Senator Pan recieved bribes equal to twice the average American income to push mandatory vaccination law

By J. D. Heyes
July 14, 2015
Natural News

 

One of the primary sponsors of recently passed legislation in California mandating that nearly all children enrolled in public and private schools in the state be vaccinated received some of the millions in campaign donations showered on the bill’s supporters by Big Pharma.

Democratic Sen. Richard Pan, a physician, according to the table published below, was the top recipient of a share of more than $2 million in campaign contributions by large pharmaceutical companies as the measure, SB 277, was being “debated” in the California legislature.

As reported by the Sacramento Bee newspaper, Pan received $95,150 from pharmaceutical firms; the only other elected official receiving more than $90,000 was Assembly Speaker Toni Adkins ($90,205); the speaker decides what legislation will be taken up by the chamber.

In all, the SacBee reported, Big Pharma and its industry surrogates gave legislators in the 2013-2014 session more than $2 million:

Nine of the top 20 recipients are either legislative leaders or serve on either the Assembly or Senate health committees. Receiving more than $95,000, the top recipient of industry campaign cash is Sen. Richard Pan, a Sacramento Democrat and doctor who is carrying the vaccine bill.

Critics of the process noted that the campaign donations more than likely influenced how lawmakers voted – a charge proponents of the bill dismiss.

“We aren’t pushing this bill behind the scenes,” Priscilla VanderVeer, the senior director for communications for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, known as PhRMA, the industry’s main trade group, told the paper.

Pan historically has been supported by the Big Pharma vaccine industry

While PhRMA had never taken a public position on SB 277, the organization was widely known to have supported vaccinations as part of what it termed sound public health policy.

Still, the industry donated more than a half-million dollars to outside campaign spending groups that nevertheless assisted in getting some members elected last year, the SacBee reported.

“Leading pharmaceutical companies also spent nearly $3 million more during the 2013-2014 legislative session lobbying the Legislature, the governor, the state pharmacists’ board and other agencies, according to state filings,” the paper reported.

Tables (below) showing who gave, who received, and how much, were compiled by The Daily Sheeple news website.

NaturalNews has documented Pan’s financial connection to Big Pharma in the past. In this May report, we noted, citing TruthStream Media:

California’s bill to force vaccinations despite religious and philosophical beliefs — ostensibly guaranteed by the 1st Amendment – has been introduced by a pediatrician and state senator with ties to the vaccine industry.

Dr. Pan was among more than two-dozen California lawmakers who received campaign donations on record from Merck in the 2010 election cycle, ahead of supporting a 2011 law allowing girls as young as 12 years old to receive Gardasil vaccinations for HPV (manufactured by Merck) without parental consent.

Pan was a member of the state Assembly during the 2010 cycle; as documented by Health Impact News, he reportedly received $1,000 in campaign contributions from Merck.

Dr. Oz and the case of NO endorsement kickback

As NaturalNews editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, reported about a year ago elected officials on the national level have also been “paid” by Big Pharma to go after alternative healers and health advocates.

One such attack involved U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-MO., who launched broadsides at Dr. Oz for several health products he has endorsed. Come to find out, Adams reported, McCaskill had received some $146,000 in campaign donations from – you guessed it – Big Pharma.

“According to campaign contribution data published at OpenSecrets.org, prescription drug mega-retailer Express Scripts gave McCaskill over $109,000 in campaign contributions, most of which was routed through lobbyist groups or PACs,” Adams reported.

“Sen. McCaskill also accepted over $37,000 from Monsanto, widely regarded to be the most evil corporation in the world and an enemy of sustainable food production, heirloom seeds and traditional American farming methods,” he said.

Dr. Oz, by contrast, never got a cent from any company whose product he was pushing.

It seems when it comes to health public policy, it has become the best that money can buy.

Sources:

http://www.sacbee.com

http://www.thedailysheeple.com

http://healthimpactnews.com

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://www.truthwiki.org/Vaccine_Fanaticism/

Nestle CEO Says He Would Profit More from CA’s Drought if He Could

Serious droughts don’t seem to matter

By Christina Sarich
July 12, 2015
Natural Society

 

According to Credo, Nestle CEO Tim Brown was asked in a radio interview recently if the company would consider halting their water extraction from a national forest in drought-stricken California. The answer may not be what you’d expect.

Did Brown apologize for the corporation’s contribution to California’s water crisis? Nope. He doubled down and said, “Absolutely not. In fact, if I could increase it, I would.”

Many of the 200,000 activists who signed a petition asking Nestle to stop extracting water from the national forest reserve found out about Nestle’s actions through Natural Society. In all, the sheer amount of protest drummed up quite a bit of negative press for Nestle. The company has still refused to change its ways.

Water privatization, as they’ve made clear, is their goal. Nestle’s former CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe also has a long history of disregarding public health and abusing the environment to take part in the profit of an astounding $35 billion in annual profit from water bottle sales alone. It is clear that this corporation doesn’t think clean drinking water is a human right.

Nestle recently updated their website to address the question – Have you been sourcing water illegally in the San Bernadino National Forest without a proper permit?

“No. We understand that our permit is one of hundreds awaiting renewal by the US Forest Service (USFS). The USFS has repeatedly informed Nestlé Waters North America (NWNA) that we can lawfully continue our operations pending the reissuance of our permit and that the provisions of our existing permit are still in force until the effective date of a new permit. NWNA has continued to receive and pay invoices from the USFS for the annual permit fee, as we have since it was first issued. We also continue to report our water use from the spring to the State Water Resources Control Board.”

Never mind that California is going through the worst drought in history, and that other companies have been responsible enough to halt the bottling of water in order to honor the environmental devastation that the state faces.

Also, never mind that Nestle’s permit to extract water expired 27 years ago!

It’s time to halt Nestle’s water privatization plans, especially while utilizing an expired license in a state that is having serious water issues. Nestle is taking water and then selling it back to a drought-stricken population. It has to stop.

American CEOs paid 300 times more than workers

By David Brown
June 29, 2015
World Socialist Web Site

 

A new study by the Economic Policy Institute showed that while worker pay has stagnated since the economic crash of 2008, CEO pay has skyrocketed. While the average worker made the same in 2014 as they did in 2009, CEO compensation rose by 54.3 percent in the same period.

The average pay for CEOs at the largest US firms in 2014 was 303.4 times the pay of an average worker. CEOs averaged $16.3 million, up 3.9 percent from 2013, while the average worker in 2014 only made $53,200. In practical terms, that means a top CEO takes home more than a worker makes in a year after 8 hours on the job.

The standard justification for this obscene disparity is that CEOs are highly skilled individuals who significantly impact corporate productivity and ultimately “create” thousands and thousands of jobs. Then, so the myth goes, there is stiff competition among the largest companies to hire the best CEOs, which drives the exorbitant compensation packages.

The study examined compensation packages for CEOs at the top 350 US firms from 1965 to 2014. The authors then compared them with the average wages of workers, the wages of high-earning workers and stock market values. Researchers found that “CEO pay does not reflect greater productivity of executives but rather the power of CEOs to extract concessions.”

The report debunks the claim that growing CEO compensation is simply the result of a competitive market for skilled professionals, the argument advanced by the CATO institute and other think tanks. When compared to the top 0.1 percent of wage earners, CEOs make 5.84 times as much. Moreover, this gap is widening. Other measures of compensation relative to skill pale in comparison. College graduates, for instance, only earn 1.82 times as much as high school graduates.

Historically speaking, the rise in CEO compensation is tied to the global decline of American capitalism and the increasing financialization of the economy. In 1965 the ratio of CEO to worker pay was 20 to 1. By 1978 the ratio had only grown to 30 to 1. It was only in the 90s that CEO pay reached absurd heights, rising from 59 to 1 in 1989 to 376 to 1 in 2000.

By then CEO compensation was increasingly directly tied to stock prices, such that the dot-com crash in 2000 saw the ratio drop to 189 to 1. CEO pay then rebounded with the growing financial bubble to near record highs before crashing with the market in 2008. As a whole, between 1978 and 2014, CEO pay grew by 997 percent while worker pay grew by only 11 percent.

The current growth in CEO pay is directly tied to the quantitative easing program of the Federal Reserve, which has driven share buybacks and speculation, pushing markets to record highs while undermining the actual productive forces in the economy.

A report in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year showed that the companies in the S&P 500 index had “sharply increased their spending on dividends and buybacks to a median 36 percent of operating cash flow, from 18 percent in 2003.” This doubling in one decade was accompanied by a decline in investment in production.

A particularly sharp example of this occurred with the announcement by General Motors last March that they would buy back $5 billion worth of stock and increase dividend payouts by another $5 billion. GM stock shot up 4 percent immediately after the announcement.

While the maneuver netted massive profits for investors, senior autoworkers at GM have had their wages frozen since 2007 while the wages of new hires were cut in half as part of the 2009 bankruptcy and bailout. Rather than use any of their $25 billion cash hoard to invest in new production or raise workers’ wages, that money went to padding the portfolios of investors and corporate executives.

Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, was given $16.2 million in compensation in 2014. That includes a $1.6 million salary, $2.1 million in other incentives and $11.8 million in company stock.

Mind Altering Drugs

By Peter Vlemmix
Global Research, June 29, 2015
Peter Vlemmix, June 20, 2015

 

We fight a continuous war to prevent people taking illegal mind altering drugs for pleasure or sorrow, it’s called the war on drugs. 

Yet we use society’s most respected professionals –namely medical doctors and pharmacists– to hand out legal mind altering drugs, which have devastating consequences on people’s health.

You are made to believe that Big Pharma is interested in your health, but in practice it is a lethal profit making machine.

–

 

 

The Day the Earth Died

And Why Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Etc., Were Virtually Silent About It

By Eric Zuesse
June 25, 2015
Washington’s Blog

 

As the civilizations that we all know, and love, and lived, slide increasingly into totalitarian misery; and the environment, which had been our lives, becomes less and less livable, there will be, in retrospect, one key day, which historians will mark, as the turning-point toward Earth’s death; and it was 23 June 2015. That’s the day when the U.S. Senate, which had previously turned down the procedural move (called “Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority,” and discussed here) that opens the door to passing U.S. President Obama’s falsely-called ‘trade’ deals, finally (in effect) passed it — thereby reducing the Constitutionally required two-thirds of Senators that’s needed to approve any of these treaties in order for it to become law, down to merely an unConstitutional 50% of the Senators (+ the Vice President as the tie-breaker), as if a treaty were like any merely ordinary law (which requires only 50%+1); “Fast Track” thus enormously increases the likelihood of passing any of Obama’s world-murderous ‘trade’ treaties, from approximately 0%, to approximately 100%.

Here is how these treaties will murder the Earth:

Each of these ‘trade’ deals is about lots more than merely international commerce; it is far more fundamentally about sovereignty — who rules?  There is a feature in each one of them that empowers international corporations to sue any member-nation to the treaty, which tries to pass any regulation, including any environmental regulation, that is stricter than what is set in stone forever in the given ‘trade’ deal. If, for example, scientists discover that, in order for our planet not to go into an exponentially increasing temperature — basically, to go environmentally haywire, and a rapid descent into planetary death (unlivable) — then the requirements for cutting back on fossil fuels must be increased, the situation will already be one in which any member nation that would even try to increase those requirements will be sued by international oil and coal and gas corporations for trying to prevent such environmental haywire, and these lawsuits will be adjudicated by panels not of judges who are appointed by democratically elected representatives of the given nation’s public, but instead by mere panels of international ‘arbitrators’ whose careers will be dependent upon how favorably they rule for international corporations. There will be no democracy, at all, in this. The member-nations to the treaty will no longer actually be democracies. (If they ever were.) There will be a higher power, and it’s trans-national: the hundred or so individuals who collectively control all of the major international coporations.

Instead of national democracies, the member-nations of these ‘trade’ deals will have become little more than supplicants to the international corporate dictatorship, which dictatorship rules collectively over all of the national signatories to the international ‘trade’ treaty.

Now, it’s true that the international corporations will not be empowered to change any law within any one of the member-nations; but, they won’t even need to. How do you think that, in this circumstance, countries will handle their regulatory obligations, if they can be sued for increasing their national standards so as to accommodate new scientific findings, or even merely in order to change financial regulations so as to prevent crashes such as in 1929 and 2008? Any increase in any national regulation will place that nation in almost certain jeopardy of being internationally assessed to pay huge fines to the suing international corporations. That will become the great international racket: suing nations, for violating the ‘rights’ of international investors — ‘rights’ that transcend any of the rights of the citizenry in any one of those countries. (No contrary provision is afforded for nations, to sue international investors; it’s all just one-way.)

So: these ‘trade’ deals will not directly and overtly block any increase in the regulations of food-safety, the environment, drug-safety, worker-safety, workers’ wages, medical care, education, or any of the many other things that governments must regulate in order for the public to be protected, and served. Instead, this legislative blockage will be indirect, and covert. But it will be just as real, and just as effective, as if it were an outright legal prohibition. The individual nations will be forced to yield to the ‘higher’ rights (the real sovereignty) of the top international investors.

In other words: What the U.S. Senate did on 23 June 2015 was to hand America’s sovereignty over to international corporations. It gave President Obama what he had been seeking with unprecedented intensity, and which he has called his “legacy”: it’s the power to transfer lots of America’s democratic national sovereignty over to international corporations — that is, to the roughly 100 individuals on this planet who own the controlling blocks of stock in the world’s large international corporations, the people who are the real beneficiaries in all of this.

Not only will environmental regulations be frozen into place, once a given treaty is in force, and so the entire planet will become, essentially, doomed (because emerging science will be ignored if it doesn’t serve the interests of the hundred or so top billionaiures); but protections of workers’ rights will also not increase — not rise in any country — beyond what the treaty specifies. The set-in-stone standards will govern, while the planet simply boils away, and boils off. This will have been the ultimate conservative victory.

The end result of that conservative victory will be global impoverishment, and ultimate environmental collapse, while the world’s few billionaires, and especially the richest hundred of them, will become enormously richer, because their freedoms and associated power will be enormously increased, at everyone else’s expense, by what happened on 23 June 2015. And, of course, those international corporations have been lobbying and buying politicians to the tune of billions of dollars, precisely in order to achieve this outcome — their totalitarian international power.

The most curious aspect of this catastrophic outcome is that the so-called ‘charities’ and ‘non-profits,’ such billionaires’ tax-writeoffs as the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations that are already heavily beholden to international corporations and to the people who control those, have been basically silent about the planetary destruction that their sponsors have been fighting to achieve, via Obama’s ‘trade’ deals. (There’s been token resistance, but only token.) The American public had falsely thought that only a few amendments needed to be added in order for these to be ‘good’ ‘trade’ deals for the public — amendments such as “Trade Adjustment Assistance,” which would provide token and brief transitional training to some of the millions of Americans who will be losing their jobs, as those jobs become increasingly outsourced abroad to lower-wage or more brutally anti-union countries and make ‘us’ more like ’them’ — the low-wage and desperate masses there.

The real “us,” and “them,” are instead the public, versus the aristocracy. It’s so within every country, but it’s unmentionable in the United States; and when you look at ‘non-profits’ such as Greenpeace, Sierra Club, etc., and see that they were virtually silent and not vigorously exposing the corrupt ‘liberals’ during the legislative process, while this monstrosity was passing into law — a monstrosity that will make all of those organizations’ alleged ‘missions’ into mere mockery — the victory of them, over us, was as if those nominal ‘charities’ had never even existed.

For example: the websites of all of those ‘charities’ should have been flaming against “ISDS” as being an Earth-killer, but they weren’t. Instead, they focused on far less-dangerous features, “threats to forests” and the like. That was more covering-up than exposing the mega-threat.

We’re not all in this together. And they know it. Only the public were prevented from knowing it — until too late. 

For more about this, see the article I previously linked to. It also provides the historical background, and the only remaining way forward that still might possibly be available to block Obama’s success in this (a Constitutional challenge to the “Fast Track” provision of Richard Nixon’s Trade Act of 1974).

———-

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of  Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.

US criminal economics: TPP secret treaty = ‘constitutional republic,’ debt = ‘money’, 500 million+ dead from poverty = ‘necessary.’ Had enough to demand arrests?

By Carl Herman
June 23, 2015
Washington’s Blog

 

hat tip: Ellen Brown, Web of Debt Blog

“Psychopaths are unable to form emotional attachments or feel real empathy with others, although they often have disarming or even charming personalities. Psychopaths are very manipulative and can easily gain people’s trust. They learn to mimic emotions, despite their inability to actually feel them, and will appear normal to unsuspecting people… When committing crimes, psychopaths carefully plan out every detail in advance and often have contingency plans in place. Unlike their sociopathic counterparts, psychopathic criminals are cool, calm, and meticulous.” – Psychology Today

The .01% psychopathic oligarch “leaders” (and here) in US government, banking/finance, and corporate media wage war upon the 99.99% in ~100 crucial areas. Aside from lie-began overt unlawful military Wars of Aggression connected to economic domination with the US starting over 200 such armed attacks since WW2 and war-murdering ~30 million people (with these crimes “covered” by corporate media, let’s consider three central economic policies:

Attempting to pass TPP (so-called, “Trans-Pacific Partnership”) to remain a classified “secret treaty” for four years if passed, and without the US Constitutional requirement of 2/3 Senate approval. This is clear to anyone with a high school US government class as illegal and the Orwellian opposite of limited government under a representative constitutional republic. This is unlimited government with “rules” dictated as they go.
Claiming that US escalating total debt is a “money” supply, despite the fact that creating what we use as money as debt is the same as adding negative numbers forever, and clear to anyone with a middle school mathematics education that such mechanics can only increase the total debt and interest totals forever. This “debt supply” guarantees increasing and unpayable debt to the big banks who create the debt out of nothing, and is fundamental fraud with harm in annual trillions of dollars to claim debt rather than debt-free money is “good for us” (full documentation). Government leaders have legal fiduciary responsibility to best represent the American public.
Claiming that ~ one million children dying every month in gruesomely slow and painful deaths from poverty is an economic necessity because we don’t have “enough money,” despite the facts that money is paper, the investment is less than 1% of income (which developed nations continuously promise and then fail to deliver), this reduces population growth rates in every historical case, and the CIA claims this is the best way to end global terrorism. The total number of deaths from preventable poverty since just 1975 is ~500 million; more than all deaths from all wars and acts of violence in all recorded human history (full documentation of all poverty claims). These are Crimes against Humanity for the systemic mass-murders of millions while supporting policies such as TPP as a “race to the bottom” to further animalize human labor.

The above three bullet points summarize, with the links providing complete and professional documentation. Those of us working for reforms are unaware of even any attempts to refute our factual claims; our experience is as attributed to Gandhi:

“First they ignore you.

Then they laugh at you.

Then they fight you.

And then you win.”

Explaining Gandhi’s statement of unchallenged facts, MIT’s Simon Johnson (and former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund) describes our big banks being led by gambling oligarchs who have captured government as in “banana republics” (his words). He concludes fraud is the heart of Wall Street. His immediate best-selling book, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street takeover and the next financial meltdown, was discussed with President Johnson’s Press Secretary and journalist with over 30 Emmy Awards, Bill Moyers, to explain the US banking system, loss of trillions of American taxpayer dollars to oligarchs’ manipulation as a matter of definitive fact, the looting of America being protected by partners with political muscle, and all rational consideration of the facts proving massive financial crimes:

SIMON JOHNSON: The American democracy was not given to us on a platter. It is not ours for all time, irrespective of our efforts. Either people organize and they find political leadership to take this on, or we are going to be in big trouble, okay?… That’s absolutely the heart of the problem. I would also say and tell you, and emphasize, these people will not come out and debate with us. The heads of these companies or their representatives, they will not come out. They’re afraid. They don’t have the substance. They don’t have the arguments. We have the evidence. They have the lobbyists. And that’s all they have.

BILL MOYERS: They’ve got the power, the muscle, the money.

SIMON JOHNSON: They have money.

BILL MOYERS: You just have the arguments. You just have the facts. On your side.

SIMON JOHNSON: Absolutely. That’s exactly what it comes down to.

The punchline of these .01% crimes is to ask you:

Are you demanding arrests of .01% criminal leaders for obvious crimes annually killing millions, harming billions, and looting trillions?

You can also rely upon your basic history education from middle and high school to remind you that such crimes are usual on Earth, from the Roman Empire to US treaty-violations to steal land in “expansions” for “self-defense.”

Let’s look at the reasoning to support a “yes” or “no” answer for demanding lawful arrests (arrests would be to stop apparently obvious crimes; more on refusing orders for obvious crimes).

Yes, I’m demanding arrests: Confirming the facts about this article’s three topics, and/or the ~100 other crucial areas of lies and crimes, along with consideration that the .01% propaganda you hear from “leaders” and corporate media are exactly the non-responses described by Gandhi and Simon Johnson, your demand for arrests of obvious .01% “leaders” is simple responsible citizenship to stop what any prudent observer would conclude are obvious crimes. This is exactly the response the US Founding Generation demanded of Americans in order to keep a constitutional republic.

“It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power… Our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go… In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” – Thomas Jefferson, Draft Kentucky Resolution (1798. ME 17:388)

No, I’m not demanding arrests: My questions to you:

Explain to us how this article’s three topics are lawful, including the US ongoing Wars of Aggression.
If you conclude these are crimes, explain how failure to demand lawful arrests to stop these crimes is responsible citizenship.

Really, if you’re not demanding arrests and have answers to the above two questions, please respond at this article at Washington’s Blog. Those of us working for reforms have yet to find reasonable explanation that US policies centering in war and what is used for money are lawful.

**

Note: I make all factual assertions as a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History, with all economics factual claims receiving zero refutation since I began writing in 2008 among Advanced Placement Macroeconomics teachers on our discussion board, public audiences of these articles, and international conferences. I invite readers to empower their civic voices with the strongest comprehensive facts most important to building a brighter future. I challenge professionals, academics, and citizens to add their voices for the benefit of all Earth’s inhabitants.

**

Carl Herman is a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History; also credentialed in Mathematics. He worked with both US political parties over 18 years and two UN Summits with the citizen’s lobby, RESULTS, for US domestic and foreign policy to end poverty. He can be reached at Carl_Herman@post.harvard.edu

Note: Examiner.com has blocked public access to my articles on their site (and from other whistleblowers), so some links in my previous work are blocked. If you’d like to search for those articles other sites may have republished, use words from the article title within the blocked link. Or, go to http://archive.org/web/, paste the expired link into the box, click “Browse history,” then click onto the screenshots of that page for each time it was screen-shot and uploaded to webarchive. I’ll update as “hobby time” allows; including my earliest work from 2009 to 2011 (blocked author pages: here, here).

TPP: U.S. Congress Rejects Fast Track “Trade Promotion Authority” – For Now

By Stephen Lendman
June 13, 2015
Global Research

 

Baseball great Yogi Berra was right. “It ain’t over till it’s over.” More on this below.

On Friday, House members rejected fast track (Trade Promotion Authority – TPA) by a convoluted process explained below.

If enacted, it would let Obama ram through Congress with minimal hearings and no debate anti-consumer, ecosystem-destroying trade legislation global justice advocates call NAFTA on steroids.

Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade legislation empowers corporations over national sovereignty, domestic laws and popular interests. It’s nightmarish by any standard.

Not according to Obama. On April 25, he lied claiming TPP is “the highest standard trade agreement in history.”

“It’s got strong provisions for workers and the environment…(I)t fixes a lot of what was wrong with NAFTA…”

It’s “a race to the top…If I didn’t think this was the right thing to do for working families, I wouldn’t be fighting for it.”

False on all counts!! TPP makes NAFTA look tame by comparison. It’s an anti-consumer, environmentally destructive jobs killer – a boon for corporate predators at the expense of ordinary people in all 12 TPP countries.

The battle to defeat fast track and TPP isn’t over. Here’s what happened Friday.

Late May enacted Senate legislation included fast track (TPA) and Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) authorizing funding programs for workers displaced by jobs-killing imports.

On Friday, the Republican-controlled House voted on TPA and TAA separately. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D. CA) called for slowing down fast track to ensure more transparent and accountable to the public negotiations.

Democrat opposition followed. TAA was overwhelmingly defeated 302 – 126. Many Republicans rejected it.

TAA and TPP were packaged together. Defeating one negated the other. Speaker John Boehner (R. OH) proceeded anyway.

He called for a vote on a technically dead bill – meaning the result was invalid. Fast track passed 219 – 211. He forced another TAA vote next week.

If it passes, a combined TAA/TPP package would go to Obama for enactment. If it fails, fast track would go back to the Senate for possible passage without TAA.

House members defeated TAA  overwhelmingly (by a 176 vote margin). It’s highly unlikely even the most concerted push can turn around enough no votes to make a difference.

At the same time, Obama and corporate lobbyists are capable of the most deceitful, underhanded practices. So it bears repeating. “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

On Friday, Global Trade Watch Director Lori Wallach said “weeks of procedural gimmicks and deals swapped for yes votes…could not assuage Americans’ concerns that more of the same trade policy would kill more jobs and push down our wages.”

The more people understand what lawmakers negotiate behind their backs, the angrier they get, Wallach explained.

“Today the allegedly unstoppable momentum of the White House, GOP leadership and corporate coalition pushing Fast Track to grease the path for adoption of the almost-completed, controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal just hit the immovable object called transpartisan grassroots democracy,” said Wallach.

“Today’s outcome is a testament to the strength and diversity of the remarkable coalition of thousands of organizations that overcame a money-soaked lobbying campaign by multinational corporations and intense arm-twisting by the GOP House leadership and the Obama administration.”

The battle for justice never ends. Organized people beating organized money sometimes means it’s possible more often with enough determination to challenge powerful interests at their own dirty game.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. 
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 
Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.
It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PMCentral time plus two prerecorded archived programs. 

An American Oligarch‘s Dirty Tale of Corruption

By F. William Engdahl
June 12, 2015
New Eastern Outlook

 

Rarely does the world get a true look inside the corrupt world of Western oligarchs and the brazen manipulations they use to enhance their fortunes at the expense of the public good. The following comes from correspondence of the Hungarian-born billionaire, now naturalized American speculator, George Soros. The hacker group CyberBerkut has published online letters allegedly written by Soros that reveal him not only as puppet master of the US-backed Ukraine regime. They also reveal his machinations with the US Government and the officials of the European Union in a scheme where, if he succeeds, he could win billions in the plunder of Ukraine assets. All, of course, would be at the expense of Ukrainian citizens and of EU taxpayers.

What the three hacked documents reveal is a degree of behind-the-scene manipulation of the most minute details of the Kiev regime by the New York billionaire.

In the longest memo, dated March 15, 2015 and marked “Confidential” Soros outlines a detailed map of actions for the Ukraine regime. Titled, “A short and medium term comprehensive strategy for the new Ukraine,” the memo from Soros calls for steps to “restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine without violating the Minsk agreement.” To do the restoring, Soros blithely notes that “General Wesley Clark, Polish General Skrzypczak and a few specialists under the auspices of the Atlantic Council [emphasis added—f.w.e.] will advise President Poroshenko how to restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine without violating the Minsk agreement.”

Soros also calls for supplying lethal arms to Ukraine and secretly training Ukrainian army personnel in Romania to avoid direct NATO presence in Ukraine. The Atlantic Council is a leading Washington pro-NATO think tank.

Notably, Wesley Clark is also a business associate of Soros in BNK Petroleum which does business in Poland.

Clark, some might recall, was the mentally-unstable NATO General in charge of the 1999 bombing of Serbia who ordered NATO soldiers to fire on Russian soldiers guarding the Pristina International Airport. The Russians were there as a part of an agreed joint NATO–Russia peacekeeping operation supposed to police Kosovo. The British Commander, General Mike Jackson refused Clark, retorting, “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you.” Now Clark apparently decided to come out of retirement for the chance to go at Russia directly.

Naked asset grab

In his March 2015 memo Soros further writes that Ukrainian President Poroshenko’s “first priority must be to regain control of financial markets,” which he assures Poroshenko that Soros would be ready to assist in: “I am ready to call Jack Lew of the US Treasury to sound him out about the swap agreement.”

He also calls on the EU to give Ukraine an annual aid sum of €11 billion via a special EU borrowing facility. Soros proposes in effect using the EU’s “AAA” top credit rating to provide a risk insurance for investment into Ukraine.

Whose risk would the EU insure?

Soros details, “I am prepared to invest up to €1 billion in Ukrainian businesses. This is likely to attract the interest of the investment community. As stated above, Ukraine must become an attractive investment destination.” Not to leave any doubt, Soros continues, “The investments will be for-profit but I will pledge to contribute the profits to my foundations. This should allay suspicions that I am advocating policies in search of personal gain. “

For anyone familiar with the history of the Soros Open Society Foundations in Eastern Europe and around the world since the late 1980’s, will know that his supposedly philanthropic “democracy-building” projects in Poland, Russia, or Ukraine in the 1990’s allowed Soros the businessman to literally plunder the former communist countries using Harvard University’s “shock therapy” messiah, and Soros associate, Jeffrey Sachs, to convince the post-Soviet governments to privatize and open to a “free market” at once, rather than gradually.

The example of Soros in Liberia is instructive for understanding the seemingly seamless interplay between Soros the shrewd businessman and Soros the philanthropist. In West Africa George Soros backed a former Open Society employee of his, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, giving her international publicity and through his influence, even arranging a Nobel Peace Prize for her in 2011, insuring her election as president. Before her presidency she had been well-indoctrinated into the Western free market game, studying economics at Harvard and working for the US-controlled World Bank in Washington and the Rockefeller Citibank in Nairobi. Before becoming Liberia’s President, she worked for Soros directly as chair of his Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA).

Once in office, President Sirleaf opened the doors for Soros to take over major Liberian gold and base metals assets along with his partner, Nathaniel Rothschild. One of her first acts as President was to also invite the Pentagon’s new Africa Command, AFRICOM, into Liberia whose purpose as a Liberian investigation revealed, was to “protect George Soros and Rothschild mining operations in West Africa rather than champion stability and human rights.”

Naftogaz the target

The Soros memo makes clear he has his eyes on the Ukrainian state gas and energy monopoly, Naftogaz. He writes, “The centerpiece of economic reforms will be the reorganization of Naftogaz and the introduction of market pricing for all forms of energy, replacing hidden subsidies…”

In an earlier letter Soros wrote in December 2014 to both President Poroshenko and Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, Soros openly called for his Shock Therapy: “I want to appeal to you to unite behind the reformers in your government and give your wholehearted support to a radical, ‘big bang’ type of approach. That is to say, administrative controls would be removed and the economy would move to market prices rapidly rather than gradually…Naftogaz needs to be reorganized with a big bang replacing the hidden subsidies…”

Splitting Naftogaz into separate companies could allow Soros to take control of one of the new branches and essentially privatize its profits. He already suggested that he indirectly brought in US consulting company, McKinsey, to advise Naftogaz on the privatization “big bang.”

The Puppet-Master?

The totality of what is revealed in the three hacked documents show that Soros is effectively the puppet-master pulling most of the strings in Kiev. Soros Foundation’s Ukraine branch, International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) has been involved in Ukraine since 1989. His IRF doled out more than $100 million to Ukrainian NGOs two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, creating the preconditions for Ukraine’s independence from Russia in 1991. Soros also admitted to financing the 2013-2014 Maidan Square protests that brought the current government into power.

Soros’ foundations were also deeply involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought the corrupt but pro-NATO Viktor Yushchenko into power with his American wife who had been in the US State Department. In 2004 just weeks after Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation had succeeded in getting Viktor Yushchenko as President of Ukraine, Michael McFaul wrote an OpEd for the Washington Post. McFaul, a specialist in organizing color revolutions, who later became US Ambassador to Russia, revealed:

Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine? Yes. The American agents of influence would prefer different language to describe their activities — democratic assistance, democracy promotion, civil society support, etc. — but their work, however labeled, seeks to influence political change in Ukraine. The U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy and a few other foundations sponsored certain U.S. organizations, including Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Solidarity Center, the Eurasia Foundation, Internews and several others to provide small grants and technical assistance to Ukrainian civil society. The European Union, individual European countries and the Soros-funded International Renaissance Foundation did the same.

Soros shapes ‘New Ukraine’

Today the CyberBerkut hacked papers show that Soros’ IRF money is behind creation of a National Reform Council, a body organized by presidential decree from Poroshenko which allows the Ukrainian president to push bills through Ukraine’s legislature. Soros writes, “The framework for bringing the various branches of government together has also emerged. The National Reform Council (NRC) brings together the presidential administration, the cabinet of ministers, the Rada and its committees and civil society. The International Renaissance Foundation which is the Ukrainian branch of the Soros Foundations was the sole financial supporter of the NRC until now…”

Soros’ NRC in effect is the vehicle to allow the President to override parliamentary debate to push through “reforms,” with the declared first priority being privatization of Naftogaz and raising gas prices drastically to Ukrainian industry and households, something the bankrupt country can hardly afford.

In his letter to Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk, Soros hints that he played a key role in selection of three key non-Ukrainian ministers—Natalia Jaresko, an American ex- State Department official as Finance Minister; Aivras Abromavicius of Lithuania as Economics Minister, and a health minister from Georgia. Soros in his December 2014 letter, referring to his proposal for a “big bank” privatization of Naftogaz and price rise, states, “You are fortunate to have appointed three ‘new Ukrainian’ ministers and several natives (sic) who are committed to this approach.”

Elsewhere Soros speaks about de facto creating the impression within the EU that the current government of Yatsenyuk is finally cleaning out the notorious corruption that has dominated every Kiev regime since 1991. Creating that temporary reform illusion, he remarks, will convince the EU to cough up the €11 billion annual investment insurance fund. His March 2015 paper says that, “It is essential for the government to produce a visible demonstration (sic) during the next three months in order to change the widely prevailing image of Ukraine as an utterly corrupt country.” That he states will open the EU to make the €11 billion insurance guarantee investment fund.

While saying that it is important to show Ukraine as a country that is not corrupt, Soros reveals he has little concern when transparency and proper procedures block his agenda. Talking about his proposals to reform Ukraine’s constitution to enable privatizations and other Soros-friendly moves, he complains, “The process has been slowed down by the insistence of the newly elected Rada on proper procedures and total transparency.”

Soros suggests that he intends to create this “visible demonstration” through his initiatives, such as using the Soros-funded National Reform Council, a body organized by presidential decree which allows the Ukrainian president to push bills through Ukraine’s legislature.

George Soros is also using his new European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank to lobby his Ukraine strategy, with his council members such as Alexander Graf Lambsdorff or Joschka Fischer or Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, not to mention former ECB head, Jean-Claude Trichet no doubt laying a subtle role.

George Soros, now 84, was born in Hungary as a Jew, George Sorosz. Soros once boasted in a TV interview that he posed during the war as a gentile with forged papers, assisting the Horthy government to seize property of other Hungarian Jews who were being shipped to the Nazi death camps. Soros told the TV moderator, “There was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was–well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets–that if I weren’t there–of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would.”

This is the same morality apparently behind Soros’ activities in Ukraine today. It seems again to matter not to him that the Ukrainian government he helped bring to power in February 2014 US coup d’etat is riddled with explicit anti-semites and self-proclaimed neo-Nazis from the Svoboda Party and Pravy Sektor. George Soros is clearly a devotee of “public-private-partnership.” Only here the public gets fleeced to enrich private investors like Mr. Soros and friends. Cynically, Soros signs his Ukraine strategy memo, “George Soros–A self-appointed advocate of the new Ukraine, March 12, 2015.”

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

 

Reddit and Twitter: Only YOU Can Stop TPP

By WashingtonsBlog
June 11, 2015
Washington’s Blog

 

The House of Representatives is voting this Friday to pass Fast Track authority for the horrible TPP treaty.

At this point, only social powerhouses like Reddit and Twitter can generate enough of a public outcry to stop the TPP.

Please make this America’s opposition to TPP go viral …

Contact your Congress Critter … and tell them NO to TPP and NO to Fast Track Authority!

We will update this post with a list of Congressmen who must be swayed to defeat the bill (the “whip list”) and other breaking developments between now and Friday’s vote.

Report: Pfizer ‘Hid Link’ Between Anti-Depressants and Birth Defects

Something we’ve been reporting on for years

By Anthony Gucciardi
June 9, 2015
Natural Society

 

Image from: Angele’s Zoloft Birth Defects Blog

Pharmaceutical mammoth Pfizer faces more than 1,000 lawsuits from victims who say that the company knew about the relationship between birth defects and their #1 best-selling anti-depressant. A claim that Pfizer has, of course, battled against.

Now, however, new reports have surfaced that Pfizer’s own scientific advisers were warning of the deadly link for more than a year. Something that my team told you in 2012 was already going on. According to Bloomberg:

“A Pfizer Inc. report shows a scientist warned executives last year about a potential link between the anti-depressant drug Zoloft and birth defects and recommended changes to the medication’s safety warning.

The document from a Pfizer drug-safety official might complicate the company’s efforts to fend off lawsuits brought by parents of children with malformed hearts. Pfizer has consistently rejected suggestions Zoloft caused newborn abnormalities and said Monday the document was taken out of context by lawyers suing the company.”

In other words, Pfizer likely employed a popular Big Pharma tactic: ignore any science that reveals serious side effects, and instead choose to pay some relatively meager fines for the damages. After all, paying a few million (or billion) in fines is often nothing compared to the profits from drugs like Zoloft, which rakes in around $2.9 billion per year alone.

After all, Pfizer has a familiar history with government fines. It was in 2009 when the corporation paid one of the largest health care fraud settlements of all time, shelling out $2.3 billion for “the intent to defraud or mislead” consumers with their painkiller Bextra. Again, a fine that is less than the sales of Zoloft for a single year.

As we read further down into the Bloomberg report, yet again it seems that research indicating serious side effects was simply ignored:

“Pfizer researchers also acknowledged in a 1998 report, which has been introduced into evidence in the Philadelphia trial, they’d found more than a dozen side-effect reports about babies’ birth defects for which their mothers’ Zoloft use couldn’t be ruled out as a cause.”

Sadly, this is nothing new for the mega pharmaceutical conglomerate. Eli Lilly & Co., the manufacturers of Prozac, did their best to hide the link between Prozac and increased risk of suicide for a number of years. Ultimately, it took a Harvard psychiatrist to proclaim that Americans were being treated like ‘guinea pigs’ by Eli Lilly & Co.’s Prozac for real public interest.

Will Pfizer end up paying a couple billion or less in fines for leading to an unknown number of life-threatening birth defects? It is the most likely outcome, for which the company is quite thankful. As long as they can write off the settlement loss and continue to take in the yearly profits, the company will get over it quickly.