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Even the FDA Doesn't Know What Chemicals Are in Your Food |
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Saturday, 12 April 2014 09:27 |
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Maffini writes: "It gets worse: Companies can add chemicals into our food without ever telling the FDA about their identity, their uses and (wait for it) their safety!"
What is in our food? (photo: NRDC)
Even the FDA Doesn't Know What Chemicals Are in Your Food
By Maricel Maffini, EcoWatch
12 April 14
 e all have secrets, from small ones (the scale isn’t broken, I ate too many cookies!) to bigger ones (yes, we knew for a long time that tobacco kills people).
For more than 50 years, many in the food industry have not had to disclose information to consumers and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about the safety of chemicals they put in our food. Additives manufacturers have taken advantage of a dysfunctional regulatory system that allows for minimal or no disclosure, is plagued with conflicts of interest, and provides weak oversight of something as vital to our health as food.
For consumers, it’s bad enough that most of the ingredients listed in packaged food have hard to pronounce names and we do not always know why they are there; we don’t know how much and how many chemicals leach from the packaging into the food; or little is known about the safety of those chemicals because a small percentage are actually tested.
But it gets worse: Companies can add chemicals into our food without ever telling the FDA about their identity, their uses and (wait for it) their safety!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWrUkU3RtV0
As long as a company designates a chemical as being ‘generally recognized as safe,’ or GRAS in regulatory parlance, according to FDA’s interpretation of the law, it has no responsibility to inform the agency. FDA doesn’t know about the safety of an estimated 1,000 chemicals because they aren’t disclosed.
I’m still a child at heart and what do children do when they are told something is secret? Curiosity is innate. So, we sought to find out what these chemicals are, who is making these safety decisions and why companies choose to forgo FDA’s review process. We identified 56 companies that appear to rely on undisclosed GRAS safety determinations for 275 chemicals. Sixty-two percent of them responded to our inquiries but did not share their safety determination with us; the remaining 38 percent, selling 218 chemicals, never responded us. The great majority of the chemicals were active ingredients in dietary supplements. You can read more about these companies and their reasons to go around the FDA in our Generally Recognized as Secret: Chemicals Added to Food in the United States.
How does this impact me and my family, you may ask? As long as FDA doesn’t know about the safety of thousands of chemicals, it cannot ensure the safety of the food we eat and cannot protect public health. It’s that simple. FDA has tried to figure out how to be informed about the safety of GRAS chemicals for many years; its last attempt was creating a voluntary program whereby companies submit their safety assessment and the agency’s scientists punch holes in their argument. If the company’s argument for safety is strong, the agency sends a “no questions” letter to the company.
If FDA starts raising concerns and the company sees that its argument could fail, a company can withdraw the submission without prejudice and can continue marketing the chemical.
We submitted a Freedom of Information Act (see Appendices) request to the agency for information about 16 chemicals that companies submitted for review but along the evaluation process asked FDA to stop its assessment. In reviewing the FDA records we got, we noticed that the agency’s scientists asked excellent questions and had many concerns about the safety of chemicals. For instance, they were justifiably concerned about epigallocatechn-3-gallate (EGCG) because of its apparent liver, thyroid, testis, spleen and gastrointestinal toxicity in animal tests, and its ability to break down DNA in human cells which may be associated with fetal leukemia.
They were also concerned about GABA, a brain chemical, or theobromine, a stimulant, because by the companies’ own calculations people could be exposed to 5 times more than the safe dose if these chemicals were added to food. In other words, if the exposure is several times higher than the safe dose, the chemical’s use is not safe. Although our report shows the value of FDA’s reviews, the broken system doesn’t stop these potentially unsafe chemicals from reaching our plates, especially for those safety decisions that industry chooses not to disclose to FDA and the public.
How can something be ‘generally recognized’ and not disclosed at the same time? We have heard that these chemicals are “natural” (even though some are highly purified components of the natural source) and people have been eating them for centuries.
We also are told that companies don’t disclose because FDA posts the GRAS notifications it receives in its website and competitors can take advantage of it with little investment. But the lack of disclosure—at least of the studies used to justify a finding of safety—seemingly contradicts the regulations stating that “general recognition of safety through scientific procedures shall ordinarily be based upon published studies…” (21 CFR § 170.30(b)). Or, as an FDA reviewer told a company “[i]n other words, if a panel of experts reviews data that are not publicly available and subsequently renders an opinion regarding safety, even if the experts are well-recognized, the opinion does not meet the general recognition of safety (emphasis added) for GRAS ingredients because the data were not publicly available.”
The GRAS exemption, as it is currently being implemented by the FDA, means that the agency is unable to protect our food and our health. The law places the responsibility on FDA to ensure the safety of chemicals in food. If it doesn’t know what chemicals are in our food or have the documentation demonstrating their safety, it can’t do its job.
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Why Aren't We Putting US Agencies on Trial for Financing El Chapo's Drug War? |
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Friday, 11 April 2014 14:27 |
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Schivone writes: "Nearly seven weeks before an overnight capture at a beach resort, the Mexican newspaper El Universal reported how US agencies had armed and financed El Chapo's Sinaloa criminal empire for at least 12 years."
(photo: unknown)
Why Aren't We Putting US Agencies on Trial for Financing El Chapo's Drug War?
By Gabriel Matthew Schivone, Guardian UK
11 April 14
From Capone to Mexico's captured cocaine king, the villains we love to hate obscure the truth about America's secret support
  his American system of ours," shouted the famed gangster Al Capone in a 1930 interview. "Call it Capitalism, call it what you like – gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it."
Since those untouchable days, Chicago officials have awarded "Public Enemy No 1" status to only one other person: cartel billionaire Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known – now to the world over – as "El Chapo".
Nearly seven weeks ago, of course, El Chapo was captured by US and Mexican authorities after 13 years on the lam. Having achieved a cultural stature akin to that of a Bond villain, his capture naturally got all the limelight – while his US backers went more or less unmentioned.
But nearly seven weeks before an overnight capture at a beach resort, the Mexican newspaper El Universal reported how US agencies had armed and financed El Chapo's Sinaloa criminal empire for at least 12 years. That link has been substantiated by DEA and Justice Department court testimonies, and even US agents confirmed the financing had been approved by high-ranking officials and federal prosecutors. But the American media barely reported how entrenched the American government has become in the Mexican drug trade.
Instead, we got photos of agents leading a shackled Guzman, his head bowed by one of the marines' gloved hands gripping his neck, toward a US Blackhawk helicopter that would shuttle him off to a high-security prison.
"The choice of news organizations to not make the connection reflects a choice [of] what media would like for us to remember and would like for us to forget," said Crystal Vance Guerra, a Latin American studies scholar at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She asked: Why don't we hold these agents and agencies to the same judgment as organized crime?
As we wait for the biggest gangster trial in years, why, indeed, aren't we putting American intelligence and drug agencies on trial for financing a drug war?
The latest instalment of the "war on drugs" has killed 100,000 people since its official declaration by Mexican President Filipe Calderon and US President George W Bush in 2006. During this period, the US-El Chapo partnership was reportedly never closer: under the deal, Washington allowed El Chapo's Sinaloa cartel to carry on business as usual while top Sinaola members, for their part, provided information on their rivals. DEA agents met with their informants more than 50 times, El Universal reported, as the agents offered their whisperers immunity.
American patronage goes well beyond stoking the largest and most powerful of the Mexican cartels (Sinaloa), as well as the most heinous (Golfo and Los Zetas). The US also openly armed and financed even bigger players in this game – Mexico's state and security forces. Just as the US-El Chapo relationship was at its closest, the Bush administration signed into law the Merida Initiative, a huge militarization package to Mexico under the "war on drugs" Between 2008 and 2012, President Obama increased security aid under the plan – for helicopters, armored vehicles, surveillance equipment and police training programs – totalling $1.9bn.
As US authorities surely knew by this time, appearances were deceiving on Mexico's counter-narcotics battlefield, awash with stockpiles of American guns and money. Drug arrests of cartel associates amounted to less than 2% of over 50,000 arrests made in the first four years of the Bush-Calderon partnership. As unflagging Mexican journalist Anabel Hernandez showed in her 2013 book, Narcoland, Mexico's government wasn't fighting to stop a drug trade industry – it were fighting for what the industry had to offer. Shattering popular misconceptions about the drug wars, Hernandez concluded:
The biggest danger is not in fact the drug cartels, but rather the government and business officials that work for them and fear exposure.
The US played a leading role in creating the cartel underground in the first place. Joint US-Mexican military forces carried out brutal scorched-earth incursions in Mexico as early as 1976, ostensibly targeting small, rural poppy and marijuana farmers but actually destroying mostly poor communities caught in the middle. This enforcement-based approach hardened farmers into reactionary elements that relocated to major cities and eventually formed the federated Sinaloa-led cartels.
The American-made monster modeled itself off its creator. Today, more and more drug cartel-tycoons are investing in "legitimate" business enterprises expanded by US-based free trade. In Mexico alone, free trade agreements mandated a flood of US agribusiness imports that displaced 2.3m jobs in the agricultural sector; the average wage dropped severely while the commercial sector and the informal economy grew exponentially.
While actors both small-time (cartel) and big-time (government and corporate) claim to "make the most" of the American dream, those who end up suffering the most are the poor, women and undocumented migrants in the Mexico, Central America and the US. The amalgamation of the criminal ring that enriched El Chapo with US business interests therefore shows capitalism at its worst: a race for wealth free of moral or ethical considerations.
Officially, El Chapo's judgments are currently underway in Chicago, because the authorities there believe they have the strongest case to extradite the former public enemy for trial. The government of Mexico, however, will not consider extradition to the US without first trying El Chapo in Mexican courts.
But when the time comes, shouldn't El Chapo's US backers – the high-ranking US officials responsible for inciting and directing cartel violence – face prosecution, too?
We have long glamorized the lives of high-profile criminals, in everything from civil rallies to popular TV shows to entire musical genres. Cartels are the public demon so many of us love to hate. But a public focus on them essentially deflects attention from the way in which other players – like the US government – are not only complicit, but even run the show.
As the filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro Gómez once observed, "You can have a main character be the hero, but almost invariably the star is going to be the villain." He could easily have been talking about the larger-than-life media depictions of Al Capone in the 1930s. Or the media frenzy around El Chapo Guzman.
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FOCUS | The Federal Bureau of Incompetence |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Friday, 11 April 2014 13:08 |
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Pierce writes: "Why did the FBI slow-play the local cops on what the Russians told them about the elder Tsarnaev?"
(photo: file)
The Federal Bureau of Incompetence
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
11 April 14
 evin Cullen of the Boston Globe, who is the best cityside columnist in American newspapers, pretty much has had it with the FBI. Actually, he pretty much had it with the FBI while covering how the Boston office of the Feebs ran camouflage for the murderous Whitey Bulger for couple of decades. But he further has had it because, as was revealed during the congressional hearings into the Boston Marathon bombings and the subsequent firefight and search, the FBI may have had information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev that it declined to share with local authorities, and that it has been banging its own drum on television about how the FBI cracked the case.
Unfortunately, neither DesLauriers nor Douglas was able to shed any light on what the FBI did when it came to the advance warning they had from Russian authorities about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. A "60 Minutes" spokesman said correspondent Scott Pelley asked the question but producers decided the FBI's answers were, as he put it, "not newsworthy." Nothing the FBI has said about this is newsworthy, because they haven't said anything. It's standard operating procedure at the FBI. Wednesday's hearing before the House Committee on Homeland Security in Washington raised more questions than answers because the FBI won't give answers. "Why would they be accountable to ‘60 Minutes' or the Globe or whoever when they aren't even accountable to Congress?" asks Bill Keating, the Massachusetts congressman who sits on that committee. Keating watched the "60 Minutes" episode, too, and almost fell off his chair because the FBI had been ducking Congress by suggesting they didn't want to compromise the investigation into the bombing or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's upcoming trial. "We asked the FBI to come before our committee three times, and they refused," Keating told me. "And then I see them on TV pointing at one of the Tsarnaev brothers in a surveillance photo . . . So they can go on TV, but they can't go before Congress?"
Why did the FBI slow-play the local cops on what the Russians told them about the elder Tsarnaev? They're not talking, not even to Congress, which really ought not to be optional at this point. In fact, the whole thing stinks of bureaucratic empire building and ass-covering. The New York Times ran a Bureau-centric piece in which the FBI's inspector general blamed the Russians, not for refusing to share information on Tsarnaev, but refusing to share enough information about him. (God, it must be nice to have the Russians to blame for things again.) From the Times:
Russian officials had told the F.B.I. in 2011 that the suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, "was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer" and that Mr. Tsarnaev "had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country's region to join unspecified underground groups." But after an initial investigation by the F.B.I., the Russians declined several requests for additional information about Mr. Tsarnaev, according to the report, a review of how intelligence and law enforcement agencies could have thwarted the bombing.
Now, even assuming the Russians were negligent in turning over all that they had concerning Tsarvaev's slide into improvised jihadism, I am sure that the police in Boston, Cambridge, or Watertown would have liked to know what the Russians did tell the FBI in 2011. Alas, the FBI does not work or play well with others. Cullen, again:
Right after 9/11, three very fine police leaders - Boston Police Commissioner Paul Evans, Lowell Police Chief Ed Davis, and John Timoney, of the New York, Philadelphia, and Miami police - went to Washington to see FBI Director Bob Mueller. They knew that everything had changed when those planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and that field in Pennsylvania. They wanted assurances that the FBI would change, too, and begin sharing information with local police. But nothing changed. The FBI doesn't share information with other agencies. It never did. I've talked to Cambridge police officers who would have been all over Tamerlan Tsarnaev if they had known Russian authorities told the FBI he had extremist leanings. They never got that intelligence because the FBI couldn't be bothered sharing with local cops.
We have not been able to get this case right for a year. (Hanging over all of this is the fact that one of the primary witnesses against Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Ibragim Todashev, was shot to death in Florida while he was being interrogated by the FBI.) Dzokhar Tsarnaev is going to get hammered at his trial, and everybody will cheer, and the fact that we have not been able to get this case right for a year will be forgotten.
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Why US Fracking Companies Are Licking Their Lips Over Ukraine |
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Friday, 11 April 2014 09:54 |
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Klein writes: "The way to beat Vladimir Putin is to flood the European market with fracked-in-the-USA natural gas, or so the industry would have us believe."
Author, journalist and activist Naomi Klein says her choice to risk arrest at the XL Pipeline protest 'was a last-minute decision,' 09/02/11. (photo: Shadia Fayne Wood/Tar Sands Action)
Why US Fracking Companies Are Licking Their Lips Over Ukraine
By Naomi Klein, Guardian UK
11 April 14
From climate change to Crimea, the natural gas industry is supreme at exploiting crisis for private gain – what I call the shock doctrine
he way to beat Vladimir Putin is to flood the European market with fracked-in-the-USA natural gas, or so the industry would have us believe. As part of escalating anti-Russian hysteria, two bills have been introduced into the US Congress – one in the House of Representatives (H.R. 6), one in the Senate (S. 2083) – that attempt to fast-track liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, all in the name of helping Europe to wean itself from Putin's fossil fuels, and enhancing US national security.
According to Cory Gardner, the Republican congressman who introduced the House bill, "opposing this legislation is like hanging up on a 911 call from our friends and allies". And that might be true – as long as your friends and allies work at Chevron and Shell, and the emergency is the need to keep profits up amid dwindling supplies of conventional oil and gas.
For this ploy to work, it's important not to look too closely at details. Like the fact that much of the gas probably won't make it to Europe – because what the bills allow is for gas to be sold on the world market to any country belonging to the World Trade Organisation.
Or the fact that for years the industry has been selling the message that Americans must accept the risks to their land, water and air that come with hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in order to help their country achieve "energy independence". And now, suddenly and slyly, the goal has been switched to "energy security", which apparently means selling a temporary glut of fracked gas on the world market, thereby creating energy dependencies abroad.
And most of all, it's important not to notice that building the infrastructure necessary to export gas on this scale would take many years in permitting and construction – a single LNG terminal can carry a $7bn price tag, must be fed by a massive, interlocking web of pipelines and compressor stations, and requires its own power plant just to generate energy sufficient to liquefy the gas through super-cooling. By the time these massive industrial projects are up and running, Germany and Russia may well be fast friends. But by then few will remember that the crisis in Crimea was the excuse seized upon by the gas industry to make its longstanding export dreams come true, regardless of the consequences to the communities getting fracked or to the planet getting cooked.
I call this knack for exploiting crisis for private gain the shock doctrine, and it shows no signs of retreating. We all know how the shock doctrine works: during times of crisis, whether real or manufactured, our elites are able to ram through unpopular policies that are detrimental to the majority under cover of emergency. Sure there are objections – from climate scientists warning of the potent warming powers of methane, or local communities that don't want these high-risk export ports on their beloved coasts. But who has time for debate? It's an emergency! A 911 call ringing! Pass the laws first, think about them later.
Plenty of industries are good at this ploy, but none is more adept at exploiting the rationality-arresting properties of crisis than the global gas sector.
For the past four years the gas lobby has used the economic crisis in Europe to tell countries like Greece that the way out of debt and desperation is to open their beautiful and fragile seas to drilling. And it has employed similar arguments to rationalise fracking across North America and the United Kingdom.
Now the crisis du jour is conflict in Ukraine, being used as a battering ram to knock down sensible restrictions on natural gas exports and push through a controversial free-trade deal with Europe. It's quite a deal: more corporate free-trade polluting economies and more heat-trapping gases polluting the atmosphere – all as a response to an energy crisis that is largely manufactured.
Against this backdrop it's worth remembering – irony of ironies – that the crisis the natural gas industry has been most adept at exploiting is climate change itself.
Never mind that the industry's singular solution to the climate crisis is to dramatically expand an extraction process in fracking that releases massive amounts of climate-destabilising methane into our atmosphere. Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases – 34 times more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, according to the latest estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And that is over a 100-year period, with methane's power dwindling over time.
It's far more relevant, argues the Cornell University biochemist Robert Howarth, one of the world's leading experts on methane emissions, to look at the impact in the 15- to 20-year range, when methane has a global-warming potential that is a staggering 86-100 times greater than carbon dioxide. "It is in this time frame that we risk locking ourselves into very rapid warming," he said on Wednesday.
And remember: you don't build multibillion-dollar pieces of infrastructure unless you plan on using them for at least 40 years. So we are responding to the crisis of our warming planet by constructing a network of ultra-powerful atmospheric ovens. Are we mad?
Not that we know how much methane is actually released by drilling and fracking and all their attendant infrastructure. Even while the natural gas industry touts its "lower than coal!" carbon dioxide emissions, it has never systematically measured its fugitive methane leaks, which waft from every stage of the gas extraction, processing, and distribution process – from the well casings and the condenser valves to the cracked pipelines under Harlem neighbourhoods. The gas industry itself, in 1981, came up with the clever pitch that natural gas was a "bridge" to a clean energy future. That was 33 years ago. Long bridge. And the far bank still nowhere in view.
And in 1988 – the year that the climatologist James Hansen warned Congress, in historic testimony, about the urgent problem of global warming – the American Gas Association began to explicitly frame its product as a response to the "greenhouse effect". It wasted no time, in other words, selling itself as the solution to a global crisis that it had helped create.
The industry's use of the crisis in Ukraine to expand its global market under the banner of "energy security" must be seen in the context of this uninterrupted record of crisis opportunism. Only this time many more of us know where true energy security lies. Thanks to the work of top researchers such as Mark Jacobson and his Stanford team, we know that the world can, by the year 2030, power itself entirely with renewables. And thanks to the latest, alarming reports from the IPCC, we know that doing so is now an existential imperative.
This is the infrastructure we need to be rushing to build – not massive industrial projects that will lock us into further dependency on dangerous fossil fuels for decades into the future. Yes, these fuels are still needed during the transition, but more than enough conventionals are on hand to carry us through: extra-dirty extraction methods such as tar sands and fracking are simply not necessary. As Jacobson said in an interview just this week: "We don't need unconventional fuels to produce the infrastructure to convert to entirely clean and renewable wind, water and solar power for all purposes. We can rely on the existing infrastructure plus the new infrastructure [of renewable generation] to provide the energy for producing the rest of the clean infrastructure that we'll need ... Conventional oil and gas is much more than enough."
Given this, it's up to Europeans to turn their desire for emancipation from Russian gas into a demand for an accelerated transition to renewables. Such a transition – to which European nations are committed under the Kyoto protocol – can easily be sabotaged if the world market is flooded with cheap fossil fuels fracked from the US bedrock. And indeed Americans Against Fracking, which is leading the charge against the fast-tracking of LNG exports, is working closely with its European counterparts to prevent this from happening.
Responding to the threat of catastrophic warming is our most pressing energy imperative. And we simply can't afford to be distracted by the natural gas industry's latest crisis-fuelled marketing ploy.
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resident Obama on Friday continued to denounce voter apathy in a push to get more Democrats to the polls for midterm elections, and blasted Republicans for 
