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Vermont just passed the nation’s first GMO food labeling law. Now it prepares to get sued | Washington Post



PHOTO CAPTION: Edge Fuentes, left, stands with his wife Katie Spring, right, and their 9-month-old son Waylon in their planting room surrounded by seedlings for vegetables and flowers at their Good Heart Farmstead in Worcester, Vt. Spring and Fuentes backed the GMO labeling law, arguing people need to be able to know what’s in their food. (AP Photo/Wilson Ring)

By Niraj Chokshi

Vermont on Thursday became the first state in the nation to require the labeling of genetically engineered foods.

Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) signed that mandate into law on Thursday afternoon, saying in a statement “we believe we have a right to know what’s in the food we buy.” The new law represents a significant victory for advocates who have for years pushed such measures at the state and local level. But there remains one more hurdle to overcome: a likely lawsuit.

There’s no guarantee of legal action, of course, but legislators, officials and advocates are preparing for the state to be sued over the new law. Last month, state Attorney General Bill Sorrell told Vermont Public Radio that he would be “very surprised” if the state isn’t sued. And officials were so sure of a challenge that the measure itself creates a $1.5 million legal defense fund, to be paid for with settlements won by the state. They think it’s coming, but they also say they’re ready.

“The threat of a lawsuit worked for a while, but now it doesn’t work anymore,” says Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association, whose organization has for years worked with activists and lawmakers in Vermont on the issue. “I think they may go ahead and sue and do it rather quickly in the hopes that it may gather momentum,” he added, referring to biotech industry groups.

Other states have pursued similar measures, but Vermont’s law will be the first of its kind. Connecticut and Maine passed labeling requirements, but with trigger clauses requiring multiple other states to pass labeling requirements before their own go into effect. At least 25 states have considered such legislation, according to a recent report on labeling requirements from the nonprofit Council for Agricultural Science and Technology. And advocates are hopeful they will get a measure on the Oregon ballot this year.

Efforts to label GMO foods, 2013. (Council for Agricultural Science and Technology Issue Paper 54)

PHOTO CAPTION: Efforts to label GMO foods, 2013. (Council for Agricultural Science and Technology Issue Paper 54)

Industry groups argue that such laws are costly and bad for consumers. But even some academics have questioned the reasons for implementing a labeling requirement.

That recent report — authored by professors from the universities of California, Illinois and Missouri — found no science-based reason for singling out genetically engineered foods. They also suggested that such requirements could have possible trade implications — many of the labeling requirements in other countries violate World Trade Organization agreements, they write — and that food costs could potentially rise if companies decide to use non-modified ingredients instead of simply slapping a genetically modified organism (GMO) label on products. (If they opt to comply with labeling requirements instead, costs could be minimal.)


PHOTO CAPTION: A tomato breeder displays varieties grown at the Monsanto Co. facility in Woodland, California. Monsanto is the world’s largest producer of genetically engineered seed. (Noah Berger/Bloomberg)

Proponents argue that the science behind genetically modified food is far from conclusive and ask why consumers should take risks without knowing what they’re eating. If companies truly stand behind the safety of GMO foods, they shouldn’t worry about having to identify them, advocates for labeling argue.

Whatever the wisdom of labeling policies, though, Vermont is set to move forward with its requirement. Cummins and others are relatively calm about the prospect of lawsuits, though, because they’re prepared. Advocates expect industry will challenge the law on three constitutional grounds, none of which they expect to be successful (of course). Here’s how the food industry may fight back and why labeling proponents think they can win, according to their legal analyses.

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1. The First Amendment argument

The first argument that industry is expected to make in challenging Vermont’s GMO law is that it violates commercial free speech rights under the First Amendment. (Businesses have limited free speech protections based on the benefit of free-flowing information to an open society.)

The Supreme Court has established two tests for reviewing whether such rights have been violated, according to two legal analyses of Vermont’s law. Under one test — from Zauderer v. Office of Disciplinary Counsel of the Supreme Court of Ohio — the U.S. Supreme Court found that requiring commercial speech is considered constitutional if the required speech conveys “purely factual information in support of a legitimate government interest,” according to a memo from Emord & Associates, a food and drug law firm. In other words, government can require businesses to make factual statements if it’s in the service of the public good in some way.

The other First Amendment test revolves around whether a state can restrict commercial speech. It stems from New York’s attempt,  in the interest of conserving energy, to ban utilities from promoting use of electricity. The Supreme Court overturned the ban, challenged by Central Hudson Gas & Electric. In so doing, the court set up a four-part test, according to another memo from the Vermont Law School’s Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic, which represents the Vermont Public Interest Research Group. A limit on commercial speech must meet four requirements, the court found:

  1. First, the court has to decide that the speech is protected, meaning it must be about legal activity and not be misleading.
  2. Second, the government has to claim a substantial interest in limiting the speech.
  3. Third, the policy in question has to “directly advance” that interest.
  4. Fourth, that policy must not overreach in achieving its goal.

Both legal memos and labeling advocates come to the same conclusion: a labeling law will likely pass either test.


PHOTO CAPTION: Javier Alcantar tends to corn crops at the Monsanto test field in Woodland, California. (Noah Berger/Bloomberg)

2. Does federal law trump state law?

Another argument that proponents of GMO labeling expect to hear is that Vermont’s new law stomps on territory covered by the federal government. There are three conditions under which federal law trumps state law, a process known as preemption, according to the Law Clinic memo. They are known as express preemption, field preemption and conflict preemption.

Express preemption is when Congress explicitly says a federal law trumps state laws. Both memos conclude that it has not done so with such labeling requirements, which don’t explicitly govern genetically modified foods. A conflict preemption exists when it’s impossible to comply with both federal and state law. Again, federal regulations don’t touch on the use of “genetically enginereed,” “natural” or similar terms, so it’s possible for a business or individual to comply with federal and state labeling requirements, both memos find. Finally, federal law trumps state law when it’s clear that the federal interest in a field is so great that it’s assumed to be the one in charge. In that instance, “congressional intent to supersede state laws must be ‘clear and manifest,’” which neither memo finds it is.


PHOTO CAPTION: A tassel of corn grows in a field on Pioneer Hi-Bred International land in Waialua, Hawaii. The nation’s leading corn seed companies have farms in Hawaii, but their fields have become a flash point in a spreading debate over genetic engineering. (Audrey McAvoy/AP)

3. Does it interfere with interstate commerce?

The third challenge labeling proponents expect to hear is that the GMO law unconstitutionally interferes with interstate commerce. While the Constitution’s Commerce Clause grants Congress the authority to regulate interstate commerce, it is also understood to implicitly limit state powers to do the same.

The Supreme Court has in the past applied two tests in assessing whether a policy violates the clause. The first is whether a law discriminates against interstate commerce — in other words, does it explicitly favor commerce within the state over commerce between states.

Vermont’s GMO law treats Vermont companies the same as companies based in other states, so advocates are confident it would survive that first test. The second test would ensure that any burden on interstate commerce — e.g. increased costs of labeling GMO foods — are fairly balanced with the local benefits the law provides, such as protecting public health and the environment. Again, advocates conclude the law is balanced.

Source: Washington Post
Read Also: Vermont GMO Labeling Law is Constitutional Under the First Amendment

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The Deep State Hiding in Plain Sight | YouTube & Bill Moyers

Mike Lofgren, a congressional staff member for 28 years, joins Bill Moyers to talk about what he calls Washington’s “Deep State,” in which elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests. “It is how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war,” Lofgren tells Moyers.

Source: YouTube & Bill Moyers

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Putin Is Doing the Complete Bidding of the Rothschilds | War is Crime

By Dave Hodges

PutinDollarBeing a former college basketball coach, I marvel at the skill of a good strategist who can carry out a game plan. Vladimir Putin would have been a great college basketball coach, a masterful poker player, a top used car salesman and he is an excellent leader of his country when it comes to foreign policy. Putin has made the Federal Reserve, Wall Street and our government look amateurish.

If it wasn’t for the fact that Putin has the potential to be one of the most despotic figures in all of history, I would be a fan of his cunning and his ability to carry out an agenda on multiple fronts with precision and skill.

However, there is one group that Putin does not outfox, out-strategize and out maneuver; that would be the forces controlling the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

Putin is developing almost a cult following among some people in the alternative media. To them, he represents a man with the force of conviction to tell international banking to go to hell. To these well-intentioned, but misguided analysts, Putin has succeeded where other world leaders have lost their lives (e.g. JFK, Hussein, etc.). As romantic and appealing as a superhero may be who will ride in and save the world from the evil bankers, nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to Putin. Whether Putin realizes it or not, he is doing the complete bidding of the big boys at the BIS and everything is moving right along according to plan.

This article explores the fact that Putin, although he may be, on the surface, resisting international banking on one level, he is very much under their control on another level. This article will also explore the implications for these events upon the American people.

The Starting Point

In the alternative media, many make the mistake of speaking about the “banksters” as if they were one entity all working towards the same goal which is the establishment of a singular economic system which controls the planet through rabid debt management. Generally, this is true. However, the process of international banking is compartmentalized and when goals are not met, we see divisions emerging and this is exactly what we are witnessing at the present moment.

Before we can effectively analyze how Putin is in the process of putting himself in charge of the world’s chessboard, we need to first take a very brief look at how international banking is organized.

Level One: The Bank for International Settlements

International banking has three major levels. The executive directors of this grand economic scheme, the Bank for International Settlements, from Basel, sit at the head of the table. The BIS sets global economic policy by manipulating currency exchange rates (e.g. IMF), establish lending rates, picking national winners and losers, etc. The singular mission of the BIS is to march the world’s central banks into the NWO that they control.

It can be said that the forces, both known and unknown, are the rulers of the planet.

Level Two: The Central Banks

The second level of power consists of the global central banks including the Federal Reserve which is an unelected cabal of private bankers who have wrestled the financial power of this country away from Congress and control the nation’s money. It is the same in every country. And of course, if an entity controls the money of a nation, they also control those who use their money through the establishment of a predatory debt enslavement system. You learned this principle of finance as a teenager when your parents told you, “For as long as you live under this house, you will do what I say.” The power of the purse determines who controls behavior. The world’s central banks take their marching orders from the Bank for International Settlements because the monetization of the fiat currency that each central bank controls is determined by the BIS.

It can be accurately stated that the central banks are rulers of nations and represent mid-level management in the hierarchy of the process. 

Level Three: The National Banking Industry

The third level of power in this unholy system are the financial institutions of a nation. In our case, this would be institutions such as Goldman Sachs, other lesser Wall Street investment houses as well as the megabanks (e.g. Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, etc.). Policies that are developed in Basel are implemented by these institutions.

The investment houses conduct the day to day management of the polices which flow downhill from the BIS.

Finally, there is everybody else and that would be the sheep of this country who know nothing of how any of this works. Don’t hold your breath on a sudden level of developing awareness, most of us are all too brainwashed by the system to achieve this level of awareness.

The Game Plan for Building a New World Order

Since the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement which established the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the US was made the de facto world policeman as a result, Americans have enjoyed economic dominance because in order to buy energy, the world needed to purchase dollars from our Federal Reserve. After the world departed from the gold standard for the fiat currency standard, the US is the only country that truly enjoyed a solvent currency and our standard of living has reflected this status.

Americans have been allowed to enjoy this most favored status because it became our task, on behalf of the BIS, to put together coalitions of central banks to force unwilling nations into this system. And when a nation, such as Libya and Iraq, attempted to swim upstream against the debt enslavement policies of these banks, the leaders were murdered and the people become indentured debt slaves. The cost to America is endless war, massive debt and a reputation for being the “Great Satan”.

Virtually, all nations have succumbed to this tyranny, with two notable exceptions, Russia and China. To a lesser extent, India has also become problematic for the BIS since they have joined Russia and China in using national currency and/or gold to conduct trade among each other rather than using the “required” dollar.

If the BIS is going to realize its dream of New World Order, Russia, China and the United States economies must all be crushed. For when the world lies in ruin, out of chaos will come order. Putin is the main driving force in making this a reality.

Putin Has Checkmated the Central Banks At Level Two

Putin is defeating the world’s central banks at two levels. One, he is spearheading an effort to move the world away from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. This is what the Syrian and Iranian crisis was all about (e.g. selling oil for gold rather than the Petrodollar) and Putin exposed Obama’s false flag event (i.e. gassing the Syrian rebels) for what it really was. Further, Putin now has the power to refuse to accept the dollar as payment for his gas flowing into Europe. If the Petrodollar dies, what will happen to the US economy? If this does happen, we will find out very quickly why DHS purchased 2.2 billion rounds of ammunition to go with its 2700 armored personnel carriers.

Second, Putin is threatening to become the main supplier of energy on the planet. With the consummation a recent gas deal between the Russians and the Chinese, Putin is undermining the control of energy that the central banks have enjoyed since the early days of the creation of Saudi Arabia to oversee oil production.

Putin is spitting in the face of the Federal Reserve and the other G7 central banks by encouraging Iran to sell its oil for gold. This is turning international finance on its head. Putin also has enough of a military presence, along with nuclear weapons, to stave a direct conventional invasion of his country. Putin has positioned himself to control the energy needs of Europe as the Europeans will be forced to choose between heating their homes or remaining a military ally of the US. This will eventually lead to a disintegration of NATO, thus enhancing Putin’s military power by comparison.

Has Putin Really Killed the New World Order?

The march of the G7 toward consolidating national power under the central banks has stopped dead in its tracks. Russia, China, India and to a lesser extent, Brazil and South Africa are now charting their own independent economic course. When Libya refused to regionalize and weaken its currency and they were adamant about avoiding the debt slavery, their leaders were murdered and their country was conquered by al-Qaeda proxy forces supported by the funds of the G7.

However, Russia and China are not Libya and Iraq. Both nations possess nuclear weapons and sizeable armies. For the moment, the dream of a New World Order appears to be dead. Or is it?

The BIS Employs the Sun Tzu Strategy of “Death’s Ground”

The G7 central banks are impotent against Putin as he has outmaneuvered them at every turn. But for the big boys at Basel, things are proceeding according to plan. If the BIS has to sacrifice some of its central banks to get what it wants, so be it. The BIS will also think nothing of fermenting the conditions for the next world war.

Over 2,000 years ago, Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, imparted a knowledge of military strategy which is still being taught in our service academies and in our war colleges. One of the primary principles of Sun Tzu consists of the concept of placing one’s soldiers on “death’s ground” if you want them to fight hard and achieve victory against all odds. The best military example that comes to mind is what happened to the WWII Normandy invasion force at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. These men were thrown onto a beach where there was no retreat and they were only going to leave the beach dead or victorious. The BIS has employed a Sun Tzu strategy of placing its second level of power, the central banks, on death’s ground. The G7 central banks will conquer Putin, or they will die. However, before rigor mortis sets in, the G7 nations will commence a world war based on economic survival. Again, out of chaos will come order.

World War III Is Inevitable

The failure of the central banks to corral and control Putin has made World War III a likely scenario. As Putin continues on the path of destroying the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, what will the Federal Reserve do? There will be a war to preserve the status quo. As China, Russia and the United States are drawn into a confrontation, the world’s economy will be obliterated along with billions of lives. In the aftermath of the coming global holocaust, the supreme financial rulers of the planet will be waiting to create order, the New World Order, out of chaos.

A willing pawn of the NWO, or not, Putin is no hero. He is doing exactly what is expected. Make no mistake about, the BIS controls the central banks, world finance and Putin. The New World Order is very much alive.

Source:  War is Crime

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Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America | Cato Institute

By Radley Balco

Americans have long maintained that a man’s home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing.

Executive Summary

OverkillAmericans have long maintained that a man’s home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work.

The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers.

These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

This paper presents a history and overview of the issue of paramilitary drug raids, provides an extensive catalogue of abuses and mistaken raids, and offers recommendations for reform.

About the Author

Radley Balko is a policy analyst for the Cato Institute specializing in vice and civil liberties issues. He is a columnist for FoxNews.com and has been published in Time magazine, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Forbes, the National Post, Worth, Reason, and several other publications. Balko has also appeared on CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, NPR, and MSNBC.

Source: Cato Institute

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If I was President of the World, I Would | The Global Conversation

TheGlobalConversation

By Neale Donald Walsch

NDWThe people of the Crimean Peninsula have spoken, in an election that the world must assume was largely untainted by coercion or ballot-box stuffing or other corruptions. The result was never in doubt in any event, as more than 60% of the residents of Crimea are Russian speakers and are deeply embedded in the Russian culture. That majority wants to be part of Russia. It never favored being separated from Russia in the first place.

So the people of the Crimean Peninsula have spoken, voting overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine and become an independent republic, the government of which, all the voters knew, will immediately request membership in the Russian Federation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin made an astonishing statement of agreement with them on Tuesday when, if an NBC News report  by Albina Kovalyova is correct, he said that Crimea was “stolen” from Russia when it was handed to Ukraine in the first place, half a century ago.

The NBC News report said that Putin, addressing a joint session of the Russian parliament, “described the 1954 allocation of Crimea to Ukraine by then Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev as a mistake and said that the wishes of the local people had been ignored.”

The NBC report goes on to quote Putin as saying that Russia was going through a difficult period at that time, and that “the people of Crimea were not asked about anything. It was hard to imagine then that Russia and Ukraine would be different countries. But it happened. The U.S.S.R. collapsed.”

The result of this was that “When Crimea became part of a different state, Russia felt it was stolen,” NBC quoted Putin as saying. “A million people went to bed in one country and woke up in another,” the report said he added.

The network said that Putin told the Russian parliament that Russia thought Ukraine would be a friendly neighbor, but that the situation “developed differently.”

On Tuesday Putin apparently went even further, describing Kiev, which is the capital of Ukraine, as “the mother of all Russian cities,” again according to yet another report from NBC News.

President Putin says he would think that Americans would understand and support the vote for independence by the people of Crimea, just as Americans support the whole idea of freedom of choice and independence, having declared its own independence from England many years ago.

Mr. Putin also said that he hoped that Germany and the rest of Europe would understand the desire of Russia to embrace Crimea again as a part of the Russian Federation, just as East and West Germany joined together once again a few years ago to form one nation — a move that, Putin said, Russia supported. He did not point out that this was even though Russia then “lost” East Germany as a satellite region under Russian control.

These words, reportedly from Putin as quoted by NBC News, are being placed here in order to put the entire Crimea/Ukraine situation in a new and larger context, allowing, perhaps, for a deeper understanding of why Russia is taking the position it is now taking regarding Crimea and Ukraine.

This does not make the Russian position “right” (nor does it make it “wrong”) — it simply makes it, perhaps, more understandable to people in the West.

All of which brings us to a remarkable idea placed in the Comments Section beneath the last headline story on this webpage, which also focused on the situation in Crimea, and invited readers to offer their suggestions on how to deal with the apparent impasse between Russia, Ukraine, the U.S., and Europe.

A reader named Cate Grieves wrote…

“If I was the President of the world, I would get all the Presidents together. They then sit around a large ROUND table. They would then have to stick a large white piece of paper to the front of their clothes. On this piece of paper would be their name — in LARGE black ink in capital letters. Then each person hands the person on their left, their name badge. They then put it on.”

“Then, each person has to believe they are the person whose name they have. They then explain to the group, to the best of their ability, why they believe they are right. They are only allowed to speak for the name they have on.”

“After they have all spoken, they move the names along again, one more person to the left.When they have all had a turn at each name badge, they can then discuss an outcome. The other rules for this event are: that no-one is allowed to interupt or criticise what anyone has said. They are all allowed to speak for as long as they want. They do not get to speak with their own name badge.”

Now there’s a fascinating idea. It would be an exercise in wearing the other shoe, and it could offer a remarkable format for creating a solution to more than a few problems around the world. (And in people’s homes!)

It would probably never happen, because “role playing” would probably be considered too “New Agey” or too much like a “psychological game” for world leaders (or couples in a marriage, for that matter) to actually engage in it. But it is an idea that could change the world.

In any event, now having heard more from Vladimir Putin on this whole subject, your own additional comments and observations are invited below. What does our contemporary spirituality invite us to say and do about all of this?

Source: The Global Conversation

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Russia’s New Ability To Evade NSA Surveillance Is Either A Crazy Coincidence Or Something Much Worse | Business Insider

By Michael Kelley

Snowden1U.S. officials think that Russia recently obtained the ability to evade U.S. eavesdropping equipment while commandeering Crimea and amassing troops near Ukraine’s border.The revelation reportedly has the White House “very nervous,” especially because it’s unclear how the Kremlin hid its plans from the National Security Agency’s snooping on digital and electronic communications.

One interesting fact involved is the presence of Edward Snowden in Russia, where he has been living since flying to Moscow from Hong Kong on June 23.

In July, primary Snowden source Glenn Greenwald told The Associated Press that Snowden “is in possession of literally thousands of documents that contain very specific blueprints that would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it.”

So it’s either a coincidence that the Russians figured out how to evade NSA surveillance while hosting the NSA-trained hacker, or else it implies that Snowden may have provided the Russians with access to the NSA’s blueprint.

Snowden told James Risen of The New York Times that he gave all of the classified documents he had taken from the NSA’s internal systems to the journalists he met in Hong Kong and kept no copies himself. However, there are clear issues with that claim and it is still unknown when he gave up access to the cache.

It is also unclear how many documents Snowden ended up taking — officials say he accessed 1.7 million files — or whether the “vast majority” of the intel he took is related to military operations (as opposed to strictly surveillance).

One official told The Wall Street Journal that the Russian camouflage in Ukraine situation is “uncharted territory,” and that a primary concern now is the question of whether Russia could cloak their next move by shielding more communications from the U.S.

Snowden’s detractors seem to have made up their minds about how Russia learned to evade the NSA leading up to and during the invasion of Crimea.

Source: Business Insider

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Climate Change: ‘Abrupt,’ ‘Unpredictable,’ ‘Irreversible’ and ‘Highly Damaging’ | Bill Moyers

By John Light

CoastlineIn a rare move, the world’s largest scientific society released a report nudging the public to wake up to the scientifically sound and increasingly frightening reality of climate change.

“As scientists, it is not our role to tell people what they should do or must believe about the rising threat of climate change,” the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) wrote in the introduction to its new report, “What We Know.” “But we consider it to be our responsibility as professionals to ensure, to the best of our ability, that people understand what we know: human-caused climate change is happening, we face risks of abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes and responding now will lower the risk and cost of taking action.”

“They are very clearly saying that we as the scientific community are completely convinced, based upon the evidence, that climate change is happening and human-caused,” said Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. “The more people understand that the experts have reached this agreement, the more they in turn decide, ‘well, then I think it’s happening, and I think it’s human-caused, and I think it’s a serious problem, and in turn it increases people’s support for policy.”

The report noted that even though 97 percent of experts agree climate change is happening and we humans are causing it, Americans remain under the impression that the question is still unsettled. According to a 2013 report by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, 33 percent of Americans said they believed there was widespread disagreement among scientists and four percent said that “most scientists think global warming is not happening.” Only 42 percent of Americans knew that “most scientists think global warming is happening.”

These numbers suggest that disinformation circulated by the fossil fuel industry, utility companies and their political and media allies has successfully confused the public about the truth of global warming. Spreading the perception that scientists are still undecided is key to their strategy.

Leiserowitz likened it to the campaign waged for decades by tobacco companies. “This in fact was [Big Tobacco’s] primary strategy — to sow doubt,” he said. “They literally wrote, ‘doubt is our product.’ As long as they could give people a false perception that the health community was still undecided about whether smoking caused human health problems, people would continue to smoke. They used that strategy very successfully to delay action on smoking for many years. And it’s been very well-documented that the groups that oppose climate action lifted chapter and verse the exact same strategy right out of the tobacco playbook.”

“That’s the backdrop to this particular statement — that is said very clearly by AAAS — and why it is so important.”

The evidence that human behavior — such as our economies’ reliance on fossil fuels — is causing our climate to change and putting our planet and society at increased risk is overwhelming, the report authors write. “[L]evels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are rising. Temperatures are going up. Springs are arriving earlier. Ice sheets are melting. Sea level is rising. The patterns of rainfall and drought are changing. Heat waves are getting worse as is extreme precipitation. The oceans are acidifying.”

Whether they link it to global warming or not, Americans already detect that something is changing. In 2013, the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication report found that 51 percent said weather in their local area had been worse over the past several years. That observation is in line with research. “These problems are very likely to become worse over the next 10 to 20 years and beyond,” the AAAS authors write. By becoming aware of the science behind global warming now, Americans will be better prepared to make “risk management” choices.

The AAAS says that “What We Know” will have an associated outreach campaign to scientists, economists, community leaders, policymakers and the public through media and meetings.

Source: Bill Moyers

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The truth is out: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it | The Guardian

By David Graeber

British banknotes – moneyBack in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn’t know how banking really works, because if they did, “there’d be a revolution before tomorrow morning”.

Last week, something remarkable happened. The Bank of England let the cat out of the bag. In a paper called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy“, co-authored by three economists from the Bank’s Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong, and that the kind of populist, heterodox positions more ordinarily associated with groups such as Occupy Wall Street are correct. In doing so, they have effectively thrown the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window.

To get a sense of how radical the Bank’s new position is, consider the conventional view, which continues to be the basis of all respectable debate on public policy. People put their money in banks. Banks then lend that money out at interest – either to consumers, or to entrepreneurs willing to invest it in some profitable enterprise. True, the fractional reserve system does allow banks to lend out considerably more than they hold in reserve, and true, if savings don’t suffice, private banks can seek to borrow more from the central bank.

The central bank can print as much money as it wishes. But it is also careful not to print too much. In fact, we are often told this is why independent central banks exist in the first place. If governments could print money themselves, they would surely put out too much of it, and the resulting inflation would throw the economy into chaos. Institutions such as the Bank of England or US Federal Reserve were created to carefully regulate the money supply to prevent inflation. This is why they are forbidden to directly fund the government, say, by buying treasury bonds, but instead fund private economic activity that the government merely taxes.

It’s this understanding that allows us to continue to talk about money as if it were a limited resource like bauxite or petroleum, to say “there’s just not enough money” to fund social programmes, to speak of the immorality of government debt or of public spending “crowding out” the private sector. What the Bank of England admitted this week is that none of this is really true. To quote from its own initial summary: “Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits” … “In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money ‘multiplied up’ into more loans and deposits.”

In other words, everything we know is not just wrong – it’s backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes. There’s really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it. They will never get caught short, for the simple reason that borrowers do not, generally speaking, take the cash and put it under their mattresses; ultimately, any money a bank loans out will just end up back in some bank again. So for the banking system as a whole, every loan just becomes another deposit. What’s more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity. Since the beginning of the recession, the US and British central banks have reduced that cost to almost nothing. In fact, with “quantitative easing” they’ve been effectively pumping as much money as they can into the banks, without producing any inflationary effects.

What this means is that the real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow. Government spending is the main driver in all this (and the paper does admit, if you read it carefully, that the central bank does fund the government after all). So there’s no question of public spending “crowding out” private investment. It’s exactly the opposite.

Why did the Bank of England suddenly admit all this? Well, one reason is because it’s obviously true. The Bank’s job is to actually run the system, and of late, the system has not been running especially well. It’s possible that it decided that maintaining the fantasy-land version of economics that has proved so convenient to the rich is simply a luxury it can no longer afford.

But politically, this is taking an enormous risk. Just consider what might happen if mortgage holders realised the money the bank lent them is not, really, the life savings of some thrifty pensioner, but something the bank just whisked into existence through its possession of a magic wand which we, the public, handed over to it.

Historically, the Bank of England has tended to be a bellwether, staking out seeming radical positions that ultimately become new orthodoxies. If that’s what’s happening here, we might soon be in a position to learn if Henry Ford was right.

Source: The Guardian

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Sunshine Week: Transparency issues persist with Obama administration | Washington Post

By Josh Hicks

ObamaLipsSunday marked the start of Sunshine Week, a time when government-transparency advocates promote their cause and issue reports gauging the openness of federal agencies.

The findings have never been great for the current administration, which promised to be the most transparent in history on the day President Obama took office. In recent years, most agencies have not fully complied with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requirements.

This year’s reports show improvement in some areas, but still much to be desired by news organizations and open-government groups such as the Center for Effective Government and the National Security Archive.

An Associated Press analysis of federal data found that the Obama administration has grown more secretive over time, last year censoring or outright denying FOIA access to government files more than ever since Obama took office.

The administration has also cited more legal exceptions to justify withholding materials and refused to turn over newsworthy files quickly, and most agencies took longer to answer records requests, according to the AP study.

A separate report this week from the National Security Archives found that 54 percent of all agencies have ignored directives that Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder issued in 2009 calling for a “presumption of disclosure” with FOIA requests. The good news: That number is down from about 70 percent of agencies last year.

The National Security Archives also found that nearly half of all federal agencies have not updated their FOIA regulations to comply with 2007 amendments Congress made to the law. The changes require agencies to cooperate with a new FOIA ombudsman in the Office of Government Information Services and report specific data on FOIA output, among other provisions.

The National Security Archive, which claims to file more FOIA requests than any other group, gathers and publishes declassified U.S. government files, with a focus on U.S. foreign policy documents.

In a third analysis, the Center for Effective Government released its annual government-transparency report card on Monday, handing out failing grades to seven of the 15 agencies it reviewed. The scores are based on three metrics: processing requests for information, establishing rules for answering requests and creating user-friendly Web sites.

The White House has put forward an action plan that could help the administration improve its marks by creating one core FOIA regulation and a common set of practices to help requesters and federal agencies better understand the guidelines.

In Congress, the House has passed a bipartisan bill that would require agencies to update their regulations within 180 days.

Source: Washington Post