Puppet MastersS


Bullseye

From Saccharin to GE Seed: Report profiles Monsanto's history peddling chemicals for food, agriculture & war


enewspf.com
Wed, 03 Apr 2013 20:42 UTC
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© cuesa.org
From its beginnings as a small chemical company in 1901, Monsanto has grown into the largest biotechnology seed company in the world with net sales of $11.8 billion, 404 facilities in 66 countries across six continents and products grown on over 282 million acres worldwide. Today, the consumer advocacy nonprofit Food & Water Watch released its report, Monsanto: A Corporate Profile.

"There is a growing movement of people around the country who want to take on Monsanto's undue influence over lawmakers, regulators and the food supply," said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch and author of the book Foodopoly.
"People need to know about Monsanto's history as a heavy industrial chemical manufacturer; a reality at odds with the environmentally friendly, feed-the-world image that the company spends millions trying to convey."
"At the end of March, the American public saw first hand the unjustifiable power that Monsanto holds over our elected officials when an unprecedented rider, dubbed the 'Monsanto Protection Act,' was tacked onto the spending bill to fund the federal government," said Dave Murphy, founder and executive director of Food Democracy Now!
"This is an outrageous interference with our courts and separation of powers and we cannot sit back and allow our elected officials to continue to take orders from Monsanto at the expense of family farmers and consumers."
The report offers a timeline of milestones in the company's history including chemical disasters, mergers and acquisitions, and the first genetically modified plant cell.
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Snakes in Suits

Farmers and consumers vs. Monsanto: David meets Goliath

Tory Field and Beverly Bell
Other Worlds
Sun, 07 Apr 2013 17:26 UTC
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© Tequila Minsky © 2013"Down with Monsanto" read a banner as thousands marched for food sovereignty in Haiti, March 22, 2013.
Bordering an interstate highway in Arkansas, a giant billboard with a photo of a stoic-looking farmer watches over the speeding traffic. He's staring into the distance against the backdrop of a glowing wheat field, with the caption "America's Farmers Grow America." It's an image to melt all our pastoral hearts.

Until we read the small print in the corner: "Monsanto."

The maker of Agent Orange, Monsanto's former motto used to be, "Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible." Today its tag line is "Committed to Sustainable Agriculture, Committed to Farmers." Its website claims the company helps farmers "be successful [and] produce healthier foods... while also reducing agriculture's impact on our environment." It even boasts of the corporation's dedication to human rights.

Behind the PR gloss is a very different picture. Via Campesina, the world's largest confederation of farmers with member organizations in 70 countries, has called Monsanto one of the "principal enemies of peasant sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty for all peoples." Via Campesina members also target Monsanto as a driving influence behind land grabs, forcing small farmers off their land and out of work. The agribusiness giants also contribute to climate change and other environmental disasters, outgrowths of industrial agriculture.
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Wolf

Best of the Web: The Wicked Witch is Dead: Margaret Thatcher's toxic legacy - public division and unfettered corporate greed


The Guardian
Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:03 UTC
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Her legacy is public division, private selfishness and a cult of greed that together shackle the human spirit

Whether you were for her or against her, Margaret Thatcher set the agenda for the past three and a half decades of British politics. All the debates that matter today in the public arena, whether in economics, social policy, politics, the law, the national culture or this country's relations with the rest of the world, still bear something of the imprint she left on them in her years in office between 1979 and 1990. More than 20 years after her party disposed of her when she had become an electoral liability, British public life is still defined to an extraordinary degree by the argument between those who wish to continue or refine what she started and those who want to mitigate or turn it back. Just as in life she shaped the past 30 years, so in death she may well continue to shape the next 30. These are claims that can be made about no other modern British prime minister. She was in many ways the most formidable peacetime leader this country has had since Gladstone.

The fact that Mrs Thatcher was Britain's first and so far only woman major party leader, chosen entirely on merit, and then Britain's first woman prime minister, were of course huge landmarks. But her gender, though fundamental to her story, was in the end secondary. It was at least as significant, in the evolution of the late 20th-century Tory party, that she came from a petit-bourgeois background, a shopkeeper's daughter, though the man she overthrew in 1975, Ted Heath, had similarly middling origins and John Major an even humbler start. There was something of the rebel and outsider about her, as well as much that was stultifyingly conventional.

Comment: In short, she was a psychopath whose pernicious influence spread through society, embodying the destructive principle from the top down. As for the 'kinder, more cohesive face' that succeeded her, Tony Blair was worse than Thatcher... Britain, like the U.S. and elsewhere, is truly in the death grip of a bunch of toxic psychopaths.

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War Whore

Mass slaughter: Twelve civilians, including 11 children killed in Afghan NATO strike


RT
Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:03 UTC
NATO dead children Kunar
© ReutersAfghan villagers sit near the bodies of children who they said were killed during an air strike in Kunar province April 7, 2013.
A NATO airstrike has killed 11 children and one woman in the East of Afghanistan, report local officials. A house collapsed during the attack, causing the casualties and leaving six women injured.

The civilians were killed during a joint Afghan-NATO operation late on Saturday night in the Shigal district of Kunar province, which borders Pakistan.

"Eleven children and a woman were killed when an air strike hit their houses," provincial spokesman Wasifullah Wasifi said on Sunday.

A Reuters journalist saw the bodies of 11 children being carried by their families and other villagers. They were on their way to the office of Mohammad Zahir Safai, the Shigal district chief, to register their protest.

The body of the female victim was not seen, as women's bodies are not displayed in accordance of custom. However, local residents told the journalist of her death.
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Bad Guys

'The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer': 'Kissinger Cables' among latest and biggest WikiLeaks documents release to date


RT
Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:56 UTC
WikiLeaks
© Reuters/Toru Hanai
WikiLeaks has published the 'Kissinger Cables': its largest public release of documents in nearly a year, totaling some 1.7 million classified files, including information on the US's secret diplomatic history.

A variety of files have been collected and collated, including from congressional correspondence, intelligence reports, and cables.

Julian Assange, who heads the organization, told the Press Association that the documents were illustrative of the "vast range and scope" of global US influence. He is to present and mark the release of the documents on Monday in a mass-press conference.

Assange is currently residing at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, under the threat of arrest if he leaves.

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is quoted as saying, "Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, 'The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer'," during a 1975 conversation which included a Turkish and Cypriot official.
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Bad Guys

'He who controls the past controls the future': Assange on massive Project K leak


RT
Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:40 UTC
Julian Assange
© RT
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange formally unveiled on Monday the latest release from the whistleblower site, Project K, calling it "the single most significant geopolitical publication that has ever existed."

Speaking via Skype from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Assange introduced Project K on Monday morning to a group of journalists at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

Nearly three years earlier to the day, Assange spoke at the Press Club in person to debut "Collateral Murder," a video of US soldiers firing at Iraqi civilians that has since become one of WikiLeaks' most well-recognized contributions to journalism. Since that release, WikiLeaks and the organization's associates have become the target of a number of government investigations, with Assange himself having been confined to the embassy in London for nearly one year while awaiting safe passage to Ecuador where he was granted political asylum. Ongoing attempts to prosecute the journalists for sharing state secrets aside, however, Assange and company have now unloaded the organization's biggest leak yet.
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Vader

Thatcher's mean legacy: The queen mother of global austerity and financialization

Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson
Counterpunch
Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:50 UTC
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© REX FEATURES
We typically honor the convention to refrain from speaking ill of the recently departed. But Margaret Thatcher probably would not object to an epitaph focusing on how her political legacy was to achieve her professed aim of "irreversibly" dismantling Britain's public sector. Attacking central planning by government, she shifted it into much more centralized financial hands - the City of London, unopposed by any economic back bench of financial regulation and "free" of meaningful anti-monopoly price regulation.

Mrs. Thatcher transformed the character of British politics by heading a democratically elected Parliamentary government that permitted financial planners to carve up the public domain with popular consent. Like her actor contemporary Ronald Reagan, she narrated an appealing cover story that promised to help the economy recover. The reality, of course, was to raise Britain's cost of living and doing business. But this zero-sum game turned the economy's loss into a vast windfall for the Conservative Party's constituency in Britain's banking sector.

By underpricing her privatization of British Telephone and subsequent vast monopolies, she made it appear that customers would be the big gainers, rather than large financial institutions. And by giving underwriters a windfall 3% commission (formerly based on floating the stock of much smaller start-up companies), Mrs. Thatcher oversaw the start of Britain's Great Polarization between the creditor 1% and the increasingly indebted 99%.
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Bizarro Earth

When war hawks become human rights officials

Chris Hedges
truthdig
Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:37 UTC
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© Leadership Conference on Civil and Human RightsSuzanne Nossel
The appointment of Suzanne Nossel, a former State Department official and longtime government apparatchik, as executive director of PEN American Center is part of a campaign to turn U.S. human rights organizations into propagandists for pre-emptive war and apologists for empire. Nossel's appointment led me to resign from PEN as well as withdraw from speaking at the PEN World Voices Festival in May. But Nossel is only symptomatic of the widespread hijacking of human rights organizations to demonize those - especially Muslims - branded by the state as the enemy, in order to cloak pre-emptive war and empire with a fictional virtue and to effectively divert attention from our own mounting human rights abuses, including torture, warrantless wiretapping and monitoring, the denial of due process and extrajudicial assassinations.

Nossel, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs under Hillary Clinton in a State Department that was little more than a subsidiary of the Pentagon, is part of the new wave of "humanitarian interventionists," such as Samantha Power, Michael Ignatieff and Susan Rice, who naively see in the U.S. military a vehicle to create a better world. They know little of the reality of war or the actual inner workings of empire. They harbor a childish belief in the innate goodness and ultimate beneficence of American power. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, the horrendous suffering and violent terror inflicted in the name of their utopian goals in Iraq and Afghanistan, barely register on their moral calculus. This makes them at once oblivious and dangerous. "Innocence is a kind of insanity," Graham Greene wrote in his novel "The Quiet American," and those who destroy to build are "impregnably armored by ... good intentions and ... ignorance."
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Gold Seal

Best of the Web: Margaret Thatcher and misapplied death etiquette

Glenn Greenwald
The Guardian
Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:26 UTC
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© Don McpheeMargaret Thatcher
The dictate that one 'not speak ill of the dead' is (at best) appropriate for private individuals, not influential public figures

News of Margaret Thatcher's death this morning instantly and predictably gave rise to righteous sermons on the evils of speaking ill of her. British Labour MP Tom Watson decreed: "I hope that people on the left of politics respect a family in grief today." Following in the footsteps of Santa Claus, Steve Hynd quickly compiled a list of all the naughty boys and girls "on the left" who dared to express criticisms of the dearly departed Prime Minister, warning that he "will continue to add to this list throughout the day". Former Tory MP Louise Mensch, with no apparent sense of irony, invoked precepts of propriety to announce: "Pygmies of the left so predictably embarrassing yourselves, know this: not a one of your leaders will ever be globally mourned like her."

This demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death is not just misguided but dangerous. That one should not speak ill of the dead is arguably appropriate when a private person dies, but it is wildly inappropriate for the death of a controversial public figure, particularly one who wielded significant influence and political power. "Respecting the grief" of Thatcher's family members is appropriate if one is friends with them or attends a wake they organize, but the protocols are fundamentally different when it comes to public discourse about the person's life and political acts. I made this argument at length last year when Christopher Hitchens died and a speak-no-ill rule about him was instantly imposed (a rule he, more than anyone, viciously violated), and I won't repeat that argument today; those interested can read my reasoning here.

Comment: And take note that "our political leaders" who "must be heralded and consecrated as saints upon death", refers to Western leaders, who are all psychopaths or patholgicals to some extreme degree or another. It's ok to dance on Chavez's grave because he was a conscientious person who actually cared for others. That around a third of Venezuela's population turned out to send him off in a massive state funeral contrasts sharply with the lack of state funeral for Thatcher: the current Tory government must have suspected that so few people would turn up.

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Ambulance

Suicide car bomber kills 15, brings chaos to Damascus

Oliver Holmes
Reuters
Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:20 UTC
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© Reuters/SANA/Handout A view shows wreckage of cars after a suicide car bomb exploded in the main business district of Damascus April 8, 2013, in this handout photograph distributed by Syria's national news agency SANA .The death toll from a suicide car bomb which exploded in central Damascus on Monday rose to 15, with 47 wounded, Syrian state television said.
A suicide car bomb exploded in the main business district of Damascus on Monday, killing at least 15 people, setting cars ablaze and damaging buildings, according to state television.

A Damascus resident who described the blast as the biggest she had heard in the capital during the two-year-old revolt against President Bashar al-Assad said large plumes of black smoke were rising from the Sabaa Bahrat district.

State television said the explosion had occurred near a school in Sabaa Bahrat, a heavily populated area that also houses the Central Bank and the Finance Ministry. It said 53 people were wounded.

Residents and opposition activists reported hearing gunfire and ambulance sirens in the vicinity. State television said shots had been fired in the air to clear a path for ambulances.
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