Child Labor (Cranberry Bog) by Arthur Rothstein, 1939. Brooklyn Museum. Courtesy Wikipedia. Oligarchy is bad for children’s health All past civilizations protected children. It was self-evident that healthy children assured continuity, security and happiness.  However, machine-powered civilizations give the illusion corporations, oligarchies, and the government control everything. Children fade in this confused vision. The disproportional power of the few dehumanizes everything, including children.   Oligarchs control medicine, drugs, chemicals, farming and politics. If their products harm children, their lobbyists, scientists and politicians cover up the truth.   Delaney Clause  In the United States, this oligarchic control has flooded the country with thousands of chemicals, most of them untested and potentially harmful to life. This fact angered Democratic Congressman James Delaney from New York. He found it intolerable that A...

Monarch butterfly. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos. Occupy Health In May 2018, I met Susan Downs at an international conference at the University of Patras, Greece. She is a physician and a fearless documentary producer. Her motto is “Occupy Health.” The moment Downs realized I was the author of  Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA , she invited me for a brief taped interview. She also phoned her colleagues at the Silicon Valley Health Institute in Palo Alto, California, and the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, California, and convinced them to invite me for talks. They did.  On Thursday, November 15, 2018, I spoke at the  Silicon Valley Health Institute  and on Friday, November 16, 2018, I spoke at the Commonwealth Club . Stories from the past In both presentations I summarized my knowledge and experience. I worked on Capitol Hill for two years and for the US Environmental Protection Agency for twenty-five years. I su...

Husband and wife with their children in front of their house in rural Northeast Brazil. The wife is holding her little daughter born with a tiny brain possibly caused by the release of the genetically modified mosquitoes and the adding to drinking water of the teratogenic insecticide, pyriproxyfen. Courtesy of Future History Films. Agribusiness power The twentieth first century continues the toxic business as usual of the twentieth century. Agribusiness, part of the military-industrial-complex, is king. The new weapon is spraying the world with mostly badly tested chemical poisons. And the strategy is the control of the natural world and societies.  Few people know exactly what these chemical poisons do. Occasionally, they do kill insects and weeds. But they do much more, mostly harm. Scientists have revealed certain facts about those invisible effects. But agribusiness nullifies the significance of that knowledge. It does that by buying agricultural universities, the...

Aedes aegypti mosquito potentially carrying the Zika virus. Courtesy Wikipedia. Introduction Researchers discovered the  Zika virus  in the Zika forest of Uganda – in 1947. It is a virus not much different than the viruses causing dengue, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, West Nile fever, and St. Luis encephalitis. The Zika virus eventually spread throughout most of the world. Mosquitoes carry and spread the Zika virus. But for decades the Zika disease afflicting humans was free of brain deform or the shrinking of the infant’s brain  known as microcephaly (a Greek term meaning tiny brain-head).    The 2016 Olympics in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil I heard the name Zika for the first time in 2016 during the Summer Olympics in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Reporting on the  PBS Newshou r  offered warnings for those going to Brazil. Other large media went almost berserk. They were shouting that women near the Olympics site were giving...