SNOPES FACT CHECK: Did a Russian Asbestos Company Put Trump’s Face on Their Product?
A Russian asbestos company placed a seal with the face of President Donald Trump on their product with the note “Approved by Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States.”
RATING
TRUE
ORIGIN
On 25 June 2018, a Russian mining company named Uralasbest, which is one of the world’s largest producers of asbestos, posted a message of support for President Trump on their official Facebook and VK (a Russian version of Facebook) pages. The post included photographs of packed asbestos material adorned with the face of Trump and the text “Approved by Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States.”
More Asbestos! More Asbestos! More Asbestos! – Rolling Stone
The new evaluation framework is a nifty way for the EPA to circumvent an Obama-era law requiring the EPA to evaluate hundreds of potentially dangerous chemicals. Asbestos is among the first batch of 10 chemicals the EPA will examine, and also one of the most blatantly dangerous to public health. Its use is banned in over 60 countries, and though it is only heavily restricted in the United States, asbestos is no longer used in construction because of the health risks it poses. Direct or indirect exposure to the carcinogen can cause lung cancer and mesothelioma, and it has been found to kill 40,000 Americans annually. The World Health Organization wrote that “all types of asbestos cause lung cancer, mesothelioma, cancer of the larynx and ovary, and asbestosis.”
As an amoral New York City real estate developer, Trump has long supported the use of asbestos.
In his 1997 book, The Art of the Comeback, Trump argued that the association of the chemical with health risks was part of a mob-created conspiracy. “I believe that the movement against asbestos was led by the mob, because it was often mob-related companies that would do the asbestos removal. Great pressure was put on politicians, and as usual, the politicians relented,” he wrote.
The EPA announced last Friday that it would evaluate and require approval for new uses of asbestos but would not evaluate the health risks of asbestos already in the environment. “The end result will be a seriously inadequate risk evaluation that fails to address major contributors to the heavy and growing toll of asbestos mortality and disease in the United States,” said Linda Reinstein, president of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization in a statement.
Reinstein, whose husband developed Mesothelioma and passed away in 2006, told Newsweek that she met with Nancy Beck, deputy assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, on two occasions along with representatives from the AFL-CIO and the International Association of Fire Fighters. The group explained the hazards of legacy asbestos and presented over 100 studies confirming that low-dose asbestos exposure caused disease, but were shut down by Beck, she said. Beck was previously a senior director at the American Chemistry Council, a lobbyist group that represents Dow Chemical, DuPont, Monsanto and ExxonMobil Chemical.
Overseas, the United States is engaged in real wars in which bombs are dropped, missiles are launched, and people (generally not Americans) are killed, wounded, uprooted, and displaced. Yet here at home, there’s nothing real about those wars. Here, it’s phony war all the way. In the last 17 years of “forever war,” this nation hasn’t for one second been mobilized. Taxes are being cut instead of raised. Wartime rationing is a faint memory from the World War II era. No one is being required to sacrifice a thing.
Now, ask yourself a simple question: What sort of war requires no sacrifice? What sort of war requires that almost no one in the country waging it take the slightest notice of it?
“When it comes to its wars, the government treats the people like mushrooms, keeping them in the dark and feeding them bullshit.”
America’s conflicts in distant lands rumble on, even as individual attacks flash like lightning in our news feeds. “Shock and awe” campaigns in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, initially celebrated as decisive and game changing, ultimately led nowhere. Various “surges” produced much sound and fury, but missions were left decidedly unaccomplished. More recent strikes by the Trump administration against a Syrian air base or the first use of the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal, the MOAB super-bomb, in Afghanistan flared brightly, only to fizzle even more quickly. These versions of the German blitzkrieg-style attacks of World War II have been lightning assaults that promised much but in the end delivered little. As these flashes of violence send America’s enemies of the moment (and nearby civilians) to early graves, the homeland (that’s us) slumbers. Sounds of war, if heard at all, come from TV or video screens or Hollywood films in local multiplexes.
I am antiwar basically because there is NO shared experience….about 1% of the population fights these wars ….what kind of war asks for no sacrifice?
War taxes, like conscription, used to be synonymous with war. In addition to generating revenue, taxes also created an accountability linkage between leaders and their conduct of war. As Charles Tilly put it in his observations on fiscal sociology, taxation “constitutes the largest intervention of governments in their subjects’ private life.” Centuries earlier, Adam Smith recognized this when he worried that leaders might sidestep war taxes — which he favored as an equitable and financially sound way to finance wars — out of concern for “offending the people, who, by so great and so sudden an increase of taxes, would soon be disgusted with the war.” It was exactly that possibility of disgust, however, that provided accountability. If leaders of democratic political systems had to…
You are not obligated to be a busy bee of possessions. You don’t possess your life anyway. There is no need to store your life. You may well not need a big pantry to fill. You don’t need more closets. What are you doing with all these hangers and shoes that get in your way.
Collect the giving of love. Wealth comes not from the items you keep. Abandon the old ways. Acclaim new. Possessions amount to accumulated upkeep.
Clear your space and clear your life. You are not here to squeeze whatever you can into your life. Make room for life. New life comes not from accumulation but from room to grow. Gain space. This is how you expand your heart and bring more essence of life into your life. Leave room for air to flow. Accumulating wastes time and space even as time and space do not exist..
When a nation is focusing on excessive amounts of fear, it does things that compromise democracy, eliminate freedoms and do things that are counter to peaceful, harmonious co-existence. The NDAA is an example of the kinds of laws that are passed when a nation is ruled by fear instead of by love
NS (Nuclear Ship) Savannah had to be backed into berths at harbors to keep the nuclear reactor ‘away from shore’. The Atoms For Peace nuclear ship building program proved one thing; that nuclear ships are VERY expensive and dangerous. Disastrous things can happen if things go wrong with a ship that is powered by nuclear energy. They all pose a terror risk, whether out on the ocean, or tied up near a city. No one in their right mind wants anything to do with or have it in their city, just in case something really bad goes wrong.
MOSCOW — In the aptly named city of Asbest, in the Ural Mountains 900 miles (1500 km) northeast of Moscow, the dominance of Russia’s asbestos industry — the world’s largest — is on clear display. Just east of the city is the massive open-pit Uralasbest mine. At seven miles (11 km) long and 1-½ miles (2.5 km) wide, it is nearly half the size of Manhattan — and more than a thousand feet (300 meters) deep. Nearly half a million metric tons of asbestos are gouged from the mine each year.
Seventy thousand people live in Asbest, once known as “the dying city” for its extraordinary rates of lung cancer and other asbestos-related diseases. But Uralasbest does not appear to have suffered any loss of status. It and other Russian asbestos producers operate with the swagger that comes from unwavering government support. Controversy bypasses them, perhaps in no small measure because Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is their ally. Nothing, it seems, is allowed to interfere with an industry that employs 400,000 people and, along with its counterpart in neighboring Kazakhstan, generates at least $800 million a year.
The U.S. dollar, now at its highest level in 13 months, is being driven higher by the Fed’s interest rate increases and its sell-off of government securities.
“Markets are waking up to the reality that there will be consequences to the rise in interest rates,” said economist Jacob Funk Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It’s part of the transition away from the zero-rate environment we’ve had where money has been really, really cheap.”
Global debt loads have exploded since the Great Recession. From $97 trillion in 2007, total household, corporate and government debt grew to $169 trillion last year, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.
Got huge debt bubbles? When will they go ‘pop’? Watch for an economic down turn as anti inflation higher interest rates take hold. As earnings and profits decline due to slow down, countries and corporations will be unable to repay these huge debts and the bubbles will start popping.
