Environment and Health
Hope Dims for Electricity Reform
Coal, oil, gas, and nukes have mounted a powerful defense against altering the status quo, and local utility companies daily build more legislative walls guarding their potent existing cartels. Public utility regulators remain cozy with those utilities, and the regional agencies in charge of seeing that there’s enough juice to go around remain deeply secretive and deep in the industry’s pocket.
Flying and Radiation Risks
Whole body X-ray scanning machines were developed and first used to detect theft at gold and diamond mines on and inside the bodies of workers in Africa. They are fluoroscopic X-ray machines that provide a real-time image of a person’s body using “back-scatter,” or “soft” X-rays. They emit much less penetrating energy than machines found in a medical setting, such as CT scanners. However, like all machines, if their design, manufacture, calibration or maintenance is defective, then doses to passengers and security staff could be larger than claimed.
Maybe Tobacco Execs Should Go to Prison
Did you ever notice how it works? Sell your cousin a joint for some harmless fun and you both end up in jail. But manufacture cigarettes that kill tens of thousands of people and not only do you earn billions of dollars, you avoid all risk of hard time. Lawsuits may cost you something but your personal freedom is never at stake. And presumably if you had a conscience you wouldn’t have gone into the business to begin with.
We are What We Eat
That morsel at the end of your fork isn’t just food. It’s the product of fossil fuels, industrialized agriculture and chemical herbicides.
The Right’s Obsession with Abortion and Sex
The Right just doesn’t like it. Abortion, like birth control, allows women to enjoy the pleasures of sex without suffering the penalties of children. Naturally, conservatives aren’t keen on birth control either, except for themselves. Actually, the Right isn’t really into fun.
Pro-Life
Let’s Sign the Tobacco Treaty
By 2005, the world’s first public health and corporate accountability treaty was taking effect to tackle the world’s leading preventable cause of death and disease: tobacco use. That treaty may be the least well-known tobacco milestone here in the United States, but it’s the most significant. For one, the global tobacco treaty may save 200 million lives by 2050 when it’s fully implemented. It also tackles head-on the type of corporate abuse that hooked generations on a deadly product with little or no accountability.
Health Care Is a Study in Greed
America’s No. 1 growth industry is health care. No one has yet found No. 2. This preeminent role is not due to deadly epidemics, environmental meltdown, or massive public education. It’s due to greed.
Utah v. Women
No one should be surprised by a proposed Utah law that would consider possible criminal prosecution and life imprisonment for women who suffer miscarriages in that state. Appalled maybe, but not surprised. It was just a matter of time.
Taxpayers Are Getting Nuked
Compulsive gamblers are perpetually looking for the big score. Always thinking that the next card will draw that inside straight or the last card will turn their garbage into gold. Casinos have a name for these people–suckers. Well, Uncle Sam has pushed more than $8 billion into the pot, gambling on big returns from the nuclear power industry. Sadly, we know where this ends.
