Full Text Of TPP Released: And It's Really, Really Bad

from the no-wonder-they-were-hiding-it dept

Politics
by Mike Masnick
Fri, Nov 6th 2015

Yesterday, a month after it was announced that the TPP was "finalized," the official text was finally released. Immediately after that, USTR (somewhat oddly) reposted the whole thing to Medium -- apparently in an effort to appear transparent for an agreement that was negotiated for years in secret. The overall document has been broken out into many different sections, but if you add it all up it's over 6,000 pages long. The Washington Post did what none of the governments actually did and made the document searchable. I spent much of yesterday trying to read through the various sections, and it appears to be super problematic. Along with the text, the USTR posted a bunch of nonsense propaganda about what they want people to think the TPP is really about.

But the problems with the TPP run deep: Despite earlier promises from both the USTR and Australia that intellectual property would not be subject to the "corporate sovereignty" provisions (which they call "investor state dispute settlement" or ISDS), they absolutely are. And this is a massive problem. It means that any country that's a member of the TPP can effectively never move its intellectual property rules in the direction of better benefiting the public -- because some foreign company will claim that this takes away their expected profits. Section 9.1 lists "intellectual property" as the type of asset that is a part of the ISDS process.

We already know what a mess this can create. Remember Eli Lilly is currently using NAFTA's corporate sovereignty provisions to demand half a billion dollars from Canada, after Canada rejected two of its patents because Canada realized the drugs that Eli Lilly had tried to patent did not deliver the benefits the company claimed when trying to get the patent. Canada said that was a good reason to reject the patent. Eli Lilly claimed that this was taking away its assets and demanded half a billion dollars.

Now imagine what would happen if anyone tried to... say... shorten copyright terms? Or require registration for copyright? Or fix the patent system so that you can't patent obvious and broad concepts any more? Does anyone doubt that any country that did so would be beset by these kinds of attacks, which wouldn't even be handled by courts, but by a tribunal of corporate lawyers, often the very same lawyers these companies would hire for other work? Including intellectual property in the investment chapter is a poison pill designed to ensure that intellectual property can only continue to ratchet up, rather than back.

Now, there is a very limited "exception" concerning the "revocation, limitation or creation of intellectual property rights" if it's "consistent" with the TRIPS Agreement -- an earlier trade agreement regarding intellectual property. As KEI notes, this limited exception isn't going to cut it:

The exceptions for intellectual property in the TPP investment chapter are important, and often designed to accommodate existing state practice in the United States or other countries, but one should not overstate the degree to which intellectual property rights are excluded. The meaning of the WTO TRIPS agreement and the TPP IP Chapter itself will be subject to review and arbitration led by private right holders, on topics such as "adequate" or "reasonable" compensation or remuneration for non-voluntary uses of intellectual property rights, the standards for granting patents, and other issues, to determine "to the extent" an action of policy is "consistent" with the TRIPS or the TPP IP Chapter. This not only leads to forum shopping (TRIPS and TPP IP obligations can be interpreted via TPP ISDS), but also empowers private right holder investors (and not consumers) to bring cases and benefit from sanctions against governments.

KEI also notes that these "exceptions" don't apply to any of the new expanded IP requirements that the TPP has introduced -- including things like much higher damages requirements and the possibilities of criminal charges for the vaguely defined "commercial scale" infringement.

What's kind of amazing here is that we've spent years warning about problems with the "intellectual property" chapter and the "investment" chapter individually, and the absolute worst part of this agreement is the way the negotiators tied them together in a ridiculous and dangerous way. This is much, much worse than many of the things we feared would be in the agreement, and it's made even worse by the fact that the USTR directly promised this would not be in the agreement.

There are a number of other problems as well: KEI warns that at least part of the e-commerce provision can be read to ban a requirement for open source software, which would seem to undermine certain open source licenses, like the GPL. Michael Geist notes that the document confirms that Canada basically has agreed to wipe out many useful copyright reforms from a few years ago, and to extend its copyrights yet again, robbing the public of the public domain. Of course, that raises the question of whether or not someone could make an ISDS claim that Canada is taking away their "investment" in Canada... Oh, who am I kidding. ISDS doesn't apply to the public... just to companies.

There are also, as expected, serious problems for affordable medicine and healthcare, privacy, surveillance and more. Despite claiming to demand "nondiscriminatory treatment of digital products" and "cross border transfer by electric means" of information -- an anti-censorship/blocking provision -- the agreement lets Malaysia off the hook on such requirements.

In addition to that, last month we wrote about how it appeared that the negotiators had carved tobacco out of the ISDS section, but upon reading the whole thing, people are pointing out that it's not actually true, as it makes that part voluntary for countries to decide themselves.

In short, the TPP appears to be a massive mess, and in some ways worse than we feared. According to some, concurrent with the release, President Obama told Congress of his intent to sign the TPP, which started the 90-day clock for Congress to "review" the agreement -- conveniently making sure that much of the debate is limited by the end-of-the-year holidays, long Congressional "recesses" that happen around this time, and other key end-of-the-year business. In short, this agreement that was negotiated in near total secrecy (unless you were a big corporate lobbyist) is a really bad deal, and the administration is going to play every trick it can come up with to get it approved. Now would be a good time to let your elected officials know that they need to vote against the TPP.

We’re the ‘Weeds’ for Monsanto Roundup Weed Killer

Column: Economics

Region: USA in the World

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to kill you.” Such a comment might be applied to the most widely used weed-killers on Earth–Monsanto’s patented Roundup based on the systemic herbicide, Glyphosate. Earlier this year the authoritative International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World health Organisation (WHO) declared that glyphosate is probably carcinogenic to humans. Scientific studies have confirmed it. Now a new, peer-reviewed scientific study over a two-year life span of test rats, clearly demonstrates that consumption of even tiny amounts of Roundup or other glyphosate-containing weed killers produces severe liver and kidney damage and in some cases premature death.

The well-meaning faceless bureaucrats over at the supra-national EU Commission in Brussels refuse to even seriously consider such studies and classify as “secret” a German government report from this past January because it likely would show Monsanto’s dirty paw prints. All this does is once more show the criminal conspiracy by Monsanto, the world’s leading purveyor of Genetically Modified Organisms or GMO plants to use myths, lies and any sort of corruption of science to ram their poisons down the throats of our food animals and of us human beings.

Shocking new Study

On August 25, the international scientific journal, Environmental Health, published the peer-reviewed results of a two-year study by a team led by Michael N. Antoniou of the Department of Medical and Molecular Genetics, King’s College London. He conceived the study together with Prof. Gilles-Eric Seralini of the Institute of Biology, University of Caen, in France.

Under strictest conditions the different groups of rats were given micro-diluted concentrations of glyphosate and its adjuvants as found in Roundup from Monsanto. The glyphosate equivalent dose of Roundup administered in this study was half that permitted in drinking water in the European Union and Australia, and 14,000 times lower than that permitted in drinking water in the USA.

Moreover, the amount of glyphosate-equivalent Roundup consumed by the animals on a daily basis was many thousands of times below the regulatory set safety limits of glyphosate alone in all regions around the world.

This is the most extensive and only known long-term study of the potential toxic effects of glyphosate-based herbicides such as Monsanto’s Roundup, even though Roundup with glyphosate was discovered by Monsanto in 1970.

Glyphosate-based herbicides (GBH) such as Roundup are the major pesticides used worldwide and are currently applied on at least 24 % of the total global cropland. They are also used extensively in domestic and urban environments. Residues of GBH are routinely detected in foodstuffs and drinking water contaminated via rain, surface runoff and leaching into groundwater. In short it’s almost everywhere.

What the scientists discovered should set alarm bells ringing around the world. Have you heard even so much as a jingle bell so far?

They discovered that male animals suffered from pathological liver and kidney damage resulting in an increased rate of premature deaths. Further, significant alteration in the pattern of gene function was found in both the liver and kidneys of the Roundup group of rats compared with the control group. The alterations in gene function were consistent with fibrosis (scarring), necrosis (areas of dead tissue), phospholipidosis (disturbed fat metabolism) and damage to mitochondria (the centres of respiration in cells).

I want to underscore the seriousness of what Antoniou and his colleagues are describing. The liver is a vital organ. It has some 500 functions in the body including detoxification of various metabolites, protein synthesis, and the production of biochemicals necessary for digestion. This gland plays a major role in metabolism. It regulates a variety of essential reactions, including the synthesis and breakdown of small and complex molecules which are necessary for normal vital functions. In short, the liver supports almost every organ in the body and is vital for survival. 

And we should also be clear on the role of other glyphosate-damaged organ, the kidneys, which are essential for the body’s removal of waste products of metabolism. Kidneys are essential to the urinary system and also the regulation of electrolytes, maintenance of acid–base balance, and regulation of blood pressure by maintaining the salt and water balance. They are the body’s natural filter of the blood, and remove water-soluble wastes which are diverted to the bladder.  If both kidneys and liver are damaged seriously, we are in bad trouble, or even dead.

To sum up the Antoniou and Seralini team’s rat research results, rats fed ultra-low concentrations of glyphosate-based Roundup over the two year life-span period showed that, “twice the number of biochemical parameters was disturbed in kidney than what can be expected by chance. Furthermore, a testosterone/estrogen imbalance was evident with testosterone serum levels significantly increased by 97 % by comparison to controls, while estradiol serum levels were decreased by 26 %. These observations together with pituitary gland disturbances suggest endocrine disrupting effects.” Estradiol is a steroid and estrogen sex hormone, and the primary female sex hormone. It is essential for the development and maintenance of female reproductive tissues but also has important effects in many other tissues including bone. Estrogens have essential functions in men as well.

The scientists continue their conclusions: “Overall, toxicity process analysis revealed gene expression disturbances associated with apoptosis, necrosis, phospholipidosis, mitochondrial membrane dysfunction and ischemia. Thus the alteration…in this study correlates with the observed increased signs of anatomical and functional pathology of the liver and kidneys.” They observed “more than 4000 genes whose expression was altered in both the liver and kidneys within the Roundup treatment group.”

Monsanto and corrupt scientists

Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini designed this newest study with his colleagues as a follow-up to a sensational 2012 study. The new study was specifically on the impact, not of feeding Roundup-sprayed GMO corn from Monsanto, but solely the isolated impact of Roundup, the glyphosate-based Roundup weed-killer used in all GMO crops today. In September 2012 Food and Chemical Toxicology, published Seralini’s first ever-long-term two year study of the impact of Monsanto GMO corn sprayed, as Monsanto requires, with Monsanto’s Roundup weed-killer.

That 2012 Seralini report described the world’s first feeding study of the effects on more than 200 rats of a diet of GMO corn over a period of a full two years at a cost of €3 million.  The study found alarming instances of cancer tumors in rats fed GMO corn treated with Monsanto Roundup with Glyphosate. World media coverage forced the EU Commission to cover its pro-GMO tracks.

More than one year later, in 2013, in an unprecedented and entirely unethical move, the Food and Chemical Toxicology editors retracted the Seralini 2012 article. It was later discovered that a former senior Monsanto employee, Richard Goodman, had been named by the journal to their Editorial Board shortly before the Seralini study was retracted. A year after that blatantly corrupt action, Goodman along with Editor-in-chief A. Wallace Hayes were themselves both “removed” by the publisher. 

But the corruption doesn’t stop with the attempts to ostracise the Seralini rat studies.

EU Declares German Monsanto study “Secret”

In the latest twist in this criminal drama of lies and intrigues the EU Commission has just declared a German government study “secret” and unavailable for examination by independent scientific experts.

The EU Commission is refusing to let independent experts have access to the recent report prepared by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) on the risk assessment of glyphosate.

On August 10, 2015 the EU Commission wrote to Testbiotech.org, an industry-independent group of experts registered as a non-profit organization to promote independent research and public debate on the impacts of biotechnology, a euphemism for GMO.

The EU Commission wrote that it had denied a request by Testbiotech to examine the documents made available to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) by the German government. The EU insisted, bizarrely, that the documents “are protected in their entirety” as confidential. The EU Commission can see “no overriding public interest” that would justify access. The letter was signed by Ladislav Miko, Acting Director-General of the EU Commission’s Food Safety Directorate (the name of the EU office even sounds like 1984). Miko is another of those Brussels faceless bureaucrats with immense responsibility and no transparency.

At issue is a report sent to the EU Commission’s Monsanto-linked EFSA, (European Food Safety Authority), this spring by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) on the safety of glyphosate. The German assessment was made following widespread publicity about the WHO assessment that glyphosate was a likely cancer causing chemical. Surprisingly, the BfR came to the opposite conclusion, namely that there is no risk of cancer from glyphosates. Theirs was in a hasty study that apparently relied on an equally hasty study provided to the German government by…you guessed it–Monsanto scientists. That Monsanto study that formed the basis of the cheery German BfR report is what the scientific experts of Testbiotech.org wish to put under the microscope. To avoid that potential embarrassment, the EU Commission has labeled the German study “secret and confidential.” The German government has also kept their report secret.

The criminal melodrama gets even more remarkable though.

In a 2013 court ruling made by the European Court of Justice, (Case T 545/11), judges ruled that data relevant for the risk assessment of herbicides have to be made public. The EU Commission as well as the German government are in contempt of that ruling.

Whatever Monsanto touches seems to ooze with corruption and fraud. It’s interesting and extraordinary in its pervasiveness, and suggests the company has a deeper agenda than mere corporate profit. I would posit that the deeper Monsanto agenda has something to do with the company’s long history with the pro-eugenics Rockefeller family and more recently with eugenicist advocate, Bill Gates of Microsoft.

Is the entire GMO project, a project financed and brought to commercialization primarily by the Rockefeller Foundation, a hidden eugenics project to gradually reduce world population of what Rockefeller and his kind would call “useless eaters” or human “weeds”? It’s beginning to look more and more just like that. What an elegant way to get hundreds of millions or even a few billions of people to have them slowly eat themselves to death by consuming GMO and glyphosates they don’t even notice until it’s too late. Especially Asians, Africans, all non-Anglo-Saxons. But that is really ridiculous now, isn’t it?“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to kill you.”

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/11/06/we-re-the-weeds-for-monsanto-roundup-weed-killer/

Spraying Our Killing Fields with Agent Orange  ...
Could it be that some people are deliberately trying to maim and kill us?

Column: Society

Region: USA in the World

The United States Department of Agriculture is rapidly challenging the war machine of the Pentagon for the most wanted and most feared honor of creating the world’s largest and most effective killing fields. Killing fields is of course a reference to the compelling British movie of the 1980’s about the US war in Cambodia which Nixon ordered in May, 1970, in frustration at the lack of victory in neighboring Vietnam. These killing fields, however, are the golden green fields of US GMO corn and the endless acres of GMO soybeans which make up almost all US corn and soybean production today.

Would you knowingly feed your family a documented toxin that is said to cause cancers, autism and other illnesses? If you are old enough to recall the tragic history of the Vietnam War of the 1970s and the US military’s massive spraying across the rich jungles of Vietnam with a highly toxic defoliant or weed-killer nicknamed Agent Orange, the following might give you pause.

‘Super-weeds’

The advent of the widespread use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), the direct result of President G.H.W. Bush’s collusion with Monsanto in 1992, opened a Pandora’s Box for the human and animal food chain which is only now beginning to be seriously looked at by a larger scientific and lay public. To date, almost all GMO patented seeds or crops, whether soybean, corn or cotton, have been modified for one trait enhancement–that they are resistant to the powerful and highly toxic weed-killer glyphosate, the main component of Monsanto’s Roundup, the world’s best-selling weed-killer.

At the beginning of US commercialization of GMO in the mid-1990s, glyphosate herbicides, whether from Monsanto, Dow, DuPont or Syngenta or others, appeared to farmers to be salvation for weed control. It killed everything, everything, except the genetically modified GMO corn or soybean crops which had been genetically manipulated, not to increase harvest yield as Monsanto slick PR would have us believe, but only to “resist” glyphosate and Roundup. Farmers were delighted at the beginning. Monsanto GMO plantings spread across the fields of America to the point today, according to a recent USDA survey, GMO soybeans sprayed with glyphosate weed-killer chemicals comprise fully 94% of the entire US soybean harvest. That means virtually every food product on US supermarket shelves containing soy or soybean derivative is GMO, sprayed with glyphosate. The figure was only 17% in 1997. The USDA figure for GMO corn drenched in glyphosate chemicals this year will reach 92% of all corn produced in America. The United States is the world’s largest corn producer and the largest exporter, and the world’s largest soybean producer.

US produced GMO corn and soybeans covered with glyphosate, are exported to the European Union and even to China under various legal loopholes, despite a de facto prohibition of GMO planting in those countries. It is exported as high protein “power feed” for animals–chicken, pigs, cattle.

Initially into the turn of the century all seemed to be going well. Owing to the collusion between G.H.W. Bush and subsequent US presidents Clinton, Baby Bush and Obama, Americans were denied the basic human right to know what they were feeding their family. It was prohibited that the US Government Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or the USDA or any other government agency independently test the approved GMO patented crops for health and safety. It was known as the Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence and it’s a criminal fraud in force since 1992 when old Bush agreed with Monsanto on that. Farmers have since sprayed tons of glyphosate chemicals on their crops of GMO corn or soybeans or cotton–the three major US GMO crops.

After several years however, nature found devious ways to outfox Monsanto, Dow, DuPont and their glyphosate weed-killers. Nature mutated new varieties of so-called super-weeds. Today an estimated 50 percent of US farmland is being strangled by new super-weeds requiring application of far more tons of chemical weed-killers than with normal non GMO and non-glyphosate-treated crops.

The spread of giant fields of super-weeds is worst in the southeastern United States where most soybeans and cotton crops are grown. There, as of 2013, a reported 92 percent of cotton and soybean fields were infested as a result of Roundup Ready crops.

The now-Roundup-resistant Palmer amaranth is just one example of the weeds spreading across America’s farmland. It’s a fast-growing weed that can reach eight feet in height, outcompeting soybeans or cotton; it develops a tough stem that can damage farm machinery. Other aggressive super weeds, impervious to Roundup or other glyphosate weed-killers, are spreading rapidly through the Midwest and the Corn Belt. The cause is the widespread use since the mid-1990s of GMO crops sprayed with Roundup or other glyphosate based weed killers. Nature is clever in finding solutions and the nature of super weeds is far cleverer, it seems, than the minds of the GMO Monsanto scientists devising weed-killers.

Roundup resistant Super weeds are covering American GMO acres

Some of the super-weeds have incorporated genetic material from the GMO plants into their own genetics and used it to grow taller, stronger, and with greater vitality than the previous weeds that were killed by glyphosate when it was first introduced to genetically modified crop fields.

2,4-D-a cure worse than the disease

Now the even-cleverer scientists at Monsanto-rival Dow Chemical have rolled out a new, likely even more toxic cocktail they claim will solve the super-weed crisis the glyphosate weed-killers caused in the first place. Only this “solution” is worse than the super-weed disease itself. It involves mixing the glyphosate chemicals together with something chemists call 2, 4-Dichlorophenoxy acetic acid or simply 2,4-D.

Dow Chemical has won USDA and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approval for its new herbicide, “Enlist,” which is based on 2,4-D as well as other non-disclosed (company confidential) chemical adjuvants. They claim it will solve the problem of glyphosate-resistant super-weeds caused by widespread GMO crop spraying with Monsanto’s Roundup. The EPA claims that “tests” have proven 2,4-D completely safe even for the fetus inside a mother’s womb. The only problem is that the safety tests were funded and given to the corrupt EPA by Dow Chemical itself.

The US Government EPA is a cesspool today of chemical industry influence. Decisions on permitting toxic chemicals to be sprayed on food crops are not made as to whether there is any human health risk from the chemical. Rather the EPA criterion is a bizarre “cost-benefit analysis.” The agency calculates the social cost of possible illnesses even deaths from spraying with a given chemical. It weighs those costs against the benefits to farmers, to the corporate profit, to the economy of approving a new weed-killer. Since it was created in the mid-seventies, the EPA has issued regulations restricting the use of only five industrial chemicals out of more than eighty thousand in the environment.

One since-fired EPA whistle-blower described the corrupt relation between the chemical industry and the EPA that is supposed to safeguard the public from harmful chemicals. Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, former Senior Policy Analyst in the Office of the Administrator at the US Environmental Protection Agency told about the collusion between the EPA and the chemical companies. She was fired for publicly protesting the poisoning of South African mine workers by a US corporation in 2000. She describes the EPA culture: “…when I first arrived at EPA, it was not unusual to have someone from Dow Chemical sitting at a desk in the corner in the same office that you were in, who was also writing environmental policy. … It took me a while to sort of… get a handle on who was a government official and who was from the private sector…”

In announcing approval of the new weed-killer, Enlist, Dow AgroSciences President, Tim Hassinger, said it promised to be the biggest selling and most profitable in the history of Dow’s agriculture division.

History of Agent Orange

But the US Department of Agriculture and the EPA are lying to the public about the benign effects of Dow’s Enlist super weed killer containing 2,4-D. They claim that 2,4-D is harmless and that even though it was a component in the deadly Agent Orange used during the Vietnam War as a jungle defoliant. They claim that the “harmful” part of Agent Orange, 2,4,5-T, an unintended by-product of the manufacture was responsible for the negative health effects and eventually led to the ban on Agent Orange. We are supposed to believe 2,4-D is as harmless as a vanilla milkshake.

Agent Orange’s ingredient 2,4-D, was first developed during World War II as one of many chemical warfare agents, used as a herbicide or plant killer that was sprayed by air to kill enemy crops. Later during the Korean and Vietnam wars it was compounded with another chemical to create what came to be called Agent Orange. Agent Orange contained both 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T. According to the National Pesticide Information Center Dioxin, an unintended by-product of the manufacture of 2,4,5-T, was blamed for the negative health effects and eventually led to the ban of Agent Orange.

A report of the Natural Resources Defense Council on 2,4-D states:

Over the past 40 years, dozens of studies have shown the connection between 2,4-D and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (cancers of the blood) and soft-tissue sarcoma in people. Other research reveals that 2,4-D enters breast milk and semen where it disrupts normal hormone functions, which can also cause serious and lasting effects during fetal and infant development. In fact, in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, researchers have found higher rates of certain birth defects in areas with the highest use of 2,4-D and other similar herbicides. The higher rate of birth defects was most evident in infants conceived in the spring—the time of year when the herbicide is most used. Those birth defects were significantly higher in males, and consisted mostly of cardiac and lung abnormalities.

New England Journal of Medicine calls for Halt

Dow AgroSciences in October, 2014 got EPA approval for a second variant of “Enlist” containing 2,4-D. This is called “Enlist Duo.” Enlist Duo contains 2,4-D choline and glyphosate. It has been approved in Canada and the US. It’s used on genetically modified soybeans and genetically modified maize that is resistant to 2,4-D and glyphosate. If the EU is foolish or corrupt enough to approve Washington’s Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, Enlist Duo will soon be spread across the farm fields of the EU as well.

The New England Journal of Medicine, the most respected medical science journal in the United States, has now come out sounding the alarm on the decision by the EPA and USA to approve Dow’s Enlist Duo. In an article in the August 20, 2015 issue, Dr Philip Landrigan M.D. and Charles Benbrook, PhD call for a drastic policy change regarding the Dow herbicide combination.

They point out that the recent spread since the mid-1990’s of GMO herbicide-resistant crops “has led to overreliance on herbicides and, in particular, on glyphosate. In the United States, glyphosate use has increased by a factor of more than 250 — from 0.4 million kg in 1974 to 113 million kg in 2014. Global use has increased by a factor of more than 10. Not surprisingly, glyphosate-resistant weeds have emerged and are found today on nearly 100 million acres in 36 states. Fields must now be treated with multiple herbicides, including 2,4-D, a component of the Agent Orange defoliant used in the Vietnam War.”

The authors focus on the safety issue regarding GMO crops arising from the October, 2014 EPA decision approving Enlist Duo, stating:

“It will be marketed in tandem with newly approved seeds genetically engineered to resist glyphosate, 2,4-D, and multiple other herbicides. The EPA anticipates that a 3-to-7-fold increase in 2,4-D use will result. In our view, the science and the risk assessment supporting the Enlist Duo decision are flawed. The science consisted solely of toxicologic studies commissioned by the herbicide manufacturers in the 1980s and 1990s and never published…These studies predated current knowledge of low-dose, endocrine-mediated, and epigenetic effects and were not designed to detect them. The risk assessment gave little consideration to potential health effects in infants and children, thus contravening federal pesticide law. It failed to consider ecologic impact, such as effects on the monarch butterfly and other pollinators. It considered only pure glyphosate, despite studies showing that formulated glyphosate that contains surfactants and adjuvants is more toxic than the pure compound.” 

They add, “The second new development is the determination by the (World Health Organization’s) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in 2015 that glyphosate is a ‘probable human carcinogen’ and 2,4-D a ‘possible human carcinogen.’ These classifications were based on comprehensive assessments of the toxicologic and epidemiologic literature that linked both herbicides to dose-related increases in malignant tumors at multiple anatomical sites in animals and linked glyphosate to an increased incidence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in humans.”

The authors conclude that GMO foods and the herbicides applied to them “may pose hazards to human health that were not examined in previous assessments. We believe that the time has therefore come to thoroughly reconsider all aspects of the safety of plant biotechnology…we believe the EPA should delay implementation of its decision to permit use of Enlist Duo. This decision was made in haste. It was based on poorly designed and outdated studies and on an incomplete assessment of human exposure and environmental effects. Second, the National Toxicology Program should urgently assess the toxicology of pure glyphosate, formulated glyphosate, and mixtures of glyphosate and other herbicides.” 

Could it be that some people are deliberately trying to maim and kill us?

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/10/31/spraying-our-killing-fields-with-agent-orange/

ABIOTIC OIL, PEAK OIL, AND SAUDI ARABIA       ??? 

Oh Oil, where is thy peak?

Posted on November 6, 2015 by Joseph P. Farrell •http://gizadeathstar.com/2015/11/abiotic-oil-peak-oil-and-saudi-arabia/

Over the past few weeks I've been drawing attention to the growing crisis facing Saudi Arabia, a crisis exacerbated in part by Russia's intervention in Syria. Regular readers will recall that I even blogged about recent Saudi overtures to Russia, in some versions, even holding out a membership in OPEC to that country.
Russia is in a unique position regarding the entire global petroleum industry, for it is the one country that self-consciously, and deliberately, decided to scientifically test the idea that hydrocarbons were "fossil fuels", a hypothesis that came up wanting during the period that the Soviet Union was investigating and testing this hypothesis.
All this brings us to a very intriguing article shared by Ms. M.W., from Mr. F. William Engdahl, on the origins of the Soviet research, and its geopolitical implications:
Oh Oil, where is thy peak?
Consider just the discovery of new energy fields summarized by Mr. Engdahl:

In 2006 Brazil’s Petrobras made the largest offshore oil discovery of the last 30 years, holding at least 8 billion barrels of oil in the Santos Basin 250 kilometers from Rio de Janiero. Then-President Lula da Silva proclaimed it would give the “second independence” for Brazil, that from Western oil imports. In 2008 nearby Petrobras, a state company, discovered an equally large natural gas field called Jupiter near their Santos oil discovery. Under Lula’s presidency, the Parliament passed measures to insure oil development would remain in Brazilian hands under Petrobras and not in those of the American and British or other foreign oil majors. In May 2013 after Lula retired and was succeeded by Dilma Rousseff as President, US Vice President Joe Biden flew to Brazil to meet with her and the heads of Petrobras. According to Brazilian sources, Biden demanded Rousseff remove the laws that kept American oil majors from controlling the huge oil and gas finds. She politely declined and soon after she was hit with a major US Color Revolution destabilization that continues to this day, not surprising, with a scandal around Petrobras at the center.
More recently, Iceland, recovering from her banking crisis, began seriously looking offshore for oil and gas in the Jan Mayen Ridge north of the Arctic Circle in 2012. The geophysics are the same as offshore North Sea and one Icelandic former senior government official told me during a visit some five years ago that a private geological survey indicated Iceland could be a new Norway. According to the US Geological Survey, the Arctic could hold 90 billion barrels of oil, most of which is untapped. China made Iceland a key partner, and the two signed a free-trade agreement in 2013 after China’s CNOOC signed an offshore joint venture in 2012 to explore the offshore.
In April 2015 the energy exploration firm UK Oil & Gas Investments announced it had drilled near Gatwick Airport and found what they estimated could be up to 100 billion barrels of new oil. By comparison the entire North Sea has yielded some 45 billion barrels in 40 years. As well in May, UK oil company Rockhopper announced a new oil discovery in the disputed waters of the Falkland Islands offshore of Argentina believed to contain up to one billion barrels of oil.
Now in August, 2015 the Italian oil company ENI announced discovery of a supergiant gas field in the Egyptian offshore, the largest ever found in the Mediterranean Sea, larger than Israel’s Leviathan. The company announced the field could hold a potential of 30 trillion cubic feet of lean gas in place covering an area of about 100 square kilometres. Zohr is the largest gas discovery ever made in Egypt and in the Mediterranean Sea.
There are huge undeveloped oil and gas reserves in the Caribbean, the area of an impact crater that made numerous fissures and where three active tectonic plates come together and part. Haiti is one such region, as is Cuba. In May the Cuban government released a study that estimated Cuba’s offshore territorial waters held some 20 billion barrels of oil. Russia’s oil subsidiary, Gazprom Neft, has already invested in one section in Cuban waters, and during Russian President Putin’s July, 2014 visit to Havana in which Russia cancelled 90% of Cuban Soviet-era debt worth some $32 billion, Igor Sechin, the CEO of Russia’s state-owned Rosneft, the world’s largest oil company, signed an agreement with Cupet, the Cuban state oil company, to jointly explore the basin off Cuba’s northeast coast. That Russian participation in the huge Cuban oil search might explain the sudden rush of the Obama Administration to “warm up” relations with Cuba.

In addition to this, however, there's the Cold War era Soviet research into the whole notion of "fossil fuels":

In the 1950s a group of Soviet scientists was tasked with making the USSR self-sufficient in oil and gas as the Cold War heated up. The first step in their research was to critically investigate all known scientific literature on origins of hydrocarbons. As they looked closely at the so-called fossil fuel theory of oil, they were amazed how unscientific it was. One physicist estimated that for the huge oil that has come out of one giant well, Ghawar, in Saudi Arabia, it would require a block of dead dinosaurs, assuming 100% conversion of meat and bone to oil, that would reach 19 miles wide, deep and high. They soon looked for other explanations for the birth of oil.
They made exhaustive tests in the deep-earth research labs in Moscow of the Soviet military. They developed the brilliant hypothesis that oil was constantly being created deep in the bowels of the Earth below the mantle. It pushes upward towards the surface passing through beds of various elements such as ferrite. They did repeated laboratory experiments producing hydrocarbons under tempetrature and pressure imitating that in the mantle. These migration channels, as the Soviet scientists termed them, were fissures in the mantle caused over millions of years under the expanding of the earth and forced by the enormous temperatures and pressures inside the mantle. The path the initial methane gas takes upwards towards the surface determines whether it emerges and collects as oil or as gas, as coal, as bitumen as in Canada’s Athabasca Tar Sands, or even as diamonds which are also hydrocarbons. The Russian and Ukrainian scientists also discovered, not surprisingly, that every giant oilfield was “self-replenishing,”that is new oil or gas is being constantly pushed up from inside the mantle via the faults or migration channels to replace oil withdrawn. Old oil wells across Russia that were pumped far beyond their natural full rate during the end of the Soviet era when maximum production was considered highest priority, were then shut, considered exhausted. Twenty years later, according to Russian geophysicists I have spoken with, those “depleted” wells are being reopened and, lo and behold, completely refilled with new oil.

So what prevents these resources from being developed? Recall that just a few years ago, as oil prices were high, the USA had expanded its oil production in North Dakota, producing jobs, and actually for a period becoming an equal producer of oil with one of the world's most loathsome regimes, whose wealthy princes  hypocritically  smoke cigars and imbibe alcohol, while simultaneously supporting a medieval regime of head-chopping, limb-amputating, and even crucifixion to maintain its grip on power at tome. The result has been geopolitically and financially predictable, according to Mr. Engdahl::

Today a geopolitical decision by Saudi Arabia to wipe out the market-disturbing recent emergence of the United States as world’s largest oil producer owing to the major increase in shale oil production, has temporarily collapsed world oil prices from over $100 a barrel in July 2014 to around $43 today in the US market. That is leading to a dramatic cut-back in oil exploration around the world. In a fair world, oil or gas should be available at affordable prices to every nation to serve its own energy requirements and not the monopoly of a tiny cartel of British or American companies. Good to know is the fact that the oil and gas are there in super-abundance that we need not freeze in the dark or turn to windmills until the time mankind develops completely different forms of energy that are clean and earth-friendly. Wars to control oil or gas would become silly nonsense.

As I have blogged previously, the regime in Riyadh is under severe internal and external pressures, oil being its one and only viable export to the world; it has absolutely nothing else - absolutely nothing - else to offer. Russia does not need the Middle East's oil or gas, neither from Riyadh or Tehran. China might, but one can only assume that China has been long aware of the Soviet era research, and is similarly exploring for its own energy supplies.
Additionally, recent energy advances - think only of our recent articles here on the awarding of a USA patent to Dr. Andrea Rossi and his cold fusion technique - ultimately spell the end of the oil-based hydrocarbon energy systems that the world has lived with(or under) for the last century and more. Even the mullahs in Tehran understand this long term implication. So another alternative for combating Islamicist terrorism presents itself: cut off its source of funding, by developing those energy resources.  There's no need to be dependent upon Saudi oil, and additionally, this might afford the West a means to deal with China, by becoming suppliers to its growing energy needs. Imagine, for a high-octane-speculation moment, what a kind of BRICSA equivalent to OPEC - with the UK, Brazil, Iceland, the USA, Saudi membership prohibited - might accomplish.                    

Oh Oil, where is thy peak?

Column: Economics

Region: USA in the World

There are two great myths used in recent years to convince the world of imminent catastophe unless we drastically change our living style in the direction of austerity. Both myths are based on scientific fraud and uncritical propagation by sympatheic mainstream and even some alternative media. One is the idea that world climate is warming, or at least “changing,” owing almost solely to us, to our man-made emissions. The second great myth, launched first in 1956 in Houston Texas by an employee of one of the world’s largest oil companies, was dusted off some 15 years ago at the start of the Dick Cheney-George W. Bush Administration. It’s called the theory of Peak Oil.

The good news is our coastal cities are not about to be washed away by melting icebergs or rising oceans, nor is our supply of conventional oil and gas–hydrocarbons–likely to run out for centuries or more. It has nothing to do with the highly damaging and very costly extraction of tight oil from shale rocks, but with the abundance of conventional oil around the world, the vast part of which has yet to be discovered or even mapped.

The most dramatic discoveries of new oil and gas reserves in recent years has come from the Mediterranean in areas off Cyprus, Israel, Lebanon and believed to be offshore Greece as well. In 2010 Israel and the Houston, Texas company, Noble Energy, discovered the largest offshore gas field, Leviathan. It was the world’s largest gas discovery in a decade, with enough gas to serve Israel for at least a century. The geophysics of the offshore areas around Greece suggest that that hapless country could also have more than enough undiscovered oil and gas to repay all foreign debt and more. Not surprisingly the Washington-led IMF demands that Greece privatize her state oil and gas companies, a near certainty that major Western oil firms would sit on their development as was done in past decades until leases expired in 2004 and reverted back to the Greek Government.

In 2006 Brazil’s Petrobras made the largest offshore oil discovery of the last 30 years, holding at least 8 billion barrels of oil in the Santos Basin 250 kilometers from Rio de Janiero. Then-President Lula da Silva proclaimed it would give the “second independence” for Brazil, that from Western oil imports. In 2008 nearby Petrobras, a state company, discovered an equally large natural gas field called Jupiter near their Santos oil discovery. Under Lula’s presidency, the Parliament passed measures to insure oil development would remain in Brazilian hands under Petrobras and not in those of the American and British or other foreign oil majors. In May 2013 after Lula retired and was succeeded by Dilma Rousseff as President, US Vice President Joe Biden flew to Brazil to meet with her and the heads of Petrobras. According to Brazilian sources, Biden demanded Rousseff remove the laws that kept American oil majors from controlling the huge oil and gas finds. She politely declined and soon after she was hit with a major US Color Revolution destabilization that continues to this day, not surprising, with a scandal around Petrobras at the center.

More recently, Iceland, recovering from her banking crisis, began seriously looking offshore for oil and gas in the Jan Mayen Ridge north of the Arctic Circle in 2012. The geophysics are the same as offshore North Sea and one Icelandic former senior government official told me during a visit some five years ago that a private geological survey indicated Iceland could be a new Norway. According to the US Geological Survey, the Arctic could hold 90 billion barrels of oil, most of which is untapped. China made Iceland a key partner, and the two signed a free-trade agreement in 2013 after China’s CNOOC signed an offshore joint venture in 2012 to explore the offshore.

In April 2015 the energy exploration firm UK Oil & Gas Investments announced it had drilled near Gatwick Airport and found what they estimated could be up to 100 billion barrels of new oil. By comparison the entire North Sea has yielded some 45 billion barrels in 40 years. As well in May, UK oil company Rockhopper announced a new oil discovery in the disputed waters of the Falkland Islands offshore of Argentina believed to contain up to one billion barrels of oil.

Now in August, 2015 the Italian oil company ENI announced discovery of a supergiant gas field in the Egyptian offshore, the largest ever found in the Mediterranean Sea, larger than Israel’s Leviathan. The company announced the field could hold a potential of 30 trillion cubic feet of lean gas in place covering an area of about 100 square kilometres. Zohr is the largest gas discovery ever made in Egypt and in the Mediterranean Sea.

There are huge undeveloped oil and gas reserves in the Caribbean, the area of an impact crater that made numerous fissures and where three active tectonic plates come together and part. Haiti is one such region, as is Cuba. In May the Cuban government released a study that estimated Cuba’s offshore territorial waters held some 20 billion barrels of oil. Russia’s oil subsidiary, Gazprom Neft, has already invested in one section in Cuban waters, and during Russian President Putin’s July, 2014 visit to Havana in which Russia cancelled 90% of Cuban Soviet-era debt worth some $32 billion, Igor Sechin, the CEO of Russia’s state-owned Rosneft, the world’s largest oil company, signed an agreement with Cupet, the Cuban state oil company, to jointly explore the basin off Cuba’s northeast coast. That Russian participation in the huge Cuban oil search might explain the sudden rush of the Obama Administration to “warm up” relations with Cuba.

How oil is ‘born’

The accepted oil industry explanation holds that oil is a finite resource, a so-called fossil fuel, biological in origin, that was created hundreds of millions of years ago by the death of dinosaurs whose detritis by some yet-unidentified physical process transformed into hydrocarbons. The claim is that concentrated biological detritis somehow sank deep into the earth—the world’s deepest oil drillling in Russia’s Sakhalin region, drilled by Exxon, is more than 12 kilometers deep. There it supposedly flowed into underground pockets they call reservoirs. Others say also algae and tree leaves and other biological decayed matter added to the process.

In the 1950s a group of Soviet scientists was tasked with making the USSR self-sufficient in oil and gas as the Cold War heated up. The first step in their research was to critically investigate all known scientific literature on origins of hydrocarbons. As they looked closely at the so-called fossil fuel theory of oil, they were amazed how unscientific it was. One physicist estimated that for the huge oil that has come out of one giant well, Ghawar, in Saudi Arabia, it would require a block of dead dinosaurs, assuming 100% conversion of meat and bone to oil, that would reach 19 miles wide, deep and high. They soon looked for other explanations for the birth of oil.

They made exhaustive tests in the deep-earth research labs in Moscow of the Soviet military. They developed the brilliant hypothesis that oil was constantly being created deep in the bowels of the Earth below the mantle. It pushes upward towards the surface passing through beds of various elements such as ferrite. They did repeated laboratory experiments producing hydrocarbons under tempetrature and pressure imitating that in the mantle. These migration channels, as the Soviet scientists termed them, were fissures in the mantle caused over millions of years under the expanding of the earth and forced by the enormous temperatures and pressures inside the mantle. The path the initial methane gas takes upwards towards the surface determines whether it emerges and collects as oil or as gas, as coal, as bitumen as in Canada’s Athabasca Tar Sands, or even as diamonds which are also hydrocarbons. The Russian and Ukrainian scientists also discovered, not surprisingly, that every giant oilfield was “self-replentishing,” that is new oil or gas is being constantly pushed up from inside the mantle via the faults or migration channels to replace oil withdrawn. Old oilwells across Russia that were pumped far beyond their natural full rate during the end of the Soviet era when maximum production was considered highest priority, were then shut, considered exhausted. Twenty years later, according to Russian geophysicists I have spoken with, those “depleted” wells are being reopened and, lo and behold, completely refilled with new oil.

The Russians have tested their hypothesis to the present day, though with little support until now from their own government, whose oil companies perhaps feared that a glut of new oil would collapse oil prices. In the west, the last thing Exxon or other Anglo-American oil majors wanted was to lose their (once) iron grip on the world oil market. They had no interest in a theory that would contradict their Peak Oil theory.

Today a geopolitical decision by Saudi Arabia to wipe out the market-disturbing recent emergence of the United States as world’s largest oil producer owing to the major increase in shale oil production, has temporarily collapsed world oil prices from over $100 a barrel in July 2014 to around $43 today in the US market. That is leading to a dramatic cut-back in oil exploration around the world. In a fair world, oil or gas should be available at affordable prices to every nation to serve its own energy requirements and not the monopoly of a tiny cartel of British or American companies. Good to know is the fact that the oil and gas are there in super-abundance that we need not freeze in the dark or turn to windmills until the time mankind develops completely different forms of energy that are clean and earth-friendly. Wars to control oil or gas would become silly nonsense.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/10/09/oh-oil-where-is-thy-peak/

The Suspicious Downing of Russia’s Metrojet Airbus A321-200. “The ISIS is a Creation of the CIA”       ~ hehe "who's" PUTIN ...really go~in ...after ...  ???

By Larry Chin

Global Research, November 05, 2015

Region: Middle East & North Africa, Russia and FSU

Theme: Intelligence

The explosion and crash of Russian Metrojet Airbus A321-200 over Egypt’s Sinai peninsula raises ominous new questions. There are going to be numerous theories bandied about in the course of another long international “investigation”, accompanied with endless political spin from all sides.
We hear numerous variations that boil down to two basic theories: catastrophic mechanical failure or bomb. Many officials have already ruled out a missile strike because there was no evidence of a missile launch nor an engine burn. US satellites detected heat around the plane before the explosion, but the cause of the heat is unknown. In an Associated Press account, US aviation analyst Paul Beaver stated, “It doesn’t tell us if it was a bomb, or if someone had a fight in the airplane with a gun—there is a whole raft of things that could happen in this regard.” Adding to the mystery, Beaver also noted that in the event of a fuel tank or engine explosion, “engines are designed so that if something malfunctions or breaks off, it is contained within the engine”. The plane broke up at high altitude.
Most recently, British officials have more strongly suggested that a bomb was the cause. And now, US intelligence officials are coming forward to embrace the idea of a bomb.
Looking past the political smoke, one scenario deserves scrutiny.
The Islamic State (IS) has taken responsibility for the incident. In a manifesto, the IS claimed to have brought down the Russian plane in retaliation for Russian military intervention in Syria.
Egyptian officials immediately derided the claim as propaganda that damages the image of Egypt. But at the same time, the authenticity of the IS propaganda has not been debunked. The nature of the propaganda was in keeping with previous manifestos; CIA standard procedure. There is “insufficient evidence” to support the claim, but there never is sufficient evidence. By design.
Given the amply documented fact that the IS (ISIS, ISIL, etc.) is a creation of US intelligence, and function as assets and military-intelligence fronts of the CIA and Washington—financed, recruited and trained by the US and its allies— why shouldn’t the claims of responsibility be taken at face value?
In an era in which false flag atrocities and deception have constituted US foreign policy, it is in no way inconceivable that forces aligned with Washington committed yet another act of terrorism, another act of war, to send a message of warning and/or provocation to Moscow.
This is by no means the first time that the downing of a plane has been exploited for political purpose, aimed at Russia. The false flag shootdown of MH-17 and the cover-up and propaganda that followed offers a ghastly example. The history of American covert operations is rife with atrocities involving planes.
The CIA is opportunistic, flexible, and selective with its work. In this conveniently-timed case, Washington can deny terrorism, warn about terrorism, poo-pooh the jihadist rhetoric (sourced to their own propaganda machine), and express sympathy, all at the same time that a brutal political message is sent to Moscow.
This scenario is not merely “conspiracy theory” when viewed against current big picture realities, and the fact that a superpower war is underway. As chronicled by Michel Chossudovsky:

While the media narrative acknowledges that Russia has endorsed the counter-terrorism campaign, in practice Russia is (indirectly) fighting the US-NATO coalition by supporting the Syrian government against the terrorists, who happen to be the foot soldiers of the Western military alliance, with Western mercenaries and military advisers within their ranks. In practice, what Russia is doing is fighting terrorists who are supported by the US.
The forbidden truth is that by providing military aid to both Syria and Iraq, Russia is (indirectly) confronting America.
Moscow will be supporting both countries in their proxy war against the ISIL which is supported by the US and its allies.
Russia is now directly involved in the counter-terrorism campaign in coordination with the Syrian and Iraqi governments.

In fact, as written in Tru Publica, the war in Syria is not about the Islamic State.
In fact,

“the countries involved in this war are now from all four hemispheres of the planet who are now represented and engaged in a conflict that will definitely be a fight to the very end.”

We can even go beyond this measured view. From Ukraine to Syria, to hot spots across the Middle East and North Africa, we are witnessing an increasingly open war between Washington and Russia, no different than the Cold War (Vietnam, etc.) but with stakes even higher, engulfing far more of the planet. Add to this the increasing tensions between the United States and China, and the map of the global conflict is literally worldwide. What cannot be argued is that the war between the superpowers is intensifying, perhaps past the brink.
The downing of a Russian passenger plane and the death of hundreds of Russians would mean nothing to the war criminals with grand aspirations of conquest for the geography and resources of the most resource-rich chunks of the Earth.
Russia has openly and resolutely waged effective military counter-terrorism operations against the terror fronts of the US and NATO—all jihadist terrorist armies, including ISIS, ISIL, Al-Qaeda, and Al-Nusra, which are all US and CIA fronts. What Moscow has done is call Washington’s bluff and upping the ante.
Put simplistically, Moscow said:

“If you (US-NATO) truly wish to combat terrorism throughout the region, then we will ‘help you’, by actually doing it.”

These operations were followed by agonized and flummoxed whines from Washington, as more and more of the Anglo-American empire’s terror assets have been hampered from their massive attempt to topple the Assad regime. The Vienna-Geneva Peace Talks are a charade that buys time for Washington to counter the Russian actions.
Moscow, acting as the actual “good guys”, have “ruined everything”; ripped the “false good guy” mask off of Washington’s massive criminal operation. This embarrassment to the empire had to be met with a desperate reply.
Was Metrojet Airbus A321-200 part of this response? The message from the Islamic State (aka the CIA) clearly was.
The message was received: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov quickly rejected any connection between the crash and the Russian military operation in Syria, while Putin himself has vowed that nothing will succeed in scaring them off.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Larry Chin, Global Research, 2015