January 12, 2016

Toxic “Reform” Law Will Gut State Rules On Dangerous Chemicals

(The Intercept) A NEW SET OF BILLS that aims to update the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act may nullify the efforts of states such as Maine and California to regulate dangerous chemicals. The Senate’s bill, passed last month, just before the holidays, is particularly restrictive. The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act — named, ironically, for the New Jersey senator who supported strong environmental protections — would make it much harder for states to regulate chemicals after the EPA has evaluated them, and would even prohibit states from acting while the federal agency is in the process of investigating certain chemicals.

The Senate’s version has some significant differences from the House bill — the TSCA Modernization Act, which passed in June — and the reconciliation process is now underway. If the worst provisions from both bills wind up in the final law, which could reach the president’s desk as soon as February, the new legislation will gut laws that have put Oregon, California, Maine, Vermont, Minnesota, and Washington state at the forefront of chemical regulation.

Toxic Sippy Cups and Baby Bottles

For Mike Belliveau the passage of Maine’s chemical law in 2008 felt like the crowning moment in his career. The environmental advocate had spent years working on the Kid Safe Product Act, which is one of the strongest protections against dangerous chemicals in the country. Since it was passed, Maine has used the law to come up with a list of more than 1,700 “chemicals of concern.” The state has also required manufactures to report the use of a handful of those chemicals, and has banned them altogether when there are safer alternatives.

Among the chemicals Maine has strictly regulated are flame retardants called PBDEs, which are linked to learning disabilities and behavior problems, and BPA, an endocrine disruptor and likely human carcinogen. Maine phased out the use of PBDEs in furniture and electronics. Manufacturers must now report the use of BPA in certain products and can no longer use it in baby bottles, sippy cups, water bottles, infant formula cans, or baby-food packaging. The EPA was also looking at the health effects of PBDEs and BPA, but while it was considering them, Maine took action. ................(more)

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/11/toxic-reform-law-would-gut-state-rules-on-dangerous-chemicals/

January 12, 2016

Hillary Clinton Whiffs on Reforming Wall Street’s Rating Agencies

(The Intercept) Hillary Clinton’s response to Bernie Sanders’s plan to aggressively break up the big banks responsible for the financial crisis is to suggest that he is naive.

“My plan also goes beyond the biggest banks to include the whole financial sector,” Clinton wrote in a New York Times op-ed in December. “My plan is more comprehensive,” she said at the first Democratic debate in October — and for that reason, “frankly, it’s tougher.”

But Clinton’s vision of financial reform neglects one part of the industry everyone agrees was an essential factor in the 2008 crisis: the credit rating agencies, which assess the worthiness of Wall Street securities for investors.

Sanders’s plan, released last week, would no longer allow the companies that issue securities to pick which rating agency they use – a simple but outrageous practice that creates an enormous conflict of interest and helps facilitate fraud. ...............(more)

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/12/hillary-clinton-whiffs-on-reforming-wall-streets-rating-agencies/

January 11, 2016

My favorite cover of a David Bowie song, by Peter Murphy......

January 11, 2016

Why “Collateral Damage” Elicits So Little Empathy Among Americans

from tomdispatch:


Ted Cruz’s Stone-Age Brain and Yours
Why “Collateral Damage” Elicits So Little Empathy Among Americans

By Rick Shenkman


After Senator Ted Cruz suggested that the United States begin carpet bombing Islamic State (IS) forces in Syria, the reaction was swift. Hillary Clinton mocked candidates who use “bluster and bigotry.” Jeb Bush insisted the idea was “foolish.” Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, tweeted: “You can't carpet bomb an insurgency out of existence. This is just silly.”

When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer objected that Cruz’s proposal would lead to lots of civilian casualties, the senator retorted somewhat incoherently: "You would carpet bomb where ISIS is -- not a city, but the location of the troops. You use air power directed -- and you have embedded special forces to direction the air power. But the object isn't to level a city. The object is to kill the ISIS terrorists." PolitiFact drily noted that Cruz apparently didn’t understand what the process of carpet (or “saturation”) bombing entails. By definition, it means bombing a wide area regardless of the human cost.

By almost any standard Cruz’s proposal was laughable and his rivals and the media called him on it. What happened next? By all rights after such a mixture of inanity and ruthlessness, not to say bloody-mindedness against civilian populations, his poll numbers should have begun to sag. After all, he’d just flunked the commander-in-chief test and what might have seemed like a test of his humanity as well. In fact, his poll numbers actually crept up. The week before the imbroglio, an ABC opinion poll had registered him at 15% nationally. By the following week, he was up to 18% and one poll even had him at a resounding 24%.

How to explain this? While many factors can affect a candidate’s polling numbers, one uncomfortable conclusion can’t be overlooked when it comes to reactions to Cruz’s comments: by and large, Americans don’t think or care much about the real-world consequences of the unleashing of American air power or that of our allies. The other day, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that, in September and October, a Saudi Arabian coalition backed by the United States “carried out at least six apparently unlawful airstrikes in residential areas of the (Yemeni) capital,” Sana’a. The attacks resulted in the deaths of 60 civilians. Just about no one in the United States took notice, nor was it given significant media coverage. More than likely, this is the first time you’ve heard about the HRW findings. ................(more)

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176088/tomgram%3A_rick_shenkman%2C_how_we_learned_to_stop_worrying_about_people_and_love_the_bombing/

January 11, 2016

Hedge-Fund Dazzle Has Peaked, Record Closures Next

Hedge-Fund Dazzle Has Peaked, Record Closures Next
by Wolf Richter • January 11, 2016


[font color="blue"]This data “will be met with dismay by the hedge fund industry.”[/font]

“Alternative Investments” were the Holy Grail. They promised big returns that would be independent from the gyrations of the stock and bond markets. Hedge Funds and Private Equity firms marketed them to wealthy individuals and institutional investors, such as pension funds.

“Feel the power of Alternative Investments – B.A.M.” That’s how Credit Suisse advertised it on its website back in October 2013. It was so irresistible that I took a screenshot of the ad, to be used at an opportune moment, and now is that moment:



This was the heyday of Alternative Investments. QE Infinity was making everything possible. Yields on bonds had plunged to near nothing. Prices of most assets were soaring. Risks no longer existed and hence weren’t priced into anything. And anyone could make big returns. But that’s like so 2013….

“Low interest rates, steep commodity losses, and intense equity market volatility contributed to a challenging environment in 2015, resulting in a wide dispersion between the best and worst performing funds,“ explained Kenneth Heinz, president of Hedge Fund Research (HFR) in its report about the hedge fund debacle that 2015 had become.

So hedge funds across the $2.9 trillion industry were in the red for December and ended the year 2015 down 0.85%, according to HFR’s fund-weighted composite index. It was only the fourth year since 1990 that the index ended up in the hole. ..................(more)

http://wolfstreet.com/2016/01/11/the-era-of-hedge-fund-dazzle-has-peaked/

January 11, 2016

China Rout Threatens to Spawn India Crisis, Top Banker Says

(Bloomberg) A deepening slowdown in China threatens to derail India’s economic growth, triggering financial market upheaval and a falling currency, Vishal Kampani, the nation’s top investment banker, said.

“If China keeps getting hit like this, the yuan has to devalue, and we will see another crisis in India,” Kampani, managing director at JM Financial Ltd., the South Asian country’s top mergers and acquisitions adviser last year, said in a Jan. 8 interview. “I refuse to believe that India will stand out and will look very different.”

Indian stocks and the rupee fell Monday, tracking declines in other emerging markets as volatility in China sapped risk appetite globally. China’s efforts to stabilize the yuan failed to halt equity losses, reviving concern about the Communist Party’s ability to manage an economy set to grow at its weakest pace since 1990.

India’s benchmark S&P BSE Sensex Index fell 0.4 percent on Monday in Mumbai after dropping as much as 1.4 percent earlier. The rupee weakened 0.2 percent to 66.7725 against the dollar as of 4:11 p.m. local time. ...........(more)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-11/china-rout-threatens-to-spawn-crisis-in-india-top-banker-says

January 11, 2016

Chris Hedges: The Great Forgetting

from truthdig:



The Great Forgetting

Posted on Jan 10, 2016
By Chris Hedges


America’s refusal to fund and sustain its intellectual and cultural heritage means it has lost touch with its past, obliterated its understanding of the present, crushed its capacity to transform itself through self-reflection and self-criticism, and descended into a deadening provincialism. Ignorance and illiteracy come with a cost. The obsequious worship of technology, hedonism and power comes with a cost. The primacy of emotion and spectacle over wisdom and rational thought comes with a cost. And we are paying the bill.

The decades-long assault on the arts, the humanities, journalism and civic literacy is largely complete. All the disciplines that once helped us interpret who we were as a people and our place in the world—history, theater, the study of foreign languages, music, journalism, philosophy, literature, religion and the arts—have been corrupted or relegated to the margins. We have surrendered judgment for prejudice. We have created a binary universe of good and evil. And our colossal capacity for violence is unleashed around the globe, as well as on city streets in poor communities, with no more discernment than that of the blinded giant Polyphemus. The marriage of ignorance and force always generates unfathomable evil, an evil that is unseen by perpetrators who mistake their own stupidity and blindness for innocence.

“We are in danger of forgetting, and such an oblivion—quite apart from the contents themselves that could be lost—would mean that, humanly speaking, we would deprive ourselves of one dimension, the dimension of depth in human existence,” Hannah Arendt wrote. “For memory and depth are the same, or rather, depth cannot be reached by man except through remembrance.”

Those few who acknowledge the death of our democracy, the needless suffering inflicted on the poor and the working class in the name of austerity, and the crimes of empire—in short those who name our present and past reality—are whitewashed out of the public sphere. If you pay homage to the fiction of the democratic state and the supposed “virtues” of the nation, including its right to wage endless imperial war, you get huge fees, tenure, a television perch, book, film or recording contracts, grants and prizes, investors for your theater project or praise as an pundit, artist or public intellectual. The pseudo-politicians, pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-artists know what to say and what not to say. They offer the veneer of criticism—comedians such as Stephen Colbert do this—without naming the cause of our malaise. And they are used by the elites as attack dogs to discredit and destroy genuine dissent. This is not, as James Madison warned, the prologue to a farce or a tragedy; we are living both farce and tragedy. ...........................(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_great_forgetting_20160110

January 10, 2016

Americans eat way too much sugar — here’s where it comes from

(MarketWatch) The new federal dietary guidelines that came out last week put a number on how much sugar we’re supposed to consume, and it’s even less than you might think.

The guidelines, which the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture release every five years, put an emphasis on healthy food “patterns” that include nutritious options and state that no more than 10% of the calories in one’s diet should come from added sugar. To put that number into perspective, for the 2,000-calorie recommended diet, that’s about 10 to 12 teaspoons, or about 40 to 48 grams of sugar.

And there are 39 grams of sugar in one 12-ounce can of regular Coke.

“If you look at the label on your yogurt and it has upwards of 25 grams of sugar, just at breakfast you’re getting half of your daily sugar allotment,” said Despina Hyde, a registered dietitian and diabetes educator in the weight management center at New York University’s Langone Medical Center.

In previous sets of guidelines, the HHS and USDA recommended choosing and preparing foods with low amounts of added sugars, but they did not specify the amount of calories in the diet that should come from sugar. .................(more)

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-eat-way-too-much-sugar-heres-where-it-comes-from-2016-01-08?link=MW_home_latest_news

January 10, 2016

“You Just Need to Be White to Win”

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.


“You just need to be white to win.” That’s the tagline, in English translation, for a TV ad pushing Snowz, a skin whitening cream from Seoul Secrets Thailand, a cosmetics firm, since withdrawn after the Seoul Secrets (no doubt accidental on purpose) uproar and moral panic. Here’s the ad; I don’t think you need more than the visuals:



(Skin whitening products are stacked up in drugstores all over Asia; they’re a $2 billion industry). What’s interesting to me — and this is going to be one of those superficial posts where, magpie-like, I collect and display a number of bright, shiny objects — is that the initial framing, which made its way from the Twitter all the way to the English-language media worldwide, is that the Seoul Secrets ad was racist. On the Twitter:

.....(snip).....

AP:

“Ewwwwwww,” [copy that] was the reaction of 28-year-old Jutamas Tritaruyanon, one of many to post their disapproval on Facebook.

“This ad is so obviously racist and another attempt to brainwash Thai women,” Jutamas, a Bangkok-based office worker, told AP. “They’re saying that being dark is ugly. It’s a narrow-minded and disgusting attitude.”

CNN:

A new Thai beauty ad claiming white skin is the key to success has unleashed a storm of criticism in Thailand, especially online, where people complain the ad perpetuates damaging, racist ideas.

And out into the aggregators. .............(more)

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/01/you-just-need-to-be-white-to-win.html

January 10, 2016

Bernie Asks: Why Does The Status Quo Candidate OPPOSE The FAMILY Act?

from the Working Life blog:



by Jonathan Tasini


Along the long list of claims obscured by magic dust the status quo candidate regularly sprays around—the you-have-to-be-drunk-to-believe her sudden opposition to the Trans Pacific Partnership (a trade deal she once called the “gold standard” which, I wager, would be a “gold standard” again at the appropriate time, with a change of 10 words and a comma cuz after all it would be “different”), opposition to the Keystone Pipeline, the phony-baloney tough-on-her-bankrollers from Wall Street (You know the ones she represented in New York because, oh, 9/11) and well the list goes on and on—you can add the being an advocate for families.

Put simply, she doesn’t think a family is worth somewhere between $1.38 and $1.61 per week—the price of a small payroll tax to fund the FAMILY Act, a bill proposed by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, which Bernie is a co-sponsor along with 19 other Senators; Rep. Rosa DeLauro has proposed the House bill which has 112 cosponsors.

What would the bill do? Per Senator Gillibrand:

The “Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act” or the FAMILY Act would create an independent trust fund within the Social Security Administration to collect fees and provide benefits. This trust would be funded by employee and employer contributions of 0.2 percent of wages each, creating a self-sufficient program that would not add to the federal budget. Benefit levels, based on existing successful state programs in New Jersey and California, would equal 66 percent of an individual’s typical monthly wages up to a capped monthly amount that would be indexed for inflation. The proposal makes leave available to every individual regardless of the size of their current employer and regardless of whether such individual is currently employed by an employer, self-employed or currently unemployed, as long as the person has sufficient earnings and work history. In this way it would apply to young, part-time and low-wage workers.

For example, the average woman worker earning the median weekly wage would only need to contribute $1.38 per week (for a total of $72.04 per year) into the program, and even the highest wage earners would have a maximum contribution of $4.36 per week, or $227.40 per year. This means that for less than ONE tall brewed Starbucks coffee ($1.85) or about the cost of ONE venti latte per week (over $4) we could create a program that will be so beneficial for our families. The average full time working woman earning the median weekly wage would receive a total of $5,514.48 if she took the full 12 weeks of paid leave. Operating the trust fund through the Social Security Administration would enable the program to capitalize on a number of administrative efficiencies thus decreasing the need to create new bureaucracies.

.....(snip).....

The problem in our country is NOT that our taxes are too high. That’s Republican bullshit that Democrats regurgitate—the elites, the party hacks, the DLC-types, the lobbyist-funded politicians of which there are too many and the Wall Street Democrats (Wall Street having invested millions of dollars in the status quo candidate and her husband, through huge campaign contributions and six-figure speaking fees to give for an hour speech (to actually say zero of value—it’s all about legalized corruption and buying access), a payoff higher than most Americans would ever earn in an entire year). ...................(more)

http://www.workinglife.org/2016/01/08/bernie-asks-why-does-the-status-quo-candidate-opposed-the-family-act/