MA Gov. Patrick meets with Fidelity Investments, says he didn’t discuss Fidelity’s tax breaks “at any depth at all.” Fidelity’s earmarked share of the $300 million a year we keep giving away in faux “job creation” corporate income tax breaks didn’t merit in depth discussion? Even when they cut MA jobs? Guess he’s saving his depth for cuts to local aid to our cities, towns, and schools! http://ow.ly/4mRrH
Continue reading Gov. Patrick gives Fidelity his deepest consideration. Their tax breaks? Not so much.Fukushima Rad. Iodine Releases 100,000X Three Mile Island, IEER release.
http://www.ieer.org/comments/F…
By Brian Moench, MD. Should we all whistle “Don’t worry, be happy”? No safe level of radiation.
http://www.truth-out.org/radia…
Physicians for Social Responsibility: No safe level of radiation.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/4uz…
Twenty years after the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, the Rio+20, to take place in Rio again in under 13 months, is shaping up to be a critical event in the planet’s fate.
ETC Group’s Jim Thomas explains how, on the road to Rio+20, the hijackers (bankers and largest corporations) are already seizing the reins, why a hollow “green economy” amounts to a Trojan horse for ongoing destruction-as-usual, and what is behind the twin magic potions peddled by corporate execs and politicians as climate solutions: “markets” and “technology”.
People from all walks of life need to know this. A planetary revolt is necessary to get the profiteers off of our backs, and the high priests of techno-fixes off their pedestals.
Continue reading RIO+20: green economy, greenwashed economy, greed economy?I was recently an invited speaker at a conference on health and human rights at Seoul National University in South Korea. The occasion was the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the School of Public Health and I was asked to give a keynote address on the “right to know”. It’s an important issue in Seoul because a number of young workers at Samsung factories have become ill (some have died) and the company refuses to provide information on hazardous exposures claiming “trade secrets”. Although community and worker rights to information about dangerous chemicals and processes were won in the United States in the 1980’s, the issue is still a live one: BP refused to give information to the public on the chemical dispersant used in the Gulf of Mexico claiming trade secrets, but EPA (which did get the information) was badgered by the press until it finally released the data.
Continue reading Worker Rights are Human RightsAccording to the EPA, more than 53 million children and about 6 million adults spend a substantial part of their days in schools. The EPA has recognized that many schools have environmental problems, and, in 1995, released the first edition of its Indoor Air Quality Tools for Schools kit to encourage school districts to address environmental problems. The EPA estimates that an average of one out of 13 school-age children has asthma, and that asthma is a leading cause of student absenteeism.
Health concerns in schools are not limited to indoor air quality. Recently, schools are identifying and remediating PCBs found in building materials. As the public considers how to develop policies to respond to school-based health issues, they often consider AHERA, the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act as a model for regulating health issues in schools.
Continue reading Asbestos Canaries in the Schools
{ The 10th and final installment of Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series }
Underequipment, overdevelopment, and mature technology
The combination of transportation and transit that constitutes traffic has provided us with an example of socially optimal per capita wattage and of the need for politically chosen limits on it. But traffic can also be viewed as but one model for the convergence of world-wide development goals, and as a criterion by which to distinguish those countries that are lamely underequipped from those that are destructively overindustrialized.
A country can be classified as underequipped if it cannot outfit each citizen with a bicycle or provide a five-speed transmission as a bonus for anyone who wants to pedal others around. It is underequipped if it cannot provide good roads for the cycle, or free motorized public transportation (though at bicycle speed!) for those who want to travel for more than a few hours in succession. No technical, economic, or ecological reason exists why such backwardness should be tolerated anywhere in 1975. It would be a scandal if the natural mobility of a people were forced to stagnate on a pre-bicycle level against its will.
Continue reading Energy and Equity: Underequipment, overdevelopment, and mature technology{ Installment 9 in Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series. }
Dominant versus subsidiary motors
People are born almost equally mobile. Their natural ability speaks for the personal liberty of each one to go wherever he or she wants to go. Citizens of a society founded on the notion of equity will demand the protection of this right against any abridgment. It should be irrelevant to them by what means the exercise of personal mobility is denied, whether by imprisonment, bondage to an estate, revocation of a passport, or enclosure within an environment that encroaches on a person’s native ability to move in order to make him a consumer of transport. This inalienable right of free movement does not lapse just because most of our contemporaries have strapped themselves into ideological seat belts. Man’s natural capacity for transit emerges as the only yardstick by which to measure the contribution transport can make to traffic: there is only so much transport that traffic can bear. It remains to be outlined how we can distinguish those forms of transport that cripple the power to move from those that enhance it.
Continue reading Energy and Equity: Dominant versus subsidiary motorsToday was the last seminar in a series on clean energy and the media at Harvard’s Kennedy School. The subject, scheduled months ago, was “The Seesaw Coverage of Nuclear Power” with Matt Wald, NYTimes, Ned Potter, ABC News, and Matt Bunn, Harvard.
My rough notes follow.
Continue reading Seesaw Coverage of Nuclear PowerBy Susanne King, appearing originally on the editorial page of the Berkshire Eagle
Writing about the Massachusetts health care reform program in a 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal, Governor Deval Patrick stated, “Because of our reform… families are less likely to be forced into bankruptcy by medical costs.” Both Governor Patrick and President Obama have used the benchmark of medical bankruptcy as a key measure to prove the success of their health insurance reforms. Unfortunately, according to a study this month from Harvard University by Dr. David Himmelstein and associates, the absolute number of medical bankruptcies in Massachusetts increased between 2007 and 2009, the years after health care reform had been enacted. Dr. Himmelstein commented, “Massachusetts health reform, like the national law modeled after it, takes many of the uninsured and makes them under-insured, typically giving them a skimpy defective policy that’s like an umbrella that melts in the rain. The protection’s not there when you need it.”
For example, in Boston, the least expensive individual coverage available to a fifty six-year-old carries an annual premium of $5,616 and a deductible of $2000, and even then only covers 80% of the next $15,000 cost for covered services. Therefore, someone with a chronic condition like diabetes could have to pay $10,000 annually out of pocket, in addition to the premium.
Continue reading Vermont Leads the Way