Quote of the day -- on Monsanto and their GMOs

Lest anyone should think it's from some Left Wing, progressive, corporate-hating person with too many opinions, check out the source for the quote, too:

Reasons to go, buy and eat organic

11. You'll have less insecticides (read: poison) in your body

12. You'll be as least somewhat less likely to contract cancer since you'll have less insecticides in your body.

13. However more costly initially, organic is less expensive than cancer.

14. No one really likes hospitals all that much.

Kansas, corporate America and their poisons in the NY Times today

Yes sir, the little town of Treece, Kansas--or what and who is left of it--is in The New York Times today:

Last Ones Left in a Toxic Kansas Town

It seems this little town on the edge of Oklahoma was a zinc and lead area for decades and many big profits were made by companies.

Trouble is, no one held those companies responsible for the clean up:

"Then there’s the water. The local Tar Creek is the color of orange juice, and it smells like vinegar. This is because when the mining companies left, they shut off the pumps that kept abandoned shafts from filling with groundwater. Once water flooded the tunnels, it picked up all the trace minerals underground — iron, lead and zinc — and flushed them into rivers and streams. Fish and fowl fled or went belly-up. 'The only thing polluted in Treece,' says Rex Buchanan, interim director at the Kansas Geological Survey, 'is the earth, air and water.'”

And the thing is, there are lots of corporate-made Treeces all over the US.

Do you suppose America and Americans will ever learn?

If we do, do you suppose it won't be too late?

Here's hoping.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/magazine/last-ones-left-in-treece-kan-a-toxic-town.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120520

Quote of the day--on the oh, so safe nuclear industry

June 2000

U.S. Senator Mike DeWine (R-OH) led a field senate hearing regarding workers exposed to hazardous materials while working in the nation's atomic plants. At the hearing, which revealed information about potential on and off-site contamination at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, DeWine noted, "We know that as a result of Cold War efforts, the government, yes, our federal government, allowed thousands of workers at its facilities across the country to be exposed to poisonous materials, such as beryllium dust, plutonium, and silicon, without adequate protection." Testimony also indicated that the Piketon plant altered workers' radiation dose readings and worked closely with medical professionals to fight worker's compensation claims.

Yes, by all means, rest easy, people of the world.  We're safe.   --The Nuclear Industry and your respective government

More here:  http://www.lutins.org/nukes.html

With yet another hat tip and thanks to Skippy the Bush Kangaroo (see the blog) for the link.

Chris Hedges on hope

Hope knows that unless we physically defy government control we are complicit in the violence of the state. All who resist keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become enemies of hope. They become, in their passivity, agents of injustice. If the enemies of hope are finally victorious, the poison of violence will become not only the language of power but the language of opposition. And those who resist with nonviolence are in times like these the thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration.

Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. Hope does not come with the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is an action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and the more potent hope becomes. Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganized and absurd. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope does not believe in force. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on us all. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good. This is the secret of hope’s power and it is why it can never finally be defeated. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our enemy our own face.

Hope is not for the practical and the sophisticated, the cynics and the complacent, the defeated and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state, which saturates our airwaves with lies, seeks to obliterate. Hope is what our corporate overlords are determined to crush. Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don’t resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations to think. No. Above all do not think. Obey.

W.H. Auden wrote:

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are, 
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in the cold, dead words of national security, global markets, electoral strategy, staying on message, image and money. The powerful protect their own. They divide the world into the damned and the blessed, the patriots and the enemy, the rich and the poor. They insist that extinguishing lives in foreign wars or in our prison complexes is a form of human progress. They cannot see that the suffering of a child in Gaza or a child in the blighted pockets of Washington, D.C., diminishes and impoverishes us all. They are deaf, dumb and blind to hope. Those addicted to power, blinded by self-exaltation, cannot decipher the words of hope any more than most of us can decipher hieroglyphics. Hope to Wall Street bankers and politicians, to the masters of war and commerce, is not practical. It is gibberish. It means nothing.

Any act of rebellion, any physical defiance of those who make war, of those who perpetuate corporate greed and are responsible for state crimes, anything that seeks to draw the good to the good, nourishes our souls and holds out the possibility that we can touch and transform the souls of others. Hope affirms that which we must affirm. And every act that imparts hope is a victory in itself.

Also from Auden:

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is“Death of the Liberal Class.” More information on the Dec. 16 protest can be found at www.stopthesewars.org.

When you're not focused on the 700 billion dollar bailout (for the wealthy, from the White House)

Here's another beauty from the pinheads in this administration:

The EPA "has declared there is no need to rid drinking water of a rocket fuel ingredient."

Wha??

WTF?

Rocket fuel ingredient?

In drinking water in the United States?

Yes, ladies and gentlemen. You read right. Read on:

"The EPA reached the conclusion in a draft regulatory document reviewed Monday by the Associated Press. The ingredient, perchlorate, has been found in at least 395 sites in 35 states at high enough levels that some scientists say could interfere with thyroid function and pose health risks."

Yow.

The United States.

395 sites.

35 states.

Well, I, for one, am just glad the United States government is here to protect us, aren't you?

Now that we're over either the sarcasm or the laughter, this brings up some terrific, serious questions.

Where are these sites? Where are they mostly located? Are they in--or near--major cities?

What companies would most likely be responsible for these exposures? And please don't tell us it can't be certain. There can't be THAT many organizations handling this stuff.

Boy, I hope we get our government back from the corporations one day.

And soon.