Congress Confronts Its Contradictions: George Monbiot

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 30th September 2008

According to Senator Jim Bunning, the proposal to purchase $700bn of dodgy debt by the US government “is financial socialism, it is un-American”(1). The economics professor Nouriel Roubini calls George Bush, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke “a troika of Bolsheviks who turned the USA into the United Socialist State Republic of America”(2). Bill Perkins, the venture capitalist who took out an advertisement in the New York Times attacking the deal, calls it “trickle-down communism”(3).

They are wrong. The banking subsidies Congress rejected last night are as American as apple pie and obesity. The sums demanded by Bush and Paulson might be unprecedented, but there is nothing new about the principle: corporate welfare is a consistent feature of advanced capitalism. Only one thing has changed: Congress has been forced to confront its contradictions.

One of the best studies of corporate welfare in the United States is published by my old enemies at the Cato Institute. Its report, by Stephen Slivinski, estimates that in 2006 the federal government spent $92bn subsidising business(4). Much of it went to major corporations like Boeing, IBM and General Electric.

The biggest money crop - $21bn - is harvested by Big Farmer. Slivinski shows that the richest 10% of subsidised farmers took 66% of the pay-outs. Every few years Congress or the administration promises to stop this swindle, then hands even more state money to agribusiness. The Farm Bill passed by Congress in May guarantees farmers a minimum of 90% of the income they’ve received over the past two years, which happen to be among the most profitable they’ve ever had(5). The middlemen do even better, especially the companies spreading starvation by turning maize into ethanol, which are guzzling billions of dollars’ worth of tax credits.

Slivinski shows how the federal government’s Advanced Technology Program, which was supposed to support the development of technologies that are “pre-competitive” or “high risk” has instead been captured by big businesses flogging proven products. Since 1991, companies like IBM, General Electric, Dow Chemical, Caterpillar, Ford, DuPont, General Motors, Chevron and Monsanto have extracted hundreds of millions from this programme. Big business is also underwritten by the Export-Import Bank: in 2006, for example, Boeing alone received four and half billion in loan guarantees(6).

The government runs something called the “Foreign Military Financing Program” which gives money to other countries to purchase weaponry from US corporations. It doles out grants to airports for building new runways and to fishing companies to help them wipe out endangered stocks.

But the Cato Institute’s report has exposed only part of the corporate welfare scandal. A new paper by the US Institute for Policy Studies shows that, through a series of cunning tax and accounting loopholes, the US spends $20bn a year subsidising executive pay(7). By disguising their professional fees as capital gains rather than income, for example, the managers of hedge funds and private equity companies pay lower rates of tax than the people who clean their offices. A year ago, the House of Representatives tried to close this loophole, but the bill was blocked in the Senate after a lobbying campaign by some of the richest men in America.

Another report, by a group called Good Jobs First, reveals that Wal-Mart has received at least $1bn of public money(8). Over 90% of its distribution centres and many of its retail outlets have been subsidised by county and local governments. They give the chain free land, they pay for the roads, water and sewerage required to make that land usable, and they grant it property tax breaks and subsidies (called tax increment financing) originally intended to regenerate depressed communities. Sometimes state governments give the firm straight cash as well: in Virginia, for example, Wal-Mart’s distribution centres receive handouts from the Governor’s Opportunity Fund.

Corporate welfare is arguably the core business of some government departments. Many of the Pentagon’s programmes deliver benefits only to its contractors. Ballistic missile defence, for example, which has no obvious strategic purpose and which is unlikely ever to work, has already cost the US between $120bn and $150bn. The Department of Defense wants another $62bn for the next five years(9). The US is unique among major donors in insisting that the food it offers in aid is produced on its own soil, rather than in the regions it is meant to be helping. USAID used to boast on its website that “the principal beneficiary of America’s foreign assistance programs has always been the United States. Close to 80 percent of the US Agency for International Development’s contracts and grants go directly to American firms.”(10) There is not and has never been a free market in the United States.

Why not? Because the Congressmen and women now railing against financial socialism depend for their re-election on the companies they subsidise. The legal bribes paid by these businesses deliver two short-term benefits. The first is that they prevent proper regulation, which allows them to make spectacular profits and to generate disasters of the kind that Congress is now confronting. The second is that public money which should be used to help the poorest and weakest is instead diverted into the pockets of the rich.

A report published last week by the advocacy group Common Cause shows how bankers and brokers stopped legislators from banning unsustainable lending(11). Over the past financial year, the big banks spent $49m on lobbying and $7m in direct campaign contributions. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have spent $180m in lobbying and campaign finance over the past eight years. Much of this money was thrown at members of the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee.

Whenever congressmen tried to rein in the banks and mortgage lenders they were blocked by the banks’ money. Dick Durbin’s 2005 amendment seeking to stop predatory mortgage lending, for example, was defeated in the Senate by 58 to 40. The former representative Jim Leach proposed re-regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Their lobbyists, he recalls, managed in “less than 48 hours to orchestrate both parties’ leadership” to crush his amendments(12).

The money these firms spend buys the socialisation of financial risk. The $700bn the government was looking for is just one of the public costs of its repeated failure to regulate. Even now the lobbying power of the banks is making itself felt: on Saturday the Democrats watered down their demand that the money earned by executives of the companies the government is rescuing be capped(13). Campaign finance is the best investment a corporation can make. You give a million dollars to the right man and reap a billion dollars’ worth of state protection, tax breaks and subsidies. When the same thing happens in Africa we call it corruption.

European governments are no better. The free market economics they proclaim are a con: they intervene repeatedly on behalf of the rich, while leaving everyone else to fend for themselves. Just as in the United States, the bosses of farm companies, oil drillers, supermarkets and banks capture the funds extracted by government from the pockets of people much poorer than themselves. Taxpayers everywhere should be asking the same question: why the hell should we be supporting them?

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Jim Bunning, quoted by James Politi and Daniel Dombey, 24th September 2008. Republican anger at ‘financial socialism’. Financial Times.

2. Nouriel Roubini, 18th September 2008. Public losses for private gain. The Guardian.

3. Andrew Clark, 24th September 2008. US trader attacks ‘trickle-down communism’ of markets bail-out. The Guardian.

4. Stephen Slivinski, 14th May 2007. The Corporate Welfare State: How the Federal Government Subsidizes US Businesses. Policy Analysis no. 592.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa592.pdf

5. Subsidy Watch, June 2008. Ignoring WTO implications and a presidential veto, US Congress passes the new Farm Bill. Global Subsidies Initiative.
http://www.globalsubsidies.org/en/subsidy-watch/news/ignoring-wto-implications-and-a-presidential-veto-us-congress-passes-new-farm-

6. Stephen Slivinski, ibid.

7. Sarah Anderson et al, 25th August 2008. Executive Excess 2008
How Average Taxpayers Subsidize Runaway Pay. Institute for Policy Studies. http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/#623

8. Philip Mattera et al, May 2004. Shopping for Subsidies:
How Wal-Mart Uses Taxpayer Money to Finance Its Never-Ending Growth. Good Jobs First. http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/pdf/wmtstudy.pdf

9. I explain why it won’t work and costs so much at http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/08/19/the-magic-pudding/

10. USAID. Creating Opportunities for U.S. Small Business, viewed 5th January 2004. http://www.usaid.gov/procurement_bus_opp/osdbu/book-information.htm

11. Common Cause, 24th September 2008. Ask Yourself Why… They Didn’t See This Coming. http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=4542875

12. James A. Leach, 16th July 2008. Fixing Fannie and Freddie. Institute of Politics,
John F. Kennedy School Of Government, Harvard University. http://www.iop.harvard.edu/var/ezp_site/storage/fckeditor/file/Fannie%20and%20Freddie.pdf

13. James Politi and Daniel Dombey, 28th September 2008. Long and exhausting road to compromise. Financial Times.

Que. Wal-Mart unionists get their day in top court

Que. Wal-Mart unionists get their day in top court

SCOC agrees to consider whether retail giant broke labour laws

Janice Tibbetts, Canwest News Service

Published: Thursday, August 07, 2008

OTTAWA - The Supreme Court of Canada will weigh in on a high-stakes dispute between retail giant Wal-Mart and former employees at a store in Jonquiere, Que., which shut down in 2005 after workers secured the right to unionize.

The closure drew attention continent-wide because Wal-Mart is the world's largest retailer and the Jonquiere outlet, located about three hours north of Quebec City, was one of the first in North America to be organized.

Former clerks Gaetan Plourde, Johanne Desbiens, Ingrid Ratte and Claudine Beaumont will have their day in court to argue that Wal-Mart violated labour laws in union-strong Quebec by shutting down during negotiations for an inaugural collective agreement.

Wal-Mart, the world's largest private employer with more than two million workers, has been in and out of courts nationwide challenging union drives. The case of a store closing in Quebec after it unionized is headed to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Adrian Lam/ Victoria Times Colonist

The former employees contend that they were sacked because of their union activities, which they say also violates freedom of association guarantees in the Quebec and Canadian charters of rights.

"This could have an impact on other employers who want to close their stores when employees are trying to unionize,"

said Nicolas Charron, one of the Montreal lawyers representing Plourde and Desbiens.

"It's a question of national importance that we think has not been clearly answered by the Supreme Court."

The employees are bringing their case to the Supreme Court after losing in the Quebec Court of Appeal, which concluded that the permanent closure of the Jonquiere store met the provincial labour code test of having "good and sufficient reasons" for terminating employment.

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, with more than two-million employers worldwide, has been fighting unionization in various Canadian courts in recent years, but it is the first time the Supreme Court of Canada has agreed to tackle the issue.

By convention, the court gave no reasons for granting two separate applications from the workers, one from Plourde and one from Desbiens, Ratte and Beaumont. The appeals will likely be heard in 2009.

Wal-Mart has maintained that it closed the store, located in Quebec's union heartland, because it was struggling financially.

At a time when the Jonquiere store was on its death bed, the union demanded that the company hire another 30 employees as part of the first collective agreement, said Andrew Pelletier, spokesman for Wal-Mart Canada. Almost 200 "associates" worked at the store when it closed in May 2005.

About six of 300 or so Canadian Wal-Marts are union certified, but none have collective agreements in place, said Pelletier. In the U.S., where the union movement is weaker, no Wal-Mart stores are unionized, he said.

Pelletier charged that the United Food and Commercial Workers union has taken advantage of "loopholes" in labour laws in some provinces, particularly Quebec, that permit unionization without a secret-ballot vote, provided enough workers have signed union cards.

A spokesman for the union could not be reached.

AN OPEN LETTER TO HILLARY CLINTON FROM A WELLESLEY COLLEGE ALUMNA

and Hillary gets upset about video games? Give ME a break!!

Veeger

unday, 03 February 2008

Submitted by a Truth To Power Subscriber From Yahoo News Groups [This letter was written by a woman who has clearly done her homework, and confirms that no sane human being in good conscience can cast a vote for Hillary Clinton--CB] Dear Hillary, By polling logic, I should be your supporter - Democrat, older woman, white, liberal. I was even in a dorm with you in college. I have pulled for you for years. But something this past summer fundamentally changed my responsibility to my children and grandchildren. In the time I have left in my life to protect them and others, I need to speak out. I saw a News Hour piece on Maharastra, India, about farmers committing suicide. Monsanto, a US agricultural giant, hired Bollywood actors for ads telling illiterate farmers they could get rich (by their standards) from big yields with Monsanto's Bt (genetically engineered) cotton seeds. The expensive seeds needed expensive fertilizer and pesticides (Monsanto, again) and irrigation. There is no irrigation there. Crops failed. Farmers had larger debt than they'd ever experienced And farmers couldn't collect seeds from their own fields to try again (true since time immemorial). Monsanto "patents" their DNA-altered seeds as "intellectual property." They have a $10 million budget and a staff of 75 devoted solely to prosecuting farmers. http://www.grist.org/comments/food/2008/01/17./). Since the late 1990s (about when industrial agriculture took hold in India),166,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide and 8 million have left the land. Farmers in Europe, Asia, Africa, Indonesia,South America, Central America and here, have protested Monsanto and genetic engineering for years. What does this have to do with you? You have connections to Monsanto through the Rose Law Firm where you worked and through Bill who hired Monsanto people for central food- related roles. Your Orwellian-named "Rural Americans for Hillary" was planned withTroutman Sanders, Monsanto's lobbyists. Genetic engineering and industrialized food and animal production all come together at the Rose Law Firm, which represents the world's largest GE corporation (Monsanto), GE's most controversial project (DP&L's - now Monsanto's - terminator genes), the world's largest meat producer (Tyson), the world's largest retailer and a dominant food retailer (Walmart). The inbred-ness of Rose's legal representation of corporations which own controlling interests in other corporations there and of corporate boards sharing members who are also shareholders of each other's corporations there, is so thorough that it is hard to capture. Jon Jacoby, senior executive of the Stephens Group - one of the largest institutional shareholders of Tyson Foods, Walmart, DP&L - is also Chairman of the Board of DP&L and arranged the Wal-Mart deal. Jackson Stephens' Stephens Group staked Sam Walton and financed Tyson Foods. Monsanto bought DP&L. All represented at Rose. You didn't just work there, you made friends. That shows in the flow of favors then and since. You were invited onto Walmart's board, you were helped by a Tyson executive to make commodity trades (3 days before Bill became governor), netting you $100,000, Jackson Stephens strongly backed Bill for Governor, and then for President (donating $100,000). Food and friends, in Clinton terms: Bill's appointed friend Mike Espy, Secretary of Agriculture, who immediately significantly weakened federal chicken waste and contamination standards, opening the door to major expansion of Tyson's chicken factory farms. Espy resigned, indicted for accepting bribes, illegal contributions, money laundering, illegal dispersal of USDA subsidies, .... Tyson Foods was the largest corporate offender. But what Bill did for Monsanto "genetic engineering" goes beyond inadequate concepts of giving corporate friends influence: He unleashed genetic engineering into the world. And then he helped close off people's escape from it. Genetic engineering is many orders of magnitude different from "normal" (even polluting) business in its potential biologic ramifications. The warning myth of Pandora'a Box - letting irretrievable things rush out into nature - has become real. The harrowing change to the world from nuclear fission and fusion is the closest parallel. What did Bill do? 1. Bill's put Monsanto people in at the FDA, as US Agricultural Trade Representatives, on International Biotechnology Consultive Forums, and more ... (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/072600-03.htm) or http://www.monitor.net/monitor/9904b/monsantofda.html or http://www.mindfully.org/GE/Revolving-Door.htm 2. Bill's FDA gave Monsanto permission to market rBGH (a GE bovine growth hormone), the first genetically engineered product let loose on us (or did tomatoes with fish DNA get there first?). 3. Despite reports of bovine illness and death, Bill's FDA did not recall it or put warnings on it. Even "a very angry, very vocal nationwide consumer base" had no impact. " 4. Bill's FDA wouldn't even label rBGH as "present" in milk. 5. When dairy farmers tried to label their own milk rBGH-free so the public could choose, Bill's USDA threatened all dairies that their products could be confiscated from stores. Michael Taylor, USFDA Deputy Commissioner, was formerly Monsanto's counsel. 6. How were consumers to protect their family, given Bill's FDA enforced public blindness, except to buy only organic? But Bill's FDA tried to close off that last escape, proposing to include in "organic" standards, "the dirty three" a : genetic engineering of plants and animals, use of irradiation in food processing and use of municipal sewage sludge as a fertilizer. (My emphasis.) The FDA backed down. Had this gone through, Monsanto could have finally labeled rBGH milk ... as "organic." And animal waste from factory farms, a pollution nightmare for Tyson and others, could have been sold as fertilizer. USDA head Dan Glickman: "This is probably the largest public response to an [Agriculture Department] rule in modern history." In fact the response was 20 times greater than anything ever before proposed by the USDA. Personally, I resent years of effort to protect my children and now grandchildren, from that crap. Politically, Bill sided against small farmers and against the public's right to know, and with Monsanto. A snap shot of our food: Oils: Sheep died in India after feeding on Bt cotton fields. We feed our children Bt cotton, as cottonseed oil in peanut butter and cookies. Grains: 49% of US corn acreage was planted in Bt corn in 2007. A French study proved Monsanto's GMO corn causes kidney and liver toxicity. Soft drinks and candy have highly concentrated Bt corn, in the form of high fructose Bt corn syrup. The US food system depends most on two crops, soy (90% GMO, 90% of traits owned by Monsanto) and corn, the largest crop (60% GMO, nearly 100% Monsanto traits). "[E] ssentially our entire food supply is genetically modified, to the benefit of one company." The Grocery Manufacturers of America in 2000 estimated that 70 percent of US food contains GM traits. Meat: Steroids bulk up atheletes. Monsanto steroids bulk up animals - more weight, more profit. We feed our children steroids in meats. Is this why our children are fattening, like Hansel and Gretel? Poultry: Bill's USDA weakened chicken waste and contamination standards and attempted to allow sewage sludge as fertilize crops. I will say more about disease from industrialized poultry farms waste, at the end of this letter. Milk: Over 30 scientific publications have shown increased levels of IGF-1 in milk with rBGH increases risks of breast cancer by up to seven-fold, also increasing colon and prostate cancers risks. Canada, 29 European nations, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa ban U.S. rBGH dairy products. Bill's USFDA put no restrictions, no warning labels (not allowing labels at all). (My emphasis.) American children eat that food and drink that milk, Hillary. Coincidentally, American children are increasingly fat and sick. Here, Bill ignored pleas for labeling. Abroad, Bill ignored intense international objections over the same issue - unlabeled US food exports - badly straining trading relations. Monsanto's "good ole boy," he betrayed American families at the deepest levels conceivable - their family's health and their democratic right to know. He betrayed our rural life and American family farmers - backing corporation deceit and control, over honesty and clean farming. But, HIllary, it is one thing to not label a regular ole food product to sell it, and quite another to sell a suspected-dangerous food product (rBGH), but Bill's administration didn't label (or stop) a well-known, terrifying threat - Mad Cow Disease. Bill's FDA's August, 1997 regulation permitted "known TSE-positive [Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy] material to be used in pet food, pig, chicken and fish feed," only requiring the label to read "Do not feed to cattle and other ruminants" in the US. Monsanto added to the problem. "There is evidence that rbST use [Monsanto's GE bovine growth hormone] reduces the useful lifespan of a dairy cow. ... Given that the incubation period for BSE is at least three to five years and perhaps longer, rbST-treated cows could harbor "hidden" BSE. That is, they might be infected but still asymptomatic when sent to slaughter." (My emphasis.) http://www.consumersunion.org/food/bgh-codex.htm Bill let TSE into our entire food chain. And who owned the feed and slaughter and genetic engineering corporations whch benefitted? Please, tell me, Hillary, what he could possibly have gotten in friendship or favors, that could ever justify his exposing millions of people to this? With genetic engineering itself, Bill did something to the whole world, which tried to object. Words are inadequate to express how astoundingly immoral, beyond human bounds and conceit and power, that was. "Even for the biggest "winners," it is like winning at poker on the Titanic." Jerry Mander: Facing the Rising Tide He had no right. Do you hear that? Bill had sex from Monica Lewinsky. That's "dinky immoral." That's chicken feed immoral - excuse the Tyson pun, excuse the TSE-laced pun. Bill let genetic engineering lose on NATURE itself. "Our way of life is likely to be more fundamentally transformed in the next several decades than in the previous one thousand years...Tens of thousands of novel transgenic bacteria, viruses, plants and animals could be released into the Earth's ecosystems...Some of those releases, however, could wreak havoc with the planet's biospheres." Jeremy Rifkin, Biotech Century Bill did this to us, like it was some nothing and he, some big dumb ass Southern boy, just smiling and getting in good with the Big Boys, thinking about as much about the consequences of something this immense and about us human beings out here, as he thought about you, when he was unfaithful with Monica. Just one big fool getting off on the power and used to getting away with things. Terminator genes, developed by DP&L, a Rose Firm client, prevent seeds from "working" after only one season. Farmers "must" repurchase (patents and suing not certain enough control, it seems). Those "killing" genes pose the apocalyptic risk of breaking out into nature. Natural seeds could fail, too. Nature could fail. Far-fetched? GMO fields are already contaminating normal species Berkeley Professor of Microbiology, Ignacio Chapela, wrote an open letter, warning the Mexican government about just this breaking out phenomenon happening in maize And it has already happened with weeds - pesticide resistant GMO seeds break lose and weeds become pesticide-resistant Superweeds. But Bill's USDA spokesman, Willard Phelps said the USDA wanted the technology to be `widely licensed and made expeditiously available to many seed companies.' "Genetic Engineering is often justified as a human technology, one that feeds more people with better food. Nothing could be further from the truth. With very few exceptions, the whole point of genetic engineering is to increase sales of chemicals and bio-engineered products to dependent farmers." David Ehrenfield: Professor of Biology, Rutgers University Hillary, one third of the world's bee colonies have collapsed. Gone. Farmers in India are killing themselves. Farmers and bees. Since organic farmers in India are fine and organic farmers report no colony collapse, what does these farming catatrophes say about "industrial agriculture"? Mad Cow Disease is another direct result of industrial agriculture. And now ....... transnational poultry factories are implicated as the source of bird flu. ... Small scale poultry farms and wild birds seem not to be the problem [just as small farmers are not the issue in Mad Cow Disease], and yet "initiatives are multiplying to ban outdoor poultry, squeeze out small producers and restock farms with genetically modified chickens. ... http://www.ens- newswire.com/ens/feb2006/2006-02-27-01.asp "Of the few outbreaks that did occur in [Laos], more than 90% broke out in commercial poultry operations, not free-ranging flocks." Monsanto (and others) is currently working with the USDA to force small farmers to tag every animal with a global tracking device (NAIS - National Animal Identification System). Allegedly related to food safety, Monsanto and others would be creating a vast corporate digital library on every move of small farmers's livestock. But small farmers do not create the contaminated environments, do not supply the feed, do not grind up diseased animals into feed (how Mad Cow began) and then sell it. In fact, their farming methods, free range and small scale, are significantly healthier and safer for animals and food than the massive concentration of animals by corporate industrial agriculture. Monsanto is also aggressively pushing for state laws to limit farmers' right to choose what to plant and the public's right exclude GE plants from their communities. Cattle bloated by steroids, lapse and loss of 10,000 year old normal seeds, immense pollution from factory farms, deadly-disease-ridden feed, world-wide bee colony collapse, poisoned soil and depleted water supplies, Superweeds, lawsuits against farmers, loss of family farms, and ... India farmers killing themselves in what may be the largest mass suicide in recorded human history (on average ... one farmers' suicide every 30 minutes since 2002 - The Hindu 1.30.08) - that is industrial agriculture. Monsanto and Tyson are two of the largest industrial agricultural corporations in the world. Industrial agriculture is represented by your Rose Law Firm. Your claim to care about food safety is terrifying double-speak given what Bill did and who you take donations from. Your idea of a Department of Food Safety would centralize control of food - in whose corporate connected hands? You talk tough about labeling food - ah, but "foreign" food - a sleight of hand tricking a public desperate for safe US food. You talk about food safety but Bill degraded food in every imaginable way and prevented minimally sane labeling. I am a person before I am a woman. Your gender means nothing. It is a media distraction. Your policies on health and food and women and children, are meaningless in the face of connections that have threatened those groups profoundly, connections you have never denounced. Monsanto uses child labor in India, primarily very young girls, exposing them to a lethal pesticide 13-14 hours a day, for pennies in pay. But you take donations from their lobbyists. You say you care about black people but as the poorest people in this country, they are least able to buy organic and are forced to eat the contaminated foods Bill let into our food system. The National Black Farmers Association has a boycott out on all Monsanto products. Do you eat organic? So, who are you with, hapless black consumers and black farmers, or Monsanto? Mothers left to give their children rBGH milk, or Monsanto? Women exposed to 7 times greater risk of breast cancer, or Monsanto? Desperate farmers in India and young children forced into child labor in cottonseed factories there, or Monsanto? Animals suffering from lives in filthy cages and disgusting feedlots, shot up with steroids and hormones and antibiotics, or Monsanto? Our children who eat candy with high fructose Bt corn syrup associated with kidney and liver toxicity, or Monsanto? Edwards was right about your corporate connections. I just didn't understand until I saw that PBS show and read about Monsanto, how personally affected my children and grandchildren, and all people around the world, have been. I will not vote for you. I will vote for someone who will commit themselves to work on behalf of small farmers and real food and decent treatment of animals and to end this industrialized agricultural nightmare that is taking us off a cliff. Linn Cohen-Cole Atlanta Disclaimer. I am not a scientist. I have read for months on this subject, and am including only a tiny portion of the horrifying things I have learned. I am expressing my opinion as person and may be wrong. Perhaps things are swell out there and rBGH is fabulous and TSE-laced feed is great, and genetic engineering is the best thing since manna. But I am scared for my family and I have not only a right to say so but an obligation to do so. I am angry that Monsanto was allowed the influence it had and has done the things it definitely seems to have. I am disgusted by industrialization of every tender and beautiful part of our world and hope, for all our children's sake, we are not too late to pull back.

Last Updated ( Sunday, 03 February 2008 )

Pepsi, Coke workers trade punches at Wal-Mart

I just HAVE to post this!!

By Associated Press
Published on: 10/12/07

Indiana, Pa. — The long-standing rivalry between Coke and Pepsi took a physical turn Friday when a Pepsi deliveryman allegedly punched his Coke counterpart in the face at a western Pennsylvania Wal-Mart, state police said.

The two deliverymen were "apparently bickering back and forth" while unloading their wares at the Indiana County store, police said. When the Coke deliveryman left the store, his counterpart allegedly punched him in the face three times, breaking his nose and giving him a black eye, police said.

No charges have been filed, but police characterized the incident as a misdemeanor simple assault

Kurt Nimmo on Wikipedia

More Details on the Wikipedia Propaganda Encyclopedia

Sunday August 19th 2007, 12:19 pm

Now that Wikipedia has found it appropriate to excise the error riddled entry slandering your humble blogger—who was, thanks to nameless dilettantes of unknown employ, chalked up as an antisemite and Holocaust denier—I am wishing for a pony, namely the demise of the online propaganda and slander database masquerading as an encyclopedia. As it turns out, and I reported here late last week, Wikipedia is a magnet for the CIA and FBI, tasked with revising history and, no doubt as well, slamming the opposition, an effort with a long and sordid history.

I failed to mention, however, that Wikipedia is not only a magnet for CIA and FBI hacks, but for multinational corporations as well. “Among those [Virgil Griffith, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology] alleges have been updating their entries are Wal-Mart, the world’s largest grocer, AstraZeneca, the drugs giant, Britain’s Labour Party, the CIA and the Vatican,” reports Times Online. “In one example he gives, a computer linked to an IP address registered to the Dow Chemical company is seen to have deleted a passage on the Bhopal chemical disaster of 1984, which occurred at a plant operated by Union Carbide, now a wholly-owned Dow subsidiary.”

Of course, Dow does not want you to know about this “disaster,” often characterized as the “Hiroshima of the Chemical Industry,” responsible for killing 20,000 people and inflicting an estimated 120,000 survivors with chronic and debilitating, multi-systemic gas related ailments. Not only has Dow expunged the facts on Wikipedia, but has “openly lied to shareholders about the company’s legal liabilities in Bhopal,” according to CorpWatch. “While babies in Bhopal are born with defects and drink breast milk laced with toxins, in the US a new generation has just begun to learn of the gas leak, the ongoing contamination, and their effects,” however, this information will not be gleaned from Wikipedia. It should be noted that Dow refuses to provide medical rehabilitation and economic reparations for the victims, a standard business practice for multinational corporations.

In addition, “ExxonMobil, the US oil giant, made sweeping changes to an entry on the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. A claim that the company ‘has not yet paid the $5 billion in spill damages it owes to the 32,000 Alaskan fishermen’ is deleted and replaced with references to the funds the company has paid out,” and does not intend to ever pay out, as environmental pollution is simply a by-product of doing business and the responsibility for cleaning up the mess, of course, falls to the American people. Don’t expect them to learn about ExxonMobil’s crimes on Wikipedia.

“A web surfer using a machine on Wal-Mart’s network has amended a passage on the rates that the retailer pays its employees—to the benefit of the world’s largest retailer” and a “computer registered to Disney, the media giant, was used to delete a reference to criticism of the use of Digital Rights Management software, used by the group to safeguard digital media from piracy.” AstraZeneca, the pharm giant, deleted a reference to Seroquel, a drug which allegedly made teenagers “more likely to think about harming or killing themselves,” and this deletion was attributed to “a user of a computer registered to the drug company” (consider the following “revision” posted at Wikipedia).

Not only have multinational corporations and the CIA and FBI jumped on the revisionist history bandwagon, but so have religious entities. “Individuals using computers registered to the Vatican have amended entries on Roman Catholic saints and Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein…. A computer linked to the Church of Scientology’s network was used to delete references to links between it and a group dubbed the ‘Cult Awareness Network,’” reports the Times Online.

“Massaging Wikipedia entries has become a well-established phenomenon as the reach of the world’s most popular online reference work has become apparent,” especially if there are official enemies to attack or crimes to be sanitized. “Last year the site was transformed into a political battleground in the US, with politicians’ aides accused of ‘vandalizing’ entries on opposition figures,” sort of a cyber version of dirty tricks, legendary behavior for both the FBI and CIA, long tasked with taking out the opposition. In a way, though, victims of such efforts may consider themselves lucky, as the CIA has dealt with official enemies in other countries more severely, viz., they are often assassinated. Of course, some claim the CIA and the FBI have engaged likewise tactics here, most notably in regard to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Finally, “in a signal of how tempting it can be for interested parties to amend articles, Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia founder, himself ran into controversy in 2005, when he admitted editing his own Wikipedia entry.”

Figures.

NEW REPORT CALLS WAL-MART'S SUSTAINABILITY EFFORTS "SMOKE AND MIRRORS"

• Report criticizes retailer’s methods [Arkansas Democrat-Gazette]
  Wal-Mart Stores Inc. ’s lowcost, low-price business model leads to environmental damage, sweatshop conditions at suppliers’ factories and loss of jobs in communities, a coalition of labor, environment and community groups says in a report scheduled for release today.
  
  
• Wal-Mart's Sustainability Initiative: A Civil Society Critique [Big Box Collaborative]
  “Wal-Mart Sustainability Initiative: A Civil Society Critique” written by 23 organizations which analyzes Wal-Mart's smoke and mirrors sustainability initiatives. This report calls on Wal-Mart to reframe their sustainability efforts so that workers, the environment and communities are all respected.