Four out of every 10 British families with children under the age of 12 have been replacing meat in their diet with carbohydrates such as pasta and bread to bulk out their meals and get more out of their money. 18% of Brits are buying fewer vegetables and fruits, and almost a third are purchasing less meat, according to Red Tractor.
The cost of food continues to rise in the UK, and the country’s food retailers have warned that price inflation will continue into the foreseeable future. The latest figures show grocery prices are now increasing at their fastest rate on record.
Figures provided by retail analyst Kantar found that grocery price inflation in the country reached a new record high of 16.7% in the four weeks that ended on January 22. This amounts to a nearly £ 800-pound increase on a typical yearly shopping bill. This is a notable increase from the 14.4% recorded in December and the highest level since figures were first tracked in 2008.
Some categories of food that have noted particularly sharp rises recently include eggs, milk and dog food. However, fruit, vegetables, sugar and alcohol have also noticed steep rises in the past month. According to Kantar, the price of basics such as cheese, milk, butter and bread is up 16.7% on a year-over-year basis. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) reports that olive oil has risen by nearly 40% in the last year, while low-fat milk is up 46% and sugar is up 38.5%.
People are turning to store-label products, cheap carbs and expired food to feed their families
In response to record-setting inflation, some supermarkets are expanding their store label ranges to provide customers with more value. In January, sales of store-label products climbed by 9.3%; sales of branded alternatives only rose by 1%.
Four out of every 10 British families with children under the age of 12 have been replacing meat in their diet with carbohydrates such as pasta and bread to bulk out their meals and get more out of their money. 18% of Brits are buying fewer vegetables and fruits, and almost a third are purchasing less meat, according to Red Tractor.
Another way some people are making ends meet is by eating food that is well past its use-by date. According to the ONS, almost one in five adults say they have eaten food that was beyond its use-by date, which indicates when perishable food can safely be consumed. This is despite the Food Standards Agency warning that individuals should never eat food after this date – even if it smells or looks acceptable – because it could result in serious illness.
The ONS also found that 15% of adults are somewhat or very worried that they will run out of food before they can afford to purchase more. It also revealed that Brits are struggling to stay warm amid the higher costs of energy, with nearly a quarter of those polled saying that they struggled to stay comfortably warm during the previous two weeks.
Discount grocery chains like ALDI and Lidl have noted rising sales. For the fourth month in a row, ALDI was the country’s fastest-growing grocer, noting sales that were 26.9% higher year on year and taking a 9.2% share of the market. Sales at Lidl climbed by 24.1%; they took a market share of 7.1%. Meanwhile, the sales at bigger rivals like Sainsbury’s, Asda and Tesco only saw increases of 6%; sales at Morrisons dropped by 1.9%.
It’s bad news for Brits who are already struggling with inflation across the board. The Bank of England recently raised interest rates for the 10th time in a row, which is pushing monthly mortgage payments higher; its 0.5 percent rise places rates at 4%, which is the highest level seen since the financial crisis of 2008. A further rise to 4.25% is widely expected next month.
Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund has forecasted that the British economy will shrink this year and experience the poorest performance out of all developed countries, including Russia. The news isn’t much better in the U.S., where the prices of many foods have risen exponentially as well.
“The real culprit behind this 138% hike in the price of a carton of eggs,” says the letter, “appears to be a collusive scheme among industry leaders to turn inflationary conditions and an avian flu outbreak into an opportunity to extract egregious profits reaching as high as 40%.”
‘This mass delusion that we are all under through unrelenting propaganda & censorship they are censoring all these things. If I have to read one more article of a young person dying where the word vaccine isn't even mentioned as a possibility it's disgusting’ ~ Dr Pierre Kory pic.twitter.com/Wfd778LASd
Up until now, the medical establishment had stubbornly insisted that fake sweeteners are perfectly safe for human consumption. All concerns to the contrary were dubbed as “conspiracy theories” – that is until covid jabs started killing people and a cover story was needed
Why, all of a sudden, are the dangers of artificial sweeteners being thrust to the forefront of the public health conversation? The natural health community was mocked or ignored for pointing out their dangers previously, but the narrative appears to have shifted now that distractions are needed for covid jabs.
The British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a study recently that links the consumption of artificial sweeteners like aspartame (Sweet’N Low) and sucralose (Splenda) to cardiovascular disease.
A curiously timed endeavor, French researchers decided to take a closer look at fake sweeteners in the context of heart disease right as millions of people “fully vaccinated” for covid are suffering heart effects – and in some cases, sudden death.
Up until now, the medical establishment had stubbornly insisted that fake sweeteners are perfectly safe for human consumption. All concerns to the contrary were dubbed as “conspiracy theories” – that is until covid jabs started killing people and a cover story was needed.
It appears as though some elements of “science” are now attempting to peg all this excess heart damage and sudden death among the fully jabbed on artificial sweetener consumption, which is suddenly on the radar as a health threat after decades of denial. (Related: Covid jab spike proteins cause heart attacks.)
For their research, this new study’s authors looked at 103,388 participants in the web-based NutriNet-Santé cohort. All across the board, they found that artificial sweetener consumption is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular conditions such as coronary heart disease and cerebrovascular disease.
“The findings from this large-scale prospective cohort study suggest a potential direct association between higher artificial sweetener consumption (especially aspartame, acesulfame potassium, and sucralose) and increased cardiovascular disease risk,” the paper concludes.
“Artificial sweeteners are present in thousands of food and beverage brands worldwide, however, they remain a controversial topic and are currently being re-evaluated by the European Food Safety Authority, the World Health Organization, and other health agencies.”
Artificial sweeteners are dangerous, but so are covid injections
While it is certainly true that fake sweeteners are destructive to health, the timing of this study’s publishing in a prominent, widely respected medical journal is suspect.
Why, all of a sudden, are the dangers of artificial sweeteners being thrust to the forefront of the public health conversation? The natural health community was mocked or ignored for pointing out their dangers previously, but the narrative appears to have shifted now that distractions are needed for covid jabs.
It is true that cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the leading cause of death all around the world. This was true before covid jabs were unleashed, and it is still true today. What is not true is the claim that spiking rates of CVD and associated sudden death are some kind of “mystery” that can be explained away by things that people were already doing previously.
The study does not mention covid, vaccines, or excess deaths, but its publishing at this point in time is being used by the media to suggest that the reason why more people these days are suffering stroke and heart attack events is due to even just minimal fake sweetener consumption.
“Basically, what they saw is that people who had as little as two packets a day, or like four ounces of soda, which you know, most sodas are more than four ounces,” said Mona Shah, MD, a cardiologist at Baptist Health Holistic.
“They had a nine percent higher risk of heart attack and 18 percent higher risk of stroke.”
Shah also warned that fake sweeteners disrupt healthy metabolism, which is why she recommends natural alternatives like stevia and monk fruit.
“I think the body’s kind of like, well should I secrete insulin? Wait, this is not real sugar. Or you know, so the whole balance between insulin and glucose over time is getting totally screwed up.”
If you enjoyed reading this story, you will find more like it at Sweeteners.news.
In a greatly anticipated Friday night drop of what was expected to be a cache of information involving the censoring of Hunter Biden’s notebook story days ahead of the 2020 presidential election, moments ago Elon Musk – who worked in collaboration with the notoriously independent gonzo journalist Matt Taibbi of “Vampire Squid” fame – has published the “Twitter Files.”
Shortly before their release, Matt Taibbi sent the following email to his substack subscribers:
Dear TK Readers:
Very shortly, I’m going to begin posting a long thread of information on Twitter, at my account, @mtaibbi. This material is likely to get a lot of attention. I will absolutely understand if subscribers are angry that it is not appearing here on Substack first. I’d be angry, too.
The last 96 hours have been among the most chaotic of my life, involving multiple trips back and forth across the country, with a debate in Canada in between. There’s a long story I hope to be able to tell soon, but can’t, not quite yet anyway. What I can say is that in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions.
Those of you who’ve been here for years know how seriously I take my obligation to this site’s subscribers. On this one occasion, I’m going to have to simply ask you to trust me. As it happens, there may be a few more big surprises coming, and those will be here on Substack. And there will be room here to to discuss this, too, in time. In any case, thanks for your support and your patience, and please hold me to a promise to make all this up to you, and then some.
And this is what Taibbi has been tweeting in the past few minutes (link here):
1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES
2. What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.
3. The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer.
4. Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time.
5. In its early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”
6. As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.
7. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly.
8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.”
9. Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party:
10. Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However:
11. This system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right.
12. The resulting slant in content moderation decisions is visible in the documents you’re about to read. However, it’s also the assessment of multiple current and former high-level executives.
… Okay, there was more throat-clearing about the process, but screw it, let’s jump forward
16. The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story
17. On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop:
18. Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.
19. White House spokeswoman Kaleigh McEnany was locked out of her account for tweeting about the story, prompting a furious letter from Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn, who seethed: “At least pretend to care for the next 20 days.”
20. This led public policy executive Caroline Strom to send out a polite WTF query. Several employees noted that there was tension between the comms/policy teams, who had little/less control over moderation, and the safety/trust teams:
22. Although several sources recalled hearing about a “general” warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence – that I’ve seen – of any government involvement in the laptop story. In fact, that might have been the problem…
23. The decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with the former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role.
24. “They just freelanced it,” is how one former employee characterized the decision. “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.”
25. You can see the confusion in the following lengthy exchange, which ends up including Gadde and former Trust and safety chief Yoel Roth. Comms official Trenton Kennedy writes, “I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe”:
26. By this point “everyone knew this was fucked,” said one former employee, but the response was essentially to err on the side of… continuing to err.
27. Former VP of Global Comms Brandon Borrman asks, “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?”
28. To which former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker again seems to advise staying the non-course, because “caution is warranted”:
29. A fundamental problem with tech companies and content moderation: many people in charge of speech know/care little about speech, and have to be told the basics by outsiders. To wit:
30. In one humorous exchange on day 1, Democratic congressman Ro Khanna reaches out to Gadde to gently suggest she hop on the phone to talk about the “backlash re speech.” Khanna was the only Democratic official I could find in the files who expressed concern.
31. Gadde replies quickly, immediately diving into the weeds of Twitter policy, unaware Khanna is more worried about the Bill of Rights:
32. Khanna tries to reroute the conversation to the First Amendment, mention of which is generally hard to find in the files:
33. Within a day, head of Public Policy Lauren Culbertson receives a ghastly letter/report from Carl Szabo of the research firm NetChoice, which had already polled 12 members of congress – 9 Rs and 3 Democrats, from “the House Judiciary Committee to Rep. Judy Chu’s office.”
34.NetChoice lets Twitter know a “blood bath” awaits in upcoming Hill hearings, with members saying it’s a “tipping point,” complaining tech has “grown so big that they can’t even regulate themselves, so the government may need to intervene.”
35. Szabo reports to Twitter that some Hill figures are characterizing the laptop story as “tech’s Access Hollywood moment”:
36. Twitter files continued: “THE FIRST AMENDMENT ISN’T ABSOLUTE”
Szabo’s letter contains chilling passages relaying Democratic lawmakers’ attitudes. They want “more” moderation, and as for the Bill of Rights, it’s “not absolute”
37. An amazing subplot of the Twitter/Hunter Biden laptop affair was how much was done without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, and how long it took for the situation to get “unfucked” (as one ex-employee put it) even after Dorsey jumped in.
38. While reviewing Gadde’s emails, I saw a familiar name – my own. Dorsey sent her a copy of my Substack article blasting the incident
39. There are multiple instances in the files of Dorsey intervening to question suspensions and other moderation actions, for accounts across the political spectrum
40. The problem with the “hacked materials” ruling, several sources said, was that this normally required an official/law enforcement finding of a hack. But such a finding never appears throughout what one executive describes as a “whirlwind” 24-hour, company-wide mess.
41. It’s been a whirlwind 96 hours for me, too. There is much more to come, including answers to questions about issues like shadow-banning, boosting, follower counts, the fate of various individual accounts, and more. These issues are not limited to the political right.
42. Good night, everyone. Thanks to all those who picked up the phone in the last few days.
* * *
The release was telegraphed one week ago, when Musk acknowledged that revealing Twitter’s internal discussions surrounding the censorship of the New York Post‘s Hunter Biden laptop story right before the 2020 US election is “necessary to restore public trust.”
Raise your hand if you think @ElonMusk should make public all internal discussions about the decision to censor the @NYPost’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 Election in the interest of Transparency.
Recall that the Post had its Twitter account locked in October 2020 for reporting on the now-confirmed-to-be-real“laptop from hell,” which contained still-unprosecuted evidence of foreign influence peddling through then-Vice President Joe Biden – including a 2015 meeting with an executive of Ukrainian gas giant Burisma.
Users who tried to share the link to the article were greeted with a message saying, “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.”
Then, days after Musk’s tweet, Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, admitted it was a ‘mistake’ to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story.
In his first public appearance since becoming an ex-employee, Roth suggested that the Hunter Biden laptop story was simply ‘too difficult’ for Twitter to verify. Alternatively, the company could have perhaps simply trusted the Post, one of America’s oldest publications that doesn’t have a reputation for fabricating bombshell stories – like Twitter does with countless anonymous bombshells from other major publications.
“We didn’t know what to believe. We didn’t know what was true. There was smoke,” Roth said during an interview at the Knight Foundation conference, as noted by the Epoch Times. “And ultimately for me, it didn’t reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter.”
“It set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 ‘hack and leak campaign’ alarm bells,” he said, referring to a notorious team of cyberspies affiliated with Russian military intelligence. “Everything about it looked like a hack and leak.”
When asked whether it was a mistake to censor the story, Roth replied, “In my opinion, yes.”
Would Roth have suppressed the story if it was a Don Jr. laptop full of incriminating evidence?
* * *
Finally, it will be very interesting to see which “independent”, “impartial” and “objective” members of the Mainstream Media cover the Twitter Files, which, unlike all that Russia collusion bullshit, was a real and actionable attempt to interfere with US democracy by covering up one of the most explosive political stories of a generation, not to mention an event that would have swayed the 2020 presidential election.
“There is simply no evidence that healthy schoolchildren in the U.K. are at significant risk from the SARS-CoV-2 virus and to imply that they are is disgracefully misleading,” they said.
In September 2021, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), had advised against a mass roll-out for children aged 12-15, saying the “margin of benefit” was “considered too small” and citing the low risk to healthy children from the virus.
But less than a fortnight later, ministers gave the green light for youngsters to be given a single dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech jab with the U.K.’s Chief Medical Officers arguing that this would help to keep schools open.
After watching this I will not patronize anything Disney, except for Abigail Disney, she is cool. Mind you, it’s not hard for me since I have always disliked Disney, even as a kid. I sensed something wrong and rotten with that organization. Lou
commons.wikimedia
This isn’t just a Disney story. It’s the story of nearly half of American workers who can’t make ends meet
ABIGAIL DISNEY: You know, I think of it as the assholification of America. This isn’t just a Disney story. It’s the story of nearly half of American workers who can’t make ends meet.
The Disney Company is ground zero of the widening inequality in America.
Half of the full-time workers in the United States cannot make ends meet. Thousands of them work for the Walt Disney Company.
The American dream teaches us that if you work hard enough, anything is possible. It’s magical thinking.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Disney could raise the salaries of all of its workers to a living wage. It was possible to do this when my great-uncle and grandfather built the company. It’s possible now.
GUESTS
Abigail Disney filmmaker, activist, and granddaughter of Walt Disney Company co-founder Roy Disney.
Half of the full-time workers in the United States cannot make ends meet. Thousands of them work for the Walt Disney Company. One of them reached out to the dissident heiress Abigail Disney, whose grandfather Roy Disney built what is often called the “happiest place on Earth.” Now she’s made a documentary about how the family business exploits its workers: “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales.” The film follows workers who have difficulty making ends meet despite the lofty claims of the Disney conglomerate. “This is a phenomenon that’s happening across this country in corporations and even around the world,” says Disney, who co-directed the film with Kathleen Hughes. Employees who agreed to be filmed “had a hope that if they could change Disney from within, Disney could lead the way for other corporations,” notes Hughes.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
We end today’s show looking at how half of the full-time workers in the United States cannot make ends meet. Thousands work for the Walt Disney Company. One of them reached out to the dissident heiress Abigail Disney, whose grandfather, Roy Disney, built what’s often called “the happiest place on Earth.” Now she’s made a documentary about how the family business exploits its workers. It’s called The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales. This is the trailer.
DISNEY WORKER: Disneyland was not like anywhere else on Earth. When I started working at the park, the employees were so happy to be there. The company appreciated you. At least it did.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Having the last name Disney is like having a weird superpower you didn’t ask for. But then one day I got a message from a guy named Ralph who worked at Disneyland.
How many of you know somebody who works at Disney who’s slept in their car in the last couple years? How many of you know somebody who have gone without medical care because they can’t afford it?
The American dream teaches us that if you work hard enough, anything is possible. It’s magical thinking.
REP. CAROLYN MALONEY: Dr. Disney.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Disney could raise the salaries of all of its workers to a living wage. It was possible to do this when my great-uncle and grandfather built the company. It’s possible now.
REP. TREY HOLLINGSWORTH: That is socialism. We know what that is.
RALPH: We’re the people who do the pixie dust at night. We scrub the kitchens, the floor, the toilets. With both of us working full-time, we still fall below poverty level.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: A custodian would have to work for 2,000 years to make what Bob Iger makes in one.
UNIDENTIFIED: The Disney Company is ground zero of the widening inequality in America.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: You know, I think of it as the assholification of America. This isn’t just a Disney story. It’s the story of nearly half of American workers who can’t make ends meet.
UNION ORGANIZER: I have this passion growing within me now, building power for working-class people like me.
No justice!
ABIGAIL DISNEY: If you could tell Disney anything, what would you tell me?
Microsoft is the company that funds Mark of the Beast digital identification company ID2020, and now they are promoting New Age witch Marina Abramovic who is best known for the satanic practice of spirit cooking. Is this really someone you would want to enter into holographic mixed reality with?
I suppose you can get away with just about anything if you call yourself a ‘performance artist’ instead of what you actually are, in this case we are talking about a High Priestess of modern-day Satanism, Marina Abramovic.
She is a wicked woman whose ‘performance art‘ usually revolves around snakes, pig’s blood, images of Baphomet, [pebtagrams] and all the rest of that garbage. But nothing to see her, people, Marina is just an ‘edgy performance artist’, that’s all. Yeah, right.
“And he caused his children to pass through the fire in the valley of the son of Hinnom: also he observed times, and used enchantments, and used witchcraft, and dealt with a familiar spirit, and with wizards: he wrought much evil in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him to anger.” 2 Chronicles 33:6 (KJB)
Take a look at an article published by the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies back in 2018, where they calmly and rationally discussed the rise importance of witchcraft in Hollywood. It’s not simply enlightening, it’s a stunning eye-opener, and of course we see Marina Abramovic featured prominently in it.
“We seem to be living in bewitched times. Witches are everywhere, or rather: victims of alleged witch hunts pop up all over the place, preferable on Twitter or other social media outlets. Pop-stars perform as witches, like Katy Perry in her performance at the 2014 Grammy awards, where she appeared in a cowl before a crystal ball, while later dancing with broomsticks as poles.
“Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade” (2016) made several explicit references to black witchcraft rituals. Azealia Banks proclaimed on Twitter that she practiced “three years’ worth of brujería” (witchcraft) and tweeted, while cleaning the blood-smeared room used for her animal sacrifices, “Real witches do real things” (2016).
But do your own research, we have done ours and are satisfied that Marina Abramovic is exactly who we think she is, a New Age witch who hides behind performance art to promote Satanism, witchcraft, and all the rest of her demonic nonsense. So with that, let’s take a look at what Microsoft, the same company who is funding ID2020, is doing with Abramovic. Of course, me writing all these words are actually completely unnecessary, because when you watch the promotional video Microsoft has produced to promote her, it’s lights out and case closed.
Now if you have half a brain, after everything we present to you here, the last place you want to be is in a virtual world with a New Age witch known for satanism, gore and cannibalism. But this is where evil end times company Microsoft wants to take you, don’t go.
Performance Artist Marina Abramovic Breaks New Ground—In Mixed Reality
FROM MICROSOFT: Marina Abramovic is likely the most acclaimed performance artist living today. Known for risky performances that push the limits of human endurance, it’s difficult to overstate her importance within the art world and pop culture at large.
Joslyne Raquel@joslyne_raquel
So on Good Friday Bill Gates’ new Microsoft ad dropped featuring prominent satanist Marina Abramovic who makes “art” out of blood, gore and cannibalism. #SpiritCooking
From the 1970s through to the present, she has created dozens of incredibly impactful works that explore themes of courage, ego, endurance, and spirituality. In 2010, her iconic work The Artist Is Present, was the biggest exhibition at New York City’s MoMA ever. In the piece, she sat still for eight hours, every day, for nearly three months, sustaining eye contact with whomever sat across from her.
“Any medium—visual, aural, even material—is really just a conduit for the energy of the artist to reach the understanding of the audience. In mixed reality we’ve achieved the first medium capable of presenting a recorded performance as an event happening now,” says Todd.
“The artist is forever, in this case, which changes the very nature of what the conduit means. But for the audience with The Life, it’s my hope that they never think about such things. Instead I want them to walk away feeling like they were just in the room with Marina.”
Ahh, the beauty of ‘performance art’
Marina’s most recent piece, The Life, further solidifies her unconventional and innovative approach to performance art—it’s her first artwork to harness mixed reality. Brought to life with the HoloLens 2, the 19-minute performance follows Abramović, whose phantom-like virtual image appears in a vibrant red dress as she explores the space and its borders. Viewers become mesmerized by her mindful movements, her virtual image dissolving as she interacts with the installation’s borders.
For the first time, viewers are able to experience performance art without boundaries—and without the artist technically being “present.” As soon as they don the HoloLens 2 headset, Abramović’s fully realized form takes shape before their eyes. READ MORE
If a picture says a thousand words, how many words is this video telling you? Watch and find out. But at the very least you will instantly see why we call her a New Age witch and a satanist, oops, sorry, performance artist.
Coca-Cola killed trade unionists in Latin America. General Motors built vehicles known to catch fire. Tobacco companies suppressed cancer research. And Boeing knew that its planes were dangerous. Corporations don’t care if they kill people — as long as it’s profitable.
Boeing’s dirty laundry was aired this January when the company released over a hundred pages of emails and instant messages exchanged by employees of the aerospace company to congressional investigators. The communications offered a grim snapshot of Boeing corporate culture — high-level employees insulting the intelligence of FAA officials, discussing ways to mislead aviation regulators, lamenting their own moral turpitude.
Lawmakers professed shock at the documents, calling them “astonishing and appalling” and “incredibly damning.” House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure chair Peter DeFazio said the emails “paint a deeply disturbing picture of the lengths Boeing was apparently willing to go in order to evade scrutiny from regulators, flight crews, and the flying public.”
In a piece for the Financial Times, Bjorn Fehrm, an analyst at aviation consulting firm Leeham, blames Boeing’s apparent “cultural problem” on its merger two decades ago with defense contractor McDonnell Douglas, whose CEO Harry Stonecipher prioritized the company’s bottom line above all else. Cynthia Cole, a former engineer at Boeing, agrees. In an October 2019 interview with NPR, Cole says that following the buyout in 1997, safety and quality began “taking a second seat to schedule and cost.”
It’s a bit mystifying that there are still some who are surprised that corporations and their executives, left to their own devices, engage in unscrupulous, and sometimes deadly, behavior. Coca Cola killed trade unionists in Latin America. General Motors built vehicles known to catch fire in collisions. Tobacco companies hid the cancer-causing properties of their products for decades. The catalog of the ethical and moral crimes of corporations is impressive.
These ethical and moral failings of Boeing, Coca Cola, General Motors, and so many other companies are the norm, not the exception.
Of course, it may well be that, in the case of Boeing, a newfound obsession with increasing profits disrupted long-held corporate norms, transforming Boeing’s culture into one that would put people’s lives at risk if it meant a healthy quarterly return. Certainly, it’s easy to find examples of companies whose corporate culture changed for the worse after the board put a Jack Welch clone at the helm, or a private equity company looking for windfall gains bought out the original owners.
But we should be wary of reading too much into the “Boeing gone bad” story. Its appeal rests on a powerful fiction: that the ground state for corporations, barring infection from a malign force, is to operate according to the moral standards of the community in which they exist.
This assumption elides how the elevation of profit above all else — a defining feature of capitalism — creates a permanent misalignment between the motivations and goals of corporations and those of their stakeholders.
Indeed, we see evidence of this misalignment all around us. The desire for access to high-speed internet runs up against the unwillingness of telecom providers to invest in low-income neighborhoods or rural areas. Dirty energy companies work tenaciously to prevent communities from developing viable solar and wind alternatives. Pharmaceutical companies jack up the price of life-saving medicines.
This misalignment doesn’t just drive a wedge between corporations and their customers, however. It also sours the relationship between bosses and workers, and among workers themselves.
The Boeing case is an extreme example of a broader phenomenon. Every day we’re implicitly and explicitly asked to keep quiet in the face of accounting malfeasance, health and safety violations, harassment and abuse of coworkers, and wage theft. The effects are corrosive, destroying trust and solidarity, and strengthening the power that corporations have to pursue profits with impunity.
In the face of a steep decline in the power of organized labor and the defunding and defanging of federal regulatory agencies, options for American workers to highlight corporate abuses —without risking their job or reputation — are extremely limited. In the choice between exit and voice, most people just try to find a different job, or voice their concerns by griping to their coworkers rather than confronting their boss. This leaves rotten practices and people in place, perpetuating abuse and malfeasance.
In capitalism, the fundamental divergence between the values of corporations and the values of ordinary people is constantly papered over. But sometimes, as in the case of Boeing and the hundreds of lives lost over the past year and a half, the disconnect is impossible to ignore.
It is in these moments that we should emphasize this misalignment — shout from the rooftops that, despite the power of corporations to shape the existence of ordinary people, the values of corporations do not define us.
Love, honesty, kindness, dignity, and pride are the values that motivate most people. Instead of allowing capital to shape society according to its values, we should create institutions that force companies to operate according to our values.
Nicole M. Aschoff is on the editorial board at Jacobin. She is the author of The New Prophets of Capital and the forthcoming The Smartphone Society: Technology, Power, and Resistance in the New Gilded Age.
Following decades of increased life expectancy rates, Americans have been dying earlier for three consecutive years since 2014, turning the elusive quest for the ‘American Dream’ into a real-life nightmare for many. Corporate America must accept some portion of the blame for the looming disaster.
Something is killing Americans and researchers have yet to find the culprit. But we can risk some intuitive guesses.
According to researchers from the Center on Society and Health, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, American life expectancy has not kept pace with that of other wealthy countries and is now in fact decreasing.
The National Center for Health Statistics reported that life expectancy in the United States peaked (78.9 years) in 2014 and subsequently dropped for 3 consecutive years, hitting 78.6 years in 2017. The decrease was most significant among men (0.4 years) than women (0.2 years) and happened across racial-ethnic lines: between 2014 and 2016, life expectancy decreased among non-Hispanic white populations (from 78.8 to 78.5 years), non-Hispanic black populations (from 75.3 years to 74.8 years), and Hispanic populations (82.1 to 81.8 years).
“By 2014, midlife mortality was increasing across all racial groups, caused by drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, suicides, and a diverse list of organ system diseases,” wrote researchers Steven H. Woolf and Heidi Schoomaker in a study that appears in the latest issue of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association.
At the very beginning of the report, Woolf and Schoomaker reveal that the geographical area with the largest relative increases occurred “in the Ohio Valley and New England.”
“The implications for public health and the economy are substantial,” they added, “making it vital to understand the underlying causes.”
Incidentally, it would be difficult for any observer of the U.S. political scene to read that passage without immediately connecting it to the 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Taking advantage of the deep industrial decline that has long plagued the Ohio Valley, made up of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Kentucky, Trump successfully tapped into a very real social illness, at least partially connected to economic stagnation, which helped propel him into the White House.
Significantly, thirty-seven states witnessed significant jumps in midlife mortality in the years leading up to 2017. As the researchers pointed out, however, the trend was concentrated in certain states, many of which, for example in New England, did not support Trump in 2016.
“Between 2010 and 2017, the largest relative increases in mortality occurred in New England (New Hampshire, 23.3%; Maine, 20.7%; Vermont, 19.9%, Massachusetts 12.1%) and the Ohio Valley (West Virginia, 23.0%; Ohio, 21.6%; Indiana, 14.8%; Kentucky, 14.7%), as well as in New Mexico (17.5%), South Dakota (15.5%), Pennsylvania (14.4%), North Dakota (12.7%), Alaska (12.0%), and Maryland (11.0%). In contrast, the nation’s most populous states (California, Texas, and New York) experienced relatively small increases in midlife mortality.
Eight of the 10 states with the highest number of excess deaths were in the industrial Midwest or Appalachia, whereas rural US counties experienced greater increases in midlife mortality than did urban counties.
A tragic irony of the study suggests that greater access to healthcare, notably among the more affluent white population, actually correlates to an increase in higher mortality rates. The reason is connected to the out-of-control prescription of opioid drugs to combat pain and depression.
“The sharp increase in overdose deaths that began in the 1990s primarily affected white populations and came in 3 waves,” the report explained: (1) the introduction of OxyContin in 1996 and overuse of prescription opioids, followed by (2) increased heroin use, often by patients who had become addicted to prescription opioids, and (3) the subsequent emergence of potent synthetic opioids (eg, fentanyl analogues)—the latter triggering a large post-2013 increase in overdose deaths.
“That white populations first experienced a larger increase in overdose deaths than nonwhite populations may reflect their greater access to health care (and thus prescription drugs).”
In September, Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, reached a tentative settlement with 23 states and more than 2,000 cities and counties that sued the company, owned by the Sackler family, over its role in the opioid crisis
Other factors also helped to drive up the U.S. mortality rate, including alcoholic liver disease and suicides, 85% of which occurred with a firearm or other method.
The United States spends more on health care than any other country, yet its overall health report card fares worse than those of other wealthy countries. Americans experience higher rates of illness and injury and die earlier than people in other high-income nations.
Researchers were perplexed but not surprised by the data as there existed clear signs back in the 1980s that the United States was heading for a cliff as far as longevity rates go.
So what is it that’s claiming the life of Americans, many at the prime of their life, at a faster pace than in the past? The reality is that it is likely to be an accumulation of negative factors that are finally beginning to take a toll. For example, apart from the opioid crisis, there has also been an almost total collapse of union representation across Corporate America, which has essentially crushed any form of workplace democracy. This author, a former member of three worker unions, witnessed this egregious abuse of corporate power firsthand, which is apparent by the total stagnation of wages for many decades.
Today’s real average wage – that is, after accounting for inflation – has about the same purchasing power it did about half a century ago. Meanwhile, in the majority of cases, increases in salary have a marked tendency to go to the highest-paid tier of executives.
In a report by Pew Research, “real terms average hourly earnings peaked more than 45 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 had the same purchasing power that $23.68 would today.”
One needs only consider the growing mountain of tuition debt now consuming the paychecks of many university graduates, many of whom have yet to land their dream 6-figure job from their relatively worthless liberal education, to better understand the quiet desperation that exists across the country.
At the same time, the exponential rise in the use of social media, which has been proven to trigger depression and loneliness in users, also deserves serious consideration. What society is experiencing with its massive online presence is a total overhaul as to the way human beings relate to each other. Presently, it would be very difficult to argue that the changes have been positive; in fact, they seem to be contributing to the early demise of millions of Americans in the prime of life.
Taken together, abusive labor practices that ignores workplace democracy, the epidemic of opioid usage, compounded by the anti-social features of ‘social media’ suggests a perfect storm of factors precipitating the rise of early deaths in the United States. Since all of these areas fall in one way or another under the control of corporate power, this powerful agency must find ways to help address the problem. The future success of America depends upon it.
The Canada Revenue Agency found tax leakage with companies big and small in the report released Tuesday.(Chris Wattie/Reuters)
Canadian companies avoided paying up to $11.4 billion worth of taxes they should have paid in the single tax year of 2014, according to the federal tax agency.
The Canada Revenue Agency released its fifth and final report on the tax gap, this one focusing on corporate taxes. Previous reports examined factors such as sales tax fraud, domestic tax evasion, and the use of offshore tax havens to look at how much leakage Canada’s taxation system has.
Tuesday’s report estimates that in the 2014 tax year, Canadian corporations managed to pay somewhere between $9.4 billion and $11.4 billion less than they should have in taxes.
Broadly speaking, bigger companies seem to be responsible for a bigger chunk of corporate tax leakage. The CRA report says small companies avoided paying between $2.7 billion and $3.5 billion in taxes. By the CRA’s definition, there were just over two million small companies in Canada that filed taxes that year.
Big companies, meanwhile, avoided paying between $6.7 billion and $7.9 billion. According to the CRA, there were about 14,000 big companies that filed some sort of income taxes in 2014.
A CRA analysis has found Canadian corporations managed to dodge paying roughly $10 billion in taxes in a single year. (Fabrizio Costantini/Bloomberg)
The tax agency is cracking down on that sort of behaviour, and says it thinks it will be able to recoup between 55 and 65 per cent of the corporate taxes it feels it is owed for 2014. That brings Canada’s corporate tax gap bill down to $3.3 billion and $5.3 billion in 2014.
The CRA says Canadian corporations earned $298 billion in taxable income that year, and paid about $40.9 billion in federal taxes. That means if their estimates about tax leakage are correct, the taxman missed out on about a quarter of the corporate tax revenue that could have been recouped.
“Our government is committed to cracking down on tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance, in Canada and offshore,” said Diane Lebouthillier, Canada’s minister of national revenue.
Along with previous reports, Tuesday’s corporate tax data “will help the CRA evaluate its approaches and better target compliance actions to ensure a tax system that is fair and equitable for all Canadians,” she said.
While the government is eager to recoup that money, even the tax authority admits not all of that $11-billion unpaid tax bill happened because companies were knowingly trying to defraud the system. Often, honest mistakes are to blame, including ignorance of tax law changes, accidentally overclaiming of deductions and credits, and even an inability to file taxes properly when businesses fail or go bankrupt during the year.
“Like other taxpayers, corporations may be non-compliant with their tax obligations due to both intentional and unintentional actions ranging from honest mistakes to aggressive tax avoidance,” the CRA said.
Sonia Dhaliwal, an accounting professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, said the $11-billion figure was higher than she thought it would have been, but in and of itself, it isn’t enough to make her think Canada has a rampant problem with corporate tax evasion.
Dhaliwal has previously worked with countless companies on tax issues and said that on the whole, companies big and small “try their best to be compliant.”
While corporate tax rates are comparatively lower in Canada than they are elsewhere, she said, the country actually has among the more complex tax systems in the world.
“Complexity could perhaps lead to non compliance because they’re not familiar with the rules.”
The story line is going out that the economic boom is weakening and the Federal Reserve has to get the printing press running again. The Fed uses the money to purchase bonds, which drives up the prices of bonds and lowers the interest rate. The theory is that the lower interest rate encourages consumer spending and business investment and that this increase in consumer and business spending results in more output and employment.
The Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, and Bank of England have been wedded to this policy for a decade, and the Japanese for longer, without stimulating business investment. Rather than borrowing at low interest rates in order to invest more, corporations borrowed in order to buy back their stock. In other words, some corporations after using all their profits to buy back their own stock went into debt in order to further reduce their market capitalization!
Far from stimulating business investment, the liquidity supplied by the Federal Reserve drove up stock and bond prices and spilled over into real estate. The fact that corporations used their profits to buy back their shares rather than to invest in new capacity means that the corporations did not experience a booming economy with good investment opportunities. It is a poor economy when the best investment for a company is to repurchase its own shares.
Consumers, devoid of real income growth, maintained their living standards by going deeper into debt. This process was aided, for example, by stretching out car payments from three years to six and seven years, with the result that loan balances exceed the value of the vehicles. Many households live on credit cards by paying the minimum amount, with the result that their indebtedness grows by the month. The Federal Reserve’s low interest rates are not reciprocated by the high credit card interest rate on outstanding balances.
Some European countries now have negative interest rates, which means that the bank does not pay you interest on your deposit, but charges you a fee for holding your money. In other words, you are charged an interest rate for having money in a bank. One reason for this is the belief of neoliberal economists that consumers would prefer to spend their money than to watch it gradually wither away and that the spending will drive the economy to higher growth.
What is the growth rate of the economy? It is difficult to know, because the measures of inflation have been tampered with in order to avoid cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients and the payment of COLA adjustments in contracts. The consumer price index is a basket of goods that represents an average household’s expenditures. The weights of the items in the index are estimates of the percentage of the household budget that is spent on those items. A rise in the prices of items in the index would raise the index by the weight of those items, and this was the measure of inflation.
Changes were made that reduced the inflation that the index measured. One change was to substitute a lower price alternative when an item in the index rose in price. Another was to designate a rise in price of an item as a quality improvement and not count it as inflation.
Something similar was done to the producer price index which is used to deflate nominal GDP in order to measure real economic growth. GDP is measured in terms of money, and some of the growth in the measure is due to price increases rather than to more output of goods and services. In order to have a good estimate of how much real output has increased, it is necessary to deflate the nominal measure of GDP by taking out the price rises. If inflation is underestimated, then real GDP will be overestimated. When John Williams of Shadowstats adjusts the real GDP measure for what he calculates is a two-percentage point understatement of annual inflation, there has been very little economic growth since 2009 when a recovery allegedly began, and the economy remains far below its pre-recession level in 2008.
In other words, the belief that the US has had a decade long economic recovery is likely to be an illusion produced by underestimating inflation. Indeed, every day experience with the prices of food, clothing, household goods, and services indicates a higher rate of inflation than is officially reported.
The low unemployment rate that is reported is also an illusion. The government achieves the low rate by not counting the unemployed. The economic and psychological cost of searching for a job are high. There are the economic costs of a presentable appearance and transport to the interview. For a person without a pay check, these costs rapidly mount. The psychological costs of failure to find a job time after time also mount. People become discouraged and cease looking. The government treats discouraged workers who cannot find jobs as no longer being in the work force and omits them from the measure of unemployment. John Williams estimates that the real rate of US unemployment is 20%, not 3.5%
The decline in the labor force participation rate supports Williams’ conclusion. Normally, a booming economy, which is what 3.5% unemployment represents, would have a rising labor force participation rate as people enter the work force to take advantage of the employment opportunities. However, during the alleged ten year boom, the participation rate has fallen, an indication of poor job opportunities.
The government measures jobs in two ways:the payroll jobs report that seeks to measure the new jobs created each month (which is not a measure of employment as a person may hold two or more jobs) and the household survey that seeks to measure employment. The results are usually at odds and cannot be reconciled. What does seem to emerge is that the new jobs reported are for the most part low productivity, low value-added, lowly paid jobs. Another conclusion is that the number of full time jobs with benefits are declining and the number of part-time jobs are rising.
A case could be made that US living standards have declined since the 1950s when one income was sufficient to support a family. The husband took the slings and arrows of the work experience, and the wife provided household services such as home cooked nutritious meals, child care, clean clothes, and an orderly existence. Today most households require two earners to make ends meet and then only barely. Saving is a declining option. A Federal Reserve report a couple of years ago concluded that about half of American households could not produce $400 cash unless personal possessions were sold.
As the Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policy has not served ordinary Americans or spurred investment in new plant and equipment, who has it served? The answer is corporate executives and shareholders. As the liquidity supplied by the Federal Reserve has gone mainly into the prices of financial assets, it is the owners of these assets who have benefited from the Federal Reserve’s policy. Years ago Congress in its unwisdom capped the amount of executive pay that could be deducted as a business expense at one million dollars unless performance related. What “performance related” means is a rise in profits and share price. Corporate boards and executives achieved “performance” by reducing labor costs by moving jobs offshore and by using profits and borrowing in order to buy back the company’s shares, thus driving up the price.
In other words, corporate leaders and owners benefited by harming the US economy, the careers and livelihoods of the American work force, and their own companies.
This is the reason for the extraordinary worsening of the income and wealth distribution in the United States that is polarizing the US into a handful of mega-rich and a multitude of have-nots.
The America I grew up in was an opportunity society. There were ladders of upward mobility that could be climbed on merit alone without requiring family status or social and political connections. Instate college tuition was low. Most families could manage it, and the students of those families that could not afford the cost worked their way through university with part time jobs. Student loans were unknown.
That America is gone.
The few economists capable of thought wonder about the high price/earnings ratios of US stocks and the 26,000 Dow Jones when stock buy-backs indicate that US corporations see no investment opportunities. How can stock prices be so high when corporations see no growth in US consumer income that would justify investment in the US?
When President Reagan’s supply-side economic policy got the Dow Jones up to 1,000 the US still had a real economy. How can it be that today with America’s economy hollowed out the Dow Jones is 25 or 26 times higher? Manipulation plays a role in the answer. In Reagan’s last year in office, the George H.W. Bush forces created the Working Group on Financial Markets, otherwise known as the “plunge protection team,” the purpose of which was to prevent a stock market fall that would deny Bush the Republican nomination and the presidency as Reagan’s successor. The Bush people did not want any replay of October 1987.
The plunge protection team brought together the Federal Reserve, Treasury, and Securities and Exchange Commission in a format that could intervene in the stock market to prevent a fall. The easiest way to do this is, when faced with falling stock prices, to step in and purchase S&P futures. Hedge funds follow the leader and the market decline is arrested.
What few, if any, economists and financial market commentators understand is that today all markets are rigged by the plunge protection team. For at least a decade it has not been possible to evaluate the financial situation by relying on traditional thinking and methods. Rigged markets do not respond in the way that competitive markets respond. This is the explanation why companies that see no investment opportunities for their profits better than the repurchase of their own shares can have high price/earnings ratios. This is the explanation why the market’s effort to bring stock prices in line with realistic price/earnings ratios is unsuccessful.
As far as I can surmise, the Federal Reserve and plunge protection team can continue to rig the financial markets for the mega-rich until the US dollar loses its role as world reserve currency.
* * *
We live in a Matrix of Lies in which our awareness is controlled by the explanations we are given. The control exercised over our awareness is universal. It applies to every aspect of our existence. In the article above I showed that not only is our understanding of the economy controlled by manipulation of our minds, but also the markets themselves are controlled by official intervention. In brief, you can believe nothing that you are officially told. If you desire truth, you must support the websites that are committed to truth.
For over a decade, Monsanto has been engaged in building and maintaining “hit lists” of journalists, lawmakers and regulators to be taken out if they opposed the evil agenda of GMOs and toxic glyphosate weed killer chemicals that now inundate the world food supply. Any influential person who opposed the Monsanto agenda was subjected to one or more of the following:
Attempted bribery
Death threats and intimidation
Character assassination through well-funded “negative P.R.” campaigns
Defamation via coordinated Wikipedia attacks, run by Monsanto operatives
Career destruction, such as getting scientists blacklisted from science journals
Being doxxed, having their home addresses publicized and their families and co-workers threatened
In other words, Monsanto has been running a “black ops” division for over ten years, spending perhaps $100 million or more on efforts to silence, destroy or assassinate anyone who interfered with the agricultural giant’s market dominance.
Now, the criminal mafia activity that Monsanto has carried out for years is finally being exposed as law enforcement closes in on the crimes of this evil agricultural giant now owned by Bayer, a corporation that appears to be making an effort to “clean house” and end the Monsanto crimes that targeted journalists, lawmakers and regulators with intimidation and bribery campaigns.
Law enforcement preparing criminal charges against Monsanto division operatives
“French prosecutors said on Friday they had opened an inquiry after newspaper Le Monde filed a complaint alleging that Monsanto – acquired by Bayer for $63 billion last year – had kept a file of 200 names, including journalists and lawmakers in hopes of influencing positions on pesticides,” reports Reuters.
This “hit list” of journalists and lawmakers was directly translated into action to intimidate, threaten or bribe these individuals, just as happens in the United States. In fact, a Monsanto spokesperson now confirms the Monsanto mafia used the list to take out anyone standing in the way of the Monsanto agenda. “There have been a number of cases where – as they would say in football – not the ball was played but the man, or woman, was tackled,” admitted Matthias Berninger to Reuters. Berninger is the “head of public affairs and sustainability” of Monsanto.
Further into the statement, Berninger admits Monsanto collected “non-publicly available data about individuals” and then issued an apology from Bayer for the activity. “Following an initial review, we understand that this initiative has raised concerns and criticism,” said Bayer in a May 12th public statement. “This is not the way Bayer seeks dialogue with society and stakeholders. We apologize for this behavior.”
What Natural News can reveal is that Monsanto hired black ops teams and private investigators to dig up the personal locations of individuals and their families, then engaged in activities to threaten and intimidate those individuals while publicly smearing them online through coordinated, well-funded character assassination campaigns.
This author believes that, over the last decade, I have been personally hunted by Monsanto-funded black ops teams who intended to destroy my credibility and physically harm my person in order to silence my public criticism of Monsanto and end the publishing of MonsantoMafia.com, GMO.news, Glyphosate.news and the dozens of other websites that Monsanto did not want to see published.
Health Ranger: I am willing to share details with Bayer’s investigation team in exchange for a public apology and a retraction of the smears
I am willing to consider the possibility that Bayer is genuine in its attempts to clean up the “Monsanto mafia” mess that it has inherited. It is possible that the culture of Bayer is not nearly as evil and corrupt as the culture of Monsanto, which is why I am willing to sit down with Bayer’s internal investigators and privately detail the illegal tactics that have been used against myself and others who spoke out against the multiple criminal activities carried out by Monsanto’s “black ops” teams.
I will do this in exchange for a public apology from Bayer that specifically names myself, the Food Babe, Jeffrey Smith and other individuals in the independent media (there are about twenty) who have been specifically targeted, smeared and threatened by Monsanto operatives over the years. Bayer may contact my legal team for more details of what we are requesting.
This is a rare opportunity for Bayer to hear directly from the victims of the Monsanto “black ops” division that Bayer likely was not aware it was acquiring when it purchased Monsanto, since the entire division operated in secret and relied on internal corporate money laundering to obfuscate its operations.
Bayer’s attorneys may reach out to Natural News through our public contact page. Our attorneys are also initiating contact with Bayer’s legal team to initiate discussions.
Bayer says it will support criminal indictments of Monsanto operatives
If you read the Bayer announcement that went public on May 12, you’ll find that Bayer is openly supporting the criminal indictment of Monsanto operatives who ran its black ops division. “Bayer will fully support the public prosecutor’s office in France in its investigation,” says the statement.
That same statement also explains:
As an immediate measure, we have decided to suspend our cooperation with the involved external service providers for the time being. The responsible Monsanto manager left the company shortly after the acquisition.
The “external service providers” were, Natural News has learned:
Negative P.R. firms hired to engage in online character assassination.
Rogue private investigators tasked with geo-locating targeted individuals.
“Wet work” intimidation / assassination teams that were directed to threaten violence and / or carry out direct violence against “enemies” of Monsanto, including the targeting of innocent family members.
Bayer goes on to explain, “We are also currently investigating further appropriate consequences both internally and with regard to external parties. Bayer stands for openness and fair dealings with all interest groups. We do not tolerate unethical behavior in our company.”
If true, this would stand in great contrast to Monsanto itself, which was run like a criminal mafia organization, complete with “hit men” and terror campaigns that focused on critics of the biotech company.
Perhaps Bayer is hoping to clean up the Monsanto nightmare and initiate a new era of operations where public debate replaces the intimidation, threats and murder campaigns run by former Monsanto operatives. As someone who has been routinely targeted, threatened and smeared by Monsanto, I am willing to entertain the possibility that Bayer is looking to right past wrongs. Even though I may never agree with the widespread use of herbicides and pharmaceuticals across society, I don’t go out of my way to criticize corporations unless they are engaged in acts of extreme evil.
McDonald’s for example, sells all sorts of garbage food products that are unhealthy for society, but McDonald’s doesn’t hire hit teams to hunt down and try to assassinate critics, for example. McDonald’s just runs ads and tries to get the public to focus on social happiness instead of the chemical pesticides found in their products. And for the most part, it works. Nobody goes to McDonald’s expecting an all-organic diet in the first place. McDonald’s is a “voluntary compromise” where a consumer is obtaining convenience and low cost in exchange for surrendering a bit of their own long-term health. But no one from McDonald’s puts a gun to their head and demands, “EAT HERE OR DIE MUTHA F##KA,” which is essentially the way Monsanto was run for over a decade.
Investigating “the project Monsanto commissioned”
Finally, I want to draw your attention to one more line in the Bayer press release. It refers to “the project Monsanto commissioned” and promises to “evaluate the allegations.”
I can report to you that this “project” is the black ops unit of Monsanto. It was commissioned by angry, evil Monsanto managers whose personal hatred and violence is only exceeded by the violence of the Monsanto corporation itself, which unleashed Agent Orange on the world, along with a long list of other deadly chemicals that were used against innocent civilians as weapons of war.
Monsanto was run by some of the most evil, criminal-minded people in the history of the world. These people, I believe, are directly responsible for acts of extreme violence — both online and offline — that specifically targeted Monsanto critics like myself. They belong behind bars, and it looks like Bayer may actually be willing to help put them there.
It’s time for Bayer to close the chapter on this Monsanto era of disinformation, destruction and death. Otherwise, the anger against Monsanto that is well deserved and widely publicized across the activist community will continue to reflect on Bayer and its share price. Monsanto has committed acts of tremendous evil against innocent, well-meaning individuals who only advocated a cleaner food supply and honest labeling. If Bayer does not open a dialogue with these activists and help resolve some of these issues, Bayer will continue to pay the price for crimes that it inherited through its acquisition of Monsanto, which has already proved disastrous from a financial point of view.
I believe the only way Bayer can resolve this is to talk to those of us who suffered through these malicious attacks and still somehow made it out alive. Bayer needs to publicly apologize, set the record straight, admit the crimes of the Monsanto black ops managers, and retract all the smear articles and Wikipedia entries it funded.
In this Feb. 15, 2018 file photo, Judith Enck, centre, former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency addresses those gathered at a protest against President Trump’s plan to expand offshore drilling for oil and gas. A U.S. judge in Alaska says Trump exceeded his authority when he reversed a ban on offshore drilling in vast parts of the Arctic Ocean and dozens of canyons in the Atlantic Ocean. (David Klepper/The Associated Press)
President Donald Trump exceeded his authority when he reversed bans on offshore drilling in vast parts of the Arctic Ocean and dozens of canyons in the Atlantic Ocean, a U.S. judge said in a ruling that restored the Obama-era restrictions.
Judge Sharon Gleason in a decision late Friday threw out Trump’s executive order that overturned the bans that comprised a key part of Obama’s environmental legacy.
Presidents have the power under a federal law to remove certain lands from development but cannot revoke those removals, Gleason said.
“The wording of President Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawals indicates that he intended them to extend indefinitely, and therefore be revocable only by an act of Congress,” said Gleason, who was nominated to the bench by Obama.
A message left Saturday for the Department of Justice was not immediately returned.
The American Petroleum Institute, a defendant in the case, disagreed with the ruling.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 