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
In February 2019, I wrote about the introduction of nutritionally fortified artificial sweeteners. Merisant launched a new zero calorie sweetener called Sugarly Sweet exclusively on Amazon in late January 2019, and has also created a brand-new line of artificial sweeteners fortified with vitamins and minerals.
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Amazon runs an annual sale they've dubbed Prime Day, which ran July 15 and 16, 2019, for the U.S. On the second evening, as reported by Wired, Anne-Marie Bressler received an automated email from Amazon informing her that one of the nutritional supplements she'd ordered two weeks earlier were likely counterfeit.
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Dear Prole,
I hope this missive finds you well. If not, I’ll blame it on yet another act of technofascism.
Your rights to be healthy without drugs and speak freely are being thwarted. Alas, a large swath of the general populace will never know their health choices are being eliminated.
This is an uphill battle of Sisyphean proportions. A virtual witch hunt. A deletionreminiscent of the Library of Alexandria burning. A multi-tentacled greedy schema.
Those of us who stand for health freedom and, criticize Big Anything, are losing posting privileges, getting banned,
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No one person created America's war on drugs. No individual is responsible for the accompanying manufactured crises of mass incarceration and impoverishment of working class communities of color. But in the same shamed strata as Richard Nixon and Nancy Reagan, in the view of many, you can find Joe Biden, the wobbly 2020 frontrunner and former vice president.
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The Democratic National Committee (DNC) still hasn’t agreed to the Sunrise Movement’s demand for a #climatedebate, but that hasn’t stopped candidates from focusing on the issue.
Supporters of Organic Consumers Association’s “Cook Organic, Not the Planet” campaign, along with supporters of Regeneration International, a nonprofit OCA helped launch in 2015, will be happy to hear that this election cycle, candidates are finally talking about climate change. More important, most of the candidates recognize that it will be
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Mr. Ryan supports “regenerative agriculture techniques” like cover crops and no-till farming, which can enrich soil and increase biodiversity. He also wants to pay farmers to use techniques that would capture carbon in soil to help combat climate change.
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Do you remember the good old days when we had "12 years to save the planet"? Now it seems, there's a growing consensus that the next 18 months will be critical in dealing with the global heating crisis, among other environmental challenges.
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A wave of lawsuits brought by local and state governments that are trying to hold oil companies accountable for climate change got a boost when federal judges in Rhode Island and Maryland sent two of the cases back to state court.
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Henry won't grow anything here this year. He even has a tractor and harvesting equipment stranded on an island out in the middle of the river. But here's the good news: He'll get a check anyway — a payout from his crop insurance. It won't be as much money as he'd have gotten from a soybean crop, but it'll help him get by, "which is better than going under, you know?" he says.
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Our right to know if it’s GMO is officially under attack—again.
On June 6, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) proposed to overhaul longstanding regulations governing genetically modified organisms (GMO). The proposed new rule would revise the agency's current method for regulating genetically modified plants, and would exclude newer so-called “gene-edited” GMOs.
In a statement, the USDA said the new rule came "in response to advances in genetic engineering."
A week later, in the political equivalent of a one-two-punch, President Trump bolstered the USDA’s
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