Credit danger at Bloomingdale's: 93.24% Interest!

You've got to be kidding: 93.24% interest? Can't be.

I blinked a few times, read the statement again and yes, that's what it said.

If I were to pay less than the full balance on my Bloomingdale's charge card, the store would add a finance charge of $2 on top of the 23.99 percent interest charge on any outstanding balance.

And if that happens, read the small print, "the actual ANNUAL PERCENTAGE RATE (their caps) charged on that account is 93.24%."

But wait. There's more, as I read in the really fine, gray print on the reverse of the bill.

There I learned that even if I pay this current bill in full by the due date, should I make another purchase at Bloomingdale's during the current billing period, a finance charge will appear on my next bill. And that will be based on the current balance (even though my full payment is in the mail!) plus the value of my purchase.

These terms, folks, should be illegal.

Just like all the other usurious interest rates charged on bank credit cards, and all the late fees, etc., etc. The U.S. Congress has been tinkering around the edges of credit card abuses instead of moving directly against these outrageous, confiscatory interest rates.

What cracks me up is that some of the big banks are now proudly advertising that you can opt out of overdraft protection on a credit card. Proud of what? That they've been forced by public outrage to make the "protection" optional? People were shocked to discover they had spent beyond their credit limit without realizing it and were then hit with such outrageous interest rates and charges that they amount to nothing less than theft!

So, Bloomingdale's, I won't be using your charge card ever again.

And the lesson to us all is to remember that the discount you get on the day you agree to take a department store charge card is a weapon that might just wreck your finances.

Just say no!

Quit Whining, Soft Drink Manufacturers. You've Been On the Government Dole for Too Long!

When you're out to buy a drink to go with take-out or fast food, the cheapest choice is always a Coke or a Pepsi or a Sprite. Plain bottled water usually costs more. A cup of coffee or a bottled tea costs more, and real juice, orange or apple for example, costs a lot more.

This fact should be at the heart of the growing debate about imposing a tax on sugared soft drinks rather than a false argument about individual freedom-of-choice or why Americans are getting so fat.

Advocates of the tax are focusing on the link between increased consumption of soft drinks and the rise in obesity. They say cheap soft drinks are helping to make us a nation of fattys, with all the bad health consequences that result from being obese. Placing a tax on soft drinks to raise the price, say proponents, will discourage consumption, and the money raised could be used to pay some of the cost of providing universal health care.

The opposition,led by the American Beverage Association, has framed its criticism as an objection to another form of government intrusion. It's recent quarter-page ad in The New York Times waved the flag of personal freedom:

• "Our goal is to help Americans better understand the relationship between calories consumed and calories burned--as it should be their choice what to eat or drink and not the government's."

Before you swallow that appeal to your rights, consider that the government has had both feet planted in our food supply for decades.

Every year, for example, $10 billion of our taxes are handed out in subsidies to American corn farmers, which has had the effect since the effect of keeping corn prices below the cost of growing it. Our taxes then provide an indirect subsidy to soft-drink manufacturers in saving them about $243 million a year on high-fructose corn syrup, the sweetener used in almost all our soft drinks, according to a Tufts University study. (That study is called "Sweetening the Pot," and can be found at a Tufts' website with a series of fascinating reports on how U.S. government agriculture policies are affecting our food choices.)

That taxpayer-provided discount on the corn syrup is one reason--although not a big one-- for the low price of soft drinks; the cost of the syrup represents only 3.5% of the total cost of making a soft drink, according to the Tufts researchers.

Meanwhile, farmers who raise healthy food--fruits and vegetables--get no tax subsidies at all. That puts the healthiest food at a price disadvantage against all the food products, besides soft drinks, that benefit from the subsidies. Beneficiaries include the giant agribusinesses that concoct all manner of processed foods as well as beef, pork and chicken producers who feed corn to huge numbers of animals in confined and often cruel conditions.

Furthermore, we have a long tradition of using tax policies to push behavior in one direction or another, and whether you favor the push depends, quite naturally, on your self-interest rather than your conservative or liberal ideology.

You don't hear builders, for example, objecting to the tax deduction for mortgage interest that indirectly lowers the price of owning a house and puts renting at a disadvantage. Nor did General Motors object when Congress gave tax breaks to purchasers of Hummers.

So, the idea of using a tax to push consumers away from soft drinks is consistent with past policies. Making the drinks more expensive still leaves people free to buy and drink them, but might push some toward healthier choices.

And, the money that would be raised by the tax could be used not only to help pay for universal health care but also to provide support for vegetable and fruit farmers and help build regional food production networks.

So, beverage makers should quit their whining. It's time they had to face the competition without the advantage of subsidies from taxpayers, although ending the corn, soybean and wheat subsidies has proven politically impossible. But if free enterprise and free choice are really the beverage-makers' goal, then they should be lobbying for an end to the subsidies just as vigorously as they are opposing a tax on soft drinks.

But I won't be holding my breath waiting for that to happen.

What do you think?

Healthy Froot Loops? Not.

When my sons were little and asked for cereals like Froot Loops, I used to say, "Honey, that's not real food. Real food doesn't come in those colors." I wasn't kidding. To get the rainbow of colors into this junk food, Kellogg has to add two artificial blue colorings, a red and a yellow.

Years of reporting on the harmful effects of artificial ingredients in food convinced me long ago that a healthy diet consists of food the way it comes from nature. If it takes lab scientists to create it, then I'm not interested in putting that so-called food in my body.

Now along comes a new food industry program meant to tap into Americans' increasing awareness that much of the food on supermarket shelves is just corn in different disguises, sweetened and salted to a fare-thee-well.

It's called the "Smart Choice Program," and its green check-mark label will soon be adorning Froot Loops and other foods that don't deserve that designation.

Message to consumers: ignore the label. Read the ingredients list.

The gall of Kellogg in using the label is to be expected. But supposedly respected nutritionists, like Eileen T. Kennedy, dean of Tufts University's school of nutrition science, gave their approval. The New York Times quoted her as saying that Froot Loops would be a better choice for a child's breakfast than a doughnut.

Wow. What an insult to every parent in America. Here are your choices, Mom & Dad. Serve those kids sugary fried food or sugary food made from corn, with fiber and a vitamin pill thrown in.

And, it's not only an insult to our health, it's an insult to our budgets at a time when everyone--except the bankers--are having to find ways to trim expenses.

If you take a look at the ingredients list you can see what a travesty this is. Sugar is listed as the first ingredient and actually accounts for 41% of the weight of the cereal. It amounts to 3 teaspoons of sugar, as much as in many cookies.

And the price for this combo of cheap corn, cheap fiber, and the equivalent of one vitamin pill? $6 for a 19-ounce box!

Here are some ideas of healthy breakfasts that will cost less or certainly no more. Some can be prepared the night before and grabbed right out of the fridge, others may take a few minutes to prepare and eat at home:

• A hard-boiled egg and a banana
• A peanut butter and jelly sandwich
• Cinnamon toast: slices of whole wheat bread and butter with a sprinkle of cinnamon and sugar
• A bowl of Quaker Quick Oatmeal (costs a shy more than $2 for an 18-ounce package) sprinkled with raisins. You can microwave it in the time it takes to find your keys.
  
• A smoothie: milk and whatever fruit is on hand whipped in the blender.
  

Here's my bottom line: If Froot Loops were actually healthy, the name of this product wouldn't be a deliberate misspelling of "fruit." Had they spelled it right, the name itself would be a fraud. Just like the new "Smart Choice" label.

The Truth--and Myths--About Home Births

When I told my women friends that my older son's first baby--and my first grandchild--would be born at home, most of them looked shocked. They immediately voiced fears, saying that they thought it was much safer to have the baby in a hospital because things can go wrong, and in that case, an operating room would be immediately accessible.

It didn't change their minds when I told them that this was a low-risk pregnancy, that my son's girlfriend had been healthy throughout, and that everything showed that the baby--a boy--was doing well. Nor were their minds changed when I said she would have a birth assistant (a certified doula) to help her through the labor, and then a highly experienced midwife to deliver him.

Well, he was born a week ago today, and came into the world with eyes open wide, pink and healthy and calm.

I know exactly how he looked because I saw him within moments of his birth. All four of his grandparents, his uncle and aunt, were there at home waiting. We suffered along with Nicole as we listened to her cry and yell during the last throes of childbirth. But once we heard his cry, we ran upstairs, applauded, cried, hugged and poured champagne. I'll never forget that morning.

Baby Henry began nursing like a champ immediately, and has been calm and content ever since. When he wakes up to nurse, his eyelids flutter and he frowns as if all that light is still a shock to him.

And then I remember the hospital nurseries with fluorescent lights glaring, 24 hours a day. No wonder the nurseries are usually ringing with the howls of the newborns!

So the outcome for my grandson was perfect. The midwives--a second one came at the end to help--called it a beautiful birth. They should know. For one of them it was the 251st. birth she had attended.

The birth assistant, by the way, was with Nicole throughout her labor, coaching her on changing positions, massaging her, using aroma therapy, accupressure, a birth chair, etc. to help her.

But what of my friends' fears? Justified or not?

Not.

Here's the evidence, culled from the best and most recent study of home births. It comes from a study of 7,600 births in the U.S. and Canada, published in the British Medical Journal in 2005, that were planned to occur at home with certified midwives attending. All of the births studied were low-risk, meaning that the mothers were healthy, with no chronic health problems, and that all pre-birth exams showed the babies in good health as well. The outcomes of the home births were compared to low-risk births that occurred in hospitals.

• Infant mortality was 1.7 per 1,000 births, a rate as low as occurs in hospitals with low-risk births.
• Medical interventions occurred at less than half the rate as in hospitals. For example, only 2.1% of the women at home suffered an episiotomy, compared to 33%--yes, one in three--in the hospital. Only 3.7% of the women at home ended up delivering by caesarean section, compared to 19% in the hospital.
• None of the mothers died. Some of the women--12%--were transferred to a hospital when problems developed. If a woman is within 20 minutes of a hospital, she is likely to be under care in an operating room as quickly as a woman who labors in the hospital. That's because it takes some time to mobilize the equipment and staff needed, and that mobilization can get started just as quickly with a phone call from home.
  

The study concluded: "Planned home birth for low risk women in North America using certified professional midwives was associated with lower rates of medical intervention but similar (infant)...mortality to that of low risk hospital births in the United States."

The bonus, of course, in this era of soaring health costs, is that a home birth is far less expensive than one that takes place in a hospital.

Meanwhile, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists continues to oppose home births while infant and maternal mortality rates for the U.S. continue to be far worse than those in other western countries where medical interventions, like cesaereans, occur far less often.

Which leads me to believe that opposition to home births is rooted in the desire of the medical establishment to protect their income stream, and not out of concern about the safety of women and babies.

Yet, American women are so frightened of childbirth at home that less than 1% choose to stay out of the hospital. A pity. For them, their families and babies.##

Good News about Global Warming: Kleenex To Be Made From Sustainable Wood

With good news about global warming in short supply, it's heartening to learn that Kimberly-Clarke has agreed to stop destroying forests to make Kleenex and its other disposable paper products.

This announcement came to me from Greenpeace which has been waging a long campaign they dubbed "Kleercut" to bring public pressure to bear against the manufacturer. Forests are major absorbers of carbon dioxide, and it's imperative that we harvest timber only in ways that sustain them. The success of Greenpeace reinforces my feeling that despite the continuing obstacles and nay-sayers, we now have a critical mass of people in the U.S. who understand the urgency of global warming.

Most people who know me would never call me Pollyanna, but it certainly is true that my view is affected by the people I work with and socialize with, my chosen people, if you will. And my people, along with millions like us in the U.S. and around the world, are engaged in all manner of personal life-style changes to live more gently on the earth, as well as being deeply involved in local, national and global efforts to preserve our beautiful green planet.

The changes range from people picking up after their dogs (helping to prevent bacterial contamination of the bays around here) to doing veggie barbecues instead of grilling that predictable steak (thereby helping to cut carbon dioxide emissions that come from raising so many cattle). All these changes come out of a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of all life.

In the case of Kleenex, good people, mobilized through Greenpeace and other organizations like the National Resources Defense Council, have brought public opinion to bear on Kimberly-Clarke, resulting in this announcement from Greenpeace:

"Kimberly-Clark has set a goal of obtaining 100 percent of the wood fiber for its products — including its flagship brand, Kleenex — from environmentally responsible sources. By the end of 2011, the company will no longer use any pulp from the Boreal Forest unless it is Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified. The policy also prevents the company from cutting endangered forests, and increases the company’s use of FSC-certified pulp and recycled fiber globally. (The statement continues:)

With this announcement, Kimberly-Clark, the largest tissue company in the world, becomes a sustainability leader. Now it’s time for Georgia-Pacific and Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark’s main competitors, to create their own policies to protect ancient forests."

Kudos to Kimberly-Clark!

But for a minimum of 18 months, if they are as good as their word, Kleenex and other Kimberly-Clark products may still be made from unsustainable cutting of the boreal forests, a term which refers to the evergreen forests of the northern hemisphere that lie between the tundra and the forests of trees that lose their leaves in winter.

Until then, and maybe after, I'll continue to buy Marcal toilet paper and tissues because they've been using only recycled paper for years to make their products . (For a list of sustainably produced paper products, go to the NRDC's web site.)

Of course, my optimism about the future won't stop me from writing letters to President Obama, calling members of Congress, and using my buying power to prod manufacturers to see the world green. But I do take heart from the Greenpeace success.

If we don't let ourselves be discouraged, we can pass on a beautiful world to our children and generations beyond.

Alert: Chilean Farmed Salmon Tainted with Dangerous Antibiotic

Salmon that is farmed in Chile and widely sold in the U.S. is being fed hundreds of thousands of pounds of an antibiotic that is so dangerous that its use is prohibited in food producing animals--that includes fish--by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The antibiotic, chloramphenicol, is linked to a lethal human blood disorder and is a suspected cause of cancer. There is no known safe dose; It is only used to treat serious human infections.

The situation shows, once again, how our food inspection system is so inadequate. The FDA should be inspecting Chilean salmon and stopping shipments from entering the U.S. if they contain any trace of the antibiotic.

But according to Public Citizen the FDA inspects only 1 to 2% of all seafood entering the U.S.

What a pickle, to mix metaphors: I not only love the taste of salmon, but I know it's healthy for my heart. And farmed salmon is a whole lot cheaper than wild salmon.

But if you put this in context, and think about the fact that the federal government allows other kinds of antibiotics to be fed routinely to cattle whose flesh is supposedly safe, this chloramphenicol has to be so dangerous that we should do our best to avoid it.

Word about Chilean salmon came today in a New York Times article that reported that Chile used 718,000 pounds of antibiotics last year to keep farmed salmon from dying from infections; about one-third were from the most dangerous family of antibiotics, quinolones. Farmed ocean fish are vulnerable to infection because they are grown in pens that can be unsanitary and overcrowded.

By comparison, Norway used only 2,075 pounds last year for its farmed salmon. This info became public because the environmental group, Oceana, requested the information.

Chile is the biggest supplier of salmon to the U.S., and the fish are sold by giant retailers including Wal-Mart and Safeway who, according to the Times, have reduced their purchases from the company because of health concerns.

Indirectly, of course, that means they are still selling at least some Chilean salmon.

What's a health-conscious consumer to do?

This is truly a case of buyer beware. Supermarkets, as I've noted here before, are required to label their seafood as wild or farmed and with country of origin. Your local fish monger is not covered by the law, but be sure to ask if the information is not visible.

So, to the best of your ability, buy only wild Pacific salmon, and stay within your budget by eating less. Norwegian salmon farmers rely much less on antibiotics, so that is a healthier choice. Or, try farmed U.S. trout instead for a change, which is in the same family as salmon. Environmentalists say that fish like trout that are farmed inland, rather than in the ocean, are safe to eat.

"Traitor Joe's" Takes Heat for Sales of Endangered Fish

Traitor Joe's: That's the nickname Greenpeace has pasted on Trader Joe's because the stores sell red-list fish: fish caught in ways that harm ocean habitats or other creatures or whose numbers are so low they may become extinct.

Greenpeace decided to put on the pressure because the private owners behind the supermarket chain have not been willing to even disclose how and where they get their seafood. (According to a statement from Trader Joe's, company policy is never to participate in surveys.) So now you can go to a "Traitor Joe" website and send the chain a singing fish telegram or take other action in protest.

Greenpeace recently updated the scorecards that rate markets on their seafood practices, and Trader Joe's got an F.

That's because, says Greenpeace:

• Trader Joe's has no sustainable seafood policy
• Isn't working with fishing industry groups or others trying to promote sustainable practices
• Doesn't label its products so consumers can understand what they're buying
• And claims in its ads that it is buying in a sustainable fashion, even though it's selling orange roughy and other species whose survival is in question. (See my March blog about for more info on sustainable fish.)

A statement from Jon Basalone, Executive Vice President Marketing & Merchandising for Trader Joe's, says that "Hearing recent feedback, our goal is to offer seafood options that fit customer needs ranging from food safety and taste to concern over the environment." It goes on to say that the company will take into account in its purchasing decisions the fish recommendations of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The company further denies that it actually sells some of the "red-list" species that Greenpeace claims it does, although, in a backhanded attempt to say it is really doing a better job than its competitors, it admits to selling some : "Trader Joe's sells fewer items on that 'Red List' than the #1 ranked grocery retailer in their report." Nothing to be proud of, folks.

And if true, maybe Trader Joe's would have spared itself this public relations problem if it had cooperated with Greenpeace in the first place.

In the meantime, those of us who shop at Trader Joe's should take the chain at its word that it listens to its customers and speak up about the seafood on sale. Ditto for its competitors. Remember, as you shop, that federal law now requires supermarkets to label all seafood with its place of origin and method of catch. If you don't see that information, let the store manager know you've noticed and expect better of the store.

In today's world of growing scarcity, unfortunately, we now need to know which species have been over-fished and how others are caught. Otherwise, we'll come to the point where the fish we love to eat will have been loved out of existence. You can get educated quickly at the Monterey Bay Aquarium website.##