====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
Nicholas Kristof reported in the NY Times about the recent 200 page report issued by the President’s Cancer Panel. "The report blames weak laws, lax enforcement and fragmented authority, as well as the existing regulatory presumption that chemicals are safe unless strong evidence emerges to the contrary. “Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety,” the report says. It adds: “Many known or suspected carcinogens are completely unregulated.”" http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/opinion/06kristof.html And a readers' comment: 4. Phil in the mountains of Kyushu Japan May 5th, 2010 11:22 pm Amazing your hopes for American decency in avoiding cancerous plastics. Do you really think Americans can resist what the corporate interests decide is cheapest for all here? – cheapest of course only by the corporate indecencies that give accounting only to most short-term profits for themselves? A Norwegian friend brought me up short recently when she referred to one of their public officials there as “a decent, cultured man.” This stung – made me realize that, in the chemical corporations, sales, Big Pharma – in anything connected with your plastics-delivery industries subject today – in none of these and more do we have public officials we might call “decent and cultured.” We thought – the world thought – we might finally have one in Obama, from the speeches he could give. But he then showed his mainly-corporate colors – reneging on pledge to investigate illegal telecom surveillance, expanding wars, increasing “spill, baby, spill” off-shore drilling, mega-funding more nuclear bombing research, and refusing to restore Glass-Steagal or any other regulations for the Goldman Sachs and other high finance pals with whom he’s surrounded himself. It may just be impossible for Americans to escape the suffocating priorities of power that incubate in the country’s schools. The parts of higher ed that presumably teach some “humanities” all do so in departmental silos that abort their relevance. Corporate agendas and corporate habits win – they totally run America, and without any accountability run amuck about the world. The U.S. Congress, peopled almost exclusively by the ethics-free grads of the biz and law schools, never says other than “more, more, more” to the U.S.’s militarism – over 700 bases in over 130 countries – and growing, like the incubus of plastics’ poisoning you show today. My “more, more, more”? – that’s a ref to John Fogerty and CCR. We normal Americans have some good access to a good range of culture – music, films, poets, more. But I guess it only shows those of us totally out of power, American institutional life otherwise choking under the so-much-more obviously indecent and non-cultured in charge. Thanks, though for the reminder of the short-sighted, health-and-environmental-blind corporate interests choking the world, from the Gulf now slicked in catastrophic oil spill to the rest of the world contaminated by the plastics you cite. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
