Archive for the ‘Liberty’ Category
Oregon county seeks to ban GMO crops, asserts community rights
GMO crops like these Roundup Ready sugar beets near Monroe would be outlawed in Benton County under Measure 2-89, but the initiative would have to stand up to legal challenges in court. Photo: Amanda Cowan
M2-89 relies on ‘community rights’ to challenge Oregon statute
A ban on genetically modified crops is not the most radical part of Measure 2-89.
The most radical part of the Benton County ballot measure is its attempt to circumvent state law by asserting a fundamental right of local self-governance, even in the face of state or federal law.
If passed by voters in the May 19 special election, Measure 2-89 — also known as the Benton County Local Food System Ordinance — would prohibit corporations and government entities from using genetically modified organisms anywhere in the county and require them to harvest, remove or destroy all GMOs within 90 days of passage.
But in order for the measure to take effect, it would have to override Oregon Revised Statute 633.738, a two-year-old state law that bars local jurisdictions from regulating seeds or agricultural production.
In high-flown language reminiscent of the nation’s founding documents, M2-89 begins with a statement of “findings and intent” that directly challenges the rights of corporations and the authority of state and federal laws, culminating in this remarkable statement:
“We the people of Benton County therefore enact this local law pursuant to the inherent and inalienable right of the residents of Benton County to govern their own county for their own health, safety and welfare. That authority is also secured by the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that governments are instituted to secure the rights of the people, in the State Constitution of Oregon’s recognition that all power is inherent in the people, and in the Benton County Charter, which delegates the authority to the people and their representatives to enact local legislation on matters of county concern.”
The question, of course, is this: Can they really get away with that?
….. continued at site
2014 “Noam Chomsky”: Why you can not have a Capitalist Democracy!
70% of Americans have no impact on government and are enslaved by Plutocrats who run our rigged system
The Rise of American Cannibals
The Economist Nov 6th 2014
A NEW paper by Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics suggests that, in America at least, inequality in wealth is approaching record levels. The authors examine the share of total wealth held by the bottom 90% of families relative to those at the very top. In the late 1920s the bottom 90% held just 16% of America’s wealth—considerably less than that held by the top 0.1%, which controlled a quarter of total wealth just before the crash of 1929. From the beginning of the Depression until well after the end of the second world war, the middle class’s share of total wealth rose steadily, thanks to collapsing wealth among richer households, broader equity ownership, middle-class income growth and rising rates of home-ownership. From the early 1980s, however, these trends have reversed. The top 0.1% (consisting of 160,000 families worth $73m on average) hold 22% of America’s wealth, just shy of the 1929 peak—and almost the same share as the bottom 90% of the population.
Read the full article here
The baleful influence of corporate power
Over 100 years ago, it was a Republican who warned us about the baleful influence of corporate power on representative government.
Today the business once transacted by individuals in every community is in the control of corporations, and many of the men who once conducted an independent business are gathered into the organization, and all personal identity, and all individualities lost. Each man has become a mere cog in one of the wheels of a complicated mechanism. It is the business of the corporations to get money. It exacts but one thing of its employees: Obedience to orders. It cares not about their relations to the community, the church, society, or the family. It wants full hours and faithful service, and when they die, wear out or are discharged, it quickly replaces them with new material. The corporation is a machine for making money, but it reduces men to the insignificance of mere numerical figures, as certainly as the private ranks of the regular army.
from The Texas Economic Miracle Is Killing People by Charlie Pierce
95% of Income gains going to top 1%
from The Benefits of Economic Expansions Are Increasingly Going to the Richest Americans
NYT 09/26/14 [Some call it Capitalism- looks more like Cannibalism…..]
The Finance Industry has Effectively Captured our Government
In 2009, the Atlantic published an article by Simon Johnson titled The Quiet Coup:
The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.
I believe 70+ % of Americans agree about this state of affairs but most don’t know they have so much company – often because they are encouraged to use divisive rhetoric to express it so that gridlock appears to be the problem.
If TPP becomes a reality, we have no chance of ever getting our country back. Don’t you think it’s about time to loudly protest the theft of Democracy?? ISIL is no threat compared to this one! in fact it’s a joke.
Tell Congress: no more weapons of war for local police
Sign the petition here to protect Free Speech and De-militarize the Police.
I suspect even they will appreciate it!
Update: Police aren’t just using military-issued weapons, they’re LOSING them. Fusion Investigates
You can launch a #whistleblower movement — now
A direct call for whistleblowing is now half a block from the State Department.
“Don’t wait until a new war has started,” says a billboard quoting Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg — “don’t wait until thousands more have died, before you tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or crimes…”
Right now, you can help put that billboard in other key locations, reaching thousands of employees at places like the NSA, Pentagon and CIA every day. To do that, click here.
Engdahl: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (video)
The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation, F. William Engdahl
Published on Jan 4, 2014
F. William Engdahl is an American German freelance journalist, historian and economic researcher. and author of “Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation”
This lecture at the Open Mind Conference 2013, focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish its control over the very basis of human survival, the provision of our daily bread. Control the food and you control the people. This is no ordinary lecture about the perils of GMO.
Engdahl takes the audience inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms and reveals a World of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. The lecture is based on Engdahls book “Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation” which is an eye-opener, a must-read for all those committed to the causes of social justice and World peace.
Wake-up Call 