Author: Chief Visionary Officer & Founder

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Astroturf and the Manipulation of Media Messages | Sharyl Attkisson | YouTube & TEDx~University of Nevada [click image]

Screen Shot 2020-06-15 at 7.39.52 PMIn this eye-opening talk, veteran investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson shows how astroturf, or fake grassroots movements funded by political, corporate, or other special interests very effectively manipulate and distort media messages. Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative journalist based in Washington D.C. She is currently writing a book entitled Stonewalled (Harper Collins), which addresses the unseen influences of corporations and special interests on the information and images the public receives every day in the news and elsewhere.

For twenty years (through March 2014), Attkisson was a correspondent for CBS News. In 2013, she received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for her reporting on “The Business of Congress,” which included an undercover investigation into fundraising by Republican freshmen. She also received Emmy nominations in 2013 for Benghazi: Dying for Security and Green Energy Going Red. Additionally, Attkisson received a 2013 Daytime Emmy Award as part of the CBS Sunday Morning team’s entry for Outstanding Morning Program for her report: “Washington Lobbying: K-Street Behind Closed Doors.” In September 2012, Attkisson also received an Emmy for Oustanding Investigative Journalism for the “Gunwalker: Fast and Furious” story. She received the RTNDA Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Investigative Reporting for the same story. Attkisson received an Investigative Emmy Award in 2009 for her exclusive investigations into TARP and the bank bailout.

She received an Investigative Emmy Award in 2002 for her series of exclusive reports about mismanagement at the Red Cross.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Source: YouTube

 

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Paris attack designed to shore up France’s vassal status: Roberts | PressTV

DrPaulCraigRobertsA former White House official says the terrorist attack that killed 12 people on Wednesday in Paris was a false flag operation “designed to shore up France’s vassal status to Washington.”

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, who was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, made the remarks in an article published on Thursday.

“The suspects can be both guilty and patsies. Just remember all the terrorist plots created by the FBI that served to make the terrorism threat real to Americans,” he wrote.

He said that the French economy is suffering from the US-imposed sanctions against Russia. “Shipyards are impacted from being unable to deliver Russian orders due to France’s vassalage status to Washington, and other aspects of the French economy are being adversely impacted by sanctions that Washington forced its NATO puppet states to apply to Russia.”

Dr. Roberts stated that French President Francois Hollande this week said that the sanctions against Russia should end. “This is too much foreign policy independence on France’s part for Washington.”

He added that the CIA has apparently resurrected a policy that it followed against Europeans during the post-WW II era when the US spy agency would carry out attacks in European states and blame them on communist groups.

Dr. Roberts said now the US agencies have planned false flag operations in Europe to create hatred against Muslims and bring European countries under Washington’s sphere of influence.

He noted that “the attack on Charlie Hebdo was an inside job and that people identified by NSA as hostile to the Western wars against Muslims are going to be framed for an inside job designed to pull France firmly back under Washington’s thumb.”

The widely read columnist stated that the US “government tells Americans whatever story the government puts together and sits and laughs at the gullibility of the public.”

Source: PressTV

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NYPD ‘Stoppage’ is Pushback Against Big Government | Voices of Liberty

OfficerofPeaceToday I’d like to make a few comments about their work stoppage, the slow down of the New York City Police, they are not arresting as many people. A lot of people are getting very nervous about this and trying to figure out what this all means.

This is an out growth of the conflict that became regularly apparent between the militarization of the police and their abuse of the average citizen as well as the citizens of Ferguson, and other countries reacting negatively by causing violence as well. This conflict is going on, but there is also a New York added factor that the police do not think that the mayor is treating them fairly enough and therefore they are not going to go out and arresting people.

Now ordinarily if the police were really doing something important for our safety and protecting us this would be catastrophic, something would happen, the arrests would maybe go down but the criminality would go up. So far that’s not the case. Something similar to that in Detroit in the midst of their severe crisis, they had to downsize on their police forces.

As a matter of fact, there were no signs that there was an increase in the criminality, but police have been less anxious to arrest people. There is a 94 percent decrease in the arrest of minor traffic offenses. I guess the average citizen wouldn’t care about that, that is only a gimmick to raise revenue for the city and they have quotas even though they deny it. It’s just a revenue enhancer for cities to pay policeman a lot of money. My guess is that there are way too many policeman and writing a lot of tickets is something that they do because they have the motive and incentive to raise the money.

Source: Voices of Liberty

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Biotech Outraged After China Rejects Several Billion Tons of GMO Corn |Natural Society

CornfieldBiotech corporation Syngenta’s GMO corn (known as MIR 162 or ‘Agrisure Viptera’) was recently refused by Chinese officials when shipped to the country, yet a spokesperson from the Big Ag company, Paul Minehart, “expects that the Chinese government will still approve” their prematurely released crop which is now in the subject of several US lawsuits by miffed corn-growers.

Those who grew MIR 162 were assured by Syngenta that China had already approved the corn before they even started growing it. Obviously this is not the case, since China has refused several billion tons of GM corn coming from the US already. Syngenta claims the current lawsuits directed against them by US farmers are baseless. Minehart says that he will make an official announcement when China does approve the crop for import.

If China does indeed approve the GM corn, it would reverse a decision to refuse shipments since November of 2013. It is still not understood whether the commentary by Syngenta represents wishful thinking, or an actual break-through to China’s officials concerning the approval of their MIR 162 product. Syngenta has waited four years thus far for approval.

The U.S. grain Council – who has also taken heat from farmers based on Syngenta’s premature declaration of the Chinese acceptance of Syngenta’s GM corn crop – was hoping that approval would come in the next few days, but this was reported in early December of 2014.

One of the only reasons for China to have a change of heart about accepting the Syngenta corn is that rival exporters in the Ukraine are struggling to honor contracts due to shortages.

Another factor is the recent jump in ethanol refined corn which comes from dried corn grain.

Representatives from China’s embassy in Washington, D.C., could not be reached for comment by Reuters.

Gary Martin, chief executive of the North American Export Grain Association says that:

“Chinese approval of imports would represent “news that’s four years coming.”

Martin believes it should have been done in 2011 and something held it up.

Quite possibly, like Russia, China has realized that GM crops are toxic, and don’t wish to import more of them into their food supply.

Cargill Inc and Archer Daniels Midland Co, along with dozens of U.S. farmers have sued Syngenta for selling MIR 162 corn without obtaining import approval from China, one of the major buyers for US grown corn.

In April 2014, the National Grain and Feed Association estimated that farmers would lose at least $1 billion in the refusal of MIR 162 corn shipments to China.

Source: Natural Society

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Democracy And Corruption: European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights Files War Crimes Charges Against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld And Other CIA Officials | Liberal America

By Tiffany Willis

BushRumsfeldCheneyThe European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights has filed a criminal complaint against U.S. torture program architects and members of the Bush Administration. The organization has accused CIA director George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of war crimes and they’ve called for a German prosecutor to conduct an immediate investigation.

This move follows the release of the damning Senate report on CIA torture that includes the case of German citizen Khalid El-Masri, who was captured in 2004 by CIA agents in a case of mistaken identity. The report revealed the shocking contrast of democracy and corruption.

Bizarrely, the only person involved with the CIA torture program who has been charged with a crime is the man who exposed the war crimes — whistleblower John Kiriakou.

The relevant parties in this case have given an extensive interview to Democracy Now. Some of the important points are below.

Wolfgang Kaleck, the general secretary of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights and the author of International Prosecution of Human Rights Crimes said this:

“By investigating members of the Bush administration, Germany can help to ensure that those responsible for abduction, abuse and illegal detention do not go unpunished.”

Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and chairman of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights said this:

“I strongly disagree that Bush, Cheney, et al., would have a defense. This wasn’t like these memos just appeared independently from the Justice Department. These memos were facilitated by the very people — Cheney, etc. — who we believe should be indicted. This was part of a conspiracy so they could get away with torture. But that’s not the subject here now.”

“Secondly, whatever we think of those memos, they’re of uselessness in Europe. Europe doesn’t accept this, quote, ‘golden shield’ of a legal defense. Either it’s torture or it’s not. Either you did it or you didn’t. And that’s one of the reasons, among others, why we’re going to Europe and why we went to Europe to bring these cases through the European Center.”

Ratner is the author of The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book.

Ratner also said this:

“But, of course, you know, Cheney just showed us exactly why you have to — have to prosecute torture. Because if you don’t prosecute it, the next guy down the line is going to torture again. And that’s what Cheney said: ‘I would do it again.’”

From Addicting Info‘s Ryan Denson:

Khalid El-Masri was on vacation in Skopje, in Macedonia, when he was pulled off of a bus by government agents, sodomized with a drug, and taken to the secret base that was identified only as Cobalt in the CIA torture report. After four months, and after the United States learned of the mistaken identity, they left him there and continued to torture him. They held him further because the U.S. realized they had been torturing the wrong man. Afterwards, they released him, dropping him off somewhere to resume his life.

El-Masri’s comments to Democracy Now highlight the contrast of democracy and corruption:

[translated] I was the only one in this prison in Kabul who was actually treated slightly better than the other inmates. But it was known among the prisoners that other prisoners were constantly tortured with blasts of loud music, exposed to constant onslaughts of loud music. And they were—for up to five days, they were just sort of left hanging from the ceiling, completely naked in ice-cold conditions. The man from Tanzania, whom I mentioned before, had his arm broken in three places. He had injuries, trauma to the head, and his teeth had been damaged. They also locked him up in a suitcase for long periods of time, foul-smelling suitcase that made him vomit all the time. Other people experienced forms of torture whereby their heads were being pushed down and held under water.

“And let me just say, Germany — whatever happened before, between the NSA spying on Germany and the fact that their citizen has now been revealed to have been kept in a torture place, when it was known that he was innocent, I’m pretty sure that Germany is going to take this very seriously.“

We need to throw our full support behind this investigation and our government and the Obama administration needs to not impede it in any way. This is a harsh indictment of our hypocrisy as a nation when it comes to democracy and corruption.

Source: Liberal America

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Nothing Is Ever As It Seems And No Respite For Precious Metals | Gold Eagle

By Michael Noonan

5StackedCoinsAn eminent collapse of the US fiat petrodollar? China and Russia, with their enormous build-up of physical gold over the last several years, waiting in the wings to lead a new gold-backed currency?  The growing BRICS alliance to unseat the elite’s Western NWO and its banking system?

A growing likelihood on the first question, and no and no to the latter two questions. In fact, the elites are probably doing more to destroy the fiat Federal Reserve “dollar” than any other group or alliance. There has been talk about the US destroying the dollar for at least the past four years. Kyle Bass even made the pronouncement whereby a senior Obama administration official told him, “We’re just going to kill the dollar.” That is exactly what is happening and coming from “inside information.”

What most people refuse to understand, if not even acknowledge, is the extent to which the elites have an utter stranglehold on the world’s financial system, and by world we do not mean just the Western world.  China and Russia are included. There is no single country that can exist without the machinations of the elite’s banking system. They have been running the world for a few hundred years and are masters at it.

Russia has enough gold to back its ruble in some way. Understand that the current price for gold does not represent a fair standard of value.  It is vastly undervalued, and one day, the reality of what should be a fair value for gold and silver will occur. They are both money and measures of value. Most people have reversed their thinking and measure the value of PMs by valueless fiat. This is a huge mistake and reflects how well the elites have successfully exercised mind control over the masses to maintain this false belief.

The agenda for a New World Order is at least 100 years old, when bankers and corporate presidents were all aiming to control every aspect of industry via financial manipulation, straight from the well-established Rothschild “game book,” as it were. This unabated zeal for world control is not something that has been in the works for just the past several decades. Knowledge of this does not come from an announcement in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal; rather, one has to diligently read through a myriad of source material and then see how the dots are connected.

In a nutshell, if the elites have their way, and to date they remain unopposed, the fiat Federal Reserve Note, aka the debt “dollar,” will be replaced with some form of a new international currency, or perhaps SDRs [Special Drawing Rights], an international basket of currencies. All money may exist as computer credits that can be readily tracked.  If anyone dare oppose the bankers, poof, your credits just disappeared, and you have nothing. Bankers rely on debt largesse and fear.

There will be no sovereign nations.  All countries will be held accountable to the new Wizard Of OZ bankers behind the curtain, much like the experiment called the European Union. The EU may fall apart, but the lessons learned will not be lost, and in fact they will be honed to format what is to come. The handful of banking elite that rule the Western economies will become “elite-er.”

What of China and Russia?  Both have advocated respect for the IMF with expressed desires to be participants in the system. The system will change, to be sure: no more Federal Reserve fiat “dollar” as the world’s reserve currency. Not a few hold out the errant belief that the BRICS nations, primarily China and Russia, will replace the elite’s banking system. Absolutely not! The elites are redesigning the next phase of their control over the financial world to include the BRICS, all eager to join the “club” for the first time and be major participants on the financial world stage.

The question is, will Russia make it before the Obama administration, under direct control of the elites, destroys the Russian economy? Perhaps a better question to ask is, CAN the elites take down Russia?    Just as the United States, as a physical country was replete with so many natural resources, which have all had their existence sucked out of them, Russia has the most natural resources of the entire world, and the bankers want control over them. There is one big obstacle: Vladimir Putin.

If Putin had his way, he would kick the Russian Central Bank out of Russia. It was created, designed and controlled by the Rothschilds, so Putin has little control over it. The Russian central banking elite have been getting wealthy from their arrangement, and they are not about to give up their Golden Goose.

If you want to understand why Obama has chosen to overthrow the sovereign Ukrainian government and replaced it with a puppet leader that has been conducting genocide against Russian loyalists in Eastern Ukraine, the Donbas area, it is a not-so-indirect [non]declaration of war. This has been followed up by another form of war via all the economic sanctions Obama has been strong-arming the EU to enforce against Russia to their own detriment. The US does not care, as long as it gets its way.

Western bankers will not allow Putin to remove the Russian central bank, as he is trying to do. The elites have a 3-pronged attack against Putin: 1. military threat, [Russia is more than up to the task], 2. economic sanctions, [mostly backfiring and costing the EU more], and 3. Russian banker oligarchs who will do anything to oppose Putin in order to preserve their banker-criminal enterprise.  With US history as a guide, presidential opposition, Lincoln, Garfield, Kennedy, and Reagan prove that assassinations have their effect and may not be out of the question.

It is interesting to see the West [really just Wall Street banks] attack the ruble causing it to lose about 60% of its value relative to the fiat “dollar.”***  Will it succeed, or is Putin allowing the attack to push down the value of the ruble, and at the bottom rush in to buy as much as he can, using the sale of over-valued Treasury holdings owned by Russia? In the process, flooding the market with US bonds will put pressure on the fiat “dollar,” and viola, a reverse financial coup by Putin.

***Russia has less than $700 million in debt, the US has over $18 trillion; Russian debt is about 15% of GDP, the US runs at over 100% of GDP; Russia runs a budget surplus, the US runs a burgeoning deficit; Russia has gold to back it currency, the US now only has the military to back its fiat and increasingly widely shunned “dollar;” Russia has the largest natural resources in the world, the US has depleted or ruined most of its natural resources. With which of these two countries does the rest of the world want to conduct business?

China is not in a position to have its renminbi become a world reserve currency, and that country has been announcing its support in becoming a stronger member in the IMF via participating in SDRs with its national currency.  For China, it becomes a major world player and participates in a remake of the financial COMPOSITION [not replacement] of the existing world banking system.

For the elites, it is a match made in heaven.  The US, as a spent nation, gets dumped and China becomes  a willing replacement in the pecking order. To what degree Russia is a participant remains to be seen.  While China and Russia have become stronger trading partners, China is not above seeing Russia weakened to China’s advantage. All is never as it seems.

2014 is ending unexpectedly for PMs, considerably weaker than what most thought would be sharply higher prices. Based on what the charts are conveying, at least the initial part of 2015 will not fare much better.  Supply and demand are not the driving factors. World financial dominance is. A number of PM “experts” are not focusing on this aspect.

If it has not yet become clear, seeing how the banking elites are attacking Russia, militarily and economically, willing to destroy that country, and seeing how the US is being used in its own self-destruction, willing to impose its military might and debt sabotaging of other nations, then those who cannot understand the process will never understand how gold and silver have become useful pawns in the service of the elite bankers and now how China is positioning itself to become the next United States as a world superpower. The role of Russia remains a question.  The role of gold and silver is also a burning question.

As to  substantially higher gold and silver prices in the “great reset” scheme, it makes no sense for the still-in-control elites to allow PMs to be dramatically revalued too high. Neither gold nor silver will ever be allowed to compete with their fiat monetary system. We have no clue how gold and silver will ultimately be re-priced, nor do we think does anyone else, despite all the numbers being bandied about.

What we know for sure is that the trend of any market is the most powerful and most influential force, and this week’s analysis of the PMs market is a simple fact-based one. It takes time and effort to change a trend. To whatever degree these market are being manipulated, even the manipulators eventually “show their hand” through price and volume activity. We see no change for prices remaining low, if not even making newer recent lows in the months ahead.

It does not alter the view and necessity for the ongoing accumulation of the physical metals, for having them will be essential when the big “reset” finally hits. Time remains on the side of the buyers, but low prices may give way to higher premiums in order to keep the game alive.

Last week, we wanted to see gold rally strongly on increased volume, taking out 1250 with ease. That did not happen and until it does, gold remains on the defensive and subject to staying at current levels. The longer gold stays at these levels, the greater the probability for another low. Chart comments provide the factual explanation. Read more…

Source: Gold Eagle

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Republican Judge Strikes Down Obama’s Immigration Order | ThinkProgress

By Ian Millhiser

AntiImmigrationIn an extraordinary opinion that transforms a routine sentencing matter into a vehicle to strike down a politically controversial policy, a George W. Bush-appointed judge in Pennsylvania declared President Obama’s recently announced immigration policy unconstitutional on Tuesday. Because the policy “may” apply to a defendant who was awaiting sentencing of a criminal immigration violation, Judge Arthur Schwab decides that he must determine “whether the Executive Action is constitutional.” He concludes that it is not.

Schwab spends just five pages discussing his rationale for this conclusion, an unusually short amount of legal analysis for a complex question regarding the scope of the executive branch’s power to set enforcement priorities. Notably, Schwab also spends nearly three pages discussing quotes from President Obama which, the judge claims, indicate that Obama once thought his present actions are illegal — even though Schwab eventually admits that these quotes are “not dispositive of the constitutionality of his Executive Action on immigration.”

Half of Schwab’s analysis of the Executive Action’s constitutionality is devoted to a strawman. Noting that Obama cited Congress’s failure to act on immigration in his speech announcing the new policy, Schwab devotes half of his analysis of the policy’s constitutionality to explaining that “Inaction by Congress Does Not Make Unconstitutional Executive Action Constitutional.” He’s right on this point, just as Schwab would be correct if he argued that President Obama’s authority to create this new policy does not come from a magic hat that Obama keeps in the Oval Office. But it’s somewhat curious that the judge feels the need to present Obama’s political rhetoric as if it were a constitutional argument and then tear that non-argument down.

The remainder of Schwab’s brief constitutional analysis concludes that the new policy “Goes Beyond Prosecutorial Discretion — It is Legislation.” Notably, however, Schwab cites no judicial precedents of any kind to support this conclusion.

One case that Schwab does not cite is Arizona v. United States, where the Supreme Court said that the executive branch has “broad discretion” in matters of deportation and removal. As Arizona explains, a “principal feature of the removal system is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials.” Executive branch officials, moreover, “must decide whether it makes sense to pursue removal at all.”

Notably, Arizona also indicates that this broad discretion flows from federal immigration law — i.e. laws that were enacted by Congress. This matters because Schwab’s opinion concludes that Obama’s “unilateral” policy “violates the separation of powers provided for in the United States Constitution as well as the Take Care Clause.” In essence, Schwab concludes that the president lacks the authority to act in the absence of authorization by Congress. Schwab does not even discuss the possibility that Obama’s actions may actually be authorized by Congress. Thus, even if Schwab’s reading of the Constitution is correct — itself a questionable proposition — the judge does not even discuss another major source of law that can justify the president’s actions.

Another problem Schwab does not address in his constitutional analysis is how, exactly, the executive branch is supposed to deport the many millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States if it is not allowed to set enforcement priorities among them. As the Justice Department explained in a memo discussing the legality of Obama’s policy, “there are approximately 11.3 million undocumented aliens in the country,” but the executive only “has the resources to remove fewer than 400,000 such aliens each year.”

The fact that Congress only provided sufficient resources to the Obama administration to remove a small fraction of the undocumented immigrants within the United States is itself a legislative judgment that most of these immigrants should not be removed. As the Supreme Court explained in Heckler v. Chaney, because federal agencies typically lack the resources to “act against each technical violation of the statute it is charged with enforcing,” they necessarily must set enforcement priorities. Moreover, these priorities generally should not be second-guessed by judges because “[t]he agency is far better equipped than the courts to deal with the many variables involved in the proper ordering of its priorities.”

So Schwab’s legal analysis is thin. He spends nearly as much time making what appear to be political attacks on the president as he does evaluating actual legal matters. And what little legal analysis he does provide fails to cite key Supreme Court decisions that seem to contradict his conclusion. Judge Schwab traveled far along a very thin branch to reach this decision, and he anchored his decision with little grounding in legal authorities.

Moreover, it’s not clear what effect, if any effect at all, this decision will actually have. The judge does not issue an injunction halting the new immigration policy. Nor does he even state with certainty that the actual defendant in the case before his court will benefit from an order declaring the immigration policy unconstitutional.

Yet, despite these weaknesses in his opinion, immigrant families would be wrong to write off the threat his decision could present. There was a time when the constitutional challenges to the Affordable Care Act were widely dismissed by legal experts — Ronald Reagan’s former solicitor general said he would “eat a hat which I bought in Australia last month made of kangaroo skin” if the Supreme Court struck the law down — yet these challenges rapidly gained momentum after a few Republican judges reached out to strike the law down. The same can be said about the legal theory in King v. Burwell, a lawsuit currently before the Supreme Court that seeks to gut much of Obamacare.

It remains to be seen whether Schwab’s opinion — thin though its reasoning may be — will also grant legitimacy to the case against the president’s immigration policy.

Source: ThinkProgress

 

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Senator Professor Warren is Tired of Reasoning with You People | Esquire

By Charles P. Pierce

ElizabethWarrenIt may have escaped your attention, what with this week’s revelations that America’s foreign policy took a right turn at Torquemada and didn’t stop until it got to Vlad The Impaler — And it should be said, for the purposes of apt historical parallels, that Vlad used to impale his victims in the same manner in which the CIA apparently fed recalcitrant prisoners — but the Congress is preparing to give away the store. A “bipartisan” deal has been crafted to fund the government through next September. Please forgive any typos in this post, as it is difficult for me to type, having Krazy Glue’d my wallet to my hands.

“This bill fulfills our constitutional duty to fund the government, preventing damage from shutdown politics that are bad for the economy, cost jobs and hurt middle class families,” said Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat, and Kentucky Rep. Hal Rogers, a Republican, in a joint statement. “While not everyone got everything they wanted, such compromises must be made in a divided government. These are the tough choices that we must make to govern responsibly and do what the American people sent us here to do.”

Hang on. I’ll be back in a minute. I am now attaching the wallet to my palms with tenpenny nails.

This deal does a lot of things, many of them horrible. It is a veritable compost heap of Republican goodies. The IRS gets defunded, so that phony “social-welfare” political front groups no longer will be inconvenienced in their paperwork. The EPA takes a huge whack, so that conservative bundlers and the oligarchs whom they bundle no longer will be inconvenienced by people who wish to breathe, and who believe their water should be neither yellow nor flammable. But the real Saturday end of it is a provision that guts a key provision of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill that was passed so that it would be a little harder in the future for people to wreck most of the economy and then steal what’s left. Specifically, Congress is preparing to open the casino again.

At issue is the “swaps push-out” rule, which requires banks to move derivatives trading out of taxpayer-backed subsidiaries. Derivatives are risky financial instruments that contributed to the 2008 crash. Allowing banks to conduct those trades on the assumption that taxpayers would bail them out if the deals went sour was not only bad for taxpayers; it also raised the value of the trades and thus effectively acted as a subsidy for the banks. Financial institutions, obviously, weren’t thrilled with the new rule. In 2013, lobbyists for Citigroup gave lawmakers a proposal to exempt a wide array of derivatives, and it subsequently appeared in a bill approved by a House committee that year.

Derivatives are what nearly sank the whole thing the last time around. And now, the Congress has decided, in the same kind of “bipartisan” way that brought us the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the Commodity Futures Trading Act during the Clinton Administration, to let these guys gamble with taxpayer money again. This is such a spectacularly bad idea that it’s hard to believe that its supporters didn’t sneak it into the bill the way they did just as a goof, to see what they could get away with, those scamps.

“Hey, Bob. Let’s see if we can get them to pass the Free Smack Subsidy next! Somebody call Luntz and have him think up a name for it. The Opiate Liberation And Personal Freedom Liberty Act Of 2014, or something.”

The arrangement is the result of a “bipartisan compromise” engineered by Mikulski by which Wall Street gets to oil up the roulette wheel again in exchange for increased funding for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is supposed to oversee things like derivatives training, and which the incoming, and more radical, Republican congressional majority surely will chloroform entirely the first chance it gets. Meanwhile, things are being arranged to put us all on the hook again for Wall Street’s gambling jones. And Senator Professor Warren, who can see a church by daylight, is having none of it.  She rose yesterday to excoriate the covert sellout and, by extension, the people in both parties who connived to bring it about. You want bipartisanship? This is bipartisanship.

“I come to the floor today to ask a fundamental question — who does Congress work for? Does it work for the millionaires, the billionaires, the giant companies with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers? Or does it work for all of us?”

I’m not entirely sure that she has the votes to stop this abomination. People want to go home for Christmas. Everybody’s drunk deeply of the egg nog in the rancid punchbowl of  “compromise” for its own sake.  Right now, she’s counting on the House to strip it from the bill, but a large portion of the House majority is crazy, and a large portion of the House minority is hiding behind the drapes, so I’m not optimistic. (Nancy Pelosi has gotten ferocious on the issue, though, so we’ll see.) It will be interesting to see if she exercises her right to talk the provision to death against what will be a well-organized counterattack by the Very Serious People who will sing in one voice the praises of “bipartisan” governance against this noisy obstructionist. Nothing in her career so far is as serious a gut check as this one is. The inserted provision strikes at the very heart of everything that made her a senator in the first place. It will be interesting to see how many people have her back.

And this is coming at the same time as her campaign against Antonio Weiss, the Lazard executive who’s the president’s nominee to be Undersecretary of The Treasury for Domestic Finance, something that has given severe agita to the financial press, especially Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times, who’s carried so much water for some of these guys that you could fly him over a forest fire to help put it out. Part of Warren’s problem with Weiss is a going-away goodie he got from Lazard that surprised even my cynical mind. Lazard will pay Weiss a $21 million bonus just for taking the Treasury job, in which he’ll be intimately involved with the industry Weiss is now leaving, however temporarily. How does this not seem to be a form of pre-emptive bribery? Used to be you needed a quo for every quid. And both of these fights together are the best arguments I can think of for why MoveOn and Democracy For America, both of which are trying to dragoon Warren into a quixotic presidential run, should shut the fk up.

Even the shadow of the possibility of a presidential campaign makes it easier to characterize Warren’s positions here as political grandstanding. Oh, look. Here’s Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post to do that very thing.

Speeches like the one Warren gave Wednesday will just fuel chatter about why she should challenge Hillary Rodham Clinton in two years. And she knows it.

Yeah, it’s not that she’s ever been concerned about how the country’s fiscal policy is under the control of the forces that nearly demolished it, or that she understands what the reopening of the casino will mean. It’s all about the “chatter.” Stop it, all of you. She’s right where she belongs. You don’t put a lion in a horse race.

Source: Esquire

 

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John McCain Calls Out the Torture Apologists | Daily Klos

JohnMcCainThere aren’t many subjects I’d agree with Sen. McCain on, but kudos to him for speaking out so clearly and honestly on CIA torture, unlike others who wanted the Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program delayed or kept secret forever. Kudos to him also for speaking out on why some are raising panicky objections to the release of the report:

There was considerable misinformation disseminated then about what was and wasn’t achieved using these methods in an effort to discourage support for the legislation. There was a good amount of misinformation used in 2011 to credit the use of methods with the death of Osama Bin Laden, and there is, I fear, misinformation being used today to prevent the release of this report, disputing its findings and warning about the security consequences of their public disclosure.With the report’s release, will the report’s release cause outrage that leads to violence in some parts of the Muslim world? Yes, I suppose that’s possible, perhaps likely. Sadly, violence needs little incentive in some quarters of the world today. But that doesn’t mean we will be telling the world something it will be shocked to learn. The entire world already knows that we waterboarded prisoners. It knows we subjected prisoners to various other types of degrading treatment. It knows we used black sites, secret prisons. Those practices haven’t been a secret for a decade. Terrorists might use the report’s reidentification of the practices as an excuse to attack Americans, but they hardly need an excuse for that. That has been their life’s calling for a while now.

What might cause a surprise not just to our enemies, but to many Americans is how little these practices did to aid our efforts to bring 9/11 culprits to justice and to find and prevent terrorist attacks today and tomorrow. That could be a real surprise since it contradicts the many assurances provided by intelligence officials on the record and in private that enhanced interrogation techniques were indispensable in the war against terrorism.

And I suspect the objection of those same officials to the release of this report is really focused on that disclosure; torture’s ineffectiveness. Because we gave up much in the expectation that torture would make us safer. Too much. Obviously, we need intelligence to defeat our enemies, but we need reliable intelligence. Torture produces more misleading information than actionable intelligence. And what the advocates of harsh and cruel interrogation methods have never established is that we couldn’t have gathered as good or more reliable intelligence from using humane methods. The most important lead we got in the search for Osama Bin Laden came from conventional interrogation methods. I think it’s an insult to the many intelligence officers who have acquired good intelligence without hurting or degrading suspects. Yes, we can and we will.

But in the end, torture’s failure to serve its intended purpose isn’t the main reason to oppose its use. I have often said and will always maintain that this question isn’t about our enemies, it’s about us. It’s about who we were, who we are and who we aspire to be.

Source: Daily Klos

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Proposed Federal Bill Would Prevent States, FDA, And Anyone Else From Informing Consumers Whether Food Is Bioengineered | Emord & Associates Blog

By Eric Awerbuch

EmordandAssociatesIn April, 2014, five members of Congress introduced a bill, H.R. 4432 (hereinafter “the Bill”) seeking to regulate, among other things, the labeling of bio-engineered food products.[i]  The Bill, also known as the “Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2014,” is remarkable in that it:  1) prohibits the States from regulating the labeling of bio-engineered foods; 2) gives the FDA the sole authority to regulate the labeling of bio-engineered foods, but severely restricts how the FDA can regulate the labeling of bio-engineered foods; 3) allows companies to voluntary label their products as bio-engineered when they so desire, subject to very few restrictions; and 4) prohibits under any circumstances the FDA’s ability to decide in the future whether bio-engineered foods are less safe than foods not bio-engineered.  Each of these points is discussed in detail below.

First, if the Bill passes, States will not be able to enact any laws regulating the labeling of bio-engineered foods.  Section 104(c) of the Bill explicitly states that:

No State or political subdivision of a state may directly or indirectly establish under any authority or continue in effect as to any food in interstate commerce any requirements for the labeling of a food by virtue of its having been developed using bioengineering, including any requirements for claims that a food is or contains an ingredient that was developed using bioengineering.

The quoted language would have the effect of nullifying efforts in at least 20 states to require mandatory labeling for foods that contain genetically modified organisms.[ii]  For example, Vermont enacted a law, effective July 1, 2016, that will require foods produced from genetic engineering be labeled as such.[iii]

Instead of allowing states to regulate the marketing of bio-engineered foods, the Bill purports to give the FDA such authority.  However, the FDA’s authority to regulate labeling of bio-engineered foods is greatly restricted by the terms of the Bill.  Specifically, the FDA may only require bio-engineered food labeling when it determines that 1) there is a “material difference” between the bio-engineered food and its comparable marketed food, and 2) where that difference “is necessary to protect health safety” or to prevent false or misleading labeling.[iv]  Even if those two elements exist, the FDA can only require specific labeling that “would adequately inform consumers of such material difference.”[v]  Stated differently, not only can the States not require genetically modified foods to be labeled as genetically modified, the FDA cannot even require that labeling, unless the FDA can meet the two elements identified above.  Even where the FDA can meet those two elements, the mandatory labeling must be narrowly tailored to inform consumers of the specific “material” difference between the bio-engineered food and its similar, non-bio-engineered counterpart.

What exactly is a “material difference” requiring that companies inform consumers of the difference?  The bill provides three types of differences which are considered to be material.  The first type of “material difference” is a difference that “significantly alters the characteristics, including the functional or compositional characteristics, of a food, such that the common name no longer adequately describes the food.”[vi]   It is difficult to know when such a situation would arise because “significantly alters” is not defined.  Therefore, should the Bill pass, the FDA would be entitled to a great amount of discretion to determine whether or not a bio-engineered product is “significantly altered.”  See Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Res. Def. Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837, 843 (1984) (explaining that an agency’s construction of a statute it administers is owed deference when “the statute is silent or ambiguous” on the issue).  Given the FDA’s conclusions that there is no material difference between bio-engineered food and non-bio-engineered food, it is highly unlikely that the FDA would ever require mandatory labeling when left to their discretion.[vii]  Indeed, while the statute does not define differences that are not material, it does state that the “use of bio-engineering does not, by itself, constitute a material difference.”  Id. at § 424(e).

GMOCornFurthermore, even if there was such a material difference, given that the labeling must only “adequately inform consumers of such material difference,” this requirement could be met, for example, if the company selling the bio-engineered product simply markets the product in a different name than the “similar” non-bio-engineered product.  It seems that sweet and firm, bio-engineered “tomatoes” would be able to be marketed as “specially formulated sweet and firm tomatoes.”  That label would inform consumers of the material difference—that the new tomatoes are sweet and firm—without even revealing the fact that they are bio-engineered.

The second type of “material difference” is a difference that “results in a significantly different nutritional property in the food produced from, containing or consisting of the bio-engineered organism.”[viii]    Once again, given that the labeling must only “adequately inform consumers of such material difference,” a company could label bio-engineered corn with higher protein content than non-bio-engineered corn as “high protein corn,” without ever revealing the fact that the corn is bio-engineered.

The third difference resulting in a “material difference” is where the bio-engineered food contains an allergen that consumers would not expect to be present based upon the name of the food.[ix]  A company could simply label the product with a warning such as, “warning: this product contains [allergen.]”  Again, the company would not have to disclose the fact that the product is bio-engineered.  Indeed, given that the labeling must only “adequately inform consumers of such material difference,” it is likely that the FDA will never be authorized to require that companies disclose the fact that a product is bio-engineered when narrower labels adequately inform consumers of the material differences.

While mandatory labeling is allowed only in narrow circumstances under the Bill, companies would have great opportunity to voluntarily label their bio-engineered products as they so choose.  The Bill prevents the FDA from prohibiting persons “from disclosing voluntarily on the labeling of food developed with the use of bio-engineering the manner in which the food has been modified to express traits or characteristics that differ from its comparable marketed food.”[x]  Thus, a company is free to market the differences between their bio-engineered product and similar, non-bio-engineered foods. For example, a company selling bio-engineered tomatoes may claim that “our bio-engineered tomatoes benefit the environment more than non-bio-engineered tomatoes because our tomatoes consume less water during the growing process than non-bio-engineered tomatoes.”  Companies will also be free to voluntary advertise, other than in labeling, that the food was developed with the use of bio-engineering.[xi]

The Bill also regulates the labeling of foods that are not bio-engineered.[xii]  It explicitly prohibits the labeling of non-bio-engineered foods from suggesting that “foods developed without the use of bio-engineering are safer than foods produced from, containing, or consisting of a bio-engineered organism.”[xiii]  In a day and age where courts routinely defer to agencies because agency’s have “expertise” in certain, factual issues, see Marsh v. Oregon Natural Resources Council, 490 U.S. 360, 377 (1989) (explaining that the Court defers to the agency’s analysis when the issue requires a high level of technical expertise), it is alarming that, through the Bill, Congress is making a scientific determination that non-bio-engineered foods are not safer than bio-engineered foods.  While the FDA does not currently consider non-bio-engineered to be safer than bio-engineered foods,[xiv] the Bill prevents FDA from ever reconsidering that opinion.

The Bill will have the ultimate effect of keeping Americans in the dark about information they may deem material to their purchasing decisions.  By legislating that the fact that a food is bio-engineered is not per se material, without any supporting evidence, the Bill seeks to foreclose any opportunity for a party to prove with empirical evidence that, in fact, the fact that a food is bio-engineered is indeed material to consumers’ purchasing decision.  It is plausible that, if the Bill passes, no federal agency or any other governmental entity would be allowed to require companies to disclose the fact that their product is bio-engineered in any circumstances.  The Bill will act to, at best, fail to inform consumers that they are consuming bio-engineered products, and, at worst, mislead consumers into believing that there are no bio-engineered products on the market.

[i] See H.R. 4432, 113th Cong., 2d Sess. (2014), available at https://www.congress.gov/113/bills/hr4432/BILLS-113hr4432ih.pdf.

[ii] Jenny Hopkinson, GMO labeling bill would trump states, Politico (Apr. 9, 2014, 4:57 PM), http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/gmo-labeling-bill-105548.html.

[iii] See 9 V.S.A. §§ 3043(a)–(b).

[iv] H.R. 4432, supra note 1, at § 104(c).

[v] Id. at § 424(e).

[vi] Id. at § 424(g)(4)(A).

[vii] See Draft Guidance for Industry Voluntary Labeling Indicating whether Foods have or have not been Developed using Bioengineering, 2001 WL 34768203 (F.D.A. Jan. 17, 2001), available at http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocumentsRegulatoryInformation/LabelingNutrition/ucm059098.htm.

[viii] Id. at § 424(g)(4)(B).

[ix] Id. at § 424(g)(4)(C).

[x] Id. at § 425(b)(3)(A).

[xi] Id. at § 425(b)(3)(B).

[xii] See generally, Id. at § 425.

[xiii] Id. at § 425(a)(2)(C).

[xiv] See supra, note vii.

Source: Emord & Associates Blog