The Constitutional Court of Colombia approved a plan that will drop all criminal penalties for individuals caught with small amounts of marijuana or cocaine, according to Spanish-language media reports.
That means anyone caught with less than 22 grams of marijuana, or one gram of cocaine, will no longer be subject to arrest or prosecution. People who are caught intoxicated in public can only be sent to receive medical or psychological treatment for their impairment.
The proposal, first introduced last year by Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, is intended to refocus law enforcement resources on drug-runners and cartels and away from individual users.
“Today’s judicial ruling in Colombia represents yet another important step in the growing political and judicial movement in Latin America and Europe to stop treating people who consume drugs as criminals worthy of incarceration,” Ethan Nadalmann, who heads the U.S.-based Drug Policy Alliance, said in prepared text.
“The Colombian Constitutional Court’s decision is obviously most important in Colombia, where it represents both a powerful repudiation of [the former president's] push to criminalize people who use drugs and a victory for President Juan Manuel Santos’s call for a new direction in drug policy,” he added.
The measure is just one of a number of drug war reforms Colombia’s current regime has pursued. The nation’s Chamber of Representatives approved a bill in May that would legalize the cultivation of drugs that grow as plants, like marijuana, opium, coca and poppies.
Other countries, like Mexico, Guatemala and Brazil, are considering similar measures, and South American leaders recently met in Guatemala to discuss a new regional security accord that would include drug legalization, but the summit failed to produce an agreement after several key leaders failed to show up.
Colombia, a key U.S. ally in the region, has historically bent over backwards to enforce U.S. drug policies, going so far as to host U.S. troops on their military bases and allow U.S. drone surveillance of drug smuggling routes. They’ve even accepted prior U.S. administrations sending aircraft to spray hidden poppy and coca fields with toxic herbicides known to cause a variety of adverse health effects in humans.
President Barack Obama told South American leaders earlier this year that he’s willing to have a conversation on drug reforms, but insisted that legalization is not the answer. As a candidate for the U.S. Senate, Obama claimed he supported decriminalizing marijuana possession, but he’s not favored or even acknowledged that position as president. Instead, Obama has insisted that America’s war on drugs will not end on his watch, but he has voiced support for some reforms, like an increased focus on prevention and treatment over incarceration.
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Indigenous Fight Amazon Highway
A fierce row has broken out over a controversial plan to drive a road through pristine Amazon rainforest, imperiling the future of some of the world’s last uncontacted tribes.
The 125-mile (200km) road would pass through the Alto Purús national park in Peru, connecting a remote area to the outside world but opening up the most biologically and culturally important area of the upper Amazon to logging, mining and drug trafficking. Opponents of the plan fear it will threaten the existence of uncontacted tribes such as the Mashco-Piro. The first detailed photographs of members of the tribe made headlines around the world earlier this year after they were spotted on a riverbank.
The majority indigenous population of the region appears to be largely united in its opposition to the road, which would run parallel to the Brazilian border, connecting the towns of Puerto Esperanza and Iñapari. Conservationists warn it would cause irreparable harm to the environment and the area’s people.
But the road has the support of many mixed-race settlers – or mestizos – who make up roughly one fifth of the region’s population. With the Alto Purús currently accessible only by plane, they believe that the road would improve their quality of life, bringing lower prices for fuel and food and creating profitable development opportunities.
The campaign to build the road has been led by an Italian missionary, Miguel Piovesan, who claims that indigenous people are being kept isolated and denied the chances for development available to the rest of the population. He first proposed the road in 2004, around the time the Peruvian government announced that the Alto Purús was to become the country’s largest national park.
Piovesan’s plan’s met with little initial enthusiasm, but his long and determined campaign, using his own radio station and parish website, has been so successful that the country’s Congress is now due to debate a bill to allow construction to start. Piovesan has been scathing about his opponents, particularly international organizations such as Survival International and the WWF, which he accuses of profiting from keeping the tribes in isolation.
“These international organizations gain money because they present themselves as the saviors of the Indians, this is what it’s all about. So if the Indians evolve, they [the NGOs] lose their business,” he said on a recent radio show. Last week he told the Observer that the reality was that the indigenous people were being kept in a condition of “captivity and slavery incompatible with the true ecology”.
But Piovesan’s opponents suspect that he is more interested in gaining access to potential converts for his church. Reports from Peru say that he has denied the existence of the uncontacted tribes. The main indigenous organization in Puerto Esperanza, Feconapu, has demanded that the Vatican remove the priest, accusing him of insulting and humiliating the native population.
One indigenous leader, Julio Cusurichi, warned that building the road would amount to “ethnocide” of the uncontacted tribes. According to the last census, in 2007, there are only about 3,500 people living in the region, including eight known tribes and an unknown number of uncontacted Indians living in the Madre de Díos territorial reserve. The 6.7m-acre national park is also home to wildlife including jaguar, scarlet macaw and giant river otter.
The Upper Amazon Conservancy, which works with the indigenous population, has been one of the most vocal critics of the road. Its director, Chris Fagan, accused the road’s supporters of short-sighted greed and said the majority of the population were vehemently opposed.
“They depend on the forest and rivers for daily sustenance. They see the highway as just the latest example of mestizo greed and exploitation – of rubber, their religion, animal skins, mahogany, and now a highway accessing their homelands,” he said. “It will ruin one of the wildest and culturally important places on Earth. Will reason or greed prevail?”
Rebecca Spooner, Survival International’s Peru campaigner, said building the road would devastate entire peoples: “These uncontacted tribes live either side of the Peru-Brazil border. Building this road through their forest tramples over their rights, imposing so-called ‘development’ upon them. Congress has the opportunity to step in before it’s too late. This road should not be approved.”
The issue of access to areas inhabited by uncontacted tribes came to the fore in January when the Observer exposed the plight of the Jarawa tribe of the Andaman Islands, whose women and girls were being persuaded to dance semi-naked for tourists in return for gifts of food.
Last month India’s government finally took action to end the abuse, introducing a law to create a 5km buffer zone around the Jarawa’s reserve and making breaches of the law punishable with up to seven years in jail.
But in a sign that Delhi has a fight on its hands to protect the tribe, the Andaman administration responded by instructing its police force to think very carefully before taking any action against settlers living around the buffer zone.
The 125-mile (200km) road would pass through the Alto Purús national park in Peru, connecting a remote area to the outside world but opening up the most biologically and culturally important area of the upper Amazon to logging, mining and drug trafficking. Opponents of the plan fear it will threaten the existence of uncontacted tribes such as the Mashco-Piro. The first detailed photographs of members of the tribe made headlines around the world earlier this year after they were spotted on a riverbank.
The majority indigenous population of the region appears to be largely united in its opposition to the road, which would run parallel to the Brazilian border, connecting the towns of Puerto Esperanza and Iñapari. Conservationists warn it would cause irreparable harm to the environment and the area’s people.
But the road has the support of many mixed-race settlers – or mestizos – who make up roughly one fifth of the region’s population. With the Alto Purús currently accessible only by plane, they believe that the road would improve their quality of life, bringing lower prices for fuel and food and creating profitable development opportunities.
The campaign to build the road has been led by an Italian missionary, Miguel Piovesan, who claims that indigenous people are being kept isolated and denied the chances for development available to the rest of the population. He first proposed the road in 2004, around the time the Peruvian government announced that the Alto Purús was to become the country’s largest national park.
Piovesan’s plan’s met with little initial enthusiasm, but his long and determined campaign, using his own radio station and parish website, has been so successful that the country’s Congress is now due to debate a bill to allow construction to start. Piovesan has been scathing about his opponents, particularly international organizations such as Survival International and the WWF, which he accuses of profiting from keeping the tribes in isolation.
“These international organizations gain money because they present themselves as the saviors of the Indians, this is what it’s all about. So if the Indians evolve, they [the NGOs] lose their business,” he said on a recent radio show. Last week he told the Observer that the reality was that the indigenous people were being kept in a condition of “captivity and slavery incompatible with the true ecology”.
But Piovesan’s opponents suspect that he is more interested in gaining access to potential converts for his church. Reports from Peru say that he has denied the existence of the uncontacted tribes. The main indigenous organization in Puerto Esperanza, Feconapu, has demanded that the Vatican remove the priest, accusing him of insulting and humiliating the native population.
One indigenous leader, Julio Cusurichi, warned that building the road would amount to “ethnocide” of the uncontacted tribes. According to the last census, in 2007, there are only about 3,500 people living in the region, including eight known tribes and an unknown number of uncontacted Indians living in the Madre de Díos territorial reserve. The 6.7m-acre national park is also home to wildlife including jaguar, scarlet macaw and giant river otter.
The Upper Amazon Conservancy, which works with the indigenous population, has been one of the most vocal critics of the road. Its director, Chris Fagan, accused the road’s supporters of short-sighted greed and said the majority of the population were vehemently opposed.
“They depend on the forest and rivers for daily sustenance. They see the highway as just the latest example of mestizo greed and exploitation – of rubber, their religion, animal skins, mahogany, and now a highway accessing their homelands,” he said. “It will ruin one of the wildest and culturally important places on Earth. Will reason or greed prevail?”
Rebecca Spooner, Survival International’s Peru campaigner, said building the road would devastate entire peoples: “These uncontacted tribes live either side of the Peru-Brazil border. Building this road through their forest tramples over their rights, imposing so-called ‘development’ upon them. Congress has the opportunity to step in before it’s too late. This road should not be approved.”
The issue of access to areas inhabited by uncontacted tribes came to the fore in January when the Observer exposed the plight of the Jarawa tribe of the Andaman Islands, whose women and girls were being persuaded to dance semi-naked for tourists in return for gifts of food.
Last month India’s government finally took action to end the abuse, introducing a law to create a 5km buffer zone around the Jarawa’s reserve and making breaches of the law punishable with up to seven years in jail.
But in a sign that Delhi has a fight on its hands to protect the tribe, the Andaman administration responded by instructing its police force to think very carefully before taking any action against settlers living around the buffer zone.
The European Atrocity You Never Heard About
0digg 79Share
In the largest episode of forced migration in history, millions of German-speaking civilians were sent to Germany from Czechoslovakia and other European countries after World War II by order of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union.
The screams that rang throughout the darkened cattle car crammed with deportees, as it jolted across the icy Polish countryside five nights before Christmas, were Dr. Loch's only means of locating his patient. The doctor, formerly chief medical officer of a large urban hospital, now found himself clambering over piles of baggage, fellow passengers, and buckets used as toilets, only to find his path blocked by an old woman who ignored his request to move aside. On closer examination, he discovered that she had frozen to death.
Finally he located the source of the screams, a pregnant woman who had gone into premature labor and was hemorrhaging profusely. When he attempted to move her from where she lay into a more comfortable position, he found that "she was frozen to the floor with her own blood." Other than temporarily stanching the bleeding, Loch was unable to do anything to help her, and he never learned whether she had lived or died. When the train made its first stop, after more than four days in transit, 16 frost-covered corpses were pulled from the wagons before the remaining deportees were put back on board to continue their journey. A further 42 passengers would later succumb to the effects of their ordeal, among them Loch's wife.
During the Second World War, tragic scenes like those were commonplace, as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin moved around entire populations like pieces on a chessboard, seeking to reshape the demographic profile of Europe according to their own preferences. What was different about the deportation of Loch and his fellow passengers, however, was that it took place by order of the United States and Britain as well as the Soviet Union, nearly two years after the declaration of peace.
Between 1945 and 1950, Europe witnessed the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in human history. Between 12 million and 14 million German-speaking civilians—the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16—were forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland. As The New York Times noted in December 1945, the number of people the Allies proposed to transfer in just a few months was about the same as the total number of all the immigrants admitted to the United States since the beginning of the 20th century. They were deposited among the ruins of Allied-occupied Germany to fend for themselves as best they could. The number who died as a result of starvation, disease, beatings, or outright execution is unknown, but conservative estimates suggest that at least 500,000 people lost their lives in the course of the operation.
Most disturbingly of all, tens of thousands perished as a result of ill treatment while being used as slave labor (or, in the Allies' cynical formulation, "reparations in kind") in a vast network of camps extending across central and southeastern Europe—many of which, like Auschwitz I and Theresienstadt, were former German concentration camps kept in operation for years after the war. As Sir John Colville, formerly Winston Churchill's private secretary, told his colleagues in the British Foreign Office in 1946, it was clear that "concentration camps and all they stand for did not come to an end with the defeat of Germany." Ironically, no more than 100 or so miles away from the camps being put to this new use, the surviving Nazi leaders were being tried by the Allies in the courtroom at Nuremberg on a bill of indictment that listed "deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population" under the heading of "crimes against humanity."
By any measure, the postwar expulsions were a manmade disaster and one of the most significant examples of the mass violation of human rights in recent history. Yet although they occurred within living memory, in time of peace, and in the middle of the world's most densely populated continent, they remain all but unknown outside Germany itself. On the rare occasions that they rate more than a footnote in European-history textbooks, they are commonly depicted as justified retribution for Nazi Germany's wartime atrocities or a painful but necessary expedient to ensure the future peace of Europe. As the historian Richard J. Evans asserted in In Hitler's Shadow (1989) the decision to purge the continent of its German-speaking minorities remains "defensible" in light of the Holocaust and has shown itself to be a successful experiment in "defusing ethnic antagonisms through the mass transfer of populations."
Even at the time, not everyone agreed. George Orwell, an outspoken opponent of the expulsions, pointed out in his essay "Politics and the English Language" that the expression "transfer of population" was one of a number of euphemisms whose purpose was "largely the defense of the indefensible." The philosopher Bertrand Russell acidly inquired: "Are mass deportations crimes when committed by our enemies during war and justifiable measures of social adjustment when carried out by our allies in time of peace?" A still more uncomfortable observation was made by the left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz, who reasoned that "if every German was indeed responsible for what happened at Belsen, then we, as members of a democratic country and not a fascist one with no free press or parliament, were responsible individually as well as collectively" for what was being done to noncombatants in the Allies' name.
That the expulsions would inevitably cause death and hardship on a very large scale had been fully recognized by those who set them in motion. To a considerable extent, they were counting on it. For the expelling countries—especially Czechoslovakia and Poland—the use of terror against their German-speaking populations was intended not simply as revenge for their wartime victimization, but also as a means of triggering a mass stampede across the borders and finally achieving their governments' prewar ambition to create ethnically homogeneous nation-states. (Before 1939, less than two-thirds of Poland's population, and only a slightly larger proportion of Czechoslovakia's, consisted of gentile Poles, Czechs, or Slovaks.)
For the Soviets, who had "compensated" Poland for its territorial losses to the Soviet Union in 1939 by moving its western border more than 100 miles inside German territory, the clearance of the newly "Polish" western lands and the dumping of their millions of displaced inhabitants amid the ruins of the former Reich served Stalin's twin goals of impeding Germany's postwar recovery and eliminating any possibility of a future Polish-German rapprochement. The British viewed the widespread suffering that would inevitably attend the expulsions as a salutary form of re-education of the German population. "Everything that brings home to the Germans the completeness and irrevocability of their defeat," Deputy Prime Minister Clement Richard Attlee wrote in 1943, "is worthwhile in the end." And the Americans, as Laurence Steinhardt, ambassador to Prague, recorded, hoped that by displaying an "understanding" and cooperative attitude toward the expelling countries' desire to be rid of their German populations, the United States could demonstrate its sympathy for those countries' national aspirations and prevent them from drifting into the Communist orbit.
The Allies, then, knowingly embarked on a course that, as the British government was warned in 1944 by its own panel of experts, was "bound to cause immense suffering and dislocation." That the expulsions did not lead to the worst consequences that could be expected from the chaotic cattle drive of millions of impoverished, embittered, and rootless deportees into a war-devastated country that had nowhere to put them was due to three main factors.
The first was the skill with which the postwar German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, drew the expellees into mainstream politics, defusing the threat of a potentially radical and disruptive bloc. The second was the readiness of most expellees—the occasionally crass or undiplomatic statements of their leaders notwithstanding—to renounce the use or threat of force as a means of redressing their grievances. The third, and by far the most important, was the 30-year-long "economic miracle" that made possible the housing, feeding, and employment of the largest homeless population with which any industrial country has ever had to contend. (In East Germany, on the other hand, the fact that the standard of living for the indigenous population was already so low meant that the economic gap between it and the four million arriving expellees was more easily bridged.)
The downside of "economic miracles," though, is that, as their name suggests, they can't be relied upon to come along where and when they are most needed. By extraordinary good fortune, the Allies avoided reaping the harvest of their own recklessness. Nonetheless, the expulsions have cast a long and baleful shadow over central and southeastern Europe, even to the present day. Their disruptive demographic, economic, and even—as Eagle Glassheim has pointed out—environmental consequences continue to be felt more than 60 years later. The overnight transformation of some of the most heterogeneous regions of the European continent into virtual ethnic monoliths changed the trajectory of domestic politics in the expelling countries in significant and unpredicted ways. Culturally, the effort to eradicate every trace of hundreds of years of German presence and to write it out of national and local histories produced among the new Polish and Czech settler communities in the cleared areas what Gregor Thum has described as a state of "amputated memory." As Thum shows in his groundbreaking study of postwar Wroclaw—until 1945 and the removal of its entire population, the German city of Breslau—the challenge of confronting their hometown's difficult past is one that post-Communist Wroclawites have only recently taken up. In most other parts of Central Europe, it has hardly even begun.
Still less so in the English-speaking world. It is important to note that the expulsions are in no way to be compared to the genocidal Nazi campaign that preceded them. But neither can the supreme atrocity of our time become a yardstick by which gross abuses of human rights are allowed to go unrecognized for what they are. Contradicting Allied rhetoric that asserted that World War II had been fought above all to uphold the dignity and worth of all people, the Germans included, thousands of Western officials, servicemen, and technocrats took a full part in carrying out a program that, when perpetrated by their wartime enemies, they did not hesitate to denounce as contrary to all principles of humanity.
The degree of cognitive dissonance to which this led was exemplified by the career of Colonel John Fye, chief U.S. liaison officer for expulsion affairs to the Czechoslovak government. The operation he had helped carry out, he acknowledged, drew in "innocent people who had never raised so much as a word of protest against the Czechoslovak people." To accomplish it, women and children had been thrown into detention facilities, "many of which were little better than the ex-German concentration camps." Yet these stirrings of unease did not prevent Fye from accepting a decoration from the Prague government for what the official citation candidly described as his valuable services "in expelling Germans from Czechoslovakia."
Today we have come not much further than Fye did in acknowledging the pivotal role played by the Allies in conceiving and executing an operation that exceeded in both scale and lethality the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It is unnecessary to attribute this to any "taboo" or "conspiracy of silence." Rather, what is denied is not the fact of the expulsions themselves, but their significance.
Many European commentators have maintained that to draw attention to them runs the risk of diminishing the horror that ought properly to be reserved for the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities, or giving rise to a self-pitying "victim" mentality among today's generation of Germans, for whom the war is an increasingly distant memory. Czechs, Poles, and citizens of other expelling states fear the legal ramifications of a re-examination of the means by which millions of erstwhile citizens of those countries were deprived of their nationality, liberty, and property. To this day, the postwar decrees expropriating and denationalizing Germans remain on the statute book of the Czech Republic, and their legality has recently been reaffirmed by the Czech constitutional court.
Some notable exceptions aside, like T. David Curp, Matthew Frank, and David Gerlach, English-speaking historians—out of either understandable sympathy for Germany's victims or reluctance to complicate the narrative of what is still justifiably considered a "good war"—have also not been overeager to delve into the history of a messy, complex, morally ambiguous, and politically sensitive episode, in which few if any of those involved appear in a creditable light.
By no means are all of these concerns unworthy ones. But neither are they valid reasons for failing to engage seriously with an episode of such obvious importance, and to integrate it within the broader narrative of modern European history. For historians to write—and, still worse, to teach—as though the expulsions had never taken place or, having occurred, are of no particular significance to the societies affected by them, is both intellectually and pedagogically unsustainable.
The fact that population transfers are currently making a comeback on the scholarly and policy agenda also suggests that we should scrutinize with particular care the most extensive experiment made with them to date. Despite the gruesome history, enthusiasts continue to chase the mirage of "humane" mass deportations as a means of resolving intractable ethnic problems. Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, in a much-cited study, has advocated population transfers as a valuable tool so long as they are "conducted in a humane, well-organized manner, like the transfer of Germans from Czechoslovakia by the Allies in 1945-47." John Mearsheimer, Chaim Kaufmann, Michael Mann and others have done likewise.
Few wars today, whether within or between states, do not feature an attempt by one or both sides to create facts on the ground by forcibly displacing minority populations perceived as alien to the national community. And although the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court has attempted to restrain this tendency by prohibiting mass deportations, Elazar Barkan maintains that such proscriptions are far from absolute, and that "today there is no single code of international law that explicitly outlaws population transfers either in terms of group or individual rights protections."
The expulsion of the ethnic Germans is thus of contemporary as well as historical relevance. At present, though, the study of many vital elements of this topic is still in its earliest stages. Innumerable questions—about the archipelago of camps and detention centers, the precise number and location of which are still undetermined; the sexual victimization of female expellees, which was on a scale to rival the mass rapes perpetrated by Red Army soldiers in occupied Germany; the full part played by the Soviet and U.S. governments in planning and executing the expulsions—remain to be fully answered.
At a moment when the surviving expellees are passing away and many, though far from all, of the relevant archives have been opened, the time has come for this painful but pivotal chapter in Europe's recent history to receive at last the scholarly attention it deserves.
R.M. Douglas is an associate professor of history at Colgate University. This essay is adapted from his new book, published by Yale University Press, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War.
In the largest episode of forced migration in history, millions of German-speaking civilians were sent to Germany from Czechoslovakia and other European countries after World War II by order of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union.
The screams that rang throughout the darkened cattle car crammed with deportees, as it jolted across the icy Polish countryside five nights before Christmas, were Dr. Loch's only means of locating his patient. The doctor, formerly chief medical officer of a large urban hospital, now found himself clambering over piles of baggage, fellow passengers, and buckets used as toilets, only to find his path blocked by an old woman who ignored his request to move aside. On closer examination, he discovered that she had frozen to death.
Finally he located the source of the screams, a pregnant woman who had gone into premature labor and was hemorrhaging profusely. When he attempted to move her from where she lay into a more comfortable position, he found that "she was frozen to the floor with her own blood." Other than temporarily stanching the bleeding, Loch was unable to do anything to help her, and he never learned whether she had lived or died. When the train made its first stop, after more than four days in transit, 16 frost-covered corpses were pulled from the wagons before the remaining deportees were put back on board to continue their journey. A further 42 passengers would later succumb to the effects of their ordeal, among them Loch's wife.
During the Second World War, tragic scenes like those were commonplace, as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin moved around entire populations like pieces on a chessboard, seeking to reshape the demographic profile of Europe according to their own preferences. What was different about the deportation of Loch and his fellow passengers, however, was that it took place by order of the United States and Britain as well as the Soviet Union, nearly two years after the declaration of peace.
Between 1945 and 1950, Europe witnessed the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in human history. Between 12 million and 14 million German-speaking civilians—the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16—were forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland. As The New York Times noted in December 1945, the number of people the Allies proposed to transfer in just a few months was about the same as the total number of all the immigrants admitted to the United States since the beginning of the 20th century. They were deposited among the ruins of Allied-occupied Germany to fend for themselves as best they could. The number who died as a result of starvation, disease, beatings, or outright execution is unknown, but conservative estimates suggest that at least 500,000 people lost their lives in the course of the operation.
Most disturbingly of all, tens of thousands perished as a result of ill treatment while being used as slave labor (or, in the Allies' cynical formulation, "reparations in kind") in a vast network of camps extending across central and southeastern Europe—many of which, like Auschwitz I and Theresienstadt, were former German concentration camps kept in operation for years after the war. As Sir John Colville, formerly Winston Churchill's private secretary, told his colleagues in the British Foreign Office in 1946, it was clear that "concentration camps and all they stand for did not come to an end with the defeat of Germany." Ironically, no more than 100 or so miles away from the camps being put to this new use, the surviving Nazi leaders were being tried by the Allies in the courtroom at Nuremberg on a bill of indictment that listed "deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population" under the heading of "crimes against humanity."
By any measure, the postwar expulsions were a manmade disaster and one of the most significant examples of the mass violation of human rights in recent history. Yet although they occurred within living memory, in time of peace, and in the middle of the world's most densely populated continent, they remain all but unknown outside Germany itself. On the rare occasions that they rate more than a footnote in European-history textbooks, they are commonly depicted as justified retribution for Nazi Germany's wartime atrocities or a painful but necessary expedient to ensure the future peace of Europe. As the historian Richard J. Evans asserted in In Hitler's Shadow (1989) the decision to purge the continent of its German-speaking minorities remains "defensible" in light of the Holocaust and has shown itself to be a successful experiment in "defusing ethnic antagonisms through the mass transfer of populations."
Even at the time, not everyone agreed. George Orwell, an outspoken opponent of the expulsions, pointed out in his essay "Politics and the English Language" that the expression "transfer of population" was one of a number of euphemisms whose purpose was "largely the defense of the indefensible." The philosopher Bertrand Russell acidly inquired: "Are mass deportations crimes when committed by our enemies during war and justifiable measures of social adjustment when carried out by our allies in time of peace?" A still more uncomfortable observation was made by the left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz, who reasoned that "if every German was indeed responsible for what happened at Belsen, then we, as members of a democratic country and not a fascist one with no free press or parliament, were responsible individually as well as collectively" for what was being done to noncombatants in the Allies' name.
That the expulsions would inevitably cause death and hardship on a very large scale had been fully recognized by those who set them in motion. To a considerable extent, they were counting on it. For the expelling countries—especially Czechoslovakia and Poland—the use of terror against their German-speaking populations was intended not simply as revenge for their wartime victimization, but also as a means of triggering a mass stampede across the borders and finally achieving their governments' prewar ambition to create ethnically homogeneous nation-states. (Before 1939, less than two-thirds of Poland's population, and only a slightly larger proportion of Czechoslovakia's, consisted of gentile Poles, Czechs, or Slovaks.)
For the Soviets, who had "compensated" Poland for its territorial losses to the Soviet Union in 1939 by moving its western border more than 100 miles inside German territory, the clearance of the newly "Polish" western lands and the dumping of their millions of displaced inhabitants amid the ruins of the former Reich served Stalin's twin goals of impeding Germany's postwar recovery and eliminating any possibility of a future Polish-German rapprochement. The British viewed the widespread suffering that would inevitably attend the expulsions as a salutary form of re-education of the German population. "Everything that brings home to the Germans the completeness and irrevocability of their defeat," Deputy Prime Minister Clement Richard Attlee wrote in 1943, "is worthwhile in the end." And the Americans, as Laurence Steinhardt, ambassador to Prague, recorded, hoped that by displaying an "understanding" and cooperative attitude toward the expelling countries' desire to be rid of their German populations, the United States could demonstrate its sympathy for those countries' national aspirations and prevent them from drifting into the Communist orbit.
The Allies, then, knowingly embarked on a course that, as the British government was warned in 1944 by its own panel of experts, was "bound to cause immense suffering and dislocation." That the expulsions did not lead to the worst consequences that could be expected from the chaotic cattle drive of millions of impoverished, embittered, and rootless deportees into a war-devastated country that had nowhere to put them was due to three main factors.
The first was the skill with which the postwar German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, drew the expellees into mainstream politics, defusing the threat of a potentially radical and disruptive bloc. The second was the readiness of most expellees—the occasionally crass or undiplomatic statements of their leaders notwithstanding—to renounce the use or threat of force as a means of redressing their grievances. The third, and by far the most important, was the 30-year-long "economic miracle" that made possible the housing, feeding, and employment of the largest homeless population with which any industrial country has ever had to contend. (In East Germany, on the other hand, the fact that the standard of living for the indigenous population was already so low meant that the economic gap between it and the four million arriving expellees was more easily bridged.)
The downside of "economic miracles," though, is that, as their name suggests, they can't be relied upon to come along where and when they are most needed. By extraordinary good fortune, the Allies avoided reaping the harvest of their own recklessness. Nonetheless, the expulsions have cast a long and baleful shadow over central and southeastern Europe, even to the present day. Their disruptive demographic, economic, and even—as Eagle Glassheim has pointed out—environmental consequences continue to be felt more than 60 years later. The overnight transformation of some of the most heterogeneous regions of the European continent into virtual ethnic monoliths changed the trajectory of domestic politics in the expelling countries in significant and unpredicted ways. Culturally, the effort to eradicate every trace of hundreds of years of German presence and to write it out of national and local histories produced among the new Polish and Czech settler communities in the cleared areas what Gregor Thum has described as a state of "amputated memory." As Thum shows in his groundbreaking study of postwar Wroclaw—until 1945 and the removal of its entire population, the German city of Breslau—the challenge of confronting their hometown's difficult past is one that post-Communist Wroclawites have only recently taken up. In most other parts of Central Europe, it has hardly even begun.
Still less so in the English-speaking world. It is important to note that the expulsions are in no way to be compared to the genocidal Nazi campaign that preceded them. But neither can the supreme atrocity of our time become a yardstick by which gross abuses of human rights are allowed to go unrecognized for what they are. Contradicting Allied rhetoric that asserted that World War II had been fought above all to uphold the dignity and worth of all people, the Germans included, thousands of Western officials, servicemen, and technocrats took a full part in carrying out a program that, when perpetrated by their wartime enemies, they did not hesitate to denounce as contrary to all principles of humanity.
The degree of cognitive dissonance to which this led was exemplified by the career of Colonel John Fye, chief U.S. liaison officer for expulsion affairs to the Czechoslovak government. The operation he had helped carry out, he acknowledged, drew in "innocent people who had never raised so much as a word of protest against the Czechoslovak people." To accomplish it, women and children had been thrown into detention facilities, "many of which were little better than the ex-German concentration camps." Yet these stirrings of unease did not prevent Fye from accepting a decoration from the Prague government for what the official citation candidly described as his valuable services "in expelling Germans from Czechoslovakia."
Today we have come not much further than Fye did in acknowledging the pivotal role played by the Allies in conceiving and executing an operation that exceeded in both scale and lethality the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It is unnecessary to attribute this to any "taboo" or "conspiracy of silence." Rather, what is denied is not the fact of the expulsions themselves, but their significance.
Many European commentators have maintained that to draw attention to them runs the risk of diminishing the horror that ought properly to be reserved for the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities, or giving rise to a self-pitying "victim" mentality among today's generation of Germans, for whom the war is an increasingly distant memory. Czechs, Poles, and citizens of other expelling states fear the legal ramifications of a re-examination of the means by which millions of erstwhile citizens of those countries were deprived of their nationality, liberty, and property. To this day, the postwar decrees expropriating and denationalizing Germans remain on the statute book of the Czech Republic, and their legality has recently been reaffirmed by the Czech constitutional court.
Some notable exceptions aside, like T. David Curp, Matthew Frank, and David Gerlach, English-speaking historians—out of either understandable sympathy for Germany's victims or reluctance to complicate the narrative of what is still justifiably considered a "good war"—have also not been overeager to delve into the history of a messy, complex, morally ambiguous, and politically sensitive episode, in which few if any of those involved appear in a creditable light.
By no means are all of these concerns unworthy ones. But neither are they valid reasons for failing to engage seriously with an episode of such obvious importance, and to integrate it within the broader narrative of modern European history. For historians to write—and, still worse, to teach—as though the expulsions had never taken place or, having occurred, are of no particular significance to the societies affected by them, is both intellectually and pedagogically unsustainable.
The fact that population transfers are currently making a comeback on the scholarly and policy agenda also suggests that we should scrutinize with particular care the most extensive experiment made with them to date. Despite the gruesome history, enthusiasts continue to chase the mirage of "humane" mass deportations as a means of resolving intractable ethnic problems. Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, in a much-cited study, has advocated population transfers as a valuable tool so long as they are "conducted in a humane, well-organized manner, like the transfer of Germans from Czechoslovakia by the Allies in 1945-47." John Mearsheimer, Chaim Kaufmann, Michael Mann and others have done likewise.
Few wars today, whether within or between states, do not feature an attempt by one or both sides to create facts on the ground by forcibly displacing minority populations perceived as alien to the national community. And although the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court has attempted to restrain this tendency by prohibiting mass deportations, Elazar Barkan maintains that such proscriptions are far from absolute, and that "today there is no single code of international law that explicitly outlaws population transfers either in terms of group or individual rights protections."
The expulsion of the ethnic Germans is thus of contemporary as well as historical relevance. At present, though, the study of many vital elements of this topic is still in its earliest stages. Innumerable questions—about the archipelago of camps and detention centers, the precise number and location of which are still undetermined; the sexual victimization of female expellees, which was on a scale to rival the mass rapes perpetrated by Red Army soldiers in occupied Germany; the full part played by the Soviet and U.S. governments in planning and executing the expulsions—remain to be fully answered.
At a moment when the surviving expellees are passing away and many, though far from all, of the relevant archives have been opened, the time has come for this painful but pivotal chapter in Europe's recent history to receive at last the scholarly attention it deserves.
R.M. Douglas is an associate professor of history at Colgate University. This essay is adapted from his new book, published by Yale University Press, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War.
Obama Care Approved & IRS Will Be The Enforcer
In a victory for President Obama, and a travesty for the Middle Class, the Supreme Court upheld Obama’s health care mandate empowers the IRS to begin to regulate Americans’ health care by 2014.
Expect IRS thugs armed with shotguns knocking at your door to fine you $695 per person (or $2,085 per household) for failure to purchase health insurance, if you fail to pay the outrageous fine, expect to be sued by the IRS. The revised health care law has removed the penalty of $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.
This historical Supreme Court ruling allows the federal government to force citizens to enter a contract with private corporations to buy health insurance. This is happening just days before 4th of July, when America won its Independence from British tyranny, and now we face the same tyranny today.
By 2014 all Americans will have to submit or face being fined and sued by the IRS. The American people are already struggling financially with record unemployment, inflation, and trillions of dollars in national debt, by the time health insurance becomes mandatory the middle class will be financially bankrupt.
This is the reason why the military and police are preparing martial law in U.S. streets, because people will revolt against the system that has turned us into financial slaves. They are conditioning Americans right now with military and police checkpoints, speed traps, using Army drones to spy on us, rolling out the tanks, and putting military goons on residential streets to prepare us for what is to come in the near future.
The Bilderberg Group discussed in Spain about wanting to level America into a 3rd world impoverished nation, where we’re all poor under World Government Dictatorship. Soon the American standard of living will drop significantly, services will be cut, taxes will increase until we become so poor that we are unable to fight, resistance will be futile.
Expect IRS thugs armed with shotguns knocking at your door to fine you $695 per person (or $2,085 per household) for failure to purchase health insurance, if you fail to pay the outrageous fine, expect to be sued by the IRS. The revised health care law has removed the penalty of $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.
This historical Supreme Court ruling allows the federal government to force citizens to enter a contract with private corporations to buy health insurance. This is happening just days before 4th of July, when America won its Independence from British tyranny, and now we face the same tyranny today.
By 2014 all Americans will have to submit or face being fined and sued by the IRS. The American people are already struggling financially with record unemployment, inflation, and trillions of dollars in national debt, by the time health insurance becomes mandatory the middle class will be financially bankrupt.
This is the reason why the military and police are preparing martial law in U.S. streets, because people will revolt against the system that has turned us into financial slaves. They are conditioning Americans right now with military and police checkpoints, speed traps, using Army drones to spy on us, rolling out the tanks, and putting military goons on residential streets to prepare us for what is to come in the near future.
The Bilderberg Group discussed in Spain about wanting to level America into a 3rd world impoverished nation, where we’re all poor under World Government Dictatorship. Soon the American standard of living will drop significantly, services will be cut, taxes will increase until we become so poor that we are unable to fight, resistance will be futile.
200,000 Protest Nuclear Energy In Japan
'The protesters, carrying placards which read “Rise up against the restart” and “The nuclear era is over,” lined the streets around Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s residence in central Tokyo as police watched on, according to an AFP photographer.
The main entrance to the residence was seen guarded by armoured vehicles and barricades of uniformed
#Fukushima Reactor 4 Demolition
A security camera inside the Fukushima 1 nuclear plant reveals the final steps in the demolition of a ferroconcrete structure. A mobile crane-mounted plasma torch cuts through the skeletal remnant of a three-story building, methodically cleaving the few remaining support beams, releasing dust clouds of burnt slake lime.
Though the digital mosaic is often blurry, it's clear that only one side of the structure is left standing, indicating that the three other walls had been either removed earlier at nighttime or collapsed in the Richter 5+ earthquakes that struck northeast Japan between June 17 and June 22.
The obvious conclusion could be drawn from the scene, which still goes unreported by the media, but once again as throughout this crisis I have always wished to be pleasantly wrong rather than painfully correct. In response to my skeptical query, Japanese activists responded: "It was definitely the No 4 reactor. We have not heard anything else about it. It (the demolition) was done on the day when the nation was focused on the government decision to raise the consumer tax."
The demolition of Reactor 4 - yet to be officially announced by TEPCO or the Economy Ministry - has been overlooked by the mass media and even the anti-nuclear movement, which are preoccupied by the ongoing protests in the capital Tokyo against the reopening of the Oi nuclear power plant and a parliamentary vote for a higher consumption tax. On June 26, after a divisive debate among his party members, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda and his supporters in the ruling Democratics introduced a bill doubling the consumption tax - timed to divert public attention from the deteriorating conditions at Fukushima No.1 nuclear plant. If the videoclip is indeed of a collapsed Reactor 4, then Japan and the rest of the world are in for a long hot summer and much worse ahead.
Synergistic Blasts
Three days after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami hit the Fukushima No.1 nuclear plant, its Reactor 4 sustained massive damage in an engulfing blaze on March 14 and in the subsequent re-ignition two days later. Then and ever since, TEPCO and the government has claimed that the fire at unit 4 was triggered by "hydrogen gas released from a nearby reactor," which would have been Reactor 2.
At the time of 3.11 disaster and soon thereafter over Rense radio, I stated without equivocation that hydrogen leakage could not have been the cause of the Reactor 4 fire, since extremely overheated gas would have combusted in contact with the air before reaching any other reactor. I suggested then that the actual cause was a "never-before seen type of nuclear explosion involving high-energy nuclear isotopes."
My logical deduction back then - and since confirmed by leaks and official disclosures - was that Reactor 4 had been recently loaded with fresh fuel rods in preparation for start-up on March 12. Its planned operation was kept secret and unscheduled, and therefore had to be linked to illegal enrichment of weapons-grade uranium for the purpose of making nuclear warheads.
In contrast to the official story about hydrogen, the timeline of those initial days indicates a reverse chain of cause and effect: A nuclear blast inside Reactor 4 created enough heat to set its spent-fuel pool on fire, and also intensified the neutron bombardment against a degraded Reactor 3, which exploded in a mushroom cloud on the next day, March 15. That huge explosion, in turn, re-ignited the Reactor 4 spent-fuel fire. These synergistic high-energy nuclear events did not constitute a classical chain reaction, for if complete fission had occurred an area many times larger than Nagasaki would have been leveled. Instead of a single nuclear explosion, the Fukushima crisis is a protracted series of nuclear events, unleashing a Pandora's Box of troubles onto the world.
My appraisal during last year's meltdowns led to the conclusion that melt-downs of fuel rods would quickly burn through core-reactor shrouds, the steel containment chambers beneath, and then the concrete-block footing. The consequences were obvious then, though not to the corps of nuclear engineers: That the corium would tunnel into the landfill of rock and sand, and on contact with water release enough high-pressure steam to create a sinkhole under each reactor. Huge vents of steam, as reported by nuclear workers, have since blown out through the ground surface.
The unstable landfill would eventually become too weak to support the combined weight of the reactors, spent-fuel pools, ferroconcrete structures and all the water being pumped inside The inevitable result is a collapse into a sinkhole, after which recovery of intact fuel rods would be impossible.
Finished Off by Earthquakes
Starting in the first hours of New Year's Day of this year, 2012, the loose soil under Fukushima underwent liquefaction during a series of earthquakes. The Fukushima 1 plant was completely evacuated in secret, as police barricades were set up on incoming roads and military helicopters sped in to evacuate remaining workers and engineers. Nighttime helicopter flights were heard in the darkness over Minami-Soma town, indicating that fuel rods were being airlifted into nearby river estuaries.
During the solemn New Year's holiday, when Japanese families rest at home, few residents went outdoors. Those who did venture out with dosimeters reported a major spike in radioactivity across northeast Japan. The suddenly higher readings across the Northern Hemisphere indicated that the piping for the No.4 core reactor and containment chamber had ruptured, probably when a reactor fell into a sinkhole.
Highly radioactive particles littering the ground were soon spotted by local residents - the first of the "black dust" reports - which I suggested, were fragmented pieces of heat-cracked fuel rods airlifted from atop Reactor 4. The New Year's season was not the first occasion for helicopter airlifts. In the days immediately after the March 11 disaster, a long cigar-shaped casket - suspected of containing weapons-grade fissile material smuggled in from the U.S. military stockpile in Armadillo, Texas - was hooked and pulled out of the Reactor 4 fuel pool by a Special Forces helicopter.
From June 17 to June 22, another series of 5+ quakes apparently snapped the heat-weakened steel beams that supported the spent-fuel pool, sending more than 1,500 fuel rods tumbling down over the twisted-metal wreckage of Reactor 4. Thus, the nuclear-emergency minister, Goshi Hosono, must have rushed out a secret order to tear down the heat-warped concrete structure, while his prime minister diverted media coverage and public attention with a grandstand speech to double the consumption tax. Behind this media spectacle staged less than 18 months after the 3.11 disaster, the Fukushima nuclear crisis has reached the point of no return.
In an otherwise hopeless situation, I stick to my early-on recommendation that the only feasible method to neutralize sunken reactors is to pump in borax brine (not boric acid, which eats away at metal) that will gradually crystalize to create a vast subterranean neutron-absorbing barrier, an artificial salt bed that an take solid form even under watery immersion.
Secret Activities by GE-Hitachi
The nuclear industry, regulatory agencies and the IAEA deliberately lied about the presence of nuclear fuel inside Reactor 4 and 5 (and earlier inside No.3 before it exploded), which all supposedly had been emptied for scheduled maintenance and down time. Only three reactors - Nos. 1, 2 and 6 - were authorized for electric-generation in the month of March 2011. In fact, uranium enrichment for weapons-production was being prepared inside the supposedly idle reactors.
Nearly a year after the blast at Reactor 4, TEPCO finally gave into the public pressure and disclosed the refitting of its core reactor with a new shroud, needed for the switch from uranium fuel rods to more powerful MOX, or mixed oxides of uranium and plutonium. In total secrecy, GE had brought in an American crew for the work with Hitachi engineers to install the denser neutron shield.
While in the autumn of 2010, a Diet committee had approved experimental test-runs of MOX fuel, Japanese legislators were never informed of the specifics and most understood that only Reactor 3 would be tested. Some Diet members had protested in committee hearings with TEPCO and the Economy Ministry representatives that the GE reactors were not designed to handle MOX fuel, but their objections were brushed aside under the rubric of nuclear safety.
The executives of GE, Hitachi and Toshiba, Economy MInistry officials, and nuclear regulatory agencies, including the IAEA and DOE, are undoubtedly guilty of falsification of safety studies, deliberate subversion of democratic procedures, and at the very least manslaughter abetted by corruption and bribery.
Justice Must Be Served
These murderous business executives and government leaders - salesmen of death, disease and destruction - still maintain the pretense that nothing is happening inside Fukushima 1, while they shamelessly bribe government officials and politicians in Lithuania, Britain and dozens of other countries for multi-billion euro contracts to install new nuclear reactors, practically identical in design to the ones that exploded in Fukushima.
Their plans are nothing short of diabolical. GE-Hitachi (hybridized as GEH) is proposing to build a plutonium breed reactor at the troubled British Sellafield plant, which once reprocessed Japan's MOX fuel just south of the Scottish border. This type of reactor, which produces more high-grade plutonium than it consumes, has already failed years of money-wasting and radiation-leaking operations at the Monju facility in Tokai Province, Japan.
GEH is now getting ready to test its new laser plasma extraction technology, which is claimed to separated out uranium and plutonium from spent MOX rods more efficiently than the tributyl phosphorus chemical treatment system. Disastrous laser plasma accidents have been routinely covered up since an initial test run in the 1960s torched the U.S. lab facility and seared a tunnel through solid rock. Like stupid little boys who play with matches and lighters, the nuclear industry never worries about burning down the neighborhood.
At an ethical level, our leaders are guilty of a fast-approaching mass murder and environmental devastation, and possibly genocide, depending on how the cancer toll over the coming decades is counted. The dead, the dying and the soon-to-die cannot rest until justice is done. Those responsible must be brought before stern justice to receive the ultimate punishment and nothing less.
If the undeclared war against victims with radiation-triggered illnesses across northeast Japan offers any indicator of things to come, it will not be long before the World Health Organization, partner agency of the IAEA, unleashes a super-flu virus and then distributes cyanide capsules to the sickly survivors around the world. The globalist madmen who dare claim ownership of this once living, now dying planet must be stopped - taken out - by people who still have a conscience and their courage intact before the clock runs out.
Yoichi Shimatsu, former general editor of The Japan Times Weekly, is an environmental consultant working in Southeast Asia and Japan.
Friday, June 29, 2012
Are The Psychopaths, Sociopaths, Morons & Puppets In Washington Leading The World To Destruction
When President Reagan nominated me as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, he told me that we had to restore the US economy, to rescue it from stagflation, in order to bring the full weight of a powerful economy to bear on the Soviet leadership, in order to convince them to negotiate the end of the cold war. Reagan said that there was no reason to live any longer under the threat of nuclear war.
The Reagan administration achieved both goals, only to see these accomplishments discarded by successor administrations. It was Reagan’s own vice president and successor, George Herbert Walker Bush, who first violated the Reagan-Gorbachev understandings by incorporating former constituent parts of the Soviet Empire into NATO and taking Western military bases to the Russian frontier.
The process of surrounding Russia with military bases continued unabated through successor US administrations with various “color revolutions” financed by the US National Endowment for Democracy, regarded by many as a front for the CIA. Washington even attempted to install a Washington-controlled government in Ukraine and did succeed in this effort in former Soviet Georgia, the birthplace of Joseph Stalin.
The President of Georgia, a country located between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, is a Washington puppet. Recently, he announced that former Soviet Georgia is on schedule to become a NATO member in 2014.
Those old enough to remember know that NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was an alliance between Western Europe and the US against the threat of the Red Army overrunning Western Europe. The North Atlantic is a long, long ways from the Black and Caspian Seas. What is the purpose of Georgia being a NATO member except to give Washington a military base on the Russian underbelly?
The evidence is simply overwhelming that Washington–both parties–have Russia and China targeted. Whether the purpose is to destroy both countries or merely to render them unable to oppose Washington’s world hegemony is unclear at this time. Regardless of the purpose, nuclear war is the likely outcome.
The presstitute American press pretends that an evil Syrian government is murdering innocent citizens who only want democracy and that if the UN won’t intervene militarily, the US must in order to save human rights. Russia and China are vilified by US functionaries for opposing any pretext for a NATO invasion of Syria.
The facts, of course, are different from those presented by the presstitute American media and members of the US government. The Syrian “rebels” are well armed with military weapons. The “rebels” are battling the Syrian army. The rebels massacre civilians and report to their media whores in the West that the deed was done by the Syrian government, and the Western presstitutes spread the propaganda.
Someone is arming the “rebels” as obviously the weapons can’t be purchased in local Syrian markets. Most intelligent people believe the weapons are coming from the US or from US surrogates.
So, Washington has started a civil war in Syria, as it did in Libya, but this time the gullible Russians and Chinese have caught on and have refused to permit a UN resolution like the one the West exploited against Gaddafi.
To get around this roadblock, fish out an ancient Phantom fighter jet from the 1960s Vietnam war era and have Turkey fly it into Syria. The Syrians will shoot it down, and then Turkey can appeal to its NATO allies to come to its aid against Syria. Denied the UN option, Washington can invoke its obligation under the NATO treaty, and go to war in defense of a NATO member against a demonized Syria.
The neoconservative lie behind Washington’s wars of hegemony is that the US is bringing democracy to the invaded and bombed countries. To paraphrase Mao, “democracy comes out of the barrel of a gun.” However, the Arab Spring has come up short on democracy, as have Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries “liberated” by US democratic invasions.
What the US is bringing is civil wars and the breakup of countries, as President Bill Clinton’s regime achieved in former Yugoslavia. The more countries can be torn into pieces and dissolved into rival factions, the more powerful is Washington.
Russia’s Putin understands that Russia itself is threatened not only by Washington’s funding of the “Russian opposition,” but also by the strife among Muslims unleashed by Washington’s wars against secular Muslim states, such as Iraq and Syria. This discord spreads into Russia itself and presents Russia with problems such as Chechen terrorism.
When a secular state is overthrown, the Islamist factions become free to be at one another’s throats. The internal strife renders the countries impotent. As I wrote previously, the West always prevails in the Middle East because the Islamist factions hate one another more than they hate their Western conquerers. Thus, when Washington destroys secular, non-Islamist governments as in Iraq and now targeted in Syria, the Islamists emerge and battle one another for supremacy. This suits Washington and Israel as these states cease to be coherent opponents.
Russia is vulnerable, because Putin is demonized by Washington and the US media and because Putin’s Russian opposition is financed by Washington and serves US, not Russian, interests. The turmoil that Washington is unleashing in Muslim states leaks back to Russia’s Muslim populations.
It has proved to be more difficult for Washington to interfere in China’s internal affairs, although discord has been sowed in some provinces. Several years from now, the Chinese economy is expected to exceed in size the US economy, with an Asian power displacing a Western one as the world’s most powerful economy.
Washington is deeply disturbed by this prospect. In the thrall and under the control of Wall Street and other special interest business groups, Washington is unable to rescue the US economy from its decline. The short-run gambling profits of Wall Street, the war profits of the military/security complex, and the profits from offshoring the production of goods and services for US markets have far more representation in Washington than the wellbeing of US citizens. As the US economy sinks, the Chinese economy rises.
Washington’s response is to militarize the Pacific. The US Secretary of State has declared the South China Sea to be an area of American national interest. The US is wooing the Philippine government, playing the China threat card, and working on getting the US Navy invited back to its former base at Subic Bay. Recently there were joint US/Philippines military/naval exercises against the “China threat.”
The US Navy is reallocating fleets to the Pacific Ocean and constructing a new naval base on a South Korean island. US Marines are now based in Australia and are being reallocated from Japan to other Asian countries. The Chinese are not stupid. They understand that Washington is attempting to corral China.
For a country incapable of occupying Iraq after 8 years and incapable of occupying Afghanistan after 11 years, to simultaneously take on two nuclear powers is an act of insanity. The hubris in Washington, fed daily by the crazed neocons, despite extraordinary failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, has now targeted formidable powers–Russia and China. The world has never in its entire history witnessed such idiocy.
The psychopaths, sociopaths, and morons who prevail in Washington are leading the world to destruction.
The criminally insane government in Washington, regardless whether Democrat or Republican, regardless of the outcome of the next election, is the greatest threat to life on earth that has ever existed.
Moreover, the only financing the Washington criminals have is the printing press. In a subsequent column I will examine whether the US economy will complete its collapse before the war criminals in Washington can destroy the world.
Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House.
The Reagan administration achieved both goals, only to see these accomplishments discarded by successor administrations. It was Reagan’s own vice president and successor, George Herbert Walker Bush, who first violated the Reagan-Gorbachev understandings by incorporating former constituent parts of the Soviet Empire into NATO and taking Western military bases to the Russian frontier.
The process of surrounding Russia with military bases continued unabated through successor US administrations with various “color revolutions” financed by the US National Endowment for Democracy, regarded by many as a front for the CIA. Washington even attempted to install a Washington-controlled government in Ukraine and did succeed in this effort in former Soviet Georgia, the birthplace of Joseph Stalin.
The President of Georgia, a country located between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, is a Washington puppet. Recently, he announced that former Soviet Georgia is on schedule to become a NATO member in 2014.
Those old enough to remember know that NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was an alliance between Western Europe and the US against the threat of the Red Army overrunning Western Europe. The North Atlantic is a long, long ways from the Black and Caspian Seas. What is the purpose of Georgia being a NATO member except to give Washington a military base on the Russian underbelly?
The evidence is simply overwhelming that Washington–both parties–have Russia and China targeted. Whether the purpose is to destroy both countries or merely to render them unable to oppose Washington’s world hegemony is unclear at this time. Regardless of the purpose, nuclear war is the likely outcome.
The presstitute American press pretends that an evil Syrian government is murdering innocent citizens who only want democracy and that if the UN won’t intervene militarily, the US must in order to save human rights. Russia and China are vilified by US functionaries for opposing any pretext for a NATO invasion of Syria.
The facts, of course, are different from those presented by the presstitute American media and members of the US government. The Syrian “rebels” are well armed with military weapons. The “rebels” are battling the Syrian army. The rebels massacre civilians and report to their media whores in the West that the deed was done by the Syrian government, and the Western presstitutes spread the propaganda.
Someone is arming the “rebels” as obviously the weapons can’t be purchased in local Syrian markets. Most intelligent people believe the weapons are coming from the US or from US surrogates.
So, Washington has started a civil war in Syria, as it did in Libya, but this time the gullible Russians and Chinese have caught on and have refused to permit a UN resolution like the one the West exploited against Gaddafi.
To get around this roadblock, fish out an ancient Phantom fighter jet from the 1960s Vietnam war era and have Turkey fly it into Syria. The Syrians will shoot it down, and then Turkey can appeal to its NATO allies to come to its aid against Syria. Denied the UN option, Washington can invoke its obligation under the NATO treaty, and go to war in defense of a NATO member against a demonized Syria.
The neoconservative lie behind Washington’s wars of hegemony is that the US is bringing democracy to the invaded and bombed countries. To paraphrase Mao, “democracy comes out of the barrel of a gun.” However, the Arab Spring has come up short on democracy, as have Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries “liberated” by US democratic invasions.
What the US is bringing is civil wars and the breakup of countries, as President Bill Clinton’s regime achieved in former Yugoslavia. The more countries can be torn into pieces and dissolved into rival factions, the more powerful is Washington.
Russia’s Putin understands that Russia itself is threatened not only by Washington’s funding of the “Russian opposition,” but also by the strife among Muslims unleashed by Washington’s wars against secular Muslim states, such as Iraq and Syria. This discord spreads into Russia itself and presents Russia with problems such as Chechen terrorism.
When a secular state is overthrown, the Islamist factions become free to be at one another’s throats. The internal strife renders the countries impotent. As I wrote previously, the West always prevails in the Middle East because the Islamist factions hate one another more than they hate their Western conquerers. Thus, when Washington destroys secular, non-Islamist governments as in Iraq and now targeted in Syria, the Islamists emerge and battle one another for supremacy. This suits Washington and Israel as these states cease to be coherent opponents.
Russia is vulnerable, because Putin is demonized by Washington and the US media and because Putin’s Russian opposition is financed by Washington and serves US, not Russian, interests. The turmoil that Washington is unleashing in Muslim states leaks back to Russia’s Muslim populations.
It has proved to be more difficult for Washington to interfere in China’s internal affairs, although discord has been sowed in some provinces. Several years from now, the Chinese economy is expected to exceed in size the US economy, with an Asian power displacing a Western one as the world’s most powerful economy.
Washington is deeply disturbed by this prospect. In the thrall and under the control of Wall Street and other special interest business groups, Washington is unable to rescue the US economy from its decline. The short-run gambling profits of Wall Street, the war profits of the military/security complex, and the profits from offshoring the production of goods and services for US markets have far more representation in Washington than the wellbeing of US citizens. As the US economy sinks, the Chinese economy rises.
Washington’s response is to militarize the Pacific. The US Secretary of State has declared the South China Sea to be an area of American national interest. The US is wooing the Philippine government, playing the China threat card, and working on getting the US Navy invited back to its former base at Subic Bay. Recently there were joint US/Philippines military/naval exercises against the “China threat.”
The US Navy is reallocating fleets to the Pacific Ocean and constructing a new naval base on a South Korean island. US Marines are now based in Australia and are being reallocated from Japan to other Asian countries. The Chinese are not stupid. They understand that Washington is attempting to corral China.
For a country incapable of occupying Iraq after 8 years and incapable of occupying Afghanistan after 11 years, to simultaneously take on two nuclear powers is an act of insanity. The hubris in Washington, fed daily by the crazed neocons, despite extraordinary failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, has now targeted formidable powers–Russia and China. The world has never in its entire history witnessed such idiocy.
The psychopaths, sociopaths, and morons who prevail in Washington are leading the world to destruction.
The criminally insane government in Washington, regardless whether Democrat or Republican, regardless of the outcome of the next election, is the greatest threat to life on earth that has ever existed.
Moreover, the only financing the Washington criminals have is the printing press. In a subsequent column I will examine whether the US economy will complete its collapse before the war criminals in Washington can destroy the world.
Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Major Progress At Eliminating Fluoride
Story at-a-glance
So far at least 53 communities with 3.5 million residents have been freed from fluoridation. Since 1990, more than 300 communities have "beat fluoridation" with a city council or referendum vote to end the practice. This number doesn't include the hundreds, if not thousands of communities, who have rejected the start of fluoridation programs in their city.
Many victories were the result of regular citizens who opposed fluoridation, organizing local campaigns to educate their neighbors and local decision-makers about the serious health risks associated with the practice. But prominent legislators and city councilors representing large cities have also begun introducing fluoride prohibition legislation and resolutions. This is a sign that the issue is becoming less controversial in the eyes of decision-makers, and is losing its status as an undebateable issue.
Over the past decade, we have seen the dental-lobby spending more effort and money trying to influence state-legislators to pass bills mandating statewide fluoridation.
A year ago, the Fluoride Action Network (FAN) joined the Health Liberty Coalition, formed by Mercola.com, the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), the Institute for Responsible Technology (IRT), the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), and Consumers for Dental Choice.
The purpose of forming the nonprofit partnership was to advocate and actively campaign for the freedom of individuals to make personal health decisions, and to increase access to unbiased and accurate health information.
Since 2004, FAN has been dedicated to this same goal, and we were happy to join with the strong, dedicated team of advocates, researchers, and health professionals that make up the Health Liberty Coalition.
FAN is a nonprofit and international network of medical and scientific professionals who are focused on broadening public awareness about the toxicity of fluoride compounds and the health impacts of current fluoride exposures, particularly from fluoridation of the public drinking water.
When we joined the Health Liberty Coalition last year, FAN had just helped convince the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to phase out ALL sulfuryl fluoride pesticides from the U.S. food supply after a vigorous nine-year effort together with the Environmental Working Group and Beyond Pesticides.
This gas fumigant, used to kill insects and rodents in food processing warehouses, leaves extremely high levels of fluoride residue “in or on” stored foods. We were also witnessing the beginning of a groundswell of fluoride-free campaigns and victories throughout the world that have freed at least 53 communities with 3.5 million residents from fluoridation since the October 2010 victory in Waterloo, Ontario.
Since joining the coalition, the fluoride-free movement has grown significantly. With the help of the Health Liberty coalition and Dr. Mercola, who has inspired many fluoride-free campaigners with his call for action at the local-level, the momentum has continued to build to what could be the tipping point for the end of fluoridation.
Removing Fluoride One Community At A Time
FAN's Director, Dr. Paul Connett, has said repeatedly that, "we need to beat fluoridation one open mind and one community at a time." Since 1990, more than 300 communities have "beat fluoridation" with a city council or referendum vote to end the practice. This number doesn't include the hundreds, if not thousands of communities, who have rejected the start of fluoridation programs in their city.
In just the past year alone, FAN has confirmed that at least 40 communities have voted to end fluoridation for more than 2 million residents, including in major urban areas such as:
Fairbanks, Alaska (pop. 80,000)
College Station, Texas (pop. 100,000)
Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada (pop. 140,000)
Albuquerque, New Mexico (pop. 500,000)
Pinellas County, Florida (pop. 700,000)
Many of these victories were the result of regular citizens who opposed fluoridation, organizing local campaigns to educate their neighbors and local decision-makers about the serious health risks associated with the practice. But we have also seen something else happen that is a clear sign that our movement is growing at an accelerated rate.
Recently, prominent legislators and city councilors representing large cities have begun introducing fluoride prohibition legislation and resolutions. This is a sign that the issue is becoming less controversial in the eyes of decision-makers, and is losing its status as an undebateable issue.
The pro-fluoridation lobby – led and funded by the American Dental Association (ADA), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Pew Charitable Trust, and Delta Dental – are no longer able to hide the true facts about water fluoridation from decision-makers:
The U.S. FDA classifies ingested fluoride for purposes of reducing tooth decay as an "unapproved" drug. Drugs shouldn't be in our drinking water,
Water fluoridation is a violation of your individual right to informed consent to medication,
Fluoride is not a nutrient. There is not a single process in your body that requires fluoride,
Bottle-fed infants receive the highest doses of fluoride as they rely solely on liquids for food, combined with their small size. A baby being fed formula reconstituted with tap water receives approximately 175-200 times more fluoride than a breast-fed infant,
41% of all American children aged 12-15 now have dental fluorosis, a discoloration and pitting of the enamel caused by overexposure to fluoride as a child,
Ingesting fluoride has been found to damage soft tissues (brain, kidneys, and endocrine system), as well as teeth (dental fluorosis) and bones (skeletal fluorosis). There are also 24 studies demonstrating a strong relationship between fairly modest exposure to fluoride and reduced IQ in children
The chemicals used to fluoridate water supplies are largely hazardous by-products of the fertilizer industry and have never been required to undergo randomized clinical trials for safety or effectiveness by any regulatory agency in the world, and
A multi-million dollar U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) -funded study found no relation between tooth decay and the amount of fluoride ingested by children.
At the municipal-level, there are a number of major campaigns heating up in heavily populated areas, showing just how quickly the momentum is building in opposition to fluoridation:
New York City (pop. 8.1 million) – Councilman Peter Vallone, Jr. hosted a fluoride-free rally at city hall on May 15th to promote his resolution prohibiting fluoridation of NYC drinking water. A fluoride-free victory in NYC would gain international attention and likely lead to a domino-effect of victories throughout North America. The bill awaits a public hearing, which is at the discretion of Health committee Chair. If you would like to get involved with the NYC campaign, please contact FAN's New York state coordinator. You can also help by calling the Chair of the Health committee to urge her to hold a public hearing on Vallone's fluoridation prohibition resolution.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin (area pop. 1 million) – In May, Alderman James Bohl introduced fluoridation prohibition legislation. A 7-hour long public hearing was held, which included testimony from Dr. Paul Connett, Dr. Bill Osmunson, and Dr. Yolanda Whyte, and many others (watch the full hearing). The committee is holding the legislation briefly as they collect more information and evidence from both sides. If you live in the Milwaukee area and would like to get involved, please contact End Fluoride Milwaukee (on Facebook). If you are a Milwaukee resident, or a medical or scientific professional, please contact Milwaukee Aldermen.
Phoenix, Arizona (pop. 1.5 million) – The city council is reassessing their fluoridation program. The issue was raised by Councilman Tom Simplot and local fluoride-free campaigners. The city currently spends more than $500,000 annually on fluoridation, and currently joins only 9 other Arizona communities in fluoridating their water. The city council is expected to study the issue and meet on September 11, when it will hold further hearings and decide the fate of the practice. If you live in the Phoenix area and would like to get involved, please contact FAN's Phoenix coordinator. You can also help by contacting the Phoenix Mayor and City Council.
Santa Fe, New Mexico(pop. 70,000) – City councilors are considering, and reportedly "leaning towards", ending fluoridation. Santa Fe is 1 of only 2 towns in New Mexico that add fluoride to their drinking water. The issue was raised by Councilor Chris Calvert who felt the health risk and $32,000 cost was enough reason to end the practice. If you live in the area, or are a medical or scientific professional, please contact the council and urge them to support an amendment ending fluoridation.
Anchorage, Alaska(pop. 300,000) – On June 6th, the Anchorage Assembly Public Safety Committee held a fact-finding meeting on fluoridation. Future meetings are expected, and the locals are organizing for win. If you live in the Anchorage area, please contact FAN's Anchorage coordinator. You can also contact Anchorage Councilors and urge them to end fluoridation like Fairbanks and Juneau.
Making A Statement At The State-Level
FAN has also been increasing our focus on influencing fluoride-policy at the state-level. Over the past decade, we have seen the dental-lobby spending more effort and money trying to influence state-legislators to pass bills mandating statewide fluoridation. Just last year, Arkansas legislators passed a fluoride mandate bill without hearings, without public discussion, and as quickly and undemocratically as possible.
This year, the dental-lobby was again trying to force fluoridation down the throats of non-consenting citizens in New Jersey, Vermont, and Florida, where legislation and amendments mandating fluoride were introduced. Fortunately, strong opposition to these mandates have killed the bills in Vermont and Florida before hearings were ever held, and the mandatory fluoridation bill in New Jersey seems to have stalled before getting a vote by either the Assembly or Senate.
On the fluoride-free side, this year two bills were introduced in NH calling for a prohibition of fluoridation. In Illinois, legislators introduced a bill to end the state-wide fluoridation mandate there. And in Tennessee, a legislator introduced a bill to study the effects of fluoride on the human body, and another legislator introduced a bill requiring accountability for drinking water additives.
But the biggest state victory over the past year was in New Hampshire. On August 4th, 2012, the state of New Hampshire will become the first state to require fluoridating communities to warn their citizens about the fluorosis risk the additive poses to infants. On June 7, Governor John Lynch signed HB1416, "an act relative to a required fluoride statement." The law will require the following notice on all consumer confidence reports, which must be mailed to all water consumers, be posted online, and available at city halls:
"Your public water supply is fluoridated. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, if your child under the age of 6 months is exclusively consuming infant formula reconstituted with fluoridated water, there may be an increased chance of dental fluorosis. Consult your child's health care provider for more information."
This new law is a proactive approach to reducing NH fluorosis rates by notifying parents about the risk posed to their infants by fluoridated water. Not only should the law cause more parents to take preventative action by reducing infant fluoride exposure, but it should also inspire them to question why this toxic substance is in their tap water in the first place if it isn't safe for infant consumption. This marks a point when the State of New Hampshire has officially recognized that fluoridated water poses a risk to NH infants; a risk backed up by countless studies and a growing fluorosis epidemic that afflicts 41% of U.S. adolescents.
The legislation was opposed by more than a dozen groups, including the NH Dental Association, the NH Oral Health Coalition, Delta Dental, the American Water Works Association, the Municipal Association, and the NH Department of Health and Human Services. Even with this strong opposition from the well-financed dental lobby, the bill was still passed by the NH House by a vote of 253-23, and passed unanimously by the NH Senate. HB-1416 was also signed quickly by Governor John Lynch, rather than being approved without his signature, showing his strong support for this action.
It was a strong group effort, and it showed the dental lobby that we plan on influencing future fluoride policy at the local-level AND the state-level.
Working Together We Can Eliminate the Toxic Poison Fluoride from Our Water Supply
We on the FAN team are dedicated to keeping this momentum growing. If this next year is anything like the last, then the practice of fluoridation is certainly seeing it's last days. We expect to continue building and supporting local campaigns throughout the world, winning local battles that will create ripples of influence globally. We not only expect to fight and defeat the dental lobby's state-mandate strategy, but also continue to go on the offensive with legislation reversing existing mandates, creating infant warning statements, and prohibiting fluoridation completely.
Over the next year we also plan on increasing awareness of the fluoride risk to infants and fluorosis. This means opposing the sale of fluoride-added Nursery Water, and urging fluoride manufacturers to print labels on packaging that warn parents not to reconstitute the formula with fluoridated tap water. In conjunction with our infant warning campaign, we will also be planning and executing a campaign to bring greater awareness to fluorosis, which is the discoloration and molting of tooth enamel caused by overexposure to fluoride.
Many people don't even realize they have dental fluorosis, and many dentists don't report fluorosis cases or even alert their patients to the problem or it's cause. We want to expose the fluorosis epidemic and give victims an outlet to share their story and their frustration with fluoridation.
FAN will continue to build our supporter and advocate network, and create more resources for campaigners. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for citizens to organize around the opposition to fluoridation, and to successfully remove the toxic additive from their drinking water. This will involve improvements to our website, our downloadable materials, our advocacy resources, and our social networks.
We on the FAN team are committed to:
Establishing the principle that the public water supply should never be used to deliver medicine;
Ensuring that any medicine given to people be pharmaceutical grade-not an industrial waste product contaminated with known human carcinogens like arsenic, for which there are no safe levels;
Upholding the principle that what medicines we take is an individual choice;
Making sure that public health policies are shaped by honest science;
Securing Environmental Justice for all our citizens. Some people simply cannot afford to use bottled water or buy expensive filters, and both Black and Mexican American children are more susceptible to fluoride's toxic effects (CDC, 2005, Table 23);
Protecting our babies and children from fluoride's known harmful effects. 41% of US adolescents now have dental fluorosis (CDC, 2010); 25 studies indicate an association with lowered IQ and moderate fluoride exposure, and Bassin's unrefuted 2006 study conducted at Harvard University indicates that young boys exposed to fluoridated water in their 6th-8th years have a 5-7 fold increased risk of succumbing to osteosarcoma by the age of 20. Osteosarcoma is a rare but frequently fatal bone cancer.
Upholding the Precautionary Principle. The risks from fluoride are simply too great to be ignored, especially considering that any potential benefit is small or even nonexistent. Who in their right mind could possibly justify the potential for lowering IQ, weakening bones with lifelong exposure, or even risk killing a handful of children each year in order to save what amounts to possibly only 0.6 of one tooth surface out of over 100 tooth surfaces in a child's mouth, based on the largest survey ever conducted in the US (Brunelle and Carlos, 1990)?
FAN will continue to fight for these things – and we will do so against any odds until the fluoridating world comes to its senses. But this is easier to do when we know we have the support of people like you.
So far at least 53 communities with 3.5 million residents have been freed from fluoridation. Since 1990, more than 300 communities have "beat fluoridation" with a city council or referendum vote to end the practice. This number doesn't include the hundreds, if not thousands of communities, who have rejected the start of fluoridation programs in their city.
Many victories were the result of regular citizens who opposed fluoridation, organizing local campaigns to educate their neighbors and local decision-makers about the serious health risks associated with the practice. But prominent legislators and city councilors representing large cities have also begun introducing fluoride prohibition legislation and resolutions. This is a sign that the issue is becoming less controversial in the eyes of decision-makers, and is losing its status as an undebateable issue.
Over the past decade, we have seen the dental-lobby spending more effort and money trying to influence state-legislators to pass bills mandating statewide fluoridation.
A year ago, the Fluoride Action Network (FAN) joined the Health Liberty Coalition, formed by Mercola.com, the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), the Institute for Responsible Technology (IRT), the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), and Consumers for Dental Choice.
The purpose of forming the nonprofit partnership was to advocate and actively campaign for the freedom of individuals to make personal health decisions, and to increase access to unbiased and accurate health information.
Since 2004, FAN has been dedicated to this same goal, and we were happy to join with the strong, dedicated team of advocates, researchers, and health professionals that make up the Health Liberty Coalition.
FAN is a nonprofit and international network of medical and scientific professionals who are focused on broadening public awareness about the toxicity of fluoride compounds and the health impacts of current fluoride exposures, particularly from fluoridation of the public drinking water.
When we joined the Health Liberty Coalition last year, FAN had just helped convince the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to phase out ALL sulfuryl fluoride pesticides from the U.S. food supply after a vigorous nine-year effort together with the Environmental Working Group and Beyond Pesticides.
This gas fumigant, used to kill insects and rodents in food processing warehouses, leaves extremely high levels of fluoride residue “in or on” stored foods. We were also witnessing the beginning of a groundswell of fluoride-free campaigns and victories throughout the world that have freed at least 53 communities with 3.5 million residents from fluoridation since the October 2010 victory in Waterloo, Ontario.
Since joining the coalition, the fluoride-free movement has grown significantly. With the help of the Health Liberty coalition and Dr. Mercola, who has inspired many fluoride-free campaigners with his call for action at the local-level, the momentum has continued to build to what could be the tipping point for the end of fluoridation.
Removing Fluoride One Community At A Time
FAN's Director, Dr. Paul Connett, has said repeatedly that, "we need to beat fluoridation one open mind and one community at a time." Since 1990, more than 300 communities have "beat fluoridation" with a city council or referendum vote to end the practice. This number doesn't include the hundreds, if not thousands of communities, who have rejected the start of fluoridation programs in their city.
In just the past year alone, FAN has confirmed that at least 40 communities have voted to end fluoridation for more than 2 million residents, including in major urban areas such as:
Fairbanks, Alaska (pop. 80,000)
College Station, Texas (pop. 100,000)
Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada (pop. 140,000)
Albuquerque, New Mexico (pop. 500,000)
Pinellas County, Florida (pop. 700,000)
Many of these victories were the result of regular citizens who opposed fluoridation, organizing local campaigns to educate their neighbors and local decision-makers about the serious health risks associated with the practice. But we have also seen something else happen that is a clear sign that our movement is growing at an accelerated rate.
Recently, prominent legislators and city councilors representing large cities have begun introducing fluoride prohibition legislation and resolutions. This is a sign that the issue is becoming less controversial in the eyes of decision-makers, and is losing its status as an undebateable issue.
The pro-fluoridation lobby – led and funded by the American Dental Association (ADA), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Pew Charitable Trust, and Delta Dental – are no longer able to hide the true facts about water fluoridation from decision-makers:
The U.S. FDA classifies ingested fluoride for purposes of reducing tooth decay as an "unapproved" drug. Drugs shouldn't be in our drinking water,
Water fluoridation is a violation of your individual right to informed consent to medication,
Fluoride is not a nutrient. There is not a single process in your body that requires fluoride,
Bottle-fed infants receive the highest doses of fluoride as they rely solely on liquids for food, combined with their small size. A baby being fed formula reconstituted with tap water receives approximately 175-200 times more fluoride than a breast-fed infant,
41% of all American children aged 12-15 now have dental fluorosis, a discoloration and pitting of the enamel caused by overexposure to fluoride as a child,
Ingesting fluoride has been found to damage soft tissues (brain, kidneys, and endocrine system), as well as teeth (dental fluorosis) and bones (skeletal fluorosis). There are also 24 studies demonstrating a strong relationship between fairly modest exposure to fluoride and reduced IQ in children
The chemicals used to fluoridate water supplies are largely hazardous by-products of the fertilizer industry and have never been required to undergo randomized clinical trials for safety or effectiveness by any regulatory agency in the world, and
A multi-million dollar U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) -funded study found no relation between tooth decay and the amount of fluoride ingested by children.
At the municipal-level, there are a number of major campaigns heating up in heavily populated areas, showing just how quickly the momentum is building in opposition to fluoridation:
New York City (pop. 8.1 million) – Councilman Peter Vallone, Jr. hosted a fluoride-free rally at city hall on May 15th to promote his resolution prohibiting fluoridation of NYC drinking water. A fluoride-free victory in NYC would gain international attention and likely lead to a domino-effect of victories throughout North America. The bill awaits a public hearing, which is at the discretion of Health committee Chair. If you would like to get involved with the NYC campaign, please contact FAN's New York state coordinator. You can also help by calling the Chair of the Health committee to urge her to hold a public hearing on Vallone's fluoridation prohibition resolution.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin (area pop. 1 million) – In May, Alderman James Bohl introduced fluoridation prohibition legislation. A 7-hour long public hearing was held, which included testimony from Dr. Paul Connett, Dr. Bill Osmunson, and Dr. Yolanda Whyte, and many others (watch the full hearing). The committee is holding the legislation briefly as they collect more information and evidence from both sides. If you live in the Milwaukee area and would like to get involved, please contact End Fluoride Milwaukee (on Facebook). If you are a Milwaukee resident, or a medical or scientific professional, please contact Milwaukee Aldermen.
Phoenix, Arizona (pop. 1.5 million) – The city council is reassessing their fluoridation program. The issue was raised by Councilman Tom Simplot and local fluoride-free campaigners. The city currently spends more than $500,000 annually on fluoridation, and currently joins only 9 other Arizona communities in fluoridating their water. The city council is expected to study the issue and meet on September 11, when it will hold further hearings and decide the fate of the practice. If you live in the Phoenix area and would like to get involved, please contact FAN's Phoenix coordinator. You can also help by contacting the Phoenix Mayor and City Council.
Santa Fe, New Mexico(pop. 70,000) – City councilors are considering, and reportedly "leaning towards", ending fluoridation. Santa Fe is 1 of only 2 towns in New Mexico that add fluoride to their drinking water. The issue was raised by Councilor Chris Calvert who felt the health risk and $32,000 cost was enough reason to end the practice. If you live in the area, or are a medical or scientific professional, please contact the council and urge them to support an amendment ending fluoridation.
Anchorage, Alaska(pop. 300,000) – On June 6th, the Anchorage Assembly Public Safety Committee held a fact-finding meeting on fluoridation. Future meetings are expected, and the locals are organizing for win. If you live in the Anchorage area, please contact FAN's Anchorage coordinator. You can also contact Anchorage Councilors and urge them to end fluoridation like Fairbanks and Juneau.
Making A Statement At The State-Level
FAN has also been increasing our focus on influencing fluoride-policy at the state-level. Over the past decade, we have seen the dental-lobby spending more effort and money trying to influence state-legislators to pass bills mandating statewide fluoridation. Just last year, Arkansas legislators passed a fluoride mandate bill without hearings, without public discussion, and as quickly and undemocratically as possible.
This year, the dental-lobby was again trying to force fluoridation down the throats of non-consenting citizens in New Jersey, Vermont, and Florida, where legislation and amendments mandating fluoride were introduced. Fortunately, strong opposition to these mandates have killed the bills in Vermont and Florida before hearings were ever held, and the mandatory fluoridation bill in New Jersey seems to have stalled before getting a vote by either the Assembly or Senate.
On the fluoride-free side, this year two bills were introduced in NH calling for a prohibition of fluoridation. In Illinois, legislators introduced a bill to end the state-wide fluoridation mandate there. And in Tennessee, a legislator introduced a bill to study the effects of fluoride on the human body, and another legislator introduced a bill requiring accountability for drinking water additives.
But the biggest state victory over the past year was in New Hampshire. On August 4th, 2012, the state of New Hampshire will become the first state to require fluoridating communities to warn their citizens about the fluorosis risk the additive poses to infants. On June 7, Governor John Lynch signed HB1416, "an act relative to a required fluoride statement." The law will require the following notice on all consumer confidence reports, which must be mailed to all water consumers, be posted online, and available at city halls:
"Your public water supply is fluoridated. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, if your child under the age of 6 months is exclusively consuming infant formula reconstituted with fluoridated water, there may be an increased chance of dental fluorosis. Consult your child's health care provider for more information."
This new law is a proactive approach to reducing NH fluorosis rates by notifying parents about the risk posed to their infants by fluoridated water. Not only should the law cause more parents to take preventative action by reducing infant fluoride exposure, but it should also inspire them to question why this toxic substance is in their tap water in the first place if it isn't safe for infant consumption. This marks a point when the State of New Hampshire has officially recognized that fluoridated water poses a risk to NH infants; a risk backed up by countless studies and a growing fluorosis epidemic that afflicts 41% of U.S. adolescents.
The legislation was opposed by more than a dozen groups, including the NH Dental Association, the NH Oral Health Coalition, Delta Dental, the American Water Works Association, the Municipal Association, and the NH Department of Health and Human Services. Even with this strong opposition from the well-financed dental lobby, the bill was still passed by the NH House by a vote of 253-23, and passed unanimously by the NH Senate. HB-1416 was also signed quickly by Governor John Lynch, rather than being approved without his signature, showing his strong support for this action.
It was a strong group effort, and it showed the dental lobby that we plan on influencing future fluoride policy at the local-level AND the state-level.
Working Together We Can Eliminate the Toxic Poison Fluoride from Our Water Supply
We on the FAN team are dedicated to keeping this momentum growing. If this next year is anything like the last, then the practice of fluoridation is certainly seeing it's last days. We expect to continue building and supporting local campaigns throughout the world, winning local battles that will create ripples of influence globally. We not only expect to fight and defeat the dental lobby's state-mandate strategy, but also continue to go on the offensive with legislation reversing existing mandates, creating infant warning statements, and prohibiting fluoridation completely.
Over the next year we also plan on increasing awareness of the fluoride risk to infants and fluorosis. This means opposing the sale of fluoride-added Nursery Water, and urging fluoride manufacturers to print labels on packaging that warn parents not to reconstitute the formula with fluoridated tap water. In conjunction with our infant warning campaign, we will also be planning and executing a campaign to bring greater awareness to fluorosis, which is the discoloration and molting of tooth enamel caused by overexposure to fluoride.
Many people don't even realize they have dental fluorosis, and many dentists don't report fluorosis cases or even alert their patients to the problem or it's cause. We want to expose the fluorosis epidemic and give victims an outlet to share their story and their frustration with fluoridation.
FAN will continue to build our supporter and advocate network, and create more resources for campaigners. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for citizens to organize around the opposition to fluoridation, and to successfully remove the toxic additive from their drinking water. This will involve improvements to our website, our downloadable materials, our advocacy resources, and our social networks.
We on the FAN team are committed to:
Establishing the principle that the public water supply should never be used to deliver medicine;
Ensuring that any medicine given to people be pharmaceutical grade-not an industrial waste product contaminated with known human carcinogens like arsenic, for which there are no safe levels;
Upholding the principle that what medicines we take is an individual choice;
Making sure that public health policies are shaped by honest science;
Securing Environmental Justice for all our citizens. Some people simply cannot afford to use bottled water or buy expensive filters, and both Black and Mexican American children are more susceptible to fluoride's toxic effects (CDC, 2005, Table 23);
Protecting our babies and children from fluoride's known harmful effects. 41% of US adolescents now have dental fluorosis (CDC, 2010); 25 studies indicate an association with lowered IQ and moderate fluoride exposure, and Bassin's unrefuted 2006 study conducted at Harvard University indicates that young boys exposed to fluoridated water in their 6th-8th years have a 5-7 fold increased risk of succumbing to osteosarcoma by the age of 20. Osteosarcoma is a rare but frequently fatal bone cancer.
Upholding the Precautionary Principle. The risks from fluoride are simply too great to be ignored, especially considering that any potential benefit is small or even nonexistent. Who in their right mind could possibly justify the potential for lowering IQ, weakening bones with lifelong exposure, or even risk killing a handful of children each year in order to save what amounts to possibly only 0.6 of one tooth surface out of over 100 tooth surfaces in a child's mouth, based on the largest survey ever conducted in the US (Brunelle and Carlos, 1990)?
FAN will continue to fight for these things – and we will do so against any odds until the fluoridating world comes to its senses. But this is easier to do when we know we have the support of people like you.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Silent Fukushima Spring
Japan Wild Bird Association tweeted like these below,
先月、放射性物質のツバメへの影響を調べるため飯舘村に行きました。空間線量は平均して4～5µSv/h、地上は高いところで8µSv/hありました。水田は放棄地となり、全村民が避難していてツバメは数個体しか確認できませんでした。
環境 (続く) tl.gd/i0sm0a
— 日本野鳥の会ツバメさん (@wbsj_tsubame) 6月 25, 2012
visited Iidatemura Fukushima to research how radiation affect swallows. Atmospheric dose was 4~5μSv/h at average, the highest reading was 8μSv/h on the ground. Rice fields were abandoned, all the villagers evacuated, we found only a few swallows.
RT @wbsj_tsubame: 飯舘村の影響はツバメだけではありません。キビタキやオオルリといったこの時期に見られるはずの夏鳥も確認できませんでした。森はレイチェル・カーソンの『沈黙の森』を彷彿とさせる静けさでした。生き物の声がしない森 t.co/PI1 …
NOTE: I'm sure that all of the Northern hemisphere is missing the bird abundance. In South Central Washington, this time of year would normally have hundreds of active, diving, energetic swallows, instead there are maybe a dozen birds. The bats are missing for the first time ever and same with many other bird species.
先月、放射性物質のツバメへの影響を調べるため飯舘村に行きました。空間線量は平均して4～5µSv/h、地上は高いところで8µSv/hありました。水田は放棄地となり、全村民が避難していてツバメは数個体しか確認できませんでした。
環境 (続く) tl.gd/i0sm0a
— 日本野鳥の会ツバメさん (@wbsj_tsubame) 6月 25, 2012
visited Iidatemura Fukushima to research how radiation affect swallows. Atmospheric dose was 4~5μSv/h at average, the highest reading was 8μSv/h on the ground. Rice fields were abandoned, all the villagers evacuated, we found only a few swallows.
RT @wbsj_tsubame: 飯舘村の影響はツバメだけではありません。キビタキやオオルリといったこの時期に見られるはずの夏鳥も確認できませんでした。森はレイチェル・カーソンの『沈黙の森』を彷彿とさせる静けさでした。生き物の声がしない森 t.co/PI1 …
NOTE: I'm sure that all of the Northern hemisphere is missing the bird abundance. In South Central Washington, this time of year would normally have hundreds of active, diving, energetic swallows, instead there are maybe a dozen birds. The bats are missing for the first time ever and same with many other bird species.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
How Rampant Is Conservator Elder Abuse In Los Angeles?
The elder abuse hotline runs round the clock in Los Angeles County. Twenty four hours a day, a social worker is available to take incoming complaints of abuse and neglect of elderly and dependent adults.
But not, apparently, if the abusing party is a conservator. During a call to APS last Thursday, a complaint was made that a local conservator was neglecting and medically abusing one of her wards in Pomona, California. The worker refused to accept the complaint, stating that APS does not take complaints of conservator abuse.
The call was then transferred to the supervisor, Alejandro, who stated that the Welfare and Institutions Code blocks Adult Protective Services from following up on complaints of conservator abuse. Alejandro was unable to provide the relevant WIC and promised to call back after researching it. He did not.
But both Alejandro and his social worker spoke in error. A call to the Administrative Office of Los Angeles County Adult Protective Service today confirmed that there are no legal guidelines that would inhibit APS from taking and investigating a complaint of this nature. So why are the workers declining to take these calls?
Calls to Administration got some action, but not very many answers. A call center manager named Solomon assured me he would have someone take my complaint and offered to transfer me back to the Call Center. I told him I would call over myself, to see what sort of response another social worker provided.
A social worker named Diana answered the call and informed me that APS does not investigate conservator abuse. She told me to contact the Public Guardian. When pressed, she went off the line and when she returned she told me she had been authorized to take this complaint. To wit:
In Redlands, a homeless man named Charlie Castle had been grabbed off the street by the mental health court officers and placed under a mental health conservatorship. Private Conservator Melodie Scott petitioned to take over as conservator and was so appointed. She then put the individual into a long-term nursing home, which does not provide mental health treatment, and proceeded to ignore him. The conservatorship appears to have been conceived in a grave conflict of interest. The attorney -- Ryan Sheehan -- representing the conservatee is, in fact, Melodie Scott’s lawyer. Castle has now been locked up for a year.
Apparently, Scott has a personal interest in Charles Castle. Castle recalls that, a couple of months before he was grabbed, Scott approached him on the street. She asked him if he would like her to “take care” of him. “No, ma’am,” he replied emphatically.
I had been contacted by a friend of Charlie Castle, who believed that the conservatorship had become abusive and that the conservator was neglecting Castle. The friend, a local schoolteacher, provided a picture of Charlie as someone who was intelligent, friendly and docile and, while somewhat eccentric, was able to manage his own affairs. Other members of the community, including Ken Stein, a director at the local YMCA and Pastor Craig at the Blessing Center, repeated the same perceptions of Charlie Castle.
"Charlie loves his freedom," said Stein. "He marches to a different drummer and to lock him up would be a death sentence."
According to the San Bernardino Court public records, Castle has never been charged with a crime. According to all contacts, he does not pose a danger to himself or others.
All the way up the bureaucratic food chain, agencies mandated to protect the elderlyand disabled are backing off from allegations of conservator abuse. Reports to police go uninvestigated, District Attorneys pass on their obligations to prosecute, the state agencies, such as the Professional Fiduciaries Bureau in California seem to be paralyzed and unable to even reply to incoming complaints. The State Attorney General’s offices refuses to investigate, saying they don’t “do probate.”
Numerous complaints have been tendered to the FBI, from Florida to California. The FBI has never launched an investigation. When the GAO submitted a recent report on conservatorship abuse, the recommendations were seen to only eventuate in an increase in the numbers of people under the thumb of the State, rather than to address the inherent abuses that may occur when a person loses all his rights and all access to his property. (Source)
Solomon has stated that he will institute better training among the social workers at Los Angeles County APS. One can only hope so.
But not, apparently, if the abusing party is a conservator. During a call to APS last Thursday, a complaint was made that a local conservator was neglecting and medically abusing one of her wards in Pomona, California. The worker refused to accept the complaint, stating that APS does not take complaints of conservator abuse.
The call was then transferred to the supervisor, Alejandro, who stated that the Welfare and Institutions Code blocks Adult Protective Services from following up on complaints of conservator abuse. Alejandro was unable to provide the relevant WIC and promised to call back after researching it. He did not.
But both Alejandro and his social worker spoke in error. A call to the Administrative Office of Los Angeles County Adult Protective Service today confirmed that there are no legal guidelines that would inhibit APS from taking and investigating a complaint of this nature. So why are the workers declining to take these calls?
Calls to Administration got some action, but not very many answers. A call center manager named Solomon assured me he would have someone take my complaint and offered to transfer me back to the Call Center. I told him I would call over myself, to see what sort of response another social worker provided.
A social worker named Diana answered the call and informed me that APS does not investigate conservator abuse. She told me to contact the Public Guardian. When pressed, she went off the line and when she returned she told me she had been authorized to take this complaint. To wit:
In Redlands, a homeless man named Charlie Castle had been grabbed off the street by the mental health court officers and placed under a mental health conservatorship. Private Conservator Melodie Scott petitioned to take over as conservator and was so appointed. She then put the individual into a long-term nursing home, which does not provide mental health treatment, and proceeded to ignore him. The conservatorship appears to have been conceived in a grave conflict of interest. The attorney -- Ryan Sheehan -- representing the conservatee is, in fact, Melodie Scott’s lawyer. Castle has now been locked up for a year.
Apparently, Scott has a personal interest in Charles Castle. Castle recalls that, a couple of months before he was grabbed, Scott approached him on the street. She asked him if he would like her to “take care” of him. “No, ma’am,” he replied emphatically.
I had been contacted by a friend of Charlie Castle, who believed that the conservatorship had become abusive and that the conservator was neglecting Castle. The friend, a local schoolteacher, provided a picture of Charlie as someone who was intelligent, friendly and docile and, while somewhat eccentric, was able to manage his own affairs. Other members of the community, including Ken Stein, a director at the local YMCA and Pastor Craig at the Blessing Center, repeated the same perceptions of Charlie Castle.
"Charlie loves his freedom," said Stein. "He marches to a different drummer and to lock him up would be a death sentence."
According to the San Bernardino Court public records, Castle has never been charged with a crime. According to all contacts, he does not pose a danger to himself or others.
All the way up the bureaucratic food chain, agencies mandated to protect the elderlyand disabled are backing off from allegations of conservator abuse. Reports to police go uninvestigated, District Attorneys pass on their obligations to prosecute, the state agencies, such as the Professional Fiduciaries Bureau in California seem to be paralyzed and unable to even reply to incoming complaints. The State Attorney General’s offices refuses to investigate, saying they don’t “do probate.”
Numerous complaints have been tendered to the FBI, from Florida to California. The FBI has never launched an investigation. When the GAO submitted a recent report on conservatorship abuse, the recommendations were seen to only eventuate in an increase in the numbers of people under the thumb of the State, rather than to address the inherent abuses that may occur when a person loses all his rights and all access to his property. (Source)
Solomon has stated that he will institute better training among the social workers at Los Angeles County APS. One can only hope so.
Americans Want Meat Without Antibiotics
Many U.S. grocery stores now offer at least some meat or poultry that is raised without antibiotics, sometimes even at below-average prices for all meats of that type, but shoppers must become savvy about reading labeling to get products that live up to “no antibiotics administered”-type claims, according to new research from Consumer Reports.
The declining effectiveness of antibiotics has become a national public-health crisis, leading doctors and scientists to call for much more careful use of antibiotics so that disease-causing organisms don’t become immune to them.
But since approximately 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are used by the meat and poultry industry to make animals grow faster or to prevent disease in crowded and unsanitary conditions, both supermarkets and consumers can have a major impact on this problem through their purchasing decisions.
To determine whether supermarkets are making products raised without antibiotics available to their customers and how consumers feel about them, we polled consumers, contacted companies directly, and in March and April 2012 sent 36 “secret shoppers” into 136 grocery stores in 23 states.
The shoppers reported back on more than 1,000 raw meat and poultry products that carried a claim about antibiotics or were labeled as organic. Just to be clear, shoppers’ findings represent a snapshot of offerings on the day they visited a particular store, and may not be indicative of products offered on other days or at other branches. We also conducted additional labeling research in 2011 and continue to analyze the claims in the market.
What shoppers found:
Big differences among retailers. Whole Foods, for example, guarantees that all meat and poultry sold in its stores is never treated with antibiotics. Shoppers also found wide selections of meat and poultry raised without antibiotics at Giant, Hannaford, Shaw’s, and Stop & Shop. At the other extreme, shoppers at Sam’s Club, Food 4 Less, Food Lion, and Save-A-Lot stores could not find any such meat or poultry.
What our poll found:
In a nationwide poll conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center, 57 percent of consumers indicated they had meat and poultry raised without antibiotics available at their local supermarkets. In that poll, 61 percent of consumers also indicated they would pay 5 cents or more a pound extra; and 37 percent indicated they would pay a dollar a pound or more extra for meat and poultry raised without antibiotics.
Fix Food – Fix Antibiotics – Meat Without Drugs
NOTE: What the wording, that's where the deceptive advertising and claims get you. While your intention is to buy meat that has never had any antibiotics from day of birth to appearing on the supermarket shelf, the reality is quite different. The only way you can be completely certain is that you are buying directly from a credible source or local ranch.
Grassland Beef offers you quality, grass fed poultry, beef, lamb and pork. Nothing tastes so delicious, just like your grandmother used to enjoy on the farm!
The declining effectiveness of antibiotics has become a national public-health crisis, leading doctors and scientists to call for much more careful use of antibiotics so that disease-causing organisms don’t become immune to them.
But since approximately 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are used by the meat and poultry industry to make animals grow faster or to prevent disease in crowded and unsanitary conditions, both supermarkets and consumers can have a major impact on this problem through their purchasing decisions.
To determine whether supermarkets are making products raised without antibiotics available to their customers and how consumers feel about them, we polled consumers, contacted companies directly, and in March and April 2012 sent 36 “secret shoppers” into 136 grocery stores in 23 states.
The shoppers reported back on more than 1,000 raw meat and poultry products that carried a claim about antibiotics or were labeled as organic. Just to be clear, shoppers’ findings represent a snapshot of offerings on the day they visited a particular store, and may not be indicative of products offered on other days or at other branches. We also conducted additional labeling research in 2011 and continue to analyze the claims in the market.
What shoppers found:
Big differences among retailers. Whole Foods, for example, guarantees that all meat and poultry sold in its stores is never treated with antibiotics. Shoppers also found wide selections of meat and poultry raised without antibiotics at Giant, Hannaford, Shaw’s, and Stop & Shop. At the other extreme, shoppers at Sam’s Club, Food 4 Less, Food Lion, and Save-A-Lot stores could not find any such meat or poultry.
What our poll found:
In a nationwide poll conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center, 57 percent of consumers indicated they had meat and poultry raised without antibiotics available at their local supermarkets. In that poll, 61 percent of consumers also indicated they would pay 5 cents or more a pound extra; and 37 percent indicated they would pay a dollar a pound or more extra for meat and poultry raised without antibiotics.
Fix Food – Fix Antibiotics – Meat Without Drugs
NOTE: What the wording, that's where the deceptive advertising and claims get you. While your intention is to buy meat that has never had any antibiotics from day of birth to appearing on the supermarket shelf, the reality is quite different. The only way you can be completely certain is that you are buying directly from a credible source or local ranch.
Grassland Beef offers you quality, grass fed poultry, beef, lamb and pork. Nothing tastes so delicious, just like your grandmother used to enjoy on the farm!
How Normal Is It For Army Troops To Drive Tanks & March Through US Streets?
In a move that many have seen as yet another sign of the continued push towards martial law and the normal use of troops on the streets of America, the U.S. Army is currently “training” throughout St. Louis, complete with 100′s of heavily armored military vehicles driving through St Louis neighborhoods.
The exercise, part of a program to train military police to drive heavily armored vehicles through highways and city streets, has drawn widespread criticism throughout the alternative media while the corporate media has essentially worshiped it, going out of their way to distort the facts in their numerous propaganda pieces on the subject.
In an initial report by a local corporate news outlet that was prompted by hundreds of calls from concerned citizens who had, in a scene more reminiscent of North Korea than a supposed free country, seen the military rolling through their neighborhood, the media simply told the citizens to not be alarmed.
The absurd reporting by the corporate media is simply a continuation of their shilling for the military industrial complex and the globalist takeover of America.
To add to this absurdity, the military officer in the report basically told U.S. citizens to not film armored vehicles rolling through THEIR neighborhoods.
Now, in a report by another corporate media lackey, those that have spoken out against this martial law type training have been attacked and labeled as cooky conspiracy theorists even though there are literally dozens of open admissions by the military that they are planning to use troops on American streets.
Nearly every local news outlet has reported the story:
This week the Army plans to drive armored vehicles through city streets as part of a training exercise it is holding at its reserve center in north St. Louis.
But it was KSDK’s version of the story last Thursday that really ignited the crazies.
Like Orson Welles’ broadcast of War of the Worlds, KSDK anchorman Mike Bush began the 10 p.m. newscast.
The author of this hit piece apparently thinks so low of his readers that he is actually labeling those that read official Army statements as crazies.
Last year we reported on a plan by the Pentagon to deploy a 20,000 strong (that is only the admitted number) force INSIDE the United States to trained and deployed by late 2011.
In 2008 The Pentagon announced plans to deploy a 20,000 strong internal troop force inside the continental United States (CONUS) that was set to be trained by 2011, thus dovetailing into the current troop and equipment movements around the country reported by truckers as well as many more troop sightings by everyday citizens.
We also noted how this directly correlates with a major Rand Corporation policy paper that called for a military police force to operate inside the country.
Interestingly enough, this plan directly correlates with a 2009, Army funded, Rand Corporation study that called for an internal United States police force to combat civil unrest.
The Pentagon has been training to use either U.S. troops or foreign military against the American people for years. There are literally hundreds of examples of this happening yet all we get from the corporate media is either direct lies or claims that the takeover is actually good.
Foreign Affairs, the influential globalist mouthpiece of the Council on Foreign Relations, has recently called for the Army to be used in a local police force capacity.
An article published in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, the mouthpiece for the influential Council on Foreign Relations, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General Raymond T. Odierno, advocates the army be “transitioned” into a more “flexible force” by deploying in situations normally reserved for domestic law enforcement officials. He argues that by doing so, troops will be better equipped to deal with conflict elsewhere.
In 2011 we again reported on the startling fact that the Air Force was actually taking part in arrests in local convenience stores.
In Florida City The Air Force has set up a crime hotline, which has now been removed from their website, as well as taken part in arrests at local convenience stores.
On July 15, military police – known as Security Forces patrolmen – detained a criminal suspect at a Circle K in until Miami-Dade police arrived.
In April of this year heavily armed military officers descended on downtown Chicago in black helicopters which was again labeled by the local corporate media as completely routine and actually a good thing.
In a shocking display of the police state and the creeping push towards actual martial law, heavily armed military officers in black helicopters swooped through downtown Chicago in what was billed as a routine military exercise.
Up to three Blackhawk Helicopters flew in formation and separately around downtown office buildings and apartments for at least three hours.
Again in April 2012 and this time in Crookston, MN, fully armed troops were photographed walking through neighborhood streets.
Libertarian Review – The photo shown at left was taken by a subscriber in the city of Crookston, MN from the front porch of her suburban home. No, the men pictured aren’t from the local high school’s J.R.O.T.C sqaud – they are in fact trained soldiers serving in the Minnessota National Guard, Unit 2-136 CAB / B Company.
In May 2012 the local corporate media in Florida literally characterized the invasion of the military, complete with black helicopters and simulated explosions, onto local streets a, “cool tourist story.”
“I got a kick out of it that’s for sure.”
The examples listed above are just a few of the countless pieces of evidence that indicate a very real push towards a martial law type existence in America.
They also completely debunk the notion that only crazy conspiracy theorists think this is a possibility.
Another important fact to note is that this disgusting display of repeated military and globalist industrial complex propaganda is due to the fact that most media outlets are owned by 6 corporations with direct connections to all the major defense contractors.
Note: This is not an article attacking individual military members. There are many patriotic Americans within the U.S. military who are disgusted by the upper brass and their push to use them against their own people.
The upper levels of our military have been hijacked by the globalists and are being directed to slowly implement the use of troops against Americans.
The only chances we have as a free people are the continued waking up of the populace and, perhaps more importantly, individual service members refusing to act against the people as the globalists move into their final phase of the destruction of America.
The exercise, part of a program to train military police to drive heavily armored vehicles through highways and city streets, has drawn widespread criticism throughout the alternative media while the corporate media has essentially worshiped it, going out of their way to distort the facts in their numerous propaganda pieces on the subject.
In an initial report by a local corporate news outlet that was prompted by hundreds of calls from concerned citizens who had, in a scene more reminiscent of North Korea than a supposed free country, seen the military rolling through their neighborhood, the media simply told the citizens to not be alarmed.
The absurd reporting by the corporate media is simply a continuation of their shilling for the military industrial complex and the globalist takeover of America.
To add to this absurdity, the military officer in the report basically told U.S. citizens to not film armored vehicles rolling through THEIR neighborhoods.
Now, in a report by another corporate media lackey, those that have spoken out against this martial law type training have been attacked and labeled as cooky conspiracy theorists even though there are literally dozens of open admissions by the military that they are planning to use troops on American streets.
Nearly every local news outlet has reported the story:
This week the Army plans to drive armored vehicles through city streets as part of a training exercise it is holding at its reserve center in north St. Louis.
But it was KSDK’s version of the story last Thursday that really ignited the crazies.
Like Orson Welles’ broadcast of War of the Worlds, KSDK anchorman Mike Bush began the 10 p.m. newscast.
The author of this hit piece apparently thinks so low of his readers that he is actually labeling those that read official Army statements as crazies.
Last year we reported on a plan by the Pentagon to deploy a 20,000 strong (that is only the admitted number) force INSIDE the United States to trained and deployed by late 2011.
In 2008 The Pentagon announced plans to deploy a 20,000 strong internal troop force inside the continental United States (CONUS) that was set to be trained by 2011, thus dovetailing into the current troop and equipment movements around the country reported by truckers as well as many more troop sightings by everyday citizens.
We also noted how this directly correlates with a major Rand Corporation policy paper that called for a military police force to operate inside the country.
Interestingly enough, this plan directly correlates with a 2009, Army funded, Rand Corporation study that called for an internal United States police force to combat civil unrest.
The Pentagon has been training to use either U.S. troops or foreign military against the American people for years. There are literally hundreds of examples of this happening yet all we get from the corporate media is either direct lies or claims that the takeover is actually good.
Foreign Affairs, the influential globalist mouthpiece of the Council on Foreign Relations, has recently called for the Army to be used in a local police force capacity.
An article published in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, the mouthpiece for the influential Council on Foreign Relations, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General Raymond T. Odierno, advocates the army be “transitioned” into a more “flexible force” by deploying in situations normally reserved for domestic law enforcement officials. He argues that by doing so, troops will be better equipped to deal with conflict elsewhere.
In 2011 we again reported on the startling fact that the Air Force was actually taking part in arrests in local convenience stores.
In Florida City The Air Force has set up a crime hotline, which has now been removed from their website, as well as taken part in arrests at local convenience stores.
On July 15, military police – known as Security Forces patrolmen – detained a criminal suspect at a Circle K in until Miami-Dade police arrived.
In April of this year heavily armed military officers descended on downtown Chicago in black helicopters which was again labeled by the local corporate media as completely routine and actually a good thing.
In a shocking display of the police state and the creeping push towards actual martial law, heavily armed military officers in black helicopters swooped through downtown Chicago in what was billed as a routine military exercise.
Up to three Blackhawk Helicopters flew in formation and separately around downtown office buildings and apartments for at least three hours.
Again in April 2012 and this time in Crookston, MN, fully armed troops were photographed walking through neighborhood streets.
Libertarian Review – The photo shown at left was taken by a subscriber in the city of Crookston, MN from the front porch of her suburban home. No, the men pictured aren’t from the local high school’s J.R.O.T.C sqaud – they are in fact trained soldiers serving in the Minnessota National Guard, Unit 2-136 CAB / B Company.
In May 2012 the local corporate media in Florida literally characterized the invasion of the military, complete with black helicopters and simulated explosions, onto local streets a, “cool tourist story.”
“I got a kick out of it that’s for sure.”
The examples listed above are just a few of the countless pieces of evidence that indicate a very real push towards a martial law type existence in America.
They also completely debunk the notion that only crazy conspiracy theorists think this is a possibility.
Another important fact to note is that this disgusting display of repeated military and globalist industrial complex propaganda is due to the fact that most media outlets are owned by 6 corporations with direct connections to all the major defense contractors.
Note: This is not an article attacking individual military members. There are many patriotic Americans within the U.S. military who are disgusted by the upper brass and their push to use them against their own people.
The upper levels of our military have been hijacked by the globalists and are being directed to slowly implement the use of troops against Americans.
The only chances we have as a free people are the continued waking up of the populace and, perhaps more importantly, individual service members refusing to act against the people as the globalists move into their final phase of the destruction of America.
Why Social Security Should Be Accepted Guilt Free
In his recent appearance on MSNBC’s "Morning Joe," Representative Ron Paul was asked by Sam Stein of the Huffington Post whether he was going to set a good example for younger Americans and opt out of Social Security.
As a libertarian and a constitutionalist, Congressman Paul recognizes that Social Security is an insolvent, unsustainable, unconstitutional welfare scheme. Although he wants younger workers to be given the opportunity to opt out of the system as we make a humanitarian transition away from the dependency of Social Security, when asked by Stein if he was on Social Security, Paul acknowledged that he was and saw no inconsistency in receiving benefits.
Social Security is properly a federal Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program. It provides benefits for retirement, disability, survivorship, and death to about 55 million Americans at a price to approximately 157 million taxpayers of more than $800 billion a year.
It is "funded" by payroll tax deductions from both employers (6.2%) and employees (4.2%) on a taxable wage base of $110,100. One must pay Social Security taxes for a minimum of forty quarters to be eligible for benefits, which are figured based on the average of a worker’s thirty-five highest years of earnings (up to particular year’s wage base), adjusted for inflation.
Social Security is the most expensive item in the federal budget. For years it generated more in tax revenue than it spent on benefits. However, since 2010, the system has run a deficit that is projected to increase every year as more and more baby-boomers retire.
The truth about Social Security is no secret. It is a relic from the New Deal. It is the cornerstone of the welfare state. There is no trust fund. There is no retirement account in the name of each taxpayer. Social Security is an intergenerational wealth-transfer program.
But does this mean that libertarians should not accept Social Security?
I occasionally run into, or read something written by, libertarians who say that to be a pure or consistent libertarian, one should not accept Social Security. To do so would be to sacrifice one’s principles.
Of course, these same libertarians mail letters at the government post office, drive on government roads, and conduct business with government money. But, they might reply, I am forced to do these things. The government has a monopoly on mail delivery, the vast majority of roads are owned by the government, and few businesses accept anything other than government money as a means of payment. Social Security, on the other hand, is voluntary. One can choose not to receive it.
I don’t disparage those libertarians who refuse to accept Social Security because they want to have as little interaction with the state as possible. But I don’t think that they are purer or more consistent than those libertarians who say: "Sign me up."
Let’s say you are a libertarian who has reached retirement age (67 if born in 1960 or later). The federal government has been confiscating a portion of your income for fifty years via, not just Social Security taxes, but income tax, Medicare tax, taxes on airline tickets, excise taxes, and indirect taxes on imports (tariffs) that result in you paying higher prices for imported goods. This is all in addition to state and local taxes.
And what has the federal government spent your money on? Various forms of welfare, maintaining an empire of troops and bases around the world, fighting senseless foreign wars, corporate welfare, agricultural subsidies, funding Planned Parenthood, public broadcasting, enforcing ridiculous regulations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and whole departments it has no business having like the Department of Education.
I think it is safe to say that at least 95 percent of what the federal government spends money on is unconstitutional.
Libertarians should see Social Security as a way to get some of their money back that was wasted on unconstitutional spending. It’s as if the government said: "Would you like a refund of some of the tax money you’ve paid in over the past fifty years? Okay, sign here and we will make a deposit in your bank account every month until you die." Now, is that any different than signing a form that says: "Your monthly Social Security benefit amount is _____? Does the difference in wording on a government form really make any difference?
And don’t worry about getting back more than you paid in Social Security taxes. The Social Security Trust Fund is an accounting fiction. There is no individual retirement account with your name on it. Just figure the total amount you’ve paid in federal taxes and collect your "Social Security" (or your "tax refund" if you want to be a more pure libertarian) until that amount is reached. Don’t bother only taking 95 percent of the total because you are entitled to interest on your money.
If it be argued that the tax money you paid in over your lifetime has been spent and therefore you would have to be paid with borrowed money, I would say in reply that the tax money you are paying in this year is immediately spent as well. The refund next year of your excess withholding taxes from this year will likewise be paid in borrowed money. Are you going to refuse your tax refund next year? I didn’t think so.
Anyway you look at it, the taxpayers deserve a refund.
As a libertarian and a constitutionalist, Congressman Paul recognizes that Social Security is an insolvent, unsustainable, unconstitutional welfare scheme. Although he wants younger workers to be given the opportunity to opt out of the system as we make a humanitarian transition away from the dependency of Social Security, when asked by Stein if he was on Social Security, Paul acknowledged that he was and saw no inconsistency in receiving benefits.
Social Security is properly a federal Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program. It provides benefits for retirement, disability, survivorship, and death to about 55 million Americans at a price to approximately 157 million taxpayers of more than $800 billion a year.
It is "funded" by payroll tax deductions from both employers (6.2%) and employees (4.2%) on a taxable wage base of $110,100. One must pay Social Security taxes for a minimum of forty quarters to be eligible for benefits, which are figured based on the average of a worker’s thirty-five highest years of earnings (up to particular year’s wage base), adjusted for inflation.
Social Security is the most expensive item in the federal budget. For years it generated more in tax revenue than it spent on benefits. However, since 2010, the system has run a deficit that is projected to increase every year as more and more baby-boomers retire.
The truth about Social Security is no secret. It is a relic from the New Deal. It is the cornerstone of the welfare state. There is no trust fund. There is no retirement account in the name of each taxpayer. Social Security is an intergenerational wealth-transfer program.
But does this mean that libertarians should not accept Social Security?
I occasionally run into, or read something written by, libertarians who say that to be a pure or consistent libertarian, one should not accept Social Security. To do so would be to sacrifice one’s principles.
Of course, these same libertarians mail letters at the government post office, drive on government roads, and conduct business with government money. But, they might reply, I am forced to do these things. The government has a monopoly on mail delivery, the vast majority of roads are owned by the government, and few businesses accept anything other than government money as a means of payment. Social Security, on the other hand, is voluntary. One can choose not to receive it.
I don’t disparage those libertarians who refuse to accept Social Security because they want to have as little interaction with the state as possible. But I don’t think that they are purer or more consistent than those libertarians who say: "Sign me up."
Let’s say you are a libertarian who has reached retirement age (67 if born in 1960 or later). The federal government has been confiscating a portion of your income for fifty years via, not just Social Security taxes, but income tax, Medicare tax, taxes on airline tickets, excise taxes, and indirect taxes on imports (tariffs) that result in you paying higher prices for imported goods. This is all in addition to state and local taxes.
And what has the federal government spent your money on? Various forms of welfare, maintaining an empire of troops and bases around the world, fighting senseless foreign wars, corporate welfare, agricultural subsidies, funding Planned Parenthood, public broadcasting, enforcing ridiculous regulations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and whole departments it has no business having like the Department of Education.
I think it is safe to say that at least 95 percent of what the federal government spends money on is unconstitutional.
Libertarians should see Social Security as a way to get some of their money back that was wasted on unconstitutional spending. It’s as if the government said: "Would you like a refund of some of the tax money you’ve paid in over the past fifty years? Okay, sign here and we will make a deposit in your bank account every month until you die." Now, is that any different than signing a form that says: "Your monthly Social Security benefit amount is _____? Does the difference in wording on a government form really make any difference?
And don’t worry about getting back more than you paid in Social Security taxes. The Social Security Trust Fund is an accounting fiction. There is no individual retirement account with your name on it. Just figure the total amount you’ve paid in federal taxes and collect your "Social Security" (or your "tax refund" if you want to be a more pure libertarian) until that amount is reached. Don’t bother only taking 95 percent of the total because you are entitled to interest on your money.
If it be argued that the tax money you paid in over your lifetime has been spent and therefore you would have to be paid with borrowed money, I would say in reply that the tax money you are paying in this year is immediately spent as well. The refund next year of your excess withholding taxes from this year will likewise be paid in borrowed money. Are you going to refuse your tax refund next year? I didn’t think so.
Anyway you look at it, the taxpayers deserve a refund.
Why Gastric Bypass Surgery Cures Diabetes ~ But Is There An Easier Way?
Strikingly, a report published in The New England Journal of Medicine indicates a significant number of obese patients undergoing gastric bypass surgery are free of diabetes a year following their operation.
Another recent study reveals gastric bypass surgery surprisingly prolongs remission from diabetes. Better than 4 of 10 patients undergoing gastric bypass had no need for anti-diabetic medication and exhibited improved blood sugar control numbers (hemoglobin A1c under 5.7% and fasting blood sugar under 100 milligrams per deciliter of blood) over a year after surgery.
An article posted at Forbes.com asks: "Is diabetes a surgically modifiable disease?" The unequivocal answer is yes! However, physicians are perplexed as to the mechanisms behind this phenomenon. It has remained unexplained, till now.
It turns out that gastric bypass surgery involves blood loss. Anemia is common following the operation. One study shows that hemoglobin (an iron transport protein) decreased from an average of 13.4 to 12.8 grams per deciliter of blood and ferritin (an iron storage protein) dropped from an average of 87.5 to 55.4 nanograms per milliliter of blood following gastric bypass surgery.
It was Dr. Francesco Facchini, then working at University of California San Francisco General Hospital, who first reported in 2002 that depletion of iron stores via blood letting among diabetic patients, to the point of near anemia (ferritin level 20.0), dramatically improves elevated insulin and blood sugar levels.
In the bizarre healthcare world, where the most expensive therapies become the most employed, where pools of healthcare insurance dollars are being depleted rapidly, and where modern medicine is about to price itself out of existence, it would not be surprising to see gluttonous obese patients opt for insurance-paid gastric bypass surgery over having to adhere to low-iron diets and undergo blood letting sessions over a period of 12-24 months to reduce iron levels. The average cost for the gastric bypass procedure ranges from $18,000 to $35,000. That’s quite an expensive fix, even though it produces some prolonged weight loss and resolution of diabetes.
One might ask, how did Americans go from being lean to obese beginning in the early 1980s? Whatever is the cause of the diabesity epidemic, it has to something that changed in the entire population as a whole. It appears the American populace lost ability to control portion sizes of food in lock step.
I talk about this at length in my book DOWNSIZING YOUR BODY: How the Industrial Food Complex Breeds Fat Americans. Iron fortified foods, particularly breakfast cereals, are to blame for the diabesity epidemic. A low-iron diet (limited red meat in particular) combined with judicious use of a novel dietary supplement (IP6 rice bran extract) is proposed as a home remedy for adult weight control.
Marion Nestle, noted dietician, says unless Big Food and Big Government change course, there will be no resolution to the ongoing diabesity epidemic that grips America. Snack foods designed to be eaten to the bottom of the bag are prominent on store shelves. Over-eating is the objective of the food companies.
The diabesity epidemic did not originate with a giant collective loss of portion control but rather changes in the food chain (cheaper, more processed, less nutritious foods in large portions), says Nestle. Wouldn’t you know it – big government is behind this whole mess. And America is exporting its foods overseas and spreading the diabesity epidemic around the
Another recent study reveals gastric bypass surgery surprisingly prolongs remission from diabetes. Better than 4 of 10 patients undergoing gastric bypass had no need for anti-diabetic medication and exhibited improved blood sugar control numbers (hemoglobin A1c under 5.7% and fasting blood sugar under 100 milligrams per deciliter of blood) over a year after surgery.
An article posted at Forbes.com asks: "Is diabetes a surgically modifiable disease?" The unequivocal answer is yes! However, physicians are perplexed as to the mechanisms behind this phenomenon. It has remained unexplained, till now.
It turns out that gastric bypass surgery involves blood loss. Anemia is common following the operation. One study shows that hemoglobin (an iron transport protein) decreased from an average of 13.4 to 12.8 grams per deciliter of blood and ferritin (an iron storage protein) dropped from an average of 87.5 to 55.4 nanograms per milliliter of blood following gastric bypass surgery.
It was Dr. Francesco Facchini, then working at University of California San Francisco General Hospital, who first reported in 2002 that depletion of iron stores via blood letting among diabetic patients, to the point of near anemia (ferritin level 20.0), dramatically improves elevated insulin and blood sugar levels.
In the bizarre healthcare world, where the most expensive therapies become the most employed, where pools of healthcare insurance dollars are being depleted rapidly, and where modern medicine is about to price itself out of existence, it would not be surprising to see gluttonous obese patients opt for insurance-paid gastric bypass surgery over having to adhere to low-iron diets and undergo blood letting sessions over a period of 12-24 months to reduce iron levels. The average cost for the gastric bypass procedure ranges from $18,000 to $35,000. That’s quite an expensive fix, even though it produces some prolonged weight loss and resolution of diabetes.
One might ask, how did Americans go from being lean to obese beginning in the early 1980s? Whatever is the cause of the diabesity epidemic, it has to something that changed in the entire population as a whole. It appears the American populace lost ability to control portion sizes of food in lock step.
I talk about this at length in my book DOWNSIZING YOUR BODY: How the Industrial Food Complex Breeds Fat Americans. Iron fortified foods, particularly breakfast cereals, are to blame for the diabesity epidemic. A low-iron diet (limited red meat in particular) combined with judicious use of a novel dietary supplement (IP6 rice bran extract) is proposed as a home remedy for adult weight control.
Marion Nestle, noted dietician, says unless Big Food and Big Government change course, there will be no resolution to the ongoing diabesity epidemic that grips America. Snack foods designed to be eaten to the bottom of the bag are prominent on store shelves. Over-eating is the objective of the food companies.
The diabesity epidemic did not originate with a giant collective loss of portion control but rather changes in the food chain (cheaper, more processed, less nutritious foods in large portions), says Nestle. Wouldn’t you know it – big government is behind this whole mess. And America is exporting its foods overseas and spreading the diabesity epidemic around the
Levels Of Electromagnetic Bombardment Billions Of Times Higher Than Our Ancestors
This is the claim of Dr. Kerry Crofton, PhD. She goes on to say, "We don't have to give up all electronic devices, but we do need to use them differently. First, we need to understand that the government standards we assume are protecting us are thousands of times too lenient, and there are biological effects from these 'safe' levels." The effects of these exposures are particularly an issue for concern for our children.
Some of these effects are thought to include:
• Unexplained headaches/nosebleeds
• Autism
• Insomnia
• Nausea/dizziness
• Anxiousness/ heart palpitations/other 'unexplained' cardiac symptoms
• Ringing ears
• Immune suppression
• Electro-sensitivity
• Children's leukemia
• An increased risk for brain cancer/neurological disorders
Children are at a greater disadvantage than adults due to thinner skulls, smaller brains, and the potential of long-term exposure. The effects for children expand to include retarded learning and performance impairment.
David Carpenter, MD, Director of the Institute for Health and the Environment, School of Public Health, University of Albany, New York, believes, along with many other public health experts, the current scientific evidence shows there will be widespread cancers ahead as a consequence of using cell phones and WiFi without any restrictions.
Unnecessary Exposure
The Northside Independent School District in Texas is on the verge of utilizing a radio frequency ID system in two of its schools. This is another source of electromagnetic radiation exposure for children as this system emits dangerous radio waves. The hope is to implement the strategy to track kids at all of the district's 112 campuses covering approximately 100,000 youth.
Defibrillators in high schools?
Every school in Toronto has this equipment on the premises ready and waiting to use for life threatening cardiac events. Teenagers having heart attacks is not the norm nor should be accepted as such in the future. The focus needs to be on why there are defibrillators in high schools in the first place.
The Stewart Report from the Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones (IEGMP) offers some insight. The group warns that children's bodies absorb more electromagnetic energy from outside sources than adults. "A 5-year-old will absorb around 60 percent more than an adult."
Children are being increasingly exposed to chronic levels of electromagnetic exposure through the consistent and more importantly, long-term use of cell phones and WiFi in school and at home. These exposures are cumulative with the most harmful consequences manifesting years or even decades later. There is enough evidence to strongly suggest these exposures may stimulate changes in cell function which can lead to breaks in DNA and chromosomal abnormalities, the deterioration of neurons in the brain, increased free radical production, and early aging, as well as affect how the brain operates overall.
Viable options to protect children include:
• Wired alternatives
• Texting
• Headsets
• Limiting exposure with timed sessions
• Helping them develop interests outside technology
• Reducing use
The fact that today's children are facing even more health concerns than current generations as a result of consistent, long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves calls for the scientific community and the government policy makers to step up. Children's exposure to electromagnetic waves must become a top priority. Industry needs to be regulated and limits established in order to protect children now and in the future.
NOTE: Besides financially supporting the latest electronic gadgets there are many safety precautions we can use, that are inexpensive, and effectively counteract the damaging health effects to our bodies. BioMagnetics offers many solutions.
Some of these effects are thought to include:
• Unexplained headaches/nosebleeds
• Autism
• Insomnia
• Nausea/dizziness
• Anxiousness/ heart palpitations/other 'unexplained' cardiac symptoms
• Ringing ears
• Immune suppression
• Electro-sensitivity
• Children's leukemia
• An increased risk for brain cancer/neurological disorders
Children are at a greater disadvantage than adults due to thinner skulls, smaller brains, and the potential of long-term exposure. The effects for children expand to include retarded learning and performance impairment.
David Carpenter, MD, Director of the Institute for Health and the Environment, School of Public Health, University of Albany, New York, believes, along with many other public health experts, the current scientific evidence shows there will be widespread cancers ahead as a consequence of using cell phones and WiFi without any restrictions.
Unnecessary Exposure
The Northside Independent School District in Texas is on the verge of utilizing a radio frequency ID system in two of its schools. This is another source of electromagnetic radiation exposure for children as this system emits dangerous radio waves. The hope is to implement the strategy to track kids at all of the district's 112 campuses covering approximately 100,000 youth.
Defibrillators in high schools?
Every school in Toronto has this equipment on the premises ready and waiting to use for life threatening cardiac events. Teenagers having heart attacks is not the norm nor should be accepted as such in the future. The focus needs to be on why there are defibrillators in high schools in the first place.
The Stewart Report from the Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones (IEGMP) offers some insight. The group warns that children's bodies absorb more electromagnetic energy from outside sources than adults. "A 5-year-old will absorb around 60 percent more than an adult."
Children are being increasingly exposed to chronic levels of electromagnetic exposure through the consistent and more importantly, long-term use of cell phones and WiFi in school and at home. These exposures are cumulative with the most harmful consequences manifesting years or even decades later. There is enough evidence to strongly suggest these exposures may stimulate changes in cell function which can lead to breaks in DNA and chromosomal abnormalities, the deterioration of neurons in the brain, increased free radical production, and early aging, as well as affect how the brain operates overall.
Viable options to protect children include:
• Wired alternatives
• Texting
• Headsets
• Limiting exposure with timed sessions
• Helping them develop interests outside technology
• Reducing use
The fact that today's children are facing even more health concerns than current generations as a result of consistent, long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves calls for the scientific community and the government policy makers to step up. Children's exposure to electromagnetic waves must become a top priority. Industry needs to be regulated and limits established in order to protect children now and in the future.
NOTE: Besides financially supporting the latest electronic gadgets there are many safety precautions we can use, that are inexpensive, and effectively counteract the damaging health effects to our bodies. BioMagnetics offers many solutions.
More Than Meets The Eye That Rand Paul Voted Against GMO Label Law As Written?
Federal government prohibition of GMO labeling does not, cannot legally exist
But has Sen. Paul really betrayed the American people by voting against S. Amdt. 2310, or are there inherent constitutional problems with the amendment that predicated his "Nay" vote? Upon further investigation, it appears as though the latter scenario is more accurate, as S. Amdt. 2310 falsely assumes that the federal government has the authority to grant states permission to label GMOs.
As others have already begun to point out in the days following the amendment's rejection, the legislation was essentially toothless from the start. The federal government does not, after all, have the constitutional authority to prohibit states from requiring GMO labeling, let alone permit it. The federal government has also never even tried, at this point, to legally stop individual states from mandating GMO labeling. This means S. Amdt. 2310 was a faulty attempt to address an issue that is not even an issue, and one that attempted to do so using an unconstitutional approach.
A key thing to remember in all this is that neither the federal government nor the U.S. Congress has any constitutional authority to grant states permission to label or not to label GMOs. Under the U.S. Constitution, individual states already possess their own inherent authority to determine how they wish to handle the GMO labeling issue, and the federal government does not legally possess any authority whatsoever in the matter.
Americans need to remember that our individual rights and the rights of our states, as outlined in the Constitution, are not at all contingent upon whether or not the federal government approves or disapproves of them. These rights are wholly independent of the federal government, regardless of how this increasingly tyrannical overlord system tries to interfere with them, or pretend as though it is some kind of omniscient gatekeeper that decides whether or not to grant these rights.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other federal agencies may still attempt to restrict states from labeling GMOs through loopholes and other crafty regulatory means. But in no scenario does a state require a federal amendment that "permits" states to label GMOs -- states are free to label, under the Constitution, at any time. And passing an amendment that "permits" something that is already legal and constitutional would only grants the federal government perceived power over a matter that it does not actually possess.
If the federal government is given the power to "permit" GMO labeling now, for instance, then it can "un-permit" GMO labeling later, despite the fact that it never possessed the power to permit in the first place. This is an important concept to be aware of when dealing with legislation and amendments, and one that Sen. Paul appears to have been fully aware of when voting against S. Amdt. 2310
An amendment to the Agriculture Reform, Food, and Jobs Act of 2012 (S. 3240), also known as the 2012 Farm Bill, that would have "permitted" individual states to require that food, beverages, and other edible products containing genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) be labeled, has been struck down. And among the Senate members who voted against the amendment was Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who recently faced a gauntlet of criticism over his perceived endorsement of globalist presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
The wording of the amendment, known as S. Amdt. 2310, states that it would "permit States to require that any food, beverage, or other edible product offered for sale have a label on indicating that the food, beverage, or other edible product contains a genetically engineered ingredient." Put forth by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), S. Amdt. 2310 was viewed by many as a viable way to help individual states pass GMO labeling laws without fear of retribution by the biotechnology industry and its lackeys in the federal government.
S. Amdt. 2310 is a product of Vermont's own failed attempt at passing GMO labeling laws recently, an endeavor that was allegedly squelched by Monsanto when the biotechnology giant threatened to sue the state of Vermont if it moved forward any further with the measure (http://www.naturalnews.com/035628_Monsanto_Vermont_GMO_labeling.html). The federal government's hardline stance in favor of GMOs also appears to have been an intimidating factor in the state's backing down as well.
But S. Amdt. 2310 ultimately failed to pass, with only a single Senate Republican, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voting in favor it. The rest of the party, including Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, as well as many Senate Democrats, voted against the measure. And many in the natural health community are now claiming that Sen. Paul's action in the matter is yet another example of betrayal by this perceived champion of liberty to promote honesty in food labeling.
NOTE: With mainstream media is controlled by only 6 major corporations, it isn't even a limited challenge to paint the picture that the dominant society wants you to have. Isn't it important that we remember, and remind others, that the States do not need permission from the feds for anything. Federal jurisdiction is confined to DC and any federal buildings or properties, beyond that it's only what they can intimidate others into believing that they have authority.
Perhaps Rand Paul was the only one to admit to this, how hard would it be to control any explanatory statement he would have to that effect?
But has Sen. Paul really betrayed the American people by voting against S. Amdt. 2310, or are there inherent constitutional problems with the amendment that predicated his "Nay" vote? Upon further investigation, it appears as though the latter scenario is more accurate, as S. Amdt. 2310 falsely assumes that the federal government has the authority to grant states permission to label GMOs.
As others have already begun to point out in the days following the amendment's rejection, the legislation was essentially toothless from the start. The federal government does not, after all, have the constitutional authority to prohibit states from requiring GMO labeling, let alone permit it. The federal government has also never even tried, at this point, to legally stop individual states from mandating GMO labeling. This means S. Amdt. 2310 was a faulty attempt to address an issue that is not even an issue, and one that attempted to do so using an unconstitutional approach.
A key thing to remember in all this is that neither the federal government nor the U.S. Congress has any constitutional authority to grant states permission to label or not to label GMOs. Under the U.S. Constitution, individual states already possess their own inherent authority to determine how they wish to handle the GMO labeling issue, and the federal government does not legally possess any authority whatsoever in the matter.
Americans need to remember that our individual rights and the rights of our states, as outlined in the Constitution, are not at all contingent upon whether or not the federal government approves or disapproves of them. These rights are wholly independent of the federal government, regardless of how this increasingly tyrannical overlord system tries to interfere with them, or pretend as though it is some kind of omniscient gatekeeper that decides whether or not to grant these rights.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other federal agencies may still attempt to restrict states from labeling GMOs through loopholes and other crafty regulatory means. But in no scenario does a state require a federal amendment that "permits" states to label GMOs -- states are free to label, under the Constitution, at any time. And passing an amendment that "permits" something that is already legal and constitutional would only grants the federal government perceived power over a matter that it does not actually possess.
If the federal government is given the power to "permit" GMO labeling now, for instance, then it can "un-permit" GMO labeling later, despite the fact that it never possessed the power to permit in the first place. This is an important concept to be aware of when dealing with legislation and amendments, and one that Sen. Paul appears to have been fully aware of when voting against S. Amdt. 2310
An amendment to the Agriculture Reform, Food, and Jobs Act of 2012 (S. 3240), also known as the 2012 Farm Bill, that would have "permitted" individual states to require that food, beverages, and other edible products containing genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) be labeled, has been struck down. And among the Senate members who voted against the amendment was Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who recently faced a gauntlet of criticism over his perceived endorsement of globalist presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
The wording of the amendment, known as S. Amdt. 2310, states that it would "permit States to require that any food, beverage, or other edible product offered for sale have a label on indicating that the food, beverage, or other edible product contains a genetically engineered ingredient." Put forth by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), S. Amdt. 2310 was viewed by many as a viable way to help individual states pass GMO labeling laws without fear of retribution by the biotechnology industry and its lackeys in the federal government.
S. Amdt. 2310 is a product of Vermont's own failed attempt at passing GMO labeling laws recently, an endeavor that was allegedly squelched by Monsanto when the biotechnology giant threatened to sue the state of Vermont if it moved forward any further with the measure (http://www.naturalnews.com/035628_Monsanto_Vermont_GMO_labeling.html). The federal government's hardline stance in favor of GMOs also appears to have been an intimidating factor in the state's backing down as well.
But S. Amdt. 2310 ultimately failed to pass, with only a single Senate Republican, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voting in favor it. The rest of the party, including Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, as well as many Senate Democrats, voted against the measure. And many in the natural health community are now claiming that Sen. Paul's action in the matter is yet another example of betrayal by this perceived champion of liberty to promote honesty in food labeling.
NOTE: With mainstream media is controlled by only 6 major corporations, it isn't even a limited challenge to paint the picture that the dominant society wants you to have. Isn't it important that we remember, and remind others, that the States do not need permission from the feds for anything. Federal jurisdiction is confined to DC and any federal buildings or properties, beyond that it's only what they can intimidate others into believing that they have authority.
Perhaps Rand Paul was the only one to admit to this, how hard would it be to control any explanatory statement he would have to that effect?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)