten them, you've absorbed them through your skin. You're doing it right now.

If you are an average American, your personal chemical inventory -- embedded in your blood, your breath and your bones -- will include an alphabet soup of phthalates, mercury, perfluorinated compounds, bisphenol A, and assorted chemical flame retardants.

If you are a new mother, you are passing these chemicals to your child through your breast milk. If you are pregnant, you are delivering them through your umbilical cord.

These inescapable realities of modern life -- realities that have vexed environmental advocates and worried scientists for years -- are not new. They were all foreseen, with sometimes chilling accuracy, 50 years ago this summer, when an unassuming marine biologist from Springdale, Penn., named Rachel Carson began publishing a series of articles in The New Yorker Magazine. Carson's essays, which accused the chemical industry of calculated deception and American regulators of wanton disregard for the proliferation of pesticides and other chemical pollutants released into the environment, would ultimately be published as the book "Silent Spring" -- considered by many to be the clarion call of the modern environmental movement.

Today, one study after another repeats the same cautions Carson raised decades ago, including how the tiniest chemical exposures can lead to long-term harm, especially to children.

“We’ve discovered many things that Carson intuitively anticipated, and also some things that she would’ve never imagined,” says John Peterson Myers, CEO and chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences."...

Read full article here

By Lynne Peeples, Huffington Post, July 23, 2012


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