Thursday, November 26, 2015

Mom Rejects Plea Deal of “Just” 30 Days in Jail for Letting 4 y.o. Play 120 Feet From Home

Free Range Kids
Link
. A mom who let her 4-year-old son play outside at the playground 120 feet from her home was arrested . Her neighbors had called 911 when they saw the kid outside. While many people might think four is too young for a boy to be outside on his own, the bigger question is: Is this […]

via IFTTT

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Drudge Sends the Biggest Secret Viral: “America Has Been Arming ISIS”

SHTF Plan - When It Hits The Fan, Don't Say We Didn't Warn You
Link
What would the world do if it realized the truth – that ISIS is the creation of Western forces?

via IFTTT

Monday, November 23, 2015

Academic’s Research Shows NY Times, Wash. Post Don’t Do Follow-up Reporting to See if Civilians Killed in U.S. Drone Strikes

disinformation
Link

By now you know the drill: The CIA or U.S. military forces unleash a drone strike or other aerial bombardment in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia or any other country that the United States claims the right to attack.

drone strikes, drones,

A U.S. government spokesperson reports 5 or 7 or 17 or 25 or whatever number of “militants” killed — Taliban, or al Qaeda or ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State fighters — according to its fill-in-the-blanks press release. Wire services, mainstream newspapers, television newscasters dutifully report in brief fashion on another successful drone or missile strike, fulfilling minimal journalistic standards by attributing it to the Pentagon, or intelligence or U.S. government sources — sometimes even naming the spokesperson who issued the news release.

And then — usually nothing. Yes, sometimes someone with a little clout raises a stink — say the Afghan president, or some prominent local official who was an eyewitness to the attack, or Doctors without Borders after the U.S.

Read the rest

The post Academic’s Research Shows NY Times, Wash. Post Don’t Do Follow-up Reporting to See if Civilians Killed in U.S. Drone Strikes appeared first on disinformation.



via IFTTT

White House Gave ISIS 45 Minute Warning Before Bombing Oil Tankers

Infowars
Link
Why did it take 15 months for the U.S. to target the Islamic State's oil infrastructure?

via IFTTT

Friday, November 20, 2015

Lisa Jones, girlfriend of undercover policeman Mark Kennedy: ‘I thought I knew him better than anyone’

Network Front | The Guardian
Link

She thought they were a normal couple until she found a passport in a glovebox – and then her world shattered. Now she is finally getting compensation and a police apology for that surreal, state-sponsored deception. But she still lies awake and wonders: did he ever really love me?

Police apologise to women who had relationships with undercover officers

The most traumatising time of Lisa Jones’s life began when she agonised for months over the true identity of her boyfriend. They had been together for six years and she loved him “totally, completely, more than anyone”.

“He was the closest person in the world to me,” she says. “The person who knew me better than anybody else. I thought I knew him better than anyone else knew him.” But she had begun to suspect that he was lying about who he really was.

Continue reading...

via IFTTT

Monday, November 16, 2015

Organic Food Is Healthier By Far, Finds Study After Study

Before It's News | ALTERNATIVE NEWS
Link
Organic food is healthier than conventional food by a long way, many studies are now showing. There are two main reasons why: pesticides and nutrients. Conventionally produced food is sprayed with numerous forms of pesticides, from insecticides to herbicides to fungicides and more. In large scale agriculture, these pesticides are petrochemical derivatives.

via IFTTT

Every Position On The Spectrum Supports The Government’s Propaganda — Paul Craig Roberts

PaulCraigRoberts.org
Link

Every Position On The Spectrum Supports The Government’s Propaganda Paul Craig Roberts This excellent article by Glenn Greenwald — http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43438.htm — reminded me that I have meant to write about how every sort of interest attaches to the government’s propaganda in order to make its point. Greenwald shows how the Snowden haters in the US…

The post Every Position On The Spectrum Supports The Government’s Propaganda — Paul Craig Roberts appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org.



via IFTTT

Putin: ISIS financed from 40 countries, including G20 members

RT - Daily news
Link
Preview President Vladimir Putin says he’s shared Russian intelligence data on Islamic State financing with his G20 colleagues: the terrorists appear to be financed from 40 countries, including some G20 member states.
Read Full Article at RT.com

via IFTTT

Sunday, November 15, 2015

Good intentions of the hijacked environmental movement, are you being "Green Washed"?

Signs of the Times
Link
The hijacked environmental movement is a symptom of the current general, collective state of humanity: good hearted but ignorant. Many people in the environmental movement are in it for the right reasons: they see the ongoing poisoning and destruction of the planet, led by corporations, and are determined to defend and speak out for the Earth. Yet, in spite of their good intentions, they have unwittingly allowed themselves to be channeled in a direction that is not really going to help the Earth, unintentionally supporting the very forces that are responsible for the pillaging of it.

via IFTTT

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Sorry, Eating Chicken Is a Moral Crime: The Real Horrors Behind America’s Most Popular Meat

AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed
Link
Chicken is seen as cheap protein and convenient food. But the labor practices and "killing line" are horrifying.

Before slicing off your next bite of chicken, nibble on this for a moment: To get that bird to your table, workers make at least 20,000, sometimes up to 100,000, slicing and grabbing motions every day. To keep up with a “killing line” that runs ever faster to deliver America’s most popular meat to our plates – a breakneck rate of 140 birds a minute – a largely immigrant workforce of roughly 250,000 endures chronic and crippling injuries for poverty wages.

To churn out millions of processed chickens – 30 million a day, and a record 89 pounds a year per American consumer – the poultry industry relies on severe yet normalized worker exploitation: chronic pain, lifelong repetitive motion injuries, and humiliation. After hours slicing through thousands of birds, knives grow dull, skid off the cold slippery parts, stabbing workers in the hand or arm. Poultry workers are still routinely denied bathroom breaks; some report wearing diapers to avoid soiling themselves while processing our chicken dinners without a break.

These “lives on the line,” the title of a powerful new Oxfam America report, are the human reality behind our meals – and it turns out we are all paying a heavy price for so-called “cheap chicken.” This toll includes tens of thousands of workers maimed on the job each year, crippling bodies and livelihoods; billions of dollars in federal contracts to Tyson Foods and others, despite their long record of worker mistreatment and safety violations; and massive public expense for workers’ emergency room visits and ongoing healthcare needs. (While there is no specific breakdown for the poultry industry, the National Safety Council estimates all workplace injuries and fatalities cost taxpayers $198 billion in 2012.)

The Oxfam report amplifies a growing movement pressuring the poultry and meat packing industries to both pay and treat their workers better. Just before the report went public, on October 23, Tyson announced it will increase worker pay at some of its plants; that same day, OSHA launched a program to encourage employers to improve worker safety. Earlier this year, after pressure from the Food Chain Alliance and other groups citing labor practices, the Los Angeles Unified School District postponed renewal of contracts with Tyson and Pilgrim’s Pride to provide lunch meat.

At the root of Big Chicken’s mistreatment of workers is the economic and political clout of a few powerful corporations and their industry lobbying arms, the National Chicken Council and the American Meat Institute – which have successfully pressured both Democrats and Republicans to speed up the assembly line and weaken regulations such as injury reporting. The top four companies – Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride, Sanderson Farms and Perdue Farms – control 60 percent of the U.S. poultry market, churning out products under more than 30 name brands, according to Oxfam’s report.

While the industry touts officially declining injury rates, research by Oxfam, OSHA and others shows poultry companies discourage injury reporting by pressuring ailing workers to return to the assembly line – often leading to severe chronic injuries. A federal rule change secured by the industry in 2012 also restricted which injuries need to be reported. Even official injury data show disturbing hazards: poultry workers are five times more likely than the average employee to get hurt on the job, and seven times more likely to get carpal tunnel syndrome.

Yet more troubling, surveys of chicken factory workers in Alabama, conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, found 72 percent had experienced a work-related injury, 77 percent suffered cumulative trauma disorders in their hands and wrists, and 86 percent reported hand and wrist pain, swelling, numbness and inability to close their hands.

At the core of these disastrous conditions is a deadly perfect storm of soaring consumer demand for “convenient” and “cheap” protein, and a government that’s far more responsive to the industrys production concerns than to the health and safety of a quarter of a million workers.

As chicken consumption has tripled since the late 1960s, to 89 pounds a year for the average American today, the industry has ratcheted up production speeds and squeezed its workers ever tighter to maximize profits. As chicken is sliced and diced into smaller parts to meet demands for convenient food, Oxfam reports, workers pay the price through increased repetitive motions to make all those cuts.

What do we do to end the brutalities of the killing line? Oxfam America is urging the industry’s top four companies to clean up their act, increase wages and transparency on worker injuries, and to“publicly commit to core labor rights and to ensuring the health and well-being of their workers.”

We must also insist that government do its job with our tax dollars. Following Oxfam’s report, 15 members of Congress sent a letter urging OSHA to crack down on poultry industry labor abuses. Why only fifteen? Meanwhile, the Obama administration has allowed assembly-line speeds to increase dramatically, and has made matters worse by allowing more companies to conduct their own safety inspections (aka, fox guarding the henhouse). As Food and Water Watch documented in 2012, “Company employees miss many defects in poultry carcasses” – including “defects such as feathers, lungs, oil glands, trachea and bile still on the carcass.” OSHA remains woefully understaffed, able to inspect just 1% of all US workplaces, according to a 2015 study by the AFL-CIO. Hiring more workplace and food safety inspectors, and pressuring companies to hire more workers to staff the killing line, would help enforce protections and reduce both food contamination and worker injuries.

It may not be convenient, but we cannot escape the fact that the chicken we eat comes from sweatshops that endanger both workers and consumers. America’s most popular protein comes to us through the systematic exploitation of immigrants, refugees, prison inmates, and other Americans who have no other job options. This routinized mistreatment – structured into the chicken industry’s production and profit calculations and into our weekly food budgets – must end.

RELATED STORIES

USDA #FAIL: The Shocking Truth Behind So-Called 'Humane Farming'

The Fake Meat Market Is Surging

Why the Era of Cruel Extreme Confinement of Animals Raised for Food Appears to Be Coming to an End

America's Third Largest Egg Producer Commits to Cage-Free Future

Hundreds of Thousands of Farm Animals Burned to Death in Barn Fires in the Last Year Alone

Every Day, U.S. Factory Farms Produce Enough Waste to Fill the Empire State Building

Keep up to date with the latest food news and sustainable, healthy eating tips; sign up to receive AlterNet's weekly food newsletter.



via IFTTT

Friday, November 13, 2015

Mizzou Student Leader Is “SICK AND TIRED” Of The First Amendment

Downtrend
Link
A student leader at the University of Missouri is getting really tired of the First Amendment. All this talk about free speech when – all around him – fellow students’ feelings are being really hurt is just disgusting. Brenda Smith-Lezama, vice president of the student government, was asked about professors who are beginning to push […]

via IFTTT

Thursday, November 12, 2015

9-Year-Old Boy Sends Love Note: School FREAKS OUT

Downtrend
Link
A simple love note has landed a Florida fourth-grader in the principal’s office, accused of sexual harassment. The Hillsborough 9-year-old passed a sweet love note to the girl he has a crush on, but when it was discovered, he was sent to the principal’s office accused of sexual harassment. “He’s nine!” his mother said. “What […]

via IFTTT

The Blind Leading the Blind

https://ttfuture.org/blog/michael/blind-leading-blind

The central argument for limiting as much screen time as possible from birth to age eleven is to fill that body and brain with as many natural, non-technological, self-generated imaginative play experiences as possible therefore building what for millions of years would be considered a natural-normal sensory-emotional foundation for the more abstract processes that develop later.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

'Unbelievable' Farmers Harvest Neighbor's Crops After Unexpected Death

ABC News: Top Stories
Link
Dozens of farmers rallied to bring in David Klinghagen's crops in one morning.

via IFTTT

Sunday, November 8, 2015

“US Debt Is 3 Times More Than You Think” Former Chief US Accountant Warns, Americans “Have Lost Touch With Reality”

The Burning Platform
Link
The name of this website comes from a David Walker quote. “The US government is on a “burning platform” of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon. There are striking similarities between America’s current situation and the factors […]

via IFTTT

'Million Cancer Deaths From Fukushima Expected in Japan,’ New Report Reveals

GreenMedInfo
Link

'Million Cancer Deaths From Fukushima Expected in Japan,' New Report Reveals

A shocking new report defies the chronically underestimated impacts of the Fukushima's triple meltdown on the risk of cancer in exposed populations, which does not just include Japan, but arguably the entire world. 

read more



via IFTTT

Across America, Parents Push Back Against Creeping Authoritarianism and Criminalization of Students

AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed
Link
Parents are bravely standing up to trends that restrict kids' freedom and love of learning.

America's public schools are the training ground for our next generation of engineers, doctors, artists, lawyers, and other professions that form our dynamic economy. Schools are also here to nurture our children, to allow them to grow, explore and have fun in an environment that is conducive to personal freedom.

But a troubling cultural undercurrent has been creeping into our education system, converting the educational experience into something that can range from the gratuitously stressful to downright racist and cruel, from high-stakes testing to the school-to-prison pipeline.

Parents are bravely standing up to these trends in a growing number of ways.

Breaking the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Recent events at Spring Valley High School in South Carolina have cast a spotlight on the increasing utilization of police officers in public schools for disciplinary tasks that used to be handled by teachers, administrators and parents. Protesters outside the state capitol called for the prosecution of the officer involved, and many said a wider institutional system that is over-policing schools is to blame. As budgetary pressures weigh down on schools, some districts are cutting back on these school resource officer (SRO) programs, as they are called.

Schools in Chico, Calif. canceled their SRO program for the first time in 15 years, thanks to budget shortfalls in April 2013. Sometimes police departments themselves are withdrawing.

“Frankly, we determined the program is no longer sustainable for the department,” said trooper Adam Reed, a spokesman for the state police in Pennsylvania said of his department's decision to end walkthroughs at schools. “We’re below our allotted complement of troopers right now. Because of that, we must focus more on operation and patrol needs, putting more troopers on the streets.”

Other SRO programs are being not abolished, but reformed. In September, a federal judge said SROs in Birmingham, Alabama have a “cavalier attitude” about the use of pepper spray on students; he ordered a $400,000 payout to six students who were pepper sprayed and ordered “new training and procedures” for SRO usage of pepper spray.

Late last month, President Obama addressed the school-to-prison pipeline, a sign that the issue is more relevant than ever.

Too Much Homework, Too Much Testing, Not Enough Rest

Much ink has been spilled on the so-called achievement gap between the United States and other countries, but less is said about the fact that this gap primarily exists between our country's lowest-performers—children living in endemic poverty—and the rest.

The focus on increasing standards—longer school days, never-ending school years, lots of homework, and endless testing—ignores the problem of poverty, instead offering the theory that simply pushing kids and their teachers harder will close the gap. Increasingly, America's parents oppose this approach. Revolts against high-stakes testing have taken place all over the country. In April, the fourth largest school district, Miami-Dade schools, eliminated nearly 300 district end-of-course exams, limiting the number to 10. Right-wing groups are working with organizations such as teachers unions to criticize the substance and/or the implementation of Common Core, which seeks to create national curriculum standards.

The movement against over-use of testing scored a major rhetorical victory recently when President Obama's administration admitted that testing has gone overboard, even claiming partial responsibility. Meanwhile, over 800 colleges and universities now no longer require the SAT or ACT in their admissions process, recognizing that these exams may have inflated worth.

Alongside the pushback against over-testing is a movement to reduce homework. In Gaithersburg, Maryland, elementary school principal Stephanie Brant decided her school would replace homework with reading. Rather than taking home complex and tiring assignments, Brant asked her teachers to assign 30 minutes of reading every day.

Many parents, teachers and administrators are also trying to bring back recess. Recess time has long been squeezed by demands for more instructional time and academic work, and parents are starting to notice. In Seattle, one public radio station started tracking recess time over the years, and found that recess time had been declining over the past four years, and that “schools with less time set aside for recess have more low-income students and students of color”—an indication that recess is increasingly a privilege for students with more privileged backgrounds. Those privileged students typically have a mix of higher achievement and more political influence, and thus less pressure from above to raise their performance quickly.

In Florida, several counties, including Polk, Orange and Osceola, are seeing petition drives by parents demanding at least 20 minutes of recess a day for elementary school students.

The Theory Behind Schools With Freedom 

It is no surprise that the schools most subjected to restrictions on freedom like high-stakes testing, cutting back recess and police presence, are those attended by the poor and racial minorities who tend to have lower academic achievement. The theory behind doing this is that these groups need strict treatment in order to raise their achievement.

But we know that countries with the smallest achievement gaps between rich and poor, and between black and Hispanic kids and white kids, follow a very different approach. Schools in Finland are known for their freedom and flexibility. High-stakes testing isn't used, recess is plentiful, and perhaps most importantly, the state provides quality child care and nutrition supports for families, avoiding the sorts of cognitive effects poverty has on American children.

 

Related Stories



via IFTTT

Nanny States of America – Parents Arrested for Letting Kids Play on Beach, Girl Given Detention for Hugging Friend

SGTreport - The Corporate Propaganda Antidote - Silver, Gold, Truth, Liberty, & Freedom
Link

from Liberty Blitzkrieg:

I haven’t covered the American nanny state in a while, but two articles recently caught my eye and I simply have to share. The first one relates to two parents charged with “reckless endangerment of a child,” for letting their two boys play on a Cape Cod beach for an hour unsupervised.

From [...]

via IFTTT

Chris Hedges: The TPP is the Most Brazen Corporate Power Grab in American History

AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed
Link
It's worst than any of us feared.

 

The release Thursday of the 5,544-page text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a trade and investment agreement involving 12 countries comprising nearly 40 percent of global output—confirms what even its most apocalyptic critics feared.

“The TPP, along with the WTO [World Trade Organization] and NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], is the most brazen corporate power grab in American history,” Ralph Nader told me when I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C. “It allows corporations to bypass our three branches of government to impose enforceable sanctions by secret tribunals. These tribunals can declare our labor, consumer and environmental protections [to be] unlawful, non-tariff barriers subject to fines for noncompliance. The TPP establishes a transnational, autocratic system of enforceable governance in defiance of our domestic laws.”

The TPP is part of a triad of trade agreements that includes the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA, by calling for the privatization of all public services, is a mortal threat to the viability of the U.S. Postal Service, public education and other government-run enterprises and utilities; together these operations make up 80 percent of the U.S. economy. The TTIP and TiSA are still in the negotiation phase. They will follow on the heels of the TPP and are likely to go before Congress in 2017.

Advertisement

These three agreements solidify the creeping corporate coup d’état along with the final evisceration of national sovereignty. Citizens will be forced to give up control of their destiny and will be stripped of the ability to protect themselves from corporate predators, safeguard the ecosystem and find redress and justice in our now anemic and often dysfunctional democratic institutions. The agreements—filled with jargon, convoluted technical, trade and financial terms, legalese, fine print and obtuse phrasing—can be summed up in two words: corporate enslavement.

The TPP removes legislative authority from Congress and the White House on a range of issues. Judicial power is often surrendered to three-person trade tribunals in which only corporations are permitted to sue. Workers, environmental and advocacy groups and labor unions are blocked from seeking redress in the proposed tribunals. The rights of corporations become sacrosanct. The rights of citizens are abolished.

The Sierra Club issued a statement after the release of the TPP text saying that the “deal is rife with polluter giveaways that would undermine decades of environmental progress, threaten our climate, and fail to adequately protect wildlife because big polluters helped write the deal.”

If there is no sustained popular uprising to prevent the passage of the TPP in Congress this spring we will be shackled by corporate power. Wages will decline. Working conditions will deteriorate. Unemployment will rise. Our few remaining rights will be revoked. The assault on the ecosystem will be accelerated. Banks and global speculation will be beyond oversight or control. Food safety standards and regulations will be jettisoned. Public services ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to the post office and public education will be abolished or dramatically slashed and taken over by for-profit corporations. Prices for basic commodities, including pharmaceuticals, will skyrocket. Social assistance programs will be drastically scaled back or terminated. And countries that have public health care systems, such as Canada and Australia, that are in the agreement will probably see their public health systems collapse under corporate assault. Corporations will be empowered to hold a wide variety of patents, including over plants and animals, turning basic necessities and the natural world into marketable products. And, just to make sure corporations extract every pound of flesh, any public law interpreted by corporations as impeding projected profit, even a law designed to protect the environment or consumers, will be subject to challenge in an entity called the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) section. The ISDS, bolstered and expanded under the TPP, will see corporations paid massive sums in compensation from offending governments for impeding their “right” to further swell their bank accounts. Corporate profit effectively will replace the common good.

Given the bankruptcy of our political class—including amoral politicians such as Hillary Clinton, who is denouncing the TPP during the presidential campaign but whose unwavering service to corporate capitalism assures her fealty to her corporate backers—the trade agreement has a good chance of becoming law. And because the Obama administration won fast-track authority, a tactic designed by the Nixon administration to subvert democratic debate, President Obama will be able to sign the agreement before it goes to Congress.

The TPP, because of fast track, bypasses the normal legislative process of public discussion and consideration by congressional committees. The House and the Senate, which have to vote on the TPP bill within 90 days of when it is sent to Congress, are prohibited by the fast-track provision from adding floor amendments or holding more than 20 hours of floor debate. Congress cannot raise concerns about the effects of the TPP on the environment. It can only vote yes or no. It is powerless to modify or change one word.

There will be a mass mobilization Nov. 14 through 18 in Washington to begin the push to block the TPP. Rising up to stop the TPP is a far, far better investment of our time and energy than engaging in the empty political theater that passes for a presidential campaign.

“The TPP creates a web of corporate laws that will dominate the global economy,” attorney Kevin Zeese of the group Popular Resistance, which has mounted a long fight against the trade agreement, told me from Baltimore by telephone. “It is a global corporate coup d’état. Corporations will become more powerful than countries. Corporations will force democratic systems to serve their interests. Civil courts around the world will be replaced with corporate courts or so-called trade tribunals. This is a massive expansion that builds on the worst of NAFTA rather than what Barack Obama promised, which was to get rid of the worst aspects of NAFTA.”

The agreement is the product of six years of work by global capitalists from banks, insurance companies, Goldman Sachs, Monsanto and other corporations.

“It was written by them [the corporations], it is for them and it will serve them,” Zeese said of the TPP. “It will hurt domestic businesses and small businesses. The buy-American provisions will disappear. Local communities will not be allowed to build buy-local campaigns. The thrust of the agreement is the privatization and commodification of everything. The agreement has built within it a deep antipathy to state-supported or state-owned enterprises. It gives away what is left of our democracy to the World Trade Organization.”

Advertisement

The economist David Rosnick, in a report on the TPP by the Center for Economic and Policy Research(CEPR), estimated that under the trade agreement only the top 10 percent of U.S. workers would see their wages increase. Rosnick wrote that the real wages of middle-income U.S. workers (from the 35th percentile to the 80th percentile) would decline under the TPP. NAFTA, contributing to a decline in manufacturing jobs (now only 9 percent of the economy), has forced workers into lower-paying service jobs and resulted in a decline in real wages of between 12 and 17 percent. The TPP would only accelerate this process, Rosnick concluded.

“This is a continuation of the global race to the bottom,” Dr. Margaret Flowers, also from Popular Resistance and a candidate for the U.S. Senate, said from Baltimore in a telephone conversation with me. “Corporations are free to move to countries that have the lowest labor standards. This drives down high labor standards here. It means a decimation of industries and unions. It means an accelerated race to the bottom, which we must rise up to stop.”

“In Malaysia one-third of tech workers are essentially slaves,” Zeese said. “In Vietnam the minimum wage is 35 cents an hour. Once these countries are part of the trade agreement U.S. workers are put in a very difficult position.”

Fifty-one percent of working Americans now make less than $30,000 a year, a new study by the Social Security Administration reported. Forty percent are making less than $20,000 a year. The federal government considers a family of four living on an income of less than $24,250 to be in poverty.

“Half of American workers earn essentially the poverty level,” Zeese said. “This agreement only accelerates this trend. I don’t see how American workers are going to cope.”

The assault on the American workforce by NAFTA—which was established under the Clinton administration in 1994 and which at the time promised creation of 200,000 net jobs a year in the United States—has been devastating. NAFTA has led to a $181 billion trade deficit with Mexico and Canada and the loss of at least 1 million U.S. jobs, according to a report by Public Citizen. The flooding of the Mexican market with cheap corn by U.S. agro-businesses drove down the price of Mexican corn and saw 1 million to 3 million poor Mexican farmers go bankrupt and lose their small farms. Many of them crossed the border into the United States in a desperate effort to find work.

“Obama has misled the public throughout this process,” Dr. Flowers said. “He claimed that environmental groups were supportive of the agreement because it provided environmental protections, and this has now been proven false. He told us that it would create 650,000 jobs, and this has now been proven false. He calls this a 21st century trade agreement, but it actually rolls back progress made in Bush-era trade agreements. The most recent model of a 21st century trade agreement is the Korean free trade agreement. That was supposed to create 140,000 U.S. jobs. But what we saw within a couple years was a loss of about 70,000 jobs and a larger trade deficit with Korea. This agreement [the TPP] is sold to us with the same deceits that were used to sell us NAFTA and other trade agreements.”

The agreement, in essence, becomes global law. Any agreements over carbon emissions by countries made through the United Nations are effectively rendered null and void by the TPP.

“Trade agreements are binding,” Flowers said. “They supersede any of the nonbinding agreements made by the United Nations Climate Change Conference that might come out of Paris.”

There is more than enough evidence from past trade agreements to indicate where the TPP—often called “NAFTA on steroids”—will lead. It is part of the inexorable march by corporations to wrest from us the ability to use government to defend the public and to build social and political organizations that promote the common good. Our corporate masters seek to turn the natural world and human beings into malleable commodities that will be used and exploited until exhaustion or collapse. Trade agreements are the tools being used to achieve this subjugation. The only response left is open, sustained and defiant popular revolt.

 

Related Stories



via IFTTT

Theresa May’s threat to the privacy of reading

As the US republic evolved, the lesson of Douglass’s insight – that there is an indissoluble link between liberty and the freedom to read what one chooses – was baked into its civic culture. It is what made American librarians into such doughty defenders of private reading. “Lack of privacy and confidentiality chills users’ choices, thereby suppressing access to ideas,” says the website of the American Library Association.

“The possibility of surveillance, whether direct or through access to records of speech, research and exploration, undermines a democratic society,” it continues. “Confidentiality of library records is a core value of librarianship. One cannot exercise the right to read if the possible consequences include damage to one’s reputation, ostracism from the community or workplace or criminal penalties. For libraries to flourish as centres for uninhibited access to information, librarians must stand behind their users’ right to privacy and freedom of inquiry... The right to privacy is the right to open inquiry without having the subject of one’s interest examined or scrutinised by others.”

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/08/theresa-may-proposals-privacy-reading-draft-investigatory-powers-bill

Thursday, November 5, 2015

Seven Major Takeaways From the U.K.’s Proposed Surveillance Rules

The Intercept
Link

The British government on Wednesday published a proposed new law to reform and dramatically expand surveillance powers in the United Kingdom. The 190-page Investigatory Powers Bill is thick with detail and it will probably take weeks and months of analysis until its full ramifications are understood. In the meantime, I’ve read through the bill and>>

The post Seven Major Takeaways From the U.K.’s Proposed Surveillance Rules appeared first on The Intercept.



via IFTTT

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

U.S. Prepares War Against Russia in Syrian Battlefield

Washington's Blog
Link

Eric Zuesse On Tuesday November 3rd, U.S. Defense Department spokesperson Laura Seal told The Daily Beast that twelve F-15C air-to-air combat planes are being sent to the Incirlik Turkey Air Base for deployment in Syria against Russia’s Su-30 air-to-air combat planes. Neither the F-15C nor the Su-30 can destroy ground-targets, only air-targets — enemy planes. In other words: U.S. President Barack Obama is telling Russian President Vladimir Putin that unless Putin is willing to go to war against the United...Read more

U.S. Prepares War Against Russia in Syrian Battlefield was originally published on Washington's Blog



via IFTTT

First Grader Suspended for 3 Days for Pretending to Shoot Pretend Arrow

Free Range Kids
Link
. Writing in a note that, “I have no tolerance for any real, pretend, or imitated violence. The punishment is an out of school suspension,” the principal of Our Lady of Lourdes elementary school in Cincinnati, Joe Crachiolo, suspended a first grader for pretending to shoot another student with a pretend arrow in a pretend […]

via IFTTT

Even Retailers Suffering As Americans Too Poor to Shop: “Everyone Is Broke Except the 1%”

SHTF Plan - When It Hits The Fan, Don't Say We Didn't Warn You
Link
Welcome to the "changing income landscape" in America... according to those in the know, it is a "seismic shift" and the middle class has all but disappeared.

via IFTTT

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

SPEECHLESS

SGTreport - The Corporate Propaganda Antidote - Silver, Gold, Truth, Liberty, & Freedom
Link

by Andy Hoffman, Miles Franklin:

Let’s face it. Even the world’s greatest authors get “writer’s block” from time to time. Whether I’m “great” or not is debatable, but I’m certainly amongst the financial world’s most prolific – having not missed a day of writing in at least two years. Between podcasts and articles, I [...]

via IFTTT

More Americans than ever use prescription drugs

Signs of the Times
Link
More Americans than ever are taking prescription drugs — close to 60 percent of U.S. adults, according to new research. And most seem to be related to obesity, with cholesterol and blood pressure drugs leading the pack, researchers report in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The single most popular drug is Zocor, a cholesterol-lowering drug in a class called statins, said Elizabeth Kantor, formerly of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, and now at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The drug, known generically as simvastatin, is taken by 8 percent of the U.S. population.

via IFTTT

Over Prescribed America

Over Prescribed America:



'via Blog this'

Fukushima Gets A Lot Uglier

Fukushima Gets A Lot Uglier:



'via Blog this'

18 Numbers That Scream That A Crippling Global Recession Has Arrived

End Of The American Dream
Link

The stock market has been soaring, but all of the hard economic numbers are telling us that a major global recession is here. This is so reminiscent of what happened back in 2008. Back then, all of the fundamentals were screaming “recession” by the middle of that year, but the equity markets didn’t respond until [...]

via IFTTT

Polk Teacher's Resignation Letter Hits a Nerve

http://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/post/polk-teachers-resignation-letter-hits-nerve#stream/0

Monday, November 2, 2015

12 Days Before ’08 Crash, Congress Was Secretly Told To Sell Off Their Stocks

We Are Change
Link

We Are Change

  By John Vibes Earlier this month, it was reported that less than two weeks before the economic collapse of 2008, several members of Congress took their money out of the stock market. Many high-ranking government employees were given a heads-up about the impending market crash in secret meetings with the Federal Reserve and the […]

The post 12 Days Before ’08 Crash, Congress Was Secretly Told To Sell Off Their Stocks appeared first on We Are Change.



via IFTTT

Sunday, November 1, 2015

Why Americans no longer trust the government's food guidelines

Signs of the Times
Link
Over the past 30 years, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans have become as bloated as the nation's collective waistline, serving up a thick brew of revolving-door nutrition advice, confusing messages, and perhaps even politically influenced eating recommendations. In 1985, the report — which gives updated nutrition advice to Americans every five years — was just 19 pages long. It resulted in a simple brochure with commonsense advice: "If you are too fat, your chances of developing some chronic disorders are increased. . . . To lose weight, you must take in fewer calories than you burn." It advised against vomiting or using laxatives to lose weight (back when anorexia, not obesity, was a major concern). Only two charts were included: one with the desired weight for average adults and another with the calorie-burn for exercises such as ballroom dancing and chopping wood. In 2015, the report is a 571-page behemoth and more overwhelming than a Cheesecake Factory menu. It takes on more than it can chew, from sustainability to labor concerns to tax policy. The findings — compiled by a committee appointed by the USDA and Health and Human Services agency — are important because they serve as the scientific basis for the actual dietary guidelines, which are the federal government's official recommendations on how to eat. The recommendations greatly influence federal food programs such as SNAP and child nutrition. For the guidelines to have any credibility, they must be free from political wrangling. The 2015 guidelines, which are due out by the end of the year, are already far off track. In a last-ditch effort to keep politics out of the final guidelines, the House Agriculture Committee held a hearing last week to examine how the process of developing updated nutrition advice became so ideological.

via IFTTT

AP: Hundreds of Officers Lose Licenses Over Sex Misconduct

AP: Hundreds of Officers Lose Licenses Over Sex Misconduct http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/ap-hundreds-officers-lose-licenses-sex-misconduct-34885490