9/11: The CIA agent admits the Abu Zubaydah testimony is fiction

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03/14/2013

The ground is giving way under the feet of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the attacks of September 11. The main source of the Commission’s report, Abu Zoubeida, whose confessions were extracted under torture, is now officially considered worthless. And the CIA agent who arrested and interrogated Zoubeida has admitted he invented everything.

The pervasive news surrounding the confirmation hearing of John Brennan, Obama’s nominee for CIA director, is paralleled by another, related story that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media. That is the story of the man called Abu Zubaydah, whose alleged torture testimony, obtained by the CIA while Brennan was the head of the agency’s Terrorist Threat Center, built the foundation for the official account of 9/11. This week I spoke to Lee Hamilton, former vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, about the serious problems that the government’s new stance on Zubaydah creates for the 9/11 Commission Report. As stated in my last article on the subject, Zubaydah is at the center of an unraveling of the official account of the 9/11 attacks. [1] His extensive torture at the hands of the CIA during Brennan’s tenure, which included at least 83 water-boarding sessions, hanging the man naked from the ceiling, slamming him against a concrete wall, and other atrocious experimental techniques, was said to produce valuable evidence about al Qaeda. However, the government now claims that Zubaydah was never a member or associate of al Qaeda and therefore he could not have known any of the information that the 9/11 Commission attributed to him.

From the start of our conversation, Hamilton told me that he was having trouble remembering Zubaydah. That was odd considering that an article he and Thomas Kean wrote for the New York Times in 2008, describing how the CIA obstructed the 9/11 investigation, referred several times to Zubaydah specifically. [2] The article claimed that “Beginning in June 2003, we requested all reports of intelligence information on these broad topics that had been gleaned from the interrogations of 118 named individuals, including both Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, two senior Qaeda operatives.” Kean and Hamilton further wrote that, “in October 2003, we sent another wave of questions to the C.I.A.’s general counsel. One set posed dozens of specific questions about the reports, including those about Abu Zubaydah.”

These requests from the 9/11 Commission should have resulted in the release of some revealing records. That is, while John Brennan was leading the CIA’s Terrorist Threat Center, the agency videotaped the torture of Zubaydah and others, and proceeded to intentionally withhold that information from the 9/11 Commission. Brennan and CIA director George Tenet were almost certainly involved in the decisions regarding that obstruction. The two men had worked closely together for years. As CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, Brennan often communicated directly with Tenet, avoiding the usual chain of command. At the time, as an apparent favor to the Saudis, CIA analysts were discouraged from questioning Saudi relationship to Arab extremists. [3] It seems that Brennan and Tenet had a tendency to protect some terrorist suspects and cover-up the agency’s treatment of others.
It was revealed that when Brennan was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, in 2005, the CIA had destroyed the torture tapes, most of which featured Zubaydah. [4] Describing the CIA’s obstruction, Hamilton wrote — “The agency did not disclose that any interrogations had ever been recorded or that it had held any further relevant information, in any form. Not satisfied with this response, we decided that we needed to question the detainees directly, including Abu Zubaydah and a few other key captives.” [5]

Therefore Hamilton remembered very clearly, in 2008, that he had asked the CIA at least twice, in a potentially contentious manner, for information specifically about Zubaydah. Having not received that information, Hamilton asked the CIA for the opportunity to question Zubaydah directly. The CIA not only denied these requests, it denied the Commission access to the interrogators who compelled the alleged testimony. Despite such memorable denials, however, Hamilton cannot seem to recall anything about Zubaydah at all other than his feeling that Zubaydah did not play a significant part in the 9/11 Commission Report. He told me “I’m a little fuzzy on this but the information that we had from him was not critical to our report.” [6]

Reasons for Hamilton’s new, unconvincing amnesia on the subject might include that the U.S. government recently backed off its claims about this “detainee,” who has been imprisoned by the U.S. for eleven years without charges. The retractions about Zubaydah create a tension with the 9/11 Commission Report that reveals an obvious need to revise the report.

For example, in response to the habeas corpus petition filed by Zubaydah’s defense team, the government stated that it does not contend that Zubaydah had “any direct role in or advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.” [7] The same response states that the government no longer claims that Zubaydah was ever “a member of al-Qaida or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaida.” But footnote 35 to Chapter 5 of the 9/11 Commission Report states the exact opposite. According to this footnote, “Abu Zubaydah, who worked closely with the al Qaeda leadership, has stated that KSM originally presented Bin Ladin with a scaled-down version of the 9/11 plan, and that Bin Ladin urged KSM to expand the operation with the comment, ‘Why do you use an axe when you can use a bulldozer?’” [8] That’s pretty extensive and intimate knowledge for someone who was never associated with al Qaeda.

In our talk, I reminded Hamilton that Zubaydah was mentioned over 50 times in the 9/11 Commission Report, and that his alleged torture testimony, along with that of KSM and Ramsi bin Alshibh (both of whom Zubaydah identified as being involved in the attacks), produced the foundation of the official account of 9/11. Creating the background for the official myth about al Qaeda, Hamilton’s report called Zubaydah an “Al Qaeda associate,” a “long-time ally of Bin Ladin,” a “Bin Ladin lieutenant,” and an “al Qaeda lieutenant.” [9] Despite these important references, Hamilton told me that he just couldn’t remember Zubaydah, saying “my recollection is really quite vague with regard to him.”

To refresh his memory further, I reminded Hamilton that nine separate dates of Zubaydah’s interrogation were referenced in his report. After these reminders, Hamilton said that he still had to “stretch his imagination to remember” him. It seems that if Hamilton had read my article on Zubaydah, which I had sent to him over a week before he agreed to meet and eleven days before we talked, his memory would have returned easily. Instead, Hamilton’s inability to stretch his imagination on the subject was reminiscent of the “failure of imagination” excuse used by the 9/11 Commission when it proposed an overall explanation for the events of 9/11.

Because the government no longer contends that Zubaydah was in any way associated with al Qaeda and now says that he had no knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, I asked Hamilton if he had an opinion on how Zubaydah could have known so much about al Qaeda as stated in his report. Bluntly stating “No,” Hamilton suggested that he was not concerned with these contradictions.

Our discussion went into the recent conviction of John Kiriakou, the CIA’s Chief of Counterterrorist Operations in Pakistan after 9/11, who was originally said to be responsible for the capture and initial interrogations of Zubaydah. Interestingly, Kiriakou’s story has evolved much like that of the official account concerning Zubaydah. According to people who would know, with regard to Zubaydah “Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.” [10]

Kiriakou has since been heralded as a whistleblower. And he recently said that, for embracing torture, John Brennan is a terrible choice to lead the CIA. Kiriakou claimed that he has known Brennan since 1990 and has worked for him twice. While in the CIA, Kiriakou noted, Brennan “would have had to have been intimately involved in—not necessarily in carrying out the torture techniques, but in the policy, the torture policy.” [11] It is true that this would seem to make Brennan an especially poor choice but today it is clear that those who engaged in torture, and those who used alleged torture testimony to create false reports, will not be held accountable.

This week I also spoke to Brent Mickum, Zubaydah’s attorney. Unlike Hamilton, Mickum was very straightforward and convincing. The information he possesses suggests that Zubaydah was a victim of false claims from the beginning. Mickum believes there may be alternative reasons why his client, who does not support the murder of innocents or suicide attacks and who repeatedly refused to join al Qaeda, was chosen to become the first, experimental, torture victim. Mickum expects Zubaydah to be charged sometime this year but cannot say what the charges will be. The evidence no longer supports claims that Zubaydah conspired with al Qaeda in any way. Additionally, he cannot be charged as an enemy combatant through the 2006 Military Commissions Act considering that he was captured and tortured years before that law was enacted.

With this in mind, I asked Lee Hamilton if Abu Zubaydah should be allowed to tell his own story now that his illegal detention and torture have proven to be based on falsehoods. Hamilton said that he would not take a stand on the subject one way or another. This refusal is yet another reason to suspect that Lee Hamilton will never come clean on the 9/11 Commission’s use of unreliable torture testimony.

Although Hamilton has repeatedly stated publicly that he believes torture is immoral and that the U.S. must take a strong stance against it, his actions and his work speak otherwise. The glaring problem he faces now is that it is the 9/11 Commission Report that stands as the definitive argument supporting the use of torture. After all, if not for the alleged torture testimony of Abu Zubaydah and the people he reportedly identified (KSM and Ramsi bin Alshibh in particular) Hamilton’s report would have little evidentiary basis. Consequently, as the U.S. government strains to come up with charges to apply to Zubaydah after disclaiming his connections to al Qaeda, the Commission’s report remains at risk of being further challenged by whatever charges are ultimately filed.

Former chemical laboratory manager for Underwriters Laboratories, Kevin Ryan was fired after questioning UL’s role in the establishment of the NIST report on the attacks of September 11. He is co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies. He is also a founding member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice and the 9/11 Working Group of Bloomington.

[1] Kevin R. Ryan, Abu Zubaydah Poses a Real Threat to Al Qaeda, Dig Within, October 15, 2012
[2] Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, Stonewalled by the C.I.A., The New York Times, January 2, 2008
[3] James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, Free Press, 2006
[4] Mark Mazetti, .U.S. Says C.I.A. Destroyed 92 Tapes of Interrogations, The New York Times, March 2, 2009
[5] Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, Stonewalled by the C.I.A
[6] Notes from my talk with Lee Hamilton, February 7, 2013
[7] Zayn al Abidin Muhammad Husayn v. Robert Gates, Respondents Memorandum of Points and Authorities in Opposition to Petitioner’s Motion for Discover and Petitioner’s Motion for Sanctions. Civil Action No. 08-cv-1360 (RWR), September 2009
[8] See the footnote 35 to Chapter 5 of the 9/11 Commission Report, which sources the information from “Intelligence report, interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, May 16, 2003,”
[9] National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report
[10] Jeff Stein, Foreign Policy, CIA Man Retracts Claim on Waterboarding, January 6, 2010
[11] Democracy Now, Whistleblower John Kiriakou: For Embracing Torture, John Brennan a “Terrible Choice to Lead the CIA”, January 30, 2013

Source: War is Crime

Monopoly Men: Federal Reserve Fraud (Full Documentary)

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TGE Media

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03/14/2013

The Federal Reserve, or the Fed as it is lovingly called, may be one of the most mysterious entities in modern American government.

Created during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency to protect the economy in times of financial turmoil, its real business remains to be discovered.

During the Wilson presidency, the U.S. government sanctions the creation of the Federal Reserve. Thought by many to be a government organization maintained to provide financial accountability in the event of a domestic depression, the actual business of the Fed is shrouded in secrecy.

Many Americans will be shocked to discover that the principle business of the Fed is to print money from nothing, lend it to the U.S. government and charge interest on these loans.

Who keeps the interest? Good question. Find out as the connective tissue between this and other top-secret international organizations is explored and exposed.

“Despite these warnings, Woodrow Wilson signed the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. A few years later he wrote: I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.” –Woodrow Wilson

See more videos on the Federal Reserve here.

Pope Francis Kidnapping Controversy: Jorge Mario Bergoglio Accused Of Involvement In 1976 Abductions

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TGE News

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03/14/2013

The election of Pope Francis, previously Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, has resurfaced a decades-old controversy surrounding the kidnappings of two Jesuit priests.

Bergoglio was a high-ranking official in the Society of Jesus of Argentina when a military junta was installed in the South American country in 1976. According to the Los Angeles Times, priests Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics were kidnapped in May of that year by the navy. “They surfaced five months later, drugged and seminude, in a field,” the Times reported. A 2005 lawsuit accused Bergoglio of unspecified involvement in the abductions. Reuters explains that “the military government secretly jailed [Yorio and Jalics] for their work in poor neighborhoods.”

A spokesman for Bergoglio called the claims “old slander.”

Reuters has more details:

According to “The Silence,” a book written by journalist Horacio Verbitsky, Bergoglio withdrew his order’s protection of the two men after they refused to quit visiting the slums, which ultimately paved the way for their capture.Verbitsky’s book is based on statements by Orlando Yorio, one of the kidnapped Jesuits, before he died of natural causes in 2000. Both of the abducted clergymen survived five months of imprisonment.

“History condemns him. It shows him to be opposed to all innovation in the Church and above all, during the dictatorship, it shows he was very cozy with the military,” Fortunato Mallimacci, the former dean of social sciences at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, once said.

Those who defend Bergoglio say there is no proof behind these claims and, on the contrary, they say the priest helped many dissidents escape during the military junta’s rule.

Per the Associated Press, “Yorio accused Bergoglio of effectively handing them over to the death squads by declining to tell the regime that he endorsed their work. Jalics refused to discuss it after moving into seclusion in a German monastery.” Bergoglio discussed the incident with Sergio Rubin, his authorized biographer.

Three-quarters of Americans distrust the government

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TGE News

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03/14/2013

A new poll shows that 73 percent of Americans distrust the decisions made by the federal government – a number that has been steadily increasing throughout the last two administrations.

At its highest point, which occurred during President Obama’s first term, 80 percent of Americans lacked faith in the federal government. While former President George W. Bush fared slightly better, his administration witnessed a steady decline in trust that began in 2002, according to the new data from the Pew Research Center.

The data, which was collected from a survey conducted in January, shows that all demographics and political groups have seen a rise in government distrust.

“However, there are disparities. More than twice as many Hispanics as whites (44 percent vs. 20 percent) trust the federal government, and more blacks (38 percent) than whites trust the government,” Pew Research writes about the data.

Those with a higher rate of government distrust include older Americans, independents and Republicans.

Distrust in the federal government has seen its highest numbers in the past decade. During former President Bill Clinton’s two terms in office, Americans increasingly had a favorable view of the US government. Right before Clinton left office, nearly 60 percent of Americans trusted the US government, while only 40 percent had lost faith. Trust was also particularly high, nearing 80 percent, during former President John F. Kennedy’s term.

But not only has trust in the federal government steadily declined since Obama took office, but public perception has also gone down, particularly among Democrats. Only 33 percent of Americans have a positive opinion of the federal government and 69 percent said that Washington should only conduct operations that can’t be handled by individual states.

“Since Barack Obama’s first year in office, public assessments of the federal government dropped nine points,” Pew’s press release stated, citing findings from a survey conducted in April of 2012. “Most of the change was among Democrats and independents, as the level of favorable views of government among Republicans was already low.”

Pew Research found that the highest favorability ratings were of local governments that were closest to Americans’ homes. More than 60 percent of Americans said they had a favorable view toward their local government, with 52 percent having faith in their state government.

But over the past decade, favorability ratings of federal, state and local governments have all been on the decline, during both the Bush and Obama administrations.

Source: RT News

Image: A general view of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington (Reuters / Jason Reed)

Toward a North American Union

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TGE News

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03/13/2013

The global elite, through the direct operations of President George Bush and his Administration, are creating a North American Union that will combine Canada, Mexico and the U.S. into a superstate called the North American Union (NAU). The NAU is roughly patterned after the European Union (EU). There is no political or economic mandate for creating the NAU, and unofficial polls of a cross-section of Americans indicate that they are overwhelmingly against this end-run around national sovereignty.

To answer Lou Dobbs, “No, the political elites have not gone mad”, they just want you to think that they have.

The reality over appearance is easily cleared up with a proper historical perspective of the last 35 years of political and economic manipulation by the same elite who now bring us the NAU.

This paper will explore this history in order to give the reader a complete picture of the NAU, how it is made possible, who are the instigators of it, and where it is headed.

It is important to first understand that the impending birth of the NAU is a gestation of the Executive Branch of the U.S. government, not the Congress. This is the topic of the first discussion below.

The next topic will examine the global elite’s strategy of subverting the power to negotiate trade treaties and international law with foreign countries from the Congress to the President. Without this power, NAFTA and the NAU would never have been possible.

After this, we will show that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is the immediate genetic and necessary ancestor of the NAU.

Lastly, throughout this report the NAU perpetrators and their tactics will be brought into the limelight so as to affix blame where it properly belongs. The reader will be struck with the fact that the same people are at the center of each of these subjects.

The Best Government that Money Can Buy

Modern day globalization was launched with the creation of the Trilateral Commission in 1973 by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Its membership consisted of just over 300 powerful elitists from north America, Europe and Japan. The clearly stated goal of the Trilateral Commission was to foster a “New International Economic Order” that would supplant the historical economic order.

In spite of its non-political rhetoric, The Trilateral Commission nonetheless established a headlock on the Executive Branch of the U.S. government with the election of James Earl Carter in 1976. Hand-picked as a presidential candidate by Brzezinski, Carter was personally tutored in globalist philosophy and foreign policy by Brzezinski himself. Subsequently, when Carter was sworn in as President, he appointed no less than one-third of the U.S. members of the Commission to his Cabinet and other high-level posts in his Administration. Such was the genesis of the Trilateral Commission’s domination of the Executive Branch that continues to the present day.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Trilateral Commission member George H.W. Bush was introduced to the White House as vice-president. Through Bush’s influence, Reagan continued to select key appointments from the ranks of the Trilateral Commission.

In 1988, George H.W. Bush began his four-year term as President. He was followed by fellow Trilateral Commission member William Jefferson Clinton, who served for 8 years as President and appointed fourteen fellow Trilateral members to his Administration.

The election of George W. Bush in 2000 should be no surprise. Although Bush was not a member of the Trilateral Commission, his vice-president Dick Cheney is. In addition, Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne, is also a member of the Commission in her own right.

The hegemony of the Trilateral Commission over the Executive Branch of the U.S. government is unmistakable. Critics argue that this scenario is merely circumstantial, that the most qualified political “talent” quite naturally tends to belong to groups like the Trilateral Commission in the first place. Under examination, such explanations are quite hollow.

Why would the Trilateral Commission seek to dominate the Executive Branch? Quite simply – Power! That is, power to get things done directly which would have been impossible to accomplish through the only moderately successful lobbying efforts of the past; power to use the government as a bully platform to modify political behavior throughout the world.

Of course, the obvious corollary to this hegemony is that the influence and impact of the citizenry is virtually eliminated.

Modern Day “World Order” Strategy

After its founding in 1973, Trilateral Commission members wasted no time in launching their globalist strategy. But, what was that strategy?

Richard Gardner was an original member of the Trilateral Commission, and one of the prominent architects of the New International Economic Order. In 1974, his article “The Hard Road to World Order” appeared in Foreign Affairs magazine, published by the Council on Foreign Relations.

With obvious disdain for anyone holding nationalistic political views, Gardner proclaimed,

“In short, the ‘house of world order’ would have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great ‘booming, buzzing confusion,’ to use William James’ famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.”1 [emphasis added]

In Gardner’s view, using treaties and trade agreements (such as General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs or GATT) would bind and supercede constitutional law piece by piece, which is exactly what has happened. In addition, Gardner highly esteemed the role of the United Nations as a third-party legal body that could be used to erode the national sovereignty of individual nations.

Gardner concluded that “the case-by-case approach can produce some remarkable concessions of ‘sovereignty’ that could not be achieved on an across-the-board basis”2

Thus, the end result of such a process is that the U.S. would eventually capitulate its sovereignty to the newly proposed world order. It is not specifically mentioned who would control this new order, but it is quite obvious that the only ‘players’ around are Gardner and his Trilateral cronies.

It should again be noted that the formation of the Trilateral Commission by Rockefeller and Brzezinski was a response to the general frustration that globalism was going nowhere with the status quo prior to 1973. The “frontal assault ” had failed, and a new approach was needed. It is a typical mindset of the global elite to view any roadblock as an opportunity to stage an “end-run” to get around it.

Gardner confirms this frustration:

“Certainly the gap has never loomed larger between the objectives and the capacities of the international organizations that were supposed to get mankind on the road to world order. We are witnessing an outbreak of shortsighted nationalism that seems oblivious to the economic, political and moral implications of interdependence. Yet never has there been such widespread recognition by the world’s intellectual leadership of the necessity for cooperation and planning on a truly global basis, beyond country, beyond region, especially beyond social system.”3

The “world’s intellectual leadership” apparently refers to academics such as Gardner and Brzezinski. Outside of the Trilateral Commission and the CFR, the vast majority of academic thought at the time was opposed to such notions as mentioned above.

Laying the Groundwork: Fast Track Authority

In Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, authority is granted to Congress “To regulate commerce with foreign nations.” An end-run around this insurmountable obstacle would be to convince Congress to voluntarily turn over this power to the President. With such authority in hand, the President could freely negotiate treaties and other trade agreements with foreign nations, and then simply present them to Congress for a straight up or down vote, with no amendments possible.

This again points out elite disdain for a Congress that is elected to be representative “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

So, the first “Fast Track” legislation was passed by Congress in 1974, just one year after the founding of the Trilateral Commission. It was the same year that Nelson Rockefeller was confirmed as Vice President under President Gerald Ford, neither of whom were elected by the U.S. public. As Vice-President, Rockefeller was seated as the president of the U.S. Senate.

According to Public Citizen, the bottom line of Fast Track is that…

“…the White House signs and enters into trade deals before Congress ever votes on them. Fast Track also sets the parameters for congressional debate on any trade measure the President submits, requiring a vote within a certain time with no amendments and only 20 hours of debate.”4

When an agreement is about to be given to Congress, high-powered lobbyists and political hammer-heads are called in to manipulate congressional hold-outs into voting for the legislation. (*See CAFTA Lobbying Efforts) With only 20 hours of debate allowed, there is little opportunity for public involvement.

Congress clearly understood the risk of giving up this power to the President, as evidenced by the fact that they put an automatic expiration date on it. Since the expiration of the original Fast Track, there been a very contentious trail of Fast Track renewal efforts. In 1996, President Clinton utterly failed to re-secure Fast Track after a bitter debate in Congress. After another contentious struggle in 2001/2002, President Bush was able to renew Fast Track for himself in the Trade Act of 2002, just in time to negotiate the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and insure its passage in 2005.

It is startling to realize that since 1974, Fast Track has not been used in the majority of trade agreements. Under the Clinton presidency, for instance, some 300 separate trade agreements were negotiated and passed normally by Congress, but only two of them were submitted under Fast Track: NAFTA and the GATT Uruguay Round. In fact, from 1974 to 1992, there were only three instances of Fast Track in action: GATT Tokyo Round, U.S.-Israel Free Trade Agreement and the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. Thus, NAFTA was only the fourth invocation of Fast Track.

Why the selectivity? Does it suggest a very narrow agenda? Most certainly. These trade and legal bamboozles didn’t stand a ghost of a chance to be passed without it, and the global elite knew it. Fast Track was created as a very specific legislative tool to accomplish a very specific executive task — namely, to “fast track” the creation of the “New International Economic Order” envisioned by the Trilateral Commission in 1973!

Article Six of the U.S. Constitution states that,

“all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

Because international treaties supercede national law, Fast Track has allowed an enormous restructuring of U.S. law without resorting to a Constitutional convention (Ed. note: Both Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski called for a constitutional convention as early as 1972, which could clearly be viewed as a failed “frontal assault”).

As a result, national sovereignty of the United States has been severely compromised – even if some Congressmen and Senators are aware of this, the general public is still generally ignorant.

North American Free Trade Agreement

NAFTA was negotiated under the executive leadership of Republican President George H.W. Bush. Carla Hills is widely credited as being the primary architect and negotiator of NAFTA. Both Bush and Hills were members of the Trilateral Commission!

With Bush’s first presidential term drawing to a close and Bush desiring political credit for NAFTA, an “initialing” ceremony of NAFTA was staged (so Bush could take credit for NAFTA) in October, 1992. Although very official looking, most Americans did not understand the difference between initialing and signing; at the time, Fast Track was not implemented and Bush did not have the authority to actually sign such a trade agreement.

Bush subsequently lost a publicly contentious presidential race to democrat William Jefferson Clinton, but they were hardly polar opposites on the issue of Free Trade and NAFTA: The reason? Clinton was also a seasoned member of the Trilateral Commission.

Immediately after inauguration, Clinton became the champion of NAFTA and orchestrated its passage with a massive Executive Branch effort.

Some Unexpected Resistance to NAFTA

Prior to the the 1992 election, there was a fly in the elite’s ointment — namely, presidential candidate and billionaire Ross Perot, founder and chairman of Electronic Data Systems (EDS). Perot was politically independent, vehemently anti-NAFTA and chose to make it a major campaign issue in 1991. In the end, the global elite would have to spend huge sums of money to overcome the negative publicity that Perot gave to NAFTA.

At the time, some political analysts believed that Perot, being a billionaire, was somehow put up to this task by the same elitists who were pushing NAFTA. Presumably, it would accumulate all the anti-globalists in one tidy group, thus allowing the elitists to determine who their true enemies really were. It’s moot today whether he was sincere or not, but it did have that outcome, and Perot became a lightning rod for the whole issue of free trade.

Perot hit the nail squarely on the head in one of his nationally televised campaign speeches:

“If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory south of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young — let’s assume you’ve been in business for a long time and you’ve got a mature workforce – pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care – that’s the most expensive single element in making a car – have no environmental controls, no pollution controls, and no retirement, and you didn’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south…”5 [emphasis added]

Perot’s message struck a nerve with millions of Americans, but it was unfortunately cut short when he entered into public campaign debates with fellow candidate Al Gore. Simply put, Gore ate Perot’s lunch, not so much on the issues themselves, but on having superior debating skills. As organized as Perot was, he was no match for a politically and globally seasoned politician like Al Gore.

The Spin Machine gears up

To counter the public relations damage done by Perot, all the stops were pulled out as the NAFTA vote drew near. As proxy for the global elite, the President unleashed the biggest and most expensive spin machine the country had ever seen.

Former Chrysler chairman Lee Iococca was enlisted for a multi-million dollar nationwide ad campaign that praised the benefits of NAFTA. The mantra, carried consistently throughout the many spin events: “Exports. Better Jobs. Better Wages”, all of which have turned out to be empty promises

Bill Clinton invited three former presidents to the White House to stand with him in praise and affirmation NAFTA. This was the first time in U.S. history that four presidents had ever appeared together.

Of the four, three were members of the Trilateral Commission: Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. Gerald Ford was not a Commissioner, but was nevertheless a confirmed globalist insider. After Ford’s accession to the presidency in 1974, he promptly nominated Nelson Rockefeller (David Rockefeller’s oldest brother) to fill the Vice Presidency that Ford had just vacated.

The academic community was enlisted when, according to Harper’s Magazine publisher John MacArthur,

…there was a pro-NAFTA petition, organized and written my MIT’s Rudiger Dornbusch, addressed to President Clinton and signed by all twelve living Nobel laureates in economics, and exercise in academic logrolling that was expertly converted by Bill Daley and the A-Team into PR gold on the front page of The New York Times on September 14. ‘Dear Mr. President,’ wrote the 283 signatories…”6

Lastly, prominent Trilateral Commission members themselves took to the press to promote NAFTA. For instance, on May 13, 1993, Commissioners Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance wrote a joint op-ed that stated:

“[NAFTA] would be the most constructive measure the United States would have undertaken in our hemisphere in this century.”7

Two months later, Kissinger went further,

“It will represent the most creative step toward a new world order taken by any group of countries since the end of the Cold War, and the first step toward an even larger vision of a free-trade zone for the entire Western Hemisphere.” [NAFTA] is not a conventional trade agreement, but the architecture of a new international system.”8 [emphasis added]

It is hardly fanciful to think that Kissinger’s hype sounds quite similar to the Trilateral Commission’s original goal of creating a New International Economic Order.

That Giant Sucking Sound Going South

To understand the potential impact of the North American Union, one must understand the impact of NAFTA.

NAFTA promised greater exports, better jobs and better wages. Since 1994, just the opposite has occurred. The U.S. trade deficit soared and now approaches $1 trillion dollars per year; the U.S. has lost some 1.5 million jobs and real wages in both the U.S. and Mexico have fallen significantly.

Patrick Buchanan offered a simple example of NAFTA’s deleterious effect on the U.S. economy:

“When NAFTA passed in 1993, we imported some 225,000 cars and trucks from Mexico, but exported about 500,000 vehicles to the world. In 2005, our exports to the world were still a shade under 500,000 vehicles, but our auto and truck imports from Mexico had tripled to 700,000 vehicles.

“As McMillion writes, Mexico now exports more cars and trucks to the United States than the United States exports to the whole world. A fine end, is it not, to the United States as “Auto Capital of the World”?

“What happened? Post-NAFTA, the Big Three just picked up a huge slice of our auto industry and moved it, and the jobs, to Mexico.”9

Of course, this only represents the auto industry, but the same effect has been seen in many other industries as well. Buchanan correctly noted that NAFTA was never just a trade deal: Rather, it was an “enabling act – to enable U.S. corporations to dump their American workers and move their factories to Mexico.” Indeed, this is the very spirit of all outsourcing of U.S. jobs and manufacturing facilities to overseas locations.

Respected economist Alan Tonelson, author of The Race to the Bottom, notes the smoke and mirrors that cloud what has really happened with exports:

“Most U.S. exports to Mexico before, during and since the (1994) peso crisis have been producer goods – in particular, parts and components sent by U.S. multinationals to their Mexican factories for assembly or for further processing. The vast majority of these, moreover, are reexported, and most get shipped right back to the United States for final sale. In fact, by most estimates, the United States buys 80 to 90 percent of all of Mexico’s exports.”10

Tonelson concludes that “the vast majority of American workers has experienced declining living standards, not just a handful of losers.”

Mexican economist and scholar Miguel Pickard sums up Mexico’s supposed benefits from NAFTA:

“Much praise has been heard for the few ‘winners’ that NAFTA has created, but little mention is made of the fact that the Mexican people are the deal’s big ‘losers.’ Mexicans now face greater unemployment, poverty, and inequality than before the agreement began in 1994.”11

In short, NAFTA has not been a friend to the citizenry of the United States or Mexico. Still, this is the backdrop against which the North American Union is being acted out. The globalization players and their promises have remained pretty much the same, both just as disingenuous as ever.

Prelude to the North American Union

Soon after NAFTA was passed in 1994, Dr. Robert A. Pastor began to push for a “deep integration” which NAFTA could not provide by itself. His dream was summed up in his book, Toward a North American Union, published in 2001. Unfortunately for Pastor, the book was released just a few days prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and thus received little attention from any sector.

However, Pastor had the right connections. He was invited to appear before the plenary session (held in Ontario, Canada) of the Trilateral Commission on November 1-2, 2002, to deliver a paper drawing directly on his book.

His paper, “A Modest Proposal To the Trilateral Commission“, made several recommendations:

“… the three governments should establish a North American Commission (NAC) to define an agenda for Summit meetings by the three leaders and to monitor the implementation of the decisions and plans.
A second institution should emerge from combining two bilateral legislative groups into a North American Parliamentary Group.
“The third institution should be a Permanent Court on Trade and Investment
“The three leaders should establish a North American Development Fund, whose priority would be to connect the U.S.-Mexican border region to central and southern Mexico.
The North American Commission should develop an integrated continental plan for transportation and infrastructure.
“…negotiate a Customs Union and a Common External Tariff
“Our three governments should sponsor Centers for North American Studies in each of our countries to help the people of all three understand the problems and the potential of North America and begin to think of themselves as North Americans”12 [emphasis added]

Pastor’s choice of the words “Modest Proposal” are almost comical considering that he intends to reorganize the entire North American continent.

Nevertheless, the Trilateral Commission bought Pastor’s proposals hook, line and sinker. Subsequently, it was Pastor who emerged as the U.S. vice-chairman of the CFR task force that was announced on October 15, 2004:

“The Council has launched an independent task force on the future of North America to examine regional integration since the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement ten years ago… The task force will review five spheres of policy in which greater cooperation may be needed. They are: deepening economic integration; reducing the development gap; harmonizing regulatory policy; enhancing security; and devising better institutions to manage conflicts that inevitably arise from integration and exploit opportunities for collaboration.”13

Independent task force, indeed! A total of twenty-three members were chosen from the three countries. Each country was represented by a member of the Trilateral Commission: Carla A. Hills (U.S.), Luis Robio (Mexico) and Wendy K. Dobson (Canada). Robert Pastor served as the U.S. vice-chairman.

This CFR task force was unique in that it focused on economic and political policies for all three countries, not just the U.S. The Task Force stated purpose was to,

“… identify inadequacies in the current arrangements and suggest opportunities for deeper cooperation on areas of common interest. Unlike other Council-sponsored task forces, which focus primarily on U.S. policy, this initiative includes participants from Canada and Mexico, as well as the United States, and will make policy recommendations for all three countries.”14 [Emphasis added]

Richard Haass, chairman of the CFR and long-time member of the Trilateral Commission, pointedly made the link between NAFTA and integration of Mexico, Canada and the U.S.:

“Ten years after NAFTA, it is obvious that the security and economic futures of Canada, Mexico, and the United States are intimately bound. But there is precious little thinking available as to where the three countries need to be in another ten years and how to get there. I am excited about the potential of this task force to help fill this void,”15

Haass’ statement “there is precious little thinking available” underscores a repeatedly used elitist technique. That is, first decide what you want to do, and secondly, assign a flock of academics to justify your intended actions. (This is the crux of academic funding by NGO’s such as Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Carnegie-Mellon, etc.)

After the justification process is complete, the same elites that suggested it in the first place allow themselves to be drawn in as if they had no other logical choice but to play along with the “sound thinking” of the experts.

The task force met three times, once in each country. When the process was completed, it issued its results in May, 2005, in a paper titled “Building a North American Community” and subtitled “Report of the Independent Task Force on the Future of North America.” Even the sub-title suggests that the “future of North America” is a fait accompli decided behind closed doors.

Some of the recommendations of the task force are:

“Adopt a common external tariff.”

“Adopt a North American Approach to Regulation”
“Establish a common security perimeter by 2010.”
“Establish a North American investment fund for infrastructure and human capital.”
“Establish a permanent tribunal for North American dispute resolution.”
“An annual North American Summit meeting” that would bring the heads-of-state together for the sake of public display of confidence.
“Establish minister-led working groups that will be required to report back within 90 days, and to meet regularly.”
Create a “North American Advisory Council”

Create a “North American Inter-Parliamentary Group.”16

Sound familiar?

It should: Many of the recommendations are verbatim from Pastor’s “modest” presentation to the Trilateral Commission mentioned above, or from his earlier book, Toward a North American Union.

Shortly after the task force report was issued, the heads of all three countries did indeed meet together for a summit in Waco, Texas on March 23, 2005. The specific result of the summit was the creation of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPPNA).

The joint press release stated,

“We, the elected leaders of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, have met in Texas to announce the establishment of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America.

“We will establish working parties led by our ministers and secretaries that will consult with stakeholders in our respective countries. These working parties will respond to the priorities of our people and our businesses, and will set specific, measurable, and achievable goals. They will outline concrete steps that our governments can take to meet these goals, and set dates that will ensure the continuous achievement of results.

“Within 90 days, ministers will present their initial report after which, the working parties will submit six-monthly reports. Because the Partnership will be an ongoing process of cooperation, new items will be added to the work agenda by mutual agreement as circumstances warrant.”17

Once again, we see Pastor’s North American Union ideology being continued, but this time as an outcome of a summit meeting of three heads-of-states. The question must be raised,

“Who is really in charge of this process?”

Indeed, the three premiers returned to their respective countries and started their “working parties” to “consult with stakeholders.” In the U.S., the “specific, measurable, and achievable goals” were only seen indirectly by the creation of a government website billed as “Security and Prosperity Partnetship of North America.”

The stakeholders are not mentioned my name, but it is clear that they are not the public of either of the three countries; most likely, they are the corporate interests represented by the members of the Trilateral Commission!

The second annual summit meeting took place on March 30-31, 2006, in Cancun, Mexico between Bush, Fox and Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper. The Security and Prosperity Partnership agenda was summed up in a statement from Mexican president Vicente Fox:

“We touched upon fundamental items in that meeting. First of all, we carried out an evaluation meeting. Then we got information about the development of programs. And then we gave the necessary instructions for the works that should be carried out in the next period of work… We are not renegotiating what has been successful or open the Free Trade Agreement. It’s going beyond the agreement, both for prosperity and security.”18 [emphasis added]

Regulations instead of Treaties

It may not have occurred to the reader that the two SPP summits resulted in no signed agreements. This is not accidental nor a failure of the summit process. The so-called “deeper integration” of the three countries is being accomplished through a series of regulations and executive decrees that avoid citizen watchdogs and legislative oversight.19

In the U.S., the 2005 Cancun summit spawned some 20 different working groups that would deal with issues from immigration to security to harmonization of regulations, all under the auspices of the Security and Prosperity Partnership. The SPP in the U.S. is officially placed under the Department of Commerce, headed by Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez, but other Executive Branch agencies also have SPP components that report to Commerce.

After two years of massive effort, the names of the SPP working group members have not been released. The result of their work have also not been released. There is no congressional legislation or oversight of the SPP process.

The director of SPP, Geri Word, was contacted to ask why a cloud of secrecy is hanging over SPP. According to investigative journalist Jerome Corsi, Word replied

“We did not want to get the contact people of the working groups distracted by calls from the public.” 20

This paternalistic attitude is a typical elitist mentality. Their work (whatever they have dreamed up on their own) is too important to be distracted by the likes of pesky citizens or their elected legislators.

This elite change of tactics must not be understated: Regulations and Executive Orders have replaced Congressional legislation and public debate. There is no pretense of either. This is another Gardner-style “end-run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece.”

Apparently, the Trilateral-dominated Bush administration believes that it has accumulated sufficient power to ram the NAU down the throat of the American People, whether they protest or not.

Robert A. Pastor: A Trilateral Commission Operative

As mentioned earlier, Pastor is hailed as the father of the North American Union, having written more papers about it, delivered more testimonies before Congress, and headed up task forces to study it, than any other single U.S. academic figure. He would seem a tireless architect and advocate of the NAU.

Although he might seem to be a fresh, new name to in the globalization business, Pastor has a long history with Trilateral Commission members and the global elite.

He is the same Robert Pastor who was the executive director of the 1974 CFR task force ( funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations) called the Commission on US-Latin American Relations – aka the Linowitz Commission. The Linowitz Commission, chaired by an original Trilateral Commissioner Sol Linowitz, was singularly credited with the giveaway of the Panama Canal in 1976 under the Carter presidency.

ALL of the Linowitz Commission members were members of the Trilateral Commission save one, Albert Fishlow; other members were W. Michael Blumenthal, Samuel Huntington, Peter G. Peterson, Elliot Richardson and David Rockefeller.

One of Carter’s first actions as President in 1977 was to appoint Zbigniew Brzezinski to the post of National Security Advisor. In turn, one of Brzezinski’s first acts was to appoint his protégé, Dr. Robert A. Pastor, as director of the Office of Latin American and Caribbean Affairs. Pastor then became the Trilateral Commission’s point-man to lobby for the Canal giveaway.

To actually negotiate the Carter-Torrijos Treaty, Carter sent none other than Sol Linowitz to Panama as temporary ambassador. The 6-month temporary appointment avoided the requirement for Senate confirmation. Thus, the very same people who created the policy became responsible for executing it.

The Trilateral Commission’s role in the Carter Administration is confirmed by Pastor himself in his 1992 paper The Carter Administration and Latin America: A Test of Principle:

“In converting its predisposition into a policy, the new administration had the benefit of the research done by two private commissions. Carter, Vance, and Brzezinski were members of the Trilateral Commission, which provided a conceptual framework for collaboration among the industrialized countries in approaching the full gamut of international issues. With regard to setting an agenda and an approach to Latin America, the most important source of influence on the Carter administration was the Commission on U.S.-Latin American Relations, chaired by Sol M. Linowitz.”21

As to the final Linowitz Commission reports on Latin America, most of which were authored by Pastor himself, he states:

“The reports helped the administration define a new relationship with Latin America, and 27 of the 28 specific recommendations in the second report became U.S. policy.”22

Pastor’s deep involvement with Trilateral Commission members and policies is irrefutable, and it continues into the present.

In 1996, when Trilateral Commissioner Bill Clinton nominated Pastor as Ambassador to Panama, his confirmation was forcefully knocked down by Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), who held a deep grudge against Pastor for his central role in the giveaway of the Panama Canal in 1976.

The setback obviously did not phase Pastor in the slightest.

Where from here?

The stated target for full implementation of the North American Union is 2010.

“The Task Force proposes the creation by 2010 of a North American community to enhance security, prosperity, and opportunity. We propose a community based on the principle affirmed in the March 2005 Joint Statement of the three leaders that ‘our security and prosperity are mutually dependent and complementary.’ Its boundaries will be defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter within which the movement of people, products, and capital will be legal, orderly, and safe. Its goal will be to guarantee a free, secure, just, and prosperous North America.” 23

Don’t underestimate the global elite’s ability to meet their own deadlines!

Conclusion

This paper does not pretend to give thorough or even complete coverage to such important and wide-ranging topics as discussed above. We have shown that the restructuring of the United States has been accomplished by a very small group of powerful global elitists as represented by members of the Trilateral Commission.

The Trilateral Commission plainly stated that it intended to create a New International Economic Order. We have followed their members from 1973 to the present, only to find that they are at the dead center of every critical policy and action that seeks to restructure the U.S.

Some critics will undoubtedly argue that involvement by members of the Trilateral Commission is merely incidental. However, the odds for their involvement at random is too large to be even remotely understandable; it would be like winning the lottery jackpot five times in a row, with the same numbers!

The credo of The August Review is “Follow the money, follow the power.” In this view, the United States has literally been hijacked by less than 300 greedy and self-serving global elitists who have little more than contempt for the citizens of the countries they would seek to dominate. According to Trilateralist Richard Gardner‘s viewpoint, this incremental takeover (rather than a frontal approach) has been wildly successful.

To again answer Lou Dobbs question, “Have our political elites gone mad?” — No Lou, they are not “mad”, nor are they ignorant. To look into the face of these global elites is to look into the face of unmitigated greed, avarice and treachery.

Footnotes

Gardner, Richard, The Hard Road to World Order, (Foreign Affairs, 1974) p. 558
ibid, p. 563
ibid. p. 556
Fast Track Talking Points, Global Trade Watch, Public Citizen
Excerpts From Presidential Debates, Ross Perot, 1992
MacArthur, The Selling of Free Trade, (Univ. of Cal. Press, 2001) p. 228
Washington Post, op-ed, Kissinger & Vance, May 13, 1993
Los Angeles Times, op-ed, Kissinger, July 18, 1993
The Fruits of NAFTA, Patrick Buchanan, The Conservative Voice, March 10, 2006
Tonelson, The Race to the Bottom (Westview Press, 2002) p. 89
Trinational Elites Map North American Future in “NAFTA Plus“, Miquel Pickard, IRC Americas website
A Modest Proposal To the Trilateral Commission, Presentation by Dr. Robert A. Pastor, 2002
Council Joing Leading Canadians and Mexicans to Launch Intependent Task Force on the Future of America, Press Release, CFR Website
ibid.
ibid.
Building a North American Community, Council on Foreign Relations, 2005
North American Leaders Unveil Security and Prosperity Partnership, International Information Programs, U.S. Govt. Website
Concluding Press Conference at Cancun Summit, Vicente Fox, March 31, 2006
Traditional Elites Map North American Future in “NAFTA Plus“, Miguel Pickard, p. 1, IRC Website
Bush sneaking North American super-state without oversight?, Jerome Corsi,WorldNetDaily, June 12, 2006.
The Carter Administration and Latin America: A Test of Principle, Robert A. Pastor, The Carter Center, July 1992, p. 9
ibid. p. 10
Building a North American Community, Council on Foreign Relations, 2005, p. 2

Further Reading

Meet Robert Pastor: Father of the North American Union, Human Events, Jerome R. Corsi, July 25, 2006

Robert A. Pastor Resume, American University, 2005

North America’s Super Corridor Coalition, Inc. Website

Source

What is the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP)?

By

TGE News

-

03/13/2013

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a secretive, multi-national trade agreement that threatens to extend restrictive intellectual property (IP) laws across the globe and rewrite international rules on its enforcement. The main problems are two-fold:

(1) IP chapter: Leaked draft texts of the agreement show that the IP chapter would have extensive negative ramifications for users’ freedom of speech, right to privacy and due process, and hinder peoples’ abilities to innovate.

(2) Lack of transparency: The entire process has shut out multi-stakeholder participation and is shrouded in secrecy.

The twelve nations currently negotiating the TPP are the US, Japan, Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, and Brunei Darussalam. The TPP contains a chapter on intellectual property covering copyright, trademarks, patents and perhaps, geographical indications. Since the draft text of the agreement has never been offically released to the public, we know from leaked documents, such as the February 2011 draft US TPP IP Rights Chapter [PDF], that US negotiators are pushing for the adoption of copyright measures far more restrictive than currently required by international treaties, including the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

The TPP Will Rewrite Global Rules on Intellectual Property Enforcement

All signatory countries will be required to conform their domestic laws and policies to the provisions of the Agreement. In the US, this is likely to further entrench controversial aspects of US copyright law (such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [DMCA]) and restrict the ability of Congress to engage in domestic law reform to meet the evolving IP needs of American citizens and the innovative technology sector. The recently leaked US-proposed IP chapter also includes provisions that appear to go beyond current US law.

The leaked US IP chapter includes many detailed requirements that are more restrictive than current international standards, and would require significant changes to other countries’ copyright laws. These include obligations for countries to:

Place Greater Liability on Internet Intermediaries: The TPP would force the adoption of the US DMCA Internet intermediaries copyright safe harbor regime in its entirety. For example, this would require Chile to rewrite its forward-looking 2010 copyright law that currently establishes a judicial notice-and-takedown regime, which provides greater protection to Internet users’ expression and privacy than the DMCA.

Regulate Temporary Copies: Treat temporary reproductions of copyrighted works without copyright holders’ authorization as copyright infringement. The language reveals a profound disconnect with the reality of the modern computer, as all routine computer functions rely upon the regular creation of temporary copies of programs and files. As drafted, the related provision creates chilling effects not just on how we behave online, but also on the basic ability of people and companies to use and create on the Web.

Expand Copyright Terms: Create copyright terms well beyond the internationally agreed period in the 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The TPP could extend copyright term protections from life of the author + 50 years, to Life + 70 years for works created by individuals, and either 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation for corporate owned works (such as Mickey Mouse).

Enact a “Three-Step Test” Language That Puts Restrictions on Fair Use: The United States Trade Representative (USTR) is putting fair use at risk with restrictive language in the TPP’s IP chapter. US and Australia have proposed very restrictive text, while other countries such as Chile, New Zealand, and Malaysia, have proposed more flexible, user-friendly terms.

Escalate Protections for Digital Locks: It will compel signatory nations to enact laws banning circumvention of digital locks (technological protection measures or TPMs) [PDF] that mirror the DMCA and treat violation of the TPM provisions as a separate offense even when no copyright infringement is involved. This would require countries like New Zealand to completely rewrite its innovative 2008 copyright law, as well as override Australia’s carefully-crafted 2007 TPM regime exclusions for region-coding on movies on DVDs, videogames, and players, and for embedded software in devices that restrict access to goods and services for the device—a thoughtful effort by Australian policy makers to avoid the pitfalls experienced with the US digital locks provisions. In the US, business competitors have used the DMCA to try to block printer cartridge refill services, competing garage door openers, and to lock mobile phones to particular network providers.

Ban Parallel Importation: Ban parallel importation of genuine goods acquired from other countries without the authorization of copyright owners.

Adopt Criminal Sanctions: Adopt criminal sanctions for copyright infringement that is done without a commercial motivation, based on the provisions of the 1997 US No Electronic Theft Act.

In short, countries would have to abandon any efforts to learn from the mistakes of the US and its experience with the DMCA over the last 12 years, and adopt many of the most controversial aspects of US copyright law in their entirety. At the same time, the US IP chapter does not export the limitations and exceptions in the US copyright regime like fair use, which have enabled freedom of expression and technological innovation to flourish in the US. It includes only a placeholder for exceptions and limitations. This raises serious concerns about other countries’ sovereignty and the ability of national governments to set laws and policies to meet their domestic priorities.

Non-Transparent and On The Fast Track

Despite the broad scope and far-reaching implications of the TPP, negotiations for the agreement have taken place behind closed doors and outside of the checks and balances that operate at traditional multilateral treaty-making organizations such as the World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade Organization.

Like ACTA, the TPP is being negotiated rapidly with little transparency. During the TPP negotiation round in Chile in February 2011, negotiators received strong messages from prominent civil society groups demanding an end to the secrecy that has shielded TPP negotiations from the scrutiny of national lawmakers and the public. Letters addressed to government representatives in Australia, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand and the US emphasized that both the process and effect of the proposed TPP agreement is deeply undemocratic. TPP negotiators apparently discussed the requests for greater public disclosure during the February 2011 negotiations, but took no action.

Why You Should Care

TPP raises significant concerns about citizens’ freedom of expression, due process, innovation, the future of the Internet’s global infrastructure, and the right of sovereign nations to develop policies and laws that best meet their domestic priorities. In sum, the TPP puts at risk some of the most fundamental rights that enable access to knowledge for the world’s citizens.

The US Trade Rep is pursuing a TPP agreement that will require signatory counties to adopt heightened copyright protection that advances the agenda of the US entertainment and pharmaceutical industries agendas, but omits the flexibilities and exceptions that protect Internet users and technology innovators.

The TPP will affect countries beyond the 11 that are currently involved in negotiations. Like ACTA, the TPP Agreement is a plurilateral agreement that will be used to create new heightened global IP enforcement norms. Countries that are not parties to the negotiation will likely be asked to accede to the TPP as a condition of bilateral trade agreements with the US and other TPP members, or evaluated against the TPP’s copyright enforcement standards in the annual Special 301 process administered by the US Trade Rep.

Via Electronic Frontier Foundation

Here’s what you can do:

Are you in the United States?

Tell U.S. lawmakers to stand up for your digital rights and preserve our constitutional checks and balances in government. Demand your state representatives oppose any initiative to enact Fast Track (aka Trade Promotion Authority), which hands their own constitutional authority to debate and modify trade law.

Join EFF and more than 30,000 people in sending a message to Congress members to demand an end to these secret backdoor negotiations. Tell the White House to uphold openness and transparency in TPP negotiations.

For close analysis of the TPP and its impacts on digital rights, visit Knowledge Ecology International’s TPP resource page.

For more information on other aspects of the TPP, visit Public Citizen’s resource page.

“Doomsday Seed Vault” in the Arctic

By

TGE News

-

03/13/2013

Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO giants know something we don’t.

By F. William Engdahl

One thing Microsoft founder Bill Gates can’t be accused of is sloth. He was already programming at 14, founded Microsoft at age 20 while still a student at Harvard. By 1995 he had been listed by Forbes as the world’s richest man from being the largest shareholder in his Microsoft, a company which his relentless drive built into a de facto monopoly in software systems for personal computers.

In 2006 when most people in such a situation might think of retiring to a quiet Pacific island, Bill Gates decided to devote his energies to his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest ‘transparent’ private foundation as it says, with a whopping $34.6 billion endowment and a legal necessity to spend $1.5 billion a year on charitable projects around the world to maintain its tax free charitable status. A gift from friend and business associate, mega-investor Warren Buffett in 2006, of some $30 billion worth of shares in Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway put the Gates’ foundation into the league where it spends almost the amount of the entire annual budget of the United Nations’ World Health Organization.

So when Bill Gates decides through the Gates Foundation to invest some $30 million of their hard earned money in a project, it is worth looking at.

No project is more interesting at the moment than a curious project in one of the world’s most remote spots, Svalbard. Bill Gates is investing millions in a seed bank on the Barents Sea near the Arctic Ocean, some 1,100 kilometers from the North Pole. Svalbard is a barren piece of rock claimed by Norway and ceded in 1925 by international treaty (see map).

On this God-forsaken island Bill Gates is investing tens of his millions along with the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta Foundation and the Government of Norway, among others, in what is called the ‘doomsday seed bank.’ Officially the project is named the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard island group.

The seed bank is being built inside a mountain on Spitsbergen Island near the small village of Longyearbyen. It’s almost ready for ‘business’ according to their releases. The bank will have dual blast-proof doors with motion sensors, two airlocks, and walls of steel-reinforced concrete one meter thick. It will contain up to three million different varieties of seeds from the entire world, ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future,’ according to the Norwegian government. Seeds will be specially wrapped to exclude moisture. There will be no full-time staff, but the vault’s relative inaccessibility will facilitate monitoring any possible human activity.

Did we miss something here? Their press release stated, ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future.’ What future do the seed bank’s sponsors foresee, that would threaten the global availability of current seeds, almost all of which are already well protected in designated seed banks around the world?

Anytime Bill Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto and Syngenta get together on a common project, it’s worth digging a bit deeper behind the rocks on Spitsbergen. When we do we find some fascinating things.

The first notable point is who is sponsoring the doomsday seed vault. Here joining the Norwegians are, as noted, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; the US agribusiness giant DuPont/Pioneer Hi-Bred, one of the world’s largest owners of patented genetically-modified (GMO) plant seeds and related agrichemicals; Syngenta, the Swiss-based major GMO seed and agrichemicals company through its Syngenta Foundation; the Rockefeller Foundation, the private group who created the “gene revolution with over $100 million of seed money since the 1970’s; CGIAR, the global network created by the Rockefeller Foundation to promote its ideal of genetic purity through agriculture change.

CGIAR and ‘The Project’

As I detailled in the book, Seeds of Destruction1, in 1960 the Rockefeller Foundation, John D. Rockefeller III’s Agriculture Development Council and the Ford Foundation joined forces to create the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, the Philippines. By 1971, the Rockefeller Foundation’s IRRI, along with their Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center and two other Rockefeller and Ford Foundation-created international research centers, the IITA for tropical agriculture, Nigeria, and IRRI for rice, Philippines, combined to form a global Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (CGIAR).

CGIAR was shaped at a series of private conferences held at the Rockefeller Foundation’s conference center in Bellagio, Italy. Key participants at the Bellagio talks were the Rockefeller Foundation’s George Harrar, Ford Foundation’s Forrest Hill, Robert McNamara of the World Bank and Maurice Strong, the Rockefeller family’s international environmental organizer, who, as a Rockefeller Foundation Trustee, organized the UN Earth Summit in Stockholm in 1972. It was part of the foundation’s decades long focus to turn science to the service of eugenics, a hideous version of racial purity, what has been called The Project.

To ensure maximum impact, CGIAR drew in the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Development Program and the World Bank. Thus, through a carefully-planned leverage of its initial funds, the Rockefeller Foundation by the beginning of the 1970’s was in a position to shape global agriculture policy. And shape it did.

Financed by generous Rockefeller and Ford Foundation study grants, CGIAR saw to it that leading Third World agriculture scientists and agronomists were brought to the US to ‘master’ the concepts of modern agribusiness production, in order to carry it back to their homeland. In the process they created an invaluable network of influence for US agribusiness promotion in those countries, most especially promotion of the GMO ‘Gene Revolution’ in developing countries, all in the name of science and efficient, free market agriculture.

Genetically engineering a master race?

Now the Svalbard Seed Bank begins to become interesting. But it gets better. ‘The Project’ I referred to is the project of the Rockefeller Foundation and powerful financial interests since the 1920’s to use eugenics, later renamed genetics, to justify creation of a genetically-engineered Master Race. Hitler and the Nazis called it the Ayran Master Race.

The eugenics of Hitler were financed to a major extent by the same Rockefeller Foundation which today is building a doomsday seed vault to preserve samples of every seed on our planet. Now this is getting really intriguing. The same Rockefeller Foundation created the pseudo-science discipline of molecular biology in their relentless pursuit of reducing human life down to the ‘defining gene sequence’ which, they hoped, could then be modified in order to change human traits at will. Hitler’s eugenics scientists, many of whom were quietly brought to the United States after the War to continue their biological eugenics research, laid much of the groundwork of genetic engineering of various life forms, much of it supported openly until well into the Third Reich by Rockefeller Foundation generous grants.2

The same Rockefeller Foundation created the so-called Green Revolution, out of a trip to Mexico in 1946 by Nelson Rockefeller and former New Deal Secretary of Agriculture and founder of the Pioneer Hi-Bred Seed Company, Henry Wallace.

The Green Revolution purported to solve the world hunger problem to a major degree in Mexico, India and other select countries where Rockefeller worked. Rockefeller Foundation agronomist, Norman Borlaug, won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work, hardly something to boast about with the likes of Henry Kissinger sharing the same.

In reality, as it years later emerged, the Green Revolution was a brilliant Rockefeller family scheme to develop a globalized agribusiness which they then could monopolize just as they had done in the world oil industry beginning a half century before. As Henry Kissinger declared in the 1970’s, ‘If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population.’

Agribusiness and the Rockefeller Green Revolution went hand-in-hand. They were part of a grand strategy which included Rockefeller Foundation financing of research for the development of genetic engineering of plants and animals a few years later.

John H. Davis had been Assistant Agriculture Secretary under President Dwight Eisenhower in the early 1950’s. He left Washington in 1955 and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Business, an unusual place for an agriculture expert in those days. He had a clear strategy. In 1956, Davis wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review in which he declared that “the only way to solve the so-called farm problem once and for all, and avoid cumbersome government programs, is to progress from agriculture to agribusiness.” He knew precisely what he had in mind, though few others had a clue back then— a revolution in agriculture production that would concentrate control of the food chain in corporate multinational hands, away from the traditional family farmer. 3

A crucial aspect driving the interest of the Rockefeller Foundation and US agribusiness companies was the fact that the Green Revolution was based on proliferation of new hybrid seeds in developing markets. One vital aspect of hybrid seeds was their lack of reproductive capacity. Hybrids had a built in protection against multiplication. Unlike normal open pollinated species whose seed gave yields similar to its parents, the yield of the seed borne by hybrid plants was significantly lower than that of the first generation.

That declining yield characteristic of hybrids meant farmers must normally buy seed every year in order to obtain high yields. Moreover, the lower yield of the second generation eliminated the trade in seed that was often done by seed producers without the breeder’s authorization. It prevented the redistribution of the commercial crop seed by middlemen. If the large multinational seed

companies were able to control the parental seed lines in house, no competitor or farmer would be able to produce the hybrid. The global concentration of hybrid seed patents into a handful of giant seed companies, led by DuPont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred and Monsanto’s Dekalb laid the ground for the later GMO seed revolution. 4

In effect, the introduction of modern American agricultural technology, chemical fertilizers and commercial hybrid seeds all made local farmers in developing countries, particularly the larger more established ones, dependent on foreign, mostly US agribusiness and petro-chemical company inputs. It was a first step in what was to be a decades-long, carefully planned process.

Under the Green Revolution Agribusiness was making major inroads into markets which were previously of limited access to US exporters. The trend was later dubbed “market-oriented agriculture.” In reality it was agribusiness-controlled agriculture.

Through the Green Revolution, the Rockefeller Foundation and later Ford Foundation worked hand-in-hand shaping and supporting the foreign policy goals of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and of the CIA.

One major effect of the Green Revolution was to depopulate the countryside of peasants who were forced to flee into shantytown slums around the cities in desperate search for work. That was no accident; it was part of the plan to create cheap labor pools for forthcoming US multinational manufactures, the ‘globalization’ of recent years.

When the self-promotion around the Green Revolution died down, the results were quite different from what had been promised. Problems had arisen from indiscriminate use of the new chemical pesticides, often with serious health consequences. The mono-culture cultivation of new hybrid seed varieties decreased soil fertility and yields over time. The first results were impressive: double or even triple yields for some crops such as wheat and later corn in Mexico. That soon faded.

The Green Revolution was typically accompanied by large irrigation projects which often included World Bank loans to construct huge new dams, and flood previously settled areas and fertile farmland in the process. Also, super-wheat produced greater yields by saturating the soil with huge amounts of fertilizer per acre, the fertilizer being the product of nitrates and petroleum, commodities controlled by the Rockefeller-dominated Seven Sisters major oil companies.

Huge quantities of herbicides and pesticides were also used, creating additional markets for the oil and chemical giants. As one analyst put it, in effect, the Green Revolution was merely a chemical revolution. At no point could developing nations pay for the huge amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. They would get the credit courtesy of the World Bank and special loans by Chase Bank and other large New York banks, backed by US Government guarantees.

Applied in a large number of developing countries, those loans went mostly to the large landowners. For the smaller peasants the situation worked differently. Small peasant farmers could not afford the chemical and other modern inputs and had to borrow money.

Initially various government programs tried to provide some loans to farmers so that they could purchase seeds and fertilizers. Farmers who could not participate in this kind of program had to borrow from the private sector. Because of the exorbitant interest rates for informal loans, many small farmers did not even get the benefits of the initial higher yields. After harvest, they had to sell most if not all of their produce to pay off loans and interest. They became dependent on money-lenders and traders and often lost their land. Even with soft loans from government agencies, growing subsistence crops gave way to the production of cash crops.5

Since decades the same interests including the Rockefeller Foundation which backed the initial Green Revolution, have worked to promote a second ‘Gene Revolution’ as Rockefeller Foundation President Gordon Conway termed it several years ago, the spread of industrial agriculture and commercial inputs including GMO patented seeds.

Gates, Rockefeller and a Green Revolution in Africa
With the true background of the 1950’s Rockefeller Foundation Green Revolution clear in mind, it becomes especially curious that the same Rockefeller Foundation along with the Gates Foundation which are now investing millions of dollars in preserving every seed against a possible “doomsday” scenario are also investing millions in a project called The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

AGRA, as it calls itself, is an alliance again with the same Rockefeller Foundation which created the “Gene Revolution.” A look at the AGRA Board of Directors confirms this.

It includes none other than former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as chairman. In his acceptance speech in a World Economic Forum event in Cape Town South Africa in June 2007, Kofi Annan stated, ‘I accept this challenge with gratitude to the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and all others who support our African campaign.’

In addition the AGRA board numbers a South African, Strive Masiyiwa who is a Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. It includes Sylvia M. Mathews of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Mamphela Ramphele, former Managing Director of the World Bank (2000 – 2006); Rajiv J. Shah of the Gates Foundation; Nadya K. Shmavonian of the Rockefeller Foundation; Roy Steiner of the Gates Foundation. In addition, an Alliance for AGRA includes Gary Toenniessen the Managing Director of the Rockefeller Foundation and Akinwumi Adesina, Associate Director, Rockefeller Foundation.

To fill out the lineup, the Programmes for AGRA includes Peter Matlon, Managing Director, Rockefeller Foundation; Joseph De Vries, Director of the Programme for Africa’s Seed Systems and Associate Director, Rockefeller foundation; Akinwumi Adesina, Associate Director, Rockefeller Foundation. Like the old failed Green Revolution in India and Mexico, the new Africa Green Revolution is clearly a high priority of the Rockefeller Foundation.

While to date they are keeping a low profile, Monsanto and the major GMO agribusiness giants are believed at the heart of using Kofi Annan’s AGRA to spread their patented GMO seeds across Africa under the deceptive label, ‘bio-technology,’ the new euphemism for genetically engineered patented seeds. To date South Africa is the only African country permitting legal planting of GMO crops. In 2003 Burkina Faso authorized GMO trials. In 2005 Kofi Annan’s Ghana drafted bio-safety legislation and key officials expressed their intentions to pursue research into GMO crops.

Africa is the next target in the US-government campaign to spread GMO worldwide. Its rich soils make it an ideal candidate. Not surprisingly many African governments suspect the worst from the GMO sponsors as a multitude of genetic engineering and biosafety projects have been initiated in Africa, with the aim of introducing GMOs into Africa’s agricultural systems. These include sponsorships offered by the US government to train African scientists in genetic engineering in the US, biosafety projects funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank; GMO research involving African indigenous food crops.

The Rockefeller Foundation has been working for years to promote, largely without success, projects to introduce GMOs into the fields of Africa. They have backed research that supports the applicability of GMO cotton in the Makhathini Flats in South Africa.

Monsanto, who has a strong foothold in South Africa’s seed industry, both GMO and hybrid, has conceived of an ingenious smallholders’ programme known as the ‘Seeds of Hope’ Campaign, which is introducing a green revolution package to small scale poor farmers, followed, of course, by Monsanto’s patented GMO seeds. 6

Syngenta AG of Switzerland, one of the ‘Four Horsemen of the GMO Apocalypse’ is pouring millions of dollars into a new greenhouse facility in Nairobi, to develop GMO insect resistant maize. Syngenta is a part of CGIAR as well.7

Move on to Svalbard

Now is it simply philosophical sloppiness? What leads the Gates and Rockefeller foundations to at one and the same time to back proliferation of patented and soon-to-be Terminator patented seeds across Africa, a process which, as it has in every other place on earth, destroys the plant seed varieties as monoculture industrialized agribusiness is introduced? At the same time they invest tens of millions of dollars to preserve every seed variety known in a bomb-proof doomsday vault near the remote Arctic Circle ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future’ to restate their official release?

The facility consists of three separate underground chambers. Each chamber has the capacity to store 1,5 million different seed samples.

It is no accident that the Rockefeller and Gates foundations are teaming up to push a GMO-style Green Revolution in Africa at the same time they are quietly financing the ‘doomsday seed vault’ on Svalbard. The GMO agribusiness giants are up to their ears in the Svalbard project.

Indeed, the entire Svalbard enterprise and the people involved call up the worst catastrophe images of the Michael Crichton bestseller, Andromeda Strain, a sci-fi thriller where a deadly disease of extraterrestrial origin causes rapid, fatal clotting of the blood threatening the entire human species. In Svalbard, the future world’s most secure seed repository will be guarded by the policemen of the GMO Green Revolution–the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, Syngenta, DuPont and CGIAR.

The Svalbard project will be run by an organization called the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT). Who are they to hold such an awesome trust over the planet’s entire seed varieties? The GCDT was founded by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and Bioversity International (formerly the International Plant Genetic Research Institute), an offshoot of the CGIAR.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust is based in Rome. Its Board is chaired by Margaret Catley-Carlson a Canadian also on the advisory board of Group Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux, one of the world’s largest private water companies. Catley-Carlson was also president until 1998 of the New York-based Population Council, John D. Rockefeller’s population reduction organization, set up in 1952 to advance the Rockefeller family’s eugenics program under the cover of promoting “family planning,” birth control devices, sterilization and “population control” in developing countries.

Other GCDT board members include former Bank of America executive presently head of the Hollywood DreamWorks Animation, Lewis Coleman. Coleman is also the lead Board Director of Northrup Grumman Corporation, one of America’s largest military industry Pentagon contractors.

Jorio Dauster (Brazil) is also Board Chairman of Brasil Ecodiesel. He is a former Ambassador of Brazil to the European Union, and Chief Negotiator of Brazil’s foreign debt for the Ministry of Finance. Dauster has also served as President of the Brazilian Coffee Institute and as Coordinator of the Project for the Modernization of Brazil’s Patent System, which involves legalizing patents on seeds which are genetically modified, something until recently forbidden by Brazil’s laws.

Cary Fowler is the Trust’s Executive Director. Fowler was Professor and Director of Research in the Department for International Environment & Development Studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He was also a Senior Advisor to the Director General of Bioversity International. There he represented the Future Harvest Centres of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in negotiations on the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources. In the 1990s, he headed the International Program on Plant Genetic Resources at the FAO. He drafted and supervised negotiations of FAO’s Global Plan of Action for Plant Genetic Resources, adopted by 150 countries in 1996. He is a past-member of the National Plant Genetic Resources Board of the US and the Board of Trustees of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, another Rockefeller Foundation and CGIAR project.

GCDT board member Dr. Mangala Rai of India is the Secretary of India’s Department of Agricultural Research and Education (DARE), and Director General of the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR). He is also a Board Member of the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), which promoted the world’s first major GMO experiment, the much-hyped ‘Golden Rice’ which proved a failure. Rai has served as Board Member for CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center), and a Member of the Executive Council of the CGIAR.

Global Crop Diversity Trust Donors or financial angels include as well, in the words of the Humphrey Bogart Casablanca classic, ‘all the usual suspects.’ As well as the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, the Donors include GMO giants DuPont-Pioneer Hi-Bred, Syngenta of Basle Switzerland, CGIAR and the State Department’s energetically pro-GMO agency for development aid, USAID. Indeed it seems we have the GMO and population reduction foxes guarding the hen-house of mankind, the global seed diversity store in Svalbard. 8

Why now Svalbard?

We can legitimately ask why Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation along with the major genetic engineering agribusiness giants such as DuPont and Syngenta, along with CGIAR are building the Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic.

Who uses such a seed bank in the first place? Plant breeders and researchers are the major users of gene banks. Today’s largest plant breeders are Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta and Dow Chemical, the global plant-patenting GMO giants. Since early in 2007 Monsanto holds world patent rights together with the United States Government for plant so-called ‘Terminator’ or Genetic Use Restriction Technology (GURT). Terminator is an ominous technology by which a patented commercial seed commits ‘suicide’ after one harvest. Control by private seed companies is total. Such control and power over the food chain has never before in the history of mankind existed.

This clever genetically engineered terminator trait forces farmers to return every year to Monsanto or other GMO seed suppliers to get new seeds for rice, soybeans, corn, wheat whatever major crops they need to feed their population. If broadly introduced around the world, it could within perhaps a decade or so make the world’s majority of food producers new feudal serfs in bondage to three or four giant seed companies such as Monsanto or DuPont or Dow Chemical.

The Seed Vault functions like a safety deposit box in a bank.

That, of course, could also open the door to have those private companies, perhaps under orders from their host government, Washington, deny seeds to one or another developing country whose politics happened to go against Washington’s. Those who say ‘It can’t happen here’ should look more closely at current global events. The mere existence of that concentration of power in three or four private US-based agribusiness giants is grounds for legally banning all GMO crops even were their harvest gains real, which they manifestly are not.

These private companies, Monsanto, DuPont, Dow Chemical hardly have an unsullied record in terms of stewardship of human life. They developed and proliferated such innovations as dioxin, PCBs, Agent Orange. They covered up for decades clear evidence of carcinogenic and other severe human health consequences of use of the toxic chemicals. They have buried serious scientific reports that the world’s most widespread herbicide, glyphosate, the essential ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide that is tied to purchase of most Monsanto genetically engineered seeds, is toxic when it seeps into drinking water.9 Denmark banned glyphosate in 2003 when it confirmed it has contaminated the country’s groundwater.10

The diversity stored in seed gene banks is the raw material for plant breeding and for a great deal of basic biological research. Several hundred thousand samples are distributed annually for such purposes. The UN’s FAO lists some 1400 seed banks around the world, the largest being held by the United States Government. Other large banks are held by China, Russia, Japan, India, South Korea, Germany and Canada in descending order of size. In addition, CGIAR operates a chain of seed banks in select centers around the world.

CGIAR, set up in 1972 by the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation to spread their Green Revolution agribusiness model, controls most of the private seed banks from the Philippines to Syria to Kenya. In all these present seed banks hold more than six and a half million seed varieties, almost two million of which are ‘distinct.’ Svalbard’s Doomsday Vault will have a capacity to house four and a half million different seeds.

GMO as a weapon of biowarfare?

Now we come to the heart of the danger and the potential for misuse inherent in the Svalbard project of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller foundation. Can the development of patented seeds for most of the world’s major sustenance crops such as rice, corn, wheat, and feed grains such as soybeans ultimately be used in a horrible form of biological warfare?

The explicit aim of the eugenics lobby funded by wealthy elite families such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman and others since the 1920’s, has embodied what they termed ‘negative eugenics,’ the systematic killing off of undesired bloodlines. Margaret Sanger, a rapid eugenicist, the founder of Planned Parenthood International and an intimate of the Rockefeller family, created something called The Negro Project in 1939, based in Harlem, which as she confided in a letter to a friend, was all about the fact that, as she put it, ‘we want to exterminate the Negro population.’ 11

A small California biotech company, Epicyte, in 2001 announced the development of genetically engineered corn which contained a spermicide which made the semen of men who ate it sterile. At the time Epicyte had a joint venture agreement to spread its technology with DuPont and Syngenta, two of the sponsors of the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault. Epicyte was since acquired by a North Carolina biotech company. Astonishing to learn was that Epicyte had developed its spermicidal GMO corn with research funds from the US Department of Agriculture, the same USDA which, despite worldwide opposition, continued to finance the development of Terminator technology, now held by Monsanto.

In the 1990’s the UN’s World Health Organization launched a campaign to vaccinate millions of women in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines between the ages of 15 and 45, allegedly against Tentanus, a sickness arising from such things as stepping on a rusty nail. The vaccine was not given to men or boys, despite the fact they are presumably equally liable to step on rusty nails as women.

Because of that curious anomaly, Comite Pro Vida de Mexico, a Roman Catholic lay organization became suspicious and had vaccine samples tested. The tests revealed that the Tetanus vaccine being spread by the WHO only to women of child-bearing age contained human Chorionic Gonadotrophin or hCG, a natural hormone which when combined with a tetanus toxoid carrier stimulated antibodies rendering a woman incapable of maintaining a pregnancy. None of the women vaccinated were told.

It later came out that the Rockefeller Foundation along with the Rockefeller’s Population Council, the World Bank (home to CGIAR), and the United States’ National Institutes of Health had been involved in a 20-year-long project begun in 1972 to develop the concealed abortion vaccine with a tetanus carrier for WHO. In addition, the Government of Norway, the host to the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault, donated $41 million to develop the special abortive Tetanus vaccine. 12

Is it a coincidence that these same organizations, from Norway to the Rockefeller Foundation to the World Bank are also involved in the Svalbard seed bank project? According to Prof. Francis Boyle who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 enacted by the US Congress, the Pentagon is ‘now gearing up to fight and win biological warfare’ as part of two Bush national strategy directives adopted, he notes, ‘without public knowledge and review’ in 2002. Boyle adds that in 2001-2004 alone the US Federal Government spent $14.5 billion for civilian bio-warfare-related work, a staggering sum.

Rutgers University biologist Richard Ebright estimates that over 300 scientific institutions and some 12,000 individuals in the USA today have access to pathogens suitable for biowarfare. Alone there are 497 US Government NIH grants for research into infectious diseases with biowarfare potential. Of course this is being justified under the rubric of defending against possible terror attack as so much is today.

Many of the US Government dollars spent on biowarfare research involve genetic engineering. MIT biology professor Jonathan King says that the ‘growing bio-terror programs represent a significant emerging danger to our own population.’ King adds, ‘while such programs are always called defensive, with biological weapons, defensive and offensive programs overlap almost completely.’ 13

Time will tell whether, God Forbid, the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Bank of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation is part of another Final Solution, this involving the extinction of the Late, Great Planet Earth.

Notes

1 F. William Engdahl, Seeds of Destruction, Montreal, (Global Research, 2007).
2 Ibid, pp.72-90.
3 John H. Davis, Harvard Business Review, 1956, cited in Geoffrey Lawrence, Agribusiness, Capitalism and the Countryside, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1987. See also Harvard Business School, The Evolution of an Industry and a Seminar: Agribusiness Seminar, http://www.exed.hbs.edu/programs/agb/seminar.html.
4 Engdahl, op cit., p. 130.
5 Ibid. P. 123-30.
6 Myriam Mayet, The New Green Revolution in Africa: Trojan Horse for GMOs?, May, 2007, African Centre for Biosafety, www.biosafetyafrica.net.
7 ETC Group, Green Revolution 2.0 for Africa?, Communique Issue #94, March/April 2007.
8 Global Crop Diversity Trust website, in http://www.croptrust.org/main/donors.php.
9 Engdahl, op. cit., pp.227-236.
10 Anders Legarth Smith, Denmark Bans Glyphosates, the Active Ingredient in Roundup, Politiken, September 15, 2003, in organic.com.au/news/2003.09.15.
11 Tanya L. Green, The Negro Project: Margaret Sanger’s Genocide Project for Black American’s, in www.blackgenocide.org/negro.html.
12 Engdahl, op. cit., pp. 273-275; J.A. Miller, Are New Vaccines Laced With Birth-Control Drugs?, HLI Reports, Human Life International, Gaithersburg, Maryland; June/July 1995, Volume 13, Number 8.
13 Sherwood Ross, Bush Developing Illegal Bioterror Weapons for Offensive Use,’ December 20, 2006, in www.truthout.org.

(Global Research)

The 5 stages of economic collapse: Financial, Commercial, Political, Social & Cultural

By

TGE News

-

03/13/2013

Having given a lot of thought to both the differences and the similarities between Russia and the U.S. – the one that has collapsed already, and the one that is collapsing as I write this – I feel ready…to define five stages of collapse to serve as mental milestones as we gauge our own collapse-preparedness and see what can be done to improve it.

So writes Dmitry Orlov (www.cluborlov.blogspot.com) in edited excerpts from his original article* entitled Five Stages of Collapse.

Orlov goes on to say, in part:

…The proposed taxonomy ties each of the five collapse stages to the breaching of a specific level of trust, or faith, in the status quo. Although each stage causes physical, observable changes in the environment, these can be gradual…

The 5 stages of collapse

Stage 1: Financial collapse

Faith in “business as usual” is lost. The future is no longer assumed [to] resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out, and access to capital is lost.

Stage 2: Commercial collapse

Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.

Stage 3: Political collapse

Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.

Stage 4: Social collapse

Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.

Stage 5: Cultural collapse

Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for “kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity” (Turnbull, The Mountain People). Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes “May you die today so that I die tomorrow” (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago). There may even be some cannibalism.

The Five Stages of Collapse

Although many people imagine collapse to be a sort of elevator that goes to the sub-basement (our Stage 5) no matter which button you push, no such automatic mechanism can be discerned. Rather, driving us all to Stage 5 will require that a concerted effort be made at each of the intervening stages. That all the players seem poised to make just such an effort may give this collapse the form a classical tragedy – a conscious but inexorable march to perdition…Let us sketch out this process.

Stage 1 (Financial) Collapse Scenarios

Stage 1 collapse, as we are currently observing it, consists of two parts:

a part of the general population is forced to move, no longer able to afford the house they bought based on inflated assessments, forged income numbers, and foolish expectations of endless asset inflation. Since, technically, they should never have been allowed to buy these houses, and were only able to do so because of financial and political malfeasance, this is actually a healthy development.
men in expensive suits tossing bundles of suddenly worthless paper up in the air, ripping out their remaining hair, and (some of us might uncharitably hope) setting themselves on fire on the steps of the Federal Reserve. They, to express it in their own vernacular, “fucked up,” and so this is also just as it should be.

The government response to this could be to offer some helpful homilies about “the wages of sin” and to open a few soup kitchens and flop houses in a variety of locations including Wall Street. The message would be: “You former debt addicts and gamblers, as you say, ‘fucked up,’ and so this will really hurt for a long time. We will never let you anywhere near big money again. Get yourselves over to the soup kitchen, and bring your own bowl, because we don’t do dishes.” This would result in a stable Stage 1 collapse – the Second Great Depression.

However, this is unlikely, because in the U.S. the government happens to be debt addict and gambler number one. As individuals, we may have been as virtuous as we wished, but the government will have still run up exorbitant debts on our behalf. Every level of government, from local municipalities and authorities, which need the financial markets to finance their public works and public services, to the federal government, which relies on foreign investment to finance its endless wars, is addicted to public debt. They know they cannot stop borrowing, and so they will do anything they can to keep the game going for as long as possible.

About the only thing the government currently seems…fit to do is:

extend further credit to those in trouble,
set interest rates at far below inflation,
accept worthless bits of paper as collateral and
pump money into insolvent financial institutions.

This has the effect of diluting the dollar, further undermining its value, and will, in due course, lead to hyperinflation, which is bad enough in any economy, but is especially serious for one dominated by imports. As imports dry up and the associated parts of the economy shut down, we pass Stage 2: Commercial Collapse.

Stage 2 (Commercial) Collapse Scenarios

As businesses shut down, storefronts are boarded up and the population is left largely penniless and dependent on FEMA and charity for survival, the government may consider what to do next. It could, for example:

repatriate all foreign troops and set them to work on public works projects designed to directly help the population.
promote local economic self-sufficiency, by establishing community-supported agriculture programs, erecting renewable energy systems, and organizing and training local self-defence forces to maintain law and order.
order the Army Corps of Engineers to bulldoze buildings erected on former farmland around city centers, return the land to cultivation, and to construct high-density solar-heated housing in urban centers to resettle those who are displaced.
reduce homelessness by imposing a steep tax on vacant residential properties and funneling the proceeds into rent subsidies for the indigent.

With plenty of luck, such measures may be able to reverse the trend, eventually providing for a restoration of pre-Stage 2 conditions.

This may or may not be a good plan, but in any case it is rather unrealistic, because the United States, being so deeply in debt, will be forced to accede to the wishes of its foreign creditors, who own a lot of national assets (land, buildings, and businesses) and who would rather see a dependent American population slaving away working off their debt than a self-sufficient one, conveniently forgetting that they have mortgaged their children’s futures to pay for military fiascos, big houses, big cars, and flat-screen television sets.

A much more likely scenario, however, is that the federal government (knowing who butters their bread) will remain subservient to foreign financial interests and:

impose austerity conditions,
maintain law and order through draconian means, and
aide in the construction of foreign-owned factory towns and plantations.

As people start to think that having a government may not be such a good idea, conditions become ripe for Stage 3.

Stage 3 (Political) Collapse Scenarios

After a significant amount of bloodletting, much of the country becomes a no-go zone for the remaining authorities. Foreign creditors decide that their debts might not be repaid after all, cut their losses and depart in haste. The rest of the world decides to act as if there is no such place as The United States – because “nobody goes there any more”…

Stage 3 collapse can sometimes be avoided by the timely introduction of international peacekeepers and through the efforts of international humanitarian NGOs. In the aftermath of a Stage 2 collapse, domestic authorities are highly unlikely to have either the resources or the legitimacy, or even the will, to arrest the collapse dynamic and reconstitute themselves in a way that the population would accept.

As stage 3 collapse runs its course, the power vacuum left by the now defunct federal, state and local government is filled by a variety of new power structures. Remnants of former law enforcement and military, urban gangs, ethnic mafias, religious cults and wealthy property owners all attempt to build their little empires on the ruins of the big one, fighting each other over territory and access to resources. This is the age of Big Men: charismatic leaders, rabble-rousers, ruthless Macchiavelian princes and war lords. In the luckier places, they find it to their common advantage to pool their resources and amalgamate into some sort of legitimate local government, while in the rest their jostling for power leads to a spiral of conflict and open war.

Stage 4 (Social) Collapse Scenarios

Stage 4 collapse occurs when society becomes so disordered and impoverished that it can no longer support the Big Men, who become smaller and smaller, and eventually fade from view. Society fragments into extended families and small tribes of a dozen or so families, who find it advantageous to band together for mutual support and defense. This is the form of society that has existed over some 98.5% of humanity’s existence as a biological species, and can be said to be the bedrock of human existence. Humans can exist at this level of organization for thousands, perhaps millions of years. Most mammalian species go extinct after just a few million years, but, for all we know, Homo Sapiens still have a million or two left.

Stage 5 (Cultural) Collapse Scenarios

If pre-collapse society is too atomized, alienated and individualistic to form cohesive extended families and tribes, or if its physical environment becomes so disordered and impoverished that hunger and starvation become widespread, then Stage 5 collapse becomes likely. At this stage, a simpler biological imperative takes over, to preserve the life of the breeding couples. Families disband, the old are abandoned to their own devices, and children are only cared for up to age 3. All social unity is destroyed, and even the couples may disband for a time, preferring to forage on their own and refusing to share food. This is the state of society described by the anthropologist Colin Turnbull in his book The Mountain People. If society prior to Stage 5 collapse can be said to be the historical norm for humans, Stage 5 collapse brings humanity to the verge of physical extinction.

Conclusion

As we can easily imagine, the default is cascaded failure: each stage of collapse can easily lead to the next, perhaps even overlapping it. In Russia, the process was arrested just past Stage 3: there was considerable trouble with ethnic mafias and even some warlordism, but government authority won out in the end. In my other writings, I go into a lot of detail in describing the exact conditions that inadvertently made Russian society relatively collapse-proof. Here, I will simply say that these ingredients are not currently present in the United States.

In light of the unfolding global sovereign debt fiasco…[however, I have now come to the conclusion that, after] years of both government and finance betting on a future that cannot exist, doubling down every time they lose again, the Five Stages of Collapse is nothing but a nice theory.

[Instead,] I think that the stage 1 (financial) and stage 2 (political) collapses will compress into a single chaotic episode. Commercial collapse will not be far behind, because global commerce is dependent on global finance, and once international credit locks up the tankers and the container ships won’t sail. Shortly thereafter it will be lights out.

Source: munKNEE.com

Leafy greens influence gene expression, boosting native immune response to fight disease

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TGE News

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03/13/2013

Our native immune system is truly amazing in its complexity and ability to continually adapt to an ever changing environment of potential pathogens that could easily colonize and highjack our health if not detected and eradicated quickly. Many people, especially as they age, have a compromised immune response due to negative lifestyle factors including smoking, exposure to environmental and household toxins, stress and especially diet. Up to 80 percent of our initial immune response takes place in our digestive system, and the body uses cues from what we eat to activate essential actions to potential invaders.

Consuming a largely processed food diet that is void of nutrients and flavonoids dulls our immune system and dramatically increases the risk of infection, inflammation and chronic disease. A research team from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute’s Molecular Immunology Division in Australia have published the result of their work in the journal Nature Immunology that demonstrates how eating your greens may be even more important than previously thought, with the discovery that an immune cell population essential for intestinal health could be controlled by leafy greens in your diet.

Leafy greens and crucifers help express digestive genes that boost our innate immune response

A special type of immune cell known as an innate lymphoid cell (ILC) is found throughout the digestive tract and can help protect the body from invading pathogens and also provides a balance between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bacteria in the intestine. Additionally ILC’s play an important role in controlling food allergies, inflammatory diseases and obesity, and may even prevent the development of bowel cancers. The team discovered that a gene (T-bet) is responsible for producing these critical immune cells and is expressed by signals fed from the foods we eat.

Lead study author, Dr. Gabrielle Belz noted “In this study, we discovered that T-bet is the key gene that instructs precursor cells to develop into ILCs, which it does in response to signals in the food we eat and to bacteria in the gut.” The researchers found that proteins in leafy green cruciferous vegetables interact with surface cell receptors that switch on T-bet to initiate the innate immune response in the digestive tract. Further, the team determined that ILC’s produce a hormone (interleukin-22) that protects the body from invading bacteria and help maintain a healthy environment in the intestine by balancing bacteria levels, and may also help to resolve cancerous digestive lesions.

Dr. Belz concluded “Our research shows that, without the gene T-bet, the body is more susceptible to bacterial infections that enter through the digestive system. This suggests that boosting ILCs in the gut may aid in the treatment of these bacterial infections.” This research helps to explain why a natural food diet consisting of at least five to nine daily servings of vegetables and fruits is essential to promote optimal health and keep our vital immune systems running at peak efficiency to protect our well-being and longevity.

About the author:
John Phillip is a Certified Nutritional Consultant and Health Researcher and Author who writes regularly on the cutting edge use of diet, lifestyle modifications and targeted supplementation to enhance and improve the quality and length of life. John is the author of ‘Your Healthy Weight Loss Plan’, a comprehensive EBook explaining how to use Diet, Exercise, Mind and Targeted Supplementation to achieve your weight loss goal. Visit My Optimal Health Resource to continue reading the latest health news updates, and to download your Free 48 page copy of ‘Your Healthy Weight Loss Plan’.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.nature.com/ni/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ni.2545.html
http://www.nutraingredients.com
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130304105658.htm
http://www.wehi.edu.au

Source: Natural News.com

Facebook knows your secrets: ‘Likes’ reveal users’ personality

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TGE News

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03/13/2013

Facebook’s ‘like’ button can reveal more than you realize, a new study has showed. By liking posts and links, you may be revealing personal secrets, like your sexuality or religious and political views. The findings have raised privacy concerns.

A study by the National Academy of Sciences examined 58,000 Facebook users in the US, who volunteered their likes, demographic profiles and psychometric test results. Researchers managed to draw “surprisingly accurate” findings about a given user’s race, IQ, sexuality, substance use, personality and political views by analyzing the topics and items they ‘liked,’ even if they set strong privacy settings for their page.

The study’s authors developed an algorithm that uses Facebook ‘likes’ to create personality profiles, potentially revealing a user’s personality. Anyone with training in data analysis could be able to derive such information, even if users had not explicitly shared it, they explained.

As a result, researchers were able to predict whether men were homosexual with 88 percent accuracy by their ‘like’ clicks on sites related to gay marriage or same-sex relations. Preferences of music and TV shows, for example, were also more revealing than users may have imagined: Men who liked the musical TV show ‘Glee’ were more likely to be gay, the study showed.

In 82 percent of cases, Christians and Muslims were correctly identified among the volunteer profiles. And the study was not only predictive of sexuality or religion, but also a user’s IQ.

Those with higher IQs tended to more frequently like ‘The Colbert Report’ TV show, for example, or films like ‘The Godfather’ and ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Those with lower IQs liked Harley Davidsons and Bret Michaels of the rock band Poison.

Similarly accurate predictions were also made about users’ political views, and could even predict potential voting patterns during elections, mapped to users’ relationship status, their number of Facebook friends and a half-dozen other personality traits.

“The important point is that, on one hand, it is good that people’s behavior is predictable because it means Facebook can suggest very good stories on your news feed,” South China Morning Post quoted Michael Kosinsky, one of the academics behind the study as saying.

While the study could be seen as a new step towards creating more personalized content, it also highlighted the potential threats to privacy posed by Facebook. “What is shocking is that you can use the same data to predict your political views or your sexual orientation. This is something most people don’t realize you can do,” Kosinsky warned.

Similar profiles could be created using other digital data, including Web searches, emails and mobile phone activity, according to a co-author of the study: ``Your likes may be saying more about you than you realize,” David Sitwell, a Cambridge University researcher said, according to AFP. “But you don’t realize that years later all those likes are building up against you.”

Facebook declined to comment on the study.

Source: RT

DHS Purchased Enough Ammo to Sustain a Hot War in America For Years

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TGE News

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03/13/2013

Shepard Ambellas | Intellihub

For the next five years the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is ramping up for what could be nothing other than a conflict on American soil. The question is, “Will the conflict be from an invading force or with America’s very own citizens?”

In fact the situation is much worse than anyone could have ever imagined as one could only hope that DHS doesn’t have the intention in standing off with the American people.

While profiteering by large corporations is likely a motive, we also have to question the reality that lies right in front of our face.

Although the government claims that the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia uses 15 million rounds a year, that estimate is for all agencies combined and just includes target ammunition. We are now talking about high velocity sniper style ammunition and hollow points on top of target ammunition, designed to kill and not very economical for target practice.

Marketplace.FedBid.com lists one partial government bid order for the following proving that DHS is indeed seeking hollow point rounds;

Line Item(s)

Item No	Description	Qty	Unit
001	Commercial Leaded Training Ammo (CLTA) Pistol Cartridge .40 caliber 165 Grain, jacketed Hollow point(Jhp) p/n P40HSTS3G OR EQUAL. BRASS CASING 100,000 ROUNDS PRICE PER 1000 ROUNDS WILL INCLUDE DELIVERY.	100	MX
002	Commercial Leaded Training Ammo (CLTA) 9MM 115 GRAIN JACKETED HOLLOW POINT P/N 9BP-115 GRAIN JHP OR EQUAL BRASS CASING 100,000 ROUNDS PRICE PER 1000 ROUNDS WILL INCLUDE DELIVERY.	100	MX
003	Commercial Leaded Training Ammo (CLTA) PISTOL CARTIDGE 9MM BALL 124 GRAIN P/N AE9AP OR EQUAL BRASS CASING 40,000 ROUNDS PRICE PER 1000 ROUNDS WILL INCLUDE DELIVEY

According to a recent report by Andre Buncombe, “US forces have fired so many bullets in Iraq and Afghanistan – an estimated 250,000 for every insurgent killed – that American ammunition-makers cannot keep up with demand.

A recent government report says that US forces are now using 1.8 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition a year. The total has more than doubled in five years, largely as a result of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as changes in military doctrine.”

However and whatever way you slice it something is wrong with this picture. Take a look at the ACLU’s recent stance on armored vehicles (tanks) on the streets of America for example; towns with small populations and virtually no violent crime are literally getting militarized equipment suitable for war at the behest of lying city council members while expending our tax dollars.

An excerpt from a recent report released by the ACLU entitled, Town’s Don’t Need Tanks, But They Have Them reads;

Keene, New Hampshire has a population of 23,409, except during the months of July and August when campers flock in for the summer. Keene’s violent crime index? 134.4, compared to a national average of 213.6. Most common crime? Theft. Good thing the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) gave Keene money to buy a BearCat, an armored counter-attack vehicle. What is Keene using its BearCat for? Good question.

Here’s what we do know: a Keene City Council member has admitted that the city lied to DHS about its need for terrorism-prevention tools. To explain why the police included the word “terrorism” on their application for federal funding for the Bear Cat purchase, a city council member said, “Our application talked about the danger of domestic terrorism, but that’s just something you put in the grant application to get the money.” He continued, “What red-blooded American cop isn’t going to be excited about getting a toy like this? That’s what it comes down to.”

So while we do show that local towns have police that like big expensive toys, we also see the abuse of taxpayer monies which are lining privatized corporations bank accounts all the while setting a dominant presence above the American people that DHS will control us at all costs.

So is this more than profiteering and the staging of power? Is the US government anticipating the breakdown of society in America as we know it? Possibly an economic collapse or some type of major despair? An invasion? Or are they just scared of free minded individuals who take note of the constitution put into effect by our once great nations forefathers?

Sources:

^http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2013/03/11/1-6-billion-rounds-of-ammo-for-homeland-security-its-time-for-a-national-conversation/

^http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_22594279/homeland-security-aims-buy-1-6-billion-rounds

^http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/us-forced-to-import-bullets-from-israel-as-troops-use-250000-for-every-rebel-killed-28580666.html

About the Author

Shepard Ambellas is the founder & director of Intellihub.com (a popular alternative news website), researcher, investigative journalist, radio talk show host, and filmmaker.

Source: Intellihub.com

10 Things You May Not Know About The Papal Conclave

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TGE News

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03/13/2013

The Sistine Chapel is possibly the most lavish polling station on the planet. Inside, under its vaulted and exquisitely painted ceiling 115 Cardinals from around the globe are voting to elect a new Pope. That much we all know, but what about the other bits? What actually goes on inside the chapel whilst the world waits for news? Where do the Cardinals sleep? What about food and bathroom breaks? Can a newly elected Pope say “thanks but no thanks” to taking on the job of head of the Catholic Church?

1. Under lock and key. Conclave comes from the Latin “cum-clave” meaning literally “with key” – the cardinal-electors will be locked in the Sistine Chapel each day until Benedict XVI’s successor is chosen. The tradition dates back to 1268, when after nearly three years of deliberation the cardinals had still not agreed on a new pope, prompting the people of Rome to hurry things up by locking them up and cutting their rations. Duly elected, the new pope, Gregory X, ruled that in future cardinals should be sequestered from the start of the conclave.

2. Don’t even try to spy. During the conclave they are allowed no contact with the outside the world – no papers, no TV, no phones, no Twitter. And the world is allowed no contact with them. The threat of excommunication hangs over any cardinal who breaks the rules.Before the conclave starts, the Sistine Chapel is swept for recording equipment and hidden cameras. It is a myth that a fake floor is laid to cater for anti-bugging devices… Anti-bugging devices are used, and the floor is raised, but only to protect the marble mosaic floor.

3. In house or outhouse? Until 2005, the cardinals endured Spartan conditions in makeshift “cells” close to the Sistine Chapel. They slept on hard beds and were issued with chamber pots. Pope John Paul II changed that with the construction of a five-storey 130-room guest house near St Peter’s – Domus Sanctae Marthae (St Martha’s House). But cardinals still have to rough it while voting. In an interview with the Catholic News Service last week, Antonio Paolucci, the director of the Vatican Museum said: “I believe they may be installing portable chemical toilets inside the chapel.”

4. The interval is almost over. The pontificate used to be known as a “reign” – hence the period between two popes being called an interregnum (“between reigns”). Many of the regal trappings of the papacy were set aside by Pope Paul VI, who began his pontificate in 1963 with a coronation, but never wore the beehive-shaped papal tiara again.

5. Voting is all sewn up. The cardinals hold one vote on day one and then two each morning and afternoon until a candidate wins a two-thirds majority. Each writes his choice on a slip of paper, in disguised handwriting, and folds it in half. Cardinals then process to the altar one by one and place the ballots in an urn. The papers are mixed, counted, opened and scrutinised by three cardinals, the third of whom passes a needle and thread through the counted votes. At the end of each morning and afternoon session the papers are burned.

6. Black smoke and white smoke. Those 115 ballot papers produce an unusual amount of smoke… which pours out of a chimney specially installed on the roof of the Sistine Chapel. A chemical is mixed with the paper to produce black smoke when voting is inconclusive, or white smoke when a pope has been elected. But even the white smoke looks dark against a bright sky, so to avoid any possible confusion, white smoke is accompanied by the pealing of bells. In 2005, though, the official responsible for authorising the bells was temporarily occupied with other duties, so there was a period of confusion while white smoke billowed out, and the bells of St Peter’s remained silent.

7. One size does not fit all. The Pope has to look the part when he is presented to the faithful from a balcony overlooking St Peter’s Square. So papal tailors Gammarelli prepare three sets of vestments – in small, medium and large sizes. These will include a white cassock, a white silk sash, a white zucchetto (skullcap), red leather shoes and a red velvet mozzetta or capelet with ermine trim – a style revived by Benedict XVI. The Pope dresses by himself, donning a gold-corded pectoral cross and a red embroidered stole. (Popes traditionally wore red, but in 1566 St Pius V, a Dominican, decided to continue wearing his white robes. Only the Pope’s red mozzetta, capelet and shoes remain from the pre-1566 days.)

8. What are the odds? Experts suggest more than £10m ($15m) will be wagered as people guess which cardinal will get the nod – making this the world’s most bet-upon non-sporting event. It’s not a new phenomenon. In 1503 betting on the pope was already referred to as “an old practice”. Pope Gregory XIV was so cheesed off that in 1591 he threatened punters with excommunication, but the gambling continues unabated. Prominent Italian and Latin American names currently lead the field.

9. “Thanks but no thanks”. Technically, an elected Pope can refuse to take up the position, but it’s not really done to turn down the Holy Spirit. That said, few relish the prospect of leading the world’s largest Church, beset as it is at the moment with falling congregation numbers, sex abuse scandals and internal wrangling. So many new popes are overcome with emotion after their election that the first room they enter, to dress for the balcony scene, is commonly known as the Room of Tears.

10. Sex equality has no place at the Vatican. Chairs with a large hole cut in the seat are sometimes thought to have been used to check the sex of a new Pope. The story goes that the aim of the checks was to prevent a repeat of the scandal of “Pope Joan”, a legendary female cardinal supposedly elected pope in the 14th Century. Most historians agree that the Joan story is nonsense. Examples of the chairs, the sedes stercoraria, are apparently held in museums, but their purpose is unclear. One unconfirmed theoryis that they were used to check that the new pope had not been castrated.

About the Author

Chris Carrington is a writer, researcher and lecturer with a background in science, technology and environmental studies. Chris is an editor for The Daily Sheeple. Wake the flock up!

Source: The Daily Sheeple

The Living Matrix (Full Documentary)

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TGE Media

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03/13/2013

The revolution in alternative healing.

This full-length film brings you breakthroughs that will transform your understanding of how to get well and stay well. Now you can get an up-close look at the science of information as medicine. Leading researchers and health practitioners share their discoveries on the “miracle cures” traditional medicine can’t explain.

“If you think you have an incurable disease, if you think
it yourself – you are right.
If you think your problem is curable, then you are also right”

Top 5 Ways to Practice Non-Conformity in the Matrix

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TGE News

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03/13/2013

The human mind is easily programmed, and human behavior is largely autonomous once the sub-conscious has a suggestion of what to do. By default, people seem inclined to conform to the ideas, environment and behaviors around them, at least as a means of survival and of fitting in. Unless an individual takes charge of their own mind and their own behavior, most people are content to follow along with what other people are doing, even if that means doing something self-destructive.

As we grow, we learn how to play and interact with others, and we learn how others react to us. We begin to develop an understanding of which behavior is acceptable and which is not, and if we are paying attention, we realize that there is a subtle system of rewards and punishments involved in social interaction. Adherence to this system is what keeps society together, and depending on what rewards and punishments appeal to us, we choose which ideas and behaviors to conform to and comply with. As a result, different societal roles become open to us.

The new rebel then, the new hero, is someone, anyone, who combats the staleness of a decaying society by looking at the areas in our lives most in need of repair and then, deliberately, does not do what the conformist majority is doing. This is the thoughtful person who applies the knowledge and information we have available today in the pursuit of living in creative ways that defy the herd and defend life and liberty.

In no particular order, here are the top five ways to practice non-conformity in the world that we have created for ourselves – the matrix of self-destruction.

Monetary Non-conformity – The human race is enslaved to a corrupt and inflationary monetary system. To act as a balance to this, any opportunity to conduct life without using the dollar and the credit system is a stunning act of non-conformity. By practicing trade, barter and local exchange, and using alternative currencies whenever possible, a practical statement is made in support of an alternative to central bank tyranny and manipulation. Most important, however, is the simple decision to spend less overall and live without consumer debt.
Shun the Materialistic and the Entertainment Driven Lifestyle – The consumption of consumer goods in our world has grown to dangerous proportions, and no matter your political bent, you can’t deny the existence of the plastic ocean gaining mass in the Pacific. To be realistic about one’s true needs and to consume less “stuff” makes one stand out as a non-conformist in today’s culture. Much of this consumerism is part of a lifestyle of entertainment that we have developed in recent decades. We seem to value being entertained more than anything else, and we will do anything, and incur any debt, in order to get that which entertains and distracts us. Choosing a non-consumeristic, non-entertainment driven lifestyle is an important act of disobedience to the norm.
Health Rebel – The truth about the condition of American health is ugly, and clearly something is wrong with the conformist ideas of diet and health. From horse meat, to high-fructose corn syrup, to GMOs, the conformist diet is deathly harmful to our well-being. To continue on with this unhealthy lifestyle is self-destructive, and to buck this trend simply means to take care of yourself properly, as we all should be doing anyways. Taking care of the body is easy and enjoyable, and each step towards health brings with it a renewed outlook on life. Taking control of diet, finding some enjoyable type of exercise, and being courageous enough to try out alternative, non-pharmaceutical modalities of healing when possible, are, oddly enough, all one has to do in order to stand out as a health non-conformist.
Re-Education – The quality of the future can be seen in the quality of our youth, and the current models of building quality people seem to be falling short. Trying out new modalities of education for our children is an inspiring way to work towards a better vision for the future. Green schooling, homeschooling and even un-schooling children offer hope for something different from the next generation. With access to unlimited educational resources via the Internet, almost anyone can educate themselves in almost any field, and so the re-education of the individual is an act of great non-conformity.
Experience-Based Spirituality – The nature of personal spirituality itself is evolving in these transformative times as people have access to a vast assortment of ideas, philosophies, wisdom traditions, substances, and dogmas. The non-conformist of today explores practices and ideas that work best to induce direct experience, following intuition to develop a connection to the sacred part of humanity, which is so routinely trampled in our hectic world. Finding inner peace through whichever religion or philosophy you choose is critical to creating a world free from toxic effects of collective fear. There is a war being waged against the conscience and consciousness of the average person, and seeking direct, personal spiritual experience and connection to the great mystery is the way to prevail.

The normal, conformist modality of human behavior seems to be contributing to and exacerbating the problems of this world, rather than helping to eradicate them or working to alleviate suffering. To assist in the collective shift toward a means of living and being that sustains life rather than ensures self-destruction is as easy as practicing non-conformity whenever possible.

About the Author

Sigmund Fraud is a survivor of modern psychiatry and a dedicated mental activist. He is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com where he pursues the possibility of a massive shift towards a more psychologically aware future for mankind.

Source: Waking Times

How medicine is killing us all: Antibiotics, superbugs and the next global pandemic

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TGE News

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03/13/2013

While globalists like Bill Gates are feverishly working on ways to reduce human population through vaccines, GMOs and abortions, an even more effective population killer is now emerging: drug-resistant strains of “gram-negative” bacteria: Superbugs.

The global abuse of antibiotics and the rise of drug-resistant superbugs has become an urgent issue of survival for the human race, and even mainstream medical experts are now describing microbiological doomsday scenarios if the situation isn’t reversed. As The Guardian reported today:

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria with the potential to cause untreatable infections pose “a catastrophic threat” to the population, the chief medical officer for Britain warns in a report calling for urgent action worldwide.

Big Pharma causes the problem, then walks away

How did it get this bad? After Big Pharma polluted the medical landscape with a flood of antibiotics that caused drug-resistant strains to emerge, it has since abandoned any new research on antibiotics, claiming “there’s no profit in it.”

The antibiotics pipeline is empty. But drug-resistant bacteria aren’t asleep at the wheel; they’re rapidly mutating, developing new biological defenses against Big Pharma’s drugs. With each passing month, the superbugs get stronger. “No new classes of antibiotics have been developed since 1987, and none are in the pipeline across the world,” reports The Independent.

It continues, “…for Big Pharma, there is little money in expensively developing new compounds which will only be taken in short courses, compared to a drug for blood pressure, say, which may have lifelong use for patients.”

Even if it were profitable to develop new antibiotics, it’s a losing game anyway because a drug that takes 10 years to develop can become useless in as little as one year in the real world. That’s thanks to the rapid mutation capabilities of gut bacteria.

The net result is that the western medical system that was built on chemicals as the weapons of war against disease has run out of chemicals to fight superbugs. The “end game” of modern medicine is upon us, and the drug industry openly admits it’s not even working on solutions to this problem.

Natural remedies for superbugs have been suppressed and censored

Meanwhile, the governments and medical institutions of the world have, for an entire century, suppressed the natural antibiotics cures that can very effectively kill superbugs. Natural remedies like colloidal silver, aloe vera, garlic, medicinal herbs and high-potency nutritional therapies have been attacked, censored and criminalized. This has left the population with a problem that’s best stated in three parts:

#1) A wave of antibiotic-resistant superbugs is accelerating toward humanity.
#2) Big Pharma has run out of chemicals to treat them.
#3) The corrupt medical system has censored natural antibiotics.

The result is that the people are left with no solutions other than to lay down and die.

Not coincidentally, that may be exactly what the system wants you to do.

Modern medicine IS population control

It turns out that the entire system of medicine has been veering aggressively toward population control for the past decade.

For example, vaccines were once widely known to be dangerous for pregnant women, but the medical authorities “flipped the script” just a few years ago and said that pregnant women now need more vaccines than everybody else. The upshot is that vaccines cause huge increases in spontaneous abortions (i.e. population reduction). For example, Gardasil is reportedly linked to more stillbirths than any other vaccine. Eugenicists like Bill Gates refer to this as “reproductive health,” by the way. That’s code for “population reduction.”

Chemotherapy would have never been given to pregnant women in years past, but now it’s actually recommended as a preventive cancer therapy for expectant mothers. Chemotherapy, of course, is a chemical weapon that kills unborn babies and causes spontaneous abortions, organ damage and birth defects.

The aggression behind today’s big vaccine push is also largely a population control measure. Vaccines cause infertility due to the mercury, aluminum and formaldehyde chemicals they contain. All of these chemicals interfere with fertility and gestation.

Most of the pharmaceuticals being heavily pushed today (statin drugs, blood thinners, etc.) are at least partially designed to kill you before you can collect social security.

The idea is to make sure the population only lives long enough to keep working and paying into the system, but not long enough to actually collect benefits which are bankrupting the nation. Before long, “dying early” is going to be pushed as “patriotic” and “good for the country.” You can fully expect the socialist government to start spreading guilt about longevity. If you live long enough to collect money from the government, they’re going to make sure you feel incredibly guilty about it. (“How dare you live long enough to collect some of the money we stole out of your paycheck during your working years!”)

Superbugs are a key ally to the system in all this because they create a convenient scapegoat to take the blame for a failed medical system. A patient who is over-medicated, immuno-suppressed and taken over by an aggressive superbug infection can be written off as another casualty of a “fatal infection.” Never mind the fact that the person was made vulnerable to infections by all the toxic therapies and prescription drugs that serve as the foundation of western chemical medicine.

Superbugs are the new Lee Harvey Oswalds of medicine: they take the blame for the killing and prevent people from asking in-depth questions about what really happened.

Probiotics remain completely ignored

What’s really astonishing in all this is the delusional belief that only Big Pharma can “discover” new drugs that kill these drug-resistant bacteria. In all of western medicine, there is never any discussion of the all-important role of probiotics in establishing healthy gut flora, thereby crowding out the dangerous strains. If “anti” biotics are the problem, then “pro” biotics are the solution.

It is absolutely astonishing that modern medicine refuses to advocate probiotics, and it reveals how the entire system of modern medicine remains stuck in a 1940’s mentality where the body was a “battleground” and medicines were “weapons” to be unleashed against “the enemy.”

This delusional metaphor is what has driven the failed system of modern medicine for nearly a century, and it’s the reason superbugs and antibiotics have reached a point of such insanity that the entire population is now threatened with the possibility of a runaway global pandemic.

The medical system also doesn’t understand synergistic phytonutrients and how a concert of plant-based chemicals work together in ways that are far more powerful than any one isolated chemical could ever be. Big Pharma is always looking for the next great isolated molecule but can never embrace the idea that isolated chemicals are always less effective and more dangerous than full-spectrum phytochemicals from the natural world. (A drug can never be as powerful as a plant, because a drug doesn’t have the phytonutrient complexity of a plant.)

Eliminating gram-negative superbugs from the gut of a patient is easy if you aren’t medically ignorant (i.e. trained in medical school). Simply embracing the power of antibacterial superfoods like garlic — combined with the health-protective powers of probiotics — yields phenomenal results. Food choice also impacts gut health (obviously), yet doctors rarely talk to their patients about what they should eat. Somehow, modern medicine has isolated food choice from health outcomes, creating a truly delusional health care system in which patients are treated with deadly chemicals rather than food as medicine.

This is what got us to this crisis in the first place: doctors functioning as chemical pushers… and patients surrendering their personal power to the failed medical system.

Why humanity’s superbug crisis can’t be solved with chemicals

To get out of this crisis, we can’t approach it with the same type of thinking that caused the problem in the first place. This isn’t a situation that can be solved with “another chemical.” This is going to require transcending the failed age of chemical medicine and embracing the factors of healthy gut flora — and that has everything to do with diet, supplements, superfoods, etc.

The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI), not surprisingly, can only see a future based on more chemicals. “More still needs to be done and we believe that for there to be a continual supply of effective antibiotics, a comprehensive review of the R&D [research and development] environment and good stewardship are required urgently,” they say (Guardian source, above).

This is a classic example of medical insanity. It’s the chemicals that brought us to this crisis, and the only solution they can think of is coming up with more chemicals. (Remember the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results…)

This is exactly like the Federal Reserve observing a global currency confidence crisis and deciding the best solution is to print more money. It’s like a heroin addict reasoning that the way to quit heroin is to take just one more hit.

When it comes to superbugs and medicine, we are living in an age of outright, runaway insanity that has infected nearly all the doctors, hospitals, drug companies and health authorities. Unless they wake up and finally recognize the error of their ways, this situation is only going to spiral into an ever-expanding crisis that may soon lead to a runaway superbug plague.

They don’t want to cure you; they want to kill you (slowly)

Yet the failed battle cry continues: “Just one more chemical!” Little do the doctors realize the system doesn’t want to find cures for infections and disease… the system wants people to die as early and as often as possible (but not before doctors, cancer clinics and drug companies extract their share of revenues from their human victims).

What they’re waiting for now is the spread of superbugs from hospital patients to home families, communities and neighborhoods. This is where things really accelerate in terms of disease transmission and population reduction. The doctors pump grandma full of antibiotics and drugs, destroy her intestinal flora and immune system, expose her to the deadly superbugs circulating around the hospital, then send her home with family where she can infect everyone else.

That’s modern medicine. That’s how the system really works, and that’s why medicine is a very real threat to the survival of the human race.

Source: Natural News.com

Hackers release financial records of first lady, vice president, att’y general, others

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TGE News

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03/12/2013

U.S. first lady Michelle Obama, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

Hackers are continuing to leak the alleged personal finance records of US politicians and celebrities. The list of those supposedly exposed now includes First Lady Michelle Obama, Donald Trump, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Britney Spears.

When Gossip website TMZ first reported the leak on Monday, without disclosing the hacking site’s name, the list contained sensitive information for 11 prominent Americans: Celebrities Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, Mel Gibson, Ashton Kutcher, Jay-Z and Beyonce, as well as public figures Joe Biden, Robert Mueller, Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder and LAPD Chief Charlie Beck.

The number of victims of the hacking has increased by 6 over the day, with Michelle Obama now topping the list. The site does not explain why these particular individuals had their personal data leaked.

The website in question is Exposed.su, RT has learned.

The ‘.su’ domain was country code for USSR for only a short period – from 1990 to 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. The hackers’ website is linked to a twitter account partly written in bad Russian, as though the messages were translated by machine.

The page contains links to the names of the figures allegedly hacked, an image of a girl holding her forefinger up to her mouth, and a quote from the television program Dexter: “If you believe that God makes miracles, you have to wonder if Satan has a few up his sleeve.”

While most of the celebrities’ pictures on the website are unflattering, the clear exception is Michelle Obama – whose page shows an ‘I love Michelle Obama’ sign and features an excuse written above her personal data: “Blame your husband, we still love you, Michelle. <3”

Among the specific details included in the data dump are the Social Security numbers and alleged home addresses and contact information for most of the celebrities, as well as their credit reports and other financial information.

Several of the purported credit reports appear to have been generated last week, according to AP, which also said that the Los Angeles Police Department is investigating how the Social Security number, address and credit report of their police chief ended up on the site. “The best word I can use to describe it is creepy,” Los Angeles police Commander Andrew Smith said in an interview with AP.

The LAPD also vowed to investigate leaks of personal info of any celebrities living in the city if they make such a request.

The FBI confirmed the following day that it was investigating not only the leak of FBI Director Robert Mueller’s personal data but the entire affair, according to an official’s comment to the Huffington Post.

Screenshot from www.exposed.su

For former first lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, hackers have released only her Social Security Number and places of residence. For other targets, though, the information leaked allows for much more of a glimpse into their finances.

Although disclosures of financial details are not uncommon for government officials, or discussions of a celebrity’s net worth, the data made public is never as detailed as that disclosed by the Exposed.su hackers. Further, anyone whose Social Security Number is made public is at risk of identity theft.

According to the documents hosted on Exposed.su, Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher was spending $981 each month for a car he leased from Chase Auto Finance in 2004. Rapper Jay-Z, real name Sean Carter, has been reported to a collections agency on at least one occasion. As of this month, he also has a HSBC mortgage account with a balance of $816,882, and a credit line of over $5.5 million. The page for his wife, performer Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter, includes the singer’s SSN, a list of homes and a handful of phone numbers, as well as bank transaction information.

RT called one of the numbers listed as belonging to Beyoncé to confirm its authenticity, but was transferred to two separate operators, who claimed that they had received a number of calls. That number was revealed to be registered to Gelfand, Rennert & Feldman, “A leading full-service business management firm for entertainers, executives and select high net worth individuals.”

AP attempted to reach representatives of celebrities on the hackers’ list, only to have them decline to comment or receive no response at all.

Source: RT

5 Ways to Recharge, Enjoy Life Without Technology

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TGE News

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03/12/2013

I was a little late to the cell-phone craze. I admit, technology didn’t really strike me until about 2006. Despite social networks connecting people across the world every second of every day, it seems that truly connecting with people is going down the tubes. Unfortunately, it’s quite difficult to unplug yourself from this technological link.

Now, like many if not most Americans, I often panic when driving without my phone. It didn’t take long for me to go from freedom to completely dependent on my little device. Along with about half of the U.S. population, I use a smart phone; it’s my calendar, my mailbox, my phone, and my business partner all in one. But no matter how much anyone can’t live without their phone, it must be turned off from time to time in order to truly appreciate the world, engage spiritually, and reconnect with nature and those close to us.

5 Ways You Can Unplug

1. Socialize

No, really socialize—like face-to-face with people you know in “real life”. Get a cup of coffee; go out for lunch. And while you’re both spending time together, try shutting the phone down. Trust me, the world won’t end and your friend will probably appreciate it.

2. Go for a Hike

People used to go on walks with compasses; these walks were called hikes. While you don’t need to delve into a wilderness journey with nothing but the clothes on your back, it’s always nice to go for a walk in the woods. The Japanese call this forest bathing, and it has been shown to not only boost health, but make people happier and even smarter. Leave your phone in your car, or if that’s too scary—shut it off and put it in your backpack. Resist the temptation to Tweet every step of your hike and simply enjoy Mother Nature.

3. Cook and Eat a Meal

Food preparation, when done correctly, can take a significant amount of time and attention. Do it this time without your phone, Ipad or your laptop on the countertop. Don’t take a photo of your plate and don’t update Facebook with “So full. Cooked the best meal EVER”! Just enjoy it.

4. Read a Book

Read a book with actual paper pages! Kindles and other readers are great, for storing a lot of material, but nothing can take the place of a literal page-turner. Put the devices away and crack open a book or magazine. Don’t get distracted by text messages or phone calls. Really get into the book like you probably did long ago, in what may seem like a previous life when your phone wasn’t in your hand every minute of the day.

5. Turn off the Television

Most importantly of all, turn off the TV. The TV is one of the most impact mediums used today to shape both the conscious and subconscious. Celebrities, television shows, the new, and advertisements are responsible for everything from how people think to how they act. A very open statement, I know, but it’s incredibly important to unplug yourself from the tube as much as you can. The news portrays what it wants you to see as much as television programs tell people how to think.

Disconnecting from technology is important. When we are constantly “on call”, it can significantly boost stress levels and contribute to the feeling that there isn’t enough time in the day. Notice there was one thing in common with these few suggestions and that was the powering down of your gadgets. Freedom isn’t being able to be reached no matter where you are or what you are doing; freedom is in finding those places and moments when you can appreciate silence, solitude, or just being in the moment without being tied down to a machine. This is one aspect of freedom, anyway.

Source: NaturalSociety.com

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UK journalists worked as spies for MI6: Investigation

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TGE News

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03/12/2013

Several high-profile British journalists have collaborated with Britain’s secret intelligence agency MI6 during the Cold War, a new investigation shows.

According to a BBC Radio 4′s Document programme called “The ‘secret agents’ of the UK press”, reports by a Soviet newspaper 45 years ago of “leaked” MI6 documents revealing the agency’s links with leading British newspapers were probably genuine.

In December 1968, the Russian newspaper Izvestia published a series of articles accusing senior journalists in the UK of being spies, listing their names and alleged codenames.

The paper said journalists and editors at the Observer, the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the BBC worked secretly with MI6.

At the time, the claims were dismissed by all the newspapers and journalists concerned. The head of the BBC’s External Service described the articles as “a fantastic example of secret police propaganda”.

However, the BBC investigation by Jeremy Duns, which was aired earlier this week, suggested the documents were probably genuine and revealed how British spies used journalists to gather information.

The programme found the format and language of the documents published in the Russian paper were true, but establishing whether they were genuine was difficult, as MI6 has released no relevant files and all the people named are now dead.

The programme also discovered a redacted memo in the BBC archives dated April 24, 1969, which expressed sympathy for “friends caught up in the scandal”, referring to those working for MI6.

Furthermore, the Document programme interviewed a number of people who might know the truth. Espionage historians and former correspondents said that despite all the denials, the memos were genuine.

“These are genuine MI6 documents,” said Stephen Dorril, author of a history of MI6, adding that former MI6 officer Anthony Cavendish had told him that the agency used journalists in the Cold War.

BBC official historian Jean Seaton said the claims about the use of messages and tunes to assist M16 during the post-war period were “certainly plausible BBC style”.

Phillip Knightley, the former Sunday Times correspondent and espionage journalist, said, “It doesn’t surprise me. I had heard these names before banded around on Fleet Street.”

Source: Press TV

Thousands of Dutch girls abused by priests since 1945: Report

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TGE News

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03/12/2013

Thousands of Dutch girls have suffered sexual and physical abuse by Roman Catholic Church officials since 1945, a report says.

An independent investigative commission, funded by the Dutch Bishop’s Conference and mandated by the government, reported on Monday that the girls were molested by members of the clergy in their homes or in churches.

According to the report, they suffered physical abuse and intimidation at the hands of nuns at young women’s homes.

The committee said around 40 percent of the girls interviewed in the study, led by former Hague mayor Wim Deetman, had been raped by priests or deacons.

In December 2011, the preliminary results of the investigation mainly focusing on children estimated that up to 20,000 of them were harassed at Catholic boarding schools between 1945 and 2010, and “several tens of thousands” faced abuse of some kind.

The latest follow-up study concentrated more on Catholic girls and young women, who in addition to boarding schools, were often sent to homes for unwed mothers run by nuns if they became pregnant without being married.

“In cases of physical violence without sexual abuse, both new and previous complaints point toward primarily female perpetrators, mostly nuns who worked as educators or caregivers,” the report said, adding, “In heavy cases of sexual abuse, the perpetrators were primarily male.”

Following of the revelations, the umbrella organization of the Dutch Catholic Church and religious institutions issued a statement and apologized, saying they will consider how to offer help to victims.

“Not only the doers are blameworthy, but also those who were to ensure things went properly in the homes and institutions where the girls were sheltered,” the statement said.

“Violating the physical and spiritual integrity of any person, especially that of children, is under all circumstances repulsive,” it added.

Source: Press TV

The Top 10 Weapons Of Mass Destruction

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03/12/2013

Edwin Starr once asked in his song “War, what is it good for?” Indeed, it is something that can never be won and must never be fought. Alas, centuries of war and destruction, including two world wars, seem to be insufficient in teaching man the futility of it all. Weapons are being constantly invented that would increase the casualty number and efficiency of a kill. Weapon making has become both an art and science.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed thousands of people, but man kept looking for ways to improve on them. The results are weapons that can obliterate an entire country. Here is a list of the top ten weapons of mass destruction.

1. Biological Weapons

Biological weapons make use of some kind of virus or disease that can affect millions of people. The danger of this weapon is that it could be uncontrollable once released. Nothing could stop it from spreading outside the original target area. Whenever simulations are made in which the target is to kill all human beings in this world, the weapon of choice is always biological because no other weapon has the same potential and capacity. It is the most difficult weapon of mass destruction to detect and identify because doctors would probably point to natural outbreaks of disease before suspecting any use of biological weapons. Examples of biological weapons are anthrax, tularemia, plague and ebola.

2. Chemical Weapons

Chemical weapons make use of deadly chemical products, either in the form of blisters, blood, choking or nerve agents. Only miniscule amounts are required for it to become effective, and just like biological weapons, it would be hard to control it once released to the atmosphere. Even when identified, cleaning it up can be extremely hard and almost impossible. It would also take a lot of time, money and effort. It is probably the easiest of all weapons of mass destruction to obtain. Examples of chemical weapons are mustard gas, ricin and lewisite. These chemicals are so dangerous that countries are not allowed to own more than a ton of these.

3. Fission Bomb

Modern nuclear weapons get their explosive energy from fission reactions. Fission bombs get their explosion purely from fission reactions. We all know it as the atomic bomb. In this weapon, enriched uranium or plutonium, which are both fissile material, is arranged into a supercritical mass. This is the amount needed to initiate a nuclear chain reaction that will grow exponentially. Enriched uranium can be triggered by either the gun method or the implosion method. Plutonium, on the other hand, can only make use of the more sophisticated implosion method, in which sub critical spheres are compressed to several times over its density by using chemical explosives.

4. Fusion Bomb

Also called the hydrogen bomb, fusion bombs rely on fusion reactions between isotopes of hydrogen called tritium and deuterium. Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam developed it in the United States in 1951, though Andrei Sakharov was able to develop the same separately for the Soviet Union in 1955. While it uses a fission weapon to trigger the fusion reaction, a large amount of the energy produced by this bomb comes from the nuclear fusion. The energy of the fission bomb is used however to compress and heat the fusion fuel. It is considered a more efficient weapon than the fission bomb, though it is also more difficult to design and execute. Only the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China and India have been able to successfully detonate a fusion bomb.

5. Boosted Fission Weapon

The boosted fission weapon is basically a fission bomb that makes use of some fusion reactions to boost its yield. The fusion reactions are not that significant however to make the weapon count as a fusion bomb. It merely utilizes the neutrons produced by the fusion reactions to increase the weapon’s efficiency.

6. Neutron Bomb

This weapon is detonated with a blast of neutron radiation. It is basically a salted bomb, in which cobalt or gold or some other suitable materials surround the weapon. The resulting blast will yield an exceptional large amount of radioactive contamination. As the explosion produced is relatively small, the infrastructure of the place bombed would remain intact and the fallout should be minimal. The tremendous amount of contamination produced by the radioactivity, however, means that there would be massive numbers of casualties in the affected area.

7. Napalm Bomb

This bomb is made of petroleum jelly and was used extensively as an incendiary bomb in the Vietnam War by the United States. There were already incendiary bombs before, but it could be easily wiped off, so adhesive was added to prevent its removal and enable it to cause more harm. But it could be drowsed by water, so magnesium was added so that water would instead burn with it. And as if those were not enough, lead was also added to make it poisonous. Exploded napalm can reach a temperature of 1,200 degrees Celsius.

8. Pure Fusion Bombs

This bomb does away with the need for fission weapons to trigger the weapon. Development would be simpler and faster because it does not require the creation of a fission weapon first. A pure fusion bomb also has a much less amount of fallout compared to regular fusion bombs because there would be no fission products that would be dispersed upon explosion.

9. Radiological Weapons

This is considered a medium level weapon of mass destruction. It involves the dispersion of radioactive materials by using an explosive device. While it may be hard to clean it up, the death rate would most likely be on the low level.

10. Toxicological Weapons

Toxicological weapons employ a variety of natural and artificial poisons. This kind of weapon is highly effective in causing death. Its range of effectiveness, however, is very limited and restricted in terms of area. It is also relatively easier to clean up than other weapons. It is probably the least dangerous of all the weapons of mass destruction.

Source: TheRiches.org

Modern Day Mind Control Overview

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TGE News

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03/12/2013

Mind Control:

Overview, Hypnosis, CIA, MK Ultra, Psychiatry, Psychology

There are 3 basic levels of mind control:

1st) Conscious (Cognitive Psychology)

2nd) Unconscious ( Unconscious behavioral)

3rd) Biological (Psychiatry)

The topic of mind control is elaborate, multifaceted, and multi layered. For the casual reader, it can quickly become numbing, overwhelming the senses and creating a desire to exit the topic, but avoiding this subject is the most foolish thing you could possibly do since your only chance of surviving this hideous and insidious enslavement agenda, which today threatens virtually all of humanity, is to understand how it functions and take steps to reduce your vulnerability.

The plans to create a mind controlled workers society have been in place for a long time. The current technology grew out of experiments that the Nazis started before World War II and intensified during the time of the Nazi concentration camps when an unlimited supply of children and adults were available for experimentation. We’ve heard about the inhumane medical experiments performed on concentration camp prisoners, but no word was ever mentioned by the media and the TV documentaries of the mind control experiments. That was not to be divulged to the American public. Mind control technologies can be broadly divided into two subsets: trauma-based or electronic-based.

The first phase of government mind control development grew out of the old occult techniques which required the victim to be exposed to massive psychological and physical trauma, usually beginning in infancy, in order to cause the psyche to shatter into a thousand alter personalities which can then be separately programmed to perform any function (or job) that the programmer wishes to”install”. Each alter personality created is separate and distinct from the front personality. The ‘front personality’ is unaware of the existence or activities of the alter personalities. Alter personalities can be brought to the surface by programmers or handlers using special codes, usually stored in a laptop computer. The victim of mind control can also be affected by specific sounds, words, or actions known as triggers.

The second phase of mind control development was refined at an underground base below Fort Hero on Montauk , Long Island (New York) and is referred to as the Montauk Project. The earliest adolescent victims of Montauk style programming, so called Montauk Boys, were programmed using trauma-based techniques, but that method was eventually abandoned in favor of an all-electronic induction process which could be “installed” in a matter of days (or even hours) instead of the many years that it took to complete trauma-based methods.

Dr. Joseph Mengele of Auschwitz notoriety was the principle developer of the trauma-based Monarch Project and the CIA’s MK Ultra mind control programs. Mengele and approximately 5, 000 other high ranking Nazis were secretly moved into the United States and South America in the aftermath of World War II in an Operation designated Paperclip. The Nazis continued their work in developing mind control and rocketry technologies in secret underground military bases. The only thing we were told about was the rocketry work with former Nazi star celebrities like Warner Von Braun. The killers, torturers, and mutilators of innocent human beings were kept discretely out of sight, but busy in U.S. underground military facilities which gradually became home to thousands upon thousands of kidnapped American children snatched off the streets (about one million per year) and placed into iron bar cages stacked from floor to ceiling as part of the ‘training’. These children would be used to further refine and perfect Mengele’s mind control technologies. Certain selected children (at least the ones who survived the ‘training’) would become future mind controlled slaves who could be used for thousands of different jobs ranging anywhere from sexual slavery to assassinations. A substantial portion of these children, who were considered expendable, were intentionally slaughtered in front of (and by) the other children in order to traumatize the selected trainee into total compliance and submission.

Source: WorldTruthTV

French Study finds Pesticide Residues in 90% of Wines

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TGE News

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03/12/2013

Pesticide residues were found in the vast majority of 300 French wines tested, say researchers.

A study of more than 300 French wines has found that only 10% of those tested were clean of any traces of chemicals used during vine treatments.

Pascal Chatonnet and the EXCELL laboratory in Bordeaux tested wines from the 2009 and 2010 vintages of Bordeaux, the Rhone, and the wider Aquitaine region, including appellations such as Madiran and Gaillac.

Wines were tested for 50 different molecules found in a range of vine treatments, such as pesticides and fungicides.

Some wines contained up to nine separate molecules, with ‘anti-rot’ fungicides the most commonly found. These are often applied late in the growing season.

‘Even though the individual molecules were below threshold levels of toxicity,’ Chatonnet told Decanter.com, ‘there is a worrying lack of research into the accumulation effect, and how the molecules interact with each other.

‘It is possible that the presence of several molecules combined is more harmful than a higher level of a single molecule,’ he said.

Vineyards represent just 3% of agricultural land in France, but the wine industry accounts for 20% of phytosanitary product volumes, and 80% of fungicide use specifically.

Since 2008, France’s Ecophyto national plan (involving the study of the ways in which organisms are adapted to their environment) has sought to cut pesticide use by 50% by 2018.

‘By 2012, there had been no reduction at all, even a small rise of 2.7% between 2010 and 2011,’ said Stéphane Boutou, also of EXCELL.

While EU rules limit pesticide residues on grapes to 250 molecules, there are no limits set for wine.

‘Some molecules will break down during the process of fermentation, and we need more research into what they synthesise into, and more traceability in place,’ Chatonnet said.

‘But we should not forget that it is not the consumers who are most impacted by this, it is the vineyard workers who are applying the treatments.’

In May 2012, the French government officially recognized a link between pesticides and Parkinson’s disease in agricultural workers.

Source: http://www.decanter.com

South Korea Military Drills Begin As North Korea Threatens War

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03/12/2013

North Korea’s young leader urged front-line troops to be on “maximum alert” for a potential war as a state-run newspaper said Pyongyang had carried out a threat to cancel the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War.

Kim Jong Un told artillery troops stationed near disputed waters that have seen several bloody clashes in past years that “war can break out right now,” according to a report by North Korean state media.

Kim’s visit and the armistice claim are part of a torrent of angry North Korean rhetoric that has followed last week’s U.N. sanctions over Pyongyang’s Feb. 12 nuclear test. Pyongyang has also vowed to strike the United States with nuclear weapons.

It is unclear, however, what will come next and whether North Korea will match its words with action. South Korea’s Defense Ministry said Tuesday there were no signs that North Korea would attack or conduct more nuclear or missile tests anytime soon and that Pyongyang was merely trying to apply “psychological pressure” on the South.

A U.N. spokesman said that Pyongyang cannot unilaterally dissolve the armistice, which is still valid. Pyongyang is also years away from acquiring the smaller, lighter nuclear warheads needed to pose a credible nuclear missile threat to the United States.

Indeed, several signs pointed to business as usual between the Koreas – despite the bluster.

North Korea apparently cut one telephone and fax hotline at a village straddling the Demilitarized Zone between the countries, but otherwise there have been no substantial operational changes, Seoul’s Unification Ministry and Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday.

There are at least two other working communication channels between the Koreas. As they did Monday, the two Koreas used a separate military hotline Tuesday to allow hundreds of South Koreans to cross the border to a jointly run factory park in the North Korean border town of Kaesong, according to the South’s Unification Ministry.

Much of the bellicosity is seen as an effort to shore up loyalty among citizens and the military for Kim Jong Un.

Still, North Korea’s anger, and Seoul’s stern rebuttals, is boosting animosity and causing worries on an already tense Korean Peninsula. The rivals this week are also holding dueling military drills.

U.S. National Security adviser Tom Donilon told the Asia Society in New York that Pyongyang’s claims may be “hyperbolic,” but the United States will protect its allies.

“There should be no doubt: We will draw upon the full range of our capabilities to protect against, and to respond to, the threat posed to us and to our allies by North Korea,” Donilon said.

Aside from the nuclear threats, Pyongyang has so far only made a somewhat mysterious promise to strike its enemies at a time and place of its own choosing. This alarms many, however, as two sudden attacks blamed on North Korea killed 50 South Koreans in 2010.

Seoul has responded to North Korean threats with tough talk of its own and has placed its troops on high alert.

The North Korean government made no formal announcement on its repeated threats to scrap the 60-year-old armistice, but the country’s main newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, reported that the armistice was nullified Monday as Pyongyang had said it would.

The North has threatened to nullify the armistice several times before, and in 1996, after one such vow, it sent hundreds of armed troops into a border village. The troops later withdrew.

Despite the Rodong Sinmun report, U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said the armistice is still valid and still in force because the armistice agreement had been adopted by the U.N. General Assembly and can’t be dissolved unilaterally.

Nesirky added that officials at U.N. headquarters in New York were unaware of any operational changes on the ground on the Korean Peninsula.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the U.S. was “certainly concerned by North Korea’s bellicose rhetoric. And the threats that they have been making follow a pattern designed to raise tension and intimidate others.”

The angry words from both Koreas haven’t stopped them from communicating about the only remaining operational symbol of joint cooperation, the Kaesong industrial complex. It is operated in North Korea with South Korean money and know-how and a mostly North Korean workforce – and provides a badly needed flow of hard currency to a country where many face food shortages.

“If South Koreans don’t go to work at Kaesong, North Korea will suffer” financially, said analyst Hong Hyun-ik at the private Sejong Institute in South Korea. “If North Korea really intends to start a war with South Korea, it could have taken South Koreans at Kaesong hostage.”

The 11-day U.S.-South Korean joint military drills that started Monday involve 10,000 South Korean and about 3,000 U.S. troops. Those coincide with two months of separate U.S.-South Korean field exercises that began March 1.

Also continuing are large-scale North Korean drills that Seoul says involve the army, navy and air force. The South Korean Defense Ministry said there have been no military activities it considers suspicious.

The North Korean rhetoric escalated as the U.N. Security Council on Thursday approved a new round of sanctions over Pyongyang’s nuclear test.

“This is part of their brinksmanship,” said Daniel Pinkston, a Seoul-based expert on North Korea with the International Crisis Group think tank. “It’s an effort to signal their resolve, to show they are willing to take greater risks, with the expectation that everyone else caves in and gives them what they want.”

Part of what North Korea wants is a formal peace treaty to end the Korean War, instead of the armistice that leaves the peninsula still technically in a state of war. It also wants security guarantees and other concessions, direct talks with Washington, recognition as a nuclear weapons state, and the removal of 28,500 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea.

Pinkston said there is little chance of fighting breaking out while war games are being conducted, but he added that he expects North Korea to stage some sort of provocation in the future.

North Korea was responsible for an artillery attack that killed four South Koreans in 2010. A South Korean-led international investigation found that North Korea torpedoed a South Korean warship that same year, killing 46 sailors. Pyongyang denies sinking the ship.

South Korean and U.S. officials have been closely monitoring Pyongyang’s actions and parsing its recent rhetoric, which has been more warlike than usual.

Under new President Park Geun-hye, South Korea’s Defense Ministry, which often brushes off North Korean threats, has looked to send a message of strength in response to the latest comments from Pyongyang.

The ministry has warned that the North’s government would “evaporate from the face of the Earth” if it ever used a nuclear weapon.

While outside scientists are still trying to determine specifics, the North’s rocket test in December and third nuclear test last month may have pushed the country a step closer to acquiring the ability to hit the U.S. with weapons of mass destruction.

Analysts have also said that more missile and nuclear tests are possible reactions from North Korea.

North Korea has a variety of missiles and other weapons capable of striking South Korea. Both the warship sinking and island shelling in 2010 occurred near a western sea boundary that North Korea fiercely disputes. It has been a recurring flashpoint between the rivals that has seen three other bloody naval skirmishes since 1999.

Source: Huffington Post

Why is Queen Elizabeth’s Nurse Wearing a Masonic Belt?

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03/12/2013

Every time a story involves the British Royal family, mass media are quick to document every single detail of it. When Queen Elizabeth left King Edward VII Hospital on March 3rd, news sources covered the event extensively, even describing her outfit, her pearl necklace and her brooch.

There is however one significant detail mass media completely ignored. Check out the nurse’s belt buckle.

The Queen’s nurse is wearing a belt buckle bearing Masonic symbols.

This massive belt buckle features the Masonic square and compass alongside a pentagram – another important Masonic symbol that is used in ritual magick.

According to the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, this belt buckle was given to nurses who trained at the Royal Masonic Hospital, a private hospital for Freemasons and other fee-paying patients. The Royal Masonic Hospital stopped existing in 1992 but its belt buckles are apparently still worn by “elite” nurses such as the one who treated the queen.

It is interesting to see how symbols of power appear in places of power.

Handshake with the Queen

Remember that King Edward VII Hospital is where Kate got hospitalized due to a pregnancy-related illness, which led to the suicide of one of the nurses.

Source: Vigilant Citizen

Cheney Admits that He Lied about 9/11

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03/12/2013

What Else Did He Lie About?

The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd writes today:

In a documentary soon to appear on Showtime, “The World According to Dick Cheney,” [Cheney said] “I got on the telephone with the president, who was in Florida, and told him not to be at one location where we could both be taken out.” Mr. Cheney kept W. flying aimlessly in the air on 9/11 while he and Lynn left on a helicopter for a secure undisclosed location, leaving Washington in a bleak, scared silence, with no one reassuring the nation in those first terrifying hours.

“I gave the instructions that we’d authorize our pilots to take it out,” he says, referring to the jet headed to Washington that crashed in a Pennsylvania field. He adds: “After I’d given the order, it was pretty quiet. Everybody had heard it, and it was obviously a significant moment.”

When they testified together before the 9/11 Commission, W. and Mr. Cheney kept up a pretense that in a previous call, the president had authorized the vice president to give a shoot-down order if needed. But the commission found “no documentary evidence for this call.

In other words, Cheney pretended that Bush had authorized a shoot-down order, but Cheney now admits that he never did. In fact, Cheney acted as if he was the president on 9/11.

Cheney lied about numerous other facts related to 9/11 as well. For example, Cheney:

Falsely linked Iraq with 9/11 (indeed, the entire torture program was aimed at establishing such a false linkage; and Cheney is the guy who pushed for torture, pressured the Justice Department lawyers to write memos saying torture was legal, and made the pitch to Congress justifying torture. The former director of the CIA said Cheney oversaw American torture policies)

Falsely claimed that spying on Americans, torture, the Patriot Act, the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war and the “war on terror” were all necessitated by 9/11 … when all of them started or were planned before 9/11

Falsely stated that an attack such as 9/11 was unforeseeable, when Al Qaeda flying planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon was something which American military and intelligence services – and our allies – knew could happen

Falsely pretended that he was out of the loop during the 9/11 attacks

Falsely blamed others for 9/11, when Cheney was in charge of all of America’s counter-terrorism exercises, activities and responses on 9/11. See this Department of State announcement and this CNN article …

… And when Cheney was apparently responsible for letting the Pentagon get hit by an airplane (confirmed here and here)

And was instrumental in squashing a real investigation into 9/11

* Indeed, Cheney initiated Continuity of Government plans on 9/11 which essentially nullified America’s constitutional form of government.

Lifting the Veil

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TGE Media

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03/12/2013

Barack Obama and the failure of capitalist ‘democracy’

“Lifting the Veil is the long overdue film that powerfully, definitively, and finally exposes the deadly 21st century hypocrisy of U.S. internal and external policies, even as it imbues the viewer with a sense of urgency and an actualized hope to bring about real systemic change while there is yet time for humanity and this planet. See this film!” – Larry Pinkney Editorial Board Member & Columnist The Black Commentator

Visit producer’s website: http://metanoia-films.org/lifting-the-veil/

Earthlings

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TGE Media

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03/12/2013

Yes, it’s cruel. Yes, you will cry. A MUST see! Absolutely life-changing documentary!

EARTHLINGS is the single most powerful and informative documentary about society’s tragic and unforgivable use of nonhuman animals, narrated by Joaquin Phoenix with soundtrack by Moby. Directed by Shaun Monson, this multi-award winning film by Nation Earth is a must-see for anyone who cares about nonhuman animals or wishes to make the world a better place.

Dr. Michael Klaper: Food That Kills

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TGE Media

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03/12/2013

Presented by: Dr. Michael Klaper – 1993.

Official Website for Dr. Michael Klaper http://doctorklaper.com/

Stepping Into The Fire

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TGE Media

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03/12/2013

Stepping Into the Fire is the cinematic release that reaches into the ash of the bare bones of existence and asks the question “is humanity born to die, or is humanity born to live?” The film follows the true story of three successful individuals brought together by an ancestral medicine from South America that has become legendary for its miraculous and profound effects. Ayahuasca — as the Amazonian brew is known — is well known for its mental, physical and energetic healing properties. Stepping Into the Fire closely examines the life-changing effects Ayahuasca can have and illustrates why environment and health are so crucial to human success on a global scale.

The story begins with Roberto Velez — a high-level New York Stock Exchange trader — raised since adolescence in America, but ultimately of Peruvian descent. In the peak of his career, Velez finds himself seeking; unable to reconcile his material gains with the lack of direction and depth in his life. With nowhere else to turn, Velez scours Peru — the land of his ancestors — only to find Mancoluto, a first-level master shaman descended from one of the earliest civilizations in Amerindian history, Chavin. Mancoluto’s expertise in natural health, particularly in the case of two ancestral medicines known as Ayahuasca and Huachuma, provides him a unique lens when treating Velez’s predicament. Once this connection was made, countless other pieces start falling into place and a center for ancient Peruvian healing arts is quickly born.

Whole Foods announces mandatory GMO labeling by 2018

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TGE News

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03/12/2013

In a huge victory for the alternative media and grassroots activism, Whole Foods announced on Friday that it would require GMO labels on all products by 2018. (Click here for the press release.) This announcement deals a significant blow to Monsanto, DuPont and all the GMO pushers who openly admit that they want consumers to remain ignorant about what they’re eating.

It’s a brilliant move for Whole Foods, given that by 2018, anyone who wants to be certain whether they are avoiding GMOs will gladly choose to do all their shopping at Whole Foods. After all, if Albertson’s (for example) doesn’t require GMO labeling while Whole Foods does, in which store would you rather shop? Whole Foods!

But the real story here is everything that led up to this. The turning point in all this was, in my opinion, the 2012 release of the Organic Spies video in which Whole Foods employees were caught on camera lying to customers about GMOs.

Natural News broke this story and was instrumental in getting the video posted on our free speech protected video service TV.naturalnews.com, a public location which could not be easily banned by Whole Foods. YouTube, by comparison, routinely bans videos that blow the whistle on dishonest corporate behavior, but TV.naturalnews.com hosts whistleblowing videos and has so far resisted all attempts to have those videos banned or removed. (We even host most of the Jesse Ventura Conspiracy Theory series, including the “memory-holed” FEMA camp episode that has disappeared everywhere else.)

This Organic Spies video proved to be hugely embarrassing to Whole Foods, causing an uproar across the ‘net and causing many customers to start shopping elsewhere such as Green PolkaDot Box, which avoids carrying any products containing GMOs.

Following the Organic Spies video, InfoWars reporters Aaron Dykes and Melissa Melton launched a breakthrough video investigation that exposed the “big Whole Foods lie” of claiming “Nothing artificial, ever” on the side of their stores while secretly selling unlabeled GMOs in their stores. We also documented the “Nothing artificial, ever” fraud here on Natural News. GMOs are, of course, “artificial.” They are engineered by man, not created by nature. In this video, Whole Foods was caught in yet another blatant, embarrassing lie.

The Prop 37 campaign was also in full swing during all this, and Whole Foods refused to contribute a single dollar to the California ballot measure. After being confronted and publicly shamed, a Whole Foods executive did quietly contribute $25,000, but only after being called out for failing to support the campaign.

Alternative media holds Whole Foods’ feet to the fire

Add all this up and you get the impression that Whole Foods was actively opposed to GMO labeling. And it was the alternative media that was holding Whole Foods’ feet to the fire. While the mainstream media refused to even touch the issue (because mainstream media is nothing more than a dumbed-down, cartoon-level disinfo broadcast for morons and sheeple), the alternative media plowed full steam ahead. Natural News, InfoWars, Mercola, the Organic Consumers Association, the Institute for Responsible Technology and many other organizations kept hammering the issue, and tens of millions of grassroots activists made their voices heard in a resounding way.

Through various back channels, Whole Foods got the message loud and clear that there was no way they were going to be able to stop this. The alternative media can’t be easily bought off because the key people who run the alternative media aren’t in it for money (unlike the mainstream media).

If Whole Foods didn’t get fully behind the mandatory labeling of GMOs, it was going to find itself in a runaway confidence crisis. After all, if health-conscious customers can’t trust Whole Foods to be transparent with them about what’s really in their foods, there’s not much of a reason to shop at Whole Foods, is there?

Whole Foods capitulates and decides to require labeling

Sometime between November 2012 and March 2013, Whole Foods executives made a decision to finally get behind GMO labeling. They announced that all the foods they carry would need to be labeled with GMO content by 2018. As StreetInsider.com reports:

Whole Foods Market announced… that, by 2018, all products in its U.S. and Canadian stores must be labeled to indicate whether they contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It is the first national grocery chain to set a deadline for full GMO transparency.

On the surface, this was immediately heralded as a highly ethical leadership decision by the market leader in health food retailing, but behind the scenes an entirely different equation was being calculated. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey never makes a decision unless it’s in his financial interest to do so, and as his history of false-identity Wild Oats blogging shows, he’s not beyond engaging in wild deceptions in order to make more money for himself and his investors.

Ultimately, Mackey and the Whole Foods executives realized what I’ve been trying to tell them for months: That if they didn’t get behind GMO labeling, they were going to lose everything. Promoting GMO labeling isn’t simple a choice of ethics for Whole Foods, it’s a matter of economic survival.

And what made that decision carry weight? The alternative media.

Whole Foods decision is huge victory for alternative media and grassroots activism

Without Natural News, Organic Consumers Association, Jeffrey Smith, Info Wars and millions of grassroots activists pounding this issue day after day, the cost of Whole Foods doing nothing would not have been high enough to alter the equation. Whole Foods made this decision precisely because of Natural News, the Organic Spies, Info Wars and other alternative media organizations. Because Whole Foods knows that we will not drop this issue and we were going to keep hammering this issue in a very public manner if they did not come out and announce support for GMO labeling.

So in one sense, Whole Foods deserves credit for doing the right thing in this announcement, but at another level they were forced into that position by people like you, the readers of the alternative media.

Whole Foods will deny all this, of course. They will claim this decision was nothing more than a response to the requests of their many customers. But those requests were largely caused by people learning about this entire issue from the alternative media, which has really become the new mainstream media because we are the only sources of real news these days (and we’re not run by the White House or mega corporations).

The way Whole Foods explains all this, however, they made this decision solely because they are impressively angelic in their hearts and minds. As Whole Foods President A.C. Gallo says: “We have always believed quality and transparency are inseparable and that providing detailed information about our products is part of satisfying and delighting the millions of people who place their trust in Whole Foods Market each day.”

That quote is a complete load of bull, of course. In truth, Whole Foods has systematically deceived its customers about GMOs for many years. It has placed signs on its stores that are blatantly false and misleading: “Nothing artificial, ever!” And it has waged a campaign of total disinformation about the GMOs that continue to be sold right now in not just the food products, but also the supplements it retails. (Yes, many supplements sold at Whole Foods are loaded with genetically modified ingredients.)

So don’t let Whole Foods fool you into thinking this is all about “doing the right thing.” If anything, Whole Foods has decided to do the right thing only as a last resort, after being forced to do so by the alternative media and grassroots activists. As Winston Churchill famously said in the European theater of World War II, “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing… after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”

Ultimately, it’s hard-working people like Ronnie Cummins and Jeffrey Smith who really deserve the credit for Whole Foods making this move.

That’s why all this is a victory for grassroots activism over corporate deception. This shows the power of the alternative media to connect people in ways that achieve real change. This shows that when push comes to shove, the alternative media is in many ways more powerful than the lying mainstream media which has engaged in a shameful GMO cover-up.

What happens next

Despite everything written above, if Whole Foods has the guts to make a public announcement like this, they will have my support in this endeavor. It’s a gutsy move to publicly oppose Monsanto and the wholly corrupt, mafia-minded biotech industry.

No doubt Whole Foods is going to endure unbelievable heat for this. You can fully expect a lawsuit to be filed by Monsanto against the retailer, and even the USDA and FDA will likely get involved. Remember, it was really Monsanto and the FDA that forced wholesome milk producers to remove the “no rBGH” claim from their labels.

My prediction: Monsanto and the FDA are going to wage a massive regulatory assault on Whole Foods and try to find some way to force Whole Foods to back off this promise to label GMOs. We, the grassroots activists who helped make this happen, would be wise to help defend Whole Foods in this decision. At some point, we may have to organize letter-writing campaigns, call-in campaigns, etc., to the FDA and even U.S. Senators to oppose FDA regulations that attempt to censor and silence GMO labeling. That will probably happen in 2014 – 2015.

In the mean time, product suppliers who sell to Whole Foods are going to have to start making a big decision themselves: Do we create a separate line of products just for Whole Foods, or do we label all our products no matter where they are sold?

Some food companies will decide to pull out of Whole Foods in protest. These will likely be the “no on 37” brands that are total GMO sellouts like Kashi, Silk, Larabar and others. There will be tremendous economic pressure put on Whole Foods over this, believe me.

But the more responsible brands — like Nature’s Path cereals and Amy’s Kitchen — will welcome the labeling and they will quickly comply. (In Nature’s Path’s case, by the way, they are already 100% non-GMO, so they are already compliant. Amy’s also avoids GMOs.)

This will mean that some shelf space may open up at Whole Foods stores because those GMO deceivers will pull out. But this is actually a fantastic opportunity for non-GMO brands to come in and fill the space. This will actually improve Whole Foods’ overall product selection and make it an even more inviting place to shop. (Heck, I might even start shopping there again.)

Those companies that choose to comply with the labeling will obviously start telling their own raw materials suppliers that they don’t want to buy any more GMOs. And those raw materials suppliers, in turn, will tell their farmers to stop growing GMOs because the market demand is collapsing

Simple economics means more farmers will stop growing GMOs

The upshot of this is that farmers who grow GMOs will be punished with plummeting demand while farmers who grow certified non-GMO crops will be rewarded with increased demand and increased prices. (Isn’t the free market wonderful?)

The end result is victory for everyone: Whole Foods gets its reputation back, consumers get honest labeling, farmers get away from toxic GMOs and superweeds, the environment benefits from less genetic pollution and toxic Monsanto pesticides being sprayed, and the health of those who shop at Whole Foods is vastly improved by not eating hidden GMOs!

Who are the losers in all this? Monsanto and the biotech industry. You might argue they are already losers, ethically speaking, but I’m talking about economics: They are about to get hammered right where it counts: in the pocketbook.

In essence then, this ballsy decision by Whole Foods is one giant kick in the crotch for Monsanto, which is precisely what that corporate monstrosity rudely deserves.

I would personally like to join in this crotch-kicking contest by getting behind Whole Foods in this decision and helping support its efforts to follow through with its GMO labeling promise.

So, for the record, Natural News is fully supportive of Whole Foods on this issue, and we intend to rally grassroots support to help Whole Foods defend this decision when the time comes.

And ultimately, if this goes into place over the next five years, I plan to be among those who help publicize the good news and encourage everybody to shop at Whole Foods. Five years isn’t as far off as you think, and I’m a pretty young guy, so I’ll still be here covering all this.

Bottom line? Wind up your kicking legs, everybody. We’re all about to join in a massive grassroots ballet of Monsanto crotch-kicking lasting five years. Think of it as inverted river dancing.

This article was written by Mike Adams and was first published at NaturalNews.com

The symbolism of Brennan being sworn in with hand on Constitution without Bill of Rights

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TGE News

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03/12/2013

There has been a great deal of buzz surrounding the swearing-in ceremony of John Brennan as director of the CIA during which he took his oath of office with his hand on the original draft of the US Constitution which, most notably, did not include the Bill of Rights.

Some see this as quite symbolic given the extreme rejection of the most essential rights by the current administration, most notably the wild interpretation of the concept of due process, the claimed authority to kill Americans even when there is no clear evidence of terrorist activity and the claimed authority to indefinitely detain Americans without charge or trial.

The White House wrote, “Brennan was sworn in with his hand on an original draft of the Constitution, dating from 1787, which has George Washington’s personal handwriting and annotations on it.”

Why is that problematic?

“That means, when Brennan vowed to protect and defend the Constitution, he was swearing on one that did not include the First, Fourth, Fifth, or Sixth Amendments — or any of the other Amendments now included in our Constitution,” Marcy Wheeler of Empty Wheel points out. “The Bill of Rights did not become part of our Constitution until 1791, 4 years after the Constitution that Brennan took his oath on.”

Keep in mind, Brennan is referred to as the chief architect of the Obama administration’s highly contentious open-ended drone program.

Wheeler maintains that “these vows always carry a great deal of symbolism” and the White House also “took pains to emphasize the symbolism of the ceremony” according to Oliver Knox.

“There’s one piece of this that I wanted to note for you,” said spokesman Josh Earnest at the White House’s daily briefing. “Director Brennan was sworn in with his hand on an original draft of the Constitution that had George Washington’s personal handwriting and annotations on it, dating from 1787.”

“Director Brennan told the president that he made the request to the archives because he wanted to reaffirm his commitment to the rule of law as he took the oath of office as director of the CIA,” Earnest said.

The problem is that he reaffirmed his commitment to a Bill of Rights-free version of the Constitution. “That means: No freedom of speech and of the press, no right to bear arms, no Fourth Amendment ban on ‘unreasonable searches and seizures,’ and no right to a jury trial,” writes Knox.

Some bloggers maintain that there is a quite deep meaning behind this ceremony.

“This administration seems to view the Constitution, and especially the Bill of Rights, as impediments to progress,” writes Mike Shortridge. “Progression towards what exactly is a major point of contention, but the steps taken to circumvent the Bill of Rights are indisputable.”

Others maintain that even if he had taken an oath on a Constitution that includes the Bill of Rights, it wouldn’t stop him from violating it.

“Even if Brennan had taken an oath on the Constitution with the Bill of Rights included, does anyone think that would stop him from making a mockery of the document if the president ordered him to?” Rick Moran asks.

Others just make passing mention of the symbolism of the document choice.

Was this choice pregnant with meaning or are people just reading into it? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter or in the comments section of this post.

Did I forget anything or miss any errors? Would you like to make me aware of a story or subject to cover? Or perhaps you want to bring your writing to a wider audience? Feel free to contact me at admin@EndtheLie.com with your concerns, tips, questions, original writings, insults or just about anything that may strike your fancy.

This article first appeared at End the Lie.

Things You Didn’t Know About Organic Food

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03/12/2013

Before you buy organic or natural foods, see what today’s food experts told us about making smart food choices.

To get to your plate, most food travels over 1,000 miles—even organic food. Check the labels or ask the market manager to figure out the origin of your organic produce, and try to buy local. In addition to helping the environment, shopping local keeps dollars in your community. Note: Even if a local, small farm isn’t certified organic, many of them use organic methods.

Before World War II, all crops were organic. It was only afterward that farms used new, synthetic pesticides and chemicals to minimize weed, insects, and rodent damage. What’s not new? Many worry about the long-term effects of ingesting chemical residues from “conventional” produce (i.e., sprayed crops), as well as the impact these treatments have had on our planet and our resources.

Organic isn’t just for the rich.

Many are making efforts to help everyone access organic food, from giant companies like Walmart to local non-profits like Growing Power, a Milwaukee community garden that helps thousands of area residents buy affordable, sustainable food.

78% of U.S. families buy some organic food.

Yet according to the Organic Trade Association, even though sales of organic food and beverages have grown from $1 billion in 1990 to an estimated $29 billion in 2011, that only represents 4.2% of all food sold in the U.S.

Everyone can eat an organic diet.

One popular criticism is that farmers can’t grow enough to supply organic food for all. It’s true that if everyone needed to eat organic meat in quantity, it would be difficult for today’s agribusiness to produce enough organic feed to nourish the livestock. That said, if people ate less meat, and we had a large-scale shift in thinking, it would be possible for our lands to be developed to yield organic produce as they did before World War II. Also, we’d probably go farther in the fight against hunger.

If you think [insert organic granola bar name here is a cute little artisan line, think again.

The majority of organic brands you see in the grocery aisle are owned by giant corporations. Bear Naked? Kashi? Morningstar Farms? Kellogg. Naked juice? Pepsi. Odwalla? Coca Cola. LaraBar? Cascadian Farm? General Mills. And the latest is the acquisition of Bolthouse Farms by Campbell Soup Company for over $1.5 billion.

Organic could still come from China.

To get to your plate, most food travels over 1,000 miles—even organic food. Check the labels or ask the market manager to figure out the origin of your organic produce, and try to buy local. In addition to helping the environment, shopping local keeps dollars in your community. Note: Even if a local, small farm isn’t certified organic, many of them use organic methods.

Organic meat isn’t always grass fed or free range.

According to the USDA: “Organic meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy products come from animals that are given no antibiotics or growth hormones,” which helps cut down the levels you ingest. (People who eat conventional meats usually have traces of 12 to 15 different antibiotics in their bloodstream at any time.) However, organic doesn’t mean the animals ate grass and roamed a pasture; it could just mean they’re fed organic corn as opposed to genetically modified corn. Ask questions before you buy.

Skip labels that call seafood organic.

When it comes to fish and ocean life, there are no federal regulations that makes something “sustainable” or “organic.” So if you see seafood marked as such, be wary: It’s not required on a state or federal basis to meet any specific standards, it hasn’t been tested for toxicity, and it’s probably more expensive.

Organic is not about superfoods.

A recent Stanford meta-analysis claimed that “eating organic doesn’t give you any health benefits,” which caused a lot of commentary on whether organic was better for you. However, researchers honed in on nutrient makeup without examining pesticide residue and antibiotic resistance. They also left out the bigger picture: Organic farming systems replenish soil and protect important resources like water, compared to conventional farming which can contaminate soil and water with chemicals and nitrogen.

Know the “Dirty Dozen”? Meet the “Clean 15.”

If you pick conventional produce, the Environmental Working Group came up with the “Clean 15″ (low-pesticide residue on conventional crops) and the “Dirty Dozen” (highest pesticide residue, might make more sense to buy organic). Remember that eating fruits and vegetables, however they’re grown, is far better than skipping them completely.

Processed food that’s organic is still processed food.

If a food comes out of a box and is labeled organic, it means it’s healthier only in that it was minimally produced without artificial ingredients, preservatives, or irradiation. And you can feel good that workers, animals, and the environment were all treated better in the process. However, it might not be nutritionally better for you!

“Conventional” farming isn’t sustainable.

Chemical fertilizers are only so successful in controlling pests before they develop tolerances. Then, new stronger formulas need to be developed, which eventually taps out our soils. The short-term gains of conventional farming (ie, cheaper prices) are actually reducing our chances to return to organic methods.

Organic seeds are in danger.

Four of the world’s largest agrochemical companies own a whopping 50% of the world’s farmed seeds—and they aren’t breeding them for organic conditions. Just as we need to think about the soils, we also need to think about the seeds; conserving and developing crop genetic diversity is essential.

Less than 1% of all American crops are organic.

Based on the most recent data collected from Organic-World.Net, only .6% of American crops are organic and without genetic modification.

Organic crops are less likely to be buggy.

Because the soil is nourished by natural methods, the crops are better equipped to resist disease and insects. When pests get out of hand, organic farmers rely on natural options like insect predators, traps, and mating disruption to get rid of them and restore balance to their land.

“Organic” doesn’t mean 100% organic.

According to the USDA, unless it says “100% organic,” any item labeled “organic” only needs 95% of its ingredients to have been organically grown. Also, some ingredients are exempt from the definition because they are “too difficult to source organically,” including foods using sausage castings, some coloring, celery powder, sausage casings, and fish oils.

Calling your food “natural” is easier than getting an “organic” seal of approval.

Organic foods undergo intense USDA regulations: No synthetic fertilizers, synthetic growth and breeding hormones, antibiotics, and GMOs; any pesticides used must be natural. It takes three years, and thousands of dollars in fees, for farms to go organic. Once certified, farmers get regular inspections, keep detailed logs and must stay prepared for surprise visits to test their soil and water. “Natural” foods don’t have such rigorous scrutiny.

Organic crops aren’t just for food.

Everything from t-shirts to napkins and cosmetic puffs can be purchased as certified organic products that are made from organic fiber. Organic flowers and organic furniture are also rising in popularity, too.

Sources: Organic Valley; Brendan Brazier, Best selling author of Thrive, Formulator of Vega; USDA; Organicnewsroom.com; Jenny Gensterblum, Chef at Léman Manhattan Preparatory School; HappyFamily,Tara DelloIacono Thies,registered dietitian and nutritionist at Clif Bar & Company; University of California at Berkeley; countdownyourcarbon.org,omorganics.org; Carrie Brownstein, Seafood Quality Standards Coordinator at Whole Foods; thedailygreen.com.

Source: RD.com

The Global Elite

Here’s what you can do:

The Five Stages of Collapse

Big Pharma causes the problem, then walks away

Natural remedies for superbugs have been suppressed and censored

Modern medicine IS population control

Probiotics remain completely ignored

Why humanity’s superbug crisis can’t be solved with chemicals

They don’t want to cure you; they want to kill you (slowly)

1. Socialize

2. Go for a Hike

3. Cook and Eat a Meal

5. Turn off the Television

1. Biological Weapons

2. Chemical Weapons

3. Fission Bomb

4. Fusion Bomb

5. Boosted Fission Weapon

6. Neutron Bomb

7. Napalm Bomb

8. Pure Fusion Bombs

9. Radiological Weapons

10. Toxicological Weapons

Mind Control:

Alternative media holds Whole Foods’ feet to the fire

Whole Foods capitulates and decides to require labeling

Whole Foods decision is huge victory for alternative media and grassroots activism

What happens next

Simple economics means more farmers will stop growing GMOs

Organic isn’t just for the rich.

78% of U.S. families buy some organic food.

Everyone can eat an organic diet.

If you think [insert organic granola bar name here is a cute little artisan line, think again.

Organic could still come from China.

Organic meat isn’t always grass fed or free range.

Skip labels that call seafood organic.

Organic is not about superfoods.

Know the “Dirty Dozen”? Meet the “Clean 15.”

Processed food that’s organic is still processed food.

“Conventional” farming isn’t sustainable.

Organic seeds are in danger.

Less than 1% of all American crops are organic.

Organic crops are less likely to be buggy.

“Organic” doesn’t mean 100% organic.

Calling your food “natural” is easier than getting an “organic” seal of approval.

Organic crops aren’t just for food.

Stay Connected

The Global Elite