11/24/00
12:20:44 PM
Will Al Gore become the Dimpled President? Read David Corn's up-to-the-minute report on the latest in the legal wrangling in Florida. Available exclusively on The Nation web-site at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=special&s=corn1211
You can also find new post-election coverage currently by Katha Pollitt, Eric Alterman, Jonathan Schell and Alex Keyssar at:
And, still as relevant as ever is our photo illustration of Mad magazine icon Alfred E. Neuman transformed into George W. Bush as featured on our November 20 cover. Print, download and email this celebrated cover at:
http://www.thenation.com/special/alfredw.mhtml
Finally, don't miss our history section this week with excerpts from The Nation's coverage of Election 1876 - the last time a presidential race has been as contested and controversial as Election 2000.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=history&s=1876elec
11/24/00
12:19:12 PM
To: Campaign Committee and Others From: Joe Simonetta Re: I have written and sent the following letter to several newspapers Date: 11.24.2000
Dear Editor,
What is going on in this emotionally charged highly partisan battle for Florida’s decisive twenty-five electoral votes? More than meets the eye. We humans are the products of billions of years of evolution. As biologist Holmes Rolston noted, "In a landscape of contest and conflict, nature has proceeded with a recklessness that is indifferent to life." Everything is condemned to live by attacking or competing with other life. An odious scene of violence exists everywhere. This is the context out of which life arose and the one in which it persists. Evolution characterized by such conflict has ominous implications for our species. The aggression necessary for survival is imprinted in our psyches and remains lethally operational. It is visible in this election contest.
Mr. Gore won the national popular vote. That is indisputable. No matter, it is the electoral vote that is decisive. Whoever wins Florida and its electoral votes wins the White House. The battle for Florida has been and continues to be obnoxious, "an odious scene." The Republicans would have us believe that the Democrats are trying to steal Florida’s votes. They have proceeded with a recklessness indifferent to law and reality. The reality is that Gore would have won by thousands of votes if Palm Beach County had not flawed its ballot. Surely, in their hearts, the Republicans know this. Surely, too, they know the true will of the majority.
Yet they persist arrogantly with their inflammatory language and vacuous charges. From the start, they attempted to block and discredit a lawful process. Now, they attack even the integrity of the Florida Supreme Court. A shortsighted and dangerously destabilizing tactic. Moreover, the Republicans have had the same legal opportunities as the Democrats to ask for manual recounts in any and all counties. In some counties, the Republicans had manual recounts. Their standard bearer, Mr. Bush, claims to be a "uniter" and one who trusts the people. At every opportunity to be a uniter, he has supported shrill divisive tactics. At every opportunity to "trust the people," Mr. Bush turned his back. He allowed his spokespeople (Baker, Hughes, Harris, Limbaugh, and countless other surrogates) to attack the same lawful manual recount process that exists in his own state. This has been a shameful spectacle and it continues unabated. This kind of behavior has ominous implications for our Republic.
Sincerely,
Joseph R. Simonetta
11/24/00
12:13:43 PM
FAIR-L Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting Media analysis, critiques and news reports
ACTION ALERT: U.S. Coverage of Global Warming Talks: Rare, Not Well-Done
November 22, 2000
Delegates from over 160 countries are gathered at the Hague in the Netherlands this week for negotiations to finalize the Kyoto climate treaty, the 1997 protocol on combating global warming. Despite the high stakes involved in global warming, news coverage of the Hague talks in mainstream U.S. print media has been extremely sparse. National television coverage found in a search of the Nexis news database has so far been limited to one episode of CNN's Ahead of the Curve (11/20/00).
The foreign press, however, has devoted significant attention to the story, with many articles describing the talks as "deadlocked," and blaming what are seen as obstructionist U.S. tactics for the stalemate. Here's a sampling of headlines from overseas, all from November 20:
--"Gas-Guzzling U.S. Under Fire at Global Warming Talks" (Agence France Presse) --"U.S. Blamed for Climate Treaty Talks Deadlock" (London Daily Telegraph) --"Climate Talks Fail to Close Rift with U.S." (London Guardian) --"U.S. Blocks Attempts to Cut Global Warming" (London Independent) --"Pollution Pact Under Threat as America Is Accused of Con Trick" (London Times)
One of the few U.S. outlets to pay attention to the Hague talks, the New York Times presented a quite different take on how the talks were going. Their November 20 headline: "U.S. Move Improves Chance for Global Warming Treaty."
What pro-environment move is the Times referring to? The Kyoto agreement requires the reduction of fossil-fuel emissions like carbon dioxide, of which the U.S. is by far the world's largest producer. The "new stance" that the Times celebrates is the U.S.'s new willingness to compromise on its demand that it be allowed to count forests as major credits in meeting the emission-reduction targets mandated by the protocol.
Since vegetation absorbs carbon dioxide, the reasoning goes, the U.S. should get points simply for not cutting down its existing forests. Counting such "carbon sinks" as emission reductions would allow the U.S. to skip many of the more expensive and inconvenient environmental measures the Kyoto agreement proposes, like redesigning industry to actually reduce pollution at its source. Essentially, the U.S. has gone from insisting on a measure that would allow it to sidestep emissions reduction requirements, to agreeing to negotiate on it.
While papers like the London Times described the U.S.'s latest proposal as one that "threatens to derail" the entire Kyoto conference, putting the U.S. "at loggerheads with Britain and the rest of the European Union," the New York Times went to some length to portray the U.S. as a constructive partner in the talks, saying that the U.S.'s "new stance" will "brighten prospects" for the Kyoto treaty's finalization, and that "despite outward discord," delegates "seemed poised for compromise."
Since the November 20 article, the U.S. stance the Kyoto talks has become even more controversial abroad. Some more recent headlines from overseas:
--"U.S. Trying to 'Wriggle Out of Fossil Fuel Pact'" (London Daily Telegraph, 11/22/00) --"Explorers on the Trail of 'Carbon Sinks' Stir Spectre of Imperialism" (Financial Times, 11/22/00) --"U.S. Berated for Wriggling Out of Treaty Pledges; EU Fury Grows as Americans Try to Exploit Loopholes" (London Guardian, 11/22/00) --"Europe Rejects U.S. Call to Alter Pollution Targets; Americans Threatening Kyoto Gains, Says EU" (London Independent, 11/22/00) --"Chirac to Americans: They = CO2; He Firmly Urges the U.S. to Limit Its Emissions" (France's Liberation, 11/21/00)
The London Daily Telegraph (11/22/00) reported that after examining the new American proposal on carbon sinks, the European Union has found that, far from being a genuine compromise, the plan would actually "allow the United States to increase its emissions of greenhouse gases by 8 per cent, instead of cutting them by 7 per cent by 2010 as it is required to under the Kyoto treaty."
Conflict between the U.S. and Europe over this measure has become so intense that, according to the London Guardian (11/22/00), "there were signs" that the EU "was prepared to reach an agreement with other developed countries which excluded the U.S. if necessary." To date, the New York Times has not reported these developments.
ACTION: Please encourage the New York Times to continue their coverage of the Kyoto conference at the Hague, and ask them to improve it with more critical analysis of the U.S. role in the talks and of U.S. environmental policy.
CONTACT: New York Times mailto:nytnews@nytimes.com Toll free comment line: 1-888-NYT-NEWS
As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if you maintain a polite tone. Please cc fair@fair.org with your correspondence.
11/24/00
12:12:32 PM
DECLARATION OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES ON CLIMATE CHANGE
The Hague, November 11-12, 2000
I. PREAMBLE
We, the Indigenous Peoples of our Mother Earth, as partners with in the United Nations Family, have collectively developed our rights, responsibilities and aspirations in international law and formal declarations, including the U.N. Draft Declaration on Indigenous Peoples Rights. In the light and spirit of these instruments we welcome this opportunity to participate in the UNFCC -Process, for the recognition, promotion and protection of our rights. As the Delegates of Indigenous Peoples and organisations convened on the occasion of the Sixth Conference of the Parties of the Framework Convention on Climate Change in the Second International Indigenous Forum on Climate Change at the Hague from November 11th to the 12th, 2000, we affirm the Albuquerque Declaration, the Quito Declaration, Lyon Declaration and Position Paper of the First Forum of the Indigenous Peoples on Climatic Change. Furthermore, we address the Parties and other participants at this Conference to share the conclusions of our Forum:
II. CONSIDERATIONS
1. Earth is our Mother. Our special relationship with Earth as stewards, as holders of indigenous knowledge cannot be set aside. Our special relation with her has allowed us to develop for millenia a particular knowledge of the environment that is the foundation of our lifestyles, institutions, spirituality and world view. Therefore, in our philosophies, the Earth is not a commodity, but a sacred space that the Creator has entrusted to us to care for her, this home where all beings live.
2. Our traditional knowledge on sustainable use, conservation and protection of our territories has allowed us to maintain our ecosystems in equilibrium. This role has been recognised at the Earth Summit and is and has been our contribution to the planet's economy and sustainability for the benefit present and future generations.
3. Our cultures, and the territories under our stewardship, are now the last ecological mechanisms remaining in the struggle against climate devastation. All Peoples of the Earth truly owe a debt to Indigenous Peoples for the beneficial role our traditional subsistence economies play in the maintenance of planet's ecology.
4. Over twenty international instruments affirm, promote or suggest the rights of Indigenous Peoples to full and direct participation without discrimination in the development of national and international policies that have the potential to impact upon us. However, while instruments such as the ILO Convention covers a wide range of Indigenous Peoples rights, such as labor issues, land rights, social and economic rights, cultural rights, political representation and self-governance, they fail to adequately protect our concerns with regard to the destruction of the Earth's climate.
5. We reaffirm our ancestral rights to self-determination and our right to decide without any outside interference on issues directly or indirectly related to our lands and territories, that include terrestrial and marine ecosystems and that are among the most diverse and particularly fragile on the planet.
6. There have been advances in the legal-philosophical debate for the recognition of our collective rights. Furthermore, we think that there have been regional and national advances on this matter, but unfortunately, grave and systematic human rights violations and violations of the fundamental liberties of the Indigenous Peoples persist.
7. Climate change is a reality and is affecting hundreds of millions of our peoples and our territories, resulting in famine, extreme poverty, disease, loss of basic resources in our traditional habitats and provoking involuntary displacements of our peoples as environmental refugees. The causes of climate change are the production and consumption patterns in industrialised countries and are therefore, the primary responsibility of these countries. The policies of developing countries and economies in transition that promote coal and uranium mining, logging, nuclear and large hydro electric power station and oil and gas extraction and transportation contribute to climate change and the destruction of our territories.
8. We are profoundly concerned that current discussions within the Framework Convention on Climate Change, as well as the practical implementation of the Kyoto Protocol do not recognise our right to adequate participation. These policies and mechanisms exclude us as participants, deny our contributions, and marginalize our Peoples. These policies and mechanisms will permit developed countries to avoid their responsibility to reduce emissions at source, promote the expansion of global capital, and deepen our marginalization.
9. We are also profoundly concerned that the measures to mitigate climate change currently being negotiated are based on a worldview of territory that reduces forests, lands, seas and sacred sites to only their carbon absorption capacity. This world view and its practices adversely affect the lives of Indigenous Peoples and violate our fundamental rights and liberties, particularly, our right to recuperate, maintain, control and administer our territories which are consecrated and established in instruments of the United Nations.
10. We reject the inclusion of carbon sinks within the CDM and disagree with the definition of carbon sinks as stated in the Kyoto Protocol. We, as Indigenous Peoples, manage the "natural carbon sinks" in our territories according to our world view and their integral use is a right that our people have and exercise according to our local and specific needs. We do not accept that forests are valued only for their carbon sequestration capacity.
11. We are profoundly concerned that the current proposed definitions of afforestation, deforestation, and reforestation pose a threat to the traditional uses of Indigenous Peoples of their lands and territories. We demand that these definitions be in accord with the already accepted definitions in other international conventions, specifically the Convention on Biological Diversity.
12. Concepts, practices, and measures, such as plantations, carbon sinks and tradeable emissions, will result in projects which adversely impact upon our natural, sensitive and fragile eco-systems, contaminating our soils, forests and waters. In the past, even well intentioned development policies and projects have resulted in disastrous social and ecological consequences. In this case, the concepts, policies and measures being negotiated do not consider the best interests of Indigenous Peoples. Consequently, we cannot accept any concepts,projects or programmes that ravage our territories or deny, limit, or restrict our fundamental rights and freedom.
III. RECOMMENDATIONS
1. We propose that COP guarantees the fullest and most effective participation of Indigenous Peoples in all activities related to the FCCC through:
a. notation of this Declaration,
b. accreditation of Indigenous Peoples with special status in the decision-making processes in the Conference of the Parties, meetings of the Subsidiary Bodies, as well as at all activities carried out within the Convention;
c. establishment of an ad-hoc, open-ended working group on Indigenous Peoples and climate change with the broad participation of Indigenous Peoples;
d. creation of a Division on Indigenous Peoples within the Convention's Secretariat;
e. inclusion of a permanent agenda item on Indigenous Peoples in the permanent agenda of the COP and its subsidiary bodies and all activities that they organise;
f. meaningful consultation between the FCCC and the CBD, the proposed Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and other bodies dealing with Indigenous issues;
g. inclusion of Indigenous Peoples in the IPCC, Executive Board of the CDM, expert review teams and the compliance committee;
2. We propose that COP establish appropriate programs of capacity building, formation and diffusion of the Convention and the Kyoto Protocol and its activities with the participation of the representative Indigenous organisations.
3. We propose that COP support access for Indigenous Peoples as equal partners at every level of decision-making including needs assessments, case studies, and national and international policy-making activities concerning climate change impacts, causes and solutions.
4. We propose that to ensure the non intervention of oil, gas, nuclear and large hydro-electric power station, logging and mining companies, in their exploitation of natural resources in Indigenous territories, COP support Indigenous Peoples in our permanent struggle to defend the environment through such actions as: a. establishment of a moratorium on these activities in pristine areas and the promotion of locally appropriate, renewable, and efficient energy solutions;
b. imposition of legally binding obligations to restore all areas already affected by such activites, with the participation of Indigenous Peoples; and
c. creation of a fund for use by Indigenous Peoples to address the potential and actual impacts of development and climate change in the short and long term in a manner compatible with our traditional and customary cultures and lifestyles.
The Hague on the 15th of November, 2000
11/24/00
12:09:44 PM
ENVIRONMENT NEWS SERVICE (ENS) http://ens-news.com
"We Cover the Earth For You"
FIVE DAYS LEFT TO TACKLE CLIMATE CHANGE
THE HAGUE, The Netherlands, November 20, 2000 (ENS) - The president of climate change talks under way in The Hague says governments could still be talking in 2008, such is the lack of compromise.
For full text and graphics visit: http://ens.lycos.com/ens/nov2000/2000L-11-20-10.html
******
COLOMBIA'S ENVIRONMENT A CASUALTY IN U.S. WAR ON DRUGS
By Brian Hansen
WASHINGTON, DC, November 20, 2000 (ENS) - The aerial fumigation program that has grown out of the U.S. government's so-called "war on drugs" is endangering the fragile ecosystems and indigenous cultures of Colombia's Amazon Basin, a coalition of groups warned today at a news conference on Capitol Hill.
For full text and graphics visit: http://ens-news.com/ens/nov2000/2000L-11-20-15.html
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KENYA'S MAU FOREST DISMEMBERED FOR POLITICAL PAYOFFS
By Robert Otani
NAIROBI, Kenya, November 20, 2000 (ENS) - One of Kenya's few remaining moist forests is set to lose another 60,000 hectares (148,000 acres) of land, intensifying a conservation crisis brought about by the Kenya government's systematic destruction of the country's forest cover.
For full text and graphics visit: http://ens-news.com/ens/nov2000/2000L-11-20-02.html
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BIRD HABITAT CENTRAL TO UK PORT EXPANSION BATTLE
SOUTHAMPTON, United Kingdom, November 20, 2000 (ENS) - A UK company plans to build a container terminal on 240 hectares of open grazing marsh and mudflats described by environmental groups as an internationally important wildlife haven.
For full text and graphics visit: http://ens.lycos.com/ens/nov2000/2000L-11-20-11.html
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HAWAIIAN JUDGE HALTS LOBSTER FISHERY FOR BENEFIT OF MONK SEALS
HONOLULU, Hawai'i, November 20, 2000 (ENS) - Hawaiian monk seals, one of the most endangered marine mammals in the world have won protection from a federal court. An estimated 1,300 to 1,400 monk seals are still living on a chain of tiny islands stretching northwest of the main Hawaiian Islands.
For full text and graphics visit: http://ens-news.com/ens/nov2000/2000L-11-20-01.html
******
ENVIRONMENT NEWS SERVICE AMERISCAN: NOVEMBER 20, 2000
Environmentalists Urge Clinton to Ground Airport
Companies to Develop Low Emissions Truck Engine
Georgia Park is for the Birds
Activists Dump Biotech Contaminated Corn at EPA Office
Scientists Launch World's First Marine Census
Georgia Awards Grants for Greenspace Protections
Researchers Launch Study of Texas Aquifer
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Signs Giant Panda Import Permit
Feds Bolster Efforts to Halt Marine Poaching
For full text and graphics visit: http://ens-news.com/ens/nov2000/2000L-11-20-09.html
11/24/00
12:01:45 PM
Rense.com http://www.sightings.com/general5/beyondredemption.htm
The Democrats Are Beyond Redemption By Andrew O'Hehir Link 11-23-00
It's your party and you can cry if you want to Will Gore lose Florida? Who cares. The Democrats are beyond redemption.
_____
Here's a memo to all the whiny, sore-loser Democrats (or sore-winner Democrats, as the case may be) who are trying to blame Ralph Nader and the Green Party for your predicament: Get over it. I and the 2.7 million other Americans who voted for Nader are not your wayward children who stayed out past curfew. We are, by definition, your political opponents. We didn't vote for your party because we think it stinks, and we don't care all that much whether you won or lost. Is that clear enough? Now can we just pick a president by reading the entrails of a pregnant chad or something and move on?
Check your civics textbooks and the Constitution; does it say anywhere that the two-party system was ordained by the Creator, or that the Democratic Party has an eternal right to the votes of progressives and leftists, no matter how mealy-mouthed and corrupt the party gets? It's undoubtedly true that many Green voters would prefer Al Gore to George W. Bush, on balance. There's no contradiction involved there; most of Pat Buchanan's voters (outside Palm Beach County, anyway) would presumably prefer Bush to Gore.
But Nader voters -- and Buchanan voters, albeit in smaller numbers -- made a principled decision. Revolutionary, I know, but stick with me on this. They decided it was more important to try to build a genuinely independent political movement than to participate in the profoundly undemocratic choice between two Ivy League daddy's boys suckled on the soft-money teat, about whom the public seems equally ambivalent.
Is building such a movement within the profoundly flawed universe of American electoral politics even possible? Maybe, maybe not. But for many people on the left, the Nader campaign felt like the first genuine injection of positive energy in mainstream politics since Jesse Jackson in the 1980s. We're sick of sitting up late nights like an abandoned wife with a candle in the window, pining for a Democratic Party that ran out on us years ago yet still expects us to show up on Election Day.
Clearly, liberals and activists who still see hope for the Democrats will disagree. But the exaggerated anti-Nader venom, such as that found in an entertaining Salon article by my colleague Charles Taylor, strikes me as an advanced case of kill-the-messenger syndrome. The Democratic Party's injuries are self-inflicted; they can't be blamed on a geeky consumer advocate and his tiny, poorly organized thirdparty.
First off, let's get rid of one canard. Even if Bush wins, we'll never know whether Nader "cost" Gore the election; exit polls suggest that many Nader voters wouldn't have voted at all in a straight Gush-Bore matchup. (And for whatever it's worth, Bush attracted about twice as many registered Democrats as Nader did.) But Nader's very presence in the race, and the enthusiasm his candidacy generated among students, environmentalists and other progressive activists, indicates that cracks are showing in the politics of fear that have held the amorphous Democratic coalition together in recent years.
Ever since the disastrous defeat of George McGovern by Richard Nixon in 1972, the Democratic Party has had two unwritten rules for dealing with its own left wing. Rule 1: There is no left. Rule 2: If there is a left, it must be destroyed or at least silenced. As the party slid toward the mushy center, essentially morphing into the Republican Party of the Eisenhower era (while the Republican Party itself was morphing into, I don't know, the Brown Shirts), it left its progressive-environmentalist-feminist wing increasingly homeless. Some people on this wing played along, believing that even the centrist New Democrats were preferable to the post-Reagan GOP; others abandoned electoral politics for academics, community activism or gardening.
Let's note an important historical contrast here: In 1964, the Republican Party was transformed by a wave of grass-roots activism, and nominated a true believer (Barry Goldwater) who galvanized the activist core but got slaughtered in the general election by a popular incumbent president. A generation later, these activists conquered not just their own party but the entire country, sweeping Ronald Reagan to power on an unprecedented conservative tide.
The McGovern campaign represented a parallel upsurge of activism within the Democratic Party, and produced the same short-term result. But union leaders, big-city mayors, tort lawyers, Southern congressmen and other entrenched forces essentially united to purge the activists, who terrified them politically and threatened their power. In the long run, this created a party without a grass-roots base, whose only electoral strategy was to study the polls and bend with the wind, to "triangulate" (in the loathsome phrase of the loathsome Dick Morris) a middle road between liberals and conservatives.
Could the McGovern radicals ever have triumphed on a national scale the way the Goldwater radicals did? I don't know, but that's not the point. The Republican shift to the right was motivated by the personal convictions of millions of party activists; the Democratic shift to the center was motivated not by principle but by Morris-style strategic thinking. Some people, like President Clinton and Gore, may have believed wholeheartedly in this new direction. But its only real purpose was to gain power. From that moment forward the Democratic Party became a reactionary force whose core values were never certain. In short, it sold its soul.
Of course, the Democrats could afford to do that because they still had large groups of loyal voters they could take almost entirely for granted, even if they no longer had any activist base outside a few Washington think tanks. African-Americans, Latinos, feminists, environmentalists and the progressive wing of the labor movement had no place else to go, in terms of electoral politics. Many were understandably terrified of the newly energized GOP, which seemed to want to lock women in the kitchen, sell Yellowstone to the highest bidder and get the poor off welfare and into prison
11/24/00
12:01:06 PM
The Republicans, in fact, provided the cudgel the Democratic leadership used to batter renegade movements like Jackson's Rainbow Coalition -- which strove to reconnect the party with a multiracial, working-class base -- back into line. If you think we're bad, went the Democratic theme song, wait till you see the other guys. It worked, for a while. During the Clinton years, the party did the minimum necessary to hang on to poor, dark-skinned and liberal voters, while doing the maximum possible to pry affluent suburbanites loose from the Republicans.
But the triangulation strategy can only continue to work if no one presents a genuine, grass-roots challenge for those abandoned and dispirited left-leaning voters. Even a marginal (and marginally successful) effort to do so, like that of Nader and the Greens, must be savaged and, if possible, discredited. This horror of being attacked at the Democratic Party's most vulnerable point accounts, I believe, for the near-hysterical pitch of much of the Nader-bashing, which simply repeats the same old tune: We may suck but the Republicans suck worse.
This is what I mean by the politics of fear. Democratic loyalists, from Congress to the academy to the editorial page of the New York Times, are trying to terrorize Green voters into repentance with horror stories: We have delivered the country into the hands of Trent Lott and Tom DeLay; we're ensuring that right-wing wacko judges get appointed to the Supreme Court; we're a bunch of effete white intellectuals who won't suffer the likely consequences of our actions. But the real fear at issue here is the fear of the Democratic apparatchiks themselves, at the prospect of their soulless, sclerotic party being undermined by the forces of genuine democracy.
In the interests of civil discourse, I'm going to skip over the ad hominem, and thoroughly irrelevant, attacks on Nader's personality and manner that form a distinct subset of Nader-bashing. Suffice it to say that Nader is an imperfect candidate on many levels, but he's also a man of real integrity and accomplishment who has worked for the good of American citizens his entire life and never panders to his audience. Besides, anyone who voted for Gore, for any reason, has permanently lost the right to complain about boring, irritating and pedantic politicians.
In fact, the relentless negativity and fear-mongering of the Green-baiters only makes it clear that they don't have anything good to say about their own candidate or their own party. This spectacle of intelligent and well-meaning people struggling to defend a crippled institution they don't really like is more than a little sad. Many of them, I am convinced, realize that the difference between Democratic and Republican fiscal policy these days, as Michael M. Thomas of the New York Observer has put it, is mainly the question of which of Alan Greenspan's butt cheeks to lick first.
These Democratic loyalists are too smart not to realize that their candidate this year was a smug oligarch only slightly less noxious than the one he opposed. (The streets of hell will be closed for a snow day before either Gore or Bush shuts off the soft-money spigot that has thoroughly corrupted national politics.) Or that Gore's vaunted intelligence consists mostly of half-digested fragments cribbed from New Age management-guru bestsellers. Or that hisrunning mate was an intolerant, sanctimonious prick who would absolutely, positively be a Republican if he didn't adhere to a minority religion.
Now that the Republicans have emulated the Democrats and handed back their party's reins from the activist fringe to the corporate center, this year's presidential election will matter slightly less, in the world-historical scheme of things, than the battle between Coke and Pepsi. At least people actually like Coke and Pepsi; this has been more like Dr. Pepper vs. Mr. Pibb. I suppose if I really had to choose between being ruled by law firms and high-tech zillionaires (the Democrats) on one hand and oil and pharmaceutical tycoons (the Republicans) on the other, I'd pick the lawyers. But the Nader campaign, as modest and provisional as it was in the end, was an attempt to argue that the choice doesn't have to be that narrow.
All right, the Democratic hit squads say, that's very high-minded. Then they start flogging us with DeLay and Lott again. What about the poor women who'll bleed to death from botched coat-hanger abortions after Roe vs. Wade is overturned, and inner-city schoolchildren who'll go without books and lunches when their budget is vouchered out to suburban religious academies?
This is, of course, the politics of fear at its highest and most effective pitch. I don't doubt that the Bush administration (version 2.0) will be capable of doing some real harm, and I can't question the motives of anyone who felt they had to vote for Gore on that basis. But if it is Bush who takes office on Jan. 20, he will be one of the most weakened presidents in American history. He's unlikely to try and enact the agenda of the radical right, which feels lukewarm about him in any case. If he does, he's simply gift-wrapping both houses of Congress for the Democrats in 2002.
Of course, even a weak president with 51 senators on his side can install some egregious Neanderthal on the Supreme Court for life. Bush won't repeat the mistake his father made with closet liberal David Souter; it's safe to assume any W. appointments will be true-blue conservatives in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. This fear of a Bush court was clearly the Democrats' most potent weapon, and the reason why many potential Nader votes probably went to Gore at the last minute. Those of us who stuck with Ralph believed, however, that the best vote for civil rights and civil liberties was a vote for the long-term rejuvenation of democracy, not another vote for a party that doesn't stand for anything.
As for the not-so-subtle charges of elitism and racism against Nader and the Greens, it strikes me that those who have run out of legitimate arguments resort in the end to ugly innuendo. It's true that the Green movement, based in environmentalist and college-activist circles that tend to be mostly white, has done a piss-poor job of reaching people of color. Out of both tradition and pragmatism, minority voters, especially African-Americans, remain as a whole fiercely loyal to the Democrats. But whether the Green Party succeeds or not, how long will blacks and other minorities continue to tolerate the party that has eagerly collaborated in the war on drugs, the militarization of the inner city, the tremendous expansion of the prison-industrial complex, the racist application of the death penalty and the evisceration of the welfare system?
The 2000 presidential campaign will end someday, thank God, but the Nader-bashing is essentially the prelude to the next one, in which the Democrats will be desperate to fortify their voter base against further Green erosion. Beneath the Democratic fury at defectors is a clear subtext: If you're really sorry and come home and stay very quiet, this will all be forgiven in time. In Taylor's eloquent, enraged article, he argues that the Democratic Party remains the traditional home for liberals and progressives in American politics, and we should be fighting to reform and renew it, rather than abandoning it.
As Nader said repeatedly during the campaign, it wasn't the Greens who abandoned the Democrats but the other way around. The Greens face long and perhaps insuperable odds in trying to build a viable third party. But it feels good, finally, to have done something out of principle. It feels good to be free of the party that now seems unreformable and unrenewable. The party that rolled over for Newt Gingrich on welfare reform, that set back the cause of national healthcare by decades, that sold off the national forests in unprecedented quantities for nickels on the dollar, that waffled fatally on the rights of gays and lesbians, that presided over the most unequal economic boom in American history. Maybe we should be grateful for the presidential sex scandal that stopped the government dead for two years.
If anything, Nader voters should take heart from the bashing. It means that we made enough of a difference that they're scared of us and want to destroy us. It means we have a chance. It means we've reached the second, and nearly the third, stage in Gandhi's legendary formula for revolutionary change: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."
11/24/00
11:39:07 AM
Here are today's Reuters 'World Environment News' headlines, proudly brought to you by Planet Ark.
Doing environmental research? Search our news archives at: http://www.planetark.org/searchhome.cfm
Vietnam Red Cross appeals to Clinton on Agent Orange - VIETNAM http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9087
UPDATE - USDA doesn't know how StarLink tainted 1998 corn - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9077
Climate talks may be moot amid green power advances - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9068
Malaria rising as DDT use falls, scientist says - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9085
Corn leaving bad taste in world markets as GMO worries build - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9075
INTERVIEW - For Chernobyl victims, health crisis gathers pace - UKRAINE http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9070
Greens say UK low down on renewable energy league table - UK http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9067
Firm appointed to lead Great Barrier Reef clean up - UK http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9080
"What is safe to eat?" consumers ask amid BSE scare - UK http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9074
Mozambique, South Africa hit by fresh floods - SOUTH AFRICA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9076
ANALYSIS - Green-aware Scandinavia hard-pressed on Kyoto targets - NORWAY http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9072
UPDATE - Anger at US boils over at climate talks - NETHERLANDS http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9066
US climate talks chief gets custard pie in face - NETHERLANDS http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9081
INTERVIEW - Apathy on climate risks turmoil, hunger - UN expert - NETHERLANDS http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9082
EU, US lock horns at climate talks - NETHERLANDS http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9084
Russia aims to lift Kursk in $70 mln project - NETHERLANDS http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9086
INTERVIEW - US doubts must not sink climate pact - Kerry - NETHERLANDS http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9078
Key Mexican desert land to be protected - MEXICO http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9079
Lithuanian N-plant stops in unplanned shutdown - LITHUANIA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9071
UPDATE - Indian government backs off on pollution controls - INDIA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9088
Indian PM blamed for dwindling tiger population - INDIA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9083
Finnish nuclear referendum bill presented - report - FINLAND http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9069
EU to propose "generous" aid for renewable energy - EU http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9073
11/24/00
11:30:55 AM
Scientist 'killed Amazon indians to test race theory' Geneticist accused of letting thousands die in rainforest
Paul Brown, Environment correspondent The Guardian, London Saturday September 23, 2000
Thousands of South American indians were infected with measles, killing hundreds, in order to for US scientists to study the effects on primitive societies of natural selection, according to a book out next month.
The astonishing story of genetic research on humans, which took 10 years to uncover, is likely to shake the world of anthropology to its core, according to Professor Terry Turner of Cornell University, who has read the proofs.
"In its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption it is unparalleled in the history of anthropology," Prof Turner says in a warning letter to Louise Lamphere, the president of the American Anthropology Association (AAA).
The book accuses James Neel, the geneticist who headed a long-term project to study the Yanomami people of Venezuela in the mid-60s, of using a virulent measles vaccine to spark off an epidemic which killed hundreds and probably thousands.
Once the epidemic was under way, according to the book, the research team "refused to provide any medical assistance to the sick and dying Yanomami, on explicit order from Neel. He insisted to his colleagues that they were only there to observe and record the epidemic, and that they must stick strictly to their roles as scientists, not provide medical help".
The book, Darkness in El Dorado by the investigative journalist Patrick Tierney, is due to be published on October 1. Prof Turner, whose letter was co-signed by fellow anthropologist Leslie Sponsel of the University of Hawaii, was trying to warn the AAA of the impending scandal so the profession could defend itself.
Although Neel died last February, many of his associates, some of them authors of classic anthropology texts, are still alive.
The accusations will be the main focus of the AAA's AGM in November, when the surviving scientists have been invited to defend their work. None have commented publicly, but they are asking colleagues to come to their defence.
One of the most controversial aspects of the research which allegedly culminated in the epidemic is that it was funded by the US atomic energy commission, which was anxious to discover what might happen to communities when large numbers were wiped out by nuclear war.
While there is no "smoking gun" in the form of texts or recorded speeches by Neel explaining his conduct, Prof Turner believes the only explanation is that he was trying to test controversial eugenic theories like the Nazi scientist Josef Mengele.
He quotes another anthropologist who read the manuscript as saying: "Mr. Tierney's analysis is a case study of the dangers in science of the uncontrolled ego, of lack of respect for life, and of greed and self-indulgence. It is a further extraordinary revelation of malicious and perverted work conducted under the aegis of the atomic energy commission."
Prof Turner says Neel and his group used a virulent vaccine called Edmonson B on the Yanomani, which was known to produce symptoms virtually indistinguishable from cases of measles.
In the memo Prof Turner says: "One of Tierney's more startling revelations is that the whole Yanomami project was an outgrowth and continuation of the atomic energy commission's secret programme of experiments on human subjects.
"Neel, the originator of the project, was part of the medical and genetic research team attached to the atomic energy commission since the days of the Manhattan Project."
James Neel was well-known for his research into the effects of radiation on human subjects and personally headed the team that investigated the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs on survivors and their children.
According to Prof Turner, the same group also secretly carried out experiments on human subjects in the US. These included injecting people with radioactive plutonium without their knowledge or permission.
11/24/00
11:29:17 AM
US War on Drugs Poison Environment
Colombia: Monsanto, US War on Drugs Poison Environment
Brian Hansen Environment News Service November 20, 2000 WASHINGTON, DC
The aerial fumigation program that has grown out of the U.S. government's so-called "war on drugs" is endangering the fragile ecosystems and indigenous cultures of Colombia's Amazon Basin...
The fumigation program, which the U.S. finances as part of a $1.3 billion Colombian aid package approved this summer, is designed to eradicate coca and other plants used to manufacture illicit drugs.
But critics say the program indiscriminately wipes out legitimate subsistence crops as well as natural plants, and kills birds, mammals and aquatic life.
The chemicals are applied by aircraft and frequently fall on Columbia's indigenous peoples, subjecting them to a variety of health afflictions, critics add.
"This spraying campaign is equivalent to the Agent Orange devastation of Vietnam - a disturbance the wildlife and natural ecosystems have never recovered from...is occurring on the watch of the current Congress and [executive] administration, supported by taxpayer dollars."
Though carried out by Colombian police and military authorities, the aerial fumigation program utilizes U.S. government aircraft, fuel, escort helicopters and private military contractors.
The herbicide approved for the program, glyphosate, is manufactured by the U.S. based Monsanto Corporation and is commonly referred to by the trade name Roundup.
Full story
http://www.corpwatch.org/headlines/2000/399.html
11/24/00
11:28:04 AM
Noam Chomsky speaks to Socialist Worker about:
Globalising resistance to corporate power
NOAM CHOMSKY is one of the most well known writers and anti-imperialist campaigners in the US today. He has written on many subjects, including the role of the media and NATO's war in Kosovo. He spoke to Socialist Worker about the growing mood against capitalism.
HOW SIGNIFICANT were the protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organisation and in Washington against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank?
VERY SIGNIFICANT. I don't recall anything like it. For a long time there have been vocal protests against what's misleadingly called globalisation, this particular mode of corporate-run international integration which has harmed a great many people-probably the majority of the population of the world.
This has led to local protests over specific issues. But in the last couple of years the protests have become integrated. You see many examples of it. The international efforts that undermined the Multilateral Agreement on Investment were extremely impressive. They were done very quickly with virtually no publicity.
Seattle was a major protest, and the major institutions had to back down. In Washington it was again the same story. The variety of constituencies involved in these protests is remarkable. They involve people who in the past did not have much to do with each other, like steel workers, gay activists and environmentalists. The protests also have an international character, bringing together people from movements like the landless workers' movement in Brazil, the peasant movement in India and working people in the US.
IN WASHINGTON the movement seemed to be deepening and becoming more politicised. People were making links in a way that we haven't seen for a long time.
YES. THE protesters know what they are talking about. People are asking more fundamental questions. People who call the protests reformist are missing the point. For one thing the reforms are good-if you can achieve them, they help people. But also when there is a limit placed on reforms it helps you come to understand the way the world works, and that's important. You begin by calling for a minor reform. You find you can make a little progress on that, but then you face an iron wall. That teaches you something. You ask questions about why there's an iron wall and you look a little deeper into the way the system works. Then there's more pressure and sometimes more reaction. Part of the point of the protests is that they educate the protesters. You learn about where the institutions will be willing to bend and where they will not. That sharpens the protesters for the next stage.
AMONG THE protesters there seems to be a sophisticated understanding of the way corporations are choking the life out of the world, and also a vision of essentially a socialist society.
IT IS true of some of them. And those people are to a large extent people who have learned that through the experience of trying to carry out corporate reform. You start by going to an investors' meeting and calling for socially positive investment. You find you can make a minuscule difference, but you can't go too far. You ask why you can't, and you get to what you're describing.
TEN YEARS ago we were told it was the "end of history", the end of wars and civil conflict. How does that fit with the reality of the world today?
THE SOVIET Empire collapsed, and other regions like Yugoslavia collapsed. When that kind of collapse happens you get violent ethnic conflict because imperial systems, like totalitarian states, tend to suppress internal conflict. When the British Empire collapsed there were atrocities much worse than anything going on today in Eastern Europe. In south Asia there was a huge war between India and Pakistan that is still going on 50 years later. In Palestine it is the same.
When the French Empire collapsed there were wars all over Africa. So too when the Portuguese empire collapsed in the mid-1970s. There were major wars in Africa where South Africa acted as the front guy for the US and Britain to try to undermine the newly independent countries. In south east Asia where Portugal had a small empire you had the same thing, except this time Indonesia played the role of South Africa. Atrocities in East Timor went on right through until last year. When the Russian Empire collapsed it was the same story. Many of the conflicts in Africa today, like in Rwanda, are a lingering result of the breakdown of the Belgian, German and French imperial systems.
WHERE DOES US foreign and military policy fit into the picture today?
IT'S THE same story. One interesting index is arms transfers.
The main countries that get arms are Israel and Egypt. Egypt gets them because it supports Israel. That has to do with US domination of the Middle East's oil resources. Turkey is also a leading recipient of US arms. Turkey is a NATO country and was on the frontline of the Cold War. But the level of arms transfers was fairly steady and not all that high until 1984. Then it went much higher and stayed high. The peak year was 1997. In that single year Turkey got more arms from the United States than in the entire period of 1950 to 1984.
This was because in order to crush the Kurds the Turkish state needed a huge flow of US arms. So US arms were pouring in for massive ethnic cleansing operations and massacres in southeastern Turkey. By 1998 they had suppressed the Kurdish movement, so the arms sales declined. Until then Turkey was the leading recipient of US arms apart from Israel and Egypt. In 1999 it was replaced by Colombia. Colombia had been the leading recipient of US arms in the western hemisphere through the 1990s. It also had one of the worst human rights records in the 1990s. Why? Because Colombia has a powerful guerilla movement which the state has not been able to crush.
HOW DOES NATO's bombing in the Balkans last year fit in?
WHEN NATO bombed Yugoslavia it was not because of human rights problems. They don't give a damn about human rights. NATO did it because Serbia didn't follow the rules. Milosevic is doubtless a war criminal and a gangster. But the US and Britain have no problem supporting war criminals and gangsters-they do it all the time. Take Saddam Hussein. Tony Blair and the United Nations tell you he is the only monster in history who has not only developed weapons of mass destruction but even used them against his own population. All that's missing is, "Yes, he used weapons of mass destruction against his own population, but with the SUPPORT of the US and Britain."
The real reason they are after Saddam Hussein is because he disobeyed orders. Now that's a crime. You can gas Kurds if you like-we don't care about that-but don't disobey orders! That's the way great powers work. The United States works that way. Britain, which is by now more or less the attack dog of the United States, works that way. Russia is doing the same in Chechnya.
HOW DO the big corporations fit into this picture?
STATES ARE to some extent independent actors. But overwhelmingly they reflect the concentration of power inside them. That concentration inside contemporary industrial countries is concentrated corporate power. This concentration of power is extremely high in the US but it is also international-although big corporations are rooted in, and heavily dependent on, their own home countries.
What's called globalisation, a development that has taken place in the last 25 years, is a real power play on the part of concentrated corporate power and the states that are linked to that. They are trying to develop a particular form of global integration which is in the interests of financial institutions. What happens to the population is incidental. In fact, what happens to economic growth is incidental. You get a lot of excited talk about how wonderful the economic record has been in the last 25 years. It's total nonsense. In the period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s economic growth in the industrial countries was cut by about half.
Wages have either stagnated or declined in most of the industrial countries, and primarily in the US. Working hours are going way up. Benefits are down. Although growth has slowed there is highly concentrated profit. In the Third World the growth rate in the 1990s is about half what it was in the 1970s. That's one of the effects of one particular form of globalisation, traceable in substantial measure to the financial liberalisation. These changes in the last 25 years have had the effect of harming the international economy. It still grows, but not like before. And it concentrates wealth and power far more than before, and undermines democratic processes.
There are other ways of undermining democracy. Take the European Union. One of the crucial parts of the European Union is the transfer of power to unaccountable central banks. That's a tremendous attack on democracy. In fact, it's so extreme that even conservative sectors in the United States have been shocked by it.
WHAT ABOUT future prospects? Is something shifting in the US working class?
AVERAGE WAGES in the US have only now, maybe, reached the level of 20 years ago. To have a 20 year period when average wages are stagnant or declining when there is still economic growth is probably unprecedented. US workers have the highest workload in the industrial world. They passed Japan a couple of years ago. You have to have two members of the family working in the US just to keep food on the table.
You don't have daycare systems for children so you have to figure out what to do with the children. That's not so easy for a working family. This is a tremendous burden on families. One associated factor, which may well be a consequence, is that things like child abuse have gone up. By most social indicators the US has declined since the mid-1970s. People feel that in their own individual lives, but they are also beginning to feel it collectively.
It's not just industrial workers. It's all through the economy. Small farmers are getting smashed, as are small store owners. Except for a pretty small sector most people are suffering, and you get this coming together. That's one of the striking things about Seattle. As for the future, conflicts and struggles always go on. They are never predictable. These are things you do something about.
11/24/00
11:25:38 AM
US climate talks chief gets custard pie in face
NETHERLANDS: November 23, 2000
THE HAGUE - Washington's chief negotiator at U.N. climate talks was hit in the face with a custard pie yesterday by a protester angry at what activists say is US reluctance to do anything meaningful to fight global warming.
A women walked up to Frank Loy, Under Secretary for Global Affairs at the State Department, as he sat at a table giving a news briefing and thrust the pie in his face, witnesses said.
"This is all a farce," shouted another environmentalist campaigner as the woman was hustled away by security guards.
The United States wants to use mechanisms that would allow it to trade the right to pollute with other countries as a way of meeting targeted cuts in emissions under the 1997 Kyoto global warming pact, rather than having to make many actual reductions in its own emissions.
Earlier, more than 20 British activists disrupted a meeting of a group of government ministers discussing an agreement aimed at curbing emissions of heat-trapping gases warming the planet.
A British protest group Corporate Watch said the conference was doing nothing to protect people affected by the operations of oil multinationals and climate change, especially those in central America and the Niger Delta, Bangladesh and Pacific Islands.
"The plight of the people isn't even on the agenda. Instead we have a carbon casino masquerading as a solution to a global crisis," a Carbon Watch statement said
"We need drastic cuts in emissions. But what we see is a huggle of gangsters, plotting the most profitable scams to dodge even the woefully inadequate Kyoto targets."
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
7. http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9081#top
More Pie Pics at http://www.pieman.org
11/24/00
11:15:03 AM
Here are today's Reuters 'World Environment News' headlines, proudly brought to you by Planet Ark.
Doing environmental research? Search our news archives at: http://www.planetark.org/searchhome.cfm
Clinton signs bill to protect Colorado sand dunes - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9101
Ex-Russia navy eco-warrier's legal woes worry US - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9102
Britain's Prescott sees climate pact progress - UK http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9090
British company builds wind power plant in France - UK http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9094
Slovak nuclear body reports two reactor shutdowns - SLOVAKIA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9093
Russia gives initial okay to 20-year energy strategy - RUSSIA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9099
Norway whaler fined for firing at Greenpeace boat - NORWAY http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9096
NZ veterinarians warn against going GM - free - NEW ZEALAND http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9100
UPDATE - US, EU arm-wrestle at stalled climate talks - NETHERLANDS http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9089
Climate talks chief proposes ways to break deadlock - NETHERLANDS http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9095
ANALYSIS - Rich nations plotting climate scam - activists - NETHERLANDS http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9097
Nepal to ban old vehicles to check air pollution - NEPAL http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9091
UPDATE - Malaysian floods kill seven, thousands stranded - MALAYSIA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9092
Olympics-Greek protesters greet IOC with hula hoops - GREECE http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9098
11/22/00
5:22:24 PM
THE HERALD-LEADER Lexington, Kentucky Wednesday, November 22, 2000
Editorial Board
REASONABLE APPROACH Legislature should resurrect hemp research bill
Kentucky lawmakers looking for constructive ways to occupy their time during the first “annual” General Assembly next year might want to do something for the state's farmers -- something like reviving House Bill 855.
The bill would allow state universities to conduct research into production of industrial hemp. The bill passed the House this year on a 63-31 vote, was reported out of the Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee (albeit without a recommendation), but remained stuck in the Senate Rules Committee when the session ended.
As The New York Times noted in an editorial a couple of years ago, industrial hemp suffers – unfairly -- from guilt by association. Its distant cousin is marijuana. That's pot, grass, the stuff some folks smoke – illegally -- to get high.
But industrial hemp differs from marijuana in some very important ways. The stuff in marijuana that gives you that buzz -- tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) -- is virtually non-existent in industrial hemp. Marijuana's THC content runs as high as 20 percent; industrial hemp’s THC content is less than 1 percent.
Marijuana is grown for its leaves; industrial hemp is grown for the fiber of its stalk. And when the two plants are grown in close proximity, cross-pollination from the industrial hemp cuts the THC content of marijuana, making it less valuable on the illegal drug market. So, pot growers aren’t going to use industrial hemp as a cover for growing their own product.
Canada, China and European nations grow industrial hemp without problems. A handful of states in this nation are experimenting with production of the crop. The American Farm Bureau supports research into the growing of hemp. So does the Kentucky Farm Bureau. Hemp’s supporters also include two former governors: Republican Louie Nunn and Democrat Edward T. Breathitt.
There are good reasons that hemp, which once was a staple of Kentucky’s Farm economy, is getting a new look worldwide. It’s a hardy, pest- and disease-resistant source of fiber that can be used for everything from clothing to paper products to an alternative for plastic.
Yes, the growing of industrial hemp is now illegal in the United States. But someday, perhaps soon, that will change. The plant serves too many useful purposes for this ban to remain in effect indefinitely.
If Kentucky begins research on the production and marketing of hemp now, we can be ready to help farmers return to hemp-growing when the ban is lifted.
And Kentucky farmers, reeling from the rapid decline of the tobacco economy, badly need that kind of help.
Hemp can’t replace tobacco. The estimated $200- to $600-per-acre return on hemp is far below the return on tobacco.
But it’s considerably higher than the return farmers can get from most other crops, and it might make the difference in saving a few family farms in this state.
That’s sufficient reason for the 2001 General Assembly to allow state universities to begin research into industrial hemp.
11/22/00
1:42:56 PM
FAIR-L Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting Media analysis, critiques and news reports
ACTION ALERT: ABC News Analyst Advocates Brutality Report condemned by Amnesty International
November 21, 2000
ABC News Middle East analyst and military expert Anthony Cordesman published a report last month advocating the use of "excessive force" against Palestinian civilians, including "interrogation methods that border on psychological and/or physical torture." The report was released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an influential Washington think tank where Cordesman holds a chair in international security.
Amnesty International has condemned Cordesman's report as a "dangerously irresponsible contribution to the escalating violence in Israel and the Palestinian Authority" that risks "legitimizing torture." Cordesman's CSIS report urged the Israeli government and the Palestinian National Authority to use security methods that violate human rights in order to implement any future U.S.-brokered peace agreement.
CSIS's Middle East task force, which Cordesman co-directs, includes prominent American policymakers such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman and Sen. John McCain. According to the London Independent (11/6/00), copies of the report have been circulating among senior U.S., Israeli and Palestinian Authority officials.
Cordesman has been a prominent military analyst for ABC News for over ten years, frequently appearing on-air to provide analysis of military and Middle East issues. During last year's NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, he was often invited to comment on NATO's military strategy.
In a section of his report entitled "Peace and Security as the Natural Enemies of Human Rights," Cordesman lays out his recommendations: "There will be no future peace or stable peace process," he wrote, "if the Palestinian security forces do not act ruthlessly and effectively."
Specifically, he notes that "effective counter-terrorism relies on interrogation methods that border on psychological and/or physical torture, arrests and detentions that are 'arbitrary' by the standards of civil law, break-ins and intelligence operations that violate the normal rights of privacy, levels of violence in making arrests that are unacceptable in civil cases, and measures that involve the innocent (or at least not provably directly guilty) in arrests and penalties."
As a model for the Palestinian Authority, Cordesman holds up the British forces in Northern Ireland, who often "used excessive force, abused human rights, and used extreme interrogation methods and torture" but who nevertheless "did an excellent job of balancing the conflicting problems of effective security and a concern for human rights."
Marty Rosenbluth, Israel/Occupied Territories coordinator for Amnesty International USA, told FAIR: "I've been doing human rights work for almost 20 years and this is one of the most bizarre documents I've ever seen. It's basically a blueprint for human rights violations that [the authors] want the Palestinian Authority to follow."
ACTION: Please write to ABC and ask them whether they believe it is appropriate to use someone who explicitly advocates the violation of human rights as an ABC military analyst.
CONTACT: ABC News 47 W. 66th Street New York, NY 10023 Phone: 212-456-7777 Fax: 212-456-4297 mailto:netaudr@abc.com
As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if you maintain a polite tone. Please cc fair@fair.org with your correspondence.
11/22/00
1:38:49 PM
JAMA stats tell the tale
Doctors kill more people than guns and traffic accidents
by Don Harkins
SANDPOINT -- Last St. Patrick's Day, Sandpoint Chiropractor Blaze Welch gave a lecture on how to “get off of the disease scary-go-round” at the Gardenia Center here. The purpose of the talk, which was sponsored by the North Idaho chapter of Vaccination Liberation, was to teach people that they are responsible for their own health. Dr. Welch also discussed figures from right out of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) which prove, through accurate interpretations of their own words, that in the last century we chose the wrong fork in the road with regard to our health care paradigm.
Most people have been conditioned to believe in what is called the “germ theory” of disease -- that germs cause disease. The truth is that germs (bacteria) are everywhere and they are attracted to and proliferate in dis-eased tissues.
Bacteria decompose dead matter. That is their job. For instance, when a tree dies, bacteria come in and eat the tree and it eventually becomes soil. Bacteria does not eat a live, healthy tree. The same thing is true in people -- bacteria are attracted to dead matter. Therefore, if you have dead matter in your body, bacteria will come in and get to work decomposing the dead tissue so that it may eventually become soil.
In the mid 1800s, western medical science had the choice of going one of two ways. Bechamp's theory of disease maintained that every living thing has arisen from the microzyma (the “fundamental unit of the corporate organism”) and “every living thing is reducible to the microzyma.”
Bechamp believed that microzymas secrete fermentative substances that aid in digestion in a healthy body and evolve into bacteria when they encounter dead or damaged cells.
Pasteur's germ theory of disease maintained that diseases come into our bodies and make germs that we must fight so that we may be rid of them. J.I. Rodale explained Pasteur's “germ theory” of disease by stating that, “Germs live in the air, every once in awhile get into a human body, multiply and cause illness. Nothing to it at all. All you have to do is kill germs and disease is licked.”
Bechamp's theory placed all of the responsibility of disease prevention on the individual and his lifestyle. In a practical sense, there was no money in that and people would be empowered with the ability to resist dis-ease by taking care of themselves.
Western medical science went with Pasteur's theory because it opened the door which created the world's medical and pharmaceutical industries. Since the 1850s, we have been developing new drugs to attack and kill the disease invaders and the result has been epidemics of cancers and sicknesses and diseases -- and a very rich and powerful pharmaceutical industry.
“Last year,” commented Dr. Welch, “the pharmaceutical industry did $182 billion in drug sales world wide.” In contrast to that figure, it cost approximately $183 billion to treat adverse reactions from all of those drugs, said Dr. Welch.
Dr. Welch read off some statistics which should cause concern to anybody who sees an allopathic doctor, has medical insurance or may end up in the hospital someday. Again, the following admissions were taken from JAMA:
The top five causes of death in the United States, in order, are: Tobacco, alcohol, medical malpractice, traffic and firearms.
According to JAMA, doctors kill more people than auto accidents and guns. With that in mind, one has to wonder why gun control is such a hot legislative issue when, perhaps, we should be more concerned about doctor control.
“The number of people that doctors kill per day from medical malpractice is roughly equal to the amount of people that would die if every day, three jumbo jets crashed and killed everybody on board,” commented Dr. Welch who added, in defense of his own profession, “just imagine what headlines would result if a chiropractor or a naturopath accidentally killed just one patient?”
Another JAMA statistic stated that 1/5 (20 percent) of all people who see an allopath will suffer an “iatrogenic” (doctor-induced) injury.
Again, according to JAMA, 16 percent of all people who die in the hospital are determined by autopsy to have died of something other than their admission diagnosis. In other words, the doctor had no idea what was really wrong with the patient and, therefore, the patient may have died for want of appropriate care that would have been subsequent to an accurate diagnosis.
Another trade publication, American Medical News, stated that 28 percent of people admitted to hospitals are there because they have suffered an adverse reaction to prescribed drugs.
“We are miserably losing the battle against viruses and bacteria. Antibiotics do not work. We need to take a different tack because this is obviously not working,” said Dr. Welch.
Dr. Welch made numerous practical and logical observations throughout his lecture. One of them is so obvious that it deserves mention here. “When there is an epidemic of, say, pertussis in a school and 14 of 200 kids get sick, who gets studied?” he asked.
The answer, of course, is that the sick kids get studied. They get studied by the county health district and the health district accumulates its data and then tells the newspapers about the epidemic of sickness and everybody then flocks down to the health district or goes to see their doctor to get vaccinated.
“Would it not be more appropriate to study the 186 kids that did not get sick?” asked Dr. Welch.
Dr. Welch also read a quote from the British Medical Journal which states that only one percent of all scientific research papers which explore medicine are scientifically sound.
So, if that is true, then not only are allopathic doctors incorrect in their understanding of the basic nature of disease, they are basing 99 percent of their conclusions, and therefore their diagnosis and treatment of people, on flawed science.
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11/22/00
1:29:51 PM
Autistic children...caused by vaccine...?
By Julie Foster © 2000 WorldNetDaily.com A report by Dr. Harold Buttram, a practicing physician in Quakertown, Pa., suggests the recent increase in the number of autistic children could be caused by the combination measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine routinely given to children at age 18 months -- a phenomenon the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claim is highly unlikely.
In a past study of autistic children, researchers found that 84 percent of the children had antibodies against a certain type of brain tissue, indicating that the immune system was destroying brain cells. The researchers also found the brain tissue antibody to be very similar to the antibody that's formed against the MMR vaccine. Additionally, MMR antibody was found in 59 percent of the autistic children compared to 10 percent in normal children.
Buttram also noted some experts believe certain childhood illnesses including measles, mumps, rubella and chicken pox are a necessary and helpful step in strengthening the immune system. Because the vaccines are given by injection, the immune response of the mucous membranes, through which these diseases enter the body, is not challenged and strengthened. Those who support the theory also attribute the use of vaccines to the great increase in cases of asthma and eczema, both of which are diseases of the mucous membranes.
Buttram was quick to point out that measles and other diseases may result in complications that cause brain injury. Therefore, physicians and government officials may be choosing between the lesser of two evils.
"It is true that there may be situations where extreme measures may be justified, as the lesser of two evils, to preserve life and health," Buttram wrote. "The basic question, therefore, is whether the benefits of current childhood vaccines outweigh the harm, or whether the reverse is true."
The incidence of autism in California increased 273 percent from 1987 to 1998, and a growing number of medical professionals are questioning the FDA's vaccine safety tests.
"A small but growing minority of physicians and scientists are becoming aware that safety testing for the various vaccines has been woefully inadequate," Buttram wrote.
He cited a 1994 National Academy of Sciences review of the safety of the hepatitis B vaccine. The review was done to investigate five possible adverse effects of the vaccine. However, conclusions could not be made about four of the effects due to a lack of enough research.
Dr. Bernard Rimland, founder and director of the Autism Research Institute in San Diego, Calif., told DiscoveryHealth.com, "There are no data on the triple vaccines."
When the institute opened in 1967, Rimland noticed that a number of parents had mentioned that the diptheria, pertussin and tetanus, or DPT, vaccine seemed to have an adverse effect on their children.
"In the late '70s and early '80s, we began hearing the same thing about MMR," he said.
Rimland pointed out that triple vaccines can put additional stress on the body. A person's immune system usually deals with one virus at a time. Combining the individual measles, mumps and rubella vaccines into one package results in a much more dangerous vaccine, he said.
Rimland also noted that doctors can report adverse effects of vaccines through the Vaccine Adverse Effect Reporting System, which is mandated by the Food and Drug Administration. However, the VAERS is a voluntary program. According to the FDA, between 90 and 99 percent of adverse effects resulting from vaccinations go unreported.
"The physician has been taught repeatedly that these vaccines are perfectly safe and that any event that is supposedly associated with them is just a coincidence," Rimland remarked.
He also cited possible malpractice suits, added paperwork and the lack of a penalty as reasons why doctors do not report these occurrences.
In an exclusive WorldNetDaily interview, Jane Orient, M.D., executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, said she believes an autism-MMR vaccine link should be investigated.
"I think that there has [Image] been a frightening Jane Orient, increase in cases of M.D. autism that has not been explained," Orient said. "There are a number of anecdotal reports from parents that symptoms of autism have appeared close to the time of the vaccine."
Orient, who is a clinical lecturer in medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, and a professor of clinical medicine at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, told WND, "With each vaccine and each patient, there needs to be a risk-benefit analysis" to determine if the vaccine is worth the risk of developing autism.
The CDC disputes a connection between the vaccine and autism, saying, "The causes of autism are unknown in most cases."
The government agency's website states: "In a few cases, biologic causes have been identified, although none are unique to autism. ... The current theory favored by many experts is that autism is a genetically-based disorder that occurs before birth."
"To date there is no convincing evidence that any vaccine can cause autism or any kind of behavioral disorder," the agency says. "A suspected link between measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism has been suggested by some parents of children with autism. Typically, symptoms of autism are first noted by parents as their child begins to have difficulty with delays in speaking after age one. MMR vaccine is first given to children at 12 to 15 months of age. Therefore, autism cases with an apparent onset within a few weeks after MMR vaccination may simply be an expected but unrelated chance occurrence.
"The only evidence that has been presented to suggest that MMR vaccine may be associated with autism has been published by the Lancet. An editorial published in the same issue, however, discussed concerns about the validity of the study. Based on data from 12 patients, Wakefield and colleagues speculated that MMR vaccine may have been the possible cause of bowel problems which led to a decreased absorption of essential vitamins and nutrients which resulted in developmental disorders like autism. No scientific analyses were reported, however, to substantiate the theory," says the agency.
However, the CDC does concede, "If measles vaccine, or any other vaccine, causes autism then it would have to be a very rare occurrence since millions of children have received vaccines without ill health effects."
"From January 1990 through February 1998, only 15 cases of autism behavior disorder after immunization were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS)," the CDC states. "Because of the small number of reports over an 8 year period, the cases reported are likely to represent unrelated chance occurrences that happened around the time of vaccination."
But the FDA admits such reports are rare -- only 1 to 10 percent of cases involving adverse affects from the vaccine are reported, making the CDC's statement questionable.
Buttram is skeptical of government involvement in the medical field.
"When arbitrary decisions in the mandating of vaccines are made by government bureaucracies, which frequently work hand-in-glove with the pharmaceutical industry, with no recourse open to parents, we have all the potential ingredients for a tragedy of historic proportions," Buttram concluded.
Buttram's report was published in the March/April issue of the Medical Sentinel.
Julie Foster is a staff reporter for WorldNetDaily.
11/22/00
1:24:53 PM
From: http://www.ioa.com/~davehart/altmedcon.htm
The Allopathic Medical Paradigm
a.. The Medical Mafia a.. The Medical Conspiracy in America b.. Medical Paradigm Menu c.. Reproductive System Cancers d.. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome e.. More on Medical Conspiracy in America
Development of Corporate International Technocratic Manipulation Paradigms
a.. Biological Manipulation of the Planetary Population
Vaccine Paradigm, Biological Warfare, Gulf War Syndrome, Pharmaceutical Industry, FDA, Immune Dysfunction
b.. Chemical Manipulation of the Planetary Population
Fluoridation, Excitotoxins, Aspartame, Glutamates, Mercury Amalgams, Environmental Neurotoxins
Synergistic Co-Factorial Effects, Food Additives
a.. Food, Diet and Human Degeneration
b.. Meat and Dairy, Protein, Diabetes, Cholesterol, Cancer and Additive Gambits
c.. Psychosocial Manipulation of the Planetary Population - Basal Paradigms, Psychosocial Programming, Mind Control
d.. Electromagnetic Manipulation of the Planetary Population
Electromagnetic Spectrum Effects on Human Neurophysiology Post WWII I.G. Farben Extensions and/or Corporate Interactives
a.. Monsanto | Ciba Switzerland | Searle
b.. Eli Lilly | Roche | Bayer A.G.
c.. August 1997: Farbenindustrie i.A. Cancels Shareholders Meeting
The Pharmaceutical and Chemical Empires (begins in Germany)
a.. Business and Political Alliances Between the U.S. "Establishment" and the Nazis - Before, During and After World War II - up to the Present b.. The I.G. Farben Story | Elkhorn Farben References c.. Impact financial and economic considerations had on I.G. Farben's decision to build I.G. Auschwitz d.. Gleanings from I.G.Farben, 1947 | Nazi Malaria Experiments e.. The Pharmaceutical Drug Racket - Part 1 f.. The Pharmaceutical Drug Racket - Part 2 g.. Pharmaceutical Drugs and Death Rates h.. Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry i.. The Drug Trust
Developing Technocratic Control Paradigms
a.. Privacy, Surveillance and Mind Control Articles b.. Psychiatric Warfare c.. Mind Control Primer d.. Dumbing Down of the Children of Society e.. Object-Based Education f.. Electroshock Therapy g.. Mind Control: Military Applications h.. The Electronic Surveillance Project i.. A Brief History of the Central Intelligence Agency j.. Counter-Intelligence Programs k.. 21st Century Information Warfare l.. Cyberwar Concepts m.. Mass Assassination and the Phoenix Program n.. European Parliament study on Surveillance o.. European Parliament study on "Technologies of Political Control"
Militarism of "policing"
a.. PERSECUTED in the U.S. b.. The Elkhorn Manifesto SHADOW OF THE SWASTIKA: The Real Reason the Government Won't Debate Medical Cannabis and Industrial Hemp Re-legalization An Open Letter to All Americans c.. Campaign Against Fraudulent Medical Research d.. Trufax (must see ! ) a.. New Civilization Network b.. Sumeria c.. Dave's homepage
11/22/00
1:22:37 PM
Medical Mafia, CIA & Drugs
Murder By Injection: The Medical Conspiracy Against America
by Eustace Mullins
This book is a truly thorough account of the machinations underlying America's steadily deteriorating health, and is the result of some forty years of investigative research by the author Eustace Mullins. MURDER BY INJECTION reinforces and adds further light to the devastating exposés, WORLD WITHOUT CANCER by G. Edward Griffin, THE DRUG STORY by Morris Bealle and Hans Ruesch's NAKED EMPRESS OR THE GREAT MEDICAL FRAUD.
MURDER BY INJECTION explains how the ruthless Rockefeller Syndicate - under the control of the world financial structure, chiefly the Rothschilds - plays the major political, health and educational roles in America. The book describes the various arms of the Rockefeller Syndicate and their functions: the Rockefeller Oil Trust, which incorporates much of the American military-industrial complex, has political control of the nation; the Rockefeller Medical Monopoly attains control of "health" care of America; and the Rockefeller Foundation, a web of affiliated tax exempt creations, effectively controls "education".
Mullins specifies names throughout the book, many of them belonging to familiar public figures in America. Companies and their board of directors are listed with all their connections.
Eustace Mullins says that in 1987 the United States still maintains an overwhelming lead in the production and sale of drugs. Eleven of the eighteen leading firms are located in the United States and the Drug Trust in the United States is controlled by the Rockefeller group. Mullins adds: "The major banks, defense firms, and prominent political figures interlock with the CIA and the drug firms." He further states that the Rockefeller interests, having established the American Drug Trust, had long been active not only in pharmaceutical drugs but in illegal drugs as well. Mullins writes: "No chronical of the world's important drug firms would be complete without relating the connection between drug firms and the world drug operation known as 'Dope, Inc.'."
Mullins describes how the Rockefellers with the help of the American Medical Association and government officials gained control of America's "health" care industry in the early part of this century. "Educating" medical students was instrumental in their plan, Mullins writes: "Rockefeller's Education Board has spent more than $100 million to gain control of the nation's medical schools and turn our physicians to physicians of the allopathic school, dedicated to surgery and the heavy use of drugs."
MURDER BY INJECTION describes in detail the many other dangerous and lucrative rackets that the Rockefeller Syndicate has foistered onto the unsuspecting public and which are responsible for the contamination of our land, oceans and rivers, our water and food supplies, and our bodies. For example Mullins writes: "While conducting wars of attrition against the leading exponents of better nutrition, the Food and Drug Administration and the American Medical Association have valiantly defended the use of chemical fertilizers... (which, according to Dr Alexis Carrel) 'without replacing all the exhausted elements of the soil, have indirectly contributed to change the nutritive value of cereal grains and vegetables.'"
On vaccinations: "After the use of cowpox vaccine became widespread in England, a smallpox epidemic broke out which killed 22,081 people. The smallpox epidemics became worse each year that the vaccine was used. In 1872, 44,480 people were killed by it. England finally banned the vaccine in 1948, despite the fact that it was one of the most widely heralded 'contributions' which that country had made to modern medicine. This action came after many years of compulsory vaccination, during which period those who refused to submit to its dangers were hurried off to jail."
On fluoridation: "What he [Oscar Ewing] wanted, and what he had been paid to bring about, was the national fluoridation of our drinking water... At the same time, Congressmen and other politicians in Washington were privately alerted by Ewing's minions that they should be careful about ingesting the fluoridated water. Supplies of bottled water from mountain springs then appeared in every office on Capitol Hill; these have been maintained continuously ever since, at the taxpayers' expense."
On the consequences of the Rockefellers' control: "The criminal syndicalists are now looting the American nation of one trillion dollars each year, of which about one-third, more than three hundred billion dollars per year, represents the profitable depredations of the Drug Trust and its medical subsidiaries...
"America became the greatest and most productive nation in the world. When the Rockefeller Syndicate began its takeover of our medical profession in 1910, our citizens went into a sharp decline. Today, we suffer from a host of debilitating ailments, both mental and physical, nearly all of which can be traced directly to the operations of the chemical and drug monopoly, and which pose the greatest threat to our continued existence as a nation."
Although the book mainly deals with America, the situations described by Mullins in many respects equally applies to Australia, as in most other countries. The immense damning evidence that he presents makes MURDER BY INJECTION essential reading for those who are serious about understanding the true reasons behind our ailing health.
Published by the National Council for Medical Research in 1988. Hard-cover, 348 pages.
11/22/00
1:05:28 PM
The Medical Mafia: How to Get Out of it Alive and Take Back Our Health and Wealth
by Dr Guylaine Lanctot
Like many other students before her Guylaine Lanctot entered medical school with the hope of becoming part of a seemingly noble and humanitarian profession dedicated to people's health needs. She progressed well; she became a specialist in phlebology (treating varicose veins) and established successful clinics in several towns and cities in North America. However, during Lanctot's many years of medical practice the realities of medicine's shortfalls increasingly dawned on her, reaching a point where she became totally disillusioned with the basic tenets of a system that she once had so much faith in.
She questioned: why, despite the vast funds, personnel and resources had the medical system failed to stem the ever-growing tide of so many afflictions plaguing humanity? And why is it that other health modalities, those outside the medical system, despite having enormous health benefits are strongly opposed by the medical establishment and government? Is there an ideal health care system anywhere? She then decided to investigate the health systems of France, Canada and the United States in order to compare them, but unfortunately found that although the systems differ in appearance, their very essence is the same, as well as their results - too expensive, out of control, and resulting in an increasing incidence of illness.
Lanctot's search for the truth led her to questioning who is really running the health care system and for what purpose? Fortunately, her previous entrepreneurial experiences in establishing her phlebology centres in North America, where by force of circumstances she had to grapple with the legality, business and politics of medicine, and thereby rubbing elbows with the medical establishment, helped her to understand the system. Coupled with her extensive research into many important books and her many years of experience in medical practice, Lanctot had found the answers she sought. Her conclusion is that the health system is run by an alliance of powerful vested interests that operate as a veritable mafia. That health problems were, for the most part, social and environmental problems. And that they did not require medical solutions, but rather political solutions, and that this mafia has no intention whatsoever of correcting the problem, but on the contrary, it suits its interests.
Lanctot describes the players within the "Medical Mafia" and gives a brief history of its domination of the health system. She describes how the healing practices throughout history were always dominated by a minority of privileged people determined in controlling and exploiting the majority. More recently, during the period 1910-25 in North America the world financiers Rockefeller and Carnegie by backing the Flexner Report, whose rules and recommendations imposed strict "scientific" guidelines amiable to their interests, caused the elimination of the vast majority of natural therapists and forced the number of medical schools to be slashed from 650 to 50. And all in the name of "medical reform". The monopolising of the health system proceeded on a global level, and during the last two decades it continued under the auspices of the world financiers' World Health Organisation.
"In 1977. The Declaration of Alma Ata gave to the World Health Organization (WHO) the means to extend the Flexner Report not only in North America, but throughout the entire world. Again, in the name of health and the well-being of the populations of the world, and in respect of the right of 'health for all', international criteria and rules were established for practicing medicine. Control of health, therefore, was transferred from national governments to a world government. A world government that is non-elected. And of which its 'Surgeon General' in charge of health is the WHO.
"And what does this right to health mean? It means the right to medicalization. It opens the doors wide to a medicine of global sickness, whether we want it or not. Vaccinations and medications are imposed on people around the world....
"But who actually controls that the WHO? That is the question. And also the answer. The United Nations (UN), the political arm of the world financiers, that includes those who backed the Flexner Report and its application. More and more subtly, the medical and political authorities are robbing us of what is ours, as well as our rights. They establish the rules and make the laws that exploit us. It is a regime of medical terror. It is a world monopoly. Beware those who oppose it. The witch-hunt continues, but now on a global scale!"
The author also dedicates chapters to the issues of vaccinations, cancer and AIDS, uncovering a great deal of damning information. However, the book is not all doom and gloom, it also offers sensible and practical advice for citizens in taking back control of their health and lives.
11/22/00
12:56:19 PM
Shaken Baby Syndrome - the vaccination link
Many infants who suffer the so-called 'shaken baby syndrome' may be victims of undiagnosed vaccine damage.
Recently there has been quite an "epidemic" of the so-called "shaken baby syndrome". Parents, usually the fathers, or other care-givers such as nannies have increasingly been accused of shaking a baby to the point of causing permanent brain damage and death. Why? Is there an unprecedented increase in the number of people who commit infanticide or have an ambition to seriously hurt babies? Or is there something more sinister at play?
Some time ago I started getting requests from lawyers or the accused parents themselves for expert reports. A close study of the history of these cases revealed something distinctly sinister: in every single case, the symptoms appeared shortly after the baby's vaccinations.
While investigating the personal medical history of these babies based on the care-givers' diaries and medical records, I quickly established that these babies were given one or more of the series of so-called routine shots-hepatitis B, DPT (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus), polio and HiB (Haemophilus influenzae type B)-shortly before they developed symptoms of illness resulting in serious brain damage or death.
The usual scenario is that a baby is born and does well initially. At the usual age of about two months it is administered the first series of vaccines as above. (Sometimes a hepatitis B injection is given shortly after birth while the mother and child are still in hospital. However, a great number of babies now die within days or within two to four weeks of birth after hepatitis B vaccination, as documented by the records of the VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] in the USA.) So, the baby stops progressing, starts deteriorating, and usually develops signs of respiratory tract infection. Then comes the second and third injections, and tragedy strikes: the child may cry intensely and inconsolably, may stop feeding properly, vomit, have difficulty swallowing, become irritable, stop sleeping, and may develop convulsions with accelerating progressive deterioration of its condition and mainly its brain function.
This deterioration may be fast, or may slowly inch in until the parents notice that something is very wrong with their child and then rush it to the doctor or hospital. Interestingly, they are invariably asked when the baby was immunised. On learning that the baby was indeed "immunised", the parents may be reassured that its symptoms will all clear up. They are sent home with the advice, "Give your baby Panadol". If they persist in considering the baby's reaction serious, they may be labelled as anxious parents or trouble-makers. So the parents go home, and the child remains in a serious condition or dies.
Until recently, the vaccine death would have just been labelled "sudden infant death", particularly if the symptoms and pathological findings were minimal. However, nowadays, with an alarmingly increasing frequency, the parents (or at least one of them, usually the father) may be accused of shaking the baby to death. The accused may even "confess" to shaking the baby, giving the reason, for example, that having found the baby lying still and not breathing and/or with a glazed look in its eyes, they shook it gently-as is only natural-in their attempt to revive it. Sometimes, ironically, they save the baby's life, only to be accused of causing the internal injuries that made the baby stop breathing in the first place, and which in fact were already present when they shook the baby to revive it.
No matter what the parents say or do, everything is construed against them. If they are crying and emotional, they will be accused of showing signs of guilt. If they manage to remain composed and unemotional, they will be called calculating and controlling-and guilty because of that.
In another scenario the distraught parents try to describe the symptoms to an attending doctor in hospital or a surgery but are totally at a loss to understand what has happened to their baby. To their shock and dismay, they later discover that while they were describing the observed symptoms, the doctor or another staff member was writing three ominous words in the medical record: shaken baby syndrome.
Many of these parents end up indicted and even sentenced to prison for a crime that somebody else committed. Some of these cases have been resolved by acquittal on appeal or have been won based on expert reports demonstrating vaccines as the cause of the observed injuries or death. However, only God and a good lawyer can help those parents or care-givers who happen to be uneducated, or have a criminal record, particularly for violence, or have a previous history of a similar "unexplained" death of a baby in their care, or, worse still, a vaccine-injured baby with a broken arm or fractured skull. More and more often, the unfortunate parents are given the option of a "deal": if they confess and/or plead guilty, they will get only a couple of years in prison; but if they don't, they may end up getting 20 years.
I was told by a social worker in the United States that many foster parents are rotting in US prisons. First, they are forced to vaccinate their charges, and then, when side effects or death occur, they are accused of causing them.
Inevitably the possibility exists that infanticide or child abuse is involved in some of the cases. However, there is no determinable reason why so many parents or other care-givers would suddenly begin to behave like this. It is incredibly insensitive and callous to immediately suspect and accuse the distraught, innocent parents of harming their own baby.
IT CONTINUES ON THIS SITE: http://www.nexusmagazine.com//shakenbaby.html
Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 5, #5 (August-September '98)
11/22/00
12:52:12 PM
Published on Sunday, November 19, 2000 in the Observer of London
US Plays Dirty As Planet Chokes
Squabbles as America fights to avoid reducing emissions http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/111900-02.htm by Robin McKie at The Hague
It took a surprisingly short time to sandbag the Hague yesterday. In only two hours, environmentalists managed to surround the city's great conference centre with a 5ft wall made up of 50,000 sacks filled with soil and grit.
The activists - some from Latvia and Estonia, a few from Japan, several coach-loads from Britain and hundreds from other nations - had gathered to lay siege to the building in which diplomats and civil servants were trying to thrash out ground rules for limiting global warming. It was a manoeuvre replete with irony.
Rising industrial emissions of carbon dioxide are now heating the world alarmingly, say scientists, and are accelerating natural climatic warming, threatening to melt ice caps and flood low-lying areas. Hence the sandbag, a particularly potent symbol in climate-vulnerable Holland.
However, the real eyebrow-raiser was the speed of the Friends of the Earth stunt which contrasted starkly with the lumbering negotiations that have been taking place within the convention centre. For the past week, delegates have been trying to hammer out a framework for a climate-saving deal that their ministerial bosses can then knock into shape when they arrive tomorrow.
There have been few signs they are going to succeed. Despite evidence that the greenhouse effect is now at its strongest for 20 million years, that Europe's growing season has lengthened by 11 days in the past century and that scientists are predicting all Arctic ice will have disappeared by 2080, delegates remain obsessed with the minutiae of conference protocol. As one leading UK negotiator put it: 'This could turn out to be the most important conference in human history, yet all we get is haggling over trivia.'
These squabbles threaten to erupt into full-scale war, particularly between the United States and Europe, which began an alarming exchange of insults late last week. One European Union statement even accused the Americans of 'threatening the integrity' of the entire climate change convention.
At heart, the problem is simple: how can the world halt the global warming that is increasing global temperatures, sea levels and climatic instability? At the Kyoto environment summit three years ago, the industrialised nations agreed, in principle, to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to a figure 7 per cent below their 1990 output. Unfortunately, no one has been able to agree how to achieve this, or even to ratify the Kyoto summit. That is the purpose of the Hague summit.
The prime problem is America, the world's greatest emitter of carbon dioxide, which presses, with increasing insistence, that it should be spared from reducing its output and should instead be allowed to create new forests, both in the US and the Third World. These trees and plants, known collectively as carbon sinks, will soak up all that nasty carbon dioxide, say US delegates, and will obviate the need for Americans to abandon their profligacy.
The US also believes that by planting crops specially designed to soak up carbon dioxide, it could extend its 'sink' philosophy from the wild to the farmyard, thus strengthening its case for unabated industrial emissions. It was this idea, introduced at the Hague last week, that provoked that outburst of fury by Europe's delegates.
Other US agricultural innovations circulating last week included the wonderful idea of feeding sheep, pigs and cows special anti-flatulence diets to reduce levels of methane, another greenhouse gas. This notion merely induced derisive laughter.
Europe and most developing nations, as well as most non-governmental agencies, scorn the idea of carbon sinks. Only the real thing - cuts in emissions - will definitely work, they say.
In the words of the Environment Minister Michael Meacher, who will lead Britain's negotiations this week: 'There is no substitute for taking domestic action to reduce the emissions by burning less fossil fuels.'
Yet America remains obsessed with the idea it can use the dollar to buy itself out of trouble and has proposed other ploys including the concept of buying 'carbon credits' from countries such as Russia and Ukraine whose industrial collapse over the past decade means they have already reached their Kyoto reduction targets. The US wants to buy these non-existent 'saved' emissions to put towards its own target.
In short, the nation with the greatest output of carbon dioxide, the cheapest petrol in the West and the most inefficient energy industry is struggling to avoid any domestic action that might help the planet. Its delegates claim its stance is scientifically valid, though there is little evidence at the Hague to support the claim. For example, planting trees that gobble up carbon dioxide is a dangerous game, as researchers at Britain's Hadley climate centre revealed. 'Yes, trees do soak up gases produced by factories but they also contribute to global warming,' said a meteorologist, Richard Betts.
'Trees have dark leaves and bark and stand out against light backgrounds, particularly in higher, snowy latitudes. As a result, they stop sunlight being reflected back into space. Our calculation show that in places like Canada and Siberia, planting new trees would actually increase global warming.'
So is it simply a matter of Americans trying to keep their styles of life while the rest of the world struggle just to keep their lives?
Many at the Hague privately think so, although the US delegation, emollient and polished to a man, insisted theirs was the only way forward.'We have just as much to lose as the rest of the world,' said David Sandalow, the US assistant secretary of state for international environmental affairs.
At the end of the conference its organiser, the United Nations, hopes that a group of developed nations that represent a total output of 55 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions will be able to ratify the Kyoto protocol. If that magic number is reached, the deal becomes an international treaty. However, without the co-operation of the US, which accounts for 24 per cent of the world's total output of carbon dioxide, there is little likelihood of success.
And so the world's nations will square up to their climatic 'High Noon' at the Hague tomorrow. On one side, Europe - led by Britain and Germany and supported by the developing nations and green groups - is pressing for real emission cuts. On the other, the US is backed by Canada, Australia and Japan, nations which are desperate to avoid taking any action that might risk the wrath of voters.
These, then, are the hate