MindMover
MindMover's JournalAnother Leaked TPP Chapter Shows What a Disaster it Will be!
President Barack Obama has been working hard to wrap up the negotiations of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). What is curious about these negotiations is that they are all held in secret. Up until recently, congress wasn’t even allowed to read the draft text of the TPP, only corporate lobbyists. What we know about the TPP is because of leaked chapters. We know that although the TPP is a so called “free trade” agreement, only 5 chapters of the 29 have to actually do with trade. Now, the updated IP chapter has just been released.
As mentioned before, out of the 29 chapters of the TPP, only 5 have to do with trade. This newly released chapter detailed how the TPP would affect Intellectual property rights. This includes cancer treatments between the U.S. and 11 other countries. Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program spoke about the leaked chapter. “The leak shows our government demanding rules that would lead to preventable suffering and death in Pacific Rim countries, while eliminating opportunities to ease financial hardship on American families and our health programs at home.”
President Obama wants and needs Fast Track to pass the TPP. The TPP is being pushed by multinational corporations. They want all of the negotiations to be done behind closed doors. Why the lack of transparency? Even members of Congress have been allowed to see them only under very strict conditions. They were required to submit a request to see specific chapters of the current draft, and after seeing the text they cannot tell anyone what they have read, not even their staff.
http://economyincrisis.org/content/another-leaked-tpp-chapter-shows-what-a-disaster-it-will-be
App Lets You Peek Inside 80,000 Foods At Your Grocery Store
LOOKING BEYOND A NUTRITION LABEL, FOOD SCORES RATES YOUR GRUB BASED UPON ITS PESTICIDES, ANTIBIOTICS, AND PROCESSING.
Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. The package contains just a few ingredients. Milled corn. Sugar. Malt flavor. Salt. And BHT “for freshness.”
Seems innocuous enough. But is it? Entering the product into Food Scores, a new iPhone and web app by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG), only rates Kellogg’s Corn Flakes as a 5 on a scale of 10 (10 being the worst). I see this in a dashboard of meters that break down food into three parts: nutrition (the standard calories, fat, and protein stuff); ingredients (including undisclosed pesticides, contaminants, or antibiotics); and processing (how far has that product come from its source whole foods).
Food Scores has some concerns about those Corn Flakes.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3037854/infographic-of-the-day/app-lets-you-peek-inside-80000-foods-at-your-grocery-store
Schieffer: Politics the Only Product That Gets Worse as it Gets More Expensive
Face the Nation host Bob Scieffer bemoaned the rising price tag of American elections Sunday morning, especially the 2014 midterms, which at $4 billion will be the most expensive midterms in history while producing what will likely be historically low turnout and potentially little shift in actual power.
“Can you name a commodity or a product that gets worse and worse, that produces less and less of what it is supposed to produce, yet gets more expensive?” Schieffer asked. “Maybe you can name one but the only thing i can think of is American politics.”
Because centrism, Schieffer added that he’s “not blaming it on Republicans or Democrats,” he’s “blaming it on Republicans and Democrats who have turned what used to be an amateur sport in to a professional business, where the jobs that volunteers used to do for free have been outsourced to professionals.”
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/schieffer-politics-the-only-product-that-gets-worse-as-it-gets-more-expensive/
What a terrible truth ...the higher the cost and the worse it gets.
Cable News Ignores Dire New Report On Climate Change, Features Rant From Unhinged Climate Denier
On Sunday, the Weather Channel’s co-founder took his confounding message on the falsity of climate change to CNN, where he said he left Brian Stelter, the host of Reliable Sources, “wondering what had hit him.”
John Coleman, who co-founded the Weather Channel in the 1980s before being forced out a year after it went to air, has splashed across headlines this past week for his climate denying antics. It started when Coleman — who does not have a meteorology degree, let alone a climatology degree — wrote an open letter to UCLA’s Hammer Museum expressing his disapproval on a climate change presentation hosted there. In the letter he states, “there is no significant man-made global warming at this time, there has been none in the past and there is no reason to fear any in the future.”
Coleman does not back up these claims, but in the ensuing week he has added significantly to them. In an email posted online, Coleman gave a synopsis of his appearance on Reliable Sources, which was filmed on Friday:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/11/02/3587561/climate-denying-weather-channel-co-founder-goes-on-cnn-is-clearly-wrong-on-all-points/
We cannot afford to ignore this problem ...
Planet headed toward ‘irreversible’ climate damage, UN warns
The globe is heading toward “severe, pervasive, and irreversible” climate change impacts if left “unchecked,” according to a new United Nations report.
In its most comprehensive analysis ever undertaken, the U.N.’s synthesis report released Sunday, finds that the evidence behind human influence on climate change is overwhelming and undeniable, as greenhouse gas emissions are the “highest in history.”
The report, which over 800 scientists from 80 countries wrote, additionally drawing from 3,000 contributing authors and experts, argues that emissions must fall to a net zero by the end of the century, and that the window of opportunity to address the threat is shrinking.
“The report expresses with greater certainty than in previous assessments the fact that emissions of greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic drivers have been the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century,” according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which adopted the report on Saturday evening before releasing it on Sunday.
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/222565-planet-headed-toward-irreversible-climate-damage-un-warns
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/222571-kerry-un-climate-report-another-canary-in-the-coal-mine
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/02/rapid-carbon-emission-cuts-severe-impact-climate-change-ipcc-report
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/pessimistic-un-climate-change-report-also-offers-an-out/382262/
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/11/02/360932486/u-n-end-greenhouse-emissions-by-2100-or-risk-irreversible-damage?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=science&utm_medium=social&utm_term=nprnews
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2849
http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/the-world-just-got-its-final-warning-on-climate-change--ekIujj-zPx
Bill McKibben -- http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/02/ipcc-climate-change-carbon-emissions-underestimates-situation-fossil-fuels
Forty-Two Plutocrats Have Funded More Than a Third of All Super PAC Spending
With just four days to go until the 2014 midterms, here’s our final weekly roundup of news about this year’s money race.
Do you know where your polling place is, and what documents you’ll need to cast a ballot? If you have any questions, the nonpartisan League of Women Voters has answers at vote411.org. And if you encounter any problems at the polls, call the Election Protection hotline at 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1-866-687-8683) or visit their website.
Big Money: According to the Wesleyan Media Project, ad spending on congressional races has passed the $1 billion mark. Around 40 percent of it is dark money, with undisclosed donors. If you include spending on ads for ballot initiatives, judges and races for state offices, almost three million spots have aired during this election cycle at a cost of $1.67 billion.
The Times, They Are a Changin’: At Vox, Mark Schmitt, director of New America Foundation’s program on political reform, looks at three ways the 2014 midterms could permanently “transform money in politics.”
Republicans Still Dominate the Dark Money Game: Democratic-leaning donors like Tom Steyer have invested heavily in the 2014 race, but the Sunlight Foundation’s Peter Olsen-Phillips reports that when it comes to dark money, Republican-aligned groups have outspent their Democratic counterparts by around three-and-a-half to one.
http://billmoyers.com/2014/10/31/dark-money/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/10/28/top-super-pac-donors-of-the-midterms-steyer-bloomber-singer-mercer/18060219/
http://www.propublica.org/article/secret-donors-behind-some-super-pacs-funneling-millions-into-midterms?utm_campaign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=1414785193
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/09/02/how-mccutcheon-has-already-changed-campaign-finance-in-1-chart/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colbert_Super_PAC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code
The basic truth about internet access that cable & phone companies don't want you to know
A new report about the state of broadband connectivity around the world reveals some good news and bad news about policy in the United States. The good news is that in a handful of cities, Americans are enjoying world-class speeds:
And the prices are pretty darn affordable:
This achievement is really impressive when you consider that Chattanooga, Kansas City, and Lafayette aren't even remotely as dense as Seoul or Hong Kong or Tokyo, which get similar speeds. When we put our minds to it in this country, we can do great things. And what works for Chattanooga could work even better in bigger cities like Chicago or Miami.
But there's a catch. The American cities that are delivering best-in-the-world speeds at bargain prices are precisely the cities that aren't relying on Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Time-Warner, etc. to run their infrastructure. In Kansas City, Google built a state-of-the-art fiber optic network largely just to prove a point. In Chattanooga and Lafayette, the government did it. At the moment, the US federal government could issue 5-year bonds at a 1.58 percent interest rate and make grants to cities interested in following Chattanooga and Lafayette down that path. But it doesn't happen, because while broadband incumbents don't want to spend the money it would take to build state-of-the-art fiber networks, they are happy to spend money on lobbying.
http://www.vox.com/2014/10/31/7137457/broadband-speed-chattanooga-kansas-city-lafayette
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/31/upshot/why-the-us-has-fallen-behind-in-internet-speed-and-affordability.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=1
https://medium.com/backchannel/jammed-e474fc4925e4
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/10/fcc-reportedly-close-to-reclassifying-isps-as-common-carriers/
If only certain corrupt officials would get out of the way ...
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