Showing posts with label Regulation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Regulation. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

County Police Chief Recommends Arming School Personnel


CBS


St. Louis County Police Chief Tim FitchSt. Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch says it is time to talk about arming civilian school personnel following Friday’s massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, comparing it to arming airline pilots after September 11, 2001.

“I see it no differently,” he said. “Pilots have been armed now for many many years, we’ve not had another hijacking and the issue is, for the bad guy, he doesn’t know which airplane he’s getting on, if the pilot is armed or not.”

Fitch said the killing will not be stopped by legislation or laws. “If there’s somebody that’s really hellbent on doing something like this, they’re not going to care what the law is.”
The chief is adamant about his plans but realizes his calls for arming school workers will be met with resistance.

“We touched on this issue with heroin problem with schools. When we first were talking about the heroin problem in St. Louis, many of the school officials ran and they just hid out, they said ‘nope, we don’t have a heroin problem in our schools,’” Fitch said.

“They started to find out some of the students were involved in this and some of the students were dying of heroin overdoses. It forced them to have this discussion and to take action, inviting us into their schools to talk about the heroin problem in St. Louis.”
Concerning the possibility of gun control, Fitch said “it’s just not going to happen,” and called for an increased focus on mental health instead.

“One of the first thing governments tend to cut back on in tight times are mental health services,” he said. “We know this individual has a mental health history in Connecticut, we’ve seen that in all the school shootings, and additional resources would be helpful.
But, last resort, somebody’s got to take action and they got to do it quickly.”

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

The Healing Power of Marijuana Has Barely Been Tapped


Medical marijuana is now legal in 18 states, but it's clear we've discovered a fraction of its potential for health.

Alternet
Allen Badiner

There are now legal medical cannabis programs in 18 states plus Washington, DC, with pot fully legal for adults in two other states. Ironically, however, the actual healing power of the plant has barely been tapped. Smoking marijuana with THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), or better, vaporizing it (using a device to bake the plant material and inhale the active ingredients), has an indisputably palliative effect and can be medically useful for pain relief, calming and appetite stimulation. It already has confirmed benefits against glaucoma, epilepsy and other specific diseases and disorders. It also gets people high. THC triggers cannabinoid receptors in the brain and this produces the sensation of being stoned. These receptors are found in the parts of the brain linked to pleasure, memory, concentration, and time perception.

But, based mostly on research overseas there is an increasing consensus that the medicinal benefits of psychoactive THC pale in comparison to the non-psychoactive cannabidiol (CBD) from the leaves of the same plant--raw and unheated. Depending on the strain, some plants are high in CBD but also contain a lesser amount of THC which is said to enhance the healing potentiality. CBD does not make people feel “stoned” and actually counters some of the effects of THC (for example, suppressing the appetite vs. stimulating it). CBD is beginning to be recognized by researchers at mainstream medical institutions around the world as a potentially very powerful weapon against cancer.

Researchers Sean D. McAllister and Pierre Desprez, who conducted studies of CBD's effect on cancer cells for California Pacific Medical Center, suggest that these non-psychoactive compounds from the cannabis plant might, in short order, render chemotherapy and radiation distant second and third options for cancer patients. Based on a more recent study, McAllister and Desprez feel that CBD's "could stop breast cancer from spreading."

Dr. Donald Abrams, a cancer specialist and professor of integrative medicine at UCSF, conducted early trials involving THC medical cannabis, and now he is excited about the powerful impacts of CBD on cancer cells. The National Cancer Institute was busy researching this in the 1970s, Abrams explains, but restrictions on the use of cannabis for research in the United States resulted in most of the research on this subject disappearing in the U.S., and being picked up in other countries, such as Israel, Spain and Italy. He says existing studies point to a remarkable ability of CBD to arrest cancer cell division, cell migration, metastasis, and invasiveness.

Other studies point to CBD as having great promise as a defense against Alzheimer’s disease. In a 2006 study published in Molecular Pharmaceutics, a team of University of Connecticut researchers reported that cannabis “could be considerably better at suppressing the abnormal clumping of malformed proteins that is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease than any currently approved prescription.” The research team predicted that cannabinoid-based medications "will be the new breakout medicine treatments of the near future.”

Medical cannabis has a long history of use, starting in India, and then in China and the Middle East some 6,000 years ago. It came to the West in the 1800s, where it was listed in the U.S. Pharmacopeia until the 1930s. Used for over 100 ailments, cannabis was a favorite of our grandparents for cough remedies, analgesics, and tonics and was available over the counter at every local drugstore as well as companies such as Sears, Roebuck and Co. Banned in 1937 via the Marijuana Tax Act as part of a politically and racially driven prohibition craze, it was gradually removed from the pharmacopeia and research was discouraged and later prohibited via drug scheduling. The FBI linked the herb with insanity and claimed a direct correlation between cannabis and violence, and even death, especially when used by people of color.

Currently, science increasingly recognizes the role that cannabinoids play in almost every major life function in the human body. It wasn't until 1990 that endocannabinoids, produced by the human body, were discovered to act as a bio-regulatory mechanism for most human life processes and have receptors sites throughout the human body. CB2 receptors are found almost exclusively in the immune system, with the greatest density in the spleen. These CB2 receptors appear to be responsible for the anti-inflammatory and other newly recognized and very significant therapeutic effects of cannabis.

Cannabis medicine has distinct advantages. CBD, as well as THC, can be given in massive doses with no side effects. In fact, it has performed very effectively as an anti-psychotic when given in high doses. CBD selectively targets and destroys tumor cells while leaving normal healthy cells unmolested. On the other hand, chemotherapy and radiation are highly toxic and indiscriminately injure healthy cells in the brain and the body. Industrial hemp is often high in healing CBD and very low in THC. Hemp CBD is a waste product -- it's thrown out by the ton every year when it could easily be harvested for tumor shrinking.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Obama Begins Push for New National Retirement System




National Seniors Council

A recent hearing sponsored by the Treasury and Labor Departments marked the beginning of the Obama Administration’s effort to nationalize the nation’s pension system and to eliminate private retirement accounts including IRA’s and 401k plans, NSC is warning.

The hearing, held in the Labor Department’s main auditorium, was monitored by NSC staff and featured a line up of left-wing activists including one representative of the AFL-CIO who advocated for more government regulation over private retirement accounts and even the establishment of government-sponsored annuities that would take the place of 401k plans.

"This hearing was set up to explore why Americans are not saving as much for their retirement as they could," explains National Seniors Council National Director Robert Crone, "However, it is clear that this is the first step towards a government takeover. It feels just like the beginning of the debate over health care and we all know how that ended up."

A representative of the liberal Pension Rights Center, Rebecca Davis, testified that the government needs to get involved because 401k plans and IRAs are unfair to poor people. She demanded the Obama administration set up a "government-sponsored program administered by the PBGC (the governments’ Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation)." She proclaimed that even "private annuities are problematic."

Such "reforms" would effectively end private retirement accounts in America, Crone warns. "These people want the government to require that ultimately all Americans buy these government annuities instead of saving or investing on their own. The Government could then take these trillions of dollars and redistribute it through this new national retirement system."

Deputy Treasury Secretary J. Mark Iwry, who presided over the hearing, is a long-time critic of 401k plans because he believes they benefit the rich. He also appears to be one of the Administration’s point man on this issue.

"This whole issue is moving forward very quickly," warns Crone. "Already there is a bill requiring all businesses to automatically enroll their employees in IRA plans in which part of every employee’s paycheck would be automatically deducted and deposited into this account. If this passes, the government will be just one step away from being able to confiscate all these retirement accounts."

NSC has taken the lead in warning the nation about this new government onslaught and is plotting ways to stop it.

"This effort ultimately is designed to grab the retirement nest eggs of America’s senior citizens. This new government annuity scheme, even if it is at first optional, will turn into a giant effort to redistribute the wealth of America’s older citizens," explains Crone. "This scheme mirrors what I expect the President will try to do with Social Security. He wants to turn that program into a welfare program, too."

NSC will likely unveil a new grassroots campaign effort later this year or early in January to coincide with the seating of the new Congress.


Friday, October 19, 2012

NJWeedman found not guilty in pot distribution case

Philly Burbs
Danielle Camilli


Ed “NJWeedman” Forchion hopes the not-guilty verdict a Burlington County jury rendered in his pot distribution trial plants a seed for other medical marijuana patients and sparks a change in the law.

“I think other patients should argue the same points. They can call it the ‘Weedman defense,’ ” he said after a jury of 10 women and two men returned the verdict Thursday following an hourlong deliberation that ended the three-day trial. “The law is wrong. My jury heard that and understood that.”


Forchion, who claims dual residency in Pemberton Township and Los Angeles, was acquitted of possession with the intent to distribute a pound of marijuana that police found in his trunk during a traffic stop on April 1, 2010, in Mount Holly.

The state contended that the sheer volume in Forchion’s possession and the $2,000 in cash he had in his pocket at the time of his arrest were tell-tale signs of distribution, despite the absence of other packaging paraphernalia.

Forchion has maintained that he is no drug dealer. He brought the marijuana from California, where he is a licensed medical marijuana patient, for his own use while on a trip to New Jersey to visit his family, he claimed.

“I don’t use it the way the state says. To me, it’s medicine, it’s food,” Forchion said in his closing argument, noting for the jury that he had been eating pot-laced cookies throughout the trial. “I feel I’m the victim of a flawed law.”

Forchion is believed to be the first defendant in New Jersey to be allowed to present his use of medical marijuana as a defense in a criminal trial, garnering his case attention statewide and beyond as the legalization debate continues.

While he was not allowed to discuss the New Jersey law, which was not in effect when he was arrested nor would it now allow him to legally possess the drug here, Forchion was able to tell the jury that he is a licensed medical marijuana user in California.
At an earlier trial last spring, he was convicted of possession, but that jury could not reach a unanimous decision on the more serious distribution charge, leading to this week’s retrial.

Superior Court Judge Charles Delehey, who presided over both trials, will sentence Forchion in January for possession. The defendant could get up to 18 months in prison, but he likely will get a probationary term.

The longtime activist and author used his criminal case, with the potential exposure of five to 10 years in prison, to rally his cause and start debate.

In pretrial motions, which were subsequently barred from being argued before the jury, Forchion challenged the constitutionality of the state’s criminal code now that New Jersey has a Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana law that recognizes the benefits of cannabis.
He said Thursday he looks forward to the state Appellate Division reviewing that motion when he appeals the possession conviction.

Forchion, who represented himself with the help of court-appointed attorney Donald Ackerman, counted on having a few “potheads” or sympathizers on his jury to keep him out of prison. He said that he thought he was in for another deadlocked jury and that the not-guilty verdict came as a surprise.

“I expected to get one juror, but I got 12,” he said. “I didn’t expect it, and I am very grateful. I think the jury sent a huge message to the state, the governor and the Prosecutor’s Office. People don’t want marijuana users hauled into court and locked up in jail.”

Forchion, who wore a “Marijuana … It’s OK. It’s Just Illegal” T-shirt for his final day of trial, said he plans to stay in New Jersey for about a week to campaign for Congress in New Jersey’s 3rd District.

NJWeedman’s case highlighted the differences in the state’s medical marijuana laws and the national debate over legalization. While Forchion was charged here and faced prison time, in California he ran a successful medical marijuana dispensary.
It was closed when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration raided it as he awaited trial, effectively putting him out of business even though he was not charged with a crime. Forchion said Thursday that once news of his acquittal reached DEA agents in Los Angeles, he received a call that he could pick up some of his seized business equipment.

Friday, October 5, 2012

US agencies seize 686 websites accused of selling fake drugs


ICE and the DOJ have now seized more than 1,500 websites for alleged copyright infringement in the past two years


Grant Gross
Two U.S. agencies have seized 686 websites accused of selling counterfeit and illegal medicines as part of an international crackdown on online sales of fake drugs.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations division, along with the U.S. Department of Justice, seized the websites in the past week, ICE said in a press release. The U.S. operation, nicknamed Bitter Pill, was part of an Interpol operation aimed at disrupting organized crime networks allegedly behind illegal online drug sales.
The new seizures by ICE and the DOJ nearly double the number of websites shut down by the agencies in the name of copyright enforcement. As of July, the agencies had seized 839 websites for alleged copyright infringement over the past two years.
Civil liberties groups have criticized the seizure efforts, saying they lack due process for the website owners. In August, the DOJ dropped chargesagainst two sports streaming websites after shutting them down for 17 months.
The new worldwide effort, involving 100 countries, resulted in 79 arrests and the seizure of 3.7 million doses of counterfeit medicines worth an estimated US$10.5 million, ICE said. Worldwide, about 18,000 websites were shuttered during the weeklong operation, which ended Tuesday.
"These international partnerships are essential in the global fight against the trafficking of counterfeit drugs," ICE Director John Morton said in a statement. "Instead of taking potentially life-saving medicines, customers are duped into purchasing drugs that are fake or untested and could ultimately do them more harm than good."
During the operation, U.S. Customs and Border Protection intercepted packages that were believed to contain fake or illicit drugs. Payment processing companies supported the operation by identifying and blocking payments connected to illicit online pharmacies, identifying individuals responsible for sending spam emails and identifying abuse of electronic payment systems, ICE said.
During the operation, ICE special agents made undercover purchases of counterfeit drugs from multiple websites. The counterfeit drugs seized during Bitter Pill included anti-cancer medication, antibiotics and erectile dysfunction pills as well as weight loss and food supplements.
The new effort is part of Operation in Our Sites, a two-year-old effort by ICE and the DOJ to target the sale of counterfeit merchandise on the Internet. The agencies shut down the seized websites and took custody of their domain names.

Grant Gross covers technology and telecom policy in the U.S. government for The IDG News Service. Follow Grant on Twitter at GrantGross. Grant's e-mail address is grant_gross@idg.com.

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

SEC Sues the One Rating Firm Not on Wall Street’s Take


Bloomberg
William D. Cohan


The Securities and Exchange Commission, it seems, has finally lost its mind.

In April, motivated by what I consider pure maliciousness, the SEC initiated a “cease and desist” administrative proceeding it deemed “necessary for the protection of investors and in the public interest” against Egan-Jones Ratings Co., a privately owned, 20-person firm based in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and against its principal owner, Sean Egan.


Egan-Jones, founded in 1995, is one of nine ratings companies that the SEC has accredited as “nationally recognized,” allowing the firm to rate the debt of sovereign nations, companies and asset-backed securities, among others. Notably, it is the only one of the nine that gets paid by investors instead of by the issuers of securities.
The bigger and better-known ratings companies -- Standard & Poor’s (owned by McGraw-Hill Cos. (MHP)), Moody’s Corp. (MCO) and Fitch Ratings Ltd. -- are paid by the Wall Street banks that underwrite the debt securities of corporate issuers. That is, the companies are beholden to the sellers of the products they are supposed to pass judgment on, not the buyers. That’s akin to allowing the Hollywood studios to pay the nation’s film critics for their opinions.

Shopping Around

We all saw the result in 2007 and 2008. A major cause of the financial crisis was that S&P, Moody’s and Fitch, while being paid hundreds of millions of dollars by Wall Street, gave AAA ratings to complicated, risky securities that turned out to be anything but AAA. If a big bank didn’t like a proposed rating, it just shopped the deal until it found a firm that would provide something it liked better.
Who can forget this memorable April 2007 instant-message exchange between two S&P analysts, Rahul Dilip Shah and Shannon Mooney?
“Btw, that deal is ridiculous,” Shah wrote to Mooney about some mortgage securities they were asked to rate.
“I know, right . . . model def(initely) does not capture half the risk,” she replied.
“We should not be rating it,” he answered.
“We rate every deal,” Mooney replied. “It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.”
You would have thought that after the crisis exposed this kind of abhorrent behavior -- to say nothing of the obvious conflict of interest -- the SEC would have considered scrapping the issuer-pays model on ratings. You might have even thought the SEC would have sued S&P, Moody’s and Fitch for their reckless conduct.
Alas, such obvious steps are out of the question at an SEC headed by Mary Schapiro, who previously led the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Wall Street’s self-financed, self-serving watchdog organization. (When Schapiro left Finra, it gave her a $9 million bonus).
True, for a while, the SEC put on a good show of wanting to reform the ratings companies. It held round-table discussions with interested parties to discuss rectifying the horrific shortcomings of S&P, Moody’s and Fitch. Robert Khuzami, the SEC’s chief enforcement officer, suggested in an interview with Reuters a year ago that the SEC was considering a lawsuit against S&P for its role in the financial collapse. But in the end, nothing changed. The issuer-pays model is still the dominant architecture for the ratings firms.

Debt Downgrade

Now, incredibly, Egan-Jones is the sole rater that the SEC has decided to attack. The trouble for the firm started on July 16, 2011, when Egan-Jones downgraded the U.S.’s sovereign debt by one notch, to AA+ from AAA. Egan-Jones cited “the relatively high level of debt and the difficulty in significantly cutting spending.” Two days later, the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations contacted the firm seeking information about its rating decision. (The next month, S&P also downgraded the U.S.’s sovereign debt, but neither Moody’s nor Fitch did.)
Then, on Oct. 12, Egan-Jones received a call from the SEC notifying the firm of a Wells Notice, an indication that it was being investigated. On April 5 of this year, Egan-Jones again downgraded the U.S. sovereign debt, to AA from AA+. On April 19, leaks started emanating from the SEC that it had voted to start an “administrative law proceeding” against the firm. And on April 24, the SEC filed its complaint.
Just what does the SEC object to so vehemently about Egan- Jones? The commission claims that on its 2008 supplemental application to be a “nationally recognized” ratings firm, Egan- Jones “falsely stated” that it had already rated the credit of 150 asset-backed securities and of 50 sovereign-debt issues. The SEC claims Egan-Jones “willfully made these misstatements and omissions to conceal the fact that it had no experience issuing ratings on ABS or government issuers.” The SEC intends to fine Egan-Jones and to possibly censure Sean Egan -- neither move would be good for business.
Egan says the SEC is making a mountain out of a molehill. He says the paperwork requirements to comply with the Credit Rating Agency Reform Act, which had been passed by Congress in 2006, was still being worked out, and that the SEC has had no problem with his firm’s annual applications since then.
His lawyer, Alan S. Futerfas, told the Wall Street Journal that the SEC knows that Egan did rate the securities in question but it is “saying he didn’t disseminate it publicly.” Futerfas continued: “It’s a very technical argument the SEC is using; it’s not substantive. There’s nothing in this complaint that suggests or alleges that any rating was without integrity or was not accurate or was not predictive.”
If he is right, that raises a question: Is the SEC retaliating against Egan and his firm for downgrading the U.S. sovereign debt?

Principled Stand

Egan told me he is determined to fight the charges because “the issuer-paid rating firms were identified as a significant source” of the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, and yet the SEC’s “response has been to hobble, in any way possible, the most vocal counterbalance to those inflated ratings.”
Egan is standing on principle even though his legal fees will probably far exceed a fine if he loses. “Anybody who looks at this would realize that this is wrong,” he said. “It provides an opportunity for a spotlight on what’s been going on over the recent past, and hopefully it will change so that it’s a more even playing field.”
Don’t get your hopes up for that, Mr. Egan.
(William D. Cohan, the author of “Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World,” is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)
Read more opinion online from Bloomberg View. Subscribe to receive a daily e-mail highlighting new View editorials, columns and op-ed articles.
To contact the writer of this article: William D. Cohan at wdcohan@yahoo.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this article: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net.




Friday, September 21, 2012

Confidential Study Reveals Global Finance Is One Big Guesstimate

NYMag


Sadly it is probably too late for
Diamond's "but all the other
rate submitters are doing it!" defense.
A few months ago, when the Libor-rigging scandal hit, casual finance-watchers were aghast at the idea that an interest rate that was used to set rates on trillions of dollars of mortgages, car loans, and other financial products was essentially calculated by polling a few banks and expecting them not to lie to everyone. The most important number in global finance run on the honor system? Couldn't be.


But it was, and Libor was in fact undone by its own trusting nature. As we now know, a coalition of overgrown frat boys conspired to rig the rate, jettisoning the gentleman's honor of Wall Street past and paving the way for Bob Diamond's ouster.

Surely, that was it, though, and replacing Libor with a transaction-based rate that took the prices of actual securities into account would solve the problem. There couldn't be more incredibly important financial numbers out there based on nothing more than a wink and a handshake, right?

Wrong, says Bloomberg, which obtained a confidential memo that revealed that Libor has lots of company when it comes to being easily manipulable:

Fewer than half of the benchmark interest rates surveyed in the U.S., Europe and Asia were based on actual transactions, according to a confidential International Organization of Securities Commissions discussion paper obtained by Bloomberg News. Instead, the rates were calculated by methodologies that were unclear, not transparent and only rarely subject to specific regulatory standards or obligations, the group said.
[...] 
According to the discussion paper, about 80 percent of benchmarks were either compiled by associations or private entities. For survey-based benchmarks like Libor, the criteria for submitting data was not always objective and called for judgments about rates and prices, according to the discussion paper. Even in benchmarks that are based on actual transaction data, the compiling bodies retain discretion in producing the actual rates or prices.
Manipulation potential in 80 percent of the world's benchmark rates? That's a lot of Bollinger.

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Corbett: IAEA and Nuclear Monopolists a “Gang of Thugs”

Corbett Report


Iran and the UN’s nuclear watchdog are set to resume talks later on Friday – more than two months after the previous round failed. Tehran insists it only wants peaceful energy, but the West remains suspicious of its nuclear ambitions. Hopes aren’t high for these negotiations either – while Iranian citizens continue to be hit hardest by US and European sanctions. For more on this we RT talks to James Corbett – journalist and editor of The Corbett Report – an online multi-media news and information source.

Which ‘Natural’ Food Companies Are Fighting the Effort to Label GMOs?

From the Trenches

Huffington Post  On Nov. 6, California voters will have the opportunity to vote on historic Proposition 37, which would mandate the labeling of genetically-engineered foods. At a time when it’s hard to get a large percentage of Americans to agree on almost anything, polls show that as many as 90 percent of us want genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) labeled. More than 40 other nations, including the entire European Union, already require disclosure. But Monsanto and its allies are dedicated to keeping consumers in the dark and are pouring tens of millions of dollars into a disinformation campaign intended to defeat Prop 37.

You might expect the biotech industry to try to block a measure that would require foods that contain GMOs to say so on their packages. After all, a growing body of scientific research is indicating that GMOs might be far more dangerous than was previously imagined. But Monsanto’s allies in the effort to defeat Prop 37 include some unexpected culprits. It can be shocking to realize that some of the most trusted names in the naturalfood world are in bed with Monsanto.

Naked Juice is owned by PepsiCo, which has donated $1.7 million to Monsanto’s efforts. Honest Tea, Odwalla and Simply Orange are owned by Coca-Cola, which has donated another million dollars. Alexia and Lightlife are owned by ConAgra, which has put in more than $1 million.

You won’t find this mentioned anywhere on the Kashi product packaging, but Kashi, as well as Gardenburger and Morningstar Farms, is owned by Kellogg, which has already coughed up more than $600,000 to defeat Prop 37.

Kashi has already been in plenty of trouble on the GMO front this year. A few months ago, a number of natural foods stores stopped carrying Kashi cereals when it came to their attention that the “soy used in most Kashi products is genetically modified, and that when the USDA tested the grains used there were found to be pesticides that are known carcinogens and hormone disruptors.”

In an attempt to defend itself, Kashi released a YouTube video that announced that:

“While it’s likely that some of our foods contain GMOs, the main reason for that is because in North America, well over 80 percent of many crops, including soybeans are grown using GMOs … Factors outside our control such as pollen drift from nearby crops

… have led to an environment where GMOs are not sufficiently controlled.”
This seemingly reasonable defense — that the only reason GMOs are found in Kashi products is because GMOs are widespread in the environment — might be valid if the problem was only trace GMOs, which lead to a product being less than 1 percent genetically engineered. But when theCornucopia Institute tested Kashi’s Go Lean cereal, which gets its protein from soy, they found that the soy was 100 percent genetically engineered.

There are other natural foods heroes whose profits are being used to try to keep us in the dark. Silk soy milk carries the “Non-GMO Project Verified” seal on its package. But Silk is owned by Dean Foods, which has donated more than a quarter million dollars to Monsanto’s efforts to defeat Prop 37.
The list of sell-outs who masquerade as bastions of organics is disappointingly long. R. W. Knudsen and Santa Cruz Organics are owned by Smucker, which has donated $388,000 to killing Prop 37. Cascadian Farm, Larabar and Muir Glen are owned by General Mills, which has put more than half a million dollars into the effort.

The good news is that even with large agribusiness companies purchasing natural and organic brands and then betraying consumers by funding the attack on GMO labeling, Prop 37 still stands an excellent chance of passing.

And not everyone has sold out, not by a long shot. There are still some authentic heroes in the natural food industry. Nature’s Path, Dr. Bronner’s, Nutiva and Lundberg Rice stand out among the companies that are contributing to the effort to pass Prop 37 and ensure your right to know what’s in your food. Organic Valley, Amy’s and Eden Foods are also standing up for your right to know. And the owner of a natural health website, Joseph Mercola (mercola.com), has donated nearly a million dollars to the good fight.

If you want to know more, the Cornucopia Institute has released a shopper’s guide to the companies that are donating on both sides of Prop 37.

At present, it’s not easy to know whether there are GMOs in your food. The Non-GMO Shopping Guide put out by the Institute for Responsible Technology is a great support. But the most important thing you can do is to help pass Proposition 37.

If Californians pass Prop 37 in November, it will have enormous implications to the food system throughout North America.

Ignorance, in some cases, may be bliss. But in the case of GMOs, the ignorance of not knowing what is in your food is not bliss, it’s subservience to Monsanto and its allies. And it could mean a lifetime of devastating health problems for you and your children.

It’s going to be a battle. Let’s win this one for ourselves, for the earth, and for all future generations.


Monday, August 13, 2012

Kim Dotcom Resists, Pussy Riot Protests and the Insane Clown Posse Sues ... Internet Reformation Rolls

Daily Bell


Your life is precious ... precious, yeah
So don't you forget it, get it, no
You decide who you are
You decide who you are.


~ Kim Dotcom, lyrics to "Precious"

Dominant Social Theme: These people are all criminals! If only the world had a single corpus, we could throw everyone in jail at once.

Free-Market Analysis: As the power elite that wants to run the world continues to race against time more and more brutally, what we call the Internet Reformation becomes ever more visible.

It is becoming more visible because as the elites shove the world toward global governance, people being shoved, some of them, push back.
In the past week, we've seen three high-profile instances of this sort of resistance. Kim Dotcom, CEO of destroyed Megaupload, has launched a website to proclaim his innocence and begun releasing surprisingly tuneful pop music to plead his cause and shape his public image.

Over in Russia, the punk girl band Pussy Riot is finishing up a trial that sees them accused of violating the sanctity and physical space of the Russian Orthodox Church to protest Vladimir Putin's endlessly authoritarian reign. One of the members made an eloquent closing statement that we reproduce in part below.

Most recently, the Insane Clown Posse has filed a lawsuit against the FBI declaring the group and its followers to be a "gang." We last wrote about the Insane Clown Posse here:

In Defense of the Insane Clown Posse

It seems to us that the Internet Reformation is gaining traction, inevitably, as we long ago predicted. We first pointed to Congressman Ron Paul as an embodiment of the modern Reformation but as the powers-that-be push forward on all fronts, they are assaulting many other bright and courageous people who then step to the fore.

The initial Reformation was in part sponsored by the power elite, and the elites are trying to take over THIS reformation as well. But the trouble with taking over the Internet is that one has to do it in full VIEW of the Internet.

Confusion, therefore, is employed. "They" are using apparent false flags like Julian Assange, Anonymous and even faux alternative currency movements to undercut the tremendous progress that free-market thinking has made over the past decade.

But as we long ago predicted, the Internet Reformation is fairly unstoppable at the moment. The European Union is falling apart, the global warming scam is unraveling, the war on terror has not gone as planned in Afghanistan and many other elite promotions have been exposed in detail on the Internet.

The ancient power elite, that evidently wants to run the world and uses its control of central banks to fund its mania, is in no sense defeated but it is facing challenges that it has not faced since the Gutenberg Press itself began exposing the power structure 600 years ago.

Then, the Church was riven, a New World was discovered, two vast revolutions were initiated and the cause of freedom was at once massively advanced and then, after a time, retarded.

It took the elites about 400 years to fully control the damage. They didn't really overcome it until about the 20th century, and now the Internet Reformation has undone much of the globalist progress that was made.
Let's take these three examples cited above and analyze how they may be contributing to the current Reformation.

The violent raid on Kim Dotcom's mansion may soon be seen as disastrous overreach by US Federal authorities. It was no doubt thought that 400 pound Kim Dotcom was an easy target. He could be mocked and generally demonized as a greedy, overweight criminal.

But those in the upper reaches of this elite global conspiracy are still floundering when it comes to confronting the damage the Internet is doing to their plans.

Copyright was apparently invented by the power elite of the day to retard information flow from the Gutenberg Press. It was a brilliant stroke, at once slowing injurious information and placing many informed communicators on the side of the state itself because copyright would enrich them.

But in a 21st century Internet world we need only to turn to natural law to decide how well copyright works now. Laws that demand egregious violent enforcement and then are STILL flouted are dysfunctional ones. They are in legal parlance "positive" rather than natural. Like prohibition, they don't work.

People sense that the powers-that-be are on the wrong side of the copyright issue, thus some of the sentiment supporting Kim Dotcom. You can see some of our articles here:

The Creepy Pursuit of Kim Dotcom by Corporate America and Why it Matters

VIDEO: Internet Piracy – Who are the Thieves?

Both New Zealand and American authorities are being handed one defeat after another in this case, including a judicial invalidation of the very warrant that was executed on Kim Dotcom.

The elites behind this raid – the West's top dynastic families and their enablers and associates – may eventually come to regret making Kim Dotcom their number one target. He is big, increasingly angry and something of a marketing genius.

It may be that Vladimir Putin shall also regret HIS foray into further authoritarianism. Putin is worried about his legitimacy as a ruler and has decided that making a case against three pretty young women collectively called Pussy Riot will provide the shock value he needs to calm protest against him.

But late last week it backfired with Nadezhda Tolokonnikova's closing statement, which, in our humble view, is so good it's almost dumbfounding. You can find the full statement at Infowars and Business Insider. Here's a little:

We are absolutely not happy with—and have been forced into living politically—by the use of coercive, strong-arm measures to handle social processes, a situation in which the most important political institutions are the disciplinary structures of the state – the security agencies, the army, the police, the special forces and the accompanying means of ensuring political stability: prisons, preventive detention and mechanisms to closely control public behaviour.

Nor are we happy with the enforced civic passivity of the bulk of the population or the complete domination of executive structures over the legislature and judiciary. Moreover, we are genuinely angered by the fear-based and scandalously low standard of political culture, which is constantly and knowingly maintained by the state system and its accomplices.

Look at what Patriarch Kirill has to say: "The Orthodox don't go to rallies." We are angered by the appalling weakness of horizontal relationships within society. We don't like the way in which the state system easily manipulates public opinion through its tight control of the overwhelming majority of media outlets. A perfect example is the unprecedentedly shameless campaign against Pussy Riot, based on distorting facts and words, which has appeared in nearly all the Russian media, apart from the few independent media there are in this political system.

The full text of the speech has by now been broadcast and texted around the world. Putin, who is evidently and obviously an ally of the Western power elite (he just returned from an Israeli love fest) made a mistake going after these girls.

The FBI meanwhile made a mistake targeting Insane Clown Posse, which is now going to sue them for falsely labeling them and their followers as a "gang."

The Insane Clown Posse is not a gang. In any case, if the far more insane laws against drugs and other private practices were lifted there probably wouldn't be any gang violence, especially if monopoly central banking were done away with, along with public schools, so that the economy could recover and people could find jobs again.

The FBI also played a big role in the raid on Kim Dotcom and it is very likely as the Internet Reformation continues the FBI's increasingly aggressiveness on behalf of the power elite shall meet rising pushback from the Internet Reformation.

The FBI has been exposed on the 'Net for creating and fostering false-flag terrorist episodes and has evidently and obviously covered up whatever really happened on 9/11. Like the CIA, which evidently created al Qaeda, the FBI's tactics have been exposed by the Internet and are increasingly transparent to the larger masses of people that might in a different era have been more trusting.

It is, after all, a matter of trust. What the Internet Reformation increasingly presents to viewers is a civilization that doesn't work as advertised ... and perhaps was designed not to work on purpose.

As this knowledge continues to percolate through the body politic, the ability of the powers that be to manipulate people via war, economic ruin and regulatory authoritarianism becomes increasingly difficult. The elites' dominant social themes are exposed along with their apparent one-world agenda.

The three examples we have examined here are just a small exhibit of the larger changes that are sweeping the world and making it increasingly difficult for those involved in a greater one-world conspiracy.

The last meme to fall, in our view, will be one having to do with what we call "private justice" – which was the way societies handled internal quarrels and injustices for tens of thousands of years. Public justice is increasingly exposed for the unjust mechanism that it is. You can read an article on public and private justice here:

What Amanda Knox Tells Us About Justice

Conclusion: Times are changing but we don't see that the power elite has developed any effective tactics to control the damage to their plans. Right now, they're becoming increasingly authoritarian and violent. But we bet in time they'll be forced to take a step back.