Looks like Abercrombie & Fitch has another “situation” on deck, only this time it has nothing to do with getting the cast of Jersey Shore to doff its merch. The American retailer is among 14 global brands Greenpeace is calling out for allegedly releasing hormone-disrupting chemicals—specifically nonylphenol ethoxylates—into the environment. Used as surfactants in textile production, NPEs subsequently break down to form toxic nonphenol, an endocrine disruptor that builds up in the food chain and is pretty nasty even at minute levels…

“By failing to take action to eliminate these chemicals, global brands like Adidas are expecting customers to do their dirty laundry for them,” Li says. “Every time clothes containing these chemicals are washed, hazardous substances are released into waterways across the world.”

ecouterre, 23.08.11.

Paul Gilding, the Australian environmentalist and author of the book “The Great Disruption,” argues that these demonstrations are a sign that the current growth-obsessed capitalist system is reaching its financial and ecological limits. “I look at the world as an integrated system, so I don’t see these protests, or the debt crisis, or inequality, or the economy, or the climate going weird, in isolation — I see our system in the painful process of breaking down,” which is what he means by the Great Disruption, said Gilding. “Our system of economic growth, of ineffective democracy, of overloading planet earth — our system — is eating itself alive. Occupy Wall Street is like the kid in the fairy story saying what everyone knows but is afraid to say: the emperor has no clothes. The system is broken. ..”

friedman, nytimes, 12.10.11.

on my list.

Our system is broken at every level. More than 25 million Americans are unemployed. More than 50 million live without health insurance. And perhaps 100 million Americans are mired in poverty, using realistic measures. Yet the fat cats continue to get tax breaks and reap billions while politicians compete to turn the austerity screws on all of us.

At some point the number of people occupying Wall Street — whether that’s five thousand, ten thousand or fifty thousand — will force the powers that be to offer concessions. No one can say how many people it will take or even how things will change exactly, but there is a real potential for bypassing a corrupt political process and to begin realizing a society based on human needs not hedge fund profits.

At Liberty Park, the nerve center of the occupation, more than a thousand people gather every day to debate, discuss and organize what to do about our failed system that has allowed the 400 richest Americans at the top to amass more wealth than the 180 million Americans at the bottom…

indypendent.org, 28.09.11.