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Multinational Corporations Seek to Rule Over San Diego’s Barrio Logan Community

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“We may be poor, brown folk but we have organized to take on the state, city and industry numerous times and have won. This may be our biggest battle yet, a battle for our very existence.”

By Doug Porter

For thirty years, San Diego’s Barrio Logan community existed without a community plan. There was no law, no order when it came to land use and zoning.  Having prospered in chaos for so many years, nearby maritime industries are threatening the region’s economy unless they get their way.

Historically speaking, in the minds of the downtown-centric elites any regulatory structure was simply not necessary in Barrio Logan. After all, the community was just chock full of “them”, as in people of color, mostly of Mexican heritage.  Children were exposed to toxic emissions, the nearby waters used to dump heavy metals and other pollutants, and the robber barons of the shipbuilding industry looked away.   [Read more…]

Want to Try Herbal Remedies? 4 Ways to Make Sure You Don’t Get Ripped Off (Or Worse)

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Herbal products can work wonders, but sometimes the products on the shelf are overpriced, ineffective or even unsafe.

By Jill Richardson / AlterNet

You’re not feeling well, so you head to the grocery store for some herbal tea. Or perhaps you pass a booth at your farmers’ market, full of herbal concoctions to cure every ill. Thanks to a 1994 law known as DSHEA (the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act), herbal products cannot promise to actually cure you of anything. Rather, they offer to support or promote a specific body part or function.

To most of us, it’s all the same, whether a tea, tincture or capsule promises to help cure our cold or “support upper respiratory health and immune function.” You see the promise, you buy the product, but does it work? Did you get ripped off?   [Read more…]

Do These Chemicals Make Me Look Fat?

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By David Epstein / ProPublica

Everyone knows Americans are fat and getting fatter, and everyone thinks they know why: more eating and less moving.

But the “big two” factors may not be the whole story. Consider this: Animals have been getting fatter too. The National Pet Obesity Survey recently reported that more than 50 percent of cats and dogs — that’s more than 80 million pets — are overweight or obese. Pets have gotten so plump that there’s now a National Pet Obesity Awareness Day. (It was Wednesday.) Lap dogs and comatose cats aren’t alone in the fat animal kingdom. Animals in strictly controlled research laboratories that have enforced the same diet and lifestyle for decades are also ballooning.   [Read more…]

Koch Brothers Letter, Plummeting Poll Numbers Bring GOP to Table

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By Doug Porter

In the wake of two major developments over the last 48 hours, Republican intransigence appears to be weakening in the Battle of the Budget, 2013 Version.

Small, mostly symbolic, steps occurred yesterday towards ending the threat of default triggered by a Tea Party-led refusal to raise the debt ceiling and, possibly, the re-opening the federal government.

Following a White House meeting for Republican representatives, a public willingness to engage in further discussions emerged. Congressman Paul Ryan told the press both sides should “put their guns back in their holsters”, according to Politico.

This motivation to sound reasonable came on the heels of a letter from financiers and Tea Party backers David and Charles Koch responding to claims made by Senate leader Harry Reid implicating them as instigators of the current standoff.   [Read more…]

Widespread Salmonella Outbreak in Raw Chicken Includes California – But Public Health Workers Are Furloughed

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As the government shutdown has furloughed the vast majority of the nation’s public health officials, it may not be any easier to trace the salmonella strain.

By Tara Culp- Ressler / ThinkProgress – Nation of Change / October 9, 2013

On Monday night – Oct. 7, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issued a public health alert for raw chicken packaged in California. The chicken has been linked to nearly 300 salmonella cases across 18 different states, a widespread outbreak that appears to have begun in March.

According to a spokesperson from the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, investigators have “had a difficult time pinpointing the source of the illnesses.”   [Read more…]

Little Statesmen

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“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

By David Benjamin / Common Dreams

PARIS — As I observe, from a nation where health care is universal, simple, cheap and far more healthful that the free-market medical blackmail that afflicts and sickens the United States, I think of a question not asked.

A handful of reactionaries in the U.S. Congress are “standing on principle” against the Affordable Care Act, passed by Congress in 2010. The media wizards who cover issues of national life-and-death as though they were NASCAR events, ask lots of questions about who’s going to do what, and when, and whose ox is gonna get gored when that happens or doesn’t happen.

But the question they never ask of either side in the latest stalemate is “What principle?” What exactly are all these blowhards standing their ground for?   [Read more…]

Until Medicare-for-All Arrives, A Desire for Obamacare to Work

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By Donna Smith / Common Dreams

Yes, it is true. I want the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare to be successful, and I want single-payer, improved and expanded Medicare for all for life. I can hear it now, and almost predict who will be saying it, “Oh, Donna’s a single-payer sell-out. Look, she said she wants the ACA to succeed. Doesn’t she get it that it’s nothing more than a bail-out to the private insurance industry?”

Yes, I get it. I lived in Washington, D.C., all through the health reform debates and saw what the process did to single-payer activists. I know that the ACA is not where we need to go. I know its failings, and I know in some ways it moves us further away from the “everybody in, nobody out” kind of system we hope to achieve. I know that the health industry basically drafted the bill to be spoon fed through Congress, and I watched and worked the press side of the days when 13 people were arrested in Max Baucus’ Senate Finance Committee for wanting single-payer on the table. I know, I know.   [Read more…]

Gap, Old Navy, and the Living Hell of a Bangladeshi Sweatshop

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Report exposes firing and overwork of pregnant workers, routine beatings and deep poverty wages in sweatshop backed by US mega-retailers.

By Sarah Lazare / Common Dreams

Twenty-year-old Bangladeshi worker Morium Begum lost her baby in her seventh month of pregnancy after being forced to work 100-plus hours a week despite sickness and exhaustion while sewing garments for Gap and Old Navy in exchange for poverty wages.

According to a 68-page report released Thursday by the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, stories like Begum’s are commonplace in the 3,750-worker Next Collections factory in Ashulia, Bangladesh, on the outskirts of Dhaka, where physical punishments—including slapping and beating—are routine, pregnant workers are subject to illegal firings or forced to toil without maternity leave, and wages are dismally low at 20 to 24 cents an hour.   [Read more…]

30 Ways the Shutdown Is Already Screwing People

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The government shutdown is already wreaking havoc on the lives of Americans.

By Tim Murphy / Mother Jones

The federal government entered shutdown mode at midnight on Monday, after Congress failed to pass a continuing resolution that would keep departments and agencies up and running. Though some Republicans have dismissed the immediate impact of the shutdown, quite a lot of people have already been affected.

Here’s a quick guide:   [Read more…]

Community Meeting Highlights Need for Interpreters

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By Ashley Mates

As California prepares itself for the implementation of Affordable Care Act, millions of California citizens will be entering into the expanded Medi-Cal program. It is estimated that approximately one and five Californians speaks English “less than well”. About 3 million Medi-Cal patients will need language services over the next five years.

At an event held on Friday, September 27, Assemblymember Toni Atkins, who has been a champion for AB 1263, asked the Governor to sign the bill that would immediately accept all available funds to for more medical interpreters.  AB 1263, sponsored by Speaker John Perez, would draw down funds from the Affordable Care Act to create Communi-Cal, a state-wide interpreters program for Medi-Cal patients.   [Read more…]

America Gets What it Deserves

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American Government Hostage Crisis officially begins as Republicans shut down the U.S. government as promised.

By Andy Cohen

Congratulations America! Judging by the results of the 2010 and 2012 Congressional elections that put Republicans in charge of the House of Representatives, you got just exactly what you wanted……and what you deserve.

There really isn’t any other logical conclusion. The government shutdown of 2013, commenced at 9 pm Pacific time last night, was inevitable. It was no secret that a government shutdown was the goal all along since the day John Boehner took the gavel as the Speaker of the House of Representatives. It’s not like we weren’t warned……repeatedly.

Congressional Republicans are celebrating today, for they’ve achieved at least half of what they’ve set out to do, and they are a mere two-and-a-half weeks away from achieving their ultimate goal: Completely sabotaging the American economy in its entirety by defaulting on the country’s debt. You see, America must fail for Republicans to succeed.

This is the mission of the “American Taliban:” To destroy our system of governance and institute a system whereby the ultimate power resides in private hands. ENRON FOR PRESIDENT!!!   [Read more…]

Despite Government Shutdown, ObamaCare Starts Today

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Survey says nearly three fourths of the population thinks the GOP’s tactic is a bad idea

By Doug Porter

The crapola has hit the fanola.  Eight hundred thousand Americans are officially furloughed. Another million or so are being asked to come to work without pay.

Why? Because Congress passed a health care law after debating it for 18 months. The President signed the law. The Supreme Court (mostly) upheld the Constitutionality of the law. And now a group of three dozen or so extremists in the House of Representatives say “no way”.   [Read more…]

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