Cesar Chelala: Corporations Should Be Held Liable for Human Rights Violations

Published on Wednesday, July 27, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/27-3

by César Chelala and Alejandro Garro

Several NGOs have filed an amicus brief urging the United States Supreme Court to review the ruling of an appeals court that corporations, under international law, cannot be held liable for damages on account of serious human rights violations. The Supreme Court should take the case and hold that, if supported by the evidence, civil damages is an available remedy against corporations for aiding and abetting international wrongs.

Kiobel vs. Royal Dutch Petroleum is a lawsuit filed in 2002 by members of the Ogoni community complaining of human rights violations that took place in the 1990s. The Ogoni are approximately half a million people who live in a 650 square kilometers region in Rivers State, Nigeria. Traditionally, they made their living by fishing and as subsistence farmers, a way of life was threatened when Shell discovered oil in 1958.

The environmental effects of oil exploitation in Ogoni territory have been dire. Major oil spills have caused serious damage to the ground and threatened the livelihood of the Ogoni people. Gas flares produce a constant noise near Ogoni villages. Polluted air from the flairs produces acid rain and causes respiratory problems in the surrounding communities. These damages are underscored in the lyrics of an Ogoni song:

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"Terra Daily" - Environmental Pollutants Lurk Long After They "Disappear"

Terra Daily
Tel Aviv, Israel (SPX) Jul 27, 2011
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Environmental_Pollutants_Lurk_Long_After_They_Disappear_999.html

The health implications of polluting the environment weigh increasingly on our public consciousness, and pharmaceutical wastes continue to be a main culprit. Now a Tel Aviv University researcher says that current testing for these dangerous contaminants isn't going far enough.

Dr. Dror Avisar, head of the Hydro-Chemistry Laboratory at TAU's Department of Geography and the Human Environment, says that, whenour environment doesn't test positive for the presence of a specific drug, we assume it's not there. But through biological or chemical processes such as sun exposure or oxidization, drugs break down, or degrade, into different forms - and could still be lurking in our water or soil.

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"Gift Chanda" - Africa is not a place for GMOs - Maina

The Post Newspapers Zambia

By Gift Chanda on Tuesday 12 July 2011,

http://www.postzambia.com/post-read_article.php?articleId=21952

AFRICA is not a place for GMOs, says African Biodiversity Network advocacy coordinator Anne Maina.

Commenting on calls by Zambian stakeholders for government to open debate on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in the country following Kenya’s introduction of GM maize, Maina said genetically engineered foods were not a solution to the food shortages and climate change problems in Africa.

Maina said Africa already had the solutions to hunger and climate change problems the continent was facing.

“Everything that genetic engineering has claimed to offer can readily be achieved through safer methods such as non-GM breeding, intercropping and creative innovation,” Maina said in an emailed statement from Kenya.

“We do not believe that top-down technological solutions will solve the many challenges that Kenyan farmers face. This one-size-fits all solution cannot attend to our varied needs.”

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Monica Young: America conned -- Psycho pharma drug pushing empire under fire

by Monica G. Young
http://www.naturalnews.com/033133_psychoactive_drugs_Big_Pharma.html


(NaturalNews) Is America truly stricken with widespread mental illness? Do tens of millions need mind-altering drugs? A recent flurry of media articles lead readers to a realization that Big Pharma and the "mental health" industry have deceived Americans on a grand scale.

The "New York Review of Books" two-part article by Dr. Marcia Angell, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, summarizes it extremely well. She analyzes three books by authors Irving Kirsch, Robert Whitaker, and Daniel Carlat. Each deconstructs the apparent mental illness epidemic and theory that mental disorders stem from brain chemical imbalances which can be corrected by drugs.

Dr. Angell's review has sparked a host of other journalists to applaud her and fuel the fire. An article in Forbes even concludes, "psychopharma is looking like an idea whose time has passed."

As an overview:

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"Ethan A. Huff" - Consolidation of seed companies leading to corporate domination of world food supply

by Ethan A. Huff, naturalnews.com  July 27, 2011

http://www.naturalnews.com/033148_seed_companies_Monsanto.html

(NaturalNews) Throughout the history of agriculture across the globe, farming has always been a diversified sector of the economy. Small, self-sustaining, family farms were the order of the day in most cultures. Even as small farms grew larger and more specialized over time, many of them still saved seeds or purchased them from other farmers, which kept control of farming in the hands of the people.

But today everything has changed, as large chemical and agribusiness firms have acquired or merged with seed companies and other agricultural input companies. They have successfully gained a foothold on genetically-modified (GM) crops with transgenic traits.

These primary factors and several others have facilitated a crescendo towards the global domination of agriculture by corporations, and thus the world's food supply.

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William Rivers Pitt: So This Is Despair

Tuesday 26 July 2011

by: William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/so-despair/1311620664

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.

- Flannery O'Connor

It is difficult to describe this emotion. I’m used to disappointment, fairly comfortable with heartbreak, and am well acquainted with rage. Over the course of my lifetime, my presidents have been Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and now Obama…and each, in his own way, has been worse than the last.

How can I say that? Easy. The problems of Nixon are still with us, and have grown worse by orders of magnitude through each successive administration. Certain presidents have exacerbated the situation beyond their expected purview, but generally speaking, each one has adopted the worst ideas of his predecessor, and in nearly every instance, has made those problems worse.

But this…this is too much.

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Alliance for Natural Health USA: FDA Copies the European Union and Slips In One of its Deadliest Weapons

Alliance for Natural Health USA, On July 26, 2011

http://www.anh-usa.org/fda-copies-eu-slips-in-one-of-its-deadliest-weapons/

Are the NDI guidelines the ultimate FDA tool to freeze dietary supplement innovation? A special report by Robert Verkerk, PhD, ANH-USA Scientific Director and ANH-Europe Executive and Scientific Director.

(Note: Once again, please do not forget our two related Action Alerts—one on the FDA’s new NDI guidance ^[1], the other on the Durbin bill ^[2]—in the last paragraph of this article. We are emphasizing these Action Alerts so strongly because the guidance and the bill could have a devastating effect on your natural health freedoms.)

If the US natural products industry values its ability to keep a diverse range of products available for the benefit of the American public, and believes in not exposing the public to unnecessary costs, we strongly suggest that it look very closely at the latest guidelines from the FDA—with eyes wide open. We refer to the FDA guidelines ^[3] on so-called “new dietary ingredients” (NDIs) that we’ve been telling you about ^[4] over the past several weeks. These guidelines preempt a crackdown on ingredients used in natural products, one that appears to be coordinated closely with a similar clampdown happening currently in Europe. The guidelines bear an uncanny likeness to the European Union’s Novel Food Regulation ^[5].

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Robert Scheer: Debt Madness Was Always About Killing Social Security

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/debt_madness_was_always_about_killing_social_security_20110727/

Posted on Jul 27, 2011

By Robert Scheer

This phony debt crisis has now passed through the looking glass into the realm where madness reigns. What should have been an uneventful moment in which lawmakers make good on the nation’s contractual obligations has instead been seized upon by Republican hypocrites as a moment to settle ideological scores that have nothing to do with the debt.

Hypocrites, because their radical free market ideology, and the resulting total deregulation of the financial markets, is what caused the debt to spiral out of control this last decade. That and the wars George W. Bush launched but didn’t have the integrity to responsibly finance. The consequence was a banking bubble and crash leading to a 50 percent run-up of the debt that has nothing to do with the “entitlements” that those same Republicans have always wanted to destroy. 

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"Washington's Blog" - There's Only One Way to Avoid a Downgrade to U.S. Credit

By Washington's Blog

Global Research, July 27, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25796

According to Reuters, a majority of economists now think that U.S. credit will be downgraded.

The debt ceiling plans being proposed likely will not avoid a debt downgrade.

Indeed, as Zero Hedge notes, the cuts being proposed in the debt ceiling proposals would be offset by the costs of the downgrade:

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"Bob Fitrakis" - Court Filing Reveals How 2004 Ohio Presidential Election was Hacked: "Unexpected Shift in Votes For George W."

By Bob Fitrakis

Global Research, July 26, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25786

A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush. 

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash. 

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