With GMO Labels Still Missing, Look for the Opposite

By Michelle Maisto
The White House is 313 miles from my Brooklyn neighborhood, but in early October, 50 or so people set off walking there, as part of the Right2Know campaign. Along the way they were joined by hundreds of others, and rallying in Washington, D.C., Oct. 16, they called on regulators to insist that genetically modified or engineered foods/organisms (known as GEs, or GMOs) be labeled as such, and for President Obama to keep his 2007 campaign promise to do this.

The effort felt in line with the Occupy movement - with the voicing of frustrations that even in simple, common sense ways there seems to be a system working against the majority of us (even back in a 2001 ABC News poll, 93% of people said they wanted GE food labeling). But it was also just one more effort in a decades-long fight - Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich has introduced a Genetically Engineered Food Right to Know Act in 1999, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2008 and 2010 - and as far as I can tell the latest effort to fail to get the job done.

There's a lot of debate about whether or not it's safe to eat GM foods, but what's being argued for is simply that they be labeled. We're living in a time where it's illegal not to tell consumers if a product is made in a room where nuts are handled, but food can be tinkered with at the DNA level and no one is obligated to say so.


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10 Years Later, 9/11 Still Shrouded in Mystery

By Will Bunch
IF YOU THINK that on the 10th anniversary you know the whole story of 9/11 - and here I'm addressing conspiracy-minded "truthers" and the 13 percent who approved of the job Dick Cheney did as vice president - actually, you don't.

Time has upheld the broad story line of how hijackers loyal to Osama bin Laden hijacked four planes and killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001 - claims about holograms being used to attack buildings instead of jetliners notwithstanding. At the same time, the dictum of famed investigative reporter I.F. Stone about all governments - i.e., they lie - is no less true about 9/11 than any other event.

Here are 10 questions about 9/11 that remain unanswered.

1. Did the CIA cover up its advance knowledge of at least two of the 9/11 hijackers?

Richard Clarke, the national counterterrorism czar on 9/11, thinks so. In an interview for an upcoming radio documentary, Clarke claimed that top-level CIA officials deliberately withheld from the White House and the FBI knowledge as early as 2000 that two al Qaeda members - Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar - were living in San Diego.

The former anti-terror chief said he believes that the CIA kept the info under wraps because it wanted to recruit the two Saudis to serve as double agents within bin Laden's organization. Instead, the two terrorists ended up hijackers on American Flight 77. George Tenet, who was CIA director, claims that Clarke is "reckless and profoundly wrong."

2. How strong is the connection between the 9/11 site cleanup and cancer and other diseases?

Last week, the New York City Fire Department's Dr. David Prezant published research in the prestigious medical journal Lancet showing that male firefighters who responded to 9/11 now have a cancer rate that's 19 percent higher than unexposed co-workers. That comes on top of earlier reports of higher rates of asthma and post-traumatic stress disorder among the responders at Ground Zero.

Indeed, the real questions are a) Why was the Bush administration so lax in issuing warnings about the toxicity of the site in 2001? and b) Why did it take a comedian, Jon Stewart, to shame Congress into funding a health-care bill for the ailing heroes of Ground Zero?

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Risks Over Recycling Sewage into Biosolids are Still Not Resolved

By Christopher Dunagan

For related articles and more information, please visit OCA's Toxic Sludge page, Washington News page, and our Environment and Climate Resource page.


Class B biosolids applied to Bremerton's forest are relatively dry. Before application, at least 99 percent of the pathogens have been removed. After 30 days, no measurable pathogens remain. Still, public access remains closed to this area.

When the city of Bremerton started applying processed sewage sludge to its forestland west of Gorst, the trees began to grow dramatically faster.

One can see the result 20 years later in tree rings when the Douglas firs are cut down: skinny rings before the application, fat rings ever since.

Some people consider biosolids - produced from sewage sludge - to be a prime fertilizer, rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and organic material.

Others raise questions about an array of low-level compounds found in the material, from toxic industrial chemicals to pharmaceutical drugs to personal health care products.

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Why Did the Climate Bill Die? Because We Still Don’t Have a Real Climate Movement

By Kelsey Wirth, Larry Shapiro, Philip Radford
Grist Magazine, Aug 5, 2010
Straight to the Source

We now know the U.S. Senate will not pass climate-changelegislation this year. Postmortems havepointed to a number of challenges: the lack of leadership from the White House,unified GOP opposition to the Senate cap-and-trade bill, the structure andrules of the Senate, and the complicated nature of cap-and-trade legislation.

There has been one major omission in much ofthis analysis: the absence of pressurefrom Americans across the country demanding that serious action be taken toaddress climate change. Few Americans arecurrently engaged in this great societal challenge in a way that would generatethe necessary political will to act. Itis the absence of this public pressure, above all else, that has resulted in thecurrent state of political inaction.

Take the most broadly transformational politicalacts in the history of the U.S. -- the signing of the Emancipation Proclamationand the approval of the 14th Amendment in the 1860s, women's suffrage in 1920,the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act of the mid-1960s, the establishmentof the EPA and the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act in the early 1970s, toname a few. They all required some formof political leadership, but that leadership was exercised in response to theabolitionist, women's suffrage, civil rights, and environmental movements of the time, social movementsthat forced the issues into our national conscience and made inaction politicallyuntenable. These social movements consistedof large numbers of people, united by a strong sense of shared values and moralpurpose, who stood up to the deeply held assumptions and powerful vestedinterests of their times.

Environmental organizations and foundations spentwell over $200 million in the attempt to enact climate change legislation. Several of these organizations builtalliances with some of the largest corporations in America in an effort topromote a watered-down bill. And eventhis effort failed. Why?

The top answer is that we failed to build a socialmovement equal to the task. In theabsence of a real climate movement, we are likely to continue to see eveninadequate half-measures fail again and again. Only a broad-based social movement aroundclimate change can get the job done, fueled by the same passion and underpinnedwith the same moral conviction that characterized the historical movements thatended slavery, promoted suffrage, secured civil rights, and mandated a cleanerand healthier environment.

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