Politics & Globalization
International trade agreements force the U.S. and other participting countries to "harmonize" food and envrironmental safety standards to the lowest common denominator. Often these agreements are negotiated behind closed doors, shutting out Congress and the public, while granting corporations and trade associations a seat at the table. It's no surprise that these agreements give transnational corporations "special rights", allowing companies to challenge individual countries' environmental, worker and food safety laws and regulations.
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Rose and Ronnie· Joe volunteer© 2008
As its progressive wing and a groundswell of new and energetic candidates continues to move the Democratic Party to the left, a new Reuters poll out Thursday shows that support for a key plank of this insurgency—Medicare for All—has hit an all-time high with 70 percent of all Americans now in favor of a such program, including nearly 85 percent of Democrats and a full 52 percent of Republicans.
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For the first three weeks of July, Peter Martens prayed for rain. At the end of the month the rain finally arrived, but by then it was too late for some of his crops. For others, it was too much water, too quickly. The lack of rain, Mr. Martens said, will reduce his corn yield by about 20 percent, but the late-summer deluges damaged the quality of his spelt, a type of wheat.
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Ahead of President Donald Trump's Tuesday night rally in West Virginia, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled a highly anticipated new rule that would roll back restrictions targeting greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants, and enable states to set their own standards.
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There is an assumption that the 2020 presidential election will be business as usual: Donald Trump will run on the economy, social issues and immigration, and the Democratic candidate will run on income inequality, Democratic socialism and Trump’s character — the 2020 version of right-left U.S. politics.
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Alaska isn’t exactly the first state you’d expect to embrace a price on carbon. Yet the state legislature will likely be weighing one after the November elections. When carbon taxes keep getting scrapped by blue states like Washington and Oregon, why would such a plan succeed in Alaska: a red state where oil companies are a major economic lifeline?
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In an historic victory for those who have long sought to see agro-chemical giant Monsanto held to account for the powerful company's toxic and deadly legacy, a court in California on Friday found the corporation liable for damages suffered by a cancer patient who alleged his sickness was directly caused by exposure to the glyphosate-based herbicides, including the widely used weed-killer Roundup.
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You may have seen a story this week detailing how Facebook shut down a series of accounts. As noted by Politico, Facebook claimed these accounts “sought to inflame social and political tensions in the United States, and said their activity was similar — and in some cases connected — to that of Russian accounts during the 2016 election.”
Similar? What does “similar” mean?
The death-pit for civil liberties is usually found in a combination of fringe/unpopular people or
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The Organic Trade Association (OTA) says it’s dedicated to promoting and protecting organics. But the organization, dubbed the Organic “Traitors” Association after it betrayed the consumer-led GMO labeling movement, is moving farther away from its organic roots—and closer to corporate control.
How do we know? The OTA recently admitted two new members: chemical giant BASF, a dicamba manufacturer and leader in genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and Cargill, one of the largest factory farm meat corporations in the world, and a big supporter of GMO crops.
The OTA states that
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If you’ve perused the new 50-State Food System Scorecard from the Union of Concerned Scientists, you’ve probably noticed a seeming contradiction. As shown on the map within this article, the heavily agricultural states in the middle of the country aren’t exactly knocking it out of the park when it comes to the overall health and sustainability of their food and farming systems.
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"Instead of putting American families first, the Trump administration is once again doing the bidding of corporations and their lobbyists."
President Donald Trump's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Transportation Department on Wednesday formally unveiled their long-anticipated plan to gut Obama-era fuel efficiency standards, a regulatory rollback environmentalists quickly denounced as "a disastrous wreck for consumers and the planet."
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