WE KNOW THAT XL-PIPELINE AND FRACKING ARE ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES BUT DID YOU KNOW THAT LEAVING A CITY'S WATER AND SEWER INFRASTRUCTURE TO CRUMBLE WHILE DIVERTING BILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO THE RICH IS ONE OF THE GREATEST ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTERS?
The amount of fresh water lost with water main breaks, the sewage leaks, and street drainage disruptions are the major pollution problems in Baltimore for the Bay and yet, we spent billions of taxpayer money subsidizing on Harbor East and East Baltimore. Sparrow's Point Mill was allowed to be gutted and taken to bankruptcy without any comprehensive look at what is an huge environmental mess.
WHETHER O'MALLEY OR RAWLINGS-BLAKE OR CITY HALL AND MARYLAND ASSEMBLY----IF A POL IS NOT SHOUTING THAT ALL MARYLAND DEVELOPMENT IS UNSUSTAINABLE-----THEY ARE NOT GREEN.
Regarding Hillary as the proponent for International Global Warming Tribunal:
It looks as though Hillary is moving from 'it takes a village' after 4 years as head of a State Department that stood with the drone warfare policy that razed villages illegally around the world in the name of 'war on terror'. Social media calls Hillary-----'it takes a drone to raze a village' candidate. Let's look what corporate 'public' media will be telling us about Hillary this 2016 election-----she is the candidate fighting for global warming policy around the world. In this Alice in Wonderland American media as state propaganda we will not be reminded that Bill and Hillary made their administration about creating global corporations and global markets just so US corporations could go overseas to avoid all US environmental and labor laws and watched as Asia was made into an environmental disaster from these US corporations. Ergo, fast-forward global warming.
HILLARY IS THE FACE OF GLOBAL WARMING FOR GOODNESS SAKE. BILL AND HILLARY ARE THE FACE OF THE TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT THAT SEEKS TO END US SOVEREIGNTY TO ALLOW US GLOBAL CORPORATIONS TO COME BACK TO THE US TO POLLUTE OUR ENVIRONMENT AS IT HAS OVERSEAS.
We listen on corporate NPR/APM where Europe has sent the fracking corporations away because it does not want to ruin its environment and natural resources like any developed world would decide as good policy. So, says NPR these fracking industries are coming back to Louisiana, the Nigerian Delta of the America's South. We hear that Russia has protected its citizens and farmers from the environmental disaster that is GMOs and protected small farmers from the US push to industrialized agriculture and meat. So too are the Europeans for the most part. Some nations in Europe had GMOs forced upon them but many did not and those that did are reversing it. Bill and Hillary Clinton have been cheerleaders for Monsanto since his Presidency. Corporate NPR now describes Europe in decline, opting for first world quality of life for its citizens instead of massive corporate fraud, corruption, and wealth at the top. Downsizing global corporations is of course the first world economic policy of the 21st Century. I know that is the direction American citizens are moving. So, corporate NPR/APM with WYPR need to WAKE UP and join the real world as we shake the neo-liberal bugs from the rug and rebuild the people's democratic party for labor and justice.
HILLARY CLINTON AS A FRIEND TO INTERNATIONAL GLOBAL WARMING MOVEMENT??????? REALLY???????? MS. GLOBAL CORPORATE TRIBUNAL WORKING ONLY FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT WILL NEVER PLACE LABOR AND JUSTICE FIRST!
Below you see the results of two decades of Reagan/Clinton neo-liberalism with the Clinton's deregulating and dismantling public oversight and passing laws weakening public justice. Cost Benefit Analysis placing corporate profit over public interest soared with Bill and Hillary meaning environmental issues.....some of the most costly outside labor laws......started to fall by the way. Now, if you are working to send US Corporations overseas to allow massive environmental pollution over there, are you really working for Clean Air and Clean Water in the US? Of course not. What happens over there comes over here.
LOOK AT THE BIG PICTURE AND FORGET THESE PROGRESSIVE BONES NEO-LIBERALS THROW. YOU ARE NOT SUPPORTING ORGANIC FARMERS AND HEALTHY EATING IF YOU ARE PUSHING MONSANTO AND INDUSTRIAL FARMING.
So, because Clinton started the dismantling of public agencies and oversight we have a small business in Baltimore having to pay thousands of dollars to monitor construction that the EPA should never have allowed and because the EPA and Maryland has no oversight of these environmental dangers. THE PEOPLE MUST PAY TO PROTECT THEMSELVES BECAUSE PUBLIC AGENCIES DESIGNED TO DO THAT HAVE BEEN DEFUNDED. Now, in Baltimore it is Johns Hopkins that promotes this dismantling of all that is public oversight and environmental disaster along the waterfront. Whether export terminals for natural gas or Port of Baltimore as global shipping hub killing the bay with invasive species....
MARYLAND IS CLINTON COUNTRY SAY NEO-LIBERALS CONTROLLING MARYLAND'S DEMOCRATIC PARTY. NAKED CAPITALISM WOULD NEVER HAVE THRIVED WITHOUT THE CLINTONS!
Across from Harbor Point, an unofficial air-monitoring effort
Black Olive owner says he wants to do his own test — set up by a Johns Hopkins researcher — to keep developer 'honest'
Johns Hopkins School of Public Health researcher Ana Rule checks air monitoring equipment she set up outside the Inn at The Black Olive. The family operating the hotel is concerned about development across the street at Harbor Point and wants to independently monitor chromium levels in the air. (Jamie Smith Hopkins, Baltimore Sun / March 23, 2014)
By Jamie Smith Hopkins, The Baltimore Sun
10:20 p.m. EDT, March 23, 2014
Ana Rule stepped onto a balcony outside the Inn at the Black Olive Sunday morning to check the first results of an unusual air-monitoring effort — one intended to make sure official monitoring across the street is accurate.
The hotel in Baltimore's Fells Point overlooks Harbor Point, the planned $1.8 billion mixed-use development on land where a factory once processed chromium. Contaminated soil — capped years ago to keep the toxic chemicals under control — would be temporarily exposed during the early part of the work there.
Environmental regulators gave approval several weeks ago for Harbor Point developer Beatty Development Group to begin collecting air samples in the run-up to construction, and monitoring would continue while work is underway.
But Stelios Spiliadis, who owns the Black Olive restaurant and whose son operates the inn, said he's not comfortable relying on the official effort. That's how air-monitoring equipment ended up on the balcony, set up by Rule, a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research associate whose expertise is air quality.
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"I hope that the developer, knowing that we are going to try to keep him honest, stays honest," Spiliadis said.
Marco Greenberg, vice president for the Baltimore-based Beatty Development, said by email Sunday the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Maryland Department of the Environment "have conducted rigorous reviews of the air monitoring methodology and procedures to be used at Harbor Point, which will utilize best practices and the latest science."
"The agencies have indicated that their approval of the construction air monitoring plans, which must be obtained before construction can begin, will come this week," he said. "During construction, all air monitoring will be done under the supervision of both EPA and MDE, and they will make frequent visits to the site."
Greenberg said "field work for the baseline monitoring has been completed," and data would be submitted to EPA and MDE this week.
A spokeswoman with the state Department of the Environment could not be reached Sunday.
Harbor Point plans are for office buildings — including energy firm Exelon Corp.'s new regional headquarters — along with stores, residences and a hotel.
Rule began monitoring general pollution levels in the area Friday afternoon and expects to set up equipment specifically to monitor chromium this week. Like the official monitors, hers are gathering baseline information — air quality before Harbor Point construction begins.
She can analyze the filters collecting general information on pollution levels, but the chromium samples will be sent to Rutgers University in New Jersey, another state with headaches associated with former chromium plants.
The Rutgers work will cost $150 a sample. Rule said she hopes to take two or three a week and continue until work involving Harbor Point's contaminated soil is finished, but that's still to be determined.
Spiliadis, who anticipates total expenses of around $5,000 or $6,000, agreed to take responsibility. He said he plans to hold fundraisers at his restaurant to defray the cost — he pointed out with a sardonic grin that none of the roughly $400 million in public subsidies for Harbor Point are coming his way.
Rule has monitored air in Turners Station, a Baltimore County neighborhood concerned about pollution. She got involved in the monitoring at the Black Olive after Spiliadis shared his concerns with Johns Hopkins staffers.
They sat in the Black Olive inn's cafe Sunday morning, Spiliadis listening as Rule explained why it's "very hard" to accurately measure chromium in the air.
It comes in two common forms: trivalent chromium, an essential trace element, and hexavalent chromium, a cancer-causing form. The dangerous form was used in the processing plant, but it can show up as its cousin on air monitors thanks to reactions with acids in the atmosphere, Rule said.
Unfortunately, "when you breathe it, it's the way that it is in the air — which is hexavalent," she said.
"So you see why I'm scared?" Spiliadis put in.
Rule said Rutgers adds steps to the EPA's chromium-measurement method "to make extra sure that the final results are what was in the air."
"We don't want to be alarmist or anything, but we want to make sure we do the right thing and we are sampling with the best possible technology," Rule said.
She then checked on the equipment, pulling out filters full of particulate matter collected since about 5 p.m. Friday. She can analyze those herself for overall pollution levels and total chromium, but not whether that chromium is hexavalent or trivalent.
She picked up one filter to show just how dirty it got in less than 48 hours. That's a baseline — the Fells Point air as it is before construction kicks off.
Spiliadis said the Black Olive inn was constructed with air quality in mind, including no paint on the walls so guests would not breathe in fumes. He said he was thinking of customers when he decided to monitor whether Harbor Point changes the air.
It might all turn out fine, Rule told Spiliadis. In that case, the monitoring would simply confirm the official readings.
"Then I would be able to sleep well," Spiliadis said.
_______________________________________________
Corporate media will now paint Hillary as protectress-in-chief of the world's environment even as the US is seen as the worst offender in all that is environmental disasters. Neo-liberalism means that environmental laws can be ignored to maximize corporate profits and no matter the progressive bones a neo-liberal throws wealth and profit wins. We see that mirrored in Maryland environmental policy.
On Hillary and Bill Clinton and Monsanto
by Forwarded article by Linn Cohen-Cole | 03.14.2008
Thought you all might be interested in reading this open letter to Hillary Clinton, by Linn Cohen-Cole, on the Clinton's ties to Monsanto, promotion of genetically engineered crops and rBGH, recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone. Please follow this link if you wish go to a version of the letter where you will be able to click on reference links in the letter, http://www.celsias.com/2008/02/19/an-open-letter-to-hillary-clinton-from-a-wellesley-college-alumna/
Open Letter to Hillary Clinton From a Wellesley College Alumna
February 19, 2008
by Linn Cohen-Cole
Dear Hillary,
By polling logic, I should be your supporter - Democrat, older woman, white, liberal. I was even in a dorm with you in college. I have pulled for you for years. But something this past summer fundamentally changed my responsibility to my children and grandchildren. In the time I have left in my life to protect them and others, I need to speak out.
I saw a News Hour piece on Maharastra, India, about farmers committing suicide [see here and here]. Monsanto, a US agricultural giant, hired Bollywood actors for ads telling illiterate farmers they could get rich (by their standards) from big yields with Monsanto’s Bt (genetically engineered) cotton seeds. The expensive seeds needed expensive fertilizer and pesticides (Monsanto, again) and irrigation. There is no irrigation there. Crops failed. Farmers had larger debt than they’d ever experienced.
And farmers couldn’t collect seeds from their own fields [see here and here] to try again (true since time immemorial). Monsanto “patents” their DNA-altered seeds as “intellectual property.” They have a $10 million budget and a staff of 75 devoted solely to prosecuting farmers [here]. Since the late 1990s (about when industrial agriculture took hold in India), 166,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide and 8 million have left the land.
Farmers in Europe, Asia, Africa, Indonesia,South America, Central America and here, have protested Monsanto and genetic engineering for years.
What does this have to do with you?
You have connections to Monsanto through the Rose Law Firm where you worked and through Bill who hired Monsanto people for central food-related roles. Your Orwellian-named “Rural Americans for Hillary” was planned withTroutman Sanders, Monsanto’s lobbyists.
Genetic engineering and industrialized food and animal production all come together at the Rose Law Firm, which represents the world’s largest GE corporation (Monsanto), GE’s most controversial project (DP&L’s - now Monsanto’s - terminator genes) [here], the world’s largest meat producer (Tyson), the world’s largest retailer and a dominant food retailer (Wal-Mart) [here].
The inbred-ness of Rose’s legal representation of corporations which own controlling interests in other corporations there and of corporate boards sharing members who are also shareholders of each other’s corporations there, is so thorough that it is hard to capture. Jon Jacoby, senior executive of the Stephens Group - one of the largest institutional shareholders of Tyson Foods, Walmart, DP&L - is also Chairman of the Board of DP&L and arranged the Wal-Mart deal. Jackson Stephens’ Stephens Group staked Sam Walton and financed Tyson Foods. Monsanto bought DP&L. All represented at Rose.
You didn’t just work there, you made friends. That shows in the flow of favors then and since. You were invited onto Walmart’s board, you were helped by a Tyson executive to make commodity trades (3 days before Bill became governor), netting you $100,000, Jackson Stephens strongly backed Bill for Governor, and then for President (donating $100,000).
Food and friends, in Clinton terms: Bill’s appointed friend Mike Espy, Secretary of Agriculture, who immediately significantly weakened federal chicken waste and contamination standards, opening the door to major expansion of Tyson’s chicken factory farms. Espy resigned, indicted for accepting bribes, illegal contributions, money laundering, illegal dispersal of USDA subsidies, …. Tyson Foods was the largest corporate offender.
But what Bill did for Monsanto “genetic engineering” goes beyond inadequate concepts of giving corporate friends influence: He unleashed genetic engineering into the world. And then he helped close off people’s escape from it.
Genetic engineering is many orders of magnitude different from “normal” (even polluting) business in its potential biologic ramifications. The warning myth of Pandora’a Box - letting irretrievable things rush out into nature - has become real. The harrowing change to the world from nuclear fission and fusion is the closest parallel.
What did Bill do?
1. Bill’s put Monsanto people in at the FDA, as US Agricultural Trade Representatives, on International Biotechnology Consultive Forums, and more … (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/072600-03.htm) or http://www.monitor.net/monitor/9904b/monsantofda.html or http://www.mindfully.org/GE/Revolving-Door.htm
2. Bill’s FDA gave Monsanto permission to market rBGH (a GE bovine growth hormone), the first genetically engineered product let loose on us (or did tomatoes with fish DNA get there first?).
3. Despite reports of bovine illness and death, Bill’s FDA did not recall it or put warnings on it. Even “a very angry, very vocal nationwide consumer base” had no impact.
4. Bill’s FDA wouldn’t even label rBGH as “present” in milk.
5. When dairy farmers tried to label their own milk rBGH-free so the public could choose [more on rBGH and labelling here], Bill’s USDA threatened all dairies that their products could be confiscated from stores. Michael Taylor, USFDA Deputy Commissioner, was formerly Monsanto’s counsel.
6. How were consumers to protect their family, given Bill’s FDA enforced public blindness, except to buy only organic? But Bill’s FDA tried to close off that last escape, proposing to include in “organic” standards, “the dirty three” a: genetic engineering of plants and animals, use of irradiation in food processing and use of municipal sewage sludge as a fertilizer. The FDA backed down.
Had this gone through, Monsanto could have finally labeled rBGH milk … as “organic.” And animal waste from factory farms, a pollution nightmare for Tyson and others, could have been sold as fertilizer.
USDA head Dan Glickman: “This is probably the largest public response to an [Agriculture Department] rule in modern history.” In fact the response was 20 times greater than anything ever before proposed by the USDA.
Personally, I resent years of effort to protect my children and now grandchildren, from that crap.
Politically, Bill sided against small farmers and against the public’s right to know, and with Monsanto.
A snap shot of our food:
Oils: Sheep died in India after feeding on Bt cotton fields. We feed our children Bt cotton, as cottonseed oil in peanut butter and cookies.
Grains: 49% of US corn acreage was planted in Bt corn in 2007. A French study proved Monsanto’s GMO corn causes kidney and liver toxicity.
Soft drinks and candy have highly concentrated Bt corn, in the form of high fructose Bt corn syrup. The US food system depends most on two crops, soy (90% GMO, 90% of traits owned by Monsanto) and corn, the largest crop (60% GMO, nearly 100% Monsanto traits). “[E] ssentially our entire food supply is genetically modified, to the benefit of one company.” The Grocery Manufacturers of America in 2000 estimated that 70 percent of US food contains GM traits.
Meat: Steroids bulk up atheletes. Monsanto steroids bulk up animals - more weight, more profit. We feed our children steroids in meats. Is this why our children are fattening, like Hansel and Gretel?
Poultry: Bill’s USDA weakened chicken waste and contamination standards and attempted to allow sewage sludge as fertilize crops. I will say more about disease from industrialized poultry farms waste, at the end of this letter.
Milk: Over 30 scientific publications have shown increased levels of IGF-1 in milk with rBGH increases risks of breast cancer by up to seven-fold, also increasing colon and prostate cancers risks. Canada, 29 European nations, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa ban U.S. rBGH dairy products. Bill’s USFDA put no restrictions, no warning labels (not allowing labels at all).
American children eat that food and drink that milk, Hillary. Coincidentally, American children are increasingly fat and sick.
Here, Bill ignored pleas for labeling. Abroad, Bill ignored intense international objections over the same issue - unlabeled US food exports - badly straining trading relations. Monsanto’s “good ole boy,” he betrayed American families at the deepest levels conceivable - their family’s health and their democratic right to know. He betrayed our rural life and American family farmers - backing corporation deceit and control, over honesty and clean farming.
But, Hillary, it is one thing to not label a regular ‘ole food product to sell it, and quite another to sell a suspected-dangerous food product (rBGH), but Bill’s administration didn’t label (or stop) a well-known, terrifying threat - Mad Cow Disease.
Bill’s FDA’s August, 1997 regulation permitted “known TSE-positive [Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy] material to be used in pet food, pig, chicken and fish feed,” only requiring the label to read “Do not feed to cattle and other ruminants” in the US.
Monsanto added to the problem. “There is evidence that rbST use [Monsanto’s GE bovine growth hormone] reduces the useful lifespan of a dairy cow. … Given that the incubation period for BSE is at least three to five years and perhaps longer, rbST-treated cows could harbor “hidden” BSE. That is, they might be infected but still asymptomatic when sent to slaughter.” http://www.consumersunion.org/food/bgh-codex.htm
Bill let TSE into our entire food chain. And who owned the feed and slaughter and genetic engineering corporations which benefitted?
Please, tell me, Hillary, what he could possibly have gotten in friendship or favors, that could ever justify his exposing millions of people to this?
With genetic engineering itself, Bill did something to the whole world, which tried to object. Words are inadequate to express how astoundingly immoral, beyond human bounds and conceit and power, that was.
“Even for the biggest “winners,” it is like winning at poker on the Titanic.” Jerry Mander: Facing the Rising Tide
He had no right
Do you hear that?
Bill had sex from Monica Lewinsky. That’s “dinky immoral.” That’s chicken feed immoral - excuse the Tyson pun, excuse the TSE-laced pun. Bill let genetic engineering lose on NATURE itself.
Our way of life is likely to be more fundamentally transformed in the next several decades than in the previous one thousand years…Tens of thousands of novel transgenic bacteria, viruses, plants and animals could be released into the Earth’s ecosystems…Some of those releases, however, could wreak havoc with the planet’s biospheres. — Jeremy Rifkin, Biotech Century
Bill did this to us, like it was some nothing and he, some big dumb ass Southern boy, just smiling and getting in good with the Big Boys, thinking about as much about the consequences of something this immense and about us human beings out here, as he thought about you, when he was unfaithful with Monica. Just one big fool getting off on the power and used to getting away with things.
Terminator genes, developed by DP&L, a Rose Firm client, prevent seeds from “working” after only one season. Farmers “must” repurchase (patents and suing not certain enough control, it seems). Those “killing” genes pose the apocalyptic risk of breaking out into nature. Natural seeds could fail, too. Nature could fail.
Far-fetched?
GMO fields are already contaminating normal species Berkeley Professor of Microbiology, Ignacio Chapela, wrote an open letter, warning the Mexican government about just this breaking out phenomenon happening in maize
And it has already happened with weeds - pesticide resistant GMO seeds break lose and weeds become pesticide-resistant Superweeds. [here]
But Bill’s USDA spokesman, Willard Phelps said the USDA wanted the technology to be `widely licensed and made expeditiously available to many seed companies.’
Genetic Engineering is often justified as a human technology, one that feeds more people with better food. Nothing could be further from the truth. With very few exceptions, the whole point of genetic engineering is to increase sales of chemicals and bio-engineered products to dependent farmers. — David Ehrenfield: Professor of Biology, Rutgers University [also see previous link]
Hillary, one third of the world’s bee colonies have collapsed [here]. Gone. Farmers in India are killing themselves. Farmers and bees. Since organic farmers in India are fine and organic farmers report no colony collapse [here], what does these farming catatrophes say about “industrial agriculture” [here]
Mad Cow Disease is another direct result of industrial agriculture. And now ……. transnational poultry factories are implicated as the source of bird flu [here]. Small scale poultry farms and wild birds seem not to be the problem [just as small farmers are not the issue in Mad Cow Disease], and yet “initiatives are multiplying to ban outdoor poultry, squeeze out small producers and restock farms with genetically modified chickens. … http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2006/2006-02-27-01.asp “Of the few outbreaks that did occur in [Laos], more than 90% broke out in commercial poultryoperations, not free-ranging flocks.”
Monsanto (and others) is currently working with the USDA to force small farmers to tag every animal with a global tracking device (NAIS - National Animal Identification System). Allegedly related to food safety, Monsanto and others would be creating a vast corporate digital library on every move of small farmers’ livestock.
But small farmers do not create the contaminated environments, do not supply the feed, do not grind up diseased animals into feed (how Mad Cow began) and then sell it. In fact, their farming methods, free range and small scale, are significantly healthier and safer for animals and food than the massive concentration of animals by corporate industrial agriculture.
Monsanto is also aggressively pushing for state laws to limit farmers’ right to choose what to plant and the public’s right to exclude GE plants from their communities.
Cattle bloated by steroids, lapse and loss of 10,000 year old normal seeds [here], immense pollution from factory farms [here], deadly-disease-ridden feed, world-wide bee colony collapse, poisoned soil and depleted water supplies, Superweeds, lawsuits against farmers, loss of family farms, and … India farmers killing themselves in what may be the largest mass suicide in recorded human history (on average … one farmer suicide every 30 minutes since 2002 - The Hindu 1.30.08) - that is industrial agriculture.
Monsanto and Tyson are two of the largest industrial agricultural corporations in the world. Industrial agriculture is represented by your Rose Law Firm.
Your claim to care about food safety is terrifying double-speak given what Bill did and who you take donations from. Your idea of a Department of Food Safety would centralize control of food - in whose corporate connected hands? You talk tough about labeling food - ah, but “foreign” food - a sleight of hand tricking a public desperate for safe US food. You talk about food safety but Bill degraded food in every imaginable way and prevented minimally sane labeling.
I am a person before I am a woman. Your gender means nothing. It is a media distraction. Your policies on health and food and women and children, are meaningless in the face of connections that have threatened those groups profoundly, connections you have never denounced.
Monsanto uses child labor in India, primarily very young girls, exposing them to a lethal pesticide 13-14 hours a day, for pennies in pay. But you take donations from their lobbyists. You say you care about black people but as the poorest people in this country, they are least able to buy organic and are forced to eat the contaminated foods Bill let into our food system. The National Black Farmers Association has a boycott out on all Monsanto products.
Do you eat organic?
So, who are you with, hapless black consumers and black farmers, or Monsanto? Mothers left to give their children rBGH milk, or Monsanto? Women exposed to 7 times greater risk of breast cancer, or Monsanto? Desperate farmers in India and young children forced into child labor in cottonseed factories there, or Monsanto? Animals suffering [here] from lives in filthy cages and disgusting feedlots, shot up with steroids and hormones and antibiotics, or Monsanto? Our children who eat candy with high fructose Bt corn syrup associated with kidney and liver toxicity, or Monsanto?
Edwards was right about your corporate connections. I just didn’t understand until I saw that PBS show and read about Monsanto, how personally affected my children and grandchildren, and all people around the world, have been.
I will not vote for you. I will vote for someone who will commit themselves to work on behalf of small farmers and real food and decent treatment of animals and to end this industrialized agricultural nightmare that is taking us off a cliff.
Linn Cohen-Cole, Atlanta
Disclaimer: I am not a scientist. I have read for months on this subject, and am including only a tiny portion of the horrifying things I have learned. I am expressing my opinion as person and may be wrong. Perhaps things are swell out there and rBGH is fabulous and TSE-laced feed is great, and genetic engineering is the best thing since manna. But I am scared for my family and I have not only a right to say so but an obligation to do so. I am angry that Monsanto was allowed the influence it had and has done the things it definitely seems to have. I am disgusted by industrialization of every tender and beautiful part of our world and hope, for all our children’s sake, we are not too late to pull back.
__________________________________________________
When the European Union voted to send fracking corporations back to the US to frack the heck out of the US environment it did so because European citizens gave massive protest and voted neo-liberals out of office in their respective nations. The fact that these fracking corporations are coming back to the US where they operate unfettered is the difference between first world nations and third world nations. Developing nations use raw natural resources for profit at great environmental cost and this is where neo-liberalism is taking the US and Maryland. Below you see WVA and PA are allowing fracking go wild because someone is getting rich doing this. Meanwhile the Maryland Assembly and neo-liberals in Maryland refuse to use baseline data on Marcellus Aquifer and threats of public lawsuits on fracking corporations for contamination to get these businesses to at least stop the worst of drilling habits and think where they drill in relation to our fresh water supplies.
THEY DO NOT NEED TO DRILL EVERYWHERE SAYS A SOCIAL DEMOCRAT AND THE NEO-LIBERALS ARE SAYING WE WILL NOT HINDER CORPORATE PROFITS BY THREATENING PUBLIC JUSTICE.
When Heather Mizeur shouts out against fracking in Maryland and against Cove Point natural gas export terminal and does not shout out to get that baseline data and shout that she will hold WVA and PA fracking corporations accountable for contaminating our ground water in Maryland and that Trans Pacific Trade Pact will end all US environmental law enforcement or communities' ability to stop exporting of natural gas.....SHE IS THROWING A PROGRESSIVE BONE WHILE RUNNING AS A NEO-LIBERAL.
BROWN, GANSLER, AND MIZEUR WILL ALWAYS GO WITH WANT CREATES WEALTH AND PROFIT.
New Study: Fluids From Marcellus Shale Likely Seeping Into PA Drinking Water
A drilling site in South Montrose, Pa. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
by Abrahm Lustgarten
ProPublica, July 9, 2012, 2 p.m.
New research has concluded that salty, mineral-rich fluids deep beneath Pennsylvania's natural gas fields are likely seeping upward thousands of feet into drinking water supplies.
Though the fluids were natural and not the byproduct of drilling or hydraulic fracturing, the finding further stokes the red-hot controversy over fracking in the Marcellus Shale, suggesting that drilling waste and chemicals could migrate in ways previously thought to be impossible.
The study, conducted by scientists at Duke University and California State Polytechnic University at Pomona and released today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tested drinking water wells and aquifers across Northeastern Pennsylvania. Researchers found that, in some cases, the water had mixed with brine that closely matched brine thought to be from the Marcellus Shale or areas close to it.
No drilling chemicals were detected in the water, and there was no correlation between where the natural brine was detected and where drilling takes place.
Still, the brine's presence – and the finding that it moved over thousands of vertical feet -- contradicts the oft-repeated notion that deeply buried rock layers will always seal in material injected underground through drilling, mining, or underground disposal.
"The biggest implication is the apparent presence of connections from deep underground to the surface," said Robert Jackson, a biology professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University and one of the study's authors. "It's a suggestion based on good evidence that there are places that may be more at risk."
The study is the second in recent months to find that the geology surrounding the Marcellus Shale could allow contaminants to move more freely than expected. A paper published by the journal Ground Water in April used modeling to predict that contaminants could reach the surface within 100 years – or fewer if the ground is fracked.
Last year, some of the same Duke researchers found that methane gas was far more likely to leak into water supplies in places adjacent to drilling.
Today's research swiftly drew criticism from both the oil and gas industry and a scientist on the National Academy of Science's peer review panel. They called the science flawed, in part because the researchers do not know how long it may have taken for the brine to leak. The National Academy of Sciences should not have published the article without an accompanying rebuttal, they said.
"What you have here is another case of a paper whose actual findings are pretty benign, but one that, in the current environment, may be vulnerable to distortion among those who oppose this industry," said Chris Tucker, a spokesman for the gas industry trade group Energy In Depth. "What's controversial is attempting to argue that these migrations occur as a result of industry activities, and on a time scale that actually matters to humanity."
Another critic, Penn State University geologist Terry Engelder, took the unusual step of disclosing details of his review of the paper for the National Academy of Sciences, normally a private process.
In a letter written to the researchers and provided to ProPublica, Engelder said the study had the appearance of "science-based advocacy" and said it was "unwittingly written to enflame the anti-drilling crowd."
In emails, Engelder told ProPublica that he did not dispute the basic premise of the article – that fluids seemed to have migrated thousands of feet upward. But he said that they had likely come from even deeper than the Marcellus – a layer 15,000 feet below the surface – and that there was no research to determine what pathways the fluids travelled or how long they took to migrate. He also said the Marcellus was an unlikely source of the brine because it does not contain much water.
"There is a question of time scale and what length of time matters," Engelder wrote in his review. In a subsequent letter to the Academy's editors protesting the study, he wrote that "the implication is that the Marcellus is leaking now, naturally without any human assistance, and that if water-based fluid is injected into these cross-formational pathways, that leakage, which is already ‘contaminating' the aquifers with salt, could be made much worse."
Indeed, while the study did not explicitly focus on fracking, the article acknowledged the implications. "The coincidence of elevated salinity in shallow groundwater... suggests that these areas could be at greater risk of contamination from shale gas development because of a preexisting network of cross-formational pathways that has enhanced hydraulic connectivity to deeper geological formations," the paper states.
For their research, the scientists collected 426 recent and historical water samples -- combining their own testing with government records from the 1980s -- from shallow water wells and analyzed them for brine, comparing their chemical makeup to that of 83 brine samples unearthed as waste water from drilling sites in the Marcellus Shale.
Nearly one out of six recent water samples contained brine near-identical to Marcellus-layer brine water.
Nevertheless, Jackson, one of the study's authors, said he still considers it unlikely that frack fluids and injected man-made waste are migrating into drinking water supplies. If that were happening, those contaminants would be more likely to appear in his groundwater samples, he said. His group is continuing its research into how the natural brine might have travelled, and how long it took to rise to the surface.
"There is a real time uncertainty," he said. "We don't know if this happens over a couple of years, or over millennia."
________________________________
Did you know that Baltimore's entire water and sewage network could have been rebuilt for the cost of taxpayer money invested in East Baltimore alone? Federal, state, and local tax losses connected to building this Johns Hopkins global corporate campus would have gone far to replace this aging city infrastructure. Whether leaking sewage or massive loss of fresh water from reservoirs from water main breaks....this is the #1 environmental disaster in Baltimore today. It should have been funded and replaced two decades ago when all of East Baltimore development began. Now, Johns Hopkins has a $2 billion endowment from all the costs it has saved from taxpayer-funded development among other things. Social democrats would never have left this crumbling infrastructure as the after-thought. Keep in mind the city loses a billion dollars every year to fraud and corruption as well.
ALL OF THIS WOULD HAVE BUILT ALL THE INFRASTRUCTURE NEEDS OF THE CITY YEARS AGO.
The environmental damage done done by failure to address this in a timely fashion is incredible. Personal property damage, utility costs, damage to the Chesapeake Bay make this delay in infrastructure repair SHOUT----BALTIMORE HAS POLITICIANS WHO COULD CARE LESS ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT.
Below you see what targeted development does ----bad management of projects compromise surrounding communities. These sinkholes resulted from East Baltimore development that allowed underground water diversions to saturate ground nearby. The residents were then told they would be responsible for the damages.
If a politician does not shout that rebuilding the entire Baltimore infrastructure system estimated place costs at a billion dollars or more......they are not democrats. Only a neo-liberal would take the position of building these corporate structures like Harbor East and East Baltimore/Hopkins before addressing aging water and sewer.
THIS IS HOW YOU KNOW AN ENVIRONMENTAL/GREEN CANDIDATE -----THEY WOULD BE SHOUTING THIS LOUDLY AND STRONGLY. HAVE YOU HEARD BROWN, GANSLER, AND MIZEUR SHOUTING AGAINST CORPORATE WELFARE?
Third sinkhole opens up on East Monument Street in Baltimore
Large sinkhole busted street open in July
UPDATED 12:04 PM EDT Oct 05, 2012
BALTIMORE —How many sinkholes will open up on East Monument Street?
Residents on city's sinkhole street voice concerns
Those who live on or own a business in the 2300 block of East Monument Street in Baltimore got a chance to voice their concerns Wednesday night over a huge sinkhole that's been causing headaches in the area for two months.
Baltimore City Department of Public Works officials on Monday said an existing sinkhole at East Monument Street between Bradford Avenue and Montford Street has widened over the weekend.
A sinkhole 10 feet in diameter has forced the Baltimore City Fire Department to shut down part of a street and evacuate people after a strong odor of natural gas was present.
More
Thursday, a third sinkhole opened up in the 2300 block of East Baltimore Street in east Baltimore.
The amount of fresh water lost with water main breaks, the sewage leaks, and street drainage disruptions are the major pollution problems in Baltimore for the Bay and yet, we spent billions of taxpayer money subsidizing on Harbor East and East Baltimore. Sparrow's Point Mill was allowed to be gutted and taken to bankruptcy without any comprehensive look at what is an huge environmental mess.
WHETHER O'MALLEY OR RAWLINGS-BLAKE OR CITY HALL AND MARYLAND ASSEMBLY----IF A POL IS NOT SHOUTING THAT ALL MARYLAND DEVELOPMENT IS UNSUSTAINABLE-----THEY ARE NOT GREEN.
Regarding Hillary as the proponent for International Global Warming Tribunal:
It looks as though Hillary is moving from 'it takes a village' after 4 years as head of a State Department that stood with the drone warfare policy that razed villages illegally around the world in the name of 'war on terror'. Social media calls Hillary-----'it takes a drone to raze a village' candidate. Let's look what corporate 'public' media will be telling us about Hillary this 2016 election-----she is the candidate fighting for global warming policy around the world. In this Alice in Wonderland American media as state propaganda we will not be reminded that Bill and Hillary made their administration about creating global corporations and global markets just so US corporations could go overseas to avoid all US environmental and labor laws and watched as Asia was made into an environmental disaster from these US corporations. Ergo, fast-forward global warming.
HILLARY IS THE FACE OF GLOBAL WARMING FOR GOODNESS SAKE. BILL AND HILLARY ARE THE FACE OF THE TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT THAT SEEKS TO END US SOVEREIGNTY TO ALLOW US GLOBAL CORPORATIONS TO COME BACK TO THE US TO POLLUTE OUR ENVIRONMENT AS IT HAS OVERSEAS.
We listen on corporate NPR/APM where Europe has sent the fracking corporations away because it does not want to ruin its environment and natural resources like any developed world would decide as good policy. So, says NPR these fracking industries are coming back to Louisiana, the Nigerian Delta of the America's South. We hear that Russia has protected its citizens and farmers from the environmental disaster that is GMOs and protected small farmers from the US push to industrialized agriculture and meat. So too are the Europeans for the most part. Some nations in Europe had GMOs forced upon them but many did not and those that did are reversing it. Bill and Hillary Clinton have been cheerleaders for Monsanto since his Presidency. Corporate NPR now describes Europe in decline, opting for first world quality of life for its citizens instead of massive corporate fraud, corruption, and wealth at the top. Downsizing global corporations is of course the first world economic policy of the 21st Century. I know that is the direction American citizens are moving. So, corporate NPR/APM with WYPR need to WAKE UP and join the real world as we shake the neo-liberal bugs from the rug and rebuild the people's democratic party for labor and justice.
HILLARY CLINTON AS A FRIEND TO INTERNATIONAL GLOBAL WARMING MOVEMENT??????? REALLY???????? MS. GLOBAL CORPORATE TRIBUNAL WORKING ONLY FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT WILL NEVER PLACE LABOR AND JUSTICE FIRST!
Below you see the results of two decades of Reagan/Clinton neo-liberalism with the Clinton's deregulating and dismantling public oversight and passing laws weakening public justice. Cost Benefit Analysis placing corporate profit over public interest soared with Bill and Hillary meaning environmental issues.....some of the most costly outside labor laws......started to fall by the way. Now, if you are working to send US Corporations overseas to allow massive environmental pollution over there, are you really working for Clean Air and Clean Water in the US? Of course not. What happens over there comes over here.
LOOK AT THE BIG PICTURE AND FORGET THESE PROGRESSIVE BONES NEO-LIBERALS THROW. YOU ARE NOT SUPPORTING ORGANIC FARMERS AND HEALTHY EATING IF YOU ARE PUSHING MONSANTO AND INDUSTRIAL FARMING.
So, because Clinton started the dismantling of public agencies and oversight we have a small business in Baltimore having to pay thousands of dollars to monitor construction that the EPA should never have allowed and because the EPA and Maryland has no oversight of these environmental dangers. THE PEOPLE MUST PAY TO PROTECT THEMSELVES BECAUSE PUBLIC AGENCIES DESIGNED TO DO THAT HAVE BEEN DEFUNDED. Now, in Baltimore it is Johns Hopkins that promotes this dismantling of all that is public oversight and environmental disaster along the waterfront. Whether export terminals for natural gas or Port of Baltimore as global shipping hub killing the bay with invasive species....
MARYLAND IS CLINTON COUNTRY SAY NEO-LIBERALS CONTROLLING MARYLAND'S DEMOCRATIC PARTY. NAKED CAPITALISM WOULD NEVER HAVE THRIVED WITHOUT THE CLINTONS!
Across from Harbor Point, an unofficial air-monitoring effort
Black Olive owner says he wants to do his own test — set up by a Johns Hopkins researcher — to keep developer 'honest'
Johns Hopkins School of Public Health researcher Ana Rule checks air monitoring equipment she set up outside the Inn at The Black Olive. The family operating the hotel is concerned about development across the street at Harbor Point and wants to independently monitor chromium levels in the air. (Jamie Smith Hopkins, Baltimore Sun / March 23, 2014)
By Jamie Smith Hopkins, The Baltimore Sun
10:20 p.m. EDT, March 23, 2014
Ana Rule stepped onto a balcony outside the Inn at the Black Olive Sunday morning to check the first results of an unusual air-monitoring effort — one intended to make sure official monitoring across the street is accurate.
The hotel in Baltimore's Fells Point overlooks Harbor Point, the planned $1.8 billion mixed-use development on land where a factory once processed chromium. Contaminated soil — capped years ago to keep the toxic chemicals under control — would be temporarily exposed during the early part of the work there.
Environmental regulators gave approval several weeks ago for Harbor Point developer Beatty Development Group to begin collecting air samples in the run-up to construction, and monitoring would continue while work is underway.
But Stelios Spiliadis, who owns the Black Olive restaurant and whose son operates the inn, said he's not comfortable relying on the official effort. That's how air-monitoring equipment ended up on the balcony, set up by Rule, a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research associate whose expertise is air quality.
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"I hope that the developer, knowing that we are going to try to keep him honest, stays honest," Spiliadis said.
Marco Greenberg, vice president for the Baltimore-based Beatty Development, said by email Sunday the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Maryland Department of the Environment "have conducted rigorous reviews of the air monitoring methodology and procedures to be used at Harbor Point, which will utilize best practices and the latest science."
"The agencies have indicated that their approval of the construction air monitoring plans, which must be obtained before construction can begin, will come this week," he said. "During construction, all air monitoring will be done under the supervision of both EPA and MDE, and they will make frequent visits to the site."
Greenberg said "field work for the baseline monitoring has been completed," and data would be submitted to EPA and MDE this week.
A spokeswoman with the state Department of the Environment could not be reached Sunday.
Harbor Point plans are for office buildings — including energy firm Exelon Corp.'s new regional headquarters — along with stores, residences and a hotel.
Rule began monitoring general pollution levels in the area Friday afternoon and expects to set up equipment specifically to monitor chromium this week. Like the official monitors, hers are gathering baseline information — air quality before Harbor Point construction begins.
She can analyze the filters collecting general information on pollution levels, but the chromium samples will be sent to Rutgers University in New Jersey, another state with headaches associated with former chromium plants.
The Rutgers work will cost $150 a sample. Rule said she hopes to take two or three a week and continue until work involving Harbor Point's contaminated soil is finished, but that's still to be determined.
Spiliadis, who anticipates total expenses of around $5,000 or $6,000, agreed to take responsibility. He said he plans to hold fundraisers at his restaurant to defray the cost — he pointed out with a sardonic grin that none of the roughly $400 million in public subsidies for Harbor Point are coming his way.
Rule has monitored air in Turners Station, a Baltimore County neighborhood concerned about pollution. She got involved in the monitoring at the Black Olive after Spiliadis shared his concerns with Johns Hopkins staffers.
They sat in the Black Olive inn's cafe Sunday morning, Spiliadis listening as Rule explained why it's "very hard" to accurately measure chromium in the air.
It comes in two common forms: trivalent chromium, an essential trace element, and hexavalent chromium, a cancer-causing form. The dangerous form was used in the processing plant, but it can show up as its cousin on air monitors thanks to reactions with acids in the atmosphere, Rule said.
Unfortunately, "when you breathe it, it's the way that it is in the air — which is hexavalent," she said.
"So you see why I'm scared?" Spiliadis put in.
Rule said Rutgers adds steps to the EPA's chromium-measurement method "to make extra sure that the final results are what was in the air."
"We don't want to be alarmist or anything, but we want to make sure we do the right thing and we are sampling with the best possible technology," Rule said.
She then checked on the equipment, pulling out filters full of particulate matter collected since about 5 p.m. Friday. She can analyze those herself for overall pollution levels and total chromium, but not whether that chromium is hexavalent or trivalent.
She picked up one filter to show just how dirty it got in less than 48 hours. That's a baseline — the Fells Point air as it is before construction kicks off.
Spiliadis said the Black Olive inn was constructed with air quality in mind, including no paint on the walls so guests would not breathe in fumes. He said he was thinking of customers when he decided to monitor whether Harbor Point changes the air.
It might all turn out fine, Rule told Spiliadis. In that case, the monitoring would simply confirm the official readings.
"Then I would be able to sleep well," Spiliadis said.
_______________________________________________
Corporate media will now paint Hillary as protectress-in-chief of the world's environment even as the US is seen as the worst offender in all that is environmental disasters. Neo-liberalism means that environmental laws can be ignored to maximize corporate profits and no matter the progressive bones a neo-liberal throws wealth and profit wins. We see that mirrored in Maryland environmental policy.
On Hillary and Bill Clinton and Monsanto
by Forwarded article by Linn Cohen-Cole | 03.14.2008
Thought you all might be interested in reading this open letter to Hillary Clinton, by Linn Cohen-Cole, on the Clinton's ties to Monsanto, promotion of genetically engineered crops and rBGH, recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone. Please follow this link if you wish go to a version of the letter where you will be able to click on reference links in the letter, http://www.celsias.com/2008/02/19/an-open-letter-to-hillary-clinton-from-a-wellesley-college-alumna/
Open Letter to Hillary Clinton From a Wellesley College Alumna
February 19, 2008
by Linn Cohen-Cole
Dear Hillary,
By polling logic, I should be your supporter - Democrat, older woman, white, liberal. I was even in a dorm with you in college. I have pulled for you for years. But something this past summer fundamentally changed my responsibility to my children and grandchildren. In the time I have left in my life to protect them and others, I need to speak out.
I saw a News Hour piece on Maharastra, India, about farmers committing suicide [see here and here]. Monsanto, a US agricultural giant, hired Bollywood actors for ads telling illiterate farmers they could get rich (by their standards) from big yields with Monsanto’s Bt (genetically engineered) cotton seeds. The expensive seeds needed expensive fertilizer and pesticides (Monsanto, again) and irrigation. There is no irrigation there. Crops failed. Farmers had larger debt than they’d ever experienced.
And farmers couldn’t collect seeds from their own fields [see here and here] to try again (true since time immemorial). Monsanto “patents” their DNA-altered seeds as “intellectual property.” They have a $10 million budget and a staff of 75 devoted solely to prosecuting farmers [here]. Since the late 1990s (about when industrial agriculture took hold in India), 166,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide and 8 million have left the land.
Farmers in Europe, Asia, Africa, Indonesia,South America, Central America and here, have protested Monsanto and genetic engineering for years.
What does this have to do with you?
You have connections to Monsanto through the Rose Law Firm where you worked and through Bill who hired Monsanto people for central food-related roles. Your Orwellian-named “Rural Americans for Hillary” was planned withTroutman Sanders, Monsanto’s lobbyists.
Genetic engineering and industrialized food and animal production all come together at the Rose Law Firm, which represents the world’s largest GE corporation (Monsanto), GE’s most controversial project (DP&L’s - now Monsanto’s - terminator genes) [here], the world’s largest meat producer (Tyson), the world’s largest retailer and a dominant food retailer (Wal-Mart) [here].
The inbred-ness of Rose’s legal representation of corporations which own controlling interests in other corporations there and of corporate boards sharing members who are also shareholders of each other’s corporations there, is so thorough that it is hard to capture. Jon Jacoby, senior executive of the Stephens Group - one of the largest institutional shareholders of Tyson Foods, Walmart, DP&L - is also Chairman of the Board of DP&L and arranged the Wal-Mart deal. Jackson Stephens’ Stephens Group staked Sam Walton and financed Tyson Foods. Monsanto bought DP&L. All represented at Rose.
You didn’t just work there, you made friends. That shows in the flow of favors then and since. You were invited onto Walmart’s board, you were helped by a Tyson executive to make commodity trades (3 days before Bill became governor), netting you $100,000, Jackson Stephens strongly backed Bill for Governor, and then for President (donating $100,000).
Food and friends, in Clinton terms: Bill’s appointed friend Mike Espy, Secretary of Agriculture, who immediately significantly weakened federal chicken waste and contamination standards, opening the door to major expansion of Tyson’s chicken factory farms. Espy resigned, indicted for accepting bribes, illegal contributions, money laundering, illegal dispersal of USDA subsidies, …. Tyson Foods was the largest corporate offender.
But what Bill did for Monsanto “genetic engineering” goes beyond inadequate concepts of giving corporate friends influence: He unleashed genetic engineering into the world. And then he helped close off people’s escape from it.
Genetic engineering is many orders of magnitude different from “normal” (even polluting) business in its potential biologic ramifications. The warning myth of Pandora’a Box - letting irretrievable things rush out into nature - has become real. The harrowing change to the world from nuclear fission and fusion is the closest parallel.
What did Bill do?
1. Bill’s put Monsanto people in at the FDA, as US Agricultural Trade Representatives, on International Biotechnology Consultive Forums, and more … (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/072600-03.htm) or http://www.monitor.net/monitor/9904b/monsantofda.html or http://www.mindfully.org/GE/Revolving-Door.htm
2. Bill’s FDA gave Monsanto permission to market rBGH (a GE bovine growth hormone), the first genetically engineered product let loose on us (or did tomatoes with fish DNA get there first?).
3. Despite reports of bovine illness and death, Bill’s FDA did not recall it or put warnings on it. Even “a very angry, very vocal nationwide consumer base” had no impact.
4. Bill’s FDA wouldn’t even label rBGH as “present” in milk.
5. When dairy farmers tried to label their own milk rBGH-free so the public could choose [more on rBGH and labelling here], Bill’s USDA threatened all dairies that their products could be confiscated from stores. Michael Taylor, USFDA Deputy Commissioner, was formerly Monsanto’s counsel.
6. How were consumers to protect their family, given Bill’s FDA enforced public blindness, except to buy only organic? But Bill’s FDA tried to close off that last escape, proposing to include in “organic” standards, “the dirty three” a: genetic engineering of plants and animals, use of irradiation in food processing and use of municipal sewage sludge as a fertilizer. The FDA backed down.
Had this gone through, Monsanto could have finally labeled rBGH milk … as “organic.” And animal waste from factory farms, a pollution nightmare for Tyson and others, could have been sold as fertilizer.
USDA head Dan Glickman: “This is probably the largest public response to an [Agriculture Department] rule in modern history.” In fact the response was 20 times greater than anything ever before proposed by the USDA.
Personally, I resent years of effort to protect my children and now grandchildren, from that crap.
Politically, Bill sided against small farmers and against the public’s right to know, and with Monsanto.
A snap shot of our food:
Oils: Sheep died in India after feeding on Bt cotton fields. We feed our children Bt cotton, as cottonseed oil in peanut butter and cookies.
Grains: 49% of US corn acreage was planted in Bt corn in 2007. A French study proved Monsanto’s GMO corn causes kidney and liver toxicity.
Soft drinks and candy have highly concentrated Bt corn, in the form of high fructose Bt corn syrup. The US food system depends most on two crops, soy (90% GMO, 90% of traits owned by Monsanto) and corn, the largest crop (60% GMO, nearly 100% Monsanto traits). “[E] ssentially our entire food supply is genetically modified, to the benefit of one company.” The Grocery Manufacturers of America in 2000 estimated that 70 percent of US food contains GM traits.
Meat: Steroids bulk up atheletes. Monsanto steroids bulk up animals - more weight, more profit. We feed our children steroids in meats. Is this why our children are fattening, like Hansel and Gretel?
Poultry: Bill’s USDA weakened chicken waste and contamination standards and attempted to allow sewage sludge as fertilize crops. I will say more about disease from industrialized poultry farms waste, at the end of this letter.
Milk: Over 30 scientific publications have shown increased levels of IGF-1 in milk with rBGH increases risks of breast cancer by up to seven-fold, also increasing colon and prostate cancers risks. Canada, 29 European nations, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa ban U.S. rBGH dairy products. Bill’s USFDA put no restrictions, no warning labels (not allowing labels at all).
American children eat that food and drink that milk, Hillary. Coincidentally, American children are increasingly fat and sick.
Here, Bill ignored pleas for labeling. Abroad, Bill ignored intense international objections over the same issue - unlabeled US food exports - badly straining trading relations. Monsanto’s “good ole boy,” he betrayed American families at the deepest levels conceivable - their family’s health and their democratic right to know. He betrayed our rural life and American family farmers - backing corporation deceit and control, over honesty and clean farming.
But, Hillary, it is one thing to not label a regular ‘ole food product to sell it, and quite another to sell a suspected-dangerous food product (rBGH), but Bill’s administration didn’t label (or stop) a well-known, terrifying threat - Mad Cow Disease.
Bill’s FDA’s August, 1997 regulation permitted “known TSE-positive [Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy] material to be used in pet food, pig, chicken and fish feed,” only requiring the label to read “Do not feed to cattle and other ruminants” in the US.
Monsanto added to the problem. “There is evidence that rbST use [Monsanto’s GE bovine growth hormone] reduces the useful lifespan of a dairy cow. … Given that the incubation period for BSE is at least three to five years and perhaps longer, rbST-treated cows could harbor “hidden” BSE. That is, they might be infected but still asymptomatic when sent to slaughter.” http://www.consumersunion.org/food/bgh-codex.htm
Bill let TSE into our entire food chain. And who owned the feed and slaughter and genetic engineering corporations which benefitted?
Please, tell me, Hillary, what he could possibly have gotten in friendship or favors, that could ever justify his exposing millions of people to this?
With genetic engineering itself, Bill did something to the whole world, which tried to object. Words are inadequate to express how astoundingly immoral, beyond human bounds and conceit and power, that was.
“Even for the biggest “winners,” it is like winning at poker on the Titanic.” Jerry Mander: Facing the Rising Tide
He had no right
Do you hear that?
Bill had sex from Monica Lewinsky. That’s “dinky immoral.” That’s chicken feed immoral - excuse the Tyson pun, excuse the TSE-laced pun. Bill let genetic engineering lose on NATURE itself.
Our way of life is likely to be more fundamentally transformed in the next several decades than in the previous one thousand years…Tens of thousands of novel transgenic bacteria, viruses, plants and animals could be released into the Earth’s ecosystems…Some of those releases, however, could wreak havoc with the planet’s biospheres. — Jeremy Rifkin, Biotech Century
Bill did this to us, like it was some nothing and he, some big dumb ass Southern boy, just smiling and getting in good with the Big Boys, thinking about as much about the consequences of something this immense and about us human beings out here, as he thought about you, when he was unfaithful with Monica. Just one big fool getting off on the power and used to getting away with things.
Terminator genes, developed by DP&L, a Rose Firm client, prevent seeds from “working” after only one season. Farmers “must” repurchase (patents and suing not certain enough control, it seems). Those “killing” genes pose the apocalyptic risk of breaking out into nature. Natural seeds could fail, too. Nature could fail.
Far-fetched?
GMO fields are already contaminating normal species Berkeley Professor of Microbiology, Ignacio Chapela, wrote an open letter, warning the Mexican government about just this breaking out phenomenon happening in maize
And it has already happened with weeds - pesticide resistant GMO seeds break lose and weeds become pesticide-resistant Superweeds. [here]
But Bill’s USDA spokesman, Willard Phelps said the USDA wanted the technology to be `widely licensed and made expeditiously available to many seed companies.’
Genetic Engineering is often justified as a human technology, one that feeds more people with better food. Nothing could be further from the truth. With very few exceptions, the whole point of genetic engineering is to increase sales of chemicals and bio-engineered products to dependent farmers. — David Ehrenfield: Professor of Biology, Rutgers University [also see previous link]
Hillary, one third of the world’s bee colonies have collapsed [here]. Gone. Farmers in India are killing themselves. Farmers and bees. Since organic farmers in India are fine and organic farmers report no colony collapse [here], what does these farming catatrophes say about “industrial agriculture” [here]
Mad Cow Disease is another direct result of industrial agriculture. And now ……. transnational poultry factories are implicated as the source of bird flu [here]. Small scale poultry farms and wild birds seem not to be the problem [just as small farmers are not the issue in Mad Cow Disease], and yet “initiatives are multiplying to ban outdoor poultry, squeeze out small producers and restock farms with genetically modified chickens. … http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2006/2006-02-27-01.asp “Of the few outbreaks that did occur in [Laos], more than 90% broke out in commercial poultryoperations, not free-ranging flocks.”
Monsanto (and others) is currently working with the USDA to force small farmers to tag every animal with a global tracking device (NAIS - National Animal Identification System). Allegedly related to food safety, Monsanto and others would be creating a vast corporate digital library on every move of small farmers’ livestock.
But small farmers do not create the contaminated environments, do not supply the feed, do not grind up diseased animals into feed (how Mad Cow began) and then sell it. In fact, their farming methods, free range and small scale, are significantly healthier and safer for animals and food than the massive concentration of animals by corporate industrial agriculture.
Monsanto is also aggressively pushing for state laws to limit farmers’ right to choose what to plant and the public’s right to exclude GE plants from their communities.
Cattle bloated by steroids, lapse and loss of 10,000 year old normal seeds [here], immense pollution from factory farms [here], deadly-disease-ridden feed, world-wide bee colony collapse, poisoned soil and depleted water supplies, Superweeds, lawsuits against farmers, loss of family farms, and … India farmers killing themselves in what may be the largest mass suicide in recorded human history (on average … one farmer suicide every 30 minutes since 2002 - The Hindu 1.30.08) - that is industrial agriculture.
Monsanto and Tyson are two of the largest industrial agricultural corporations in the world. Industrial agriculture is represented by your Rose Law Firm.
Your claim to care about food safety is terrifying double-speak given what Bill did and who you take donations from. Your idea of a Department of Food Safety would centralize control of food - in whose corporate connected hands? You talk tough about labeling food - ah, but “foreign” food - a sleight of hand tricking a public desperate for safe US food. You talk about food safety but Bill degraded food in every imaginable way and prevented minimally sane labeling.
I am a person before I am a woman. Your gender means nothing. It is a media distraction. Your policies on health and food and women and children, are meaningless in the face of connections that have threatened those groups profoundly, connections you have never denounced.
Monsanto uses child labor in India, primarily very young girls, exposing them to a lethal pesticide 13-14 hours a day, for pennies in pay. But you take donations from their lobbyists. You say you care about black people but as the poorest people in this country, they are least able to buy organic and are forced to eat the contaminated foods Bill let into our food system. The National Black Farmers Association has a boycott out on all Monsanto products.
Do you eat organic?
So, who are you with, hapless black consumers and black farmers, or Monsanto? Mothers left to give their children rBGH milk, or Monsanto? Women exposed to 7 times greater risk of breast cancer, or Monsanto? Desperate farmers in India and young children forced into child labor in cottonseed factories there, or Monsanto? Animals suffering [here] from lives in filthy cages and disgusting feedlots, shot up with steroids and hormones and antibiotics, or Monsanto? Our children who eat candy with high fructose Bt corn syrup associated with kidney and liver toxicity, or Monsanto?
Edwards was right about your corporate connections. I just didn’t understand until I saw that PBS show and read about Monsanto, how personally affected my children and grandchildren, and all people around the world, have been.
I will not vote for you. I will vote for someone who will commit themselves to work on behalf of small farmers and real food and decent treatment of animals and to end this industrialized agricultural nightmare that is taking us off a cliff.
Linn Cohen-Cole, Atlanta
Disclaimer: I am not a scientist. I have read for months on this subject, and am including only a tiny portion of the horrifying things I have learned. I am expressing my opinion as person and may be wrong. Perhaps things are swell out there and rBGH is fabulous and TSE-laced feed is great, and genetic engineering is the best thing since manna. But I am scared for my family and I have not only a right to say so but an obligation to do so. I am angry that Monsanto was allowed the influence it had and has done the things it definitely seems to have. I am disgusted by industrialization of every tender and beautiful part of our world and hope, for all our children’s sake, we are not too late to pull back.
__________________________________________________
When the European Union voted to send fracking corporations back to the US to frack the heck out of the US environment it did so because European citizens gave massive protest and voted neo-liberals out of office in their respective nations. The fact that these fracking corporations are coming back to the US where they operate unfettered is the difference between first world nations and third world nations. Developing nations use raw natural resources for profit at great environmental cost and this is where neo-liberalism is taking the US and Maryland. Below you see WVA and PA are allowing fracking go wild because someone is getting rich doing this. Meanwhile the Maryland Assembly and neo-liberals in Maryland refuse to use baseline data on Marcellus Aquifer and threats of public lawsuits on fracking corporations for contamination to get these businesses to at least stop the worst of drilling habits and think where they drill in relation to our fresh water supplies.
THEY DO NOT NEED TO DRILL EVERYWHERE SAYS A SOCIAL DEMOCRAT AND THE NEO-LIBERALS ARE SAYING WE WILL NOT HINDER CORPORATE PROFITS BY THREATENING PUBLIC JUSTICE.
When Heather Mizeur shouts out against fracking in Maryland and against Cove Point natural gas export terminal and does not shout out to get that baseline data and shout that she will hold WVA and PA fracking corporations accountable for contaminating our ground water in Maryland and that Trans Pacific Trade Pact will end all US environmental law enforcement or communities' ability to stop exporting of natural gas.....SHE IS THROWING A PROGRESSIVE BONE WHILE RUNNING AS A NEO-LIBERAL.
BROWN, GANSLER, AND MIZEUR WILL ALWAYS GO WITH WANT CREATES WEALTH AND PROFIT.
New Study: Fluids From Marcellus Shale Likely Seeping Into PA Drinking Water
A drilling site in South Montrose, Pa. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
by Abrahm Lustgarten
ProPublica, July 9, 2012, 2 p.m.
New research has concluded that salty, mineral-rich fluids deep beneath Pennsylvania's natural gas fields are likely seeping upward thousands of feet into drinking water supplies.
Though the fluids were natural and not the byproduct of drilling or hydraulic fracturing, the finding further stokes the red-hot controversy over fracking in the Marcellus Shale, suggesting that drilling waste and chemicals could migrate in ways previously thought to be impossible.
The study, conducted by scientists at Duke University and California State Polytechnic University at Pomona and released today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tested drinking water wells and aquifers across Northeastern Pennsylvania. Researchers found that, in some cases, the water had mixed with brine that closely matched brine thought to be from the Marcellus Shale or areas close to it.
No drilling chemicals were detected in the water, and there was no correlation between where the natural brine was detected and where drilling takes place.
Still, the brine's presence – and the finding that it moved over thousands of vertical feet -- contradicts the oft-repeated notion that deeply buried rock layers will always seal in material injected underground through drilling, mining, or underground disposal.
"The biggest implication is the apparent presence of connections from deep underground to the surface," said Robert Jackson, a biology professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University and one of the study's authors. "It's a suggestion based on good evidence that there are places that may be more at risk."
The study is the second in recent months to find that the geology surrounding the Marcellus Shale could allow contaminants to move more freely than expected. A paper published by the journal Ground Water in April used modeling to predict that contaminants could reach the surface within 100 years – or fewer if the ground is fracked.
Last year, some of the same Duke researchers found that methane gas was far more likely to leak into water supplies in places adjacent to drilling.
Today's research swiftly drew criticism from both the oil and gas industry and a scientist on the National Academy of Science's peer review panel. They called the science flawed, in part because the researchers do not know how long it may have taken for the brine to leak. The National Academy of Sciences should not have published the article without an accompanying rebuttal, they said.
"What you have here is another case of a paper whose actual findings are pretty benign, but one that, in the current environment, may be vulnerable to distortion among those who oppose this industry," said Chris Tucker, a spokesman for the gas industry trade group Energy In Depth. "What's controversial is attempting to argue that these migrations occur as a result of industry activities, and on a time scale that actually matters to humanity."
Another critic, Penn State University geologist Terry Engelder, took the unusual step of disclosing details of his review of the paper for the National Academy of Sciences, normally a private process.
In a letter written to the researchers and provided to ProPublica, Engelder said the study had the appearance of "science-based advocacy" and said it was "unwittingly written to enflame the anti-drilling crowd."
In emails, Engelder told ProPublica that he did not dispute the basic premise of the article – that fluids seemed to have migrated thousands of feet upward. But he said that they had likely come from even deeper than the Marcellus – a layer 15,000 feet below the surface – and that there was no research to determine what pathways the fluids travelled or how long they took to migrate. He also said the Marcellus was an unlikely source of the brine because it does not contain much water.
"There is a question of time scale and what length of time matters," Engelder wrote in his review. In a subsequent letter to the Academy's editors protesting the study, he wrote that "the implication is that the Marcellus is leaking now, naturally without any human assistance, and that if water-based fluid is injected into these cross-formational pathways, that leakage, which is already ‘contaminating' the aquifers with salt, could be made much worse."
Indeed, while the study did not explicitly focus on fracking, the article acknowledged the implications. "The coincidence of elevated salinity in shallow groundwater... suggests that these areas could be at greater risk of contamination from shale gas development because of a preexisting network of cross-formational pathways that has enhanced hydraulic connectivity to deeper geological formations," the paper states.
For their research, the scientists collected 426 recent and historical water samples -- combining their own testing with government records from the 1980s -- from shallow water wells and analyzed them for brine, comparing their chemical makeup to that of 83 brine samples unearthed as waste water from drilling sites in the Marcellus Shale.
Nearly one out of six recent water samples contained brine near-identical to Marcellus-layer brine water.
Nevertheless, Jackson, one of the study's authors, said he still considers it unlikely that frack fluids and injected man-made waste are migrating into drinking water supplies. If that were happening, those contaminants would be more likely to appear in his groundwater samples, he said. His group is continuing its research into how the natural brine might have travelled, and how long it took to rise to the surface.
"There is a real time uncertainty," he said. "We don't know if this happens over a couple of years, or over millennia."
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Did you know that Baltimore's entire water and sewage network could have been rebuilt for the cost of taxpayer money invested in East Baltimore alone? Federal, state, and local tax losses connected to building this Johns Hopkins global corporate campus would have gone far to replace this aging city infrastructure. Whether leaking sewage or massive loss of fresh water from reservoirs from water main breaks....this is the #1 environmental disaster in Baltimore today. It should have been funded and replaced two decades ago when all of East Baltimore development began. Now, Johns Hopkins has a $2 billion endowment from all the costs it has saved from taxpayer-funded development among other things. Social democrats would never have left this crumbling infrastructure as the after-thought. Keep in mind the city loses a billion dollars every year to fraud and corruption as well.
ALL OF THIS WOULD HAVE BUILT ALL THE INFRASTRUCTURE NEEDS OF THE CITY YEARS AGO.
The environmental damage done done by failure to address this in a timely fashion is incredible. Personal property damage, utility costs, damage to the Chesapeake Bay make this delay in infrastructure repair SHOUT----BALTIMORE HAS POLITICIANS WHO COULD CARE LESS ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT.
Below you see what targeted development does ----bad management of projects compromise surrounding communities. These sinkholes resulted from East Baltimore development that allowed underground water diversions to saturate ground nearby. The residents were then told they would be responsible for the damages.
If a politician does not shout that rebuilding the entire Baltimore infrastructure system estimated place costs at a billion dollars or more......they are not democrats. Only a neo-liberal would take the position of building these corporate structures like Harbor East and East Baltimore/Hopkins before addressing aging water and sewer.
THIS IS HOW YOU KNOW AN ENVIRONMENTAL/GREEN CANDIDATE -----THEY WOULD BE SHOUTING THIS LOUDLY AND STRONGLY. HAVE YOU HEARD BROWN, GANSLER, AND MIZEUR SHOUTING AGAINST CORPORATE WELFARE?
Third sinkhole opens up on East Monument Street in Baltimore
Large sinkhole busted street open in July
UPDATED 12:04 PM EDT Oct 05, 2012
BALTIMORE —How many sinkholes will open up on East Monument Street?
Residents on city's sinkhole street voice concerns
Those who live on or own a business in the 2300 block of East Monument Street in Baltimore got a chance to voice their concerns Wednesday night over a huge sinkhole that's been causing headaches in the area for two months.
Baltimore City Department of Public Works officials on Monday said an existing sinkhole at East Monument Street between Bradford Avenue and Montford Street has widened over the weekend.
A sinkhole 10 feet in diameter has forced the Baltimore City Fire Department to shut down part of a street and evacuate people after a strong odor of natural gas was present.
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Thursday, a third sinkhole opened up in the 2300 block of East Baltimore Street in east Baltimore.
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