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Saturday, May 24, 2014

Millions Worldwide March Against Monsanto

Published on Saturday, May 24, 2014 by Common Dreams

Dr. Vandana Shiva: "We did not choose to target Monsanto. Monsanto chose to target our seed and food freedom, our scientific and democratic institutions, our very lives."

- Lauren McCauley, staff writer

Marchers in Durban, South Africa. (Photo: @Revonews/ Twitter)"It's time to take back our food!" was the cry as people in 52 countries worldwide took to the streets in a global day of action on Saturday against chemical behemoth Monsanto.

The third annual March Against Monsanto (MAM) is slated to be the biggest yet, according to movement founder Tami Canal, with millions of people in over 400 cities expected to take part.

“From Agent Orange to Monsanto’s pending patents directly affiliated with weather modification to the gross government corruption, MAM has evolved to expose all the insidious tentacles that Monsanto possesses,” said Canal in an interview with Anti-Media.

Across social media, protesters shared images from demonstrations around the world where people called for the permanent boycott of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and other harmful agro-chemicals.

"People often ask me 'Why Monsanto?'" wrote food justice advocate Dr. Vandana Shiva in a statement on the March. "My response is, we did not choose to target Monsanto. Monsanto chose to target our seed and food freedom, our scientific and democratic institutions, our very lives."

"Monsanto wants superprofits through total control over nature and humanity," Shiva continued.

"The greed and violence of one corporation cannot be allowed to destroy life on Earth, the lives of our farmers, the lives of our children," Shiva added. "That is why we March Against Monsanto."

Citing recent successes such as a ban on GMO cultivation in two Oregon counties and thepassage of a GMO labeling initiative in Vermont, Canal said the movement has already seen a number of "positives" this year, where people "truly battled the Goliath biotech industry and overcame the odds and financial power of companies like Monsanto."

Though GMOs have been at least partially banned in over 15 countries and must be labelled in 62 countries, according to MAM organizers, food safety advocates face an uphill battle in the U.S.

"The revolving door between Monsanto employees, government positions, and regulatory authorities has led to key Monsanto figures occupying positions of power at the FDA and EPA," the group writes in their call to action.

A list of all March Against Monsanto demonstrations can be found here.

Report: Hillary Clinton is Scared of Trey Gowdy's Investigation

Report: Hillary Clinton is Scared of Trey Gowdy's Investigation

Hillary Benghazi

Report: Hillary Clinton is Scared of Trey Gowdy’s Investigation

When it comes to the Benghazi terrorist attack, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should bear most of the blame.  She is the one responsible for cuttingsecurity at the compound, refusing the requests for more security, and then hiring a radical Islamic militia to help guard the compound.
After the attack, even while it was still on-going, Hillary was the first to lie about the cause of the attack.  She then deliberately continued to lie about the attack being the result of a protest over a video, when she knew right away that it was instead a planned and coordinated terrorist attack.
Now with the formation of the Benghazi Select Committee, which has overwhelmingsupport from the American people, it is looking a little more likely that those responsible for the attack will finally be held accountable.  Trey Gowdy, Chair of the Benghazi Committee, has promised to use his subpoena power to question and depose Hillary Clinton, compelling her to testify under oath.
Gowdy’s Benghazi Committee has Hillary Clinton and her team of advisers worried that their coverup will finally fall apart.  Now that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has finally appointed five Democrats to fill out the rest of the Benghazi Committee, there is speculation that Clinton’s team may have had a hand in picking those Democrats committee members, in order to help her out during testimony.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) publicly considered boycotting the panel, an idea that Clinton supporters feared would leave the potential 2016 candidate exposed to the enemy fire of House Republicans.So Clinton emissaries launched a back channel campaign, contacting several House Democratic lawmakers and aides to say they’d prefer Democrats participate, according to sources familiar with the conversations. Pelosi’s staff said they have not heard from Clinton’s camp.
“Republicans are making it clear they plan to use the power of the Benghazi Select Committee to continue to politicize the tragedy that occurred in Benghazi, which is exactly why Democratic participation in the committee is vital,” a Democrat close to Clinton world said. “Inevitably, witnesses ranging from Secretary Clinton to Secretary [John] Kerry will be subpoenaed to testify, and the Democrats appointed to the committee will help restore a level of sanity to the hearings, which would otherwise exist solely as a political witch hunt.”
Hillary is worried because she knows she’s vulnerable to harsh criticism for her non-action inthe diplomatic compound in Benghazi prior to the attack. She had her own Commission – the Pickering whitewash, that placed the entire blame for the tragedy on a couple of low level State Department flunkies who weren’t even fired – absolve her of any incompetence and wrongdoing.
Now, Congress is going to look at things for real and her team is rightly scared. And unlike the Pickering Commission, Hillary is likely to testify.
As stated before, Hillary Clinton is the one that is most responsible for what happened in Benghazi, and she knows it.  Eventually, she will have to come before Trey Gowdy and his committee, and face some tough questioning that will likely break through the coverup and reveal the truth and the lies for what they are.
Hillary Clinton has already lied to Congress in her previous appearance before a committee.  For that, she should also be held accountable, and prosecuted for her lies, something any of us would be prosecuted for if we did it.
Once the truth is finally revealed, it should be the stake in the heart of any Presidential aspirations Hillary may still be entertaining.  Benghazi is just the latest in a long list of reasons why Hillary Clinton must never become the President of these United States.
 

Judge Jeanine: What would we do if the lights went out?

 

Judge Jeanine: What would we do if the lights went out?

Vulnerability of the U.S. power grid

Judge Jeanine: What would we do if the lights went out?
Sun, 23 Feb 2014 18:25:26 GMT

Report: 25% of Americans saving $0 for retirement

 

(NBC NEWS) Retirement savings for about a quarter of Americans amounts to … $0.

One out of every four Americans is not saving for retirement at all, either because they are not thinking about it, do not really know how, or worse, do not feel they can afford to, according to a report by Country Financial.

Americans between the ages of 18-29, often called “millennials“, are among the worst when it comes to saving for retirement, the firm said. A full 32 percent of them aren’t saving at all for their “golden years.”

Report: 25% of Americans saving $0 for retirement
-NO AUTHOR-
Fri, 23 May 2014 19:43:24 GMT

Pelosi drops brand-new whopper with VA blame

 

WASHINGTON — House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is blaming former President George W. Bush for the Veterans Administration scandal, but, according to the VA’s own numbers, she has the facts wrong.

Pelosi never mentioned Bush by name at a press briefing Thursday, but she left no doubt as to whom she was talking about.

She referred to “the ramifications of some seeds that were sown a long time ago, when you have two wars over a long period of time and many, many more, millions more veterans.”

Pelosi then blamed the VA scandal on an increase in veterans due to recent wars.

“[W]e go in a war in Afghanistan, leave Afghanistan for Iraq with unfinished business in Afghanistan. Ten years later, we have all of these additional veterans. In the past five years, two million more veterans needing benefits from the VA. That’s a huge, huge increase.”

Actually, according to government statistics, there are far fewer veterans in the VA.

According to the VA, the number of vets declined by 4.3 million from 2000 to 2013.

Democrats such as Pelosi claim more money is the solution.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said, “If the VA does not have enough doctors to see these patients, then these problems are a result of a lack of funding.”

But spending on the VA actually tripled from 2010 to 2013.

John Merline at Investor’s Business Daily crunched the numbers and found the VA’s budget has been exploding, even as the number of veterans steadily declines.

Even more telling, wounded warriors coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan are not increasing treatment costs.

Those vets are actually far cheaper to treat than aging vets.

In fact, the costs of treating veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is almost half of what it cost to treat other vets.

A Congressional Budget Office report found that the younger vets cost $4,800, on average, in 2010 compared with $8,800 for other veterans who used the system.

It also found, while the Iraq and Afghan vets account for 7 percent of patients treated, they were responsible for only 4 percent of health costs.

Iraq and Afghan vets, the report found, “are typically younger and healthier than the average VHA patient and as a result are less expensive to treat.”

A problem that Democrats such as Pelosi face in trying to blame Bush for the scandal is Obama’s long history of declaring the VA needed fixing and claiming he was working on the problems.

In a 2007 speech, then-Sen. Obama said: “Keeping faith with those who serve must always be a core American value and a cornerstone of American patriotism. Because America’s commitment to its servicemen and women begins at enlistment, and it must never end.”

During his transition into the White House in 2008-09, Obama even proposed in his “Obama-Biden” plan to “make the VA a leader of national health care reform so that veterans get the best care possible.”

Obama was also warned of severe problems at the VA repeatedly over the years, even before he became president.

  • WND discovered that Obama was briefed on problems at the VA as far back as 2005, when he was a senator and a member of the Veterans Affairs committee.
  • The Washington Times reported Monday that the Obama administration received notice more than five years ago that VA medical facilities were reporting inaccurate waiting times and experiencing scheduling failures that threatened to deny veterans timely health care.
  • VA officials reportedly warned the Obama-Biden transition team in the weeks after the 2008 presidential election that the wait times the facilities were reporting were not trustworthy.
  • More recently, House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller, R-Fla., wrote a letter to Obama on May 21, 2013, that warned of “an alarming pattern of serious and significant patient care issues at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Centers (VAMCs) across the country … (including) failures, deceptions, and lack of accountability permeating VA’s healthcare system. Miller concluded: “I believe your direct involvement and leadership is required.”
  • WND reported last week that Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., reminded VA Secretary Eric Shinseki that Congress had been informed two years ago that gaming the system at the VA was so widespread, employees would look to get around regulations as soon as the rules were implemented.

Pelosi even had the temerity to suggest Obamacare might be the key to fixing the VA scandal, stating, “We have the Affordable Care Act that is out there that is providing resources for more federally-qualified health clinics around the country.”

Critics such as Rush Limbaugh have pointed out just the opposite, warning that the immense problems with government-run healthcare at the VA are a preview of such horrors as death panels under the Affordable Care Act.

Similarly, John Fund wrote in National Review that the VA scandal was “a warning sign of what could happen as the pressure to ration, inherent in all government-managed health care, is applied to the general population.”

However, Pelosi did make a suggestion favored by advocates of free-market reforms of the health-care system.

She implied it might be better to treat vets in private clinics rather than at VA facilities.

“Maybe we should take a look at how we deal with our veterans’ needs in a way that says let’s help them closer to home, whether that’s a federally qualified health clinic or in some other institution that provides health care closer to home. [It's] especially important for our veterans who live in rural areas.”

Many Republican critics have said recently that having the federal government provide vouchers to allow vets to see private doctors would be a humane way to get them help and an efficient method to deal with the tremendous backlog in the VA system.

When Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., floated the idea, even the editorial board of his home-state paper, the left-of-center Arizona Republic, said “that might make sense.”

In the video below, Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., who served as a physician at the prestigious Johns Hopkins Hospital and as a medical officer in the Naval Reserve, makes the case for health-care vouchers so vets can opt out of the VA health system, calling it “the real free-market solution for helping our veterans.”

Follow Garth Kant on Twitter @DCgarth

Pelosi drops brand-new whopper with VA blame
Garth Kant
Fri, 23 May 2014 21:01:59 GMT

Mortar round kills dozens of Assad supporters at rally

 

(Los Angeles Times) Anti-government rebels lobbed a mortar shell at a campaign rally supporting President Bashar Assad in southern Syria on Friday, killing several dozen people and wounding many others, according to state media and opposition sources.

The attack heightened fears of escalating violence in pro-regime areas as the June 3 election approaches.

The Syrian state news agency SANA said the mortar shell struck a tent full of Assad’s supporters in the border city of Daraa early Friday morning. The agency blamed “armed terrorist groups,” a term the Syrian government uses to describe opposition fighters.

Mortar round kills dozens of Assad supporters at rally
-NO AUTHOR-
Fri, 23 May 2014 21:50:01 GMT

Who gave the U.S. gov’t permission to control the ionosphere in the first place?

 

(Truthstream Media) Yes, HAARP — the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program — can be used to manipulate the weather… …but even though the actual HAARP patent itself — “Weather modification is possible by, for example, altering upper atmosphere wind patterns or altering solar absorption patterns by constructing one or more plumes of atmospheric particles […]

Who gave the U.S. gov’t permission to control the ionosphere in the first place?
Melissa Melton
Thu, 22 May 2014 04:05:49 GMT

Taking on the Divide and Conquer Keeping Humanity Down

 

Joe Joseph welcomes Tempest Harbor, Kev Baker, and Marty of the Kev Baker show to discuss all of the divide and conquer tactics that are employed to keep humanity fighting amongst each.

website: thefreedomlink.net

Taking on the Divide and Conquer Keeping Humanity Down
freedomlink
Sat, 24 May 2014 02:00:00 GMT

The Truth About The VA Medical System Scandal

 

On this edition of DTRH Popeye covers the ongoing problems with the VA medical system. He takes President Obama to the woodshed for his lies about it, and his weak excuses. In hour two Popeye shows how the problems with the VA are not new at all, and in fact have been going on for a very long time. He gives examples of a few different veterans whose lives were permanently effected because of lack of care, and neglect, including his own.

website: federaljack.com

The Truth About The VA Medical System Scandal
downtherabbithole
Fri, 23 May 2014 04:00:00 GMT

California drive-by gunman kills seven in Santa Barbara

 

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A gunman has killed six in drive by shootings near Santa Barbara, California.

Police are looking at a possible link to a YouTube video. The video shows a man threatening to take revenge after repeated rejections from women. As well as the seven people killed, a further seven are in the hospital with gunshot wounds.

Witnesses described seeing a black BMW speeding through the streets of Isla Vista, near the university of California Santa Barbara campus, with shots being fired from the car.

Student Michael Vitek told local TV station KEYT he had seen one woman being fatally struck and another critically injured. “I heard shots, scream, pain,” he said.

After two exchanges of gunfire with police the suspect crashed into a parked car. The driver was dead with a gunshot wound to the head.

Investigators know the suspect’s name but would not release it before all relatives were notified, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown told reporters.

“We have obtained and are currently analysing videotaped evidence that suggests that this atrocity was a premeditated mass murder,” Sheriff Brown said.

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Contributed by Chris Carrington of The Daily Sheeple.

Chris Carrington is a writer, researcher and lecturer with a background in science, technology and environmental studies. Chris is an editor for The Daily Sheeple. Wake the flock up!

California drive-by gunman kills seven in Santa Barbara
Chris Carrington
Sat, 24 May 2014 15:26:39 GMT