Daily News Blog 05/28 By Roland Sheppard
U.S. workplaces have become “killing fields.”
The World is Heading Toward a Financial Crisis – The State of US Politics has Left Us Ill Prepared
In fact, the current “body count” is that over 40 percent of the people in the United States will get cancer. Such is the tragedy of “Trade Secrets.” The most glaring example is the occupational environment, where workplaces have become “killing fields.” In the United States, in 1990 the American Public Health Association estimated that at least 350,000 workers get occupational diseases (cancer, etc.) and 50,000 workers will die each year from these diseases. Given the steady decline in occupational health, these estimates are now most likely much higher! Blue-collar workers and agricultural workers all have higher rates of cancer and other diseases because they receive higher doses of the toxic chemicals at the workplace than the rest of the population. Eventually, these toxins spread to the entire working class as they become part of the environment. One of the Killing Fields of Richmond, Contra Costa, CA.
The Air in Richmond
An example of this fact is the population living “downwind” from the many oil refineries in Contra Costa County in the San Francisco Bay Area. People living near these refineries have very high rates of cancer. In EPA terms, this is called a “cancer cluster.” The EPA, in its corporate manner, determined that the high rates of cancer was caused by high rates of smoking in the area and not from the refineries’ carcinogenic pollutions! However, under the rules of Proposition 65 in California and after several years of litigation, the Gasoline Refining Industry had to post this warning in the February 24, 1999, issue of the San Francisco Chronicle: Text of Actual WARNING: “Chemicals known to the State to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm are found in gasoline, crude oil, and many other petroleum products and their vapors, or result from their use. Read and follow label directions and use care when handling or using all petroleum products. …” — “Trade Secrets” Cancer and the Environment (What the Bill Moyers Program Trade Secrets Revealed).
Michael Hudson: Iran War Ignites Global Financial Armageddon…
And the genius of Iran’s political stance is that if you, the rest of the world, do not stop the United States and Israel from destroying us, which is their explicit threat, they’re going to blow up all of our bridges, they’re going to destroy all of our refining capacity, they’ll destroy all of our electricity, they’ll bring about regime change and reimpose a police state like the Shah had that led us to have the revolution to overthrow them in 1979 to begin with. If you’re just going to sit by and let the world ignore all of the body of international law and the laws of war that the United Nations Charter was supposed to do, then we’re not going to go down alone. We’re going to take the other Arab oil producers with us. That’s going to cause such a shortage that it’s going to cause an international depression worse than the 1930s. And the reason why it’s worse than the Great Depression is because that was really a financial depression.
Do US War Crimes Doom the World to Endless War and Chaos?
The supposedly unlimited freedom of action attained by disdaining and trampling international law and institutions has proved to be a double-edged sword. On May 24, Iran rejected President Trump’s latest fake peace deal, confirming that he had misrepresented what Iran had agreed to and that the two sides are still very far apart, on nuclear enrichment, on control of the Strait of Hormuz, on peace in Palestine and Lebanon, and on lifting US sanctions, paying war reparations, and Iran’s $100 billion in frozen assets. Iran’s conditions for a peace agreement are necessarily uncompromising, in response to the US record of using negotiations as cover for sneak attacks, and the charade of one-sided “ceasefires with Israeli characteristics,” in which the US and Israel routinely ignore and violate every ceasefire they agree to, including the present ones in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.
Chevron to California: Relax Regulations or We Leave
The oil company and the future of the wider fossil fuel industry have emerged at the center of the California governor’s race. When it comes to California’s climate future, the most important figure in the state’s chaotic governor’s race may not be any of the candidates on the debate stage. It may not even be outgoing governor, Gavin Newsom, or President Donald Trump. Instead, it might just be Chevron, the multinational oil company that was founded in the Golden State more than 100 years ago. It is among the largest producers, refiners and sellers of petroleum products in a state rapidly shifting toward electric vehicles. Depending on which candidate is talking, the company is an example of how Big Oil is strangling consumers or an example of how climate regulations are strangling the state economy.
The EPA said it was cutting Biden-era regulations on PFAC in drinking water, but advocates say the move will harm public health and benefit industry A new Trump administration plan to ditch PFAC drinking water regulations and instead attempt to destroy “forever chemicals” on a wide scale tears a page from the fossil fuel industry’s carbon capture playbook, and will benefit the industry while harming public health.
The Long History of Controlling Water and Why It No Longer Works
The defining signature of the past 6,000 years of human civilization is the domestication of the hydrosphere—capturing, damming, canalizing, reorienting, propertizing, privatizing, consuming, profiting from, depleting, and poisoning it. From ancient hydraulic civilizations to the hydro-powered superdams, reservoirs, canals, and ports of the 21st century, water has been repurposed for humanity, often at the expense of millions of other species that depend on it. Harnessing the hydrosphere has shaped societies and the distinctiveness of cultures across history. The design of hydraulic infrastructure has partially fated societies to the entropic costs that led to their demise—and sometimes collapse. Unlike in the past, the entropic consequences of water use during the fossil-fuel-based Industrial Revolution—the water-energy nexus—have eclipsed localities, regions, and continents, propelling Earth into the sixth extinction of life.
CAPITALIST GROWTH KILLS
Pollution from land use change kills thousands in SE Asia
Study shows that deforestation destroys important natural sinks that filter out deadly air pollution Changes in land-use across Southeast Asia over the past 15 years have worsened air quality and contribute to thousands of excess deaths each year, according to a study led by researchers at the Centre for Climate Change and Environmental Health at Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore. The study, published in The Lancet Planetary Health, estimates that land-use and land-cover changes in the region were linked to around 13,000 excess deaths in 2018 alone. This is the additional number of people who died compared to what would be expected in a year without the land-use and land-cover changes. The health impacts of worsening air pollution also cause economic losses of about US$7.8 billion. Changes in land-use across Southeast Asia over the past 15 years have worsened air quality and contribute to thousands of excess deaths each year, according to a study led by researchers at the Centre for Climate Change and Environmental Health at Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore. The study, published in The Lancet Planetary Health, estimates that land-use and land-cover changes in the region were linked to around 13,000 excess deaths in 2018 alone. This is the additional number of people who died compared to what would be expected in a year without the land-use and land-cover changes.
