Palm Beach County, Florida – Journalists at the DC Post were looking through message boards that are frequented by law enforcement officers, when they found a post where one officer was causally talking about planting evidence on “mouthy drivers” and “street lawyers.”
The Post then contacted the officer and conducted an anonymous interview with him where he revealed his disturbing perspective.
The officer revealed the illegal and unethical actions that he is proud of taking on the job. The DC Post has also said that they have verified the officer’s position with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, and they have verified many of the claims that he has made.
The original post was titled “Tricks of the trade – let’s exchange!” and featured the following message:
“I have a method for getting people off the street that should not be there. Mouthy drivers, street lawyers, assholes and just anyone else trying to make my job difficult. Under my floor mat, I keep a small plastic dime baggie with Cocaine in residue. Since it’s just residue, if it is ever found during a search of my car like during an inspection, it’s easy enough to explain. It must have stuck to my foot while walking through San Castle. Anyways, no one’s going to question an empty baggie. The residue is the key because you can fully charge some asshole with possession of cocaine, heroin, or whatever just with the residue. How to get it done? “I asked Mr. DOE for his identification. And he pulled out his wallet, I observed a small plastic baggie fall out of his pocket…” You get the idea. easy, right? Best part is, those baggies can be found lots of places so you can always be ready. Don’t forget to wipe the baggie on the person’s skin after you arrest them because you want their DNA on the bag if they say you planted it or fight it in court.”
Other officers on the board responded by sharing similar stories about how they falsely arrest people who don’t adequately bow to their authority.
Later in the interview, when the officer was asked if planting evidence happened regularly within his department, he responded by saying,
“Um, yes it does, on a regular basis. Probably every day in my shift. I work nights on the Road Patrol in a rough, um, mostly black neighborhood. Planting evidence and lying in your reports are just part of the game.
Then straight from the horses mouth, the officer said that this crooked behavior was actually encouraged by the drug war. Continuing his discussion about planting evidence, the officer said,
“Yes, all the time. It is something I see a lot of, whether it was from deputies, supervisors or undercovers and even investigators. It’s almost like you have no emotion with it, that they attach the bodies to it, they’re going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway; nothing is going to happen to them anyway. One of the consequences of the war on drugs is that police officers are pressured to make large numbers of arrests, and it’s easy for some of the less honest cops to plant evidence on innocent people. The drug war inevitably leads to crooked policing — and quotas further incentivize such practices. It doesn’t help that your higherups all did the same thing when they were on the road. It’s like a neverending cycle. Like how molested children accept that as okay behavior and begin molesting children themselves.”
When asked if he would get in trouble with the police department for framing people, the officer laughed and said that this type of behavior was actually encouraged.
“Our top boss, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, supports this behavior and has for his entire career. As with anything, it depends on who you know in our agency. Last year, we had three deputies on the TAC unit, Kevin Drummond and Jarrod Foster, get caught falsifying information for a warrant. They got a pat on the back for a job well done. Just recently, we had a deputy, I think his name was Booth. He was caught completely lying on a car crash. Back a few more years, our Sheriff was involved a massive coverup of the death of two black deputies. He hid the report for years. This is only the beginning. The Sheriff has been involved in falsification of documents and his underling, Chief Deputy Michael Gauger, has been personally involved in an overtime scandal to steal money from the Sheriff’s Office. Does our Sheriff know about this behavior? Of course he does. We have even had a judge outright accuse my agency of committing fraud upon the court in a public hearing. She was one of the ones who saw through all the lying and covering up our department does to get away with the internal crime committed by deputies on a regular basis,” he said.
Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office is no special police department, and this officer is not just a bad apple. The problems that are discussed in this interview are systematic, and they occur in every town across the country.
Just this week, we exposed a police department in Missouri whose officers were forced to make arrests or faced losing their job. This leads to otherwise innocent people being charged on a regular basis.
Also this week, the Free Thought Project conducted a report to show what happens to cops who try to expose this corruption. Several officers within the Chicago police department were threatened with “going home in a casket” for exposing this same vile practice within their ranks. via FreeThoughtProject
Statistically speaking, Americans should be more fearful of the local cops than “terrorists.”
Though Americans commonly believe law enforcement’s role in society is to protect them and ensure peace and stability within the community, the sad reality is that police departments are often more focused on enforcing laws, making arrests and issuing citations. As a result of this as well as an increase in militarized policing techniques, Americans are eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist, estimates a Washington’s Blog report based on official statistical data.
Though the U.S. government does not have a database collecting information about the total number of police involved shootings each year, it’s estimated that between 500 and 1,000 Americans are killed by police officers each year. Since 9/11, about 5,000 Americans have been killed by U.S. police officers, which is almost equivalent to the number of U.S. soldiers who have been killed in the line of duty in Iraq.
Because individual police departments are not required to submit information regarding the use of deadly force by its officers, some bloggers have taken it upon themselves to aggregate that data. Wikipedia also has a list of “justifiable homicides” in the U.S., which was created by documenting publicized deaths.
Mike Prysner, one of the local directors of the Los Angeles chapter for ANSWER — an advocacy group that asks the public to Act Now to Stop War and End Racism — told Mint Press Newsearlier this year that the “epidemic” of police harassment and violence is a nationwide issue.
He said groups like ANSWER are trying to hold officers accountable for abuse of power. “[Police brutality] has been an issue for a very long time,” Prysner said, explaining that in May, 13 people were killed in Southern California by police.
As Mint Press News previously reported, each year there are thousands of claims of police misconduct. According to the CATO Institute’s National Police Misconduct Reporting Project, in 2010 there were 4,861 unique reports of police misconduct involving 6,613 sworn officers and 6,826 alleged victims.
Most of those allegations of police brutality involved officers who punched or hit victims with batons, but about one-quarter of the reported cases involved firearms or stun guns.
Racist policing
A big element in the police killings, Prysner says, is racism. “A big majority of those killed are Latinos and Black people,” while the police officers are mostly White, he said. “It’s a badge of honor to shoot gang members so [the police] go out and shoot people who look like gang members,” Prysner argued, giving the example of 34-year-old Rigoberto Arceo, who was killed by police on May 11.
According to a report from the Los Angeles Times, Arceo, who was a biomedical technician at St. Francis Medical Center, was shot and killed after getting out of his sister’s van. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department says Arceo “advanced on the deputy and attempted to take the deputy’s gun.” However, Arceo’s sister and 53-year-old Armando Garcia — who was barbecuing in his yard when the incident happened — say that Arceo had his hands above his head the entire time.
Prysner is not alone in his assertion that race is a major factor in officer-related violence. This past May, astudy from the the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, an anti-racist activist organization, found that police officers, security guards or self-appointed vigilantes killed at least 313 Black people in 2012 — meaning one Black person was killed in the U.S. by law enforcement roughly every 28 hours.
Prysner said the relationship between police departments and community members needs to change and that when police shoot an unarmed person with their arms in the air over their head, the officer should be punished.
Culture of misconduct
“You cannot have a police force that is investigating and punishing itself,” Prysner said, adding that taxpayer money should be invested into the community instead of given to police to buy more guns, assault rifles and body armor.
Dissatisfied with police departments’ internal review policies, some citizens have formed volunteer police watch groups to prevent the so-called “Blue Code of Silence” effect and encourage police officers to speak out against misconduct occurring within their department.
As Mint Press News previously reported, a report released earlier this year found that of the 439 cases of police misconduct that then had been brought before the Minneapolis’s year-old misconduct review board, not one of the police officers involved has been disciplined.
Although the city of Minneapolis spent $14 million in payouts for alleged police misconduct between 2006 and 2012, despite the fact that the Minneapolis Police Department often concluded that the officers involved in those cases did nothing wrong.
Other departments have begun banning equipment such as Tasers, but those decisions were likely more about protecting the individual departments from lawsuits than ensuring that officers are not equipped with weapons that cause serious and sometimes fatal injuries when used.
To ensure officers are properly educated on how to use their weapons and are aware of police ethics, conflict resolution and varying cultures within a community, police departments have historically heldtraining programs for all officers. But due to tighter budgets and a shift in priorities, many departments have not provided the proper continuing education training programs for their officers.
Charles Ramsey, president of both the Major Cities Chiefs Association and the Police Executive Research Forum, called that a big mistake, explaining that it is essential officers are trained and prepared for high-stress situations:
“Not everybody is going to be able to make those kinds of good decisions under pressure, but I do think that the more reality-based training that we provide, the more we put people in stressful situations to make them respond and make them react.”
GI Joe replaces Carl Winslow
In order to help local police officers protect themselves while fighting the largely unsuccessful War on Drugs, the federal government passed legislation in 1994 allowing the Pentagon to donate surplus military equipment from the Cold War to local police departments. Meaning that “weaponry designed for use on a foreign battlefield has been handed over for use on American streets … against American citizens.”
So while the U.S. military fights the War on Terror abroad, local police departments are fighting another war at home with some of the same equipment as U.S. troops, and protocol that largely favors officers in such tactics as no-knock raids.
Radley Balko, author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” wrote in the Wall Street Journal in August:
“Since the 1960s, in response to a range of perceived threats, law-enforcement agencies across the U.S., at every level of government, have been blurring the line between police officer and soldier.
“Driven by martial rhetoric and the availability of military-style equipment—from bayonets and M-16 rifles to armored personnel carriers—American police forces have often adopted a mind-set previously reserved for the battlefield. The war on drugs and, more recently, post-9/11 antiterrorism efforts have created a new figure on the U.S. scene: the warrior cop—armed to the teeth, ready to deal harshly with targeted wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar American liberties.”
As Mint Press News previously reported, statistics from an FBI report released in September reveal that a person is arrested on marijuana-related charges in the U.S. every 48 seconds, on average — most were for simple possession charges.
According to the FBI’s report, there were more arrests for marijuana possession than for the violent crimes of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault — 658,231 compared with 521,196 arrests.
While groups that advocate against police brutality recognize and believe that law enforcement officials should be protected while on duty, many say that local police officers do not need to wear body armor, Kevlar helmets and tactical equipment vests — all while carrying assault weapons.
“We want the police to keep up with the latest technology. That’s critical,” American Civil Liberties Union senior counsel Kara Dansky said. “But policing should be about protection, not combat.”
According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, there are more than 900,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the United States. In 2012, 120 officers were killed in the line of duty. The deadliest day in law enforcement history was reportedly Sept. 11, 2001, when 72 officers were killed.
Despite far fewer officers dying in the line of duty compared with American citizens, police departments are not only increasing their use of protective and highly volatile gear, but are increasingly setting aside a portion of their budget to invest in new technology such as drones, night vision goggles, remote robots, surveillance cameras, license plate readers and armored vehicles that amount to unarmed tanks.
Though some officers are on board with the increased militarization and attend conferences such as the annual Urban Shield event, others have expressed concern with the direction the profession is heading.
For example, former Arizona police officer Jon W. McBride said police concerns about being “outgunned” were likely a “self-fulfilling prophecy.” He added that “if not expressly prohibited, police managers will continually push the arms race,” because “their professional literature is predominately [sic] based on the acquiring and use of newer weapons and more aggressive techniques to physically overwhelm the public. In many cases, however, this is the opposite of smart policing.”
“Coupled with the paramilitary design of the police bureaucracy itself, the police give in to what is already a serious problem in the ranks: the belief that the increasing use of power against a citizen is always justified no matter the violation. The police don’t understand that in many instances they are the cause of the escalation and bear more responsibility during an adverse outcome.
“The suspects I encountered as a former police officer and federal agent in nearly all cases granted permission for me to search their property when asked, often despite unconcealed contraband. Now, instead of making a simple request of a violator, many in law enforcement seem to take a more difficult and confrontational path, fearing personal risk. In many circumstances they inflame the citizens they are engaging, thereby needlessly putting themselves in real and increased jeopardy.”
Another former police officer who wished to remain anonymous agreed with McBride and told Balko,
“American policing really needs to return to a more traditional role of cops keeping the peace; getting out of police cars, talking to people, and not being prone to overreaction with the use of firearms, tasers, or pepper spray. … Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been in more than my share tussles and certainly appreciate the dangers of police work, but as Joseph Wambaugh famously said, the real danger is psychological, not physical.”
Release Us – a short film on police brutality by Charles Shaw
Hmm. Hold up. So if we go by this Wikipedia entry..
“Founded as an independent company in 1982, RSA Security, Inc. was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2006 for US$ 2.1 billion and operates as a division within EMC.[5]”
People need to understand, this means RSA took around 2% of what they’d make in one year. FOR A BACK-DOOR OMG. Does this not sound more like a tax, than a payment (never mind a bribe!)? How much would you care about an extra 2% per year? Exactly. Thats all I got. Someone else needs to close that gap. -Max
What’s an encryption backdoor cost? When you’re the NSA, apparently the fee is $10 million.
Intentional flaws created by the National Security Agency in RSA’s encryption tokens werediscovered in September, thanks to documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden. It has now been revealed that RSA was paid $10 million by the NSA to implement those backdoors, according to a new report in Reuters.
Two people familiar with RSA’s BSafe software told Reuters that the company had received the money in exchange for making the NSA’s cryptographic formula as the default for encrypted key generation in BSafe.
“Now we know that RSA was bribed,” said security expert Bruce Schneier, who has been involved in the Snowden document analysis. “I sure as hell wouldn’t trust them. And then they made the statement that they put customer security first,” he said.
RSA, now owned by computer storage firm EMC Corp, has a long history of entanglement with the government. In the 1990s, the company was instrumental in stopping a government plan to include a chip in computers that would’ve allowed the government to spy on people.
The new revelation is important, Schneier said, because it confirms more suspected tactics that the NSA employs.
“You think they only bribed one company in the history of their operations? What’s at play here is that we don’t know who’s involved,” he said.
Other companies that build widely-used encryption apparatus include Symantec, McAfee, and Microsoft. “You have no idea who else was bribed, so you don’t know who else you can trust,” Schneier said.
RSA did not return a request for comment, and did not comment for the Reuters story.
Long time radio newsman/commentator Paul Harvey created the original of this homily around 1965. It was updated as the years went by and therefore versions of it vary over time. This one is probably from about 1996. It is a warning to America about its own decay.
When it comes to corruption in Afghanistan, the time may be now for the United States to look in the mirror and see what lessons can be learned from contracting out parts of that war.
On Sept. 30, Afghan President Hamid Karzai told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that the corruption wracking his government and its people has been at a level “not ever before seen in Afghanistan.”
In the 1980s, when the Soviets ran the country, the government was “not even 5 percent as corrupt,” Karzai said.
“ The Soviets didn’t give contracts to the relatives, brothers and the kin of the influential and high ups,” he said. “The Americans did, and they continue to do, but we get blamed for it.”
It’s easy to disregard what Karzai told CBS. He has often blamed the United States and its allies for corrupting his country and certainly will again. And his complaint about U.S. contracts going to relatives of influential Afghans rings hollow when you go down the list that includes many members of his own family as well as cabinet ministers.
But the record shows Karzai has a point with which others agree.
“It is time that we as Americans — in government, in the media, and as analysts and academics — took a hard look at the causes of corruption in Afghanistan. The fact is that we are at least as much to blame for what has happened as the Afghans, and we have been grindingly slow to either admit our efforts or correct them.”
That was written in September 2010 by Anthony H. Cordesman, national security expert and a former Reagan Pentagon official, in a Center for Strategic and International Studies report, “How America Corrupted Afghanistan.”
Cordesman, who spent a good deal of time in Afghanistan, wrote: “We can probably do more to fight the worst causes of Afghan corruption by changing our own actions than by any amount of effort to encourage Afghan anti-corruption drives.”
He particularly criticized the military contracting process, saying, “The bulk of the money actually spent inside Afghanistan went through poorly supervised military contracts and through aid projects where the emphasis was speed, projected starts, and measuring progress in terms of spending rather than results.”
That process led to what Karzai is complaining about now — as Cordesman did two years ago. “U.S. and foreign contractors poured money into a limited number of Afghan powerbrokers who set up companies that were corrupt and did not perform. . . . In many cases, they also paid off insurgents to let them operate,” Cordesman wrote.
He suggested that the government “tightly control the influx of outside money, limit its flow to honest and capable Afghans at every level of government, and provide the transparency to allow Afghans to see how honestly and effectively the money is used.”
I thought of the 2010 Cordesman report last week after reading an interim report sent to Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and top Pentagon officers associated with Afghanistan. The report criticized how the U.S. military is preparing to turn over to the Afghan National Army the buying of petroleum, oil and lubricants that is estimated next year to involve $343 million in U.S taxpayer funds and another $123 million from international donors.
The funding is based on an estimate of the Afghan National Army’s needs. However, the report, by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), found that the program after transition will be “vulnerable to theft and waste” because the United States and its allies do not have a “valid method for estimating [Afghan army] fuel needs,” nor records on its past “fuel purchases, deliveries and consumption.”
Corruption was evident in the past when the United States supervised the buying and delivery of fuel in Afghanistan. John F. Sopko, the special inspector general, told a House Oversight subcommittee on Sept. 13 that fuel “is a valuable commodity that is vulnerable to theft.”
Just last month, an Army sergeant pleaded guilty to approving fake documents that allowed truckers to steal $1.5 million of fuel from a forward operating base in 2010. In August, a former Army sergeant pleaded guilty to soliciting $400,000 in a similar plot that involved stealing $1.4 million of fuel in 2010 from another forward operating base.
In June, two Army servicemen pleaded guilty in a plot to steal jet fuel from a base and getting $6,000 for clandestinely filling 3,000-gallon trucks owned by an Afghan contractor.
Sopko told the House panel that his office has 20 active criminal investigations looking into the theft and diversion of fuel or bribery or bid-rigging on fuel contracts involving more than $100 million.
Perhaps worse, the SIGAR inquiry found that U.S. coalition financial records covering $475 million in fuel purchases and payments from October 2006 to February 2011 had been shredded. This was done “in violation of DOD [Department of Defense] and Department of the Army policies,” according to the SIGAR report.
In addition, SIGAR auditors were not given half the records sought for the March 2011 to March 2012 period. And although June 2012 Afghan army fuel purchases and payments were reconciled, the command “still could not account for the amount of fuel delivered and consumed,” SIGAR said.
A July SIGAR report found that because the military command did not “file claims for damaged or missing equipment, it was providing fuel for vehicles that had been destroyed.”
Sopko said his audit found that in one case “as much as 1 million gallons of fuel had been stolen over a four-month period without causing any red flags to be raised in the system.”
In short, corruption involves Americans and Afghans.
Now, according to SIGAR, the U.S.-NATO command “does not have accurate or supportable information on how much U.S. funds are needed for ANA [Afghan National Army] fuel, where and how the fuel is actually used, or how much fuel has been lost or stolen.”
The command has taken actions “to improve controls over fuel purchases, vendor deliveries, and the payment of invoice amounts,” but SIGAR maintains there is still a need to ensure “all fuel activity is tracked and accounted for.”
There may be a history of corruption in Afghanistan, but the United States is continuing to create tempting, rich, new targets such as fuel, and apparently enough Americans are willing to join in the illegal action.
Despite facing often draconian measures, whistleblowers are increasingly winning public support, reveals a new survey
The Obama administration has gone in hard against alleged whistleblowers, such as Bradley Manning. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Whistleblowing is relevant in the UK now more than ever, as the recent stream of high profile cover-ups and the relentless clamp downs on truth tellers has shown. The Hillsborough Inquiry, the string of serious problems in the NHS and related health agencies, the recently revealed Ministry of Defence internal document gagging whistleblowers from revealing wrongdoing to their own MPs. The list of examples goes on and on. They illustrate exactly why we need whistleblowers in society in the first place.
Whistleblowing is when members of an organisation reveal inside information about serious wrongdoing to someone they believe can act on it. Whistleblowers don’t have to be employees; they can be members of a school or church community organisation, for example. A good example of this is the whistleblowers who stepped forward to confirm incidents of paedophilia in Catholic institutions over the past decade.
The word whistleblower used to evoke images of shady characters whispering secrets in dark car parks. Now it’s increasingly seen as central to a healthy democracy. This trend in public attitude is happening simultaneously around the globe. A 2012 random sample Newspoll survey in Australia of 1,211 people showed that 81% believed whistleblowers should be protected and not punished, even if they reveal inside information.
The advent of online leaks news sites like WikiLeaks have likely played a role in this. There are more than 15 leaks-related sites with another, Ljost (or ‘light’ in Icelandic) officially launched by the The Associate Whistleblowing Press on 30 September.
Technology such as anonymising software like Tor, free file encryption programs such as GPG, and access to journalists via Twitter have all converged to make fertile ground for 21st century whistleblowing. It’s faster, easier and doesn’t involve any dark car parks.
This may be why western governments are running crackdowns against whistleblowers with a vehemence rarely seen in recent history. The Obama administration has gone in hard against alleged whistleblowers and in some cases journalists. The target list includes former US NSA senior executive Thomas Drake, army private Bradley Manning and reporter James Risen.
Governments are now also frequently turning technology inward to spy on employees and others in an effort to thwart whistleblowing to the media. So while whistleblowing has become easier, spying technology has also made it riskier to do online.
However, it appears the public is becoming impatient with governments that spend all their time on whistleblower witch hunts instead of punishing the underlying wrongdoing. There also seems to be a growing sense of unfairness with the David and Goliath battles, where the little guy trying to do the right thing is so outgunned from the start.
Whistleblowing tends to go hand in hand with coverups. The independent panel investigating the Hillsborough tragedy in which 96 football fans died found that police had not only lied about what happened, they had deliberately altered evidence of those who tried to tell the truth. Public outrage at the cover up was so great prime minister David Cameron had to apologise to the victims’ families.
Like Hillsborough, the Mid Staffordshire NHS Inquiry highlights growing public concern over wrongdoing and coverups. In following up reports of unusually high hospital mortality rates, an independent inquiry criticised the Stafford Hospital’s handling of patients. The few whistleblowers who dared to stand up were ignored or suffered retaliation. Another apology from the PM had to be made, again to the victims and families.
Britain now waits for the results of a new, wider public inquiry chaired by Robert Francis QC. The final report, including review of the million-plus pages of evidence, was due to be released this month. However Francis recently announced that the report would not now be delivered until early 2013. There is skepticism among health workers as to whether this inquiry – the fifth – will truly be fearless in seeking to fix the sick system.
The NHS and related health agencies’ woes have continued to mount with two high-profile whistleblowing cases pointing to more allegations of wrongdoing. In the first, radiology service manager Sharmila Chowdhury revealed allegations that doctors were being paid to see NHS patients while they were actually moonlighting with their own private patients. Ealing Hospital NHS Trust sacked Ms Chowdhury but a Watford employment tribunal judge ordered that she be reinstated. She has subsequently been made redundant – after facing legal fees of more than £100,000 to defend herself.
In a second case, a non-executive director of the regulator the Care Quality Commission (CQC), Kay Sheldon, faced accusations of being ‘mentally ill’ and attempts to sack her after she blew the whistle at a public inquiry into CQC. This is a classic response to whistleblowers: they are either ‘bad’ or ‘mad’ and thus their criticisms must not be valid.
While whistleblowers play an important role in revealing wrongdoing to the public, there is surprisingly little academic research on whistleblowing to the media, and even less on the role of technology in it. I am the principal researcher on an international study team that hopes to shed light on how technology is impacting on whistleblowing, particularly to the news organisations. In addition to interviewing whistleblowers and the investigative journalists who interact with them, we are also running a detailed online survey.
The World Online Whistleblowing Survey (WOWs) is the first online survey aimed at gauging the general public’s attitudes to whistleblowing that is being run in so many languages. The anonymous survey is available in 11 languages and is open to everyone to participate, not just whistleblowers.
The study team includes researchers from Griffith University and the University of Melbourne in Australia, and Georgetown University in the US. Early data from the online survey points strongly to a public belief among both Australian and British respondents that there is too much secrecy in organisations (a breathtaking 90% in both cases).
However, British respondents were more cynical than Australians about the usefulness of official channels for reporting wrongdoing in organisations.
About 38% of Australians believed that going to authorities via official channels was the best way to stop serious wrongdoing while only 15% of respondents from the UK agreed. Instead 43% of UK respondents thought going to the media was the most effective way, compared to 27% of Australians.
The increasing importance of whistleblowing in the health area is evidenced by a recent conference on the topic run jointly between the British Medical Association and the Patients First group. Whistleblower pediatrician Dr Kim Holt, a speaker at the event, co-founded Patients First in response to the persistent mistreatment of whistleblowers in health. She said UK legislation did not properly defend whistleblowers, and it needed to be amended to address problems such as whistleblowers facing employer ‘gag’ clauses on revealing wrongdoing and huge legal defence costs.
It’s clear whistleblowing is an important part of a participatory democracy, yet many still remain confused about what value governments and legal scholars place on it. Time will tell what influence cases such as Wikileaks and the NHS will have on this value, but one thing seems likely – despite facing often draconian measures, whistleblowers are increasingly winning public support.
Newly released court documents in the Aurora, CO theater “Batman massacre” case reveals startling inside accusations about who may actually be behind the shootings that left at least 70 people either dead or injured in the early morning hours of July 20th.
Friday’s report by the online version of Denver’s Westword Magazine details shocking claims made by, what appears to be, a new victim in a case that has throttled a community still in mourning over the tragic events. According to the court documents an individual, whose name has been officially redacted from the documents, came forward to file a “Motion to Intervene” for the right to be reasonably heard under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act (a)(4), for the purposes of presenting newly discovered evidence to the court.
Corroborating much of a recent Conspiracy Examiner story maintaining the situation as potentially being another horrific (rogue government faction) conspiracy and possible false-flag event, the newly discovered evidence, thrown out of court by Judge William Sylvester days later, details stunning accusations against billionaire Philip Anschutz, Police Chief Dan Oates, Arapaho County Dist. Atty. Carol Chambers and, according to the alleged victim, the Illuminati as being potential co-conspirators in the crime.
The stunning accusations, dated August 27, reveal a startling story by the claimant as having been visited at home by police chief Dan Oates and Dist. Atty. Carol Chambers where they forced the unnamed individual to testify as a fake victim of the shootings, under the threat of being arrested for prostitution and escort services and charity fraud, for the purposes of garnering an easy conviction against alleged shooter James Holmes. But not before being shot by the police chief in “non-life-threatening areas” of the body, according to the motion, to appear as having been shot by James Holmes himself. The motion also claims that it is likely some of the victims in the theater were merely paid actors working on behalf of the conspirators and wants multiple individuals involved in the situation to take polygraph tests to prove their innocence.
Claiming that their conscience will not let fraudulent testimony contribute to an improper conviction of James Holmes, the new mystery victim asked that the judge submit the case to the FBI and the US Congress for further investigation into the alleged conspiracy. The judge, however, instead of taking a closer look, decided to strike down the motion as fraudulent, claiming the motion as likely forged by an individual or individuals unassociated with the events. The judge also suggested the situation be investigated by the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s office and those responsible for the motion be taken into custody by the Arapahoe County Department of Human Services and “referred to the appropriate mental health agency.”
But it may in fact be the judge that needs the mental attention as all the evidence collected in the case thus far seems to point toward mostly agreeing with the individual who filed the claim, despite the media and the court’s attempts to suppress any evidence that doesn’t support the official story. Multiple and corroborating eyewitness testimony stated what appeared to be multiple individuals involved in the shooting, including supporting official dispatch audio. Individuals interviewed by local media immediately after the event also claimed to have seen teargas canisters being deployed in the theater simultaneously from two different directions, in addition to side-by-side images of James Holmes prior to the shootings and the orange haired individual taken into custody as the alleged lone gunmen after the event looks startlingly like two different individuals. There also seems to have been two different gas masks found at the scene, in addition to other damning evidence that doesn’t jive with the official version of the events.
The individual who filed the motion also added that they wanted their portion of the charity to be donated to James Holmes’ prison commissary, after using the money to find Mr. Holmes “real” attorneys who are actually willing to act in the honest defense of James Holmes, or the individual in custody for the crime.
The motion, as certified by the Arapahoe County Dist. Atty. and public defenders offices, was sent via the United States Postal Service, then was quickly denied and subsequently released days ago to the public for reasons yet to be determined.
Perhaps one of the most telling aspects of the circumstances, however, happens to be the creepy dead silence about the motion by the media, especially considering every little detail about a situation like this is normally scrutinized at every angle after being groomed with a fine tooth comb and examined under a microscope.
It was just weeks ago that certain local media outlets were considering suing for access to court records because, according to those outlets, the community had a right to know so the victims and the community could more easily begin the healing process and find some semblance of closure. Perhaps information that may open new wounds, however, regardless of how accurate or important that information may be, may not be the kind of information they were looking for.
The reason why there is so much hate and scorn for 9/11 truth activists is because they are right and consistent. The destruction of the 9/11 myth and war on terror ideology is unbearable for the children who are emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically attached to the U.S. government and the Israeli government. They are under the delusion that these evil governments actually care about them, their security, and their future.
The mature men and women of America and the West are waking up and confronting the lies of 9/11 and 7/7. And this political awakening is not unique to America and Western civilization. There is a global political and spiritual awakening happening. All totalitarian regimes in the world will fail in hijacking history and they will fall into ruin. The state terrorists in Washington, London, and Tel Aviv have already lost the battle for history and the souls of mankind.
Alternative accounts of history and reality under totalitarian regimes have always been denounced by regime political mouthpieces as crazy and conspiratorial. And they always failed because truth and history were not on their side. The crazy and the conspiratorial were proven right in the end. This is what history shows, and especially the history of the demonic 20th century. So we should have hope and continue to speak the truth about 9/11 to wake up as many people as possible before the U.S. and Israeli governments blow up the whole world.
II. Unthinking and Regressive: Think Progress Attacks 9/11 Truth, Drudge Report, And Infowars
The political mouthpiece of the Obama administration called ‘Think Progress’ tried to shame and belittle Drudge Report for highlighting Infowars stories. Paul Joseph Watson writes in his article, “Obama Front Group Attacks Drudge For Linking To Infowars”:
“Think Progress is a little more than a PR firm for the Obama administration. No wonder they are so terrified that thanks to traffic from Drudge, the likes of Infowars and World Net Daily have grown to become two of the most visible anti-Obama news outlets on the web.
Think Progress claims it is upset that Drudge is promoting what they call “conspiracy theories,” but in reality the root of the anger is that Drudge is providing a platform for some of the Obama administration’s most ardent critics.”
Think Progress is not worth talking about. It is an irrelevant thought-control political operation. Their reporters defend myths and fallacies while putting down truth-tellers as conspiracy theorists. What they are doing is not only unjust but just plain stupid. They are embarrassing themselves. It is actually very sad.
Truth is more powerful than totalitarian propaganda. The mainstreaming of the 9/11 truth movement is unstoppable. 9/11 truth deniers should rejoin reality and admit that it is wrong to defend the official conspiracy theory that was spread by the Bush administration and Israeli government quickly after the traumatic events.
III. The Religious Nature of The 9/11 Deception and Propaganda
Author and Christian theologian David Ray Griffin explained why the belief in the official conspiracy theory of 9/11 is religious in nature in his lecture in October 2007 called, “9-11 and Nationalistic Faith.” Griffin was recently interviewed by Jan Frel of AlterNet in an article called, “David Ray Griffin: How a Retired Theologian Became a High-Priest of the 9/11 Truth Movement.”Describing Dr. Griffin as a “High-Priest,” suggesting that the 9/11 truth movement is somehow a new age mystery cult, is really aiming low.
9/11 truth has nothing to do with religion or priests. Scientific facts are the basis of the movement. Architects, engineers, chemists, scientists, and university professors are the leading spokespeople. Religious figures like Dr. Griffin have contributed great wisdom and understanding but to imply that the 9/11 truth movement is led by “priests” is a lie.
Priests are nowhere to be found in the 9/11 truth movement and that’s okay because they are not needed. They are too busy defending evil empires on the pulpit and sacrificing moral principles for temporary power. Their days as the rulers of the spiritual life of Western civilization have come and gone.
Dr. Griffin is a noble exception, but, in general, Christianity has proven to be useless, corrupt, stupid, blind, and power-driven. The same is true for every other moronic religion that makes individuals submit their heart and soul to a corrupt clergy. The majority of Christians are too obsessed about the second coming and the holiness of Israel to really understand that 9/11 was an inside job committed by the occult elite in America and Israel. They don’t want to admit that the criminal wars in the Middle East have nothing to do with defending the security of USrael.
What do priests and religious idiots offer humanity and the world? Nothing. They are absent in the battle for souls and the battle for freedom because they are corrupt, blind, and stupid. Expecting Christians to fight the totalitarian state and liberate America is laughable. I’m generalizing here, but Christians, Muslims, and religious Jews are the most tyrannical, greedy, hypocritical, hateful, soulless, and ungrateful people in the world. They want to have a monopoly on the human soul and human mind. What maniacs! And the totalitarian priests who head the CIA and Mossad are just as crazy and demented because they also want to monopolize the thoughts of citizens and control the growth of society.
The role of blind religious faith in preventing people from seeing the truth about 9/11 is big. American Christians, who have bought USrael’s propaganda and blindly accept the official 9/11 story, feel no shame in calling for the destruction of Iran and the Muslim world. They make me sick. They don’t realize that they’re bringing destruction upon themselves by calling for the destruction of other nations and civilizations. As they say, what goes around comes around. If warmongering American Christians want death and destruction so much then they will get it in plenty, except the fires of hell won’t burn in the Middle East alone, but in America as well.
IV. Conspiracy Theorists And 9/11 Truthers Deserve An Apology
Who is trying to stop World War III and wake the West up from its sleep? Progressives? No. Liberals? No. Conservatives? No. Christians? No. Journalists? No. They all believe in the official 9/11 deception, which is the ideological foundation that justifies USrael’s aggressive wars in the Middle East.
9/11 truth-tellers, the “conspiracy theorists,” have tried to wake up humanity in order to stop the USraeli government from starting the catastrophe of world war three. And for their efforts they have been slandered and smeared in the press. But the 9/11 truth movement still continues to grow by the day.
There is a simple reason why the rise of 9/11 truth cannot be contained by the USraeli government, and it is this: the age of slandering and smearing is over. Belittling people by calling them mentally ill conspiracy theorists and truthers is not working anymore. We embrace these terms. We are proud of being called conspiracy theorists because it means we’re thinking.
Slandering and smearing Infowars and other alternative news websites is futile. It is a waste of time. Censorship, disinformation, and propaganda are failing. The global free market and global civil society have spoken. People want the news, not smears; truth, not lies; facts, not totalitarian propaganda; freedom, not tyranny; peace, not war.
It is time for the truth to be told about Susan G. Komen for the Cure. The organization is, flatly stated, engaged in fraud. Funded by drug companies and mammogram manufacturers, the organization preys upon women in order to grow its own financial power while feeding female victims into the conventional cancer industry grinder.
All across America, men and women participate in “run for the cure” events, raising tens of millions of dollars each year that go into the hands of Komen for the Cure. What these people don’t know is that much of that money is spent on “free” mammograms. Those mammograms, in turn, actually cause breast cancer because they subject women to high doses of ionizing radiation.
The Susan G. Komen scam, in essence, is to raise money that’s used to give women cancer and create a financial windfall for the very same companies that financially support Komen in the first place. “The Komen Foundation owns stock in General Electric, one of the largest makers of mammogram machines in the world. It also owns stock in several pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca,” reports Tony Isaacs at NaturalNews (http://www.naturalnews.com/027307_cancer_breast_ACS.html).
“DuPont, another huge chemical company and major polluter, supplies much of the film used in mammography machines. Both DuPont and GE aggressively promote mammography screening of women in their 40s, despite the risk of its contributing to breast cancer in that age group. And while biotech giant Monsanto sponsors Breast Cancer Awareness Month’s high profile event, the Race for the Cure, it continues to profit from the production of many known carcinogens.” (http://www.tbyil.com/breast-cancer-deception.htm)
Komen’s corporate partners include General Mills, Zumba Fitness, Walgreens, The Republic of Tea, REMAX, New Balance, American Airlines, Bank of America, Ford Motor Company, Dell and many more (http://ww5.komen.org/corporatepartners.aspx).
The bottom line? Komen deceives women while powerful corporations rake in the profits. This isn’t merely my own opinion. Two prominent doctors, in an article published in the British Medical Journal, have sharply condemned Komen for the Cure for lying about the “benefits” of mammograms.
Their names? Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz, directors of the Center for Medicine and the Media at Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire.
They join a growing number of other doctors and medical professionals who now see Komen for the Cure as afundraising fraud and are going public with detailed accusations against Komen’s deceptions.
In the recently published BMJ article, Woloshin and Schwartz accused Komen of lying in its promotional propaganda for the 2011 Breast Cancer Awareness Month. In advertising, Komen falsely claimed the 5-year survival rate when breast cancer is caught early is 98%, while only 23% when not “caught early.” This is how Komen tricks women into getting more mammograms which cause more cancer — by claiming “early detection saves lives.” But it’s not science; it’s pure propaganda. (See below.)
According to study authors Woloshin and Schwartz, Komen willfully ignored “a growing and increasingly accepted body of evidence [showing] that although screening may reduce a woman’s chance of dying from breast cancer by a small amount, it also causes major harms.”
Komen for the Cure is in the business of fear mongering. They want everyone to be scared out of their minds that breast cancer is going to strike down all the women in their life. And in order to deal with the fear, all you have to do is give more money to Komen.
It’s sort of like an old-school evangelical group that asks for donations and says you’ll be healed if you just “believe,” but instead of claiming to heal people with the power of faith, the Komen cult claims to heal women with the power of ionizing radiation.
With mammograms used to detect breast cancer tumors, that 10-year risk of dying from breast cancer moves ever so slightly downward to 0.46%.
In other words, the real risk reduction of dying from breast cancer by receiving mammograms is only 0.07% — seven women out of 10,000.
How mammograms kill women
Seven out of 10,000 is a far cry from the fear-mongering levels that Komen propagandizes. It’s not quite the cancer apocalypse that Komen makes it out to be, huh? And in the mean time, Woloshin and Schwartz explain that anywhere from 20% to 50% of women who receive mammograms for a decade of their lives will have at least one “false alarm.”
These false alarms often lead to women being treated with deadly chemotherapy cocktails. These expensive drugs enrich the very same drug companies that donate money to Komen for the Cure. This is all part of the cycle of fraud that exploits women’s bodies for profit, all while conducting this sick fraud with the message of “finding a cure,” emblazoned with pink ribbons. The magnitude of the deception in all this is pathological… even criminal.
“The Komen advertisement is deceptive in another way: it ignores the harms of screening,” say Woloshin and Schwartz. “Between 20% and 50% of women screened annually for a decade experience at least one false alarm requiring a biopsy. Most importantly, screening results in overdiagnosis. For every life saved by mammography, around two to 10 women are overdiagnosed. Women who are overdiagnosed cannot benefit from unnecessary chemotherapy, radiation, or surgery. All they do experience is harm,” they write.
That harm often comes in the form of unnecessary chemotherapy that poisons women but financially benefits the drug companies. Here’s another article on NaturalNews which also supports this conclusion: http://www.naturalnews.com/020829.html
“Women need much more than marketing slogans about screening,” wrote Woloshin and Schwartz. “They need — and deserve — the facts. The Komen advertisement campaign failed to provide the facts. Worse, it undermined decision making by misusing statistics to generate false hope about the benefit of mammography screening. That kind of behavior is not very charitable.”
The article goes on to emphasize that mammograms are a wash, offering no net benefit to women’s health:
The benefits and harms [of mammography] are so evenly balanced that the National Breast Cancer Coalition, a major US network of patient and professional organizations, “believes there is insufficient evidence to recommend for or against universal mammography in any age group of women.” (http://www.knowbreastcancer.org/controversies/mammography-screening/)
But instead of telling women the truth, Komen lies to women, vastly exaggerating the “benefits” of screening:
“Komen’s public advertising campaign gives women no sense that screening is a close call. Instead it simply tells women to be screened, overstates the benefit of mammography, and ignores harms altogether,” write Woloshin and Schwartz.
Komen has even fooled doctors
Beyond fooling the public, Komen’s insidious disinformation campaign has even fooled most doctors. As Woloshin and Schwartz described how doctors are tricked by the “improved survival” statistics which mislead people into thinking that screening saves lives:
“In a recent survey we conducted with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute, most US primary care doctors mistakenly interpreted improved survival as evidence that screening saves lives.”
(Wegwarth O, Schwartz L, Woloshin S, Gaissmeier W, Gigerenzer G. Do physicians understand cancer screening statistics? A national survey of primary care physicians in the United States. Ann Intern Med 2012;156:340-49.)
Obscene executive salaries
“Susan G. Komen for the Cure is a multimillion-dollar company with assets totaling over $390 million . Only 20.9% of these funds were reportedly used in the 2009-2010 fiscal year for research “for the cure,” writes Emily Michele at Alternet (http://www.alternet.org/story/154010/i_will_not_be_pinkwashed%3A_kome…)
She goes on to explain, “I don’t know about you, but I would never expect directors of a charitable “non-profit” organization to make more than most doctors, lawyers, or even politicians. Their CEO and president, Hala G. Moddelmog, made $531,924, plus $26,683 in change. That’s more than President Obama makes.”
Komen spends about 39% of its money on “public health education,” which is just another way to say “pinkwashing.” This money is used to catapult the Komen propaganda so that future fundraising events can raise even more money, much of which is paid to Komen’s fat cat executives as cushy salaries.
Just remember: When you run for the cure, a significant portion of the money you raise is going straight into the pockets of wealthy Komen executives. None of the money is actually being used to promote vitamin D or cancer prevention. “Detection,” after all, is not prevention. It’s just a way to push the cancer industry’s agenda of treating more women with toxic chemotherapy chemicals (and more ionizing radiation).
Komen’s activities are crimes against humanity — and blacks in particular
Susan G. Komen for the Cure isn’t just a dishonest, deceptive non-profit that exploits women for its own power and prestige; it also engaged in crimes against humanity. The use of deceptive statistics, lying propaganda, and false and misleading fundraising events push a machine of death and destruction that sacrifices the lives of women upon the altar of Big Pharma profits.
Notably, Komen usually targets black women, focusing their mobile mammogram trucks — “mobile cancer stations” — on low-income neighborhoods in cities like Detroit where breast cancer among African American women is far more common than in white neighborhoods. The result of all this is increased rates of breast cancer due to the mammography itself. This, in turn, results in statistics which are cited by Komen itself to spread fear and alarm over the disease, justifying their very existence.
It is, at every level, an insidious scam conducted at the cost of innocent human lives. Far from “finding a cure” for cancer, Komen spreads cancer, incites fear, lies to women and then cites the very cancer that it causes as justification for its existence.
Susan G. Komen is a danger to the American public. It functions as a recruitment branch of Big Pharma, ensnaring women with a seductive message of hope and inspiration while delivering suffering and death.
If you donate money to Komen, you are financially supporting this insidious, destructive non-profit monstrosity that destroys lives and brutalizes women. Women who undergo chemotherapy should be called, “chemically battered women,” and Komen promotes this abuse of women through its reliance on false and deceptive propaganda.
The solution to all this? Boycott Komen. Refuse to raise money for this harmful organization that exploits women. Inform your friends about pinkwashing. Share this article. Help stop the exploitation of women by Komen and its lying propaganda.
Looking for a real way to prevent breast cancer? Take more Vitamin D. Komen won’t educate women about vitamin D — (surprised?) — but here at NaturalNews, we have a powerfully informative infographic that tells the story:
Rampant silver manipulation? Rampant gold manipulation? Rampant LIBOR manipulation? Hiding MF Global client assets? These are all happening at JP Morgan according to an open letter reportedly written by an anonymous employee of the firm. The whistleblower also warns of a “cascading credit event being triggered” by derivatives related to Greek government debt. Unlike Greg Smith at Goldman Sachs, this whistleblower has chosen to remain anonymous for now. According to the letter, the whistleblower is still an employee of JP Morgan and has not resigned. But that does make it much more difficult to confirm what he is saying. With Greg Smith, we know exactly who he is and what he was doing at Goldman. As far as this anonymous whistleblower is concerned, all we have is this letter. So we must take it with a grain of salt. However, the information in this letter does agree with what whistleblowers such as Andrew Maguire have said in the past about silver manipulation by JP Morgan. And this letter does mention Greg Smith’s resignation from Goldman, so we know that it must have been written in the past few days. Hopefully this letter will cause authorities to take a much closer look at the crazy things that are going on over at JP Morgan and the other big Wall Street banks.
This anonymous letter was addressed to the CFTC, but unfortunately it looks like the CFTC has already chosen to ignore it.
The original letter from this anonymous whistleblower has already been taken down from the CFTC website. When you go there now, all you get is this message….
“The Comment Cannot Be Found. Please Return to the Previous Page and Try Again.”
Fortunately, there are many in the alternative media that copied this entire letter from the CFTC website.
The following is a copy of the original letter that the anonymous whistleblower from JP Morgan submitted to the CFTC….
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Dear CFTC Staff,
Hello, I am a current JPMorgan Chase employee. This is an open letter to all commissioners and regulators. I am emailing you today b/c I know of insider information that will be damning at best for JPMorgan Chase. I have decided to play the role of whistleblower b/c I no longer have faith and belief that what we are doing for society is bringing value to people. I am now under the opinion that we are actually putting hard working Americans unaware of what lays ahead at extreme market risk. This risk is unnecessary and will lead to wide-scale market collapse if not handled properly. With the release of Mr. Smith’s open letter to Goldman, I too would like to set the record straight for JPM as well. I have seen the disruptive behavior of superiors and no longer can say that I look up to employees at the ED/MD level here at JPM. Their smug exuberance and arrogance permeates the air just as pungently as rotting vegetables. They all know too well of the backdoor crony connections they share intimately with elected officials and with other institutions. It is apparent in everything they do, from the meager attempts to manipulate LIBOR, therefore controlling how almost all derivatives are priced to the inherit and fraudulent commodities manipulation. They too may have one day stood for something in the past in the client-employee relationship. Does anyone in today’s market really care about the protection of their client? From the ruthless and scandalous treatment of MF Global client asset funds to the excessive bonuses paid by companies with burgeoning liabilities. Yes, we at JPMorgan that are in the know are fearful of a cascading credit event being triggered in Greece as they have hidden derivatives in excess of $1 Trillion USD. We at JPMorgan own enough of these through counterparty risk and outright prop trading that our entire IB EDG space could be annihilated within a few short days. The last ten years has been market by inflexion point after inflexion point with the most notable coming in 2008 after the acquisition of Bear.
I wish to remain anonymous as of now as fear of termination mounts from what I am about to reveal. Robert Gottlieb is not my real name; however he is a trader that is involved in a lawsuit for manipulative trading while working with JPMorgan Chase. He was acquired during our Bear Stearns acquisition and is known to be the notorious person shorting in the silver future market from his trading space, along with Blythe Masters, his IB Global boss. However, with that said, we are manipulating the silver futures market and playing a smaller (but still massively manipulative) role in manipulating the gold futures market. We have a little over a 25% (give or take a percentage) position in the short market for silver futures and by your definition this denotes a larger position than for speculative purposes or for hedging and is beyond the line of manipulation.
On a side note, I do not work directly with accounts that would have been directly impacted by the MF Global fiasco but I have heard through other colleagues that we have involvement in the hiding of client assets from MF Global. This is another fraudulent effort on our part and constitutes theft. I urge you to forward that part of the investigation on to the respective authorities.
There is something else that you may find strange. During month-end December, we were all told by our managers that this was going to be a dismal year in terms of earnings and that we should not expect any bonuses or pay raises. Then come mid-late January it is made known that everyone received a pay raise and/or bonus, which is interesting b/c just a few weeks ago we were told that this was not likely and expected to be paid nothing in addition to base salary. January is right around the time we started increasing our short positions quite significantly again and this most recent crash in gold and silver during Bernanke’s speech on February 29th is of notable importance, as we along with 4 other major institutions, orchestrated the violent $100 drop in Gold and subsequent drops in silver.
As regulators of the free people of this country, I ask you to uphold the most important job in the world right now. That job is judge and overseer of all that is justice in the most sensitive of commodity markets. There are many middle-income people that invest in the physical assets of silver, gold, as well as mining stocks that are being financially impacted in a negative way b/c of our unscrupulous shorts in the precious metals commodity sector. If you read the COT with intent you will find that commercials (even though we have no business being in the commercial sector, which should be reserved for companies that truly produce the metal) are net short by a long shot in not only silver, but gold.
It is rather surprising that what should be well known liabilities on our balance sheet have not erupted into wider scale scrutinization. I call all honest and courageous JPMorgan employees to step up and fight the cronyism and wide-scale manipulation by reporting the truth. We are only helping reality come to light therefore allowing a real valuation of our banking industry which will give investors a chance to properly adjust without being totally wiped out. I will be contacting a lawyer shortly about this matter, as I believe no other whistleblower at JPMorgan has come forward yet. Our deepest secrets lie within the hands of honest employees and can be revealed through honest regulators that are willing to take a look inside one of America’s best kept secrets. Please do not allow this to turn into another Enron.
Kind Regards,
-The 1st Whistleblower of Many
———-
Another Enron?
If what this letter says is true, then the problems facing our financial system are more serious than most of us thought.
And the allegations of corruption at JP Morgan are absolutely shocking.
But this is not the first whistleblower to come forward to the CFTC with charges of rampant market manipulation by JP Morgan.
Back in 2010 I wrote about the stunning allegations that a former silver trader named Andrew Maguire presented to the CFTC. The following is an extended excerpt from that article….
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Back in November 2009, Andrew Maguire, a former Goldman Sachs silver trader in Goldman’s London office, contacted the CFTC’s Enforcement Division and reported the illegal manipulation of the silver market by traders at JPMorgan Chase.
Maguire told the CFTC how silver traders at JPMorgan Chase openly bragged about their exploits – including how they sent a signal to the market in advance so that other traders could make a profit during price suppression episodes.
Traders would recognize these signals and would make money shorting precious metals alongside JPMorgan Chase. Maguire explained to the CFTC how there would routinely be market manipulations at the time of option expiries, during non-farm payroll data releases, during commodities exchange contract rollovers, as well as at other times if it was deemed necessary.
On February 3rd, Maguire gave the CFTC a two day warning of a market manipulation event by email to Eliud Ramirez, who is a senior investigator for the CFTC’s Enforcement Division.
Maguire warned Ramirez that the price of precious metals would be suppressed upon the release of non-farm payroll data on February 5th. As the manipulation of the precious metals markets was unfolding on February 5th, Maguire sent additional emails to Ramirez explaining exactly what was going on.
And it wasn’t just that Maguire predicted that the price would be forced down. It was the level of precision that he was able to communicate to the CFTC that was the most stunning. He warned the CFTC that the price of silver was to be taken down regardless of what happened to the employment numbers and that the price of silver would end up below $15 per ounce. Over the next couple of days, the price of silver was indeed taken down from $16.17 per ounce down to a low of $14.62 per ounce.
Because of Maguire’s warning, the CFTC was able to watch a crime unfold, right in front of their eyes, in real time.
Basically, the CFTC is a government agency that appears to do next to nothing.
Another scandal involving JP Morgan has come out in recent days as well.
This one involves their credit card division. If you have a moments, you should really read the recent American Banker expose of credit card debt collection practices at JPMorgan Chase. It exposes some things that will absolutely blow your mind.
Linda Almonte, a former executive at JPMorgan Chase’s Credit Card Litigation Support Group, has revealed some incredible stuff regarding the debt collection practices at the company. Almonte says that she was shocked at what she saw when she began examining the details of a $200 million package of debt collection judgments to an outside debt collection agency….
Nearly half of the files her team sampled were missing proofs of judgment or other essential information, she wrote to colleagues. Even more worrisome, she alleged in her wrongful-termination suit, nearly a quarter of the files misstated how much the borrower owed.
In the “vast majority” of those instances, the actual debt was “lower that what Chase was representing,” her suit stated.
JPMorgan Chase issues food stamp debit cards in 26 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, and they actually want more Americans to go on food stamps so that they can make bigger profits from the division that issues them.
So now are you starting to understand why so many Americans are upset about the corruption on Wall Street?
This isn’t a “conservative issue” or a “liberal issue” – it is an American issue and the outrageous behavior of these firms has brought our financial system once again to the edge of disaster.
Over the past six months, more than 350 prominent executives have resigned from major banks and financial institutions all over the globe.
Is this a sign that the rats are fleeing a sinking ship?
Do they know something that we don’t?
What we do know is that the financial crisis in Greece is far from over and the European financial system is getting closer to a complete meltdown with each passing day.
Very few of the things that caused the financial crisis of 2008 were ever corrected and our financial system is even more vulnerable today than it was back then.
In the end, this entire pyramid of debt, leverage and corruption is going to come crashing down really hard, and the consequences are going to be absolutely catastrophic.
We’ve certainly talked quite a bit about the institutional-level corruption of the way Congress and lobbying works, but a recent This American Life episode, done in partnership with thePlanet Money team takes a much deeper dive into how lobbying works. You absolutely should listen to it. It’s really fascinating, even for folks who follow a lot of this stuff. There is also a full transcript, but hearing the whole thing is quite fascinating. Among the elements that are most interesting are the details of just how much time and effort goes into politicians raising money, and how the various fundraisers work.
But one thing that struck me in listening to it, was a comment made towards the end by (former) Senator Russ Feingold, who points out that while most people think of lobbying as bribery, they often have the picture backwards. It’s extortion:
I’ve had conversations with Democratic givers out here in the Bay Area and I’ll tell you, you wouldn’t believe the requests they’re getting. The opening ante is a million dollars. It’s not, gee, it’d be nice if you give a million. That’s sort of the baseline. This is unprecedented. And, in fact, one thing that John and I experienced was that sometimes the corporations that didn’t like the system would come to us and say, you know, you guys, it’s not legalized bribery, it’s legalized extortion. Because it’s not like the company CEO calls up to say, gee, I’d love to give you some money. It’s usually the other way around. The politician or their agent who’s got the Super PAC, they’re the ones that are calling up and asking for the money.
This is actually confirmed much earlier in the show, when former lobbyist Jimmy Williams explains that part of the job of the lobbyist is to avoid calls from politicians who are always asking for money:
Jimmy Williams: A lot of them would call and say, “Hey, can you host an event for me?” And you never want to say no. Actually, no. You always want to say no. In fact, you always want to say no. But, you could look on your phone with these caller IDs and you would be like, really? I’m not taking that call.
Alex Blumberg: Oh, so you would dodge calls for fundraising?
Jimmy Williams: Oh yeah. Every lobbyist does. Are you kidding? You spend most of your time dodging phone calls. Oh yeah.
What’s equally stunning as you listen to it, is how much everyone seems to dislike the system. The politicians hate having to spend many hours each day fundraising (which they do from phone banks across the street from the Capitol, because they’re not allowed to do it from their offices). The lobbyists hate having to focus on raising money for the politicians. The donors hate getting the calls asking for more money. One politicians talks about how he burned out all his friends:
Walt Minnick: You essentially wear out your friends and you wear out the people who are your natural supporters, because if someone writes you one check or comes to a fundraiser, they get on a list. And three or four months later you call them back again. And the best thing about being an ex-congressman is my friends now return my phone calls.
The show concludes with a fascinating discussion between Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold, who famously passed campaign finance reform a decade or so ago, only to see most of what they worked for get tossed aside by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United case. McCain explains that the Supreme Court ruled the way it did because it simply has no idea how corrupt the political system is today:
John McCain: At first, I was outraged. The day that Russ and I went over and observed the arguments, the questions that were asked, the naivety of the questions that were asked and the arrogance of some of the questioners, it was just stunning. Particularly Scalia with his sarcasm. Why shouldn’t these people be able to engage in this process? Why do you want to restrict them from their rights of free speech? And the questions they asked showed they had not the slightest clue as to what a political campaign is all about and the role of money that it plays in political campaigns. And I remember when Russ and I walked out of there, I said, Russ, we’re going to lose and it’s because they are clueless. Remember that day we were over there, Russ?
Russ Feingold: Absolutely, John. I couldn’t agree with you more. It clearly was one of the worst decisions ever of the Supreme Court. The trouble with this issue– and I think John would agree with this– is people have gotten so down about it, they think it’s always been this way. Well, it’s never been this way, since 1907. It’s never been the case that when you buy toothpaste or detergent or a gallon of gas, that the next day that money can be used on a candidate that you don’t believe in. That’s brand new. That’s never happened since the Tillman act and the Taft Hartley Act. And so, people have to realize this is a whole new deal. It’s not business as usual.
So why doesn’t it get fixed? Well, because the people in power now know how to use the system to win, so they’re afraid to mess with it, and potentially lose their ability to use the system as it stands now to succeed.
Russ Feingold: We managed to get– against all odds, we did get people. It took a lot of hard work. Now the problem is, of course, is people are reticent to do that because they got elected under the system.
Alex Blumberg: So it’s just fear of change?
Russ Feingold: Sure. When you win a certain way, your people say to you, hey, this is how we do it and this is how we won. We better not mess with success. I think that’s one of the problems in this presidential race, where not only the Republicans, but even my candidate, President Obama, has opened the door to this unlimited money through some of his people. It’s hard to get people to change something after they win that way. And that’s one of my worries about it.
It really is worth listening to the whole thing if you want to understand the institutional, unavoidable level of corruption in DC — even if it’s not the way you may have suspected it worked. The folks at Planet Money have also done some follow up stories that are interesting, including a detailing of the most and least lucrative committee assignments. In the full episode, they explain that committee assignments are all a part of the corrupt process. If you get on a “good” committee (define by its ability to raise more money from lobbyists), it also means that your party demands that you pay more money back to the party, or you may lose that lucrative committee seat. Still, it may surprise some folks that the least lucrative position is on the Judiciary Committee. That’s the committee that handled SOPA and PIPA… which involved no shortage of lobbyists. The cynical voice in the back of my head wonders if part of the SOPA/PIPA fight was really about turning the Judiciary Committee into a cash-flow positive committee, rather than a cash-flow negative committee.
If you’ve got the money, it looks like you could eat all your meals (and have some drinks) at fundraisers.
And if you’re wondering where these fundraisers happen? Planet Money has mapped those out as well. The most common locations happen to (conveniently) form a ring around the Capitol:
No reason to travel very far to collect your money, I guess…
Telling people that the men and women in Congress sometimes vote with special interests in mind is like telling people that pro wrestling is staged. We all know it happens but it’s just an inevitable part of the process. While there are sources to see who gives money to your representatives, there’s not an immediate and easy way to see which side they take with voting. A relatively new Web site aims to give you that power.
Sopatrack was started back in December of last year to let citizens know where their congressional representatives stood on SOPA. It also gave them a venue to contact their members of Congress through phone or social media. After SOPA was killed though, the creator of the site, Randy Meech, only had one thing left to do – apply his site to all bills currently going through Congress.
This is where the current Sopatrack comes in. It allows concerned citizens to see the bills that have recently been passed by Congress to see whether their members of Congress voted with or against the money for that bill. It also allows citizens to see the percentage of which their members of Congress vote with or against the money.
Sopatrack is built using the Maplight and SunlightLabs APIs. Both Web sites seek to make Congress more open by tracking the influence of money on politics or making government more transparent through technology.
To give an example, let’s take a lot at my home state of Kentucky. By clicking the red button on the top right corner, you can find your local congresspeople immediately. It then brings up a list of your local senators and representatives to see where they stand. Unsurprisingly, Senator Mitch McConnell and Senator Rand Paul both vote with the money most of the time at 75 and 91 percent respectively. Our single representative – Ben Chandler – votes with the money 53 percent of the time.
The home page is by far the most interesting though. It lists the top 10 states that vote with the money alongside the top 10 states voting against the money. It does the same thing with congresspeople. The top 10 congresspeople voting with the money are all Republican except for Senator Joseph Lieberman who is an Independent. The top 10 congresspeople voting against the money are Democrats but their lowest statistic is at voting with the money only 46 percent of the time. Take the information as you will, the point is that money still plays a major role in politics regardless of party affiliation.
The home page also lists the 10 most recent bills alongside the top fundraising bills. It then lists whether the bill’s passing or rejection was with or against the money. To use its namesake, the rejection of SOPA was voting against the money.
As a final note, the majority of Congress as of right now is voting with the money at 73 percent. That shouldn’t be too big of a surprise though. That number will be updated throughout the year as congresspeople vote for and against bills. If you want to keep tabs on your representatives,check out Sopatrack and become informed.
Rome (CNN) — Pope Benedict’s butler has been arrested on suspicion of leaking confidential documents to an Italian journalist, the Vatican said Saturday.
Paolo Gabriele, 46, was arrested Wednesday for illegal possession of confidential documents, found in his apartment in Vatican territory, the Vatican said in a statement issued three days later.
Gabriele, who has worked as the papal butler since 2006, is one of only a handful of people with access to the pontiff’s private desk.
His job included handing out rosaries to dignitaries and riding in the front seat of the “Popemobile,” a vehicle used for public papal appearances, as seen in many photographs showing Gabriele with the pope.
Last month, the Vatican gave Cardinal Julian Herranz a “pontifical mandate” to uncover the source of hundreds of personal letters and confidential documents that have been released to Gianluigi Nuzzi, an Italian journalist and author of “Sua Santita,” a book that translates to “His Holiness” and includes the documents.
Nuzzi would not confirm the identity of his sources, but he told CNN that his primary source — who he referred to as “Maria” in his book — “risked life and limb” if ever found out.
The source worked inside the Vatican, according to Nuzzi, who refused to give other details such as the source’s gender, age and if he or she was clergy or not.
Nuzzi told CNN that he has not been questioned in connection with the arrest. The Vatican called the publication of his book “criminal” when it was released last Saturday in Italian.
Feltrenelli and Mondadori booksellers both rank the book No. 1 in sales within Italy.
Nuzzi’s book highlights an internal power struggle within the Vatican through numerous documents including faxes, personal letters and inter-Vatican memos. He told CNN that he received the documents during a year of private meetings in secret locations.
The documents show that the allegations of corruption and money laundering were a concern for a number of high ranking prelates, including Carlo Maria Vigano, who is now the Papal Nuncio in Washington, DC.
Vigano wrote in a series of letters to the pope that he was concerned about the spread of corruption and that his move to Washington would stir speculation.
“Holy Father, my transfer at this time would provoke much disorientation and discouragement in those who have believed it was possible to clean up so many situations of corruption and abuse of power that have been rooted in the management of so many departments,” according to his letter which was published in the book.
The Vatican has not denied the authenticity of the documents, but instead says the breach of privacy is a criminal act.
The 108-acre city-state has its own judicial system, distinct from the Italian judicial system. CNN senior Vatican analyst John Allen pointed out that its courts normally prosecute the likes of pickpockets, “not alleged moles.”
Thus, the Vatican doesn’t have facilities to incarcerate anyone on a long-term basis and the civil and criminal penalties it typically metes out are limited, Allen said Saturday. He speculated that, for these and other reasons, the Vatican may ask — assuming that it determines there is enough evidence against Gabriele — that any such trial occur within the Italian judicial system.
“The question then would become: Does the Italian government want to pick that (trial) up?” said Allen, a senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter. “In addition to being an embarrassing scandal for the Vatican on its own terms, this also has the potential to become … a diplomatic contretemps.”
For now, Gabriele is being held in a special cell within the Vatican City, a walled enclave within Rome, according to Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi.
Lombardi said the pope was “saddened and shocked” at the arrest.
The Vatican said the first phase of its preliminary investigation, under chief prosecutor Nicola Picardi, had now ended. An investigating judge, Piero Antonio Bonnet, is leading the next stage of the investigation, which could lead to a trial or acquittal.
Gabriele has appointed two lawyers of his choice to act at the Vatican Tribunal, and has had a chance to meet them, the Vatican statement said.
“He enjoys all the legal guarantees provided by the criminal code and criminal procedure in force in the State of Vatican City,” it added.
Joe Banister is the first and thus far only IRS Criminal Investigation Division Special Agent ever to conduct, while serving as a special agent, an investigation into allegations that the IRS illegally administers and enforces the federal income tax. He respectfully reported the results of his investigation to his IRS superiors, up to and including the IRS Commissioner. Rather than address the legitimate concerns raised by one of their own distinguished investigators, his IRS superiors suspiciously refused to address the chilling evidence of IRS wrongdoing raised in his report and instead encouraged him to resign from his position. Observing that IRS management intended to cover up the deceit and illegal conduct alleged in his report, Banister chose to resign from his position so that he could report his findings to the American public. In effect, Banister had to resign from his position in order to abide by his oath to support and defend the U.S. Constitution.
It’s not enough that the biotech industry — led by multinational corporations such as Monsanto, Dow, Syngenta, BAS, and Dupont — is poisoning our food and our planet. It’s also poisoning young minds.
In a blatant attempt at brainwashing, the Council for Biotechnology Information(CBI) has widely circulated what it calls a Biotechnology Basics Activity Bookfor kids, to be used by “Agriculture and Science Teachers.” The book — calledLook Closer at Biotechnology — looks like a science workbook, but reads more like a fairy tale. Available on the council’s Web site, its colorful pages are full of friendly cartoon faces, puzzles, helpful hints for teachers — and a heavy dose of outright lies about the likely effects of genetic engineering on health, the environment, world hunger and the future of farming.
CBI’s lies are designed specifically for children, and intended for use in classrooms.
At a critical time in history when our planet is veering toward a meltdown, when our youth are suffering the health consequences (obesity, diabetes, allergies) of Big Ag and Food Inc.’s over-processed, fat-and sugar-laden, chemical-, and GMO-tainted foods, a time when we should be educating tomorrow’s adults about how to reverse climate change, how to create sustainable farming communities, how to promote better nutrition, the biotech industry’s propagandists are infiltrating classrooms with misinformation in the guise of “educational” materials.
Brainwashing children. It’s a new low, even for Monsanto.
You don’t have to read beyond the first page ofLook Closer at Biotechnology to realize that this is pure propaganda:
Hi Kids! Welcome to the Biotechnology Basics Activity Book. This is an activity book for young people like you about biotechnology — a really neat topic. Why is it such a neat topic? Because biotechnology is helping to improve the health of the Earth and the people who call it home. In this book, you will take a closer look at biotechnology. You will see that biotechnology is being used to figure out how to: 1) grow more food; 2) help the environment; and 3) grow more nutritious food that improves our health. As you work through the puzzles in this book, you will learn more about biotechnology and all of the wonderful ways it can help people live better lives in a healthier world. Have fun!
Before we take a closer look at the lies laid out in Look Closer at Biotechnology — lies that are repeated over and over again, the better to imprint them on young minds — let’s take a closer look at the book’s publisher. The Council for Biotechnology Information describes itself as “a non-profit 501(c)(6) organization that communicates science-based information about the benefits and safety of agricultural biotechnology and its contributions to sustainable development.”
According to the Internal Revenue Service, a 501(c)(6) organization is a “business league” devoted to the improvement of business conditions of one or more lines of business. The mission of a 501(c)(6) organization “must focus on the advancement of the conditions of a particular trade or the interests of the community.”
The bottom line is that CBI exists to advance the interests of the corporations that it was formed to promote — in this case, the biotech industry. While it purports to communicate “science-based information,” in fact, that’s not its mission at all. Its mission is to maximize the profits of Monsanto and the biotech industry.
Not surprisingly, CBI is funded largely by the biotech, chemical, pesticide, and seed industry giants: BASF, Bayer CropScience, Dow Agro Sciences, Dupont, Monsanto, and Syngenta.
There’s nothing new about corporations lying to the public. Corporations routinely lie to their employees. They lie in advertising. They lie in the lopsided so-called studies and research projects that they self-fund in order to guarantee the outcomes that support their often false, but self-serving premises. They buy off politicians, regulatory officials, scientists, and the media.
Although here we’re focusing on the biotech industry trying to brainwash our kids, CBI certainly does not limit its propaganda to just children. CBI recently contributed $375,000 to the Coalition Against the Costly Labeling Law — a Sacramento-based industry front group working to defeat the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act of 2012. If passed in November, this citizens’ ballot Initiative will require food manufacturers and retailers to label foods containing genetically engineered ingredients, as well as ban the routine industry practice of labeling or advertising GE-tainted foods as “natural” or “all natural.” CBI, the Farm Bureau, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association are campaigning furiously to preserve their “right” to keep consumers in the dark about whether their food has been genetically engineered or not, and to preserve their “right” to mislabel gene-altered foods as “natural.”
Clearly, the Council for Biotechnology Information has little or no regard for “science-based” information. But lies aimed directly at kids — under the guise of science education? In our schools?
Let’s take a closer look at the claims made in Look Closer at Biotechnology.
Lie #1: “Biotechnology is one method being used to help farmers grow more food.” (page 7)
This statement is patently false.
In 2009, in the wake of similar studies, the Union of Concerned Scientists examined the data on genetically engineered crops, including USDA statistics. Their report — Failure to Yield — was the first major effort to evaluate in detail the overall yields of GE crops after more than 20 years of research and 13 years of commercialization in the United States. According to the definitive UCS study, “GE has done little to increase overall crop yields.” A number of studies indicate in fact that GE soybeans, for example, actually produce lower yields than non-genetically engineered varieties.
Research conducted by the India research group, Navdanya, and reported in The GMO Emperor Has No Clothes turns up the same results:
Contrary to the claim of feeding the world, genetic engineering has not increased the yield of a single crop. Navdanya’s research in India has shown that contrary to Monsanto’s claim of Bt cotton yield of 1500 kg per acre, the reality is that the yield is an average of 400-500 kg per acre. Although Monsanto’s Indian advertising campaign reports a 50-percent increase in yields for its Bollgard cotton, a survey conducted by the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology found that the yields in all trial plots were lower than what the company promised. (Page 11).
The claim that GE crops increase agricultural yields is a blatant lie. Equally untrue is the industry’s claim that it is motivated by the desire to feed the hungry of the world. As the Union of Concerned Scientists points out: “For the most part, genetic engineering techniques are being applied to crops important to the industrialized world, not crops on which the world’s hungry depend.” Where does all the genetically engineered soy and corn — two of the largest GE crops — end up? In animal feed, processed junk foods — and school lunchrooms. Precious little goes to feed the hungry in impoverished regions.
One of the sub-arguments related to increasing yields is the biotech industry’s claim that GMO crops are more resistant to pests — hence more of the crops survive. In Look Closer at Biotechnology kids are told that agricultural biotechnology is a “precise way to make seeds with special qualities. These seeds will allow farmers to grow plants that are . . . more resistant to pests . . .” In fact widespread commercialization of herbicide-resistant and Bt-spliced GE crops has engendered a growing army of superweeds and superpests, oblivious to all but the most powerful and toxic pesticides.
What we should be teaching kids in science class is what scientists have been warning for years — that any attempt to increase resistance to pests through genetic engineering will ultimately fail. Insects — and diseases — will build up a tolerance over time, and evolve into stronger and stronger strains. That’s how nature works — and even Monsanto can’t fool Mother Nature. Organic agriculture, on the other hand, utilizing crop rotation, biodiversity, natural fertilizers, and beneficial insects, reduces crop loss from pests and weeds, without the collateral damage of toxic pesticides and fertilizers.
Recently, 22 leading scientists told the US Environmental Protection Agency that it should act with “a sense of urgency” to urge farmers to stop planting Monsanto’s genetically engineered Bt corn because it will no longer protect them from the corn rootworm. Bt corn is genetically engineered with bacterial DNA that produces an insecticide in every cell of the plant, aimed at preventing corn rootworm. Except that corn rootworms have now developed resistance to these GE mutants.
Just as scientists had predicted years ago, a new generation of insect larvae has evolved, and is eating away at the roots of Monsanto’s Bt corn — a crop farmers paid a high price for on Monsanto’s promise that they would never have to worry about corn rootworm again. Scientists are now warning of massive yield loss and surging corn costs if the EPA doesn’t act quickly to drastically reduce Bt crops’ acreage and ensure that Monsanto makes non-GMO varieties of corn available to farmers.
“Massive yield loss” doesn’t sound like “more food” — whether you’re 12 years old or 112.
What we should be telling kids is what responsible scientists and farmers — experts at the United Nations — have been saying all along: Eco-farming candouble food output. According to a UN study:
Eco-farming projects in 57 nations showed average crop yield gains of 80 percent by tapping natural methods for enhancing soil and protecting against pests.
Projects in 20 African countries resulted in a doubling of crop yields within three to 10 years.
Sound ecological farming can significantly boost production and in the long term be more effective than conventional farming.
Lie #2: “Biotechnology can help farmers and the environment in many ways.” (page 8)
Two lies for the price of one.
Biotechnology — specifically genetic engineering — helps neither farmers nor the environment, according to the majority of legitimate scientists and economists. In fact, the opposite is true. Genetic engineering of seeds has wreaked havoc on the environment and brought misery to hundreds of thousands of small farmers all over the world.
The majority of farmers in developing countries struggle to afford even the most basic requirements of seeds and fertilizers. Their survival depends on the age-old practice of selecting, saving and sharing seeds from one year to the next. When multinational corporations move into areas previously dominated by small farmers, they force those farmers to buy their patented seeds and fertilizers — under pretense of higher yields, and under threats of lawsuits if they save or share the seeds. Every year, they’re forced to buy more seeds and more chemicals from corporations — and when the promises of higher yields and higher incomes prove empty, farmers go bankrupt.
Compounding their corporate crimes, when Monsanto’s patented seeds contaminate the non-GMO crops of small farmers (because the seeds drift across property lines) Monsanto routinely sues farmers for growing their patented seeds illegally, even though the seeds were actually unwanted trespassers. Further, the company has ruined the livelihoods of small farmers by harassing them for illegally growing patented seeds, even in cases where no patented seeds have been grown, either knowingly or by accident.
As Monsanto and others have expanded worldwide, into India, China, Pakistan, and other countries, the effect on small farmers has been devastating. In India, for instance, after World Trade Organization policies forced the country in 1998 to open its seed sector to companies like Cargill, Monsanto and Syngenta, farmers quickly found themselves in debt to the biotech companies that forced them to buy corporate seeds and fertilizers and pesticides, destroying local economies. Hundreds of thousands of India’s cotton farmers have committed suicide.
And according to a Greenpeace report, poorer farmers in the Philippines were sold Monsanto’s Bt corn as a “practical and ecologically sustainable solution for poor corn farmers everywhere to increase their yields” only to find the opposite was true: Bt corn did not control pests and was “not ecologically sustainable.”
Which brings us to one more of the Council for Biotechnology Information’s lies to kids: That agricultural biotechnology is good for the environment.
Study after study, over more than a decade, has warned us of just the opposite. Even the pro-biotech USDA has admitted that GE crops use more pesticides, not less than non-GE varieties. Genetic engineering results in evermore pesticides being dumped into the environment, destroying soil and water, human and animal health, and threatening the biodiversity of the planet.
How about telling kids instead that numerous reports, including one from theGerman Beekeepers Association, have linked genetically engineered Bt corn to the widespread disappearance of bees, or what is now referred to as Colony Collapse Disorder? And while we’re at it, maybe we should remind kids of the Albert Einstein’s quote: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”
Maybe we should also tell them that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s herbicide, Roundup, the most widely used herbicide in the world, kills Monarch butterflies, fish, and frogs, destroys soil fertility, and pollutes our waterways and drinking water.
The fact is, widespread use of Monsanto’s Roundup in all agricultural and urban areas of the United States is destroying the environment, pure and simple. US Geological Survey studies released this month show that Roundup is now commonly found in rain and rivers in agricultural areas in the Mississippi River watershed, where most applications are for weed control on GE corn, soybeans and cotton. Here’s the real truth, from an article published this past week: Monsanto’s Roundup is actually threatening the crop-yielding potential of the entire biosphere. According to the article, new research published in the journalCurrent Microbiology highlights the extent to which “glyphosate is altering, and in some cases destroying, the very microorganisms upon which the health of the soil, and — amazingly — the benefits of raw and fermented foods as a whole, depend.”
Lie #3: “Scientists are using biotechnology to grow foods that could help make people healthier.” (page 11)
This is the perhaps the most outrageous lie of all. Telling kids that GE foods are more nutritious is tantamount to telling them Hostess cupcakes and Coca-Cola are health foods.
Genetic engineering — of human food and food for animals that humans eat — has been linked to a host of diseases and health issues, including auto-immune disorders, liver and kidney damage, nutritional deficiencies, allergies, accelerated aging, infertility, and birth defects.
There’s a growing and alarming body of research indicating that GMO foods are unsafe, and absolutely no research whatsoever proving that they are safe. And yet the USDA and FDA continue to approve, and just this past month even agreed tospeed up approval of these crops that scientists and physicians increasingly link to poor health.
Instead of force-feeding kids lies in bogus activity books, how about having them read some truthful articles?
The studyBt Toxin Kills Human Kidney Cells says Bt toxins are not “inert” on human cells, and may indeed be toxic, causing kidney damage and allergies observed in farmers and factory workers handling Bt crops. The article supportsprevious studies done on rats, showing that animals fed on three strains of GE corn made by Monsanto suffered signs of organ damage after only three months.
It is abundantly clear that both GMOs made to be resistant to herbicides (aka “Roundup Ready”) and those made to produce insecticides have damaging impacts on the health of mammals who consume them, particularly in the liver and kidneys. We already know that from the trials of 90 days and less. In looking a little deeper into the info, we found a number of issues that point to a probable increased level of toxicity when these foods are consumed over the long term, including likely multi-generational effects.
Multi-generational effects. Eating GMO foods harms not only our health, and our kids’ health — but quite possibly their kids, too — even if we stop eating them today.
In a recent report to the United Nations General Assembly Human Rights Council by Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, Schutter outlines the case for sustainable agricultural practices (the antithesis of industrial agribusiness, with its GE crops and heavy reliance on chemical fertilizers and pesticides). He also addresses the links between health and malnutrition. In the report, Schutter shows why undernutrition, micronutrient deficiency and overnutrition are different dimensions of malnutrition that must be addressed together through a life-course approach. From the report’s summary:
Existing food systems have failed to address hunger, and at the same time encourage diets that are a source of overweight and obesity that cause even more deaths worldwide than does underweight. A transition towards sustainable diets will succeed only by supporting diverse farming systems that ensure that adequate diets are accessible to all, that simultaneously support the livelihoods of poor farmers and that are ecologically sustainable.
Corporate greed plus a complicit government have allowed for the rampant poisoning of our food and environment, and the demise of sustainable agriculture practices — practices sorely needed if we are going to feed the world’s population, and avoid a world health crisis. And we’ve exported the same misery and destruction to foreign countries far and wide.
Propaganda like the CBI’s Look Closer at Biotechnology has brainwashed many of our kids into thinking that the biotech industry has people — not profits — in its best interests. The book’s claims are laughable. But framing blatant lies as “science” for children in schools borders on criminal.
For parents and teachers out there, here’s an alternate lesson plan. Because world hunger is a concern, because saving our planet does matter, and because better health is a worthy and achievable goal, let’s ask our kids to think critically, instead of accepting at face value “information” attractively packaged by multinational corporations.
Don M. Huber, emeritus soil scientist of Purdue University puts it in terms everyone, kids included, can understand. Huber talks about a range of key factors involved in plant growth, including sunlight, water, temperature, genetics, and nutrients taken up from the soil. “Any change in any of these factors impacts all the factors,” he said. “No one element acts alone, but all are part of a system.” “When you change one thing,” he said, “everything else in the web of life changes in relationship.”
This is what we should be teaching the future stewards of our planet.
This is my daughter. She gave this speech at a businees meeting in front of 600 people. Her eyes have been opened to a scam that is being perpetrated upon Canadians and the rest of the world.
Feel free to use it freely without altering the content in a manner that would draw conclusions unintended by the speech but please redirect people back to the original post.
Please also see these great resources for more information and people who are trying their best to enact the necessary change in our country and the world:
Energy-intensive industrial farming practices that rely on toxic chemicals and genetically engineered crops are not just undermining public health–they’re destroying the planet. Here’s how:
#1 Generating Massive Greenhouse Gas Pollution (CO2, Methane, Nitrous Oxide) and Global Warming; While Promoting False Solutions Such as Industrial Biofuels, So-Called Drought-Resistant Crops, and Genetically Engineered Trees
Evaluations of corn grown for ethanol show that whatever reduction in emissions you get from burning corn instead of oil in the gas tank is more than offset by the fact that producing biofuel from corn requires as much fuel as it could replace.
Corn production, like the production of all of the crops (corn, cotton, canola, soy, and now, sugar beets and alfalfa) that Monsanto has so successfully industrialized through its business model of selling patented GMO seeds to increase the use of its pesticides, is very fossil fuel intensive.
But that’s just the beginning of Monsanto’s contribution to agriculture’s green house gas emissions. With ever-increasing acreage, where are all those GMO crops going? They’re being fed to animals, and when you look at emissions from factory farms, you’ll wish we burned them in the gas tank instead!
Added to the greenhouse gas emissions from crop production and factory farms is the pollution related to heavily processed food and the fact that food in the U.S. travels anywhere from 1500 to 3000 miles to reach your plate and must be either cooled or frozen in transit or storage. That’s fossil fuel intensive, too.
Before we total the life cycle contribution of Monsanto’s crops to greenhouse gas emissions, we have to take several steps back and acknowledge that clearing land to grow GMO crops for animal feed is the biggest driver of forest and wetland destruction, which generates 20% of all climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases.
All told, the production and processing of Monsanto’s GMO crops, from deforestation to fossil-fuel-based pesticides and fertilizers, polluting factory farms, and fuel-intensive food processing and distribution, is estimated to produce up to 51% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
#2 Polluting the Environment and the Soil-Food Web with Pesticides, Chemical Fertilizers, and Persistent Toxins, Including Dioxin
Industrial agriculture’s heavy reliance on pesticides and fertilizers is responsible for the release of many dangerous toxins into our environment, but since Monsanto first commercialized genetically engineered crops in the 1990s, we’ve been exposed to one more than any other. It’s common name is glyphosate, but Monsanto markets it as RoundUp and has created “RoundUp Ready” crops to promote it. RoundUp Ready crops are genetically engineered to withstand endless amounts of RoundUp. The success of Monsanto’s business model has made RoundUp the most-used pesticide in the history of the world.
The trouble is, RoundUp is very toxic. It’s known to cause cancer, birth defects and infertility. In fact, some scientists are now saying it’s more dangerous than DDT.
It only took about 15 years for the RoundUp Ready technology to begin to fail, with RoundUp-tolerant super-weeds springing up across the country and farmers having to resort to more and more toxic pesticides for weed control. The biotech industry says it has a solution: replace RoundUp Ready crops with a new type of GMO, “2,4-D Ready” crops.
As dangerous as RoundUp is turning out to be, the only thing worse would be 2,4-D replacing RoundUp’s as the most popular pesticide in the world. The use of 2,4-D releases dioxin. Dioxin is what has made Agent Orange, which contained 2,4-D, a source of horrific birth defects in Vietnam to this day. Genetically engineered 2,4-D-tolerant crops would be a disaster of untold proportions.
#3 Turning Farmland into Desert, Draining Aquifers and Wetlands
In the U.S., the soil’s capability to sequester carbon has been severely deteriorated due to the enormous increase in the use of nitrogen fertilizers, mostly to raise Monsanto’s genetically engineered crops for animal feed. The soil should be a sink for excess carbon but has lost about 50% of its organic matter, making it is less than half as effective as it used to be. Many of our most productive agricultural lands have been degraded or desertified because of industrial production.
Recent studies on the University of Illinois Morrow plots (the oldest continuously farmed experimental plots in the U.S.) have shown that since 1955, when synthetic nitrogen was first used, 40-190% too much nitrogen was applied, yet yields dropped and organic matter declined dramatically. These problems on the Morrow plots are writ large on millions of acres of agricultural soils that have been degraded by synthetic fertilizer all over this country.
Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer kills soil life, including earthworms and microorganisms. In addition to reduced yields, degraded and deadened soils produce less nutritious food.
Contrary to Monsanto’s marketing claims that their business is about “squeezing more out of a drop of water,” their genetically engineered crops are notoriously thirsty. It takes twice as much water to produce a pound of a RoundupReady crop soybean plant treated with RoundUp herbicide, as it does with a soybean plant that’s not treated with RoundUp.
#4 Poisoning Drinking Water, Acidifying the Oceans
Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is also responsible for the nitrate poisoning of two-thirds of the U.S. drinking water supply. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is the major cause of the 405 oceanic dead zones around the world (including the Gulf of Mexico, the Chesapeake Bay, and the coasts of California and Oregon). Monsanto’s genetically engineered corn uses more fertilizer than any other crop.
#5 Chopping Down the Rainforests for Monoculture GMO Crops, Biofuels and Cattle Grazing
Clearing land to grow GMO crops for animal feed is the biggest driver of forest and wetland destruction, which generate 20% of all climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases. In Argentina and Brazil, Monsanto’s genetically engineered soy is the main cause of deforestation.
Argentina has one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world with an average of 0.8% of the forest cut down each year, against a global rate of 0.23%. During the period 2002-2006, 1,108,669 hectares of forest were lost. That is 277,000 hectares per year, equivalent to 760 hectares per day or 32 hectares per hour. The speed with which Córdoba’s forests are disappearing is unmatched worldwide, it even surpasses that of tropical forests in poor countries. This is a ecological tragedy for the primitive forests which shelter a biodiversity found nowhere else on the planet.
In Brazil, the soy output increased 7.2 percent in 2011, causing deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon to jump sixfold.
#6 Increasing the Cost of Food, While Reducing Nutrition and Biodiversity
The business press unabashedly links Monsanto’s profits to record-high global food prices and increases in the costs of farm inputs, especially Monsanto’s patented genetically engineered seeds. Monsanto’s profits go up as hunger increases and families lose their farms to insurmountable debt.
Nowhere has the connection between Monsanto’s fortunes and farmers’ misfortunes been so clear as in India where 200,000 farmers have committed suicide since 1997. For many Indian farmers growing Monsanto’s genetically engineered Bt cotton, suicide is their only means of escaping the debt they’ve accrued to obtain the seeds and pesticides.
Monsanto has made food and farming more expensive, while reducing the nutrition and variety of food available to the average consumer. The world’s farmers are increasingly growing more of fewer number of crops (especially Monsanto’s genetically engineered corn, cotton, soy, canola, sugar beets and alfalfa). The result is that we’re eating a lot more of these few genetically engineered crops, mostly in the form of animal products, oils & fats, and sugars. The most notorious genetically engineered ingredients are high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated vegetable oils, and processed meats.
The concentration of power in the hands of a few chemical companies like Monsanto and the industrial producers who can most easily afford their products, has resulted in a global food system dominated by two extremes: on one hand, a plenitude of industrially produced junk foods, on the other, regular food shortages and drastic price hikes. This leaves a billion people saddled with obesity and diet-related disease, even as more than a billion don’t know where their next meal is coming from.
#7 Spawning Pesticide-Resistant “Super” Bugs and Weeds, and Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria
Genetically engineered crops designed to produce insecticides or tolerate herbicides have proven a failure. Herbicide-resistant “superweeds” have increased farmers’ weed-control costs to $50/acre, as they battle weeds that can stand up to the most toxic chemicals ever invented, including RoundUp (glyphosate), 2,4-D, dicamba, atrazine, ALS inhibitors, PPO inhibitors, HPPD inhibitors and synthetic auxins. Monsanto’s Bt corn and cotton are being mowed down by resistant insectsfrom Iowa to India.
On farms raising animals for food, the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics has created a serious threat to the longevity and effectiveness of certain classes of antibiotics used to treat a host of human illnesses. Doctors concede that antimicrobial drug resistance due to use in animal feed has already cost thousands of lives. In 2006, the EU banned the use of antibiotics in water and feed, proving that raising livestock without drugs is possible.
Ban Monsanto’s RoundUp! Experts Say It’s Worse than DDT! Tell the EPA to Ban Glyphosate
Can You Imagine a World without Antibiotics? Tell the FDA to Protect Human Health and Regulate Antibiotics in Animal Feed
#8 Generating New and More Virulent Plant, Animal and Human Diseases
The following is a summary of a must-watch interview (Part 1, Part 2) that Dr. Joseph Mercola conducted with Dr. Don Huber.
The way Monsanto’s RoundUp herbicide (glyphosate) kills weeds and plants is by compromising their defense mechanisms, making them very susceptible to soil borne organisms. It’s not a direct killer, but it has a debilitating effect on the weed’s immune system, much like the human disease AIDS.
Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready gene, which enables crops to withstand glyphosate, doesn’t solve the problem of a debilitated immune system, all it does is make it possible for the plant to survive and to accumulate more glyphosate. RoundUp Ready crops aren’t killed immediately by the soil diseases RoundUp makes them susceptible to, because they’ve been engineered with genes from a resistant bacteria, but they are still more likely to succumb to disease than plants that aren’t exposed to RoundUp.
Among these disease-causing pathogens are fusaria, which causes sudden death syndrome in soybeans and is a major disease-causing organism for most of our crops. In crops sprayed with RoundUp, we find an increase of up to 500 percent in root colonization by this fungus.
While glyphosate promotes the growth of more virulent pathogens, it also kills off beneficial bacteria that might keep such pathogens in check in the soil and in the guts of animals and humans that ingest the crop.
Scientists have discovered a brand new organism in genetically engineered animal feed, an organism that has since been linked to infertility and miscarriage in cattle, horses, pigs, sheep, and poultry. We can anticipate that, with such a broad spectrum of animal species, which is extremely unusual, that humans will face the same problem, and there has been an increasing frequency of miscarriage and a dramatic increase in infertility in humans in just the last eight to 10 years.
The organism was initially identified by veterinarians around 1998, about two years after the introduction of Roundup Ready soybeans, which is one of the staple feeds. The vets were puzzled by sudden high reproductive failure in animals. While sporadic at first, the phenomenon has continued to increase in severity. Dairies are reporting rates of spontaneous as high as 70 percent.
The cause-effect relationship between high reproductive failure and this new microbial entity has been established, but the research has not yet been published. The reason for the delay is because they really do not know what the organism is. It’s not a fungus. It’s not bacteria. It’s not a mycoplasma or a virus. It’s about the same size of a small virus; you have to magnify it 40,000 times.
When the veterinarians wanted to find the source for this new organism, they went to the feed. The first place where they found high concentrations was in the soybean meal. Since it has been found it in corn and in silage, only where there is a genetically engineered crop that has had glyphosate applied to it. The organism is also found in manure when the animals have been given feeds with high glyphosate residues. When that manure is applied to pastures and cattle graze on it, we also see high infertility rates there.
The organism is found in the placenta, in the fetus, and in the sperm. In the dairy industry, it sometimes takes twice as much semen to get a conception and as many as four to eight inseminations rather than the typical 1.2 to 1.5. One bull breeder had to pull 40 percent of his bulls out of service, because of fertility.
If we continue to douse our crops with ever increasing amounts of glyphosate, we will inevitably see the same effect on human health as we’re seeing in plants and animals.
Glyphosate gets inside the plant; it cannot be washed off. Once you eat it, it ends up in your gut, where 80 percent of your immune system resides. Glyphosate can wreak havoc with your health by upsetting the healthy ratio of good and bad stomach bacteria.
Because organically-farmed fields are not doused with glyphosate, organic fields still contain beneficial soil bacteria that actually hinder pathogens in and on the food from multiplying out of control. This may be yet another reason why organic foods are less prone to be contaminated with disease-causing pathogens than conventionally-grown foods.
Pathogens such as E. coli have a high tolerance for glyphosate compared to their natural biological controls. What this means is that it may not be the presence or absence of pathogens per se that determines the safety of our food supply, but rather the presence or absence of the natural control organisms, which are effectively destroyed by glyphosate. Salmonella, Clostridium, and a lot of these disease organisms are ubiquitous. They’re everywhere. Our health is dependent on keeping them in check. If we’re eliminating that check, we’re going to see an increase in Alzheimer’s, thyroid problems, autism, Parkinson’s — any disease that has a tie with either the endocrine system or nutrient availability.
Genetically engineered crops are supposed to be nutritionally equivalent to conventional foods, but they’re not. On the contrary, they’re nutritionally inferior due to glyphosate’s herbicidal mechanism, which blocks absorption of micronutrients. Genetically engineered crops contain about 50 percent less manganese and up to 70 percent less zinc. They also contain less copper, iron and magnesium, just to name a few. This affects the overall health of the plant, and its reproductive ability, and when you eat this nutritionally inferior food, you’re not getting the micronutrients your body needs for proper function either. Animal products are similarly affected when they’re from animals raised on genetically feed.
Studies of pet rats are exposing behavioral differences in animals given genetically engineered feed, as opposed to normal food. The non-GMO-fed rats are docile. They can be pulled out of their cages and patted just like a cat. But try and reach in to the cage where the rats are being fed the genetically engineered feed. The rats are irritated. They don’t get along together. They always go off into their own little world. They do backflips. They crawl up and run around the cage. They can’t get any peace, can’t settle down. That is very typical of what you’d see with autism.
Doctors working with autistic children are noting many correlations between the rats fed genetically modified feed and autistic children. When you look at the stomachs of the GMO-fed animals, they have all of the severe allergy responses, the inflammation and the reddening. The intestinal lining is deteriorating. The smell of the intestinal contents is very rank. The biology has been drastically changed. Doctors say that’s exactly what they’re seeing with autistic children.
Another effect of the new mystery organism associated with genetically engineered crops is premature aging. Research done in Iowa three years ago showed that prime beef from a two-year old cow had to be downgraded to that from a 10-year old cow.
Glyphosate can also disrupt a number of other biological systems, including liver function, blood function, and hormonal function. Glyphosate is a potent endocrine disruptor that can affect the endocrine system, thyroid function, and pituitary function.
TAKE ACTION
Ban Monsanto’s RoundUp! Experts Say It’s Worse than DDT! Tell the EPA to Ban Glyphosate
#9 Utilizing Wasteful Fossil Fuel-Intensive Practices and Encouraging the Expansion of Natural Gas Fracking and Tar Sands Extraction (Which Destroy Forests, Aquifers, and Farmland)
The industrialized food system is responsible for more than half of greenhouse gas emissions, making Big Ag one of Big Oil’s biggest customers. We could deprive the oil and gas industry of a significant amount of income by making the shift from polluting, fossil-fuel-intensive factory farms to carbon-sequestering organic and local agriculture.
Until we do make the shift, we need to acknowledge that the old adage “you are what you eat” applies to energy and the climate, as well as the body. It isn’t just Hummers that are pushing the expansion of natural gas fracking and tar sands extraction, it’s also Big Macs.
The worst thing about agriculture’s wasteful ways that the more fossil fuels we use to produce our food, the more farmland will be destroyed in the search for new sources of that fuel.
Natural gas fracking pumps many millions of gallons of hydrocarbons and volatile organic compounds, including known carcinogens and endocrine disruptors, into the ground during the drilling process, and into the air from evaporation tanks. Pollution of water, air and food from the gas drilling industry is exempt from federal pollution laws, including the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clear Air Act, thanks to Dick Cheney’s 2005 Energy Policy Act and its ‘Halliburton Exemption.’
In upstate New York, the three million acres of superior grasslands which are currently unused are threatened by natural gas fracking. This is enough pasture land to raise local, grass-fed cattle to replace all the factory farmed beef sold in New York City.
The Keystone XL pipeline would carry toxic tar sands oil 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The pipeline would cross the massive Ogallala aquifer, which supplies drinking water in 8 US states, and irrigation for millions of acres of farmland. We’ve already seen the damage the thick tar sands oil laden with volatile compounds can do from spills in the Yellowstone River and the Kalamazoo River. The first Keystone pipeline, developed with state-of-the-art technology, has already spilled 12 times in its first year in operation.
#10 Stealing Money From the 99% to Give Huge Subsidies to the 1% Wealthiest, Most Chemical and Energy-Intensive Farms and Food Producers
The following is a summary of Donald Carr’s must-read article, “Why the 2012 Farm Bill is a Climate Bill.”
In the 2012 Farm Bill, Congress is poised to cut 7 million acres from the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). The CRP is administered through the U.S. Department of Agriculture and pays farmers to keep highly erodible land out of production.
Putting land into conservation programs leads to cleaner water, healthier soil, and robust wildlife habitat, and also plays a major role in fighting climate change. According to the USDA [PDF], one acre of protected land sequesters 1.66 metric tons of carbon every year, carbon that would otherwise end up in the atmosphere. The 7 million acres about to be cut from the CRP have been putting 11.6 million metric tons of carbon into the soil every year.
The Environmental Protection Agency says that this amount of carbon is equivalent to the annual emissions of 2 million passenger vehicles. All that stored carbon will be sent back into the atmosphere if those 7 million acres are plowed under to plant more genetically engineered corn for ethanol and livestock feed.
Meanwhile lavish government payments to highly profitable mega-farms continue, and farm state lawmakers and agribiz lobbyists are working toward newer programs that could increase taxpayers’ burden, along with agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Save the Planet From Monsanto! It’s not enough to stop eating genetically engineered food. If we want a liveable planet we’ve got to boycott all factory farmed food and make the Great Transition from energy and chemical-intensive agriculture to a re-localized and organic system of food and farming. The World According to Monsanto is a recipe for disaster. Monsanto and Big Ag contaminate every link in the food chain, threatening the very foundation of life: living nutrient-rich soil, clean water, resilient crops, healthy animals, stable climates, and diverse food sources. The good news is that agro-ecological and organic methods can reverse this threat and sustain food production for future generations, but we don’t have much time to turn things around.
Few understand the American election, even those who live here. I am forced to write for an international audience, which may actually make more sense to Americans. President Obama inherited two wars, a collapsed stock market and massive debt.
We look at the market today at 13,000 plus and still wonder why our pension funds are down and our homes are impossible to sell.
We also note that rents are up, food is up, gasoline is way way up yet that 13,000 market isn’t the same one it was in 2007.
It is a different group of companies, what we call a “fix.” The old “blue chip” companies went broke, or so we are told, and we picked new ones and are pretending things are better.
We make up for it by, not only printing massive amounts of counterfeit currency for ourselves but for Europe as well.
The Funny Money Game
More honestly, it wasn’t just the currency but the ambiguity of the banking business that let trade and investment build jobs.
Money was lent that never existed, collateralized by imagination, derivatives, overvalued real estate but real jobs were the result, jobs that came with home purchases, paid taxes, people buying things, when the “phony dollar, euro and pound” died, so did our ability to supply jobs.
We are now dependent, partially at least, on a couple of ways to continue that we see and some that are highly secret. What we see are these:
Every financial prediction is that the end came years ago but we are still moving on as though things were OK. This is a magic balancing act run by Timothy Geithner and President Obama who are trying to stop the massive thievery, overtly at least, and restore revenue through taxes on the rich, something that Reagan onward ended.
We are basing our economy on wartime spending, which is financed by borrowing. The wars, the Bush “terror wars” are the most insane and dishonorable in American history.
I even have Army Intel telling me the World Trade Center towers were brought down by sophisticated miniature hydrogen bombs. Photo analysis exists of all the attacks, millions of dollars of it, like that we released of the UFO in Korea last week. We are told it can never be released and it hasn’t ten years later, not to anyone.
Continuing on this is purposeless.The Republican Party, working with Israel and the Koch brothers, using manipulated polls, gas and oil speculation and rigging food prices is trying to crash the American economy before the election.
They are afraid of President Obama and rightly so. The GOP is primarily tied to narcotics, organized crime and has its only backing from Americans that no longer are willing to believe the outlandish lies they have been told as news for a decade.
The problem, a worse one, is that, since at least 1947, our history has been rigged as well. That story is not just strange but bizarre, frightening, and “topsy-turvy.”
We will get to some of it later. Now we move into the darker aspects of our economy, if such a thing were possible.
Federales Reservistos !!
Over the past few months, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a rogue operation even by Federal Reserve Standards, without any authorization, created $31 trillion and simply “gave it away,” pumping it into European banks, we have records as there was a partial audit done at the request of congress.
Congress, however, went silent. The reason, overtly at least, is that the foreign owned banks that represent the Federal Reserve System, really an ancient expression of 18th century “moneylenders”, had “gone under.” Their massive private debt, amounting to “qau-trillions,” imaginary though it is, has made continuation of our monetary system impossible.
Only America can illegally counterfeit the massive imaginary currency needed to float these banks while about two thirds is eventually bled off, 1/3 to organized crime and another third we can’t find at all and nobody is asking.
THREE STEPS BEYOND CONSPIRACY THEORY
"They're Heeeere!!!"
For nearly 60 years, movies and TV have slowly focused on a plotline involving secret Nazi flying saucers, alien landings, inter-dimensional travel and a future that never came.
We were supposed to be living in “Star Trek” already, having settled the moon in “1999″ as the old TV show, not even available on Netflix, told some of us.
Our “conspiracy television” tells us of flying saucer crashes, and astronauts who saw “alien spacecraft” speak up now and again.
And finally, we have recognized what has been minimally “inter-planetary” aircraft built by our own governments using technology that we have had for decades, technology that represents unlimited “free energy,” perhaps uncontrollable planetary development but worse, disclosure of some “dark secret.”
Word goes two ways: you tell folks that everything is free, free water, free electricity, and “free lunch” and we go into a population hell of “not so white” folks who worship what many Americans think might be the wrong gods.
With Romney, our Mormon candidate, his religion is based on secret inter-galactic travel, transmigration of men only into gods and the use of women as sex tools after the “brain sucking machine” finishes them off.
This really is the religion of Mormonism, this and much more. It makes Scientology look better and better.
Mormons are all Republicans. Who else would think that exploiting brain dead slaves would make you ‘godlike?”
HERE IS WHAT WE CAN TELL YOU
Senior reliable sources, by that I mean mainstream “Big Army” flag officers, have been consulted about the use of cold fusion, hydrogen/boron fusion and other “non-lethal” or “aneutronic” devices that can provide all power needed on earth at extremely low cost.
Wind and solar are considered “dead duck” technologies as fusion is both very simple physics, containable, produced not only unimaginable power but expels usable electric current without any traditional conversion required by nuclear technology.
The questions are only design and construction with working models out there already.
This technology is decades old, as is similar technology that nullifies gravity. This means that conventional rocket travel, our guided missiles, our airplanes, even our most advanced secret projects have been entirely “cover and deception.”
MORE LATER BUT SOME “DARKSIDE”
It is no secret to most of you that “bad space guys” have been visiting earth. In fact, the only crazy part is the number of films that try to depict off world or interdimensional civilizations as having any human characteristics at all.
Any “advanced civilization” could be millions of years beyond us, questions continually brought up for fans of “Dr. Who,” the British science fiction series that runs decade after decade as a demented “Scooby Doo” type show with cardboard scenery.
The “dark side” is that all this exists. The dark side is that America, seen as the representative world power, primarily at least, has decades of interaction with alien species, multiple alien species, and has “bought time” as it were through denial and through agreements that allow the seizure of humans for something far worse than the “anal probe.”
DENIAL
Lying about this while basing much of our entertainment industry on what borders on fairly full disclosure, of the threat at least, is almost a joke. Our denial comes in the cost. There is little or no sign that much in advanced technology has been passed on.
Documents outlining the relationship indicate the existence of a highly secretive and advanced committee that oversees our response which is, primarily, the divestment of technologies and resources, trillions of dollars, into programs that are meant, and this is a guess only, to allow us to defend ourselves.
The point of conjecture, based on easy to “figure out” disinformation campaigns and our decades of frozen technology, all new mobile phones and little else, is that basic concepts in physics involving both field and energy systems has created capabilities that are incompatible with a planet where stone age to iron age civilizations coexist.
We are a planet where animals are bred for food under brutal conditions and where continual warfare, too often near “UFO” level technologies used against virtually unarmed civilians are seen as acceptable by most people.
Moral and ethical concerns seem to have been systematically bred out of the most advanced societies through continual exposure to highly propagandized public education and history that barely passes for mythology.
You can add in absurdly childish economic and political systems that pontificate while, in reality, reproducing pre-feudal values, theft of resources, enslavement of the mass of population, and the defilement of the “middle” or “professional classes” within bureaucracies that foster apolitical lives or attempt to replace philosophy with dogmatic religions.
This only leaves the need to discredit or contain real creativity or advancement through a system of “branding” those who disclose truths as “whistleblower,” the genuinely talented as “elitist kooks” and the rest as “radicals” or “conspiracy theorists.”
Anyone else can be and is murdered.
When need to “manage” comes to play, appetites for perversion, buggery, abuse of power, murder and torture, satiate those who wish to prove to themselves their power is real.
Toward that end, we have seen the torture, so much of it over the past dozen years that thousands have died in secret prisons, many filmed and the most obscene acts shown to the most powerful, some members of the Supreme Court, congress and the White House.
I DIGRESS
DC Boy Toy - James Guckert/Gannon
Years ago, there were accusations made against a president by a “pimp” who organized the kidnapping and murder of children who were sold for sexual favors to leaders of our government and key industries.
The tradition, for decades, had been to supply politicians with “road secretaries, women who would provide sexual favors in lieu of normal family lives, keeping errant politicians in line and retiring with senior executive (GS 15) positions.
Some of these women held America’s greatest secrets and these relationships have glued America together, or at least did, until the middle of the Reagan administration when pedophiles, mostly homosexual, had infiltrated the government as they had the Catholic Church.
The basic accusations, kidnapping of children off the streets of America, chosen for “type” based on “requests” by the supposedly powerful and influential were quieted by groups within the FBI and intelligence agencies with dozens being murdered.
“Politics as usual,” the murder of several senators, key government scientists, FBI agents, the discrediting of dozens, imaginary street crimes, Chandra Levy, Dr. David Kelly, John Wheeler II, Vince Foster, Steve Kanga and hundreds of others, were only “safety valves.”
The only one spoken of anymore is Senator Paul Wellstone who was assassinated with his family for political reasons.
The release of the recent photograph showing Lee Harvey Oswald standing in the doorway of the Texas School Book Depository at the exact second he was supposed to be shooting President Kennedy is now accepted, part of the public record, and, not only denied but defiles us in ways we are now too stupid to begin to understand as does 9/11 and the 20 square miles torture prisons in Poland and a dozen other countries, or are they prisons?
No one has ever spoken to anyone who has ever been in one, either stationed as a guard, janitor, guard, nothing. America now has more secret prisons than Nazi Germany was said to have “concentration camps, far larger, far more expensive and, unless we can prove otherwise, capable of certainly more deaths.
How strange is that? In a nation of “human rights activists, no one asks, not a word from Ron Paul or the ACLU, not the SPLC, in fact no one has ever said a word other than mild complaints but never a law or request for an investigation or any curiosity at all.
What isn’t mentioned is that these facilities are huge, entirely secretive and show no signs of funding, no one has ever met a prisoner who has been in one, no accusations or trials are arranged, no named suspects are brought up, no crimes mentioned, no plots, no imaginary terrorist acts, in fact there is no proof that these are prisons at all.
Some of these are larger than our biggest military bases. What are they? We can’t prove they are prisons, no photos emerge, no witnesses come forward, no survivors have ever made it out, the Red Cross has never inspected them yet the Red Cross visited Auschwitz hundreds of times.
The best we could hope for is that they are CIA heroin and cocaine distribution hubs but they are too big and there are too many plus, we already know that Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo is where we run our drugs and where we manage our partnership with the Albanian Mafia.
U.S. Camp Bondsteel - Kosovo
Ever wonder why we have one of our largest military bases in the world in “Kosovo,” but nobody remembers every being stationed there or why it exists?
We had touched on stories of one or more presidential pedophile. I have talked with officials during the Bush administrations that were invited to “diplomatic functions” that ended with “private parties” upstairs. They said they thought it was just cocaine, this was the cover story.
I have since learned it was not cocaine. What was done with the kids when they had been “used up?” Does anyone believe the man in prison for killing Chandra Levy really did it?
ECONOMIC SECRETS
Organized Crime's Best Friend
There are two areas of economic secrets we will mention today, at the request of others. We have available incontrovertible proof that over half the diamonds that come into the United States are tied to terrorism and organized crime.
We also know that documents proving this, scientific papers, testimony, were turned over to both the FBI and State Department by credible sources in the international law enforcement community.
Published studies show that equipment used by American customs officials have been sabotaged to allow illegal diamonds, most manufactured using a sophisticated process more difficult to detect than simple “cloning” or simply smuggling conflict diamonds.
Fifty percent of diamonds brought into the US from Tel Aviv are illegal. Both customs and the organizations involved in overseeing diamond quality for the jewelry industry are financially involved. Quantities of proof are vast, authoritative and have caused several major firms such as DeBeers to restructure and divest.
Diamonds are the primary source of both money laundering and terrorist/weapons financing in the world and the US is quite purposefully avoiding demands they quit taking part in these activities.
America does the same thing with drugs.
NEW CHINESE PLOY
China is telling the world it can use “gold tailings” to remove 40 times more gold from ore than possible before. This is untrue.
Years ago, the South Koreans developed a methodology, though expensive, to actually manufacture gold. China has very small gold reserve for a nation as wealthy as they claim. In fact, their currency is one of the worst in the world and their banking system is inherently incompetent and corrupt.
It was also rumored, several years ago, that China, upon examining gold reserves it held in Hong Kong, found nearly 1/3rd to be counterfeit.
The issues have been, of late, seeking a currency for world trade and to secure and underwrite industrial growth while the “fiat” currencies of the west, all of them, have proven to be worthless.
Down the Black Hole
The $31 trillion dollars in unauthorized Federal Reserve currency exports is proof that, in actuality, there is no world currency exchange and it is now and has been for years, nothing but an act.
China has sought more, and to advance the process of creating a parallel currency as a hedge against political instability, to continue hiding from the public their recent political collapse and economic downturn, China has licensed South Korea’s technology for producing gold.
As cover for this, China has sent groups around the world buying non-producing mines, producing offers for worthless “gold tailings” and has been loading the internet and technical publications with pseudo-science, utter fiction and deception.
What we don’t know is how much it actually costs to manufacture gold. Is it $100 per ounce or $2000 per ounce?
Where we picked up the South Korean ploy is when they let market prices fluctuate up to $150 per oz. below accepted value.
The problems are twofold:
It creates gold as a derivative of subjective value, something Korea would never have done. Thus, any currency underwritten by gold will not only eventually have no trade value but, when the public learns of the process, gold market will crash.
Diamonds, a vastly larger market, both gem quality and industrial, have been manufactured for decades. Currently, there is no accepted technology that can detect phony diamonds. This is the truth and those who say otherwise are unaware of advances in growing diamonds from much smaller “seed crystals” with individual DNA. This is far different than “cloning” and, as yet, no equipment used by any government, quite purposefully, can detect these phony stones. Thus, all world diamonds are technically worthless.
CONCLUSION
This leaves very few waysof expressing value and power.
Future Tax Collectors?
If all currencies, all debt also, are deniable, if gold can be manufactured, and we can prove this beyond question, if all diamonds are useless and governments are choosing to turn to narcotics, weapons and hydrocarbons to express both political power and value, economic systems will continue until one of the bubbles burst or we have a world war, which is a more likely scenario.
Syria is the likely basis with US expansion of missile bases into Central Europe as the initiator.
Then again, the Serbian elections and a new realignment between Serbia and Moscow would flank US efforts to dominate the Black Sea region. With Russian power west of NATO, with Turkey and Israel at odds, with India producing ICBMs, aimed at China and Israeli ICBMs from India pointed at Europe and their real enemy, the United States.
Don’t believe this, start reading the Jerusalem Star.
US attempts to control Central Asia are going to fail until and unless we are willing to follow the unwritten Obama doctrine, trading Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and India for Israel and Britain.
When the Chinese have settled into Africa, each day planeloads arrive, they will find themselves overextended and dependent on an American military presence that has moved down the west coast of Africa in relative stealth.
The continuing problems will be narco-dependency and our lack of an American currency.
Our most crippling problem is the lack of a government, particularly the ability of the Supreme Court to go “activist” and usurp states’ rights, interfere in elections, write its own legislation, that and our “money in politics” issue, primarily involving Israeli interference in the House of Representatives is likely to bring about use of emergency presidential powers after the election.
Thus far, one Supreme Court Justice is guilty of tax evasion, another tied to organized crime, both “neocon-activists.” Both face arrest.
Despite the entertaining flurry of testimony regarding our army and Secret Service and their “whoring,” we have multiple high level confirmations of an Israeli attempt on President Obama’s life, to have been staged during the visit to Colombia.
If anything, problems with Israel are problems with Netanyahu alone. He hates black people and can’t help but show it.
Despite his lack of intellectual accomplishment, this is not a particularly clever guy, he talks to Obama as though he were talking down to a slave, which is how we are told Netanyahu thinks of anyone of African background.
On the other hand, Obama, Biden and General Dempsey, though all three extremely disappointed in Netanyahu’s lack of ability and manners, he has repeatedly insulted all three, believing his “mob” connections in the US make him “bulletproof,” see the writing on the wall.
Israel has been isolated, not by Arab dictatorships but by democracies. If Egypt can get rid of its military junta, Israel will be a lost cause, leaving them only their Wahhabist friends in Saudi Arabia.
The Muslim heresy of “Wahhabism,” spreading terrorism and ignorance, is and we aren’t kidding, a deal cut between the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel to open terrorism schools in every poor Muslim area, raising kids to be suicide bombers.
Why, we might ask? If you aren’t aware that Israel has made billions in profits peddling protection from “suicide bombers” around the world, you need to catch up on the defense industry.
To keep up business, if a real suicide bomber, some poor mentally abused kid preyed on my religious crazies can’t be found, “someone” will build a car bomb anyway. Look into it, a growth industry, invest, I am considering printing up a list of companies that do it all, disease and cure.
I found a lot of graphic suicide bomber images but just too gross for a Monday morning, so we go with generic…Jim
I found a lot of graphic suicide bomber images but just too gross for a Monday morning, so we go with generic...Jim
Without the Saudi’s funding extremist movements across the Middle East in concert with Israel and friends in the US, nations such as Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, whose elections are rated as more democratic than either those held in America or Israel, something unreported in the US press, will, as threatened, let the “sands of time” erase Zionism.
The reality, of course, is that there never was a Zionist cause. There never was a “Greater Israel” or hope of it. There is no great nuclear arsenal in Israel as there are no nuclear weapons in North Korea and very few in China.
There is only oil theft, drug running, money scams, phony terrorism and propaganda. Israel is like one of those children’s charities, where they show the poor starving child, flies around their eyes, yet your donations do nothing but buy private islands, whoring vacations and private planes.
Being honest, the only reason we mention Israel is not because they are worst, not by far, the Saudi’s leave them in the dust, it is just that their control of the press has brought the backlash they were too stupid to notice.
The Promised Land? Where is it? We’re still looking.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation employs upwards of 15,000 undercover agents today, ten times what they had on the roster back in 1975.
If you think that’s a few spies too many — spies earning as much as $100,000 per assignment — one doesn’t have to go too deep into their track record to see their accomplishments. Those agents are responsible for an overwhelming amount of terrorist stings that have stopped major domestic catastrophes in the vein of 9/11 from happening on American soil.
Another thing those agents are responsible for, however, is plotting those very schemes.
In order to help local police officers protect themselves while fighting the largely unsuccessful War on Drugs, the federal government passed legislation in 1994 allowing the Pentagon to 
More honestly, it wasn’t just the currency but the ambiguity of the banking business that let trade and investment build jobs.
Every financial prediction is that the end came years ago but we are still moving on as though things were OK. This is a magic balancing act run by Timothy Geithner and President Obama who are trying to stop the massive thievery, overtly at least, and restore revenue through taxes on the rich, something that Reagan onward ended.
Senior reliable sources, by that I mean mainstream “Big Army” flag officers, have been consulted about the use of cold fusion, hydrogen/boron fusion and other “non-lethal” or “aneutronic” devices that can provide all power needed on earth at extremely low cost.
It is no secret to most of you that “bad space guys” have been visiting earth. In fact, the only crazy part is the number of films that try to depict off world or interdimensional civilizations as having any human characteristics at all.
The point of conjecture, based on easy to “figure out” disinformation campaigns and our decades of frozen technology, all new mobile phones and little else, is that basic concepts in physics involving both field and energy systems has created capabilities that are incompatible with a planet where stone age to iron age civilizations coexist.
How strange is that? In a nation of “human rights activists, no one asks, not a word from Ron Paul or the ACLU, not the SPLC, in fact no one has ever said a word other than mild complaints but never a law or request for an investigation or any curiosity at all.
Thus far, one Supreme Court Justice is guilty of tax evasion, another tied to organized crime, both “neocon-activists.” Both face arrest.
