Month: February 2012

The singer Willie Nelson has joined with 300,000 other activists in a lawsuit against the U.S. agricultural giant Monsanto, citing the company’s practice of suing small farmers whose fields have been contaminated by Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds. The suit was filed as part of the "Occupy the Food System" campaign protesting the corporate takeover of small farms and the use of harmful pollutants like Monsanto’s "Roundup" herbicide.

The case, Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association, et al. v. Monsanto, was filed in federal district court in Manhatten on March 29, 2011, on behalf of 60 family farmers, seed businesses and organic agricultural organizations, challenging Monsanto’s patents on genetically modified seed. On June 1, 2011, we amplified our OSGATA v. Monsanto complaint by bringing on an additional 23 Plaintiffs to bring the total to 83. Our plaintiff group now represents over 300,000 members.

OSGATA and company finally got their day in court on Jan. 31. Approximately 200 farmers and supporters showed up in front of the Federal District Court in Manhattan for opening arguments. Occupy Wall Street’s food justice working group helped organize the rally, though they are not plaintiffs in the suit. “We’re part of OWS, which is all about corporate consolidation, and you can’t discuss that without addressing agriculture,” says Corbin Laedlein, a member of the working group.

“We want nothing to do with Monsanto. We don’t want their seed. We don’t want their technology. We don’t want their contamination,” says Jim Gerritsen, an organic farmer from Maine and president of OSGATA. The organization originally brought the idea of a suit to the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT), a group that wants to change how patent law works in the U.S., and PUBPAT took on the case pro bono. In Gerritsen’s estimation, about 300,000 individuals are involved in the case by proxy of organizations they’re a part of, including most certified organic farmers in the country. Gerritsen calls the dustings of GMO-crop pollen and the occasional seed carried wayward by the wind — a natural atmospheric occurrence found in what is known as the “outdoors” — contamination which not only is unwelcome, but can also could potentially lower the quality and value of organic and other non-GMO crops.

“They are probably the most aggressive patent holder in the U.S.,” Gerritsen adds. According to PUBPAT, between 1997 and April 2010, Monsanto filed 144 lawsuits against farmers for patent infringement, and more than 500 farms are investigated each year.

“The seed that Monsanto doesn’t control, they will control through contamination,” Gerritsen says. “Monsanto wants ultimate and absolute control over everything.”

 

www.commondreams.org

According to CBS 11 News in Dallas, Ellen Terrell, a wife and mother, says she was forced to go through the naked body scanner three times at Dallas / Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) in Texas during a recent trip. After receiving an odd compliment about her "cute figure" by a female screener, Terrell says she was summoned to three separate radiation blasts in the naked body scanner — and if not for objections made by the female screener, there would have been a fourth blast.

"She says to me, 'Do you play tennis?' And I said, 'Why?' She said, 'You just have such a cute figure,'" recalls Terrell of the incident. After being questioned about her athletic prowess, Terrell says she was sent through the naked body scanner a first time, only to be told that "we didn't get it," these being the words of the female TSA screener, who was communicating via a private microphone to several male TSA screeners in a back room.

After the second and third scan, the female TSA screener became visually frustrated with the other screeners who wanted Terrell to go through a fourth time, reportedly telling them through the microphone, "Guys, it is not blurry, I'm letting her go."

And Terrell's is not the only case where TSA screeners have apparently selected attractive women to go through naked body scanners, a process that is supposed to be "random." At least 500 other women have filed complaints saying they felt "targeted" by TSA screeners because of their attractive features, or for simply being female. One woman says that, while waiting in the TSA screening line, she observed that only females were selected for the naked body scanner.

Rather than dismantle the entire illegitimate and unconstitutional agency, some members of Congress have proposed establishing "passenger advocates" at all airports to address traveler complaints. Such advocates, which are the brainchild of Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), are disturbingly similar to the Jewish councils that were established by Hitler during World War II to address complaints by Jews that were evicted from their homes, and later sent to concentration camps for extermination (http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005265).

End federal government tyranny by opting out of all things TSA
The only way to really solve this escalating problem of abuse and tyranny is for every single American to join as one, and resist all forms of unconstitutional TSA screening. They constitute unreasonable search and seizure, which violate the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment (http://www.techdirt.com), while the Constitution's Tenth Amendment prohibits the federal government from assuming powers not expressly given it by the Constitution, which includes setting up illegal checkpoints at airports in the first place.

"The police state in this country is growing out of control. One of the ultimate embodiments of this is the TSA that gropes and grabs our children, our seniors, and our loved ones and neighbors with disabilities," said Republican presidential candidate and Texas Representative Ron Paul in a recent statement. "The TSA does all of this while doing nothing to keep us safe."

Courthouse News Service reports that on September 23, 2011, Heyman Matlock, the student service director of NUSD where Cayleh is a student; a school nurse; and a camera crew from KXTV came unannounced to Cayleh's home in an attempt to forcefully administer the Tdap vaccine to her. The crew not only trespassed private property, but KXTV cameras filmed the house, the family, and a list containing detailed personal and medical information about Cayleh and the other "truant" students, all of which was broadcast on television.

"Plaintiff Leisa Wells (Cayleh's mother) answered the door and found Mr. Matlock and the nurse on her doorstep, and was shocked to find that she was being filmed head-on by a KXTV television news crew as the crew was standing on her lawn," says the complaint. "Mr. Matlock stated that he was there with the nurse to administer a Tdap vaccination to Cayleh Morrison. Shocked at being filmed in this interaction and with the presumptuousness of Mr. Matlock's approach, she told him forcefully to leave, and closed the door."

While canvassing the neighborhood in pursuit of the other unvaccinated children, Matlock apparently also implied to KXTV that Cayleh and the other children were "under an obligation to be vaccinated," which is entirely false. California law provisions that individuals can opt out of getting vaccinated for both medical and philosophical reasons (http://www.nvic.org/Vaccine-Laws/state-vaccine-requirements.aspx).

But Matlock made no mention of this fact during his apparent vaccination crusade, which the lawsuit identifies as "intentionally disseminat[ing] negative information" that resulted in numerous "unwelcome contacts to the family from numerous places around the country." The family's contact information, of course, was visually displayed on screen during the KXTV report, as part of the charade.

Cayleh's family is currently seeking damages for trespass, invasion of privacy, conspiracy, and unlawful dissemination of private information and school and medical records.

However, vaccine "non-compliance" stunts like this one could soon be replaced by forced vaccination of students in private, as drug company-backed legislation in California is currently pushing to allow secret vaccinations of young students without parental consent (http://www.naturalnews.com/033629_vaccinations_parental_consent.html).

Sources for this article include:

http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/02/10/43779.htm

Vaccine Protocol
Flu & Cold Protocol

America's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has threatened CSL with revocation or suspension of its license to sell drugs and vaccines due to a series of "objectionable conditions and practices" in its manufacturing facilities including:

* Failure of laboratory staff to wear masks while dispensing and mixing vaccines;
* Deficient tests to check whether the vaccine viruses had been properly split (not performing these tests properly can increase the risk of adverse vaccine reactions); and
* Inadequate investigations into vaccine and other product failures

Vaccine safety not a priority for Australian government
Despite the obvious problems with vaccine safety and the lack of accountability shown by CSL in demonstrating that they had taken any steps to improve manufacturing processes, the Australian government has chosen to continue administering this vaccine to an unsuspecting public. According to an unnamed spokesperson for the Australian Health Department, this decision was made because "CSL is the only onshore manufacturer of influenza vaccine … that can guarantee sufficient supply of influenza vaccine to allow the national vaccination program to commence on 15 March."

Will Australians be warned?
Due to a feeling within the community that influenza might be less dangerous than the flu vaccine, the government had to dispose of more than 42 percent of the 'Swine Flu' vaccines it had purchased (7.5 million doses) at a cost to the taxpayer of over AUD $100 million. One has to wonder if this year's vaccine recipients will be warned about the increased risk of using Fluvax and if they are, how many doses will be wasted since most people would most likely not want to leave themselves at risk from a flu shot that is known to be highly reactive.

What makes this waste of our precious and limited health dollar even more deplorable is the fact that in children under the age of two, flu vaccines have been shown to be completely ineffective. In those over the age of two and healthy adults, flu vaccines do nothing to prevent the risk of hospitalization, time spent off of work or the risk death from flu. And in the elderly – the original target group for this shot – flu vaccines do nothing to prevent death or serious morbidity from flu though there does seem to be a slight protective effect against death from pneumonia.

The TGA, which is fully funded by cost-recovery (meaning it gets no money from the Australian government and is completely funded by the drug companies whose products it is meant to regulate) has proven to be more of a friend to Big Pharma rather than a watchdog to protect the health and well being of the public.

According to a study conducted in Connecticut last year, the number of conventional practitioners and pediatricians that say they have dismissed patients because of vaccine refusal appears to be on the rise. While only six percent of physicians said they "routinely" dismissed families over vaccine refusal back in 2001 and 2006, that number appears to at least be in the double-digits today, with one survey of 133 doctors showing that about 30 percent of them have refused patients who resist vaccines.

Dr. Scott J. Goldstein and his partners from the Northwestern Children's Practice in Chicago, for instance, now require all of their patients to comply with the practice's vaccine requirements. And Dr. Allan LaReau and his 11 colleagues from Bronson Rambling Road Pediatrics in Kalamazoo, Mich., stopped working with all families that refused vaccinations back in 2010 (http://online.wsj.com).

The excuses for this blatant form of medical discrimination include many of the usual suspects. One of the most humorously irrational ones, of course, is the idea that unvaccinated children pose a disease risk to the vaccinated. The sheer insanity of this pseudoscientific nonsense would be humorous if it were not taken seriously by many so-called medical professionals today.

The vast majority of the vaccines administered to children in the first few years of their lives have never been proven either safe or effective, and yet self-professed experts like Dr. Goldstein and Dr. Lareau worship them as if they are some kind of magical cure for disease. Dr. Goldstein, in fact, told CBS News that he believes vaccines have "done more than anything else over the past 100 years to help improve the health of children," an ideology that has no basis in reality.

Ironically, many of the recent disease outbreaks that have been blamed by the mainstream media on unvaccinated individuals were actually most rampant in vaccinated individuals. The 2010 whooping cough outbreak in California, for instance, was found to be most prevalent among children that have been vaccinated against whooping cough. And experts have reluctantly admitted that a failure of the vaccine, not the fact that some children were unvaccinated, was likely the real cause of that outbreak (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/vaccine-response-pertussis/).

Only, DHS isn't just trolling for terrorists by monitoring Twitter and Facebook. No, the department – which at least one presidential contender, Rep. Ron Paul, believes is out of control – is wasting valuable and limited assets evaluating media reports, organizations and news sites like The Drudge Report for anti-government attitudes and social unrest.

But wait, you ask. What does monitoring American-based Web sites and social media applications have to do with the war on terror? Probably nothing, but you may remember that the Department of Homeland Security was born out of legislation passed immediately after the 9/11 attacks to protect "the American people from terrorist threats."

First Amendment, anyone?

You're not the only one who isn't buying the spying. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a watchdog organization looking to protect civil liberties, privacy, the First Amendment and constitutional values in an increasingly interconnected world, has convinced a House subcommittee that the DHS activity is suspicious enough to warrant closer examination. The hearings come on the heels of the group's acquisition of some 300 pages of DHS documents resulting from a Freedom of Information Act request which lay bare the agency's "intelligence gathering" activities online.

"The Department of Homeland Security's monitoring of political dissent has no legal basis and is contrary to core First Amendment principles," says EPIC's director, Ginger McCall, who says a government agency that monitors what ordinary Americans are saying about federal policies goes too far, and has direct implications on freedom of speech.

"The language in the documents makes it quite clear that they are looking for media reports that are critical of the agency and the U.S. government more broadly," she said. "This is entirely outside of the bounds of the agency's statutory duties."

EPIC says documents it has obtained show that DHS has used contractors to monitor Twitter, Facebook, Hulu, Wikileaks, Drudge and other news sites including the Huffington Post. The documents reveal that the contractors were required to provide DHS with reaction regarding potential "threats and hazards," as well as any media reports that reflect adversely on the U.S. Government and the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.) ability to prevent, protect and respond, to recovery efforts or activities related to any crisis or events which impact National Planning Scenarios."

The program should also highlight "both positive and negative reports on FEMA, C.I.A., C.B.P., ICE, etc., as well as organizations outside of D.H.S.," the documents said.

Looking over your shoulder

Now, DHS officials admit that, yes, the agency was monitoring the Web for any negative opinion of the government. But they said the operation was only undertaken as a one-and-done test, then quickly dropped, because it didn't meet "operational requirements or privacy standards" which "expressly prohibit reporting on individuals' First Amendment activities."

EPIC says that, based on what it has discovered that explanation doesn't ring true. Rather, the organization says DHS believes the monitoring program is one that should be repeated.

"They are completely out of bounds here. The idea that the government is constantly peering over your shoulder and listening to what you are saying creates a very chilling effect to legitimate dissent," says McCall.

The public will soon know. The hearing by the Department of Homeland Security's subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence will hear evidence concerning EPIC's findings Feb. 16.