From futurist Stephan A. Schwartz - Trends That Will Affect Your Future …

[giovonni]

This situation is getting crazy
Note~ this story was published the day after the previous story

Pyongyang will rely on nuclear might to defend itself against the United States and South Korea, North Korea's Foreign Minister Pak Ui Chun told Russia's Interfax news agency Friday.

"We are once again assured of the rectitude of our choice of the songun (army first) policy, and in strengthening a defence that relies on nuclear forces for deterrence," he said.

Moments after his comments, the Russian foreign ministry issued a statement stating that "all sides must avoid taking any actions that can escalate the situation."

Source;
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...show_article=1

[giovonni]

This is long but worth the read ~
The tentacles of the Illness Profit System reach throughout the world, and the drive for profit corrupts like an acid everyone it touches.


Vanity Fair
Politics
Deadly Medicine
Prescription drugs kill some 200,000 Americans every year. Will that number go up, now that most clinical trials are conducted overseas—on sick Russians, homeless Poles, and slum-dwelling Chinese—in places where regulation is virtually nonexistent, the F.D.A. doesn’t reach, and “mistakes” can end up in pauper’s graves? The authors investigate the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, and the U.S. Government’s failure to rein in a lethal profit machine.
By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele•

Photo illustration by Chris Mueller
January 2011

TAKE TWO ASPIRIN
More and more clinical trials for new drugs are being outsourced overseas and conducted by companies for hire. Is oversight even possible?



You wouldn’t think the cities had much in common. Iaşi, with a population of 320,000, lies in the Moldavian region of Romania. Mégrine is a town of 24,000 in northern Tunisia, on the Mediterranean Sea. Tartu, Estonia, with a population of 100,000, is the oldest city in the Baltic States; it is sometimes called “the Athens on the Emajõgi.” Shenyang, in northeastern China, is a major industrial center and transportation hub with a population of 7.2 million.

These places are not on anyone’s Top 10 list of travel destinations. But the advance scouts of the pharmaceutical industry have visited all of them, and scores of similar cities and towns, large and small, in far-flung corners of the planet. They have gone there to find people willing to undergo clinical trials for new drugs, and thereby help persuade the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to declare the drugs safe and effective for Americans. It’s the next big step in globalization, and there’s good reason to wish that it weren’t.

Once upon a time, the drugs Americans took to treat chronic diseases, clear up infections, improve their state of mind, and enhance their sexual vitality were tested primarily either in the United States (the vast majority of cases) or in Europe. No longer. As recently as 1990, according to the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, a mere 271 trials were being conducted in foreign countries of drugs intended for American use. By 2008, the number had risen to 6,485—an increase of more than 2,000 percent. A database being compiled by the National Institutes of Health has identified 58,788 such trials in 173 countries outside the United States since 2000. In 2008 alone, according to the inspector general’s report, 80 percent of the applications submitted to the F.D.A. for new drugs contained data from foreign clinical trials. Increasingly, companies are doing 100 percent of their testing offshore. The inspector general found that the 20 largest U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies now conducted “one-third of their clinical trials exclusively at foreign sites.” All of this is taking place when more drugs than ever—some 2,900 different drugs for some 4,600 different conditions—are undergoing clinical testing and vying to come to market.

Some medical researchers question whether the results of clinical trials conducted in certain other countries are relevant to Americans in the first place. They point out that people in impoverished parts of the world, for a variety of reasons, may metabolize drugs differently from the way Americans do. They note that the prevailing diseases in other countries, such as malaria and tuberculosis, can skew the outcome of clinical trials. But from the point of view of the drug companies, it’s easy to see why moving clinical trials overseas is so appealing. For one thing, it’s cheaper to run trials in places where the local population survives on only a few dollars a day. It’s also easier to recruit patients, who often believe they are being treated for a disease rather than, as may be the case, just getting a placebo as part of an experiment. And it’s easier to find what the industry calls “drug-naïve” patients: people who are not being treated for any disease and are not currently taking any drugs, and indeed may never have taken any—the sort of people who will almost certainly yield better test results. (For some subjects overseas, participation in a clinical trial may be their first significant exposure to a doctor.) Regulations in many foreign countries are also less stringent, if there are any regulations at all. The risk of litigation is negligible, in some places nonexistent. Ethical concerns are a figure of speech. Finally—a significant plus for the drug companies—the F.D.A. does so little monitoring that the companies can pretty much do and say what they want.

Consent by Thumbprint

Many of today’s trials still take place in developed countries, such as Britain, Italy, and Japan. But thousands are taking place in countries with large concentrations of poor, often illiterate people, who in some cases sign consent forms with a thumbprint, or scratch an “X.” Bangladesh has been home to 76 clinical trials. There have been clinical trials in Malawi (61), the Russian Federation (1,513), Romania (876), Thailand (786), Ukraine (589), Kazakhstan (15), Peru (494), Iran (292), Turkey (716), and Uganda (132). Throw a dart at a world map and you are unlikely to hit a spot that has escaped the attention of those who scout out locations for the pharmaceutical industry.

The two destinations that one day will eclipse all the others, including Europe and the United States, are China (with 1,861 trials) and India (with 1,457). A few years ago, India was home to more American drug trials than China was, thanks in part to its large English-speaking population. But that has changed. English is now mandatory in China’s elementary schools, and, owing to its population edge, China now has more people who speak English than India does.

While Americans may be unfamiliar with the names of foreign cities where clinical trials have been conducted, many of the drugs being tested are staples of their medicine cabinets. One example is Celebrex, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug that has been aggressively promoted in television commercials for a decade. Its manufacturer, Pfizer, the world’s largest drug company, has spent more than a billion dollars promoting its use as a pain remedy for arthritis and other conditions, including menstrual cramps. The National Institutes of Health maintains a record of most—but by no means all—drug trials inside and outside the United States. The database counts 290 studies involving Celebrex. Companies are not required to report—and do not report—all studies conducted overseas. According to the database, of the 290 trials for Celebrex, 183 took place in the United States, meaning, one would assume, that 107 took place in other countries. But an informal, country-by-country accounting by VANITY FAIR turned up no fewer than 207 Celebrex trials in at least 36 other countries. They ranged from 1 each in Estonia, Croatia, and Lithuania to 6 each in Costa Rica, Colombia, and Russia, to 8 in Mexico, 9 in China, and 10 in Brazil. But even these numbers understate the extent of the foreign trials. For example, the database lists five Celebrex trials in Ukraine, but just “one” of those trials involved studies in 11 different Ukrainian cities.

The Celebrex story does not have a happy ending. First, it was disclosed that patients taking the drug were more likely to suffer heart attacks and strokes than those who took older and cheaper painkillers. Then it was alleged that Pfizer had suppressed a study calling attention to these very problems. (The company denied that the study was undisclosed and insisted that it “acted responsibly in sharing this information in a timely manner with the F.D.A.”) Soon afterward the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine reported an array of additional negative findings. Meanwhile, Pfizer was promoting Celebrex for use with Alzheimer’s patients, holding out the possibility that the drug would slow the progression of dementia. It didn’t. Sales of Celebrex reached $3.3 billion in 2004, and then began to quickly drop.

“Rescue Countries”

One big factor in the shift of clinical trials to foreign countries is a loophole in F.D.A. regulations: if studies in the United States suggest that a drug has no benefit, trials from abroad can often be used in their stead to secure F.D.A. approval. There’s even a term for countries that have shown themselves to be especially amenable when drug companies need positive data fast: they’re called “rescue countries.” Rescue countries came to the aid of Ketek, the first of a new generation of widely heralded antibiotics to treat respiratory-tract infections. Ketek was developed in the 1990s by Aventis Pharmaceuticals, now Sanofi-Aventis. In 2004—on April Fools’ Day, as it happens—the F.D.A. certified Ketek as safe and effective. The F.D.A.’s decision was based heavily on the results of studies in Hungary, Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey.

The approval came less than one month after a researcher in the United States was sentenced to 57 months in prison for falsifying her own Ketek data. Dr. Anne Kirkman-Campbell, of Gadsden, Alabama, seemingly never met a person she couldn’t sign up to participate in a drug trial. She enrolled more than 400 volunteers, about 1 percent of the town’s adult population, including her entire office staff. In return, she collected $400 a head from Sanofi-Aventis. It later came to light that the data from at least 91 percent of her patients was falsified. (Kirkman-Campbell was not the only troublesome Aventis researcher. Another physician, in charge of the third-largest Ketek trial site, was addicted to cocaine. The same month his data was submitted to the F.D.A. he was arrested while holding his wife hostage at gunpoint.) Nonetheless, on the basis of overseas trials, Ketek won approval.

As the months ticked by, and the number of people taking the drug climbed steadily, the F.D.A. began to get reports of adverse reactions, including serious liver damage that sometimes led to death. The F.D.A.’s leadership remained steadfast in its support of the drug, but criticism by the agency’s own researchers eventually leaked out (a very rare occurrence in this close-knit, buttoned-up world). The critics were especially concerned about an ongoing trial in which 4,000 infants and children, some as young as six months, were recruited in more than a dozen countries for an experiment to assess Ketek’s effectiveness in treating ear infections and tonsillitis. The trial had been sanctioned over the objections of the F.D.A.’s own reviewers. One of them argued that the trial never should have been allowed to take place—that it was “inappropriate and unethical because it exposed children to harm without evidence of benefits.” In 2006, after inquiries from Congress, the F.D.A. asked Sanofi-Aventis to halt the trial. Less than a year later, one day before the start of a congressional hearing on the F.D.A.’s approval of the drug, the agency suddenly slapped a so-called black-box warning on the label of Ketek, restricting its use. (A black-box warning is the most serious step the F.D.A. can take short of removing a drug from the market.) By then the F.D.A. had received 93 reports of severe adverse reactions to Ketek, resulting in 12 deaths.

During the congressional hearings, lawmakers heard from former F.D.A. scientists who had criticized their agency’s oversight of the Ketek trials and the drug-approval process. One was Dr. David Ross, who had been the F.D.A.’s chief reviewer of new drugs for 10 years, and was now the national director of clinical public-health programs for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. When he explained his objections, he offered a litany of reasons that could be applied to any number of other drugs: “Because F.D.A. broke its own rules and allowed Ketek on the market. Because dozens of patients have died or suffered needlessly. Because F.D.A. allowed Ketek’s maker to experiment with it on children over reviewers’ protests. Because F.D.A. ignored warnings about fraud. And because F.D.A. used data it knew were false to reassure the public about Ketek’s safety.”

Trials and Error

To have an effective regulatory system you need a clear chain of command—you need to know who is responsible to whom, all the way up and down the line. There is no effective chain of command in modern American drug testing. Around the time that drugmakers began shifting clinical trials abroad, in the 1990s, they also began to contract out all phases of development and testing, putting them in the hands of for-profit companies. It used to be that clinical trials were done mostly by academic researchers in universities and teaching hospitals, a system that, however imperfect, generally entailed certain minimum standards. The free market has changed all that. Today it is mainly independent contractors who recruit potential patients both in the U.S. and—increasingly—overseas. They devise the rules for the clinical trials, conduct the trials themselves, prepare reports on the results, ghostwrite technical articles for medical journals, and create promotional campaigns. The people doing the work on the front lines are not independent scientists. They are wage-earning technicians who are paid to gather a certain number of human beings; sometimes sequester and feed them; administer certain chemical inputs; and collect samples of urine and blood at regular intervals. The work looks like agribusiness, not research.

What began as a mom-and-pop operation has grown into a vast army of formal “contract-research organizations” that generate annual revenue of $20 billion. They can be found conducting trials in every part of the world. By far the largest is Quintiles Transnational, based in Durham, North Carolina. It offers the services of 23,000 employees in 60 countries, and claims that it has “helped develop or commercialize all of the top 30 best-selling drugs.”

Quintiles is privately owned—its investors include two of the U.S.’s top private-equity firms. Other private contractors are public companies, their stock traded on Wall Street. Pharmaceutical Product Development (P.P.D.), a full-service medical contractor based in Wilmington, North Carolina, is a public company with 10,500 employees. It, too, has conducted clinical trials all around the world. In fact, it was involved in the clinical trials for Ketek—a P.P.D. research associate, Ann Marie Cisneros, had been assigned to monitor Dr. Anne Kirkman-Campbell’s testing in Alabama. Cisneros later told the congressional investigating committee that Kirkman-Campbell had indeed engaged in fraud. “But what the court that sentenced her did not know,” Cisneros said, was that “Aventis was not a victim of this fraud.” Cisneros said she had reported her findings of fraud to her employer, P.P.D., and also to Aventis. She told the congressional committee, “What brings me here today is my disbelief at Aventis’s statements that it did not know that fraud was being committed. Mr. Chairman, I knew it, P.P.D. knew it, and Aventis knew it.” Following her testimony the company released a statement saying it regretted the violations that occurred during the study but was not aware of the fraud until after the data was submitted to the F.D.A.

The F.D.A., the federal agency charged with oversight of the food and drugs that Americans consume, is rife with conflicts of interest. Doctors who insist the drug you take is perfectly safe may be collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the company selling the drug. (ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit news organization that is compiling an ongoing catalogue of pharmaceutical-company payments to physicians, has identified 17,000 doctors who have collected speaking and consulting fees, including nearly 400 who have received $100,000 or more since 2009.) Quite often, the F.D.A. never bothers to check for interlocking financial interests. In one study, the agency failed to document the financial interests of applicants in 31 percent of applications for new-drug approval. Even when the agency or the company knew of a potential conflict of interest, neither acted to guard against bias in the test results.

Because of the deference shown to drug companies by the F.D.A.—and also by Congress, which has failed to impose any meaningful regulation—there is no mandatory public record of the results of drug trials conducted in foreign countries. Nor is there any mandatory public oversight of ongoing trials. If one company were to test an experimental drug that killed more patients than it helped, and kept the results secret, another company might unknowingly repeat the same experiment years later, with the same results. Data is made available to the public on a purely voluntary basis. Its accuracy is unknown. The oversight that does exist often is shot through with the kinds of ethical conflicts that Wall Street would admire. The economic incentives for doctors in poor countries to heed the wishes of the drug companies are immense. An executive at a contract-research organization told the anthropologist Adriana Petryna, author of the book When Experiments Travel: “In Russia, a doctor makes two hundred dollars a month, and he is going to make five thousand dollars per Alzheimer’s patient” that he signs up. Even when the most flagrant conflicts are disclosed, penalties are minimal. In truth, the same situation exists in the United States. There’s just more of a chance here, though not a very large one, that adverse outcomes and tainted data will become public. When the pharmaceutical industry insists that its drugs have been tested overseas in accordance with F.D.A. standards, this may be true—but should provide little assurance.

The F.D.A. gets its information on foreign trials almost entirely from the companies themselves. It conducts little or no independent research. The investigators contracted by the pharmaceutical companies to manage clinical trials are left pretty much on their own. In 2008 the F.D.A. inspected just 1.9 percent of trial sites inside the United States to ensure that they were complying with basic standards. Outside the country, it inspected even fewer trial sites—seven-tenths of 1 percent. In 2008, the F.D.A. visited only 45 of the 6,485 locations where foreign drug trials were being conducted.

The pharmaceutical industry dismisses concerns about the reliability of clinical trials conducted in developing countries, but the potential dangers were driven home to Canadian researchers in 2007. While reviewing data from a clinical trial in Iran for a new heart drug, they discovered that many of the results were fraudulent. “It was bad, so bad we thought the data was not salvageable,” Dr. Gordon Guyatt, part of the research group at McMaster University in Hamilton, told Canada’s National Post.

In addition to monitoring trials abroad, which it does not really do, the F.D.A. is responsible for inspecting drug-manufacturing plants in other countries, which it also does not really do. In 2007 and 2008, hundreds of patients taking the blood thinner heparin, which among other purposes is used to prevent blood clots during surgery and dialysis, developed serious allergic reactions as a result of a contaminant introduced at a Chinese manufacturing facility. It took months for the F.D.A., its Chinese counterpart, and Baxter International, the pharmaceutical company that distributed the drug, to track the source of contamination to Changzhou, a city of 3.5 million on the Yangtze River.

The delay was perhaps understandable, given the manufacturing process. The raw material for Baxter’s heparin comes from China’s many small pig farms. To be precise, it’s derived from the mucous membranes of the intestines of slaughtered pigs; the membranes are mixed together and cooked, often in unregulated family workplaces. By the time the source of the contaminant was pinpointed, many more patients in the United States had experienced severe reactions, and as many as 200 had died. It later turned out that the F.D.A. had indeed inspected a Chinese plant—but it was the wrong one. The federal regulators had confused the names.

The good news was that, in this instance, the F.D.A. at least knew which country the heparin had come from. The bad news is that it does not always know where clinical trials are being conducted, or even the names or types of drugs being tested, or the purpose for which they will be prescribed once approved. Companies may withhold the foreign test data until they actually submit the application to the F.D.A. for approval. By then the agency has lost the ability to see whether the trials were managed according to acceptable standards, and whether the data collected was manipulated or fabricated.

$350 per Child

If the globalization of clinical trials for adult medications has drawn little attention, foreign trials for children’s drugs have attracted even less. The Argentinean province of Santiago del Estero, with a population of nearly a million, is one of the country’s poorest. In 2008 seven babies participating in drug testing in the province suffered what the U.S. clinical-trials community refers to as “an adverse event”: they died. The deaths occurred as the children took part in a medical trial to test the safety of a new vaccine, Synflorix, to prevent pneumonia, ear infections, and other pneumococcal diseases. Developed by GlaxoSmithKline, the world’s fourth-largest pharmaceutical company in terms of global prescription-drug sales, the new vaccine was intended to compete against an existing vaccine. In all, at least 14 infants enrolled in clinical trials for the drug died during the testing. Their parents, some illiterate, had their children signed up without understanding that they were taking part in an experiment. Local doctors who persuaded parents to enroll their babies in the trial reportedly received $350 per child. The two lead investigators contracted by Glaxo were fined by the Argentinean government. So was Glaxo, though the company maintained that the mortality rate of the children “did not exceed the rate in the regions and countries participating in the study.” No independent group conducted an investigation or performed autopsies. As it happens, the brother of the lead investigator in Santiago del Estero was the Argentinean provincial health minister.

In New Delhi, 49 babies died at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences while taking part in clinical trials over a 30-month period. They were given a variety of new drugs to treat everything from high blood pressure to chronic focal encephalitis, a brain inflammation that causes epileptic seizures and other neurological problems. The blood-pressure drugs had never before been given to anyone under 18. The editor of an Indian medical journal said it was obvious that the trials were intended to extend patent life in Western countries “with no consequence or benefit for India, using Indian children as guinea pigs.” In all, 4,142 children were enrolled in the studies, two-thirds of them less than one year old. But the head of the pediatrics department at the All India Institute maintained that “none of the deaths was due to the medication or interventions used in clinical trials.”

For years, American physicians gave anti-psychotic medicines to children “off label,” meaning that they wrote prescriptions based on testing for adults, sometimes even for different conditions. That didn’t work out so well for the children, who, when it comes to medicine, really are not just little adults. To provide the pharmaceutical industry with an incentive to conduct clinical trials on children’s versions of adult drugs, Congress in 1997 enacted legislation, known as the Pediatric Exclusivity Provision, extending the patent life of certain drugs by six months. It worked so well that the industry has, in the ensuing years, been able to put younger and younger children on more and more drugs, pocketing an extra $14 billion. Between 1999 and 2007, for instance, the use of anti-psychotic medications on children between the ages of two and five more than doubled.

A study of 174 trials under the Pediatric Exclusivity Provision found that 9 percent of them did not report the location or number of sites of the clinical trials. Of those that did, two-thirds had been conducted in at least one country outside the United States, and 11 percent were conducted entirely outside the United States. Of the 79 trials with more than 100 subjects participating, 87 percent enrolled patients outside the United States. As is the case with adult studies, many children’s trials conducted abroad are neither reported nor catalogued on any publicly accessible government database. There is no public record of their existence or their results.

In the mid-90s, Glaxo conducted clinical trials on the antidepressant Paxil in the United States, Europe, and South America. Paxil is a member of a class of drugs called selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors. The class includes Zoloft, Prozac, and Lexapro. In the United Kingdom, Paxil is sold as Seroxat. The clinical trials showed that the drug had no beneficial effect on adolescents; some of the trials indicated that the placebo was more effective than the drug itself. But Glaxo neglected to share this information with consumers; annual sales of the drug had reached $5 billion in 2003. In an internal document obtained by the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the company emphasized how important it was to “effectively manage the dissemination of these data in order to minimize any potential negative commercial impact.” The memo went on to warn that “it would be commercially unacceptable to include a statement that efficacy had not been demonstrated.” After the document was released a Glaxo spokesperson said that the “memo draws an inappropriate conclusion and is not consistent with the facts.”

“Smoke and Mirrors”

It may be just a coincidence, but as controversy swirls around new drugs, and as the F.D.A. continues to slap medicines with new warning labels—especially the black-box warnings that indicate the most serious potential reactions—most of the problematic drugs have all undergone testing outside the United States. Clinical-trial representatives working for GlaxoSmithKline went to Iaşi, Romania, to test Avandia, a diabetes drug, on the local population. Glaxo representatives also showed up in other cities in Romania—Bucureşti, Cluj-Napoca, Craiova, and Timişoara—as well as multiple cities in Latvia, Ukraine, Slovakia, the Russian Federation, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. That was for the largest of the Avandia clinical trials. But there have been scores of others, all seeking to prove that the drug is safe and effective. Some took place before the drug was approved by the F.D.A. Others were “post-marketing” studies, done after the fact, as the company cast about for ways to come up with more positive results so it could expand Avandia’s use for other treatments. Based on the initial evaluations, Avandia was expected to—and did—become another Glaxo multi-billion-dollar best-seller.

While sales soared, so, too, did reports of adverse reactions—everything from macular edema to liver injury, from bone fractures to congestive heart failure. In 2009 the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit group that monitors the prescription-drug field, linked the deaths of 1,354 people to Avandia, based on reports filed with the F.D.A. Studies also concluded that people taking the drug had an increased risk of developing heart disease, one of the very conditions that doctors treating diabetics hope to forestall. The risk was so high that worried doctors inside and outside the F.D.A. sought to have the drug removed from the market, an incredibly difficult task no matter how problematic the medicine. As always, the F.D.A. was late to the party. In 2008 the American Diabetes Association and the European Association for the Study of Diabetes had warned against using Avandia. The Saudi Arabian drug-regulatory agency yanked it from the market, and the Indian government asked Glaxo to halt 19 of its Avandia trials in that country. In September 2010 the European Medicines Agency pulled Avandia from the shelves all across Europe. The F.D.A. still could not bring itself to take decisive action. This even though the F.D.A. knew that Glaxo had withheld critical safety information concerning the increased risk of heart attacks, and the F.D.A. itself had estimated that the drug had caused more than 83,000 heart attacks between 1999 and 2007. The agency settled for imposing new restrictions on the availability of the drug in the United States. Glaxo released a statement saying that it “continues to believe that Avandia is an important treatment for patients with type 2 diabetes,” but that it would “voluntarily cease promotion of Avandia in all the countries in which it operates.”

The Avandia case and others like it have prompted the U.S. Justice Department to mount an investigation under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. While it is legal for doctors in this country to accept money from drug companies for acting as consultants, this is not the case abroad, where doctors often are government employees, and such payments can be considered bribes. There are other legal issues. So far, Glaxo has paid out more than $1 billion to settle lawsuits arising from claims against Avandia and other drugs. The Senate Finance Committee calculates that, since May 2004, seven drug companies have paid out more than $7 billion in fines and penalties stemming from unlawful drug dealings. Pfizer paid the largest such fine in history—$2.3 billion for promoting off-label uses of the arthritis drug Bextra.

In theory, pharmaceutical companies are barred from selling a drug for any purpose other than the one that the F.D.A. has approved on the basis of clinical testing. But the reality is different. The minute a drug receives the green light from the F.D.A. for a specific treatment, the sponsoring company and its allies begin campaigns to make it available for other purposes or for other types of patients. The antidepressant Paxil was tested on adults but sold off-label to treat children. Seroquel, an anti-psychotic, was marketed as a treatment for depression. Physicians, often on retainer from pharmaceutical companies, are free to prescribe a drug for any reason if they entertain a belief that it will work. This practice turns the population at large into unwitting guinea pigs whose adverse reactions may go unreported or even unrecognized.

To secure the F.D.A.’s approval for Seroquel, which ultimately would go to treat schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, and manic episodes associated with bipolar disorder, AstraZeneca, the fifth-largest pharmaceutical company, conducted clinical trials across Asia, Europe, and the United States. Among the sites: Shenyang and more than a dozen other cities in China, and multiple cities in Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Poland, the Russian Federation, Serbia, Ukraine, and Taiwan. The F.D.A. initially approved the drug for the treatment of schizophrenia. But while schizophrenia may have opened the door, off-label sales opened the cash register. Money poured in by the billions as AstraZeneca promoted the drug for the treatment of any number of other conditions. It was prescribed for children with autism-spectrum disorders and retardation as well as for elderly Alzheimer’s patients in nursing homes. The company touted the drug for treatment of aggression, anxiety, anger-management issues, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dementia, and sleeplessness. Up to 70 percent of the prescriptions for Seroquel were written for a purpose other than the one for which it had been approved, and sales rose to more than $4 billion a year.

It turned out, however, that AstraZeneca had been less than candid about the drug’s side effects. One of the most troubling: patients often gained weight and developed diabetes. This meant a new round of drugs to treat conditions caused by Seroquel. In an internal e-mail from 1997 discussing a study comparing Seroquel with an older anti-psychotic drug, Haldol, a company executive praised the work of the project physician, saying she had done a great “smoke-and-mirrors job,” which “should minimize (and dare I venture to suggest) could put a positive spin (in terms of safety) on this cursed study.” After the e-mail was disclosed, in February 2009, the company said that the document cannot “obscure the fact that AstraZeneca acted responsibly and appropriately as it developed and marketed” the drug. In April, AstraZeneca reached a half-billion-dollar settlement with the federal government over its marketing of Seroquel. The U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, where the settlement was filed, declared that the company had “turned patients into guinea pigs in an unsupervised drug test.” Meanwhile, the company was facing more than 25,000 product-liability lawsuits filed by people who contended the drug had caused their diabetes.

Death Toll

The only people who seem to care about the surge of clinical trials in foreign countries are the medical ethicists—not historically a powerhouse when it comes to battling the drug companies. A team of physician-researchers from Duke University, writing last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, observed that “this phenomenon raises important questions about the economics and ethics of clinical research and the translation of trial results to clinical practice: Who benefits from the globalization of clinical trials? What is the potential for exploitation of research subjects? Are trial results accurate and valid, and can they be extrapolated to other settings?” The Duke team noted that, in some places, “financial compensation for research participation may exceed participants’ annual wages, and participation in a clinical trial may provide the only access to care” for those taking part in the trial. In 2007, residents of a homeless shelter in Grudziadz, Poland, received as little as $2 to take part in a flu-vaccine experiment. The subjects thought they were getting a regular flu shot. They were not. At least 20 of them died. The same distorting economic pressures exist for local hospitals or doctors, who may collect hundreds of dollars for every patient they enroll. In theory, a federal institutional review board is supposed to assess every clinical trial, with special concern for the welfare of the human subjects, but this work, too, has now been outsourced to private companies and is often useless. In 2009 the Government Accountability Office conducted a sting operation, winning approval for a clinical trial involving human subjects; the institutional review board failed to discover (if it even tried) that it was dealing with “a bogus company with falsified credentials” and a fake medical device. This was in Los Angeles. If that is oversight in the U.S., imagine what it’s like in Kazakhstan or Uganda. Susan Reverby, the Wellesley historian who uncovered the U.S. government’s syphilis experiments in Guatemala during the 1940s, was asked in a recent interview to cite any ongoing experimental practices that gave her pause. “Frankly,” she said, “I am mostly worried about the drug trials that get done elsewhere now, which we have little control over.”

The pharmaceutical industry, needless to say, has a different view. It argues that people participating in a clinical trial may be getting the highest quality of medical care they have ever received. That may be true in the short term. But, unfortunately, the care lasts only until the trial is completed. Many U.S. medical investigators who manage drug trials abroad say they prefer to work overseas, where regulations are lax and “conflict of interest” is a synonym for “business as usual.” Inside the United States, doctors who oversee trials are required to fill out forms showing any income they have received from drug companies so as to guard against financial biases in trials. This explains in part why the number of clinical-trial investigators registered with the F.D.A. fell 5.2 percent in the U.S. between 2004 and 2007 while increasing 16 percent in Eastern Europe, 12 percent in Asia, and 10 percent in Latin America. In a recent survey, 70 percent of the eligible U.S. and Western European clinical investigators interviewed said they were discouraged by the current regulatory environment, partly because they are compelled to disclose financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. In trials conducted outside the United States, few people care.

In 2009, according to the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, 19,551 people died in the United States as a direct result of the prescription drugs they took. That’s just the reported number. It’s decidedly low, because it is estimated that only about 10 percent of such deaths are reported. Conservatively, then, the annual American death toll from prescription drugs considered “safe” can be put at around 200,000. That is three times the number of people who die every year from diabetes, four times the number who die from kidney disease. Overall, deaths from F.D.A.-approved prescription drugs dwarf the number of people who die from street drugs such as cocaine and heroin. They dwarf the number who die every year in automobile accidents. So far, these deaths have triggered no medical crusades, no tough new regulations. After a dozen or so deaths linked to runaway Toyotas, Japanese executives were summoned to appear before lawmakers in Washington and were subjected to an onslaught of humiliating publicity. When the pharmaceutical industry meets with lawmakers, it is mainly to provide campaign contributions.

And with more and more of its activities moving overseas, the industry’s behavior will become more impenetrable, and more dangerous, than ever.


Source; http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/f...#ixzz1811hG4J8

[giovonni]

Finally, however inadvertently, the truth comes out. You are no more important than the dog waste on a banker's shoe and the government has no interest in governing for your behalf. Republican Spencer Bachus, the incoming chairman of the House Banking Committee spells it out for you: ""In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks." I will say it again. If you voted Republican, and you are not rich, you voted against your own self-interest, and this is going to become clearer and clearer to you as time goes on. I make that statement not as a Democrat or as a Republican, but as an historian.

As for Bachus, as Raw Story points out: "He has received over $800,000 from the real estate industry, $700,000 from securities and investment firms, and $415,000 from credit companies -- all of which he will have extraordinary influence over as banking committee chair." How does one distinguish this from outright bribery.

Regulators exist to ‘serve the banks,’ next House finance chairman declares
Alabama Republican Spencer Bachus, the incoming chairman of the House banking committee, suggested Congress and federal regulators should play a subservient role with banks.

"In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks," Bachus told The Birmingham News in an interview.

The Republican leadership last week designated Bachus the next chairman of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, which is tasked with overseeing banks, financial markets, housing and consumer credit.

Democrats characterized the remark as a Freudian slip, nicknaming the Alabaman "Big Bank Bachus" and claiming the new Republican-controlled House will put the interests of financial institutions ahead of the American public.

"Congressman Spencer 'Big Bank' Bachus has given Americans a startlingly honest answer about the House Republican agenda – do whatever is good for the big banks and Wall Street special interests, rather than what’s good for hardworking Americans,” said Jesse Ferguson, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Bachus later told the Birmingham News he merely meant Congress shouldn't micromanage banks.

The congressman from Alabama's 6th district has throughout his 18-year House career raised millions from financial interests, including over $1 million from commercial banks alone, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

He has received over $800,000 from the real estate industry, $700,000 from securities and investment firms, and $415,000 from credit companies -- all of which he will have extraordinary influence over as banking committee chair.

Bachus was an important negotiator for the $700,000 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) of 2008 -- often derided as the "bank bailout" -- which angered the public but also prevented a widespread collapse of the financial system. It passed with wide bipartisan support.

The outgoing chairman, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), played an instrumental role in developing sweeping financial regulatory reforms enacted by President Barack Obama in July.

Source;
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/i...s-serve-banks/

[giovonni]

Once again we are indebted to Wikileaks to reveal how complicit our government is on this assault on that most basic commodity -- food. It is going to be up to individuals and families to make compensatory arrangements, because it is going to become harder and harder to get healthy food.



Leaked Cable: Hike food prices to boost GM crop approval in Europe
Posted on December 14, 2010

By Rady Ananda
Food Freedom

In a January 2008 meeting, US and Spain trade officials strategized how to increase acceptance of genetically modified foods in Europe, including inflating food prices on the commodities market, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.

During the meeting, Secretary of State for International Trade, Pedro Mejia, and Secretary General Alfredo Bonet “noted that commodity price hikes might spur greater liberalization on biotech imports.”

It seems Wall Street traders got the word. By June 2008, food prices had spiked so severely that “The Economist announced that the real price of food had reached its highest level since 1845, the year the magazine first calculated the number,” reports Fred Kaufman in The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it.

The unprecedented high in food prices in 2008 caused an additional 250 million people to go hungry, pushing the global number to over a billion. 2008 is also the first year “since such statistics have been kept, that the proportion of the world’s population without enough to eat ratcheted upward,” said Kaufman.

All to boost acceptance of GM foods, and done via a trading scheme on which Wall Street speculators profited enormously.

Mass food riots in several nations ensued, as did an investigation by the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, resulting in a finding that, yes, unrestricted speculation in food commodities caused soaring prices.

In a comment at the end of the cable, the diplomat also revealed a level of pessimism about Spain’s willingness to help force GM foods on Europe:

“This was a very good substantive discussion. However, it is clear that while Spain will continue sometimes to vote in favor of biotechnology liberalization proposals, the Spaniards will tread warily on this issue given their own domestic sensitivities and other equities Spain has in the EU.”

That pessimism was largely unfounded, as “Spain planted 80 percent of all the Bt maize in the EU in 2009 and maintained its record adoption rate of 22 percent from the previous year,” noted a report by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA).

The leaked cables, amounting to over 1,300 right now, reveal US obsession with expanding the biotech market:

* One leaked cable confirms US concern with promoting GM foods in Africa, which Richard Brenneman described as “a significant item on the State Department’s agenda.”

* In another leaked cable describing the potential to expand US interests in “isolationist” Austria, that nation’s ban on GM foods is highlighted.

* According to a leaked cable from 2007, of concern was French President Sarkozy’s desire to implement a ban on GM foods in line with populist sentiment. According to GMO Free Regions, France maintains its opposition to GM foods today.

* In this leaked cable, the Pope openly blamed global hunger on commodity speculation and corrupt public officials, so far refusing to support the use of GM foods. (Also see my Dec. 12 piece, “Leaked cables confirm Pope’s distance from GMO debate and limited stance on bioethics.”)

More may be revealed in the remaining cables.

Profiteering Leaves World open to Future Price Manipulation

Food commodity speculation was enabled in 2000 by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Deregulation handyman Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) introduced the bill, coauthored by financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), the chairman of the Agriculture Committee.

Mother Jones describes the legislative climate when the bill passed:

“As part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown….

“Gramm’s most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry—friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career—came on December 15, 2000. It was an especially tense time in Washington. Only two days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.”

Not only did that Act enable the subprime meltdown that crashed the economy and put tens of millions into foreclosure, it also enabled Wall Street investors to artificially spike the price of food.

“Bankers had taken control of the world’s food, money chased money, and a billion people went hungry,” Kaufman clarified.

After a year long investigation, he confirmed that price hikes in food from 2005 thru the peak in June 2008 had nothing to do with the supply chain, but instead occurred as a result of a Wall Street investment scheme known as Commodity Investment Funds. The first to develop the idea was Goldman Sachs, which took 18 different food sources, including cattle, coffee, cocoa, corn, hogs and wheat, and created an investment package. Kaufman explains:

“They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known thenceforward as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index. Then they began to offer shares.”

(Kaufman summarizes his report in this June 2010 interview by Thom Hartmann, and in this July Democracy Now interview.)

Kaufman points out that also in 2008, ConAgra Foods was able to sell its trading arm to a hedge fund for $2.8 billion. The world’s largest grain trader and GMO giant, Cargill, recorded an 86% jump in annual profits in the first quarter of 2008, attributed to commodity trading and an expanding biofuels market. The Star Tribune calculated that Cargill earned $471,611 an hour that quarter.

The investment bubble burst in June 2008 and “aggregate commodity prices fell about 60% by mid-November 2008,” notes Steve Suppan of the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy. Though the US House of Representatives introduced a regulatory bill, “legislative loopholes will exempt at least 40-45%” of such trades. Supporting the loopholes is Cargill, among other multinational corporations. Suppan concludes:

“The outlook for a sustainable and transparent financial system to underwrite trade dependent food security is not good… [T]he budget for the just launched congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, scheduled to report December 15, [2010] is just $8 million. The Wall Street lobbying budget for defeating financial reform legislation is thus far $344 million…”

The final bill was signed into law in July 2010 (summarized by the New York Times), and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission continues to issue new rules purportedly aimed at regulating financial markets. “But big banks influence the rules governing derivatives through a variety of industry groups,” notes another New York Times piece.

Did the artificial price hike open EU doors to GM foods?

No, in fact ISAAA noted that: “Six European countries planted 94,750 hectares of biotech crops in 2009, down from seven countries and 107,719 hectares in 2008, as Germany discontinued its planting.”

A closer look at EU member state actions on GM foods after June 2008 details some of the GM-free battle in Europe:

* In December 2008, after a ten-year hiatus, Italy agreed to open field tests of GM crops.

* The Czech Republic became the second largest grower of Bt corn in the EU in 2008, nearly doubling the acreage planted in 2007. The USDA characterized it as being an investment target not only in agriculture but also in vaccine development.

* At the EU level, “In an apparent U-turn in his attitude as one of EU executive’s most GM-wary commissioners, environment chief Stavros Dimas” wrote draft approvals for two more varieties of GM corn, reported Reuters in December 2008.

* However, by September 2008, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland had all become GM-free, and urged the UK to do likewise.

* Though pressured by the European Commission, in January 2009 Hungary refused to lift its ban on GM foods. Its sovereign right to reject GMOs, along with Austria’s, was later upheld by an EU vote with 20 member states supporting such bans.

* In March 2009, Luxembourg became the fifth EU nation to ban GM foods, following France, Hungary, Greece and Austria.

* In October 2009, Turkey banned the import of biotech products.

For updates and a more thorough history of EU actions on GM foods, see GMO-Free Europe. European states handle the issue differently than in the US, allowing regions within a nation to maintain GM-free zones. Each step a nation takes toward GM approval invariably draws regional resistance.

Biotech Crops Expand Globally in 2009

Though the strategy to hike food prices to spur European acceptance of GM foods failed, it worked elsewhere. Globally, biotech crops expanded by 7% in 2009 over 2008 figures, according to this chart by ISAAA:




In fact, ISAAA asserted GM expansion was due to the 2008 price hikes, as noted by chairman and founder Clive James: “With last year’s food crisis, price spikes, and hunger and malnutrition afflicting more than 1 billion people for the first time ever, there has been a global shift from efforts for just food security to food self-sufficiency.”

Poorer nations hardest hit by hunger — in Africa and South America — are more vulnerable to price hikes. But even after the geologically unusual earthquake in January, Haitian farmers rejected Monsanto’s “gift” of GM seeds. However, the big push remains in Africa and China.

A Wary Future

Although it is now widely accepted that Wall Street speculation caused the food bubble, starving hundreds of millions, regulators have so far failed to curb the practices that allow international banksters to manipulate food prices.

Meanwhile, the biotech industry continues to repeat its mantra that GM food can cure world hunger. This claim is not backed by the science and it seems to hold less sway in the GM food debate, especially with the Pope recognizing what many others assert: There is no shortage of food; hunger expanded because of price hikes.


Source;
Food Freedom
Decentralize, Grow Your Own, Buy Local
http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/201...bubble-gmo-eu/

[giovonni]

In search of the Woodpecker ~
The woodpeckers, piculets and wrynecks are a family, Picidae, of near-passerine birds. Members of this family are found worldwide, except for Australia and New Zealand, Madagascar, and the extreme polar regions. Most species live in forests or woodland habitats, although a few species are known to live in treeless areas such as rocky hillsides and deserts.







Space laser spies for woodpeckers
By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News, San Francisco
17 December 2010 Last updated at 22:33 ET

US scientists are developing techniques to monitor woodpeckers from space.

An Idaho University team has been using a satellite-borne laser to try to predict in which part of a State forest the birds might be living.

The instrument cannot see individual woodpeckers or trees, but it can determine the key characteristics of a woodland, like how dense it is.

Initial work has shown maps built from such data can locate areas favoured by North American pileated woodpeckers.

The scientists want to know where these birds are because they are seen as good indicators of overall bird diversity in a forest.


Pileated woodpeckers prefer a dense stand as they forage for ants

"They create homes for lots of other species in the forest setting," explained Dr Kerri Vierling from the university's fish and wildlife department.

"They make cavities and those cavities are then used by other species for nesting and roosting.

"Woodpeckers are very sensitive to forest characteristics, and so they're very selective about where they decide to live."

The Idaho research has been presented here in San Francisco at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the world's largest annual gathering of Earth and planetary scientists.

The team assessed some 20,000 hectares of forest in the northern part of the state around Moscow Mountain. They used data acquired by laser altimeters flown on aircraft and on Nasa's Icesat spacecraft before its recent retirement (it was de-orbited in August).

Originally conceived as a means to measure the height of ice surfaces in polar regions, the Icesat instrument has also proved hugely effective in gathering information about vegetation cover in other parts of the globe.

Because of the way the beam of light sent down by the laser bounces back off canopy leaves, tree trunks and the ground, it is possible to make general statements about important forest characteristics.

Team-member Patrick Adam told BBC News: "We try to measure the diameter of the trees and their density. We can't do that directly from these instruments, but to get at diameter we can measure the height of the trees because tall trees are fatter than short trees; and we get at the density of the forest by looking at the relative amount of light that is returned from the foliage versus that which is returned from the ground.

"So by looking at the areas that have the tallest trees, we know that they also have the largest trees in diameter, and that there's a better chance of there being woodpeckers there. We don't just hypothesise that, we go out and we actually conduct ground-based woodpecker surveys in these locations as well to verify it."

Dr Lee Vierling from the university's department of forest ecology and biogeosciences added: "There's one species that needs to have high-density forest. That's the pileated woodpecker.

"It's a magnificent bird with a tall red crest on its head. It's a carpenter-ant foraging species so the denser the forest, the better for that particular bird."

Past survey's of forest structure have tended to be fairly labour intensive endeavours, involving sending many people into an area on foot to make the evaluation. And while such assessments produce very detailed results, they are necessarily limited in their spatial information.

Allying remotely sensed data to the ground effort should make habitat surveys more relevant over much broader areas of forest.

"If we are able to predict where woodpeckers are just based on satellite data then we can also surmise, based on some other vegetation characteristics, that we might also have higher diversity of forest songbirds or even some mammals and reptiles. That's useful in land management planning and biodiversity planning," said Mr Adam.

"It's a lot easier to use satellite data. It's important to still do some ground-truthing at a few select points just to make sure we're not totally going off tangent from reality. But in general, yes, we can cover large areas with the airborne lidar, and we're really hopeful with what we can use the space-borne lidar for because that has global coverage, so we could use that at a much larger scale."

The Icesat instrument is no longer in space, but it will be replaced later this decade. In addition, the US space agency is thinking of flying another laser instrument on its Deformation, Ecosystem Structure and Dynamics of Ice (DESDynI) mission.



Source;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11867165

note ~ this is a substitute thread post by giovonni

[giovonni]

Well~ here's some more leaks, that should not surprise anyone here

Pollinators -- principally honey bees -- are essential to agricultural. You and your family depend on these small beings to survive. Apparently corporate profits are more important than your survival. You think I'm kidding?

Thanks to Terrence A. Glassman.


Leaked document shows EPA allowed bee-toxic pesticide despite own scientists’ red flags




Follow the honey: Smoking bees makes them less mad when you move them, but leaked EPA documents might have the opposite effect.

It's not just the State and Defense departments that are reeling this month from leaked documents. The Environmental Protection Agency now has some explaining to do, too. In place of dodgy dealings with foreign leaders, this case involves the German agrichemical giant Bayer; a pesticide with an unpronounceable name, clothianidin; and an insect species crucial to food production (as well as a food producer itself), the honeybee. And in lieu of a memo leaked to a globetrotting Australian, this one features a document delivered to a long-time Colorado beekeeper.

All of that, plus my favorite crop to fixate on: industrial corn, which blankets 88 million acres of farmland nationwide and produces a bounty of protein-rich pollen on which honeybees love to feast.

It's The Agency Who Kicked the Beehive, as written by Jonathan Franzen!

Hive talking

An internal EPA memo released Wednesday confirms that the very agency charged with protecting the environment is ignoring the warnings of its own scientists about clothianidin, a pesticide from which Bayer racked up €183 million (about $262 million) in sales in 2009.

Clothianidin has been widely used on corn, the largest U.S. crop, since 2003. Suppliers sell seeds pre-treated with it. Like other members of the neonicotinoid family of pesticides, clothianidin gets "taken up by a plant's vascular system and expressed through pollen and nectar," according to Pesticide Action Network of North America (PANNA), which leaked the document along with Beyond Pesticides. That effect makes it highly toxic to a crop's pests -- and also harmful to pollen-hoarding honeybees, which have experienced mysterious annual massive die-offs (known as "colony collapse disorder") here in the United States at least since 2006.

The colony-collapse phenomenon is complex and still not completely understood. While there appears to be no single cause for the annual die-offs, mounting evidence points to pesticides, and specifically neonicotinoids (derived from nicotine), as a key factor. And neonicotinoids are a relatively new factor in ecosystems frequented by honeybees -- introduced in the late 1990s, these systemic insecticides have gained a steadily rising share of the seed-treatment market. It does not seem unfair to observe that the health of the honeybee population has steadily declined over the same period.

According to PANNA, other crops commonly treated with clothianidin include canola, soy, sugar beets, sunflowers, and wheat -- all among the most widely planted U.S. crops. Bayer is now petitioning the EPA to register it for use with cotton and mustard seed.

The document [PDF], leaked to Colorado beekeeper Tom Theobald, reveals that EPA scientists have declared essentially rejected the findings of a study conducted on behalf of Bayer that the agency had used to justify the registration of clothianidin. And they reiterated concerns that widespread use of clothianidin imperils the health of the nation's honeybees.

On Thursday, I asked an EPA press spokesperson via email if the scientists' opinion would inspire the agency to remove clothianidin from the market. The spokesperson, who asked not to be named but who communicated on the record on behalf of the agency, replied that clothianidin would retain its registration and be available for use in the spring.

Wimpy watchdogging

Before we dig deeper into the leaked memo, it's important to understand the sorry story of how an insecticide known to harm honeybee populations came to blanket a huge swath of U.S. farmland in the first place. It's nearly impossible not to read it as a tale of a key public watchdog instead heeling to the industry it's supposed to regulate.

In the EPA's dealings with Bayer on this particular insecticide, the agency charged with protecting the environment has consistently made industry-friendly decisions that contradict the conclusions of its own scientists -- and threaten to do monumental harm to our food system by wiping out its key pollinators.

According to a time line provided by PANNA, the sordid story begins when Bayer first applied for registration of clothianidin in 2003. (All of the documents to which I link below were provided to me by PANNA.) By 2003, U.S. beekeepers were reporting difficulties in keeping hives healthy through the winter, but not yet on the scale of colony collapse disorder. In February of this year, the EPA's Environmental Fate and Effects Division (EFED) withheld registration of clothianidin, declaring that it wanted more evidence that it wouldn't harm bee populations.

In a memo [PDF], an EFAD scientist explained the decision:

The possibility of toxic exposure to nontarget pollinators [e.g., honeybees] through the translocation of clothianidin residues that result from seed treatment (corn and canola) has prompted EFED to require field testing that can evaluate the possible chronic exposure to honeybee larvae and the queen. In order to fully evaluate the possibility of this toxic effect, a complete worker bee life cycle study (about 63 days) must be conducted, as well as an evaluation of exposure to the queen.

So, no selling clothianidin until a close, expert examination of how pollen infused with it would affect worker bees and Her Majesty the queen.

Again, that was in February of 2003. But in April of that year, just two months later, the agency backtracked. "After further consideration," the agency wrote in another memo, the EPA has decided to grant clothianidin "conditional registration" -- meaning that Bayer was free to sell it, and seed processors were free to apply it to their products. (Don't get me started on the EPA's habit of granting dodgy chemicals "conditional registration," before allowing their unregulated use for years and even decades. That's another story.)

The EPA's one condition reflected the concerns of its scientists about how it would affect honeybees: that Bayer complete the "chronic life cycle study" the agency had already requested by December of 2004. The scientists minced no words in reiterating their concerns. They called clothianidin's effects "persistent" and "toxic to honeybees" and noted the the "potential for expression in pollen and nectar of flowering crops."

These concerns aside and "conditional registration" in hand, Bayer introduced clothianidin to the U.S. market in spring 2003. Farmers throughout the corn belt planted seeds treated with clothianidin, and billions -- if not trillions -- of plants began producing pollen rich with the bee-killing stuff.



A bee does what it does best -- thankfully, not in a corn field.


n March of 2004, Bayer requested an extension on its December deadline for delivering the life-cycle study. In a March 11 memo [PDF], the EPA agreed, giving the chemical giant until May 2005 to complete the research. Clothianidin continued flowing from Bayer's factories and from corn plants into pollen.

But the EPA also relayed a crucial decision in this memo: It granted Bayer the permission it had sought to conduct its study on canola in Canada, instead of on corn in the United States. The EPA justified the decision as follows:

[Canola] is attractive to bee [sic] and will provide bee exposure from both pollen and nectar. An alternative crop, such as corn, which is less attractive to bees as a forage crop, would provide exposure from pollen, only.

Bee experts cite three problems with this decision:

1. Corn produces much more pollen than does canola;
2. its pollen is more attractive to honey bees; and
3. canola is a minor crop in the United States, while corn is the single most widely planted crop.

What happened next was ... not much. Bayer let the deadline for completing the study lapse; and the EPA let Bayer keep selling clothianidin, which continued to be deposited into tens of millions of acres of farmland.

Not until August of 2007, more than a year after its deadline, did Bayer deliver its study. In a November 2007 memo [PDF], EPA scientists declared the study "scientifically sound," adding that it, "satisfies the guideline requirements for a field toxicity test with honeybees."

Beeing and nothingness

So what were the details of that study, on which the health of our little pollinator friends depended?

Well, the EPA initially refused to release it publicly, prompting a Freedom of Information Act by the Natural Resources Defense Council. When the EPA still refused to release it, NRDC filed suit in response. Eventually, the study was released. Here it is [PDF].

Prepared for Bayer by researchers at Canada's University of Guelph, the study is a bit of a joke. The researchers created several 2.47-acre fields planted with clothianidin-treated seeds and matching untreated control fields, and placed hives at the center of each. Bees were allowed to roam freely. The problem is that bees forage in a range of 1.24 to 6.2 miles -- meaning that the test bees most likely dined outside of the test fields. Worse, the test and control fields were planted as closely as 968 feet apart, meaning test and control bees had access to each other's fields.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found "no differences in bee mortality, worker longevity, or brood development occurred between control and treatment groups throughout the study."

Tom Theobald, the Colorado beekeeper who obtained the leaked memo, assessed the study harshly on the phone to me Thursday. "Imagine you're a rancher trying to figure out if a noxious weed is harming your cows," he said. "If you plant the weed on two acres and let your cows roam free over 50 acres of lush Montana grass, you're not going to learn much about that weed."

James Frazier, professor of entomology at Penn State, concurred. Frazier has been studying colony-collapse disorder since 2006. "When I looked at the study," he told me in a phone interview, "I immediately thought it was invalid."

Meanwhile, Bayer continued selling clothianidin under its conditional registration. Then, on April 22 of this year, the EPA finally ended clothianidin's long period of "conditional" purgatory -- by granting it full registration.

The agency gifted the bee-killing pesticide with its new status quietly; to my knowledge, the only public acknowledgment of it came through the efforts of Theobald, who is extremely worried about the fate of his own bee-keeping business in Colorado's corn country. Theobald forwarded me a Nov. 29 email exchange with Meredith Laws, the acting chief of the EPA's herbicide division in the Office of Pesticide Programs, to whom he'd written to enquire about clothianidin's registration status. Laws' reply is worth quoting in its entirety:

Clothianidin was granted an unconditional registration for use as a seed treatment for corn and canola on April 22, 2010. EPA issued a new registration notice, [but] there is no document that acknowledges the change from conditional to unconditional. This was a risk management decision based on the fulfillment of data requirements and reviews accepting or acknowledging the submittal of the data.

So, the EPA gave Bayer and its dubious pesticide a full pass without even bothering to let the public know.

Just bee very careful, please

Now we get to the leaked memo [PDF]. It is dated Nov. 2 -- three weeks before Laws' reply to Theobald. It relates to Bayer's efforts to expand clothianidin's approved use into cotton and mustard. Authored by two scientists in the EPA's Environmental Fate and Effects Division -- ecologist Joseph DeCant and chemist Michael Barrett -- the memo expresses grave concern about clothianidin's effect on honeybees:

Clothianidin's major risk concern is to nontarget insects (that is, honey bees).

Clothianidin is a neonicotinoid insecticide that is both persistent and systemic. Acute toxicity studies to honey bees show that clothianidin is highly toxic on both a contact and an oral basis. Although EFED does not conduct ... risk assessments on non-target insects, information from standard tests and field studies, as well as incident reports involving other neonicotinoids insecticides (e.g., imidacloprid) suggest the potential for long term toxic risk to honey bees and other beneficial insects.

The real kicker is that the researchers essentially invalidated the Bayer-funded study -- i.e., the study on which the EPA based clothianidin's registration as an fully registered chemical. Referring to the pesticide, the authors write:

A previous field study [i.e., the Bayer study] investigated the effects of clothianidin on whole hive parameters and was classified as acceptable. However, after another review of this field study in light of additional information, deficiencies were identified that render the study supplemental. It does not satisfy the guideline 850.3040, and another field study is needed to evaluate the effects of clothianidin on bees through contaminated pollen and nectar. Exposure through contaminated pollen and nectar and potential toxic effects therefore remain an uncertainty for pollinators. [Emphasis mine.]

So, here we have EPA researchers explicitly invalidating the study on which clothianidin gained registration for corn. But as I wrote above, despite this information's being made public, the EPA has signaled that it has no plans to change the chemical's status.

In the 2011 growing season, tens of millions of acres of farmland will bloom with clothianidin-laced pollen -- honeybees, and sound science, be damned.

Now, in my correspondence with the EPA, the agency has denied that the downgrading of the Bayer study from "acceptable" to "supplemental" meant that the agency should be compelled to clothianidin's approval. In a Thursday email to me, the agency delivered a limp defense of the Bayer study, contradicting its own scientists and addressing none of the critiques of it:

EPA's evaluation of the study determined that it contains information useful to the agency's risk assessment. The study revealed the majority of hives monitored, including those exposed to clothianidin during the previous season, survived the over-wintering period.

And it downplayed the study's importance to Bayer's application to register clothianidin: The study in question is "not a 'core' study for EPA as claimed," the agency insisted. "It is not a study routinely required to support the registration of a pesticide."

I ran that response by Jay Feldman of Beyond Pesticides, the group that collaborated with PANNA in publicizing the leaked document. "I find the EPA response either misinformed or misleading," he told me. "The paper trail on this is clear. We're talking about a bad study required by EPA [that is central] to the registration of this chemical."

Feldman's assessment appears to bear out. He pointed me back to the above-linked Nov. 27 document in which EPA originally accepted the Bayer study. There, on page 5, we find this statement:

Specifically, the test was conducted in response to a request by the Canadian PMRA [Pesticides and Pest Management Agency] and the U.S. EPA; as a condition for Poncho@ [clothianidin] registration in these countries, Bayer CropScience was asked to investigate the long-term toxicity of clothianidin-treated canola to foraging honey bees.

So evidently, the discredited Bayer study does lie at the heart of clothianidin's acceptance. (I have requested an interview with an EPA official who can talk knowledgeably and on the record about these matters; the anonymous-by-request spokesperson is, at the time of publication, still looking for the "right person," I was informed via email.)

A stinging assessment

At the very least, we have ample evidence that the EPA has been ignoring the warnings of its own staff scientists and green-lighting the mass deployment of a chemical widely understood to harm pollinators -- at a time when honeybees are in grave shape.

But why? Tom Theobald, the Colorado beekeeper who broke this story, ventured an answer. "It's corporatism, the flip side of fascism," he said. "I'm not against corporations, I think they have a good model. But they're like children -- we have to rein them in or they get out of hand. The EPA's supposed to do that."

When regime change came to Washington in 2008, many of us hoped that an EPA under Barack Obama would be a better parent. EPA Director Lisa Jackson inherited quite a mess from her predecessor, and she faces the Herculean challenge of regulating greenhouse gases against fierce Republican and industry opposition.

But as concern mounts -- from her own staff and elsewhere -- that clothianidin is harming honeybees, there's no excuse for Jackson's agency to keep coddling Bayer. Frazier, the Penn State entomologist, put it to me like this: "If the Bayer study is the core study the EPA used to register clothianidin, then there's no basis for registering it." He urged the EPA to withdraw registration to avoid unnecessary risk to a critical player in our ecosystem -- as have the governments of Germany, France, Italy, and Slovenia.

Source;
http://www.grist.org/article/food-2010-12-10-leaked-documents-show-epa-allowed-bee-toxic-pesticide-/PALL/print

[giovonni]

Seems like the FDA is on a roll...

Is it any wonder that Americans are less and less well each year. If you eat a lot of meat, this is what you are eating.

Thanks to Kevin Kelley.


What's in Your Meat? FDA Reveals Antibiotic Use in Livestock



Until now, we've only guessed the amount of antibiotics used were high to keep our pig, cattle and poultry stocks healthy. In fact, the Animal Health Institute predicted 11.1 million kilograms were used nationwide in 2005. But the Food and Drug Administration's records don't go back that far.

For the first time, the FDA has released an estimate. In 2009 alone, "13.1 million kilograms of antimicrobial drugs were sold or distributed for use in food-producing animals" in the U.S., cites Livable Future from the report (.pdf) made available to the public last Thursday. There's also a chart listing approved antibiotics in each drug class.

That 13.1 million kilograms is just short of 29 million pounds. "That's a lot," writes Maryn McKenna on her Wired magazine blog. (McKenna is a journalist specializing in infectious diseases, and the author of Superbug, notes Food Safety News.)

We think of antibiotics as a good thing, something to rid ourselves of disease, but overuse can lower resistance, and that's exactly what we're seeing in meat production. This in turn calls for stronger antibiotics, which don't just stay with the animal. It carries through to the land and those working on it, not to mention its unidentified consequences to those who consume the meat.

Nutritionist Marion Nestle notes in The Atlantic that since this is the first report, "it is not possible to say whether the numbers are going up or down. But the agency is now requiring meat producers to report on antibiotic use so we now have a baseline for measuring progress."

Source;
http://www.slashfood.com/2010/12/15/...#ixzz18M3PWhRl

[giovonni]

Yet another example showing how corporate lobbying against adequate regulatory oversight has left Americans at great health risk.

The report was supposed to be available Monday at www.ewg.org, but I couldn't find it, maybe tomorrow. I am also trying to find a list of the 31 cities. I think each of you would be wise to check the water coming out of your taps. You can get it tested for a modest cost -- particularly when you think of the medical costs. For many, I fear, it is going to be a nasty surprise.

Probable carcinogen hexavalent chromium found in drinking water of 31 U.S. cities


By Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 19, 2010; 12:02 AM

An environmental group that analyzed the drinking water in 35 cities across the United States, including Bethesda and Washington, found that most contained hexavalent chromium, a probable carcinogen that was made famous by the film "Erin Brockovich."

The study, which will be released Monday by the Environmental Working Group, is the first nationwide analysis of hexavalent chromium in drinking water to be made public.

It comes as the Environmental Protection Agency is considering whether to set a limit for hexavalent chromium in tap water. The agency is reviewing the chemical after the National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health, deemed it a "probable carcinogen" in 2008.

The federal government restricts the amount of "total chromium" in drinking water and requires water utilities to test for it, but that includes both trivalent chromium, a mineral that humans need to metabolize glucose, and hexavalent chromium, the metal that has caused cancer in laboratory animals.

Last year, California took the first step in limiting the amount of hexavalent chromium in drinking water by proposing a "public health goal" for safe levels of 0.06 parts per billion. If California does set a limit, it would be the first in the nation.

Hexavalent chromium was a commonly used industrial chemical until the early 1990s. It is still used in some industries, such as in chrome plating and the manufacturing of plastics and dyes. The chemical can also leach into groundwater from natural ores.

The new study found hexavalent chromium in the tap water of 31 out of 35 cities sampled. Of those, 25 had levels that exceeded the goal proposed in California.

The highest levels were found in Norman, Okla., where the water contained more than 200 times the California goal. Locally, Bethesda and Washington each had levels of 0.19 parts per billion, more than three times the California goal.

The cities were selected to be a mix of big and smaller communities and included places where local water companies had already detected high levels of "total chromium."

"This chemical has been so widely used by so many industries across the U.S. that this doesn't surprise me," said Erin Brockovich, whose fight on behalf of the residents of Hinkley, Calif., against Pacific Gas & Electric became the subject of a 2000 film. In that case, PG&E was accused of leaking hexavalent chromium into the town's groundwater for more than 30 years. The company paid $333 million in damages to more than 600 townspeople and pledged to clean up the contamination.

"Our municipal water supplies are in danger all over the U.S.," Brockovich said. "This is a chemical that should be regulated."

Max Costa, who chairs the department of environmental medicine at New York University's School of Medicine and is an expert in hexavalent chromium, called the new findings "disturbing."

"At this point, we should strive to not have any hexavalent chromium in drinking water" or at least limit the amounts to the level proposed by California, Costa wrote in an e-mail.

Hexavalent chromium has long been known to cause lung cancer when inhaled, but scientists only recently found evidence that it causes cancer in laboratory animals when ingested. It has been linked in animals to liver and kidney damage as well as leukemia, stomach cancer and other cancers.

The American Chemistry Council, which represents the chemical industry, says the California goal is unrealistic because some water supplies have naturally occurring hexavalent chromium that is higher than .06 parts per billion.

In a written statement, the group's senior director, Ann Mason, said that "even the most sophisticated analytical methods used by EPA are not able to detect the extremely low levels that California wants to establish."

The group supports a "uniform, national standard for hexavalent chromium in drinking water, based on sound science," Mason wrote. "Research is underway to provide EPA with critical data that will allow for a more informed risk assessment of hexavalent chromium. This data will be complete by mid-2011. Given the potential impact on drinking water supplies, EPA should incorporate this data in its assessment."

Brendan Gilfillan, an EPA spokesman, said that the agency was aware of the new study by the Environmental Working Group and that the findings will be considered as the agency reviews total chromium in drinking water, work that is expected to be completed next year.

Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, said that water utilities across the country are resistant to the regulation.

"It's not their fault. They didn't cause the contamination. But if a limit is set, it's going to be extraordinarily expensive for them to clean this up," Cook said. "The problem in all of this is that we lose sight of the water drinkers, of the people at the end of the tap. There is tremendous push-back from polluters and from water utilities. The real focus has to be on public health."

The report will be available Monday at www.ewg.org

Source;
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...T2010121803715

[giovonni]

The statistics of the collapse of the country just keep piling up.


22 Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America

MICHAEL SNYDER - Business Insider


:


statistics in pics & graphs here;
http://www.businessinsider.com/22-st...lideshow-start

[giovonni]

This trend, which SR has been following for several years, is now so pregnant its effects will come into play in 2011, possibly as early as this Spring. And its isn't just cities. Illinois is functionally bankrupt, as is Arizona and California.

$2tn debt crisis threatens to bring down 100 US cities

Overdrawn American cities could face financial collapse in 2011, defaulting on hundreds of billions of dollars of borrowings and derailing the US economic recovery. Nor are European cities safe – Florence, Barcelona, Madrid, Venice: all are in trouble


huttered homes and businesses in downtown Detroit, Michigan. American cities and states have debts that could be as high as $2tn.

More than 100 American cities could go bust next year as the debt crisis that has taken down banks and countries threatens next to spark a municipal meltdown, a leading analyst has warned.

Meredith Whitney, the US research analyst who correctly predicted the global credit crunch, described local and state debt as the biggest problem facing the US economy, and one that could derail its recovery.

"Next to housing this is the single most important issue in the US and certainly the biggest threat to the US economy," Whitney told the CBS 60 Minutes programme on Sunday night.

"There's not a doubt on my mind that you will see a spate of municipal bond defaults. You can see fifty to a hundred sizeable defaults – more. This will amount to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of defaults."

New Jersey governor Chris Christie summarised the problem succinctly: "We spent too much on everything. We spent money we didn't have. We borrowed money just crazily. The credit card's maxed out, and it's over. We now have to get to the business of climbing out of the hole. We've been digging it for a decade or more. We've got to climb now, and a climb is harder."

American cities and states have debts in total of as much as $2tn. In Europe, local and regional government borrowing is expected to reach a historical peak of nearly €1.3tn (£1.1tn) this year.

Cities from Detroit to Madrid are struggling to pay creditors, including providers of basic services such as street cleaning. Last week, Moody's ratings agency warned about a possible downgrade for the cities of Florence and Barcelona and cut the rating of the Basque country in northern Spain. Lisbon was downgraded by rival agency Standard & Poor's earlier this year, while the borrowings of Naples and Budapest are on the brink of junk status. Istanbul's debt has already been downgraded to junk.

Whitney's intervention is likely to raise the profile of the issue of municipal debt. While she was an analyst at Oppenheimer, the New York investment bank, in October 2007 she wrote a damning report on Citigroup, then the world's largest bank, predicting it would cut its dividend. She was criticised for being too pessimistic but was vindicated when the bank was forced to seek government support a year later. She has since set up her own advisory firm and is rated one of the most influential women in American business.

US states have spent nearly half a trillion dollars more than they have collected in taxes, and face a $1tn hole in their pension funds, said the CBS programme, apocalyptically titled The Day of Reckoning.

Detroit is cutting police, lighting, road repairs and cleaning services affecting as much as 20% of the population. The city, which has been on the skids for almost two decades with the decline of the US auto industry, does not generate enough wealth to maintain services for its 900,000 inhabitants.

The nearby state of Illinois has spent twice as much money as it has collected and is about six months behind on creditor payments. The University of Illinois alone is owed $400m, the CBS programme said. The state has a 21% chances of default, more than any other, according to CMA Datavision, a derivatives information provider.

California has raised state university tuition fees by 32%. Arizona has sold its state capitol and supreme court buildings to investors, and leases them back.

Potential defaults could also hit Florida, whose booming real estate industry burst two years ago, said Guy J. Benstead, a partner at Cedar Ridge Partners in San Francisco. "We are not out of the woods by any stretch yet," he said.

"It's all part of the same parcel: public sector indebtedness needs to be cut, it needs a lot of austerity, and it hit the central governments first, and now is hitting local bodies," said Philip Brown, managing director at Citigroup in London.

In Europe, where cities have traditionally relied more on bank loans and state transfers than bonds, financing habits are changing. The Spanish regions of Catalonia and Valencia have issued debt to their own citizens after financial markets shut their doors because of the regions' high deficits. Moody's cut to the rating of the Basque country on Friday left it still within investment grade but noted "the rapid deterioration in the region's budgetary performance in recent years". It said it expected it to continue over the medium term.

In Italy, Moody's and S&P have threatened to downgrade Florence, while Venice has been forced over the past few months to put some of the palazzi on its canals up for sale to fund the deficit.

"Cities are on their own. Governments won't come to their rescue as they have problems of their own," said Andres Rodriguez-Pose, professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics. "Cities will have to pay for their debts, and in some cases they will have to carry out dramatic cuts, such as Detroit's."
California crunch
Vallejo, a former US navy town near San Francisco, is still trying to emerge from the Chapter Nine bankruptcy protection it entered in 2008.

The city, now a symbol of distressed local finances, is still negotiating with the unions, which refused to accept a salary cut plan two years ago. Paul Dyson, an analyst with the Standard & Poor's credit agency, said Vallejo, which is mostly a dormitory town for Oakland or San Francisco employees, did not have enough local industry to sustain its finances and property tax – a major source of local income – plunged with the collapse of the real estate market. The S&P credit-rating agency has a C rating on the town – the lowest level.

With a population of about 120,000, Vallejo has $195m (£125m) of unfunded pension obligations and has to present a bankruptcy-exit plan to a Sacramento court by 18 January. Since 1937, 619 local US government bodies, mostly small utilities or districts, have filed for bankruptcy, Bloomberg News recently reported. US cities tend to default more than European municipalities as they usually rely on bonds issued to investors, which enter into a default if the creditor misses payments. European towns, by contrast, traditionally depend on bank loans and government bailouts.

Source;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2...tens-us-cities

[giovonni]

Just like our military programs ~ the U.S. prison system is totally out of control

Like Don't Ask Don't Tell I think we are slowly coming to our senses about marijuana. I certainly never expected to hear this.

Shock: Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson favors marijuana legalization



By Stephen C. Webster
Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010 -- 3:29 pm

Update: Following publication of this story, a spokesman for the religious CBN television station contacted Raw Story to clarify Robertson's comments. His statement is reflected in the text below.

Count this among the 10 things nobody ever expected to see in their lifetimes: 700 Club founder Pat Robertson, one of the cornerstone figures of America's Christian right movement, has come out in favor of legalizing marijuana.

Calling it getting "smart" on crime, Robertson aired a clip on a recent episode of his 700 Club television show that advocated the viewpoint of drug law reformers who run prison outreach ministries.

A narrator even claimed that religious prison outreach has "saved" millions in public funds by helping to reduce the number of prisoners who return shortly after being released.

"It got to be a big deal in campaigns: 'He's tough on crime,' and 'lock 'em up!'" the Christian Coalition founder said. "That's the way these guys ran and, uh, they got elected. But, that wasn't the answer."

His co-host added that the success of religious-run dormitories for drug and alcohol cessation therapy present an "opportunity" for faith-based communities to lead the way on drug law reforms.

"We're locking up people that have taken a couple puffs of marijuana and next thing you know they've got 10 years with mandatory sentences," Robertson continued. "These judges just say, they throw up their hands and say nothing we can do with these mandatory sentences. We've got to take a look at what we're considering crimes and that's one of 'em.

"I'm ... I'm not exactly for the use of drugs, don't get me wrong, but I just believe that criminalizing marijuana, criminalizing the possession of a few ounces of pot, that kinda thing it's just, it's costing us a fortune and it's ruining young people. Young people go into prisons, they go in as youths and come out as hardened criminals. That's not a good thing."

Robertson has in recent years come under fire for increasingly flamboyant comments, such as calling for the assassinations of foreign leaders and blaming gay people for the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina.

In this instance, even though he clearly expressed support for the reform of US marijuana laws, a spokesman for religious television station CBN walked back Robertson's comments, telling Raw Story on Thursday morning the Christian Coalition founder "did not call for the decriminalization of marijuana."

"He was advocating that our government revisit the severity of the existing laws because mandatory drug sentences do harm to many young people who go to prison and come out as hardened criminals," CBN spokesman Chris Roslan wrote. "He was also pointing out that these mandatory sentences needlessly cost our government millions of dollars when there are better approaches available. Dr. Robertson's comments followed a CBN News story about a group of conservatives who have proven that faith-based rehabilitation for criminals has resulted in lower repeat offenders and saved the government millions of dollars. Dr. Robertson unequivocally stated that he is against the use of illegal drugs."

Conservatives signing up for drug policy reform

The segment, while significant for illustrating a key conservative stalwart's shifting opinion on the drug war, was mainly a plug for a new conservative group called "Right on Crime," which parlays the arguments of groups like the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) into conservative-leaning messages.

"Our marijuana prohibition laws, which send people to prison for merely possessing a plant, are clearly immoral," LEAP executive director Neill Franklin, a former Baltimore narcotics officer, told Raw Story.

"As a Christian, and as a former law enforcer who is now working to undo the damage these laws have done to our families and our communities, I'm glad to see Pat Robertson joining the chorus of faith leaders calling for reform."

Some faith-based groups, like the Council of Churches and Church IMPACT, also helped promote California's failed Prop. 19 ballot initiative, which would have legalized marijuana cultivation, sales and consumption by adults over 21-years-old. It failed to gain a majority in the state's 2010 elections.

President Obama has maintained his opposition to the legalization of marijuana, although his Department of Justice has largely taken a hands-off approach to states where voters have approved the drug's use if prescribed by a doctor.

Pat Robertson was a Republican candidate for the presidency in 1980, but saw his political ambitions dashed in the primaries by Ronald Reagan. Though he later earned Robertson's endorsement, President Reagan went on to significantly escalate the war on America's drug users.

click here for video and source page;
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/s...-legalization/

[giovonni]

One can only wonder ~ at what kind of world ~ ours could presently be, if all the developed nations spent just one quarter of their defense budgets ~ and in unison directed the resources into this renewable energy technology. Note ~ renewable energy replaces conventional fuels in four distinct areas: power generation, hot water/ space heating, transport fuels, and rural (off-grid) energy services. Solar technologies are broadly characterized as either passive solar or active solar depending on the way they capture, convert and distribute solar energy.

23 December 2010 Last updated at 14:11

New solar fuel machine 'mimics plant life'
By Neil Bowdler Science reporter, BBC News

A prototype solar device has been unveiled which mimics plant life, turning the Sun's energy into fuel.

The machine uses the Sun's rays and a metal oxide called ceria to break down carbon dioxide or water into fuels which can be stored and transported.

Conventional photovoltaic panels must use the electricity they generate in situ, and cannot deliver power at night.

Details are published in the journal Science.

The prototype, which was devised by researchers in the US and Switzerland, uses a quartz window and cavity to concentrate sunlight into a cylinder lined with cerium oxide, also known as ceria.

Ceria has a natural propensity to exhale oxygen as it heats up and inhale it as it cools down.


In the prototype, sunlight heats a ceria cylinder which breaks down water or carbon dioxide

f as in the prototype, hydrogen and/or water are pumped into the vessel, the ceria will rapidly strip the oxygen from them as it cools, creating hydrogen and/or carbon monoxide.

Hydrogen produced could be used to fuel hydrogen fuel cells in cars, for example, while a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide can be used to create "syngas" for fuel.

It is this harnessing of ceria's properties in the solar reactor which represents the major breakthrough, say the inventors of the device. They also say the metal is readily available, being the most abundant of the "rare-earth" metals.

Methane can be produced using the same machine, they say.
Refinements needed

The prototype is grossly inefficient, the fuel created harnessing only between 0.7% and 0.8% of the solar energy taken into the vessel.

Most of the energy is lost through heat loss through the reactor's wall or through the re-radiation of sunlight back through the device's aperture.

But the researchers are confident that efficiency rates of up to 19% can be achieved through better insulation and smaller apertures. Such efficiency rates, they say, could make for a viable commercial device.

"The chemistry of the material is really well suited to this process," says Professor Sossina Haile of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). "This is the first demonstration of doing the full shebang, running it under (light) photons in a reactor."

She says the reactor could be used to create transportation fuels or be adopted in large-scale energy plants, where solar-sourced power could be available throughout the day and night.

However, she admits the fate of this and other devices in development is tied to whether states adopt a low-carbon policy.

"It's very much tied to policy. If we had a carbon policy, something like this would move forward a lot more quickly," she told the BBC.

It has been suggested that the device mimics plants, which also use carbon dioxide, water and sunlight to create energy as part of the process of photosynthesis. But Professor Haile thinks the analogy is over-simplistic.

"Yes, the reactor takes in sunlight, we take in carbon dioxide and water and we produce a chemical compound, so in the most generic sense there are these similarities, but I think that's pretty much where the analogy ends."


The PS10 solar tower plant near Seville, Spain. Mirrors concentrate the sun's power on to a central tower, driving a steam turbine

Daniel Davies, chief technology officer at the British photovoltaic company Solar Century, said the research was "very exciting".

"I guess the question is where you locate it - would you put your solar collector on a roof or would it be better off as a big industrial concern in the Sahara and then shipping the liquid fuel?" he said.

Solar technology is moving forward apace but the overriding challenges remain ones of efficiency, economy and storage.

New-generation "solar tower" plants have been built in Spain and the United States which use an array of mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto tower-mounted receivers which drive steam turbines.

A new Spanish project will use molten salts to store heat from the Sun for up to 15 hours, so that the plant could potentially operate through the night.

Source and related stories here;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12051167

comments/giovonni

[giovonni]

So here's where we are America

I think this is a good assessment of what is happening. As I have written before the U.S. spends more on defense than all the rest of the world combined -- $683 billion of a world total of $1.1 trillion. Most of this money goes to companies that do nothing but service our grotesquely distorted defense sector. They don't want peace. It's not profitable.


*********************************


The Road to Recovery: Heeding Eisenhower's Warning

By Michael Gillespie

note~ Michael Gillespie is a contributing editor at The Independent Monitor, the national newspaper of Arab Americans. He writes regularly for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.


The first part of this series, The War Alarm: Waking Up from Reagan's Nightmare, examined Ronald Reagan's attempt to rewrite history by eliminating the extraordinary success of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)'s wartime economic policies, which included massive and systematic government intervention in and well-nigh complete control of the nation's industry and commerce. Roosevelt's economic policies, including rationing and wage and price controls, were instrumental in and essential to the U.S. military's greatest triumphs, the Allies crushing defeat of the fascist Axis powers less than four years after Japan's December 7, 1941 surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, and the USA's emergence as the world's economic and military superpower during and after the war.

This article explores the rise of what President Dwight David Eisenhower referred to as the "military-industrial complex" and the effects of "a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions" on American life and culture. Though it fields the most expensive and technologically sophisticated military force on the world stage, the U.S. government has not decisively won any major military conflict since 1945. Understanding these developments is necessary if Americans are to effectively address their nation's economic decline and cultural deterioration.



Eisenhower's credibility can hardly be challenged. As FDR's choice for the position of Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe, he was responsible for planning and supervising the invasion of France and Germany from the west. FDR had such confidence in him that Eisenhower sometimes worked directly with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to the chagrin of bypassed British leaders. He served as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)'s first supreme commander in 1951. As president (1953-1961), Eisenhower concluded negotiations with China to end the Korean War, maintained pressure on the Soviet Union, and avoided hostilities during two terms in the nation's highest office, a time of peace. Eisenhower's election as a Republican ended two decades of New Deal Coalition in the White House, but as president he continued New Deal policies, expanding Social Security and signing into law in 1956 the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, then the largest public works project in American history. Though he chose not to publicly criticize Sen. Joseph McCarthy, he helped remove the pathologically partisan Republican demagogue from power. Historians typically rank "Ike" among America's 10 greatest presidents. (Wikipedia)

In his farewell address to the American people, broadcast live from the White House on January 17, 1961, Eisenhower focused specifically on and warned against the dangers attendant upon the unprecedented development of a permanent armaments industry and war machine. In part, he said:

"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.

"Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

Noting that technological developments were, "largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture," Eisenhower warned against the "prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by "the power of money" and the "danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite," saying that, "it is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system - ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society."

It was imperative, Eisenhower declared, that "we - you and I, and our government, avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

"During the long lane of the history yet to be written, America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect. Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield. Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose."

Not since our first president, George Washington, addressed the nation as he left office had a president delivered so prescient a speech. Yet the decades since have seen many of Eisenhower's greatest fears confirmed and most of his sage advice ignored as subsequent leaders and policy makers have thrown caution to the wind, acting too often without wisdom or restraint. The immense, unwarranted and still metastasizing influence of what has become a Congressional-military-industrial-media-security-intelligence complex destabilizes the nation and the world, sapping economic vitality, demoralizing politics at all levels, warping religious impulses and traditions, and hindering spiritual growth.

At the center of the nation's economic difficulties is the unrestrained power of corporations, private legal entities that have usurped the Constitutional rights of individual citizens and gained all but total control of "government of the people, by the people, for the people" (Lincoln's Gettysburg Address). In their relentless pursuit of greater profitability, U.S. corporations have largely ignored or denied the serious environmental damage and change their activities cause while exacerbating the transition difficulties necessarily associated with the development and introduction of labor-saving technologies. A November 1946 article in Fortune magazine titled "Machines Without Men" addressed the issue of automated industrial production and a consequent reduction in the number of manufacturing jobs. Authors E.W. Leaver and J.J. Brown minimized concern that, "the automatic factory may well loose waves of temporary unemployment.

"So potentially efficient a production system makes the two-or-three-day [work] week economically feasible. Its cheaper costs could be passed on to in higher wages to the worker and in greater value to the consumer. It must, therefore, balance out at a higher level of living than ever before. The new machines can emancipate the worker forever from stultifying, monotonous toil," declared the corporate propagandists.

A full-page ad in the January 1949 issue of American magazine, "A message prepared by the Advertising Council, a non-profit organization supported by labor, business, and the public, Published in the Public Interest by General Electric," bragged that "our American way " works better because " we are more inventive and we know how to use machine power to produce more goods at lower cost. We have more skilled workers than any other country. And we Americans save - and our savings go into new tools, new plants, and new and better machines. Because of this, we produce more every working hour and can buy more goods with an hour's work than any other people in the world. We can make the system work even better ... by working together to turn out more ... through better machines and methods, more power, greater skills, and by sharing the benefits through higher wages, lower prices, and shorter hours."

By the 1960s, corporations had begun the mass relocation of millions of American manufacturing jobs to countries where labor is cheaper, in order, corporate spokesmen would claim, to remain competitive. Republican and Democratic leaders and law makers alike conspired with business and financial interests - corporations - to eviscerate the nation's sound and vital manufacturing base, which of course had been absolutely essential to victory in WWII. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat with ties to Brown and Root, Inc., a Texas engineering and construction company, escalated the Vietnam War after the fictitious Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The Pentagon awarded Brown and Root contracts for major construction projects in Vietnam. On May 15, 1969, then-Governor Ronald Reagan, a former spokesman for General Electric, the nation's largest "defense" contractor, ordered some 800 California law enforcement officers to break up a peaceful protest by about 6,000 people at the University of California at Berkeley. Alameda County Sheriff's deputies firing shotguns loaded with '00' buckshot charged and then chased retreating protesters. Buckshot fatally wounded James Rector, a bystander, and permanently blinded carpenter Alan Blanchard. About 130 people sought treatment at local hospitals for head trauma, buckshot wounds, and other serious injuries. Reagan, who had referred to the Berkeley campus as "a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters and sex deviants," then ordered the National Guard to occupy the entire city of Berkeley despite the Berkeley City Council's vote against the occupation. About year after the police riot and bloodshed, Reagan defended his actions publicly saying, "If it takes a bloodbath, then let's get it over with. No more appeasement." Less than a month later, on May 4, 1970, violence erupted at Ohio's Kent State University when National Guard troops opened fire on anti-war protesters killing four students and seriously wounding nine. As president, Reagan broke the back of organized labor in the USA when he fired striking Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) workers in 1981 and had the union de-certified.

Corporations are able to put the rapacious pursuit of profit before the national interest and workers' rights only because they have become powerful enough to control the nation's political institutions and processes. Nowhere are the crimes and excesses of corporations more evident than in the armaments, security, and intelligence sectors. Unlike the companies and corporations that FDR mobilized during WWII, most of these corporations have few or no profitable products or services to offer in peacetime. Because the end of hostilities necessarily means a substantially reduced need for the increasingly expensive weapons and services (mercenaries, security, espionage, intelligence, propaganda, disinformation, psychological operations, etc.) that these corporations provide, they have no interest in our government - or rather their government - ending or even winning the wars that they foment. We have endless war because endless war best suits the needs of the Congressional-military-industrial-media-security-intelligence complex.

By retaining arms industry research, development, and manufacturing jobs in the U.S. and locating their facilities in key Congressional districts spread across the country, "defense" industry giants gained enormous political influence. These huge corporations, which exist to profit from the production of expensive, increasingly sophisticated and destructive high-technology products, weapons systems designed to kill human beings, to destroy life, conspire to make government policy that suits their needs, while they prevent the formulation and implementation of policies that conform to legitimate national interests and to the principles upon which our nation was founded. So-called "defense" industry corporations have the active support and cooperation of interlocking media, security, and intelligence sector corporations. Taken together their share of the nation's total economic activity is such that it is impossible to overestimate their power on Wall Street and in official Washington. As much as President Barack Obama might have wished to end the immoral, budget-busting, counter-productive wars in and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, to have done so and thus eliminated "defense" industry jobs in the midst of an economic crisis might well have precipitated the complete economic collapse he was struggling to prevent. The "defense" industry, the war machine, and its various components and enablers are "the power of money" and the "danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite" made manifest, just as Eisenhower feared.

Some may find it comforting to believe the sophistries of apologists for Wall Street, the financial services industry, and totally ineffective government watch dog - or lap dog - agencies, including the notion that the economic crisis of 2008 surprised everyone. Others note that creating an economic crisis that further damaged an already structurally unsound economy may have been a shrewd way of assuring a steady supply of cannon fodder for an all volunteer military neck deep in criminal wars of aggression, an utterly immoral and extraordinarily risky way to run a country. A run-amok arms industry and war machine do not a sound manufacturing base and a credible foreign policy make, nor will such abominations support a thriving economy or foster the vital cultural development and spiritual growth for which "Ike" expressed such grave concern.

The noxious effects of the Congressional-military-industrial-media-security-intelligence complex on religion threaten to take the nation and the world back to a more primitive era, during which a new "dark ages" of the interregnum of wisdom will bear witness to the inexorable restoration of the imbalance between self-liberty and self-control. Following the U.S. military's ignominious defeat in Vietnam, many conservative American Christian leaders looked to scripture for support and embraced Christian Zionism, which conflates Old Testament theology and the modern nation state of Israel to arrive at the notion that, as the late Grace Halsell put it, "every act taken by Israel is orchestrated by God and should be condoned, supported, and even praised by the rest of us." Vengeful militant Christian Zionists have promote a chiliastic or millenialist theology that foresees their own rapture before a final, apocalyptic world-ending battle between the forces of good and evil at Megiddo in Israel, known as Armageddon in the New Testament.

Jewish religious fundamentalists are at least as influential in politics in Israel as Christian religious fundamentalists are in the USA. The vast majority of American politicians and bureaucrats at the federal level, including those at the highest levels of the federal government, live and work at the end of a very short leash held firmly by Israeli leaders who exercise influence primarily through Israel's powerful lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an ethnic special interest group masquerading as a civil rights monitoring organization, and legions of pro-Israel operatives within government and in media organizations. The special relationship between Israel and the USA, regularly re-affirmed at AIPAC conventions, has long been based on AIPAC-organized political support for and generous campaign contributions to American politicians, and Israeli leaders' ability to command generous, well-nigh slavish, and almost unconditional military, diplomatic, and economic support from the U.S. government.

Israeli political leaders at the highest levels have long welcomed and rewarded the support of militant American Christian Zionists leaders who seek to make an idol of the state of Israel. For decades, Christian Zionist leaders and their political organizations have lobbied heavily and persistently for U.S. military, diplomatic, and economic support for Israel while donating millions of dollars of their own money in support of Israel's systematic program of land theft and ethnic cleansing in illegally occupied Palestine. Some Christian Zionist leaders have even actively supported Israeli Zionists who plan to re-introduce ritual animal sacrifice to worship in the temple in Jerusalem. This has raised serious concerns that blood sacrifice in religion might thus be more widely re-legitimized. It was Jesus' introduction of the symbolic use of bread and wine in the remembrance supper that, with the spread of Christianity, effectively removed blood sacrifice from religion, a singularly remarkable and important act of social engineering that has undergirded human religious, social, cultural, and spiritual progress for some 2,000 years.

If the paramount mission of religion as a social influence is to stabilize the ideals of mankind during dangerous times of transition from one phase of civilization to another, from one level of culture to another, clearly Eisenhower's grave concern for the economic, political, and spiritual wellbeing of Americans was well founded indeed.

America's recovery from the economic crisis requires reform, restoration of the imbalance between the power of government "of the people, by the people, for the people" and the power of corporations. Recovery from rigid ultranationalism, religious extremism, and racial bias requires a renewed emphasis on the ethic of reciprocity and rejection of the ethic of revenge, a renewed emphasis on education along with viable plans and concerted efforts to address the root causes of social unrest and political disaffection, primarily poverty, exploitation, and oppression. Corporate America's civic religion of "the free market" based on ruthless competition, mindless consumerism, and short-term profits must be countered by a well-educated, well-informed, and empowered citizenry committed to enduring values and working toward common goals that represent the best interests of all the people. The most sophisticated and comprehensive system of mass communications the world has ever seen could serve as an effective antidote to the poisons of ultranationalism, religious fanaticism, and racial animosity, were the imbalance of power restored and corporations, restrained by the rule of law, required by government to act responsibly in the public interest for the common good.

Will growing evidence of national decline and the dual threat of global economic and environmental catastrophe have the effect of focusing our leaders' attentions and efforts on essential reforms and laudable, achievable common goals?

Source;
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The...01221-528.html

[giovonni]

Those of you reading this in other parts of the world ~ should pay heed to this trend ~

This is a demonstration of the point I have been trying to make: Virtual Corporate States have no geographical or national allegiance. Expecting these corporations to feel an obligation to help America's working men and women, or to care about preserving the middle class, is a fool's worldview. Particularly because our workforce is increasingly unskilled and ignorant as a result of the politicization of education, and the campaign of Willful Ignorance actively pursued by the Religious Right. And just to be sure they won't be taken to task the VCSs are buying control of our government. Citizen's United opened the gates to speed this on. Get the law interpreted the way you want. Don't break the law; make the law.

US companies hiring at rapid pace … overseas
By The Associated Press
Tuesday, December 28th, 2010

US firms created 1.4 million jobs abroad in 2010, compared to less than 1 million at home

Corporate profits are up. Stock prices are up. So why isn't anyone hiring?

Actually, many American companies are — just maybe not in your town. They're hiring overseas, where sales are surging and the pipeline of orders is fat.

More than half of the 15,000 people that Caterpillar Inc. has hired this year were outside the U.S. UPS is also hiring at a faster clip overseas. For both companies, sales in international markets are growing at least twice as fast as domestically.

The trend helps explain why unemployment remains high in the United States, edging up to 9.8 percent last month, even though companies are performing well: All but 4 percent of the top 500 U.S. corporations reported profits this year, and the stock market is close to its highest point since the 2008 financial meltdown.

But the jobs are going elsewhere. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, says American companies have created 1.4 million jobs overseas this year, compared with less than 1 million in the U.S. The additional 1.4 million jobs would have lowered the U.S. unemployment rate to 8.9 percent, says Robert Scott, the institute's senior international economist.

"There's a huge difference between what is good for American companies versus what is good for the American economy," says Scott.

American jobs have been moving overseas for more than two decades. In recent years, though, those jobs have become more sophisticated — think semiconductors and software, not toys and clothes.

And now many of the products being made overseas aren't coming back to the United States. Demand has grown dramatically this year in emerging markets like India, China and Brazil.

Meanwhile, consumer demand in the U.S. has been subdued. Despite a strong holiday shopping season, Americans are still spending 18 percent less than before the recession on furniture, and 10 percent less on electronics, according to MasterCard's SpendingPulse.

"Companies will go where there are fast-growing markets and big profits," says Jeffrey Sachs, globalization expert and economist at Columbia University. "What's changed is that companies today are getting top talent in emerging economies, and the U.S. has to really watch out."

With the future looking brighter overseas, companies are building there, too. Caterpillar, maker of the signature yellow bulldozers and tractors, has invested in three new plants in China in just the last two months to design and manufacture equipment. The decision is based on demand: Asia-Pacific sales soared 38 percent in the first nine months of the year, compared with 16 percent in the U.S. Caterpillar stock is up 64 percent this year.

"There is a shift in economic power that's going on and will continue. China just became the world's second-largest economy," says David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's, who notes that half of the revenue for companies in the S&P 500 in the last couple of years has come from outside the U.S.

Take the example of DuPont, which wowed the world in 1938 with nylon stockings. Known as one of the most innovative American companies of the 20th century, DuPont now sells less than a third of its products in the U.S. In the first nine months of this year, sales to the Asia-Pacific region grew 50 percent, triple the U.S. rate. Its stock is up 48 percent this year.

DuPont's work force reflects the shift in its growth: In a presentation on emerging markets, the company said its number of employees in the U.S. shrank by 9 percent between January 2005 and October 2009. In the same period, its work force grew 54 percent in the Asia-Pacific countries.

"We are a global player out to succeed in any geography where we participate in," says Thomas M. Connelly, chief innovation officer at DuPont. "We want our resources close to where our customers are, to tailor products to their needs."

While most of DuPont's research labs are still stateside, Connelly says he's impressed with the company's overseas talent. The company opened a large research facility in Hyderabad, India, in 2008.

A key factor behind this runaway international growth is the rise of the middle class in these emerging countries. By 2015, for the first time, the number of consumers in Asia's middle class will equal those in Europe and North America combined.

"All of the growth over the next 10 years is happening in Asia," says Homi Kharas, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and formerly the World Bank's chief economist for East Asia and the Pacific.

Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent often points out that a billion consumers will enter the middle class during the coming decade, mostly in Africa, China and India. He is aggressively targeting those markets. Of Coke's 93,000 global employees, less than 13 percent were in the U.S. in 2009, down from 19 percent five years ago.

The company would not say how many new U.S. hires it has made in 2010. But its latest new investments are overseas, including $240 million for three bottling plants in Inner Mongolia as part of a three-year, $2 billion investment in China. The three plants will create 2,000 new jobs in the area. In September, Coca-Cola pledged $1 billion to the Philippines over five years.

The strategy isn't restricted to just the largest American companies. Entrepreneurs, whether in technology, retail or in manufacturing, today hire globally from the start.

Consider Vast.com, which powers the search engines of sites like Yahoo Travel and Aol Autos. The company was founded in 2005 with employees based in San Francisco and Serbia.

Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria worries that the trend could be dangerous. In an article in the November issue of the Harvard Business Review, he says that if U.S. businesses keep prospering while Americans are struggling, business leaders will lose legitimacy in society. He exhorted business leaders to find a way to link growth with job creation at home.

Other economists, like Columbia University's Sachs, say multinational corporations have no choice, especially now that the quality of the global work force has improved. Sachs points out that the U.S. is falling in most global rankings for higher education while others are rising.

"We are not fulfilling the educational needs of our young people," says Sachs. "In a globalized world, there are serious consequences to that."

Original News Source AP News
link source;
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/u...ring-overseas/

[giovonni]

Recently i found this article and it really got my attention. i never considered myself a survivalist, but here is a heads-up and a excellent review of what would be required (of one) in possibly succeeding in this endeavor.

The Psychology of a Survivalist

What makes a person a survivalist? What mental attributes and worldview does a survivalist have that allows him or her to continue striving over and above others that may be more intelligent, have more book sense, or be better equipped to survive than anyone else? It all comes down to a few words.

The mind.

Yes, I know the whole premise of the article is about the psychology of a survivalist, so logically the mind is the place we’ll start. But the mind is more than just a collection of knowledge or common sense ideas that help us to live. It’s the ability to take something from thought to conception, to adapt to the environment, and to maintain a healthy outlook when everything seems hopeless. It is attitude as well as ability, and as the Bible says, as a man thinks, so he is.

These attributes are taken from Cody Lundin’s book 98.6 Degrees and makes for some interesting thoughts on how personality affects outcome, and particularly how your thoughts and feelings will affect your individual chances of surviving.

Staying Cool Under Pressure

Face it—if you’re a hot head or emotionally reactive, your chances of surviving any disastrous situation are diminished from the start. There are times when you’re going to have to FORCE your mind and body to stop, think, observe, plan…and then act.

STOP – sit down and chill, get your emotions and body in check so you’ll have better clarity of mind and response to a situation.

THINK – assess your situation.

OBSERVE – take a reading of your surroundings, the obstacles you face, and the options you may have. Give yourself the time to respond analytically to the situation, using your brain and senses instead of your emotions.

PLAN – now that you have all the data you need and a sense of the situation, decide on a plan of action and then act.

Adapt and Improvise

Adaptation is one of the major keys to survival. It’s planning for all eventualities possible and having a response in mind. It’s facing the scenario you never considered, and utilizing the things you have to force a positive conclusion. It’s an attitude of responding, assessing, and rethinking a plan as needed.

Decisiveness

The ability to make decisions is paramount in any survival scenario. Vacillating between one choice and another is how you over-think a situation to the point you are useless. Make a decision and then accept responsibility for that decision. There can be no finger-pointing in a survival situation and no one must be afraid of failure. All decisions can be rethought in hindsight. The important thing is that, after a decision is made, continuous adaptation and improvisation is applied.

The Ability to Toughen Up

Let’s face it—a survival condition is not a walk in the park. You are going to be taxed emotionally, spiritually, and physically. You will be challenged more than you ever thought possible. There are two things that will make your chances of coming through bottom out: the desire for creature comforts and complacency.

The desire for creature comforts can make you act irrationally and compromise your survival plan, putting you and those trusting you at risk. A complacent attitude will not afford you the quick wittedness that you need to assess and confront a disaster situation. When you are thrust into survival mode, you’re just going to have to put your big girl panties on and deal. Bottom line.

The Ability to Intuit and Read Other People

Your observation and reasoning skills will need to extend to being able to read other people and intuit their thoughts and emotions. This isn’t some mental telepathy, ESP junk science. This is reading signs and subtle signals that others give off, and being able to interpret those signs accurately. Learn to think from another’s standpoint so that you can better gauge anticipated reactions that might endanger you or your loved ones.

Maintain Hope…But Prepare

You cannot live your life day in and day out in fear. That’s not living. Being prepared does not negate hope in the future. It simply strategizes and prepares for an eventuality that may or may not come. Due diligence to survival prep is not foolish. Your skills may be the only thing that keeps you and others alive. Disaster comes in a moment. Remember Katrina. Remember Haiti. Remember the tornados and floods and mudslides and ice and snow that come in an instant and devastate sections of the country each year. Remember…and then prepare.

Keep Laughing

Maintaining your sense of humor is a must. Laughing releases endorphins in your brain that actually help your body cope with mental and physical stress, along with relieving pain, reducing blood pressure, and mitigating headaches and chronic illnesses. People in all walks of life cope by utilizing humor, even if it’s a morbid gallows humor or laughing at the insanity or foolishness in which they find themselves.

In the midst of it all, if you are so inclined, try to hold on to faith. We are told that God does not give us a spirit of fear, but of love, power and a sound mind. (2 Timothy 1:7) We are told to be diligent and watchful, but in the end we can only control a limited amount of what goes on. Once we reach that point where nothing we do will have an effect on the outcome of an event, then is the time to sit back and put the future in God’s hands.

Incorporating these psychological attributes into your survival preparedness plans will help you come through any disaster situation you might face. In fact, successful incorporation of these traits may be the difference between life and death for you and your loved ones.

Source;
http://www.offthegridnews.com/2010/1...a-survivalist/

comments/giovonni

[giovonni]

Part of what is driving the Teabagger movement is the fear and discomfort arising from America becoming a majority non-white country; from which it follows our educational system is becoming majority nonwhite as well. And, as the multipolar world emerges from the collapse of the bipolar world we have known all our lives this same trend will only become magnified. Notably the younger generations suffer far less from these prejudices.The problem is principally the bias of older white conservatives with those enlarged Amagdylas.



Universities Are Challenged as Demographics Shift

By REEVE HAMILTON and JON MARCUS
January 1, 2011


In August, 60 years after the University of Texas admitted its first black student, the school welcomed the first freshman class in which white students were in the minority.

White students, who accounted for 51 percent of U.T.’s freshman class in 2009, made up 48 percent in 2010. Black and Hispanic students represented about 5 percent and 23 percent, respectively, with Asians and other races making up the rest.

The state’s flagship university passed the demographic milestone earlier than some had anticipated, reflecting a similar shift that is rapidly taking place at other top-level educational institutions across the country.

Although the changing demographics of college campuses may be grabbing the headlines, the more compelling issue is how the growing number of minority students presents serious social and academic challenges for financially strapped universities, even as the schools are under pressure to boost graduation rates.

Nationally, 52 percent of Hispanic students and 58 percent of black students are unable to earn a bachelor’s degree in six years, compared with 40 percent of white students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

“What is increasingly evident now that wasn’t evident 10 or 20 years ago is the extent to which this is a national phenomenon,” said Steve Murdock, a sociology professor at Rice University and previously the state demographer of Texas and head of the United States Census Bureau. “This is not a Texas issue. It’s not a California issue. It’s a national issue.”

For the United States to maintain — let alone grow — a college-educated work force, Mr. Murdock said, those graduation numbers will have to change.

Stan Jones, former Indiana commissioner of higher education and the current president of Complete College America, a national nonprofit group dedicated to boosting the number of college graduates, said the numbers have been telling the story for years. “But it hasn’t necessarily gotten through to policy-makers that this was going on, and clearly not to the general public,” Mr. Jones said. “All of us are seeing it happening faster than we had expected.”

For example, although their birth rate is growing at a significant clip, Mr. Jones said, Hispanics do not graduate from high school, go on to college or graduate in the same numbers as white students. “If you look at the freshman class everywhere in this country, it is more representative than it’s ever been,” he said. “But in four years, if you look at the graduating class, it is not going to be representative of the country, because many of those students from the underrepresented groups won’t make it to graduation.”

Educators give several reasons for the disparity, including economic differences, the comparative quality of college preparation at urban, rural and suburban schools, and a sense of isolation among those who are the first in their families to go to college.

“These are terrific students,” said William Powers Jr., president of U.T. “Often, they may have gone to a high school where they didn’t have a calculus class or Advanced Placement classes. The challenges are also financial and what I call cultural. They might be away from home, and they don’t have parents and aunts and uncles who have already been here.”

In 2007, recognizing the demographic shift — and its accompanying challenges — U.T. set up a Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. With an annual budget of $30.4 million, it encourages minority high school students to apply to college and then supports them with a complex framework of programs that include tutoring and personal advising.

“The question is, can we get them the support to help them over the gaps?” said Gregory J. Vincent, vice president of diversity and community engagement.

The results, so far, have been promising. Generally, students in the division’s programs have grade point averages and retention rates as good as or better than the average in their respective classes. “The good news is that our students come highly motivated, so our challenges aren’t as great as you’d expect, despite assumptions some people might make about their backgrounds,” said Aileen Bumphus, executive director of the Gateway Program, an initiative under the Diversity and Community Engagement umbrella that works with about 300 first-generation students in each class.

Such programs have been crucial for students like Oscar Ayala, a U.T. senior from Houston who majors in biomedical engineering. Both of his parents are from Mexico, and neither attended college. “When it came time in high school to get ready for college, I didn’t know what that meant,” Mr. Ayala said.

But that success may prove difficult to maintain, depending in large part on decisions the Texas Legislature will make this year to confront a budget shortfall that could reach $20 billion or more. About $5 million of the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement budget comes from state money. Educators are particularly worried about cuts to the state’s largest financial aid program, which primarily serves minority students.

Robert S. Nelsen, president of the University of Texas-Pan American, a South Texas institution that is 89 percent Hispanic, said cuts to the aid program would be “devastating” to the area.

U.T.’s main campus is not immune from the tension caused by economic constraints. In November, a faculty panel proposed deep cuts to the ethnic studies programs, including the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Students, the Center for Asian American Studies and the Center for Mexican American Studies. Once the panel’s recommendations were made public, about 150 students and faculty members protested, many accusing the administration of racism. University administrators have since said the proposed cuts will be scaled back.

But the incident highlighted the fact that increased diversity does not necessarily mean increased harmony or interaction on a campus where you can see a statue of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, not far from new memorials to Mexican-American labor leader César Chávez and Barbara Jordan, the first black woman elected to Congress from the South.

Kacie Sebek, a senior from Houston, who is white, said she has seen classmates from predominantly white hometowns appear uncomfortable. “You have someone closed off in their own neighborhood, and suddenly they’re in a world where people are different,” she said.

Mr. Ayala, who was surprised by the dearth of Hispanics in his engineering programs, said students gravitate toward those with similar backgrounds. “As I started realizing who hangs out with who, I see that it’s not as diversified as it could be,” he said. “But I know it can keep moving forward.”

Still, most U.T. students hardly noticed the demographic milestone reached by the current freshman class. “If you want to take sort of a benchmark of how we’ve progressed over 20 years, it would be that this went more unrecognized than you might have expected it to,” said Mr. Powers, the university’s president. “That, in itself, is a milestone.”

Source;
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/us...ted=1&_r=1&hpw

rhamilton@texastribune.org

This article was produced by The Texas Tribune in partnership with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

[giovonni]

Finally an institution with some integrity. Bravo to the UK, unfortunately Cambridge is not an American university.


Bankers rebuffed by university over request to censor scholarly paper

By Eric W. Dolan
Friday, December 31st, 2010

A powerful banking association tried -- and failed -- to censor a Cambridge University student's thesis that exposed a flaw in electronic card security.

Chip and PIN is a smartcard payment system in the United Kingdom that requires customers to enter a personal identification number (PIN) when making a transaction. Secure as the industry would like this system to seem, it isn't, as a lone student proved earlier this year with the construction of an inexpensive device that eliminates the PIN requirement.

A thesis describing how the device works and how it was created was published on the Cambridge website in June.

The UK Cards Association (UKCA) sent a letter to the university requesting they remove the thesis, which describes how a hand-held device could allow a thief to make transactions with a stolen bank card using any PIN.

Melanie Johnson, a former Labour Treasury minister who is now chair of the UKCA, wrote that the thesis "breaches the boundary of responsible disclosure" and "places in the public domain a blueprint for building a device which purports to exploit a loophole in the security of chip and PIN."

The thesis , written by Omar Choudary, a PhD student within the Security Group at the Computer Laboratory, is titled "The smart card detective: a handheld EMV interceptor."

"During my MPhil within the Computer Lab I developed a card-sized device (named Smart Card Detective – in short SCD) that can monitor Chip and PIN transactions," Omar wrote on his blog.

"The main goal of the SCD was to offer a trusted display for anyone using credit cards, to avoid scams such as tampered terminals which show an amount on their screen but debit the card another. However, the final result is a more general device, which can be used to analyse and modify any part of an EMV (protocol used by Chip and PIN cards) transaction."

Johnson asked for the thesis to be removed from public access immediately and said she was concerned that "this type of research was ever considered suitable for publication."

"You seem to think that we might censor a student's thesis, which is lawful and already in the public domain, simply because a powerful interest finds it inconvenient," Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at the university's Computer Laboratory, replied. "This shows a deep misconception of what universities are and how we work. Cambridge is the University of Erasmus, of Newton, and of Darwin; censoring writings that offend the powerful is offensive to our deepest values."

Anderson wrote that he and his colleagues had discovered the vulnerability in 2009 and disclosed the information to the banking industry at that time.

"You complain that our work may undermine public confidence in the payments system," he continued. "What will support public confidence in the payments system is evidence that the banks are frank and honest in admitting its weaknesses when they are exposed, and diligent in effecting the necessary remedies. Your letter shows that, instead, your member banks do their lamentable best to deprecate the work of those outside their cosy club, and indeed to censor it."

Source;
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/b...ip-pin-system/

[giovonni]

Another gift from Wikileaks showing we have the best corporatocracy money can buy. No wonder these people hate Wikileaks.




WikiLeaks: US targets EU over GM crops

US embassy cable recommends drawing up list of countries for 'retaliation' over opposition to genetic modification

John Vidal, environment editor
Monday 3 January 2011

The US embassy in Paris advised Washington to start a military-style trade war against any European Union country which opposed genetically modified (GM) crops, newly released WikiLeaks cables show.



In response to moves by France to ban a Monsanto GM corn variety in late 2007, the ambassador, Craig Stapleton, a friend and business partner of former US president George Bush, asked Washington to penalise the EU and particularly countries which did not support the use of GM crops.

"Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits.

"The list should be measured rather than vicious and must be sustainable over the long term, since we should not expect an early victory. Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices," said Stapleton, who with Bush co-owned the St Louis-based Texas Rangers baseball team in the 1990s.

In other newly released cables, US diplomats around the world are found to have pushed GM crops as a strategic government and commercial imperative.

Because many Catholic bishops in developing countries have been vehemently opposed to the controversial crops, the US applied particular pressure to the pope's advisers.

Cables from the US embassy in the Vatican show that the US believes the pope is broadly supportive of the crops after sustained lobbying of senior Holy See advisers, but regrets that he has not yet stated his support. The US state department special adviser on biotechnology as well as government biotech advisers based in Kenya lobbied Vatican insiders to persuade the pope to declare his backing. "… met with [US monsignor] Fr Michael Osborn of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, offering a chance to push the Vatican on biotech issues, and an opportunity for post to analyse the current state of play on biotech in the Vatican generally," says one cable in 2008.

"Opportunities exist to press the issue with the Vatican, and in turn to influence a wide segment of the population in Europe and the developing world," says another.

But in a setback, the US embassy found that its closest ally on GM, Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the powerful Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and the man who mostly represents the pope at the United Nations, had withdrawn his support for the US.

"A Martino deputy told us recently that the cardinal had co-operated with embassy Vatican on biotech over the past two years in part to compensate for his vocal disapproval of the Iraq war and its aftermath – to keep relations with the USG [US government] smooth. According to our source, Martino no longer feels the need to take this approach," says the cable.

In addition, the cables show US diplomats working directly for GM companies such as Monsanto. "In response to recent urgent requests by [Spanish rural affairs ministry] state secretary Josep Puxeu and Monsanto, post requests renewed US government support of Spain's science-based agricultural biotechnology position through high-level US government intervention."

It also emerges that Spain and the US have worked closely together to persuade the EU not to strengthen biotechnology laws. In one cable, the embassy in Madrid writes: "If Spain falls, the rest of Europe will follow."

The cables show that not only did the Spanish government ask the US to keep pressure on Brussels but that the US knew in advance how Spain would vote, even before the Spanish biotech commission had reported.


Source;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011...us-eu-gm-crops

[giovonni]

i found this reported cable leak very telling of the ongoing dicey socio/political situation in Iran -today.




WikiLeaks document dump: Iran President Ahmadinejad slapped by head of Revolutionary Guard

BY Helen Kennedy
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Tuesday, January 4th 2011, 4:00 AM

The WikiLeaks document dump continues to kick up surprises.

A new diplomatic cable says the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guard smacked President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the face for suggesting easing restrictions on the press.

The February 2010 cable, classified secret and puckishly headlined, "He Who Got Slapped," quotes an intelligence source recounting a contentious meeting of Iran's Supreme National Security Council.

The Iranian bigs were trying to figure out what to do in the wake of Tehran's explosive pro-democracy street protests of 2009.

"Ahmadinejad claimed that 'people feel suffocated,' and mused that to defuse the situation it may be necessary to allow more personal and social freedoms, including more freedom of the press," the cable says.

It continues, "Ahmadinejad's statements infuriated Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff Mohammed Ali Jafari, who exclaimed 'You are wrong! \[In fact\] it is YOU who created this mess! And now you say give more freedom to the press?!'

"Source said that Jafari then slapped Ahmadinejad in the face, causing an uproar," the cable says.

Iran denies the slap happened. A Revolutionary Guard spokesman told the Fars News Agency that WikiLeaks' publishers "invent false stories."

The leaked State Department cables have painted Iran as a great global pariah, with even many Arab countries privately urging the U.S. to attack before Tehran can get a nuclear bomb.

hkennedy@nydailynews.com

Source;
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/worl...r_mahmoud.html



comments/giovonni

[giovonni]

The Illness Profit System in its toxic glory. Our prisons have become our principal social program for the mentally ill, and nursing homes are being turned into the place we warehouse the disabled young.



More young people are winding up in nursing homes

By MATT SEDENSKY, Associated Press Matt Sedensky, Associated Press Fri Jan 7, 6:19 pm ET

SARASOTA, Fla. – Adam Martin doesn't fit in here. No one else in this nursing home wears Air Jordans. No one else has stacks of music videos by 2Pac and Jay-Z. No one else is just 26.

It's no longer unusual to find a nursing home resident who is decades younger than his neighbor: About one in seven people now living in such facilities in the U.S. is under 65. But the growing phenomenon presents a host of challenges for nursing homes, while patients like Martin face staggering isolation.

"It's just a depressing place to live," Martin says. "I'm stuck here. You don't have no privacy at all. People die around you all the time. It starts to really get depressing because all you're seeing is negative, negative, negative."

The number of under-65 nursing home residents has risen about 22 percent in the past eight years to about 203,000, according to an analysis of statistics from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That number has climbed as mental health facilities close and medical advances keep people alive after they've suffered traumatic injuries. Still, the overall percentage of nursing home residents 30 and younger is less than 1 percent.

Martin was left a quadriplegic when he was accidentally shot in the neck last year by his stepbrother. He spent weeks hospitalized before being released to a different nursing home and eventually ended up in his current residence, the Sarasota Health and Rehabilitation Center. There are other residents who are well short of retirement age, but he is the youngest.

The yellow calendar on the wall of Martin's small end-of-the-hall room advertises activities such as arts and crafts. In the small common room down the hall, a worker draws a bingo ball and intones, "I-16. I-one-six." As Martin maneuvers his motorized wheelchair through the hallway, most of those he passes have white hair and wrinkled skin.

"It's lonely here," Martin says, as a single tear drips from his right eye.

Martin exchanges muted hellos with older residents as he travels down the hall to smoke outside. His entire daily routine, from showering to eating to enjoying a cigarette, is dictated by the schedules of those on whom he relies for help.

He usually wakes up late, then waits for an aide to shower him, dress him and return him to his wheelchair. He watches TV, goes to therapy five days a week and waits most days for his friend to bring him meals.

He mostly keeps to himself, engaging in infrequent and superficial conversations with his elders.

Martin's parents are unable to care for him at home. His father is a truck driver who is constantly on the road, and his stepmother is sick with lupus. Medicaid pays his bills; it could take a lawsuit for him to get care outside a nursing home.

Advocates who help young patients find alternatives to nursing homes say people are often surprised to learn there are so many in the facilities. About 15 percent of nursing home residents are under 65.

"When I tell people I try to get kids out of nursing homes, they have no idea," says Katie Chandler, a social worker for the nonprofit Georgia Advocacy Office.

Federal law requires states to provide alternatives to institutional care when possible, though its implementation varies from place to place. Navigating the system can require a knowledgeable advocate and, sometimes, litigation.

Not all younger nursing home residents are there for good. Some nursing homes are seeing an increase in patients who come to recover there instead of in a hospital, because it is cheaper for their insurance company.

Like Martin, many younger residents have suffered a traumatic injury. Others have neuromuscular diseases such as multiple sclerosis, or have suffered a stroke.

Brent Kaderli, 26, of Baytown, Texas, became a quadriplegic after a car accident in 2006. He hopes rehabilitation will help him gain enough strength to move into an assisted living facility and eventually, to an apartment with his girlfriend.

He shares his nursing home room with an older man who suffers from dementia. It is not ideal, but because his parents' home is not modified to accommodate his wheelchair, he thinks it's the only option right now.

"Just knowing that one day I will be better, I'm still hoping and praying for that. In the meantime, I think about my family and my friends, what I used to be able to do, and I stay sad a lot," he says. "This is probably the best that I could have at this point."

The same generational tensions that exist outside nursing homes are inside them as well, and are sometimes exacerbated by the often close confines.

Older residents complain about loud music and visitors, younger residents complain about living with someone with dementia or being served creamed spinach. Many nursing homes try to house younger residents together, though in many cases their small numbers make that difficult.

For young people who find themselves newly disabled, the psychological and social needs are often even more challenging than their physical demands. That presents a challenge for nursing homes that are used to serving people near the ends of their lives.

At Bayshore Health Center in Duluth, Minn., 34 of the 160 residents are younger people, all living in private rooms in their own wing. The staff has found that subtle changes can improve their lives.

Instead of bingo night, there are poker games and outings to nightclubs. For someone who stays up late watching a movie, breakfast can be served at 10 a.m., rather than 7 a.m. Pizza is offered in place of lasagna; Mountain Dew and Coke are poured instead of coffee and tea.

Still, many younger residents sink into depression because of their physical limitations, their loneliness and their nursing home surroundings.

"For them it's a life sentence. When you're 40 years old you know you're never getting out. This is the way your life will be forever and ever. Amen," says Diane Persson, a gerontologist who has written about the boom in younger nursing home residents.

Martin fears that may be true for him. He used to look forward to joining the Army and earning a college degree in science or engineering. Now he simply looks forward to visits from his friend Paul Tuttle, who on this day brings him nachos he feeds him along with sips of water.

"If I'm not here, he's got no one his age to talk to about football or anything," Tuttle says, wiping Martin's face.

Propped in his wheelchair, Martin says: "It makes you feel old. If that's all you're around, that's what you become."

Source;
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110107/...ng_homes_young