10 Things You Need (But Don’t Want) To Know About the BP Oil Spill

Daniela Perdomo
AlterNet
May 27, 2010

It’s been 37 days since BP’s offshore oil rig, Deepwater Horizon, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, crude oil has been hemorrhaging into ocean waters and wreaking unknown havoc on our ecosystem — unknown because there is no accurate estimate of how many barrels of oil are contaminating the Gulf.

Though BP officially admits to only a few thousand barrels spilled each day, expert estimates peg the damage at 60,000 barrels or over 2.5 million gallons daily. (Perhaps we’d know more if BP hadn’t barred independent engineers from inspecting the breach.) Measures to quell the gusher have proved lackluster at best, and unlike the country’s last big oil spill — Exxon-Valdez in 1989 — the oil is coming from the ground, not a tanker, so we have no idea how much more oil could continue to pollute the Gulf’s waters.



Jefferson Parish Homeland security director Deano Bonano responds to government inaction.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster reminds us what can happen — and will continue to happen — when corporate malfeasance and neglect meet governmental regulatory failure.

The corporate media is tracking the disaster with front-page articles and nightly news headlines every day (if it bleeds, or spills, it leads!), but the under-reported aspects to this nightmarish tale paint the most chilling picture of the actors and actions behind the catastrophe. In no particular order, here are 10 things about the BP spill you may not know and may not want to know — but you should.

1. Oil rig owner has made $270 million off the oil leak

Transocean Ltd., the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig leased by BP, has been flying under the radar in the mainstream blame game. The world’s largest offshore drilling contractor, the company is conveniently headquartered in corporate-friendly Switzerland, and it’s no stranger to oil disasters. In 1979, an oil well it was drilling in the very same Gulf of Mexico ignited, sending the drill platform into the sea and causing one of the largest oil spills by the time it was capped… nine months later.

This experience undoubtedly influenced Transocean’s decision to insure the Deepwater Horizon rig for about twice what it was worth. In a conference call to analysts earlier this month, Transocean reported making a $270 million profit from insurance payouts after the disaster. It’s not hard to bet on failure when you know it’s somewhat assured.

2. BP has a terrible safety record

BP has a long record of oil-related disasters in the United States. In 2005, BP’s Texas City refinery exploded, killing 15 workers and injuring another 170. The next year, one of its Alaska pipelines leaked 200,000 gallons of crude oil. According to Public Citizen, BP has paid $550 million in fines. BP seems to particularly enjoy violating the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and has paid the two largest fines in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s history. (Is it any surprise that BP played a central, though greatly under-reported, role in the failure to contain the Exxon-Valdez spill years earlier?)

With Deepwater Horizon, BP didn’t break its dismal trend. In addition to choosing a cheaper — and less safe — casing to outfit the well that eventually burst, the company chose not to equip Deepwater Horizon with an acoustic trigger, a last-resort option that could have shut down the well even if it was damaged badly, and which is required in most developed countries that allow offshore drilling. In fact, BP employs these devices in its rigs located near England, but because the United States recommends rather than requires them, BP had no incentive to buy one — even though they only cost $500,000.

SeizeBP.org estimates that BP makes $500,000 in under eight minutes.

3. Oil spills are just a cost of doing business for BP

According to the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, approximately $1.6 billion in annual economic activity and services are at risk as a result of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Compare this number — which doesn’t include the immeasurable environmental damages — to the current cap on BP’s liability for economic damages like lost wages and tourist dollars, which is $75 million. And compare that further to the first-quarter profits BP posted just one week after the explosion: $6 billion.

BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, has solemnly promised that the company will cover more than the required $75 million. On May 10, BP announced it had already spent $350 million. How fantastically generous of a company valued at $152.6 billion, and which makes $93 million each day.

The reality of the matter is that BP will not be deterred by the liability cap and pity payments doled out to a handful of victims of this disaster because they pale in comparison to its ghastly profits. Indeed, oil spills are just a cost of doing business for BP.

This is especially evident in a recent Citigroup analyst report prepared for BP investors: “Reaction to the Gulf of Mexico oil leak is a buying opportunity.”

4. The Interior Department was at best, neglectful, and at worst, complicit

It’s no surprise BP is always looking out for its bottom line — but it’s at least slightly more surprising that the Interior Department, the executive department charged with regulating the oil industry, has done such a shoddy job of preventing this from happening.

Ten years ago, there were already warnings that the backup systems on oil rigs that failed on Deepwater Horizon would be a problem. The Interior Department issued a “safety alert” but then left it up to oil companies to decide what kind of backup system to use. And in 2007, a government regulator from the same department downplayed the chances and impact of a spill like the one that occurred last month: “[B]lowouts are rare events and of short duration, potential impact to marine water quality are not expected to be significant.”

The Interior Department’s Louisiana branch may have been particularly confused because it appears it was closely fraternizing with the oil industry. The Minerals Management Service, the agency within the department that oversees offshore drilling, routinely accepted gifts from oil companies and even considered itself a part of the oil industry, rather than part of a governmental regulatory agency. Flying on oil executives’ private planes was not rare for MMS inspectors in Louisiana, a federal report released Tuesday says. “Skeet-shooting contests, hunting and fishing trips, golf tournaments, crawfish boils, and Christmas parties” were also common.

Is it any wonder that Deepwater Horizon was given a regulatory exclusion by MMS?

It gets worse. Since April 20, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, the Interior Department has approved 27 new permits for offshore drilling sites. Here’s the kicker: Two of these permits are for BP.

But it gets better still: 26 of the 27 new drilling sites have been granted regulatory exemptions, including those issued to BP.

5. Clean-up prospects are dismal

The media makes a lot of noise about all the different methods BP is using to clean up the oil spill. Massive steel containment domes were popular a few weeks ago. Now everyone is touting the “top kill” method, which involves injecting heavy drilling fluids into the damaged well.

But here’s the reality. Even if BP eventually finds a method that works, experts say the best cleanup scenario is to recover 20 percent of the spilled oil. And let’s be realistic: only 8 percent of the crude oil deposited in the ocean and coastlines off Alaska was recovered in the Exxon-Valdez cleanup.

Millions of gallons of oil will remain in the ocean, ravaging the underwater ecosystem, and 100 miles of Louisiana coastline will never be the same.

6. BP has no real cleanup plan

Perhaps because it knows the possibility of remedying the situation is practically impossible, BP has made publicly available its laughable “Oil Spill Response Plan” which is, in fact, no plan at all.

Most emblematic of this farcical plan, BP mentions protecting Arctic wildlife like sea lions, otters and walruses (perhaps executives simply lifted the language from Exxon’s plan for its oil spill off the coast of Alaska?). The plan does not include any disease-preventing measures, oceanic or meteorological data, and is comprised mostly of phone numbers and blank forms. Most importantly, it includes no directions for how to deal with a deep-water explosion such as the one that took place last month.

The whole thing totals 600 pages — a waste of paper that only adds insult to the environmental injury BP is inflicting upon the world with Deepwater Horizon.

7. BP is sequestering survivors and taking away their right to sue

With each hour, the economic damage caused by Deepwater Horizon continues to grow. And BP knows this.

So while it outwardly is putting on a nice face, even pledging $500 million to assess the impacts of the spill, it has all the while been trying to ensure that it won’t be held liable for those same impacts.

Just after the Deepwater explosion, surviving employees were held in solitary confinement, while BP flacks made them waive their rights to sue. BP then did the same with fishermen it contracted to help clean up the spill though the company now says that was nothing more than a legal mix-up.

If there’s anything to learn from this disaster, it’s that companies like BP don’t make mistakes at the expense of others. They are exceedingly deliberate.

8. BP bets on risk to employees to save money — and doesn’t care if they get sick

When BP unleashed its “Beyond Petroleum” re-branding/greenwashing campaign, the snazzy ads featured smiley oil rig workers. But the truth of the matter is that BP consistently and knowingly puts its employees at risk.

An internal BP document shows that just before the prior fatal disaster — the 2005 Texas City explosion that killed 15 workers and injured 170 — when BP had to choose between cost-savings and greater safety, it went with its bottom line.

A BP Risk Management memo showed that although steel trailers would be safer in the case of an explosion, the company went with less expensive options that offered protection but were not “blast resistant.” In the Texas City blast, all of the fatalities and most of the injuries occurred in or around these trailers.

Although BP has responded to this memo by saying the company culture has changed since Texas City, 11 people died on the Deepwater Horizon when it blew up. Perhaps a similar memo went out regarding safety and cost-cutting measures?

Reports this week stated that fishermen hired by BP for oil cleanup weren’t provided protective equipment and have now fallen ill. Hopefully they didn’t sign waivers.

9. Environmental damage could even include a climatological catastrophe

It’s hard to know where to start discussing the environmental damage caused by Deepwater Horizon. Each day will give us a clearer picture of the short-term ecological destruction, but environmental experts believe the damage to the Gulf of Mexico will be long-term.

In the short-term, environmentalists are up in arms about the dispersants being used to clean up the oil slick in the Gulf. Apparently, the types BP is using aren’t all that effective in dispersing oil, and are pretty high in toxicity to marine fauna such as fish and shrimp. The fear is that what BP may be using to clean up the mess could, in the long-term, make it worse.

On the longer-term side of things, there are signs that this largest oil drilling catastrophe could also become the worst natural gas and climate disaster. The explosion has released tremendous amounts of methane from deep in the ocean, and research shows that methane, when mixed with air, is the most powerful (read: terrible) greenhouse gas — 26 times worse than carbon-dioxide.

Our warming planet just got a lot hotter.

10. No one knows what to do and it will happen again

The very worst part about the Deepwater Horizon calamity is that nobody knows what to do. We don’t know how bad it really is because we can’t measure what’s going on. We don’t know how to stop it — and once we do, we won’t know how to clean it up.

BP is at the helm of the recovery process, but given its corporate track record, its efforts will only go so far — it has a board of directors and shareholders to answer to, after all. The U.S. government, the only other entity that could take over is currently content to let BP hack away at the problem. Why? Because it probably has no idea what to do either.

Here’s the reality of the matter — for as long as offshore drilling is legal, oil spills will happen. Coastlines will be decimated, oceans destroyed, economies ruined, lives lost. Oil companies have little to no incentive to prevent such disasters from happening, and they use their money to buy government regulators’ integrity.

Deepwater Horizon is not an anomaly — it’s the norm.

Surprise: New U.S. border troops won’t be used to stop illegal aliens

I Hate the Media
May 28, 2010

President Obama’s promise to put 1,200 new troops on the border is as empty as the national treasury. Turns out those troops won’t be used to stop the flow of illegal aliens.

AFP has a full report on Obama’s empty promise:

US National Guard troops being sent to the Mexican border will be used to stem the flow of guns and drugs across the frontier and not to enforce US immigration laws, the State Department said Wednesday.

The clarification came after the Mexican government urged Washington not to use the additional troops to go after illegal immigrants.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday authorized the deployment of up to 1,200 additional troops to border areas but State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told reporters, “It’s not about immigration.”

He said the move was “fully consistent with our efforts to do our part to stem, you know, violence, to interdict the flow of dangerous people and dangerous goods — drugs, guns, people.”

He said the extra troops would be used to free up civilians engaged in support functions so that law enforcement personnel can be increased along the 2,000-mile-long (3,200 kilometer) border.

How can you explain Obama’s constant kowtowing to the president of a corrupt third world country against the overwhelming opposition of the American people?

Felipe Calderon must have photos of Barack Obama in compromising positions with farm animals. It’s the only possible answer.

Obama’s Oil Spill Response: The Story Behind the Story

Robert Singer
Infowars.com
May 28, 2010

I have received a number of emails about the environmental impacts of the BP oil spill. The size of the spill and the impacts on wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico ecosystems have prompted a number of readers to write:

“Bob, it looks like you are right, the environmental damage and pollution are the goal and not the unintended consequences.”

Others have noted the irony that the leak is believed to have started on Earth Day, April 22, when the Deepwater Horizon sank. [1]

Dana Milbank, at the Washington Post, appears to realize there is story behind the story of Obama’s bizarre behavior at his lengthy news conference yesterday at the White House.

“For eight years we had a president who refused to accept blame. Now we have one who seems to enjoy it.

He decorated the East Room with wuddas, cuddas and shuddas: “We should have busted through those constraints. . . . pre-deploying boom would have been the right thing to do . . . I do think our efforts fell short. . . . They should have pushed them sooner. . . . I think that it took too long. . . . Where I was wrong was in my belief that the oil companies had their act together.”

As I sat in the fourth row on Thursday, I was struck by the weirdly passive figure before me.

He delivered lawyerly phrases and spoke of his anger about the oil spill but showed none in his voice or on his face.

He was, presumably, there to show how aggressively he has handled the disaster, but he seemed cool, almost bloodless.

CBS’s Chip Reid asked about the resignation hours earlier of Elizabeth Birnbaum, head of the MMS, or Minerals Management Service. “I found out about her resignation today,” Obama replied. Interior Secretary “Ken Salazar has been in testimony throughout the day, so I don’t know the circumstances in which this occurred.”

That’s very clear, sir. But why not share some with the guys at BP who actually are responsible for the spill?”

The leak, instead of being 210,000 gallons of the Earth’s vital fluids being extracted, the Los Angeles Times is now reporting that BP admits “that the leak rate is around 2.5 million gallons a day.

[Excerpt from An Ominous Drilling Sign for the Truth]

Crusextraction of the Earth, Response: Earthquakes And Tsunamis

In 2005, world oil-production alone (not including natural-gas) was an incomprehensible 80 — 100 million barrels of oil per day.

USGS coastal geologists understand these factors cannot be ignored as far as influencing earth crust stresses andconfirm the earth’s response to extracting by force 3,360,000,000 — 4,200,000,000 gallons of the planets vital fluids every single day: Earthquakes and tsunamis.

While disagreement abounds on this topic, scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) say that oil production at plate boundaries where hard, rocky slabs slide against each other to releases tremendous amounts of energy and could be the cause for the 2004 quake that triggered a deadly tsunami in Sumatra.

“Here’s how it works: With high-tech equipment, oil companies pinpoint oil-rich areas and use large drills to puncture the surface below the sea, sometimes as deep as 10,000 feet. As this pricey fluid gets sucked from the sediment pores, the surrounding rocks shift positions to fill in the newly vacated spaces. At a large scale, for example the volume displaced when millions of barrels of oil are produced, the land movement can actually cause a mini-seismic earthquake, said Robert Morton, a USGS coastal geologist.

During these various stages the globe of the earth is gradually being depressurized and cooled internally, causing contraction for both of these reasons. When objects cool down, they automatically shrink/contract in size. If you let high-pressure air or gas out of a cylinder, it forms ice around the outlet, and cools the entire cylinder. If you let some of the air out of a football, or basketball, the ball shrinks and goes badly out of shape.”

“Apply that to the Earth and you have earthquakes — simple common-sense — not rocket-science. A fact so simple that anyone who understands the oil-extraction process would understand, but, because they are insanely-blinded by their insatiable greed and avarice, they often overlook the obvious.” (Paul Noel, JAH, Sterling D. Allan and Mary-Sue Halliburton) [3]

The Prepper Movement — a Growing Network Preparing for the World’s End

Wendy Rose Gould
Asylum
May 28, 2010

If the proverbial you-know-what hit the global fan, would you be prepared? The answer to that question is most likely a big, fat no.



After all, it’s hard to develop life skills (e.g., growing/storing your own food, filtering water) while playing myriad video games or scrounging the Internet for funny videos to post on Facebook.

Turns out, though, that while you may not be concerned about mass chaos and world destruction, a growing number of people are.

Reading labels: What is in your mouth?

Robert Snefjella
Bancroft THis Week
May 28, 2010

Have you ever read the small print on your toothpaste box or tube? If it’s one of the much advertised brands containing fluoride, one may encounter an ominous warning. It would seem that swallowing a bit more than a little bit of the toothpaste produces a medical crisis. We are told that immediate help should be sought from medical professionals or a poison control centre.

Or perhaps your toothpaste fine print merely gives the following odd advice: If you are over six years old, cover the brush with the toothpaste. Someone under six should put only a pea sized amount on the toothbrush and should be supervised by an adult, to avoid swallowing. This begs many questions: for example, what should a six year old do? Why should one not swallow a pea sized amount of the material? What is the threat?

Now consider the situation. Us trusting, gullible folk have been trained to buy a poisonous product and then encouraged to put this poisonous product into our mouths three times a day. And the trick is not to swallow it. The producers of the poison get to escape legal sanction by including a vague warning and puerile advice. But they depend for their continuing profits on us not reading the fine print. A fine point is that the poison also sedates us. Fluoride is a major component of Prozac. Brilliant.

And in case we do peruse the fine print, the producers of the poisonous product also depend on us being so dull and so trusting that what we read will not register, that we will not understand, that the obvious will not penetrate our brain, and that our programming via advertising will trump dear old common sense. Should one decide to behave sensibly, little grasshopper, there are a variety of non fluoride toothpastes available.

Fluoride is a poisonous material that bio-accumulates and broadly undermines health. Originally used as a pesticide and rat poison, and to create apathy among prisoners of war, industrial and mining activity left much fluoride as a byproduct. The decision was made on high to pretend it’s great for teeth and put it into municipal water. This promoted apathy and sickliness in one blow, thus making the population easier to manipulate while contributing to the creation of tens of millions of customers for an avalanche of pills for every ailment. Brilliant.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that mainstream media avoid full honesty like the plague. The unstated role of much so called communication is to manipulate the public on important subjects. It’s called mind control, or brainwashing. That which would arm the public with understanding is censored or distorted. Think of the ‘news’ as your daily dose of fairy tales, superficial theatre, designed to leave you in the dark.

Forthright communication, on the other hand, illuminates our circumstance. Your shortwave radio offers a helpful exception to dishonest information. I’m not religious, but global Christian radio five days a week, from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m., offers the Power Hour, at around 6.6 MHz. This show, which deals with politics and health, repeats very early in the morning around 5 MHz. At noon until 4 p.m. five times a day at around 12.6 MHz you can hear the Alex Jones show, home of forthright communication. The Alex Jones show is repeated at 10 p.m. until 2 a.m. at around 5 MHz.

Dollar to be Replaced with IMF’s SDR as Reserve Currency?

Zero Hedge
May 28, 2010

The new reserve currency?

Jim O’Neill, who did not make any friends within the bear community earlier today, has written an interesting paper on the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights, and whether this hypernational currency can ever become a reserve currency as is, and/or with the CNY as a constituent member. While O’Neill as usual focuses on the angle of the “next paradigm” BRICs, and how they will increasingly dominate global economics, he does pose an important question: with the dollar likely to suffer the side effects of either hyperdeflation, hyperinflation, or hyperstagflation, will the next reserve currency be a diluted melange of other flawed fiat constructs (i.e., the SDR), or the currency of the one country, which for all its flaws, still has the cleanest balance sheet backing its own fiat construct. On the other hand, the question of whether this analysis is moot to begin with, and the world will revert to the gold standard as the ongoing crisis of confidence in all paper money flares up, is not raised even once… We wonder (not really) what Jim O’Neill would have to say on that particular issue.

Here are the main bullets:

— The issue of the ‘international reserve currency’ and the possible role of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR) has moved from obscurity to the centre of discussions about the future.
— Given China’s importance in terms of its share of world trade, the CNY should now be part of the SDR. The case for including it can only become more obvious as this decade progresses.
— However, actually including the CNY as a constituent of the SDR is likely to remain a challenge without the CNY becoming more widely used internationally, including as a reserve asset.
— The case for including other BRIC currencies in the SDR, especially the RUB, is also likely to become stronger over the coming decade.
— Although the Dollar will probably not be as dominant in 2020 as it is today, it is far from clear that it needs to be replaced by the SDR—or by anything else—as the main reserve currency.
— For the SDR to be attractive to private users, it will need to include the CNY and possibly other BRIC currencies. However, this alone would not guarantee that the SDR would be more attractive to private investors.

Former CIA Officials Admit To Faking Bin Laden Video

Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Two former CIA officials have admitted to creating a fake video in which intelligence officers dressed up as Osama Bin Laden and his cronies in an effort to defame the terrorist leader throughout the middle east.

The details are outlined in a Washington Post article by investigative reporter and former Army Intelligence case officer Jeff Stein.

Stein’s sources told him that during planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group considered creating a fake video of Saddam Hussein engaged in sexual acts with a teenage boy, then flooding Iraq with copies of the tape.

That idea, along with faking Iraqi news bulletins, never came to fruition according to the former CIA officials, because agreement on the projects could not be reached between the Iraq Group and CIA’s Office of Technical Services.

However, the two sources reveal that the agency did previously concoct at least one fake Bin Laden video:

The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory. The actors were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees,” he said.

The former officials told Stein that the project was taken over by the military after it ground to a halt:

The reality, the former officials said, was that the agency really didn’t have enough money and expertise to carry out the projects.

“The military took them over,” said one. “They had assets in psy-war down at Ft. Bragg,” at the army’s special warfare center.

This latest revelation bolsters evidence that the intelligence agencies, and perhaps more significantly, the military have been engaged in creating fake Bin Laden videos in the past.

As we have exhaustively documented, Intelcenter, the U.S. monitoring group that routinely releases Bin Laden video and audio, much of which have been proven to be either rehashed old footage or outright fakes, is an offshoot of IDEFENSE, a web security company that monitors intelligence from the middle east.

IDEFENSE is heavily populated by long serving ex military intelligence officials, such as senior military psy-op intelligence officer Jim Melnick, who served 16 years in the US army and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in psychological operations. Melnick has also worked directly for former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Intelcenter notoriously released the “laughing hijackers” tape and claimed it was an Al-Qaeda video, despite the fact that the footage was obtained by a “security agency” at a 2000 Bin Laden speech.

IntelCenter was also caught adding its logo to a tape at the same time as Al-Qaeda’s so-called media arm As-Sahab added its logo, proving the two organizations were one and the same.

Could the CIA group of “dark skinned actors” have been behind the infamous December 2001 “Fat nosed” Bin Laden video, that was magically found in a house in Jalalabad after anti-Taliban forces moved in?

The tape featured a fat Osama laughing and joking about how he’d carried out 9/11. The video was also mistranslated in order to manipulate viewer opinion and featured “Bin Laden” praising two of the hijackers, only he got their names wrong. This Osama also used the wrong hand to write with and wore gold rings, a practice totally in opposition to the Muslim faith.

Despite the fact that the man in the video looks nothing like Bin Laden, the CIA stood by it and declared it to be the official “9/11 confession video”.

The latest revelations also shed light on another past Bin Laden release – a tape in which he ludicrously declared himself in league with Saddam Hussein in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq.

The notion that the CIA project was taken over and drastically improved by the Pentagon at some point after 2003 jives with the improvement in quality of Bin Laden videos in later years. Most notably the video that was released immediately ahead of the 2004 election, and it’s digitally manipulated duplicate from 2007, in which Bin Laden appeared to have a dyed beard.

Top Construction Firm: WTC Destroyed By Controlled Demolition

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Respected Middle East expert and former BBC presenter Alan Hart has broken his silence on 9/11, by revealing that the world’s most prominent civil engineering company told him directly that the collapse of the twin towers was a controlled demolition.

Speaking on the Kevin Barrett show yesterday, Hart said he thought the 9/11 attack probably started as a Muslim operation headed up by Osama Bin Laden but that the plot was subsequently hijacked and carried out by Mossad agents in collusion with elements of the CIA, adding that since its formation, Israel has penetrated every Arab government and terrorist organization.

“My guess is that at an early point they said to the bad guys in the CIA – hey this operation’s running what do we do, and the zionists and the neo-cons said let’s use it,” said Hart, making reference to how top neo-cons like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their fellow Project For a New American Century authors had called for a “catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor,” the year before 9/11.

“The twin towers were brought down by a controlled ground explosion, not the planes,” said Hart, adding that this view was based on his close friendship with consultants who work with the world’s leading civil engineering and construction firm.

Hart asked the company to study the collapse of the twin towers, after which they told him directly, “There’s absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the towers were brought down by a controlled ground explosion.”

Hart then explained how the five dancing Israelis seen celebrating the attack on the World Trade Center in New Jersey as it unfolded, who turned out to be Mossad agents, proves at at a minimum Israel knew the attack was going to happen. Hart went further in speculating that the planes had been fitted with transponders and that the Israelis were guiding them in to the towers.

Host Barrett pointed out that to carry out the successful controlled demolition of three of the biggest buildings in history, the conspirators would have to ensure that they were hit, making the use of remote controlled airliners a distinct possibility. In addition, Barrett mentioned the fact that he had interviewed numerous pilots who dismissed the chances of accurately guiding a huge commercial airliner into a building while flying at sea level at around 600 miles per hour, especially considering the alleged 9/11 hijackers struggled to even fly basic Cessna light aircraft.

“Sounding a chilling note, Hart added that the U.S. is in grave danger of an Israeli-instigated false-flag nuclear attack, perhaps using an American nuclear weapon stolen from Minot Air Force Base during the “loose nukes” rogue operation of August, 2007. The motive would be to trigger a U.S. war with Iran, and perhaps to finish the ethnic cleansing of Palestine under cover of war–which Hart is convinced the Zionists are planning to do as soon as the opportunity presents itself,” writes host Barratt.

Given his biography and standing, Hart’s comments are not to be taken lightly. Hart is a former Middle East Chief Correspondent for ITN News and has also presented for BBC Panorama specializing in the Middle East. He was also a war reporter in Vietnam and the first journalist to reach Suez Canal with the Israeli army in 1967. Over the decades, Hart has developed close relationships with numerous high profile political figures, including the Shah of Iran, Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres.

Hart has been a successful author for years and has no reason to fabricate the fact that a top construction firm told him point blank that the towers were brought down in a controlled demolition.

In forwarding this information, Hart joins legions of other credible experts who to some extent or other have all publicly challenged the official 9/11 story, with many outright stating that the attacks were an inside job, people like 20-year decorated CIA veteran Robert Baer, who told a radio host that “the evidence points at” 9/11 having had aspects of being an inside job.

In addition, no less than 1198 architectural and engineering specialists have signed a petition demanding Congress re-open an official investigation into the 9/11 attack and the collapse of the twin towers.

Corporate Media Uses Fraudulent MSNBC Transcript to Portray Rand Paul as a Racist

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
May 26, 2010

In order to smear and discredit Rand Paul and prevent him from going to the Senate, MSNBC has modified a transcript of his appearance on the Rachel Maddow Show. Paul appeared on the show after he won the primary in Kentucky.

The modified transcript reads as follows:

Maddow: Do you think that a private business has the right to say, “We don’t serve black people”?

Paul: Yes. I’m not in favor of any discrimination of any form…

As Before It’s News notes, Paul’s “yes” was “some sort of insignificant vocalization to maintain the flow of conversation that was already made difficult by the satellite delay.”

Here is a YouTube video of the exchange cued up the exact moment followed by the entire video:



Here is the uncorrected transcript on the MSNBC website and a screen capture of the specific quote taken out of context.

MSNBC’s fraudulent transcript is now making the rounds in the corporate media — the usual suspects: the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC News, the Associated Press, and many others — in order to portray Rand Paul as a racist.

Only an idiot — or a disingenuous Democrat determined to shoot down Paul at all cost — would come away with the impression that Paul is a closet member of the Ku Klux Klan after watching the exchange with Maddow.

The establishment is petrified of Rand Paul and his defense of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It much prefers constitutional morons like House Minority Leader John Boehner who cannot tell the difference between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Expect the corporate media to continue its dishonest attempt to slam Paul as the November election approaches. Other Tea Party inspired candidates will be characterized as racists and fringe nutters.

Fear and Loathing (and Lost Wages)

Keith Johnson
Revolt of the Plebs
May 26, 2010

Give me a job, give me security
give me a chance to survive
I’m just a poor soul in the unemployment line
my god, I’m hardly alive

Styx—Blue Collar Man

Last week, Barrack Obama brought his stage show to a manufacturing plant in Youngstown Ohio and took credit for 290,000 new jobs added to US payrolls in April. “The fact is, our economy is growing again,” he boasted “Any fair-minded person would say that if we hadn’t acted … more people across America would be out of work today.” He’s speaking of course of the $787 billion Recovery Act that pumped even more counterfeit cash into the economy and is now redeemable (at interest) by the Federal Reserve from your American tax dollar.

The only legitimate jobs that can point to economic growth are those that create, produce or manufacture tangible goods.

At least it put people to work, right? Well, let’s take a look at some of those jobs, shall we. Already, 66,000 of those new hires will start getting their pink slips by the beginning of June. I’m speaking, of course, of the Federal employees hired to conduct the 2010 Census. Then there’s the 26,000 new jobs hired by temp agencies and day labor outfits. Those jobs you can kiss goodbye.

The most significant increase to the job market was in professional and business services (80,000). These jobs are primarily in the field of advertising and public relations, employment services, computer support, consulting and research.

The leisure and hospitality industry saw the third highest increase in new workers (45,000). We’re sure to find a few top dollar chefs and country club managers thrown into that mix, but the vast majority of these new employees are working the grill at your local Burger King.

If we tally this up, the above accounts for almost 75% of the new jobs added to US payrolls referred to in the first paragraph. Unfortunately, none of this employment is sustainable without a vibrant and robust manufacturing base. We don’t have that. Instead, we have a service economy. All of the above mentioned jobs (with the exception of the Federal Census) are service related. Advertising and public relations are done for companies that import products from China or India while your average fast food employee is busy assembling tacos from produce shipped in from Brazil and Honduras.

So what about those manufacturing jobs? Were any added to US payrolls in April? As Obama gloated over the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Employment Situation Summary last Tuesday, he and his supporters were quick to point out the significant rise in manufacturing jobs (44,000). What they didn’t tell you is that there is always a rise in production from our manufacturing sector in the first quarter. Companies need to restock inventory after the holiday buying season. That’s now over, and just three days after Obama gave his Youngtown address, the same Federal agency (BLS) that released the Employment Situation Summary came out with its devastating Mass Layoff’s Summary. Who took the biggest hit? You guessed it: manufacturing. According to this article from Reuters news service:

The Labor Department said the number of mass layoff events — defined as job cuts involving at least 50 people from a single employer — increased by 228 to 1,856 as employers shed 200,870 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis.

The number of mass layoffs in the manufacturing sector totaled 448 resulting in 63,616 initial jobless benefit claims, the department said. That was more than 24,000 higher than the previous month, but well below the 125,000 initial jobless claims in the manufacturing sector a year ago.

The Labor Department said the manufacturing sector accounted for 23 percent of all mass layoffs and 28 percent of the initial claims filed in April.

The U.S. jobs market is lagging the broader economic recovery that started in the second half of 2009. Since December 2007, when the worst recession in 70 years started, the U.S. economy has shed more than 8 million jobs and the latest data suggest it will take some time to make up for those losses.

That pretty much supplants all those enthusiastic claims about a growing economy, doesn’t it? At least it does in terms of our unemployment situation. Right now, unemployment is still hovering at 22% if we go by the government’s own (U6) number of 17.2% combined with the pre-1994 defined ‘discouraged workers’ added back into the equation. It’s even worse if you’re under the age of 25. For the roughly half of high school graduates under 25 and not in college, the average is somewhere close to 37%.

Ever since 1913, we have slowly been slipping away from an agrarian society to one that is increasingly dependent on foreign imports. Over the last ten years, this incremental suicide has accelerated us into an almost exclusively service-based economy. Today, there are over 2.7 million people working in the fast-food industry. This is a 43% increase over the last decade. We cannot sustain an economy on these kinds of jobs. Neither can we sustain an economy by hiring people to stock shelves with Chinese goods and man cash registers at your local Wal-Mart. Even worse are the needless Federal subsidy funded increases in law enforcement employment. We don’t need another SWAT team in a retirement community in South Florida or more traffic cops milking the people out of the few remaining consumer dollars they have left to spend. The only legitimate jobs that can point to economic growth are those that create, produce or manufacture tangible goods. These jobs create new wealth while the others take from it.

Of course we are daily apprised of how our government is planning to fix this crisis and bring manufacturing back to America. Their solution: green jobs. Unfortunately, green jobs are the last thing we need and will actually destroy what’s left of our existing manufacturing base. The Obama administration plans to bring the Spanish model of a green economy to America. But even Spain now admits that their own model has wreaked devastation on their economy. Their renewable energy initiatives have destroyed 2.2 jobs for every new “green” job created.

Writing in “Study of the Effects on Employment of Public Aid to Renewable Energy Sources,” economics professor Gabriel Calzada of King Juan San Carlos University in Madrid reports:

“As President Obama correctly remarked, Spain provides a reference for the establishment of government aid to renewable energy. No other country has given such broad support to the construction and production of electricity through renewable sources. The arguments for Spain’s and Europe’s ‘green jobs’ schemes are the same arguments now made in the U.S., principally that massive public support would produce large numbers of green jobs. The question that this paper answers is ‘at what price?’

“Optimistically treating European Commission partially funded data, we find that for every renewable energy job that the State manages to finance, Spain’s experience cited by President Obama as a model reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about 9 jobs lost for every 4 created.”

The economy is dead. Regardless of what anyone says about a recovery, there is no brining back to life something that has already breathed its last breath. You can keep the patient on the operating table as long as you want, but eventually you’re going to have to put a sheet over its face. The recovery is a lie. The hospital staff has applied rouge to the cheeks and rigged the electrocardiograph machine to fool the American people into believing there’s still hope. They can get away with this for a while, but soon the body is going to start to bloat and put off a terrible stink. Then the game will be up.

Trends forecaster Gerald Celente is famous for stating, “When the people have nothing left to lose, they lose it!” Right now people still have a lot to lose and the only thing that keeps them from “losing it” is fear. They’re afraid of losing what little they have left and will believe any lie if it separates them from the anguish of dealing with the passing of something they have come to love. But soon, when the dollar takes its final bow and the corpse is finally placed into the ground, that fear will turn to anger—and that’s when things will really start to get interesting.

Nuclear War Between Koreas: Brought To You By The U.S. Government

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Kim Jong-Il has put North Korean troops on combat alert and threatened military action if the South trespasses in its waters as global stock markets freak out at the prospect of a war which, if it occurs, can be blamed on the U.S. government’s history of arming the Stalinist dictator with nuclear weapons.

Korean markets plunged 3.3 per cent overnight as investors were spooked at escalating tensions between the two countries following South Korea’s allegation that the North was responsible for the March 26 torpedoing of one of its warships

Kim Jong-il responded to the charge by putting his military on combat alert, telling them to “prepare for war,” and threatening action if South Korea trespasses in its waters off the peninsula’s west coast.

On Monday, President Obama also told the U.S. military to prepare for conflict as it plans to carry out anti-submarine and other naval exercises with South Korea.

As we have documented, North Korea’s nuclear belligerency was almost exclusively a creation of the U.S. government in that they armed the Stalinist state both directly and indirectly through global arms dealers under their control, namely Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan. While labeling North Korea as part of the “axis of evil,” the U.S. government was enthusiastically funding its nuclear weapons program at every stage.

Both the Clinton and Bush administrations played a key role in helping Kim Jong-Il develop North Korea’s nuclear prowess from the mid 1990’s onwards.

Just as with Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons program, it was Donald Rumsfeld who played a key role in arming Kim-Jong-Il.

Rumsfeld was man who presided over a $200 million dollar contract to deliver equipment and services to build two light water reactor stations in North Korea in January 2000 when he was an executive director of ABB (Asea Brown Boveri). Wolfram Eberhardt, a spokesman for ABB confirmed that Rumsfeld was at nearly all the board meetings during his involvement with the company.

Rumsfeld was merely picking up the baton from the Clinton administration, who in 1994 agreed to replace North Korea’s domestically built nuclear reactors with light water nuclear reactors. So-called government-funded ‘experts’ claimed that light water reactors couldn’t be used to make bombs. Not so according to Henry Sokolski, head of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, who stated, “LWRs could be used to produce dozens of bombs’ worth of weapons-grade plutonium in both North Korea and Iran. This is true of all LWRs — a depressing fact U.S. policymakers have managed to block out.”

“These reactors are like all reactors, they have the potential to make weapons. So you might end up supplying the worst nuclear violator with the means to acquire the very weapons we’re trying to prevent it acquiring,” said Sokolski.

The U.S. State Department claimed that the light water reactors could not be used to produce bomb grade material and yet in 2002 urged Russia to end its nuclear co-operation with Iran for the reason that it didn’t want Iran armed with weapons of mass destruction. At the time, Russia was building light water reactors in Iran. According to the State Department, light water reactors in Iran can produce nuclear material but somehow the same rule doesn’t apply in North Korea.

In April 2002, the Bush administration announced that it would release $95 million of American taxpayer’s dollars to begin construction of the ‘harmless’ light water reactors in North Korea. Bush argued that arming the megalomaniac dictator Kim Jong-Il with the potential to produce a hundred nukes a year was, “vital to the national security interests of the United States.” Bush released even more money in January 2003, as was reported by Bloomberg News.

Bush released the funds despite the startling revelation, reported by South Korean newspapers, that a North Korean missile warhead had been found in Alaska.

Construction of the reactors was eventually suspended, but North Korea had an alternative source through which they could obtain the nuclear secrets vital to building an atom bomb arsenal – CIA asset and international arms smuggler AQ Khan.

In 2004, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atom bomb program, admitted sharing nuclear technology via a worldwide smuggling network that included facilities in Malaysia that manufactured key parts for centrifuges.

Khan’s collaborator B.S.A. Tahir ran a front company out of Dubai that shipped centrifuge components to North Korea.

Despite Dutch authorities being deeply suspicious of Khan’s activities as far back as 1975, the CIA prevented them from arresting him on two occasions.

“The man was followed for almost ten years and obviously he was a serious problem. But again I was told that the secret services could handle it more effectively,” former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers said. “The Hague did not have the final say in the matter. Washington did.”

Lubbers stated that Khan was allowed to slip in and out of the Netherlands with the blessing of the CIA, eventually allowing him to become the “primary salesman of an extensive international network for the proliferation of nuclear technology and know-how,” according to George W. Bush himself, and sell nuclear secrets that allowed North Korea to build nuclear bombs.

“Lubbers suspects that Washington allowed Khan’s activities because Pakistan was a key ally in the fight against the Soviets,” reports CFP. “At the time, the US government funded and armed mujahideen such as Osama bin Laden. They were trained by Pakistani intelligence to fight Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Anwar Iqbal, Washington correspondent for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, told ISN Security Watch that Lubbers’ assertions may be correct. “This was part of a long-term foolish strategy. The US knew Pakistan was developing nuclear weapons but couldn’t care less because it was not going to be used against them. It was a deterrent against India and possibly the Soviets.”

In September 2005 it emerged that the Amsterdam court which sentenced Khan to four years imprisonment in 1983 had lost the legal files pertaining to the case. The court’s vice-president, Judge Anita Leeser, accused the CIA of stealing the files. “Something is not right, we just don’t lose things like that,” she told Dutch news show NOVA. “I find it bewildering that people lose files with a political goal, especially if it is on request of the CIA. It is unheard of.”

In 2005, Pakistani President Pervez Musharaf acknowledged that Khan had provided centrifuges and their designs to North Korea.

Through their policies in aiding North Korea to build light water reactors, and via the CIA asset AQ Khan who was protected at every step of the way while he helped provide North Korea with the means to build a nuclear arsenal, the U.S. government itself is directly complicit in providing North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il with the nuclear weapons he now threatens to use against U.S. ally South Korea.

North Korea is controlled by a hereditary Stalinist dictatorship that has starved two million of its citizens to death in favor of building a million-man army. Some people put the figure at four million, one-quarter of the population. In the far north of the country there is a network of forced labor gulags where people who have ‘expressed a bland political opinion’ are, along with their entire families, tortured, raped and executed. Horrific bio-chemical experiments are performed on mass numbers of people. Babies are delivered and then stamped to death by the camp guards. If the mother screams while the guards are stamping on the baby’s neck, she is immediately assassinated by a firing squad. These guards are rewarded with bonuses and promotions for ripping out prisoners’ eyeballs.

The North Korean people are enslaved by a government that is using food as a weapon. Perhaps this is why the EU and the United States, via the UN World Food Program, resumed the shipment of hundreds of thousands of tons in food aid at the end of February 2003. This goes directly to the sitting dictatorship, which then decides who gets it by their level of allegiance to the state. Food aid only increases the power of Kim Jong-Il and yet it is veiled by the UN in bleeding heart humanitarian rhetoric. The money goes straight to enabling the North Korean leadership to live in the lap of westernized luxury with casinos and lavish new cars.

President Bush publicly claimed to loathe Kim Jong-Il and yet his administration, like Bill Clinton before him, set the policy to help North Korea obtain nuclear expertise. The U.S. intelligence network also protected AQ Khan and allowed him to provide the means with which North Korea acquired their nuclear capability.

If the tensions between the Koreas were to escalate into all out war, don’t expect the castrated American corporate media to mention how Kim Jong-Il grew to be such a threat in the first place – with the aid of nuclear weapons enthusiastically supplied by the U.S. government and its surrogates.

Woody Allen Says Obama Should Become a Dictator

Woody Allen and his adopted daugher-wife

Posted by sakerfa on May 18, 2010

(KurtNimmo) - It is another example of the mindset of the Hollywood lib elite. Film director Woody Allen — who demonstrated his warped ethos a few years ago by marrying his adopted daughter — believes Obama would get more done if he declared himself dictator.
“I am pleased with Obama. I think he’s brilliant. The Republican Party should get out of his way and stop trying to hurt him,” Allen said in an interview published by Spanish language monarchist newspaper La Vanguardia. “It would good… if he could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly.”
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
May 18, 2010

Sort of like Mussolini’s idea of making the trains run on time?

Allen is frustrated with American politics and pines for the simplicity of a dictatorship. As a member of the intellectual elite, Woody Allen has no patience for the political demands of the little people who are currently flocking in droves to the Tea Party movement and embracing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Allen’s comment that the Republican Party should get out of Obama’s way is a demand that the people sit down and shut up. Establishment Republicans do not oppose the Obama agenda of large government. Establishment Republicans are merely miffed they are not able to impose a neocon version of leviathan government. Republicans prefer bloated and grotesque military budgets to drive the nation into unsustainable debt owed to bankers while Democrats prefer social programs to accomplish the same objective.

There is essentially no difference between Democrats and Republicans, as the insider Carroll Quigley noted. Obama is run by the same Wall Street crowd and Goldman Sachs functionaries as his predecessor. Democrats and Republicans are interchangeable with minor cosmetic difference to fool the plebs.

Socialist intellectuals invariably end up advocating and supporting totalitarianism. They are viscerally opposed to classical liberalism — the ideal of limited government and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets. Socialist intellectuals have nothing but contempt for the fact individual rights are natural, inherent, inalienable, and exist independently of government. Government is everything for the socialists, including the Hollywood limo lib variety of socialist. History is riddled with intellectuals who have supported communism and fascism, both derived from Marxist theory. Both strive for statist absolutism. Both end up in mass slavery and misery.

The comic director Woody Allen should take heed. Dictators invariably turn on their faithful ideologues and slogan chanting supporters. Hitler had his Night of the Long Knives and Stalin his endless purges that terminated in execution and disappearance into gulags.

Source: Infowars

Video: CFR Meeting – Zbigniew Brzezinski Fears The Global Awakening

Posted by sakerfa on May 18, 2010

Zbigniew Brzezinski giving the CFR branch in Montreal a presentation discussing world government and his fears of the mass global awakening that has taken place.

Video: Arizona Getting A Bad Rap…If this video does not connect the dots on illegal immigration and terrorism, nothing will

Posted by sakerfa on May 18, 2010

(ActionNews2) – “We found illegals from Afghanistan, Egypt, iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan and Yemen in custody.”

Arizona Immigration – The REAL Truth

Video: Reality Report #45
Posted by sakerfa on May 19, 2010

(RTR) – Why do lawmakers really want to pass the Arizona Immigration Bill? Should the government be allowed to remove American citizenship? Why is the federal government trying to take land from an elderly Vermont farmer? Is the United States become a socialist state or a fascist state? Join us on this weeks edition to help answer thess questions. Plus, Alex Jones interviews host Gary Franchi, Tim O’Shea unveils the dirty truth about vaccines in America and we name this weeks Enemy of the State.

Video: How Corrupted Drug Companies Deceive and Manipulate Your Doctor

Posted by sakerfa on May 20, 2010

(DrMercola) – Dr. Beatrice Golomb, Associate Professor of Medicine at University of California, San Diego, masterfully exposes the corruption that has metastasized like a tumor throughout the pharmaceutical and medical industries, in the video above.

If you have any doubt about drug companies being riddled with conflicts of interest, those doubts will be shattered after seeing the evidence she presents.

The corruption has become so prolific that it has literally debased medical science.




In the above linked Chicago Breaking News article, Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious disease specialist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, is quoted as saying:

“Science is not a democracy where people’s votes decide what is right. Look at the data, look at science and make a decision based on science that has been published.”

What he is really advocating is for you to blindly believe in “facts” that may have been produced in the midst of MASSIVE conflicts of interest.

Before you assume the science in medical journals is credible, let’s take a look at what is going on behind the scenes of editing and publishing in medical science.

Bias #1: Unwanted Results are Not Published
In order for scientific studies to happen, someone has to pay for them.

The top funder for any drug trial is the pharmaceutical company that makes it, since the manufacturer is most invested in “proving” how spectacular its drug is. Dr. Golomb uses the case of statins as an example, stating that all of the major statin studies have been funded exclusively by the drug industry.

The second-highest funder of drug studies is the National Institute of Health (NIH), which is not the group of neutral government experts you may have assumed them to be. In fact, NIH accepts a great deal of money from Big Pharma and is deeply enmeshed with the industry.

But drug companies publish only a fraction of the studies they fund — the ones that promote their drugs.

If a study does not have findings that are favorable to its product, it is unlikely it will ever make it into a journal for publication.

In contrast, studies that have favorable findings almost always make the cut.

There are simply thousands of scientific studies out there that have never been seen by you or your physician because they have been screened out by editors and reviewers who are being paid to uphold an industry agenda.

Published studies overwhelmingly favor the funding company’s drug. Whichever drug is manufactured by the study sponsor is the drug that comes out on top, 90 percent of the time!

Given this, how can medical journals be considered unbiased?

Bias #2: Bad Results are Submitted as Good
When a scientific study has findings that cast doubt on the efficacy of a drug, oftentimes the negative findings are morphed into positive ones.

For example, in 2008, FDA officials analyzed a registry of 74 antidepressant trials, which included trials that were published and those that were not. The FDA’s findings were then written up in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine1.

This is what they found:

•38 of the trials reported positive results, and 37 of the 38 were published.
•36 trials had negative or questionable findings. Of the 36, 22 were not published at all, and 11 were published in a way that conveyed the results as though they were positive.
So, if you just went to the published literature, it would look like 94 percent of the studies were positive, when in reality only about 50 percent were positive … equivalent to a coin toss.

For statins, the odds that the funding company’s drug will come out on top are staggering1:

•The odds that the funding company’s statin drug will come out looking better than anyone else’s statin in the “results” section of the article are 20:1.
•The odds that the funding company’s statin will come out on top in the “conclusions” part of the article are 35:1.
So, even if they can’t make the results look good, they can often find a way to twist the conclusions so that their drug appears favorable.

Selectively omitting negative trial results can be devastating to your health, as Merck & Co. proved when they concealed the fact that three patients suffered heart attacks from Vioxx during clinical trials. They conveniently omitted this data (along with other relevant findings) from the copy of the study they submitted to the New England Journal of Medicine for publication.

The omissions were uncovered years later during the 7,000 Vioxx lawsuit litigations.

Bias #3: A Favorable Study is Submitted Multiple Times
When a study yields positive results, it is often submitted multiple times in a way that the reader doesn’t realize it’s the same study, obscured by different author lists and different details. Analyzers have had to look very carefully to determine which studies are actually duplicates because they are so cleverly disguised.

Not surprisingly, trials reporting greater treatment efficacy were significantly more likely to be duplicated, according to Dr. Golomb’s reporting.

In one analysis of the published reports about ondansetron (an anti-nausea drug), the same study was published 5 times. This duplication of data led to a 23 percent overestimation of ondansetron’s effectiveness when a meta-analysis was performed.2

Talk about good mileage!

Bias #4: Follow-Up Reviews Done by Biased Experts
The editorials that follow from a study, submitted by so-called unbiased experts and then published in reputable journals, are often done by non-neutral parties who have a financial tie to the drug maker.

Dr. Golomb uses the case of calcium channel blockers (a type of heart medication) as an example. The connection between authors declaring their support for calcium channel blockers and those not in support of them was highly statistically tied to their affiliation with the drug manufacturer — in fact, the odds that their opinion was NOT due to their affiliation was more than 1,000:1.

Bias #5: Ghostwriting
Many of the articles that appear in medical journals purportedly written by well-known academics are actually written by unacknowledged ghostwriters on Big Pharma payroll.

Consider the example of Parke-Davis and their drug Neurontin.

Parke-Davis contracted with a “medical education communication company,” or MECC, which is a company paid almost exclusively by pharmaceutical companies to write articles, reviews, and letters to editors of medical journals to cast their products in a favorable light.

In this case, MECC was paid $13,000 to $18,000 per article. In turn, MECC paid $1,000 each to friendly physicians and pharmacists to sign off as authors of the articles, making the material appear independent.

This was also done by Pfizer as a strategy for marketing Zoloft. A document was written that included 81 different articles promoting Zoloft’s usefulness for everything from panic disorder to pedophilia.

The only problem was, for some articles, the name of the author was listed as “to be determined,” even though the article was listed as already completed. They weren’t helping out an existing team of scientists who happened to be talentless at writing — Pfizer wrote the article, and then shopped around for scientists willing to claim authorship, to give it a veneer of credibility.

Wyeth-Ayerst employed a similar ghostwriting tactic to promote its “fen-phen” diet drug, Redux.

Bias #6: Journal Bias
Medical journals are generally considered by medical practitioners to be a source of reliable information. But medical journals are also businesses.

Three editors, who agreed to discuss finances only if they remained anonymous, said a few journals that previously measured annual profits in the tens of thousands of dollars now make millions annually.

The truth is that Big Pharma has become quite adept at manipulating and brainwashing practitioners of conventional medicine. They influence the very heart and center of the most respected medical journals, creating dogma and beliefs that support the drug paradigm because it is blessed by the pinnacle of scientific integrity: the prestigious peer-reviewed medical journal.

Peer-reviewed medical journals contain advertisements that are almost exclusively for drugs, amidst articles that are biased toward promoting those drugs. If you have looked through a medical journal lately, you’ll see full-page Pharma glossies, cover to cover.

Pharmaceutical companies spend almost twice as much on marketing as they spend on research!

In 2003, drug companies spent $448 million dollars on advertising in medical journals2. It has been calculated that the return on investment on medical journal ads is between $2.22 and $6.86 for every dollar spent, with larger and older brands at the higher end.

Long-term returns may be even higher when you consider that one ad viewed by a physician could result in hundreds or even thousands of drug purchases, based on the prescriptions he or she writes.

The term “peer-review” has come to imply scientific credibility. But the fact is that many of the peer-reviewers are on the drug company’s payroll, and those who are not are unlikely to detect flawed research or outright fraud.

Medical journals are the number one source of medical information for physicians. In fact, nearly 80 percent of physicians use medical journals for their education, which exceeds information from any other source3.

Do you really want to blindly take the advise of a physician whose only source of medical information is a medical journal engaged in such profound conflicts of interest?

Advertisements for drugs focus the “latest and greatest” drugs to hit the market, drugs which may not be superior to existing, less expensive alternatives. So physicians are seduced into prescribing the newest, most expensive drugs, which drives up your healthcare costs.

An excellent article in PLoS Medicine regarding drug advertising in medical journals concludes4:

“The scholarly nature of journals confers credibility on both articles and advertisements within their pages. By exclusively featuring advertisements for drugs and devices, medical journals implicitly endorse corporate promotion of the most profitable products. Advertisements and other financial arrangements with pharmaceutical companies compromise the objectivity of journals.

The primary obligation of industry is to make money for its stockholders. The primary obligation of journals should be to physicians and their patients, who depend on the accuracy of information within these publications. Medical journals should not accept advertisements from pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies, or other industries ‘relevant to medicine.’”

In 2004, Dr. Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, wrote, “Journals have devolved into information-laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”5

Bias #7: Drug Companies Masquerading as Educators
The education of medical students and residents also comes through the filter of the drug industry, which seeks to groom them before they even finish medical school.

According to Dr. Golomb’s data, Big Pharma now spends $18.5 billion per year promoting their drugs to physicians. That amounts to $30,000 per year for every physician in the U. S.!

And drug companies are allowed to develop their own education curriculum for medical students and residents, lavishing them with gifts, indirectly paying them to attend meetings and events where they promote the company’s products.

Why is the Accrediting Commission for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) so permissive with industry involvement?

Almost half of the members are representatives of Big Pharma or are consultants for businesses that work directly with it to prepare these educational programs. Only a few represent academic CME institutions.

Any discussion of physician “seduction” would be incomplete without the mentioning of the 100,000 drug reps, who are groomed and trained to wine and dine and otherwise shower physicians in sweetness until they are handing out prescriptions like candy.

Reps are even taught tactics for manipulating doctors for industry benefit, as a standard part of their training.6

Hell Hath No Fury
What happens if a physician or other person speaks up about these conflicts of interest? What happens to the proverbial whistle-blower?

Intimidating phone calls and direct threats, for starters.

In one case, Dr. Buse, an endocrinologist who is the incoming president of the American Diabetes Association, presented data in 1999 about his concerns about the risks of Avandia. Dr. Buse was intimidated with multiple phone calls by drug company officials. They suggested he could be financially liable to the company for $4 billion in lost revenues due to his “unscrupulous remarks.”

Other truth-tellers have had their reputations trashed or job offers rescinded for speaking the truths that Big Pharma works so hard to keep under wraps.

“Too Big to Nail”
An individual truth-teller might be vulnerable to the wrath of an angry drug company, but drug companies are unlikely to suffer much of a consequence for their crimes.

A CNN report from April 2, 2010 reveals the truth about how shielded these huge drug companies really are.

Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, engaged in illegally promoting their drug Bextra for off-label use, despite their knowledge that it was associated with an increased risk of stroke and heart attack.

Bextra was pulled from the market in 2005, but not before many people were damaged by its use. When Federal prosecutors realized that convicting Pfizer would likely be a corporate death sentence (as any company convicted of major health care fraud is excluded from Medicare and Medicaid), they cut Pfizer a deal. Just as the big banks on Wall Street were deemed “too big to fail,” Pfizer was deemed “too big to nail.”

Why?

Prosecutors claimed to be concerned about the loss of jobs by Pfizer employees and financial losses to Pfizer shareholders as a result of being excluded from the Medicaid/Medicare programs.

So the prosecutors charged a Pfizer subsidiary, Pharmacia & Upjohn Co., instead. In fact, this particular subsidiary company was created specifically for this purpose, as a sacrificial lamb, having been incorporated the very same day its lawyers filed a “guilty” plea in another case involving kick-backs, leaving Pfizer with the penalty equivalent of being sent to bed without supper.

In the end, all Pfizer lost was about three month’s profit, but all contracts, including those with Medicaid and Medicare, were spared.

This is just one more example of your federal government failing to protect you, and opting to protect big business’ interests instead.

The bottom line is, the drug companies aren’t going to protect you.

The government won’t protect you.

The AMA won’t protect you.7

And it is unlikely that your physician can protect you either — even a well-meaning one — when he or she is operating within a system that has become RIGGED for Big Pharma profit.

Only you can protect yourself.

So, until real systemic change takes place, your best health strategy is quite simply to employ and maintain a naturally healthy lifestyle that will optimize your body’s innate healing abilities and minimize your need for the drug companies’ latest concoctions.

Source: Mercola

Video: US Soldiers Speaks The Truth – War Crimes Exposed!

Rand Paul, Civil Rights, and More Liberal Hypocrisy on Race

Posted by sakerfa on May 22, 2010

(CampaignForLiberty) – I recently wrote two articles in which I criticized liberals for being two-faced and hypocritical when it comes to racial issues. The articles, which concerned the minimum wage, a longtime favorite government program among liberals whose negative effects fall disproportionately on blacks, were entitled “Why Do Daily Kos and Alternet Favor a Racist Government Program?” and “Free Teenagers: Repeal the Minimum Wage.”

Of course, I could also have written an article pointing out the decades-long liberal support of the drug war, another vicious government program whose adverse consequences have long fallen disproportionately on blacks and Hispanics. See, for example, this list of articles.

Thus, it’s not a coincidence that liberal icon Barack Obama, a drug user himself (he smoked dope and snorted cocaine when he was young and smokes tobacco today) and his Democratically controlled Congress are not only not ending the drug war but instead are ramping it up, even encouraging the Mexican government’s use of the military to wage the drug war in Mexico.
Jacob Hornberger
Campaign For Liberty
May 22, 2010

I could have also pointed out the long-time hypocrisy of liberals’ purported concern for Hispanics, especially the poor among them, even while supporting immigration laws and their brutal enforcement, including raiding American businesses suspected of committing the dastardly crime of entering into mutually beneficial economic relationships with financially poor Hispanics of foreign origin.

This week, thanks to Rand Paul’s win in the race for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in Kentucky, we are treated to another grand spectacle of liberal hypocrisy when it comes to race. The liberal community has gone into emotional hyper-drive over Paul’s opposition to the section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that banned racial discrimination by private businesses. The liberals are just shocked and outraged that anyone would honestly suggest that private businesses should be free to discriminate. And, of course, underlying all this is the suggestion that anyone who advocates such a position must be a secret bigot.

To examine into this latest instance of liberal hypocrisy on race, let’s delve into a few basics.

Suppose a certain white homeowner in a community publicly announces that he is holding a weekly TGIF cocktail party at his home every Friday night. He publicly invites everyone who lives within a one-mile radius of his home to his parties, but with a big exception. He says: Blacks and Jews are not invited and will not be permitted into his home.

How would libertarians respond? We would say that that man has every right in the world to take that position. We might criticize him, we might condemn him, we might ignore him, we might boycott his parties. But we would defend his right to discriminate against anyone he wants, as a matter of principle. After all, we would argue, it’s his home — his private property. To paraphrase Voltaire, we might not agree with how he uses his property, but we would defend his right to use it any way he wants. That’s what private ownership and a free society are all about.

How would liberals respond to that hypothetical? They would take the same position as libertarians! They would say that a man’s home is his castle and that he has the right to keep anyone he wants, even on racial grounds, from his home. They would defend the homeowner’s fundamental right to associate with anyone he wants, even if his choices are abhorrent and offensive to everyone else. They would not call on amending the 1964 Civil Rights Act to apply it to private homeowners.

What? Could this actually be possible? Could liberals actually be defending the right of a bigot to be a bigot in his own home? Wouldn’t this make a liberal himself a bigot? After all, isn’t that what liberals claim about people who call for the right of discrimination in private businesses — that their support of such a right makes them a closet or overt bigot?

Liberals would respond, “No, we’re not bigots simply because we support the right of homeowners to discriminate against blacks, Jews, Catholics, Hispanics, the poor, and anyone else. We simply believe in the principle of private ownership of one’s home and we’re willing to defend that principle, even when homeowners make racist choices.”

Well, then why don’t liberals extend that reasoning to people who support the right of private business owners to discriminate? Why are they so quick to claim that they’re not bigots when they stand on principle when it comes to the right of homeowners to discriminate but so quick to label libertarians who call for the same principle to be applied to business owners as racists and bigots?

Like I say, two-faced and hypocritical.

Let’s delve into this two-faced liberal hypocrisy a bit further. For years, the ACLU has publicly patted itself on the back, especially in fund-raising letters, about how it heroically stood for the right of Nazi sympathizers to march down a (government-owned) street in Skokie, Illinois. This shows how principled we are, the ACLU liberals have long claimed, because we defend the right of bigots to exercise freedom of speech, especially when the speech is abhorrent or offensive.

Would liberals accuse the ACLU of being racists and anti-Semitic bigots for defending the right of Nazi sympathizers to express their views? Of course not. Liberals would praise the ACLU for having the courage of its convictions for standing up for the free-speech rights of those who express horrendously offensive views.

Then, why not the same consideration for libertarians who stand up for the right of business owners to run their businesses the way they want, even if in the process they discriminate against Jews, Catholics, blacks, Hispanics, or anyone else?

Like I say, two-faced and hypocritical.

Now, you might be asking the obvious question: Why don’t liberals apply the freedom to discriminate that they support for private homeowners to private business owners, as libertarians do? After all, on the face of it this inconsistency doesn’t make much sense.

Liberals would respond by saying that businesses are different because they’re open to “the public.” But isn’t that really a distinction without a difference? After all, what’s the difference, in principle, between a homeowner inviting the public (minus blacks and Jews) to his Friday night parties and a businessman who invites the public (minus blacks and Jews) to purchase his goods?

Why were liberals so intent on forced integration of private businesses? What was the real reason they refused to extend their principle of freedom of association and freedom of speech with respect to homeowners and Nazi demonstrators to private business owners?

After all, hardly anyone today questions whether segregation laws and laws that impeded voting rights for blacks were morally wrong. All that needed to be done was to repeal those laws, prohibiting government from discriminating and leaving homeowners, business owners, and other private people (e.g., Nazi sympathizers) free to discriminate on any basis they chose.

How would things have turned out if businesses had been left free to discriminate? Well, does anyone today get into an uproar over the fact that people are free to discriminate in their homes? And yes, people get into an uproar over a Nazi march in Skokie, just as they get upset over the periodic burning of the flag, but how many people lose sleep over the fact that people have such rights?

The same thing would have happened if private businesses had been left free to discriminate. In fact, the likelihood is that the bigoted businesses would slowly but surely have lost market share to businesses that would sell to everyone, especially given the power of social ostracism, boycotts, moral condemnation, and the like.

After all, ask yourself: If everyone in, say, Alabama was a bigot, why would it have been necessary for the government to enact a law requiring segregation? My hunch is that the bigots knew that a free market tends to put a price on discrimination and, therefore, that bigoted firms needed state protection from the competition of firms that would choose not to discriminate.

But the most important principle is the one involving freedom. The essence of a free society is one in which people are free to live their lives any way they choose, so long as their conduct is peaceful. Freedom necessarily entails the right to make choices that other people find offensive, abhorrent, unpopular, and irresponsible. If people are free only to make the correct choices, then they are not truly free.

Liberals understand this principle, but only up to a point. That’s why they support the right of homeowners and Nazi sympathizers to discriminate. But they steadfastly refuse to extend their principles to private businesses.

Why?

I suspect that the answer lies in the long-time, deep antipathy that liberals have to the free market — to free enterprise — to capitalism — to profit. This of course raises the ugly head of socialism, the economic philosophy that has long attracted the liberal community.

In the ideal world of the liberal, there would be no private businesses, no more exploitation of the worker, no more consumer gouging, no more stolen profits. The government would own and operate all enterprises, and everyone would work for the government. The model, of course, for this socialist paradise is Cuba or North Korea.

But liberals instinctively know that they could never get away with converting America to a complete socialist system. Most Americans simply wouldn’t go along with it. So, long ago liberals decided to compromise and settle for less. They began socializing America with socialist welfare-state redistributive schemes, programs that would use the state to equalize wealth by having the IRS take from the rich and middle class to give to the poor. That’s what Social Security, Medicare, welfare, education grants, SBA loans, and so forth are all about.

But they went further than that. They also figured out if they couldn’t nationalize everyone’s business (except in certain instances, like Obama’s takeover of automobile companies and banks), they would use the state to control and direct private business operations. Here arises the ugly head of fascism, a way of life in which the state leaves businesses nominally in private hands but controls and directs them as if the state were the true owner.

The roots for this combined socialist-fascist economic system are found in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, an economic program that every American is taught in public (i.e., government) schools “saved free enterprise.” It was actually straight out of the playbook of European socialists and fascists. Indeed, Roosevelt’s Social Security plan had originated within German socialists and his NIRA and Blue Eagle campaign could easily have been implemented in fascist Italy.

Read the following book for more on this: Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939 by Wolfgang Schivelbush. If you don’t want to bother reading the book, read this review or this review or this review of the book. Or read Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism.

Now, let me say a word about conservatives. For a time, conservatives opposed the liberal movement toward socialism and fascism. Thus, many of them opposed FDR’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society as well as Johnson’s 1964 Civil Rights Act ban on discrimination by private businesses.

Over time, however, conservatives threw in the towel on all counts. Fearful that they would lose credibility, respectability, and, most important, political power, they ended up abandoning the principles of economic liberty and embracing the principles of socialism, interventionism, fascism, and big government. As part of that process, they ended up embracing liberals’ socialist welfare-state programs that came with FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society and the federal control over private businesses that came with LBJ’s 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Thus, Americans who wish to see liberty restored to our land cannot count on either liberals or conservatives. Liberals are dead-set on moving our land toward more socialism, more fascism, more control over private enterprise, more interventionism, more imperialism, more war, and more infringements on civil liberties, all of which means more big spending, big debt, big taxes, and big inflation. Conservatives, fearful of losing political power, have embraced the entire liberal agenda and are especially dead set on fortifying the warfare state in America, leaving themselves with nothing more than their old 1950s irrelevant and hypocritical mantra “free enterprise, private property, and limited government” that they use in their speeches, on their stationery, and on their websites.

Source: Campaign for Liberty