Posts Tagged ‘Cover-up’
Industry and regulators covered up Roundup/birth defect link for decades
July, 2011 ResponsibleTechnology.org
The pesticide industry knew from its own studies (including one by Monsanto) as long ago as the 1980s-and EU regulators knew since the 1990s- that the best-selling herbicide Roundup causes birth defects.
A new report by international scientists now exposes the 30-year cover-up, including efforts as recent as last year by the German government’s consumer protection office to rebut a 2010 study showing Roundup causes birth defects in frogs and chickens at tiny doses. The study was prompted by reports of high rates of birth defects and cancers in areas of South America growing GM Roundup Ready soy, which is sprayed with high doses of the herbicide. Read a lengthy article on this in the Huffington Post, a summary in The Ecologist, or the full report “Roundup and birth defects: Is the public being kept in the dark?” Monsanto responded to the report, but the report’s authors pick apart the company’s statements, showing how they are unsupported and unscientific.
The Mysterious Deaths of Nine Gulf Oil Spill Whistleblowers
In the past year, nine vocal critics or potential whistleblowers of the Gulf oil spill all died in extremely mysterious ways. [Ed note: two others are also included here: one missing, one jailed.] Their deaths could be strange, unrelated coincidences. Or they could have been killed as part of a conspiracy to silence those who were speaking out against the worst oil spill in American history.
SOURCE: REAL COASTAL WARRIORS 27 March 2011
February 17, 2011 – LSU scientist Gregory Stone, 54 – Unknown Illness
January 26, 2011 – age 31 – Mississippi Department of Marine Resources officer, from Ocean Springs arrested on child porn charge.
January 19, 2011 – former President and CEO of the International Oil Spill Control Corporation – imprisonment and subsequent murder while jailed
December 31, 2010 – a former Pentagon official and presidential aide and a defense consultant and expert on chemical and biological weapons – was beaten to death in an assault, body was discovered in a Wilmington landfill
November 23, 2010 – an incident commander for BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill response team, died Tuesday night near Destin, Florida in a small plane crash’
November 15, 2010 – age 33, worked in the USF Center for Biological Defense and Global Health Infectious Disease Research – Found dead in an apparent suicide by cyanide at a Temple Terrace hotel. She leaves behind a husband and a young child.
November, 2010 – MIA Status, of Lakeland, FL – Swan expert who “ran into legal trouble over an expired prescription license has closed his practice” — Was investigating unexplained bird deaths near Sarasota abruptly and immediately closed his practice, and apparently his investigation into the deaths of swans in Sarasota, suspected to have been impacted by the BP Oil Disaster. No one has heard or spoken with him since. Watch this news report covering his investigation before his disappearance: video
October 6, 2010 – age 66, was hit by a truck as he passed through Panama City, Florida. Mr. Grooters had been knocked down and killed close to the end of a 3,200-mile trans-America charity ride to raise awareness about the Gulf Coast oil disaster. He began his cross-country bike ride in Oceanside, California, on September 10th. Grooters’s family and friends will cycle the final stretch of the journey from the Pacific to the Atlantic in his honour, raising cash to support Gulf Coast families. Read more: here
August 9, 2010 – Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, 86, the longest-serving Republican senator in history, was among nine people on board when the 1957 DeHavilland DHC-3 Otter, crashed into a brush- and rock-covered mountainside Monday afternoon about 17 miles north of the southwest Alaska fishing town of Dillingham, federal officials said. Stevens was the recipient of a whistleblower’s communication relative to the BP Oil Disaster blow-out preventer, and a conspiracy of secrecy to hide the facts from the public. More here
A 48-year-old veteran oil worker claims “You and your fellow Committee members may wish to require BP to explain what action was ultimately instituted to cease the practice of falsifying BOP tests at BP Prudhoe drilling rigs. It was a cost saving but dangerous practice, again endangering the BP workforce, until I exposed it to Senator Ted Stevens, the EPA, and the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.” The cause of the crash is still an OPEN investigation by the NTSB.
August 13, 2010 – age 67 – Simmons’ body was found Sunday night in his hot tub, investigators said. An autopsy by the state medical examiner’s office concluded Monday that he died from accidental drowning with heart disease as a contributing factor – “It was painful as can be” to be only insider willing to speak out against the “officials” during the BP Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico
April 6, 2010 – age 46 – cell biologist and college professor, a near-native Floridian who chose to return to South Florida after studying at elite universities – was fatally shot during what police say was a home invasion robbery.
Links and video: Read the rest of this entry »
BANKSTER ACTION ALERT: NATIONAL CALL IN DAY ON FRAUDCLOSURE, TUESDAY MARCH 29TH
BANKSTER USA 
March 29, 2011 BANKSTER ACTION ALERT: NATIONAL CALL IN DAY ON FRAUDCLOSURE, TUESDAY MARCH 29TH The first draft of a proposed settlement from the 50 state Attorneys General against the big banks for their rampant mortgage fraud went public a few weeks ago. Starting with a middle-of-the-road proposal full of loopholes is not a good way to start negotiation. The big banks and their supporters have already started crying foul, trying to slip out of any real enforcement, punishment and restitution for the millions of homeowners they owe. This means that it’s time to kick into high gear our push for a “settlement that fits the crime.” The state Attorneys General are expected to meet with the big banks this week. That’s why our friends at National People’s Action, PICO National Network and others working to stop the foreclosure madness are making today Nationwide Call-In Day to all 50 state Attorneys General. TAKE ACTION! Call your state Attorney General today at 1-866-200-6444 and tell him/her that crime should not pay! Tell your AG to come out in support a settlement that provides justice for the homeowners who have been wrongfully foreclosed upon and for millions facing foreclosure, and a settlement that holds the big banks accountable for their crimes. Nothing less is acceptable. BANKSTER WONK ROOM: Read more about problems with the settlement negotiations so far: Gretchen Morgensen, New York Times “A Swift Deal May Not Be a Sound One”. Jesse Eisinger, New York Times “In Proposed Mortgage Fraud Settlement, a Gift to Big Banks.” And thank you for everything you do to fight the Banskters!
ABOUT US BanksterUSA is a project of the Wisconsin-based Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). CMD was founded in 1993 as an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, public interest group focusing on exposing corporate spin and government propaganda. |
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Some recent stories on increasing legal and economic pressures being put on struggling homeowners. |
Army admits Gulf War medical records destroyed- letter ordering destruction found
Feb. 11, 2011 AZcentral
WTSP-TV, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -
A letter from the Department of the Army telling units to destroy their records after the end of Operation Desert Storm has made it more difficult for injured veterans to get the medical benefits they need.
The letter, never made public before now, says units were told to destroy their records because officials had no room to ship the paperwork back to the United States. The letter goes on to say it was in direct contradiction to existing Army regulations.
“This could have been one, five, six, a couple of hundred or this could be thousands (of soldiers),” says Andrew Marshall, a Florida regional officer with the nonprofit Disabled American Veterans group. “You don’t know.”
One solider trying to get help from the Veterans Administration for combat-related injuries says he has been turned down because his records are missing. He did not want to be identified.
He says he has all the medical records for the time he was in the states, but the records for everything that happened outside of the country are gone.
Marshall says the Army should have backups to the records destroyed in the Persian Gulf.
But the Army’s letter says several years after soldiers began putting in medical claims, it was discovered all records below the brigade level no longer existed.
Operation Desert Storm pushed Iraqi troops out of Kuwait but kept Saddam Hussein in power and lasted from Aug. 2, 1990, to the cease-fire April 11, 1991. In the conflict, 383 service members died; as of last year, 467 were reported injured. About 2.225 million troops served in the war, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Not just the after-action reports have been destroyed or are missing. According to some files, when some veterans come to the Veterans Administration to get help for service-related disabilities, records show they served, but medical records are missing.
That means when the vets make claims, they are turned down.
Nine stories the press is underreporting — fraud, fraud and more fraud
Nieman Watchdog: Questions the press should ask
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ASK THIS | October 20, 2010 Harvard University
From liars’ loans to liars’ liens, the financial and foreclosure crisis has been one big story of banks defrauding their customers — a vast criminal enterprise. You wouldn’t know it from a lot of the media coverage, though. Regulatory hero and criminologist William K. Black helps connect the dots.
By Dan Froomkin
froomkin@niemanwatchdog.org
If it wasn’t already blindingly obvious that pervasive fraud was at the heart of the financial crisis and the ensuing foreclosure catastrophe, you would think that the latest news — that banks have routinely been lying their heads off in the rush to kick homeowners off the properties they fraudulently induced them to buy in the first place – would pretty much clinch it.
And yet the mainstream media still by and large hasn’t connected the dots.
What we are seeing all around us are the continued effects of a vast criminal enterprise that has never been brought to account, employing a process that, as University of Texas economist James Galbraith explains, involved the equivalent of counterfeiting, laundering and fencing.
So the person with the right expertise to lead us here is a criminologist — in particular William K. Black, one of the few effective regulators in recent history (during the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s), a notorious knocker of heads, and currently professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of the book, “The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One”.
Establishment ‘Journalism’ and Standard Military Puff-Pieces
“it’s all based on, on trust and relationships” ….And an agreement not to tell the truth
The McChrystal Bombshell
June 25, 2010 NPR On the Media
How did Michael Hastings get such candor from McChrystal and his advisers? CNN’s former senior Pentagon correspondent Jamie McIntyre was on the military beat for 16 years. His theory comes down to the beat reporter versus freelancer divide. Beat reporters may be less likely to use such candid moments in their stories for fear of losing future access. For a freelancer like Hastings that’s not much of a concern.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Today I accepted General Stanley McChrystal’s resignation as Commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.
BOB GARFIELD: In case you, by some miracle, missed this development, the head of military operations in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal resigned this week over insubordinate remarks made by himself and his staff about the President, the Vice-President and others, recounted by freelance reporter Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone Magazine.
In an interview with WNYC’s and PRI’s The Takeaway, he explained why he reported what others did not.
MICHAEL HASTINGS: In the past the general has given pretty good access to a number of journalists, and I believe those journalists were interested in giving sort of a flattering profile of the general, which assures you more access in the future. I understand that, but it’s not something I’m interested in doing.
Post-Democracy: why the last 30 years have been a charade
from Rethinking Iran-Contra by Robert Parry July 1, 2010
…..In view of the latest evidence – and the crumbling of the long-running October Surprise cover-up – there appears to have been a single Iran-Contra narrative spanning the entire 12 years of the Reagan and Bush-41 administration, and representing a much darker story.
And it was not simply a tale of Republican electoral skullduggery and treachery, but possibly even more troubling, a story of rogue CIA officers and Israel’s Likud hardliners sabotaging a sitting U.S. president, Jimmy Carter.
Plus, with Washington’s failure to get at the larger truth about the Iran-Contra Affair, crucial patterns were set: Republicans acted aggressively, Democrats behaved timidly, and the U.S. national news media was transformed from Watergate-era watchdogs, to lapdogs and finally to guard dogs protecting national security wrongdoing…….
Did BP Cronies Sell Stock Early Due to Insider Info?
June 17, 2010
Washington’sBlog is reporting that the initial BP oil well blow out may have begun in February:
Did the BP Oil Well Really Blow Out in February, Instead of April?
The Deepwater Horizon blew up on April 20th, and sank a couple of days later. BP has been criticized for failing to report on the seriousness of the blow out for several weeks.
However, as a whistleblower previously told 60 Minutes, there was an accident at the rig a month or more prior to the April 20th explosion:
[Mike Williams, the chief electronics technician on the Deepwater Horizon, and one of the last workers to leave the doomed rig] said they were told it would take 21 days; according to him, it actually took six weeks.
With the schedule slipping, Williams says a BP manager ordered a faster pace.
“And he requested to the driller, ‘Hey, let’s bump it up. Let’s bump it up.’ And what he was talking about there is he’s bumping up the rate of penetration. How fast the drill bit is going down,” Williams said.
Williams says going faster caused the bottom of the well to split open, swallowing tools and that drilling fluid called “mud.”
“We actually got stuck. And we got stuck so bad we had to send tools down into the drill pipe and sever the pipe,” Williams explained.
That well was abandoned and Deepwater Horizon had to drill a new route to the oil. It cost BP more than two weeks and millions of dollars. ..snip..
As Bloomberg reports today, problems at the well actually started in February:
BP Plc was struggling to seal cracks in its Macondo well as far back as February, more than two months before an explosion killed 11 and spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
It took 10 days to plug the first cracks, according to reports BP filed with the Minerals Management Service that were later delivered to congressional investigators. Cracks in the surrounding rock continued to complicate the drilling operation during the ensuing weeks. Left unsealed, they can allow explosive natural gas to rush up the shaft.
“Once they realized they had oil down there, all the decisions they made were designed to get that oil at the lowest cost,” said Peter Galvin of the Center for Biological Diversity, which has been working with congressional investigators probing the disaster. “It’s been a doomed voyage from the beginning.” read entire post here
Meanwhile, others have reported that:
Goldman Sachs sold $250 million of BP stock before spill
….Other asset management firms also sold huge blocks of BP stock in the first quarter — but their sales were a fraction of Goldman’s. Wachovia, which is owned by Wells Fargo, sold 2,667,419 shares; UBS, the Swiss bank, sold 2,125,566 shares.
Wachovia and UBS also sold much larger percentages of their BP stock, at 98 percently and 97 percent respectively.
Wachova parent Wells Fargo, however, bought 2.3 million shares in the quarter, largely discounting Wachovia’s sales……….
A reasonable observer might conclude that insider information was making the rounds between February and April. And probably the SEC will be the last to know.
–Claudia
BP Gulf catastrophe typifies corporate behavior in America
Tuesday, May 25, 2010 by Mike Adams NaturalNews
The Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe, now in its 35th day, has struck land, coating tourist beaches, marshes and shorelines with a greasy black filth that metaphorically represents the corporate greed that now dominates the U.S. economy.
We are all awash in the dark slime of corporations gone bad, and now we’re paying the price for allowing these companies to dominate our media, our government and our entire economy.
You might think government regulators could have prevented all this, but that’s hardly the case. This disaster isn’t merely about a government regulation failure; it’s about what happens when you let corporations rule Washington.
Reporters threatened with arrest by U.S. Coast Guard under orders from BP
British Petroleum has been steamrolling both the federal government and the press over this oil catastrophe in the Gulf. For starters, the U.S. Coast Guard is now threatening to arrest journalists who try to cover the story by invoking “BP rules” that forbid journalists from conducting investigative journalism. (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010…)
As reported by CBS News: “When CBS News tried to reach the beach, covered in oil, a boat of BP contractors with two Coast Guard officers on board told us to turn around under threat of arrest.”
In other words, the U.S. Coast Guard is now protecting the financial interests of corporations by trying to censor a story the public needs to see.
