Tag Archives: corporations

Elizabeth Warren Slams Wall Street Again

by Romona Traywick Posted on May 17, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, bank-basher Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) slammed several bills headed for the House floor that would severely weaken Wall Street reform.

The Dodd-Frank Act, the 2010 law aimed at preventing another financial crisis, “put in place a variety of measures that work together as a system to protect consumers, hold big banks accountable, and reduce the risk of future crises,” Warren said in a statement. “It is dangerous for Congress to amend the derivatives provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act.” (Derivatives are financial products that have values based on underlying numbers, like crop prices or interest rates; some economists believe these products helped cause the 2007 financial collapse.)

Warren’s condemnation of the bills, which just passed out of the House Financial Services Committee (HFSC), echoes a May 6th letter from Treasury secretary Jack Lew to House Financial Services Chair Jeb Hensarling attacking the bills. “The derivatives provisions in the Wall Street Reform Act constitute an important part of the reforms being put into place to strengthen our financial system by improving transparency and reducing risk for market participants,” Lew wrote in the letter. “These reforms should not be weakened or repealed.” Last year, former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner denounced a series of nearly identical bills.

One of the bills now headed to the House floor would expand the types of trading risks that banks can take on. Another would allow certain derivatives that are traded within a corporation to be exempt from almost all new Dodd-Frank regulations. Financial reform advocates say these kinds of trades can still pose a risk to the wider financial system. A third bill would allow big, multinational US-based banks to escape US regulations by operating through international arms.

“Wall Street’s aggressive determination paid off last week” when the bills passed out of committee, Warren said. The bills also have bipartisan support, and have a good chance of being taken up in the Senate. If they do, Warren says she’ll go to battle: “Now is no time to go backwards,” she said. “I will do what I can in the United States Senate to stand up to those who would chip away at reform.”

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Elizabeth Warren Slams Wall Street Again

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GOP Bill To Hogtie Wall Street Watchdog Heads for Vote

by SelenaKil Posted on May 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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A bill designed to tie the hands of a key Wall Street regulator is headed for a vote in the House this week.

The SEC Regulatory Accountability Act, introduced by Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) and co-sponsored by 23 other Republicans, sounds innocuously administrative. The bill would direct the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) “to conduct cost-benefit analyses to ensure that the benefits of any rulemaking outweigh the costs,” according to a statement by the House Financial Services Committee. Plus, says Garrett, the bill is good for jobs, job-creators, and people who want jobs. “The American people are hungry for common sense reform that will help unleash the economy,” he said in a statement. “I regularly hear from constituents, especially job creators, about how Washington red tape needs to be cut.”

But financial reform advocates say the bill could kill tons of new regulations designed to rein in the industry that crashed the economy a few years ago. “Cost-benefit has become a favorite club used by industry to try and kill legislation,” Dennis Kelleher of the financial reform group Better Markets told me earlier this year. The SEC is in the process of finalizing scores of new rules required by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, and reformers say Garrett’s bill would force the agency to study the impacts of regulations before they are known, and require analysis that would delay final rules. Not only that, says Kelleher, but the cost-benefit analysis the bill calls for includes only “industry costs,” not potential longer term costs to the broader economy that could result from killing these rules. For example, the SEC would have to consider the cost of to industry of making foreign banks adhere to US regulations, but not the cost to the global economy of allowing those banks to be regulated by potentially weaker foreign rules. (Many federal agencies are required to consider cost-benefit analyses when developing major rules, but the SEC and other independent agencies—those outside federal executive departments that are headed by a Cabinet secretary—are exempt.)

The White House slammed Garrett’s bill when it was approved by the House rules committee Wednesday, arguing that it would keep the SEC from doing its job. “The Administration believes in the value of cost-benefit analysis,” the White House Office of Management and Budget said in a statement. “However, the bill would add onerous procedures that would threaten the implementation of key reforms related to financial stability and investor protection.” Still, the president stopped short of saying he’d veto the bill.

As my colleague Tim Murphy reported Wednesday, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House rules committee, attempted to stymie the deregulatory bill by attaching an amendment that would have required political intelligence operatives to register under the Lobbying Disclosure Act and disclose their clients. It was voted down.

Now the GOP bill is headed to the House floor for a vote by Friday. Kelleher has his fingers crossed that the bill doesn’t make it into law. “Financial reform does not exist to minimize cost on the industry that almost caused a second great depression,” he says.

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GOP Bill To Hogtie Wall Street Watchdog Heads for Vote

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Did the Acting IRS Commissioner Mislead Congress?

by ggkk2121333 Posted on May 14, 2013

Mother Jones

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When Lois Lerner, a top IRS official, revealed last Friday that agency staffers had singled out conservative nonprofit groups for extra scrutiny over their potential political activities, she blamed low-level, “frontline” staffers in the agency’s Cincinnati office, a hub of activity that handles tens of thousands of applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS later said no high-level officials were aware of these controversial actions.

As it turns out, the current acting IRS commissioner knew that staffers were flagging applications from certain conservative groups a year before Congress and the public found out about it. And members of Congress are steaming mad that the IRS was aware of the questionable practices of some of its staffers and didn’t speak up about it. Several Republicans claim that Congress was misled by the IRS and its top brass about these actions.

The IRS said that current acting commissioner Steven Miller learned on May 3, 2012, that staffers had been picking out conservative groups for greater scrutiny than is typical. (Miller was deputy commissioner at the time.)

Yet Republican lawmakers say Miller neglected to tell Congress about the systematic singling out of conservative groups in subsequent interactions. Miller wrote two letters to Congress after his May 2012 briefing about how the IRS reviews applications for tax-exempt status, but did not mention the scrutiny of tea party groups. On July 25, 2012, Miller testified before the House ways and means oversight subcommittee on the subject of “organizational and compliance issues related to public charities.” During questioning, Miller was asked about tea party groups being harassed, but not about tea partiers specifically. He did not mention having been briefed on the IRS’ actions.

“It is almost inconceivable to imagine that top officials at the IRS knew conservative groups were being targeted but chose to willfully mislead the Committee’s investigation into this practice,” Rep. Dave Camp, chair of the ways and means committee, said in a statement.

An IRS spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Miller wrote in an op-ed for USA Today on Tuesday that the IRS’ singling out of conservative groups showed “a lack of sensitivity to the implications of some of the decisions that were made.” He added that sifting through applications for tax-exempt status was “factually complex, and it’s challenging to separate out political issues from those involving education or social welfare.” He did not say why he didn’t tell Congress about the tea party scrutiny when he learned of it in May 2012.

Other lawmakers say they corresponded with the IRS on the tea party issue and can’t understand why the agency didn’t share all of what it knew. “I wrote to the IRS three times last year after hearing concerns that conservative groups were being targeted,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), said in a statement Monday. “Yet it didn’t occur to anyone at the IRS to let us know that this targeting was in fact happening? Knowing what we know now, the IRS was at best being far from forthcoming, or at worst, being deliberately dishonest with Congress. These are the facts and the questions we need answered.”

They could be answered soon. On Friday, the House ways and means committee will hold a hearing on the IRS’ tea party controversy. Other House and Senate committees have pledged to investigate the matter, too.

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Did the Acting IRS Commissioner Mislead Congress?

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America’s 10 Worst Prisons: Walnut Grove

by 0df53x21 Posted on May 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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The youth prison’s record on rape was the worst “of any facility anywhere in the nation.” Richard Ross, Juvenile-in-Justice

Part 9 of an 11-part series.


#1: ADX (federal supermax)


#2: Allan B. Polunsky Unit (Texas)


#3: Tent City Jail (Phoenix)


#4: Orleans Parish (Louisiana)


#5: LA County Jail (Los Angeles)


#6: Pelican Bay (California)


#7: Julia Tutwiler (Alabama)


#8: Reeves Country Detention Complex (Texas)


#9: Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility (Mississippi)

Read the complete introduction to our 10 Worst Prisons project.

Serving time in prison is not supposed to be pleasant. Nor, however, is it supposed to include being raped by fellow prisoners or staff, beaten by guards for the slightest provocation, driven mad by long-term solitary confinement, or killed off by medical neglect. These are the fates of thousands of prisoners every year—men, women, and children housed in lockups that give Gitmo and Abu Ghraib a run for their money.

While there’s plenty of blame to go around, and while not all of the facilities described in this series have all of the problems we explore, some stand out as particularly bad actors. We’ve compiled this subjective list of America’s 10 worst lockups (plus a handful of dishonorable mentions) based on three years of research, correspondence with prisoners, and interviews with criminal-justice reform advocates concerning the penal facilities with the grimmest claims to infamy.

We will roll out the final contenders this week, complete with photos and video. Number 9 is a corporate-run facility where children allegedly have been subjected to a heartrending pattern of brutal beatings, rapes, and isolation.

Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility (Leake County, Mississippi)

Number of prisoners: Capacity 1,450 (actual population in flux)

Who’s in charge: (current) Lawrence Mack, warden; (former) George Zoley, CEO, the GEO Group; Christopher B. Epps, commissioner, Mississippi Department of Corrections

The basics: Efforts are underway to clean up and clear out Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility, which one federal judge called “a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts” visited upon children as young as 13. For years, the kids at Walnut Grove were subjected to a gauntlet of physical and sexual assaults, and psychological abuse including long-term solitary confinement. All of this took place under the management of private prison conglomerate the GEO Group.

Check out photographer Richard Ross’ Juvenile-in-Justice project, with stories from youth facilities all over America. (And don’t forget his awesome photo book.)

The backlash: Evidence gathered for a report by the Justice Department and a lawsuit by the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center “paints a picture of such horror as should be unrealized anywhere in the civilized world,” Federal District Judge Carleton Reeves wrote in a 2012 court order. The court found that conditions at Walnut Grove violated the Constitution, not to mention state and federal civil and criminal laws. Guards regularly had sex with their young charges and the facility’s pattern of “brutal” rapes among prisoners was the worst of “any facility anywhere in the nation” (court’s emphasis). Guards also were deemed excessively violent—beating, kicking, and punching “handcuffed and defenseless” youths and frequently subjecting them to chemical restraints such as pepper spray, even for insignificant infractions.

The guards also sold drugs on site and staged “gladiator-style” fights. “It’d be like setting up a fight deal like you would with two dogs,” one former resident told NPR. “They actually bet on it. It was payday for the guards.” Said another: “A lot of times, the guards are in the same gang. If the inmates wanted something done, they got it. If they wanted a cell popped open to handle some business about fighting or something like that, it just pretty much happened.” Kids who complained or tried to report these incidents faced harsh retribution, including long stints in solitary.

Judge Reeves wrote that the state had turned a blind eye to the prison company’s abuses: Walnut Grove’s charges, “some of whom are mere children, are at risk every minute, every hour, every day.” In accord with a court decree, the facility’s youngest residents have been moved to a state-run juvenile facility, and Mississippi canceled its contract with GEO—which still runs some 65 prisons nationwide. The contract was handed over to another private prison company, Management and Training Corporation, which also has been a target of criticism for advocates of criminal justice reform.

Also read: “The Lost Boys,” about what happens when you put kids in an adult isolation facility.

Watch: Local news report on a protest by Walnut Grove parents.

Coming tomorrow: An island prison where guards allegedly “use unlawful, excessive force with impunity.”

Read more: America’s 10 Worst Prisons index page.

Research for this project was supported by a grant from the Investigative Fund and The Nation Institute, as well as a Soros Justice Media Fellowship from the Open Society Foundations. Additional reporting by Beth Broyles, Valeria Monfrini, Katie Rose Quandt, and Sal Rodriguez.

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America’s 10 Worst Prisons: Walnut Grove

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WATCH: Apple Doesn’t Evade Taxes, It iEvades Them Fiore Cartoon

by Shannon Walters Posted on May 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: Apple Doesn’t Evade Taxes, It iEvades Them Fiore Cartoon

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4,693 People in America Died on the Job in 2011

by pawel Posted on May 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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Workplaces dangers have been in the news more than usual lately, from the deadly explosion at the West, Texas, fertilizer plant to the garment factory collapse in Bangladesh, where the death toll is now more than 700. In light of the latter, there is the temptation to say that what happened in Texas was an anomaly, and that conditions in US factories are so much better than in the developing world. But not so fast: A new report from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, the nation’s largest affiliation of unions, shows that 4,693 people died the job in the US in 2011 (the most recent year for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics has released figures).

According to the “Death on the Job” report, the most dangerous occupations in the US in 2011 were in the agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting sectors; mining and transportation were also near the top of the list. The average fatality rate across all occupations was 3.5 deaths per 100,000 workers.

While the numbers are much lower than they were back in 1970, when 13,800 employees died on the job, the AFL-CIO notes that that fatality rate has not improved since 2008. And another estimated 50,000 workers die each year from work-related diseases like cancers and lung ailments.

Part of the issue, the AFL-CIO concludes, is that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) remains underfunded and understaffed, and that penalties are too low to deter violations:

Because of the underfunding, federal OSHA inspectors can only inspect workplaces once every 131 years on average, and state OSHA inspectors would take 76 years to inspect all workplaces.
OSHA penalties are too low to be taken seriously, let alone provide deterrence. The average penalty is only $2,156 for a serious federal health and safety violation, and only $974 for a state violation. Even in cases involving worker fatalities, the median total penalty was a paltry $5,175 for federal OSHA and $4,200 for the OSHA state plans. By contrast, property damage valued between $300 and $10,000 in the state of Illinois is considered a Class 4 felony and can carry a prison sentence of 1 to 3 years and a fine of up to $25,000.
Criminal penalties under OSHA are also weak. While there were 320 criminal enforcement cases initiated under federal environmental laws and 231 defendants charged in FY 2012, only 84 cases related to worker deaths have been prosecuted since 1970.

Read the full report here. Also be sure to check out the Center for Public Integrity’s reporting on workplace safety in the chemical, steel, and fishing industries.

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4,693 People in America Died on the Job in 2011

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America’s Fertilizer Keeps Blowing Up. It Doesn’t Have To

by munrhexaa Posted on May 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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It didn’t take long in the aftermath of April’s explosion in West, Texas, for the problems with the fertilizer industry to come into focus. Inspections are virtually non-existent; regulatory agencies don’t talk to each other; and there’s no such thing as a buffer zone when it comes to constructing plants and storage facilities in populated areas.

Lost in the fallout, though, is a damning fact: fertilizer doesn’t have to be explosive. Pure ammonium nitrate like the kind that caused the West disaster is already banned in the United Kingdom, Germany, Colombia, the Philippines, and China, due to its explosive risk; Australia’s largest fertilizer manufacturer discontinued the use of the compound after it was used in the 2002 Bali hotel bombing. And the Department of Defense has pressured fertilizer manufacturers overseas to neutralize their own products, warning that anything less constitutes a threat to American personnel. But in the United States, with the backing of the chemical industry, explosive ammonium nitrate has held onto a small but powerful share of the market as the fertilizer-of-choice for citrus growers.

It wasn’t for lack of opportunity. In the late 1960s, a chemist from Kansas, Charles Saffer, and an explosives engineer, Samuel Porter, began working in their spare-time to develop an antidote to the kind of destructive devices Porter had witnessed while stationed in Somalia with the US military. Porter and Saffer secured a patent for non-combustible fertilizer that involves diluting ammonium nitrate with diammonium phosphate. Because diammonium phosphate is itself used as fertilizer, the new compound was—in theory—still an effective agricultural compound. The duo enlisted a partner, Robert Colbert, and found a lawyer: a young Louisiana attorney named Billy Tauzin.

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America’s Fertilizer Keeps Blowing Up. It Doesn’t Have To

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The 10 Worst Prisons in America: Polunsky

by sssaa Posted on May 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last stop for condemned Texans. Minutes Before Six

Editor’s note: This is part 2 of an 11-part series. Click here for the complete introduction.

Serving time in prison is not supposed to be pleasant. Nor, however, is it supposed to include being raped by fellow prisoners or staff, beaten by guards for the slightest provocation, driven mad by long-term solitary confinement, or killed off by medical neglect. These are the fates of thousands of prisoners every year—men, women, and children housed in lockups that give Gitmo and Abu Ghraib a run for their money.


#1: ADX


#2: Polunsky

Read an introduction to this project here.

While there’s plenty of blame to go around, and while not all of the facilities described in this series have all of the problems we explore, some stand out as particularly bad actors. We’ve compiled this subjective list of America’s 10 worst lockups (plus a handful of dishonorable mentions) based on three years of research, correspondence with prisoners, and interviews with criminal-justice reform advocates concerning the penal facilities with the grimmest claims to infamy. We will be rolling out profiles of all of the contenders in the coming days, complete with photos and video.

Our subjective ranking was based on three years of research, correspondence with prisoners, and interviews with reform advocates concerning the penal facilities with the grimmest claims to infamy. Now, as promised, let’s head on down to Texas to visit our second contender, where condemned men (even severely mentally ill ones) spend their final years under what are arguably the nation’s harshest death-row conditions.

2] Allan B. Polunsky Unit, a.k.a. death row (Livingston, Texas)

Number of prisoners: ~300

Who’s in charge: Richard Alford, former warden at Polunksy, he now oversees all the region’s prisons; Oliver Bell, chairman, Texas Board of Criminal Justice

A typical cell at Polunsky. Minutes Before Six

The basics: “The most lethal death row anywhere in the democratic world” is also probably “the hardest place to do time in Texas,” writes Robert Perkinson, author of the book TexasTough. Indeed, the all-solitary Allan B. Polunsky Unit houses condemned Texans under some of the nation’s harshest death row conditions. The prisoners are housed in single cells on 22-hour-a-day lockdown, and even during their daily “recreation” hour, they are confined in separate cages. With no access to phones, televisions, contact visits, they remain in essentially a concrete tomb (PDF) until execution day—a stretch of at least three years for the mandatory appeals, and far longer if they opt to keep fighting. Some have been known to commit suicide or waive their appeals rather than continue living under such conditions.

The backlash: At Polunsky, the “emotional torture” of awaiting death in total isolation is “driving men out of their minds,” former prisoner Anthony Graves told senators last year at the first-ever Judiciary Committee hearing on solitary confinement. “I would watch guys come to prison totally sane and in three years they don’t live in the real world anymore,” recalled Graves, who was exonerated in 2010, after spending more than 18 years on death row.

Graves detailed for the senators some of the profoundly erratic behavior of his fellow prisoners. “I know a guy who would sit in the middle of the floor, rip his sheet up, wrap it around himself, and light it on fire. Another guy…would take his feces and smear it all over his face as though he was in military combat.”

Listen: Click on the arrow for audio of M*A*S*H* actor Mike Farrell reading our essay, “How Crazy Is Too Crazy to be Executed?”

This man, Graves added, was ruled competent for execution. While on the gurney, “he was babbling incoherently to the officers, ‘I demand that you release me soldier, this is your captain speaking.’ These were the words coming out of a man’s mouth, who was driven insane by the prison conditions, as the poison was being pumped into his arms.”

Another prisoner, a paranoid schizophrenic named Andre Thomas, scooped out his eye and ate it during his stay at Polunsky. He, too, remains on track for execution. It is perhaps no wonder that Dallas insurance executive Charles Terrell asked to have his name removed from the facility after it became death row.

Watch: Anthony Graves’ Senate testimony:

Coming tomorrow: A facility with a “pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos.”

Research for this project was supported by a grant from the Investigative Fund and The Nation Institute, as well as a Soros Justice Media Fellowship from the Open Society Foundations. Additional reporting by Beth Broyles, Valeria Monfrini, Katie Rose Quandt, and Sal Rodriguez.

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The 10 Worst Prisons in America: Polunsky

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Why Is the Toxic Dispersant Used After BP’s Gulf Disaster Still the Cleanup Agent of Choice in the US?

by 9ji7g4x Posted on April 19, 2013

Mother Jones

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Great Britain, the home country of BP, has banned the stuff. So has Sweden. But BP says as long as the US allows it, they’ll use Corexit dispersant on their next oil spill. “If this vision becomes reality, long-term destruction to our health and environment will expand exponentially.” This according to a damning new report, Deadly Dispersants in the Gulf: Are Public Health and Environmental Tragedies the New Norm for Oil Spill Cleanups?, by the nonprofit Government Accountability Project (GAP).

The GAP report was issued today in advance of tomorrow’s three-year anniversary of BP’s monster debacle in Gulf of Mexico, the worst environmental disaster in US history, that killed eleven people and injured sixteen others. BP managed to hide most of the 4.9 million barrels of oil erupting from its maimed well from human eyes by flooding it with 1.84 million gallons of Corexit dispersant, both at the wellhead on the deep sea floor (a first) and at the surface.

That had devastating affects on human health, says the GAP, based on data they collected from extensive Freedom of Information Act requests and from evidence collected over 20 months from more than two dozen employee and citizen whistleblowers who experienced the cleanup’s effects firsthand.

BP oil spill clean-up worker near Grande Isle, LA, June 2010. © Julia Whitty

The report cites four major areas of concern: 1) existing health problems; 2) failure to protect clean-up workers; 3) ecological problems and food safety issues; 4) and inadequate compensation. Ongoing health problems from the “BP Syndrome” include: blood in urine, heart palpitations, kidney and liver damage, migraines, multiple chemical sensitivity, memory loss, rapid weight loss, respiratory system and nervous system damage, seizures, skin irritation (burning and lesions), and temporary paralysis, plus long-term concerns about exposure to known carcinogens.

Failure to protect clean-up workers began with BP and the government misrepresenting known risks by asserting that Corexit was low in toxicity—this contrary to warnings in BP’s own internal manual—says the GAP. They cite other problems:

Interviewed cleanup workers reported they either didn’t receive any training or didn’t receive the federally required training.
Worker resource manuals detailing Corexit health hazards were not delivered or were removed from BP worksites early in the cleanup, when health problems began.
Divers were allowed to enter the water after assurances it was safe and additional protective equipment was unnecessary, despite government agency regulations prohibited diving during the spill due to health risks.
BP and the federal government publicly denied any significant chemical exposure to humans was occurring, though of the workers the GAP interviewed, 87% reported contact with Corexit while on the job, and subsequent blood test results revealed high levels of chemical exposure.
BP and the federal government believed that allowing workers to wear respirators would not create a positive public image and the feds permitted BP’s retaliation against workers who insisted on wearing this protection. Nearly half of the cleanup workers interviewed by GAP reported that they were threatened with termination when they tried to wear respirators or additional safety equipment on the job. Many received early termination notices after raising safety concerns on the job.
All workers interviewed reported that they were provided minimal or no personal protective equipment on the job.

As for compensation: “BP’s Gulf Coast Claims Fund denied all health claims during its 18 months of existence.”

© Julia Whitty Living mollusk trying to escape BP oil spill:

Among the ecological damage in the report the GAP notes: “The FDA grossly misrepresented the results of its analysis of Gulf seafood safety. Of GAP’s witnesses, a majority expressed concern over the quality of government seafood testing, and reported seeing new seafood deformities firsthand. A majority of fishermen reported that their catch has decreased significantly since the spill.”

I’ve written extensively about ongoing problems regarding Corexit emerging from the science: overview here; dispersant made spill 52 times more toxic here; dispersant allowed oil to penetrate beaches more deeply here; fish hammered by oil and dispersant here; the decline of microscopic life on oil-and-dispersal-tainted beaches here, and horrific and ongoing whale and dolphin deaths here and here.

The GAP report demands that both BP and the government take corrective action to mitigate ongoing suffering and to prevent the future use of this toxic substance, including: a federal ban on Corexit; Congressional hearings on the link between the current public health crisis in the Gulf and Corexit exposure; immediate reform of EPA dispersant policy, specifically to determine whether such products are safe for humans and the environment prior to granting approval; establishment of effective medical treatment programs run by medical experts specializing in chemical exposure for Gulf residents and workers; funding by the federal government of third-party independent assessments of both the spill’s health impact on Gulf residents and workers, and such treatment programs when established.

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Why Is the Toxic Dispersant Used After BP’s Gulf Disaster Still the Cleanup Agent of Choice in the US?

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Will Monsanto Ties Influence Nutritionists’ Stance on GMOs?

by bloksaggfdflajn Posted on April 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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The GMO seed giant Monsanto recently flexed its muscles in Congress, working with a senator to sneak a friendly rider into an unrelated funding bill. Now it appears to be having its way with the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. As the New York Times reports, a dietician who’d been working on crafting the group’s GMO policy claims she was pushed aside for pointing out her colleagues’ links to Monsanto.

The controversy started during last fall’s highly contested battle over a ballot initiative that would have required labeling genetically modified food in California. The prestigious dieticians’ group was incorrectly listed by the official state voters’ guide as one of the scientific organizations that had “concluded biotech foods are safe.” Actually, the AND had taken no position on the issue, but it promised to come out with a position paper on it. (The ballot initiative ultimately failed.)

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Will Monsanto Ties Influence Nutritionists’ Stance on GMOs?

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