Since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted in 1948, the growing global economy has created new challenges. With operations that can span several different countries, large multinational corporations, such as mining and extraction companies, can act with impunity, without state oversight or the control of international human rights mechanisms.
As of 2013, more than 50 per cent of the world’s publically listed exploration and mining companies were headquartered in Canada. Many of those companies have been accused of being irresponsible, engaging in conduct they could never get away with in Canada, exploiting weak or corrupt governments and legal systems in foreign countries that turn a blind eye to their operations.
In 2009, Adolfo Ich, a Mayan Q’eqchi’ community leader, was shot dead by a security guard employed at the Fenix nickel mine in El Estor, Guatemala. Adolfo was seeking to calm the community during a protest on contested land with the mine. A bystander at the protest, German Chub, was also shot by the same security guard and left for dead. He is now a paraplegic.
Chub, along with Adolfo’s widow Angelica, took the mine’s security guard to Guatemalan courts, but the case was thrown out. Angelica was even charged with obstruction of justice.
Hope for change
In the CBC Docs Special PresentationIn Search of a Perfect World, we meet Canadian lawyer Murray Klippenstein, who is using domestic law to champion international human rights. He managed to convince an Ontario Court to let the Guatemalans, including Angelica and German, sue the mining company here, in Canada.
“Mining companies kind of lived in this world where we go to another country far away, where the courts are corrupt, and that they could get away with things. But that’s not the case anymore,” says Klippenstein.
He hopes this landmark case sends shockwaves through the boardrooms of Canada, “What happened in Guatemala is what you did. You did it from here in Toronto. And so you have to be accountable here.”
Meanwhile, in January 2018 — an effort years in the making — the federal government announced the creation of an independent Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE) “to investigate allegations of human rights abuses linked to Canadian corporate activity abroad.” The office will be advised by a multi-stakeholder advisory body on responsible business conduct abroad.
For more on this story, including former CBC correspondent Peter Mansbridge’s interviews with the Guatemalan villagers, watch In Search of a Perfect World.
Before the Internet was launched in 1992, our thoughts, values and beliefs were informed by our family and friends and by the books, magazines and newspapers we read and by what we heard on radio and saw on television. If we wanted to communicate with each other we would pick up the telephone, write a letter or meet face to face.
The Internet changed everything.
The World Wide Web gave us electronic access to free, uncensored information on our computers, tablets and cell phones and the ability to instantly share that information with each other. It connected us together in a virtual public square, where we could do our own research and talk about our personal experiences, and express what we think and believe and how we feel about important issues that affect our lives.
There are three billion people on the Internet communicating with each other. 1 Except for the printing press created in the 15th century, there is no other single means of communication that has had as profound an impact on freedom of thought and speech as the World Wide Web.
Yes, the Internet has changed everything. And, now, everyone needs to know how the Internet is changing.
In the very near future you may not be able to find information about vaccine science, policy and law published on websites like NVIC.org and
TheVaccineReaction.org or be able to connect with us on social media platforms to have an open conversation about it. With the cancellation of net neutrality in the U.S. in 2017,2 3 the two decade forging of public-private business partnerships between governments and politically powerful corporations and institutions has cleared the way for factual information about health to be censored as “fake news” and quietly removed from the Internet if it does not conform with public health policy and government recommendations for use of pharmaceutical and food products.
Has the Internet been hijacked by Wall Street? It sure looks that way.
An electronic wall is being built to block you from getting information you want so you only get information someone else decides you need. An electronic burning of the books has begun, and the people are being silently herded into a virtual Dark Age. While this censorship is starting with conversations about health and vaccination, it will not end there.
Those who have bought and control the Internet now have the power to restrict or block any kind of information they do not want you to see or talk about with your family, friends and others you connect with online.4 5
So who is doing the judging of what is truth and what is “fake news” online?
The Internet Police Thinking and Speaking for You
Web of Trust6 and Snopes,7 both for-profit enterprises, have attempted to police the Internet for the past decade by rating websites for “trustworthiness” or branding articles published online as “true” or “false,” even as they themselves became embroiled in controversy about trustworthiness.8 9 10 But Snopes and Web of Trust are rookies compared to the professional SWAT team hired this year by a new corporation, NewsGuard Technologies, Inc., to rate websites and online publications so, in their own words, they can quote “fight false news, misinformation and disinformation.”11 12 13 14 15 16 17 NewsGuard is collaborating with The Paley Center for Media,18 Google,19 Microsoft,20 21 Publicis,22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 schools, libraries32 and other institutions to protect you and your children from news and perspective they think will harm you and society.
There is no question that “fake news” is a real problem in both mainstream and alternative media when demonstrably false information is deliberately disguised as fact. However, it is also a real problem when demonstrably factual information or perspective is mislabeled as “fake news,” simply because it criticizes government policy or threatens the bottom line of corporations selling government recommended commercial products like liability free vaccines.
One of the most politically powerful public-private partnerships today is the lucrative one that has been forged by the pharmaceutical industry with government,33 34 35 36 37 38 mainstream media39 and wealthy philanthropic foundations with political agendas.40 41 42 43 44 45
NVIC Giving a Voice for the Vaccine Injured, Defending Human Rights
It has been 25 years since the nonprofit charity founded in 1982 by parents of vaccine injured children, the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), began posting vaccine information on the Internet. Our mission is to prevent vaccine injuries and deaths through public education and to protect the ethical principle of informed consent to medical risk taking, which serves as the foundation for the ethical practice of medicine.46 The co-founders and parent representatives of NVIC have a long, transparent public record of consumer advocacy, including working with Congress to secure vaccine safety informing, recording, reporting and research provisions in the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 and serving on federal vaccine advisory committees and testifying in congressional and state legislative hearings.47 48
We represent and give a voice to a vulnerable minority, the ones for whom the risks of vaccination turn out to be 100 percent. But we also represent and give a voice to people who believe that the human right to freedom of thought, speech, conscience and informed consent must be protected.49
Verifiable Facts About Vaccination Not “Fake News”
Ten years before the birth of the Internet, one of the best-kept secrets in America was that vaccines can and do cause injury and death and that some individuals are more vulnerable to being harmed by vaccination. In 1982, an Emmy award winning television documentary DPT: Vaccine Roulette produced by consumer reporter Lea Thompson alerted parents and pediatricians that the whole cell pertussis vaccine in DPT shots could brain damage children.50 51 It was a mainstream media outlet – NBC – that blew the whistle on the pharmaceutical industry’s neglect, and the medical establishment’s denial of DPT vaccine reactions, and the 50-year failure of industry and government to improve the safety of a vaccine mandated for all children to attend school.
These are verifiable facts: the truth, not “fake news.”
Three years later in 1985, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich published DPT: A Shot in the Dark, a book that further documented the risks and failures of the old crude whole cell pertussis vaccine.52 A year later, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. In that legislation, for the first time the US government acknowledged that FDA licensed and CDC recommended vaccines can and do injure children.53 54
Since the 1986 Act was passed, the government has awarded four billion dollars in compensation to thousands of children and adults who have suffered permanent injuries, or whose loved ones have died after being given federally licensed and recommended vaccines.55
These are verifiable facts: the truth, not “fake news.”
Between 1991 and 2013, the National Academy of Sciences published a series of reports on vaccine adverse effects.56 These reports confirmed that vaccines can cause brain and immune system disorders, and that genetic, biological and environmental risk factors make some individuals more vulnerable to being harmed but doctors don’t know how to identify them because of gaps in vaccine science.57
These are verifiable facts: the truth, not “fake news.”
More than 684,000 adverse events following vaccination, including hospitalizations, injuries and deaths, have been reported to the federal government since 1990.58 This number is estimated to represent less than one percent of all vaccine adverse events that have actually occurred.59
These are verifiable facts; the truth, not “fake news.”
The U.S. government now recommends that children receive 69 doses of 16 vaccines between the day of birth and age 18, with 50 doses given before the age of six,60 which is triple the number of vaccinations given to children in 1983.61 Almost all of these vaccinations are mandated by states for children to attend school62 and some children are being refused medical care and adults are being fired from their jobs if they don’t get every one of them, even after suffering vaccine reactions and deterioration in health.63 64 65 66 67
Vaccine policy and mandates have helped to create a global vaccine market now projected to bring in a staggering $57 billion dollars for drug companies by 2025.68 69
These are verifiable facts, not “fake news.” But very soon you may not be able to get this information or talk about it online.
It is already happening.
Discrimination and Censorship: NVIC’s Information Targeted Online
Traffic to NVIC’s websites has fallen more than 50 percent since net neutrality was cancelled last year and access to our online information was restricted by suppressive algorithms and rating systems.70
Although NVIC takes a pro-education, pro-informed consent position and does not make vaccine use recommendations, NVIC’s Pinterest account was recently suspended.71 The reason given was that Pinterest takes action “against accounts that repeatedly save content that includes harmful advice, misinformation that targets individuals or protected groups or content that originates from disinformation campaigns” and that Pinterest operators “don’t allow advice when it has immediate or detrimental effects on a Pinner’s health or on public safety. This includes promotion of false cures for terminal or chronic illnesses and anti-vaccination advice,” adding that they rely on “information from national and internationally recognized institutions like the CDC and WHO World Health Organization” to guide their judgments.
NVIC is awaiting the judgment of NewsGuard Technologies about whether our weekly online journal newspaper The Vaccine Reaction will be given a green or red rating, which will send a signal to major search engines and social media platforms with the power to preserve or censor and make information disappear from the Internet.
Censoring Information for The Greater Good?
The new Internet Police scrubbing the World Wide Web of information they do not want you to see or talk about is part of the larger culture war going on today in our country and in many countries.72 73 When it comes to vaccination, discrimination and censorship is justified in the name of public safety and The Greater Good.74 75
Who’s greater good? Who among us in society should be given the power to take away our freedom to seek and obtain knowledge, to engage in rational thinking, to speak in the public square and follow the judgment of our conscience when making decisions about what we are willing to risk our lives and our children’s lives for?
In America, where the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution guarantees civil liberties to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority, we cannot wait any longer to publicly discuss and answer that question. It is a question that needs open public discussion, not censorship, because what is at stake affects not only freedom of thought and speech, but the loss of autonomy, the first and most sacred of all natural rights that protects every one of us from exploitation by wealthy corporations and politically powerful institutions.
Taking Positive Action with Eyes Wide Open and No Fear
In this time of oppression, we cannot know what needs to be done unless we go forward with our eyes wide open, understanding the new reality without fearing it. It is time to collect, preserve and cherish the good books, articles, films, videos and podcasts that have been published about vaccination and share them with our family and friends; time to save and download to our computers and external hard drives the written and video information still online that we want to keep and share with our children and our grandchildren. Time to expand the open public record by attending, testifying at and recording every legislative hearing, every town hall gathering, and every federal vaccine advisory committee meeting where people discuss vaccination or attempt to eliminate the human right to autonomy and censor freedom of thought and speech.
If the doors to the Internet are closing, we can still stand up and speak in the smaller public squares that have always been there. We can come together and talk the old fashioned way, meeting in cafes, hotels, churches and in the privacy of our own homes. We can set up telephone trees and stay in touch by mail the way we did before the Internet. We can still use the World Wide Web to create private messaging and host webinars. We can create new ways of communicating with each other using more secure channels for uncensored conversations about vaccination and health.
No matter what happens to the Internet, the best way to not lose touch with us is to register today for the free online NVIC Advocacy Portal, which is a secure communications network that puts you in electronic contact with your own legislators and provides you with real time information about vaccine-related legislation moving in your state. Taking that action provides us with an address to send you information in the mail, which also happens if you make a charitable donation to NVIC in any amount.
Today, everybody knows somebody who was healthy, got vaccinated and was never healthy again. NVIC has been here for 36 years telling the truth about vaccination and advocating for better quality vaccine science, higher government vaccine safety licensing standards, more humane public health policies and protection of informed consent rights. The truth about vaccination is out there now and the truth will shine bright and clear in the end, no matter who tries to stop it from being known.
It’s your health, your family, your choice and our mission continues: No forced vaccination. Not in America.
U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York charges four men on grounds of wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy, connected to tax haven use, leaving three arrested and one at large.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York charged four people for taking part in a scheme, similar to the infamous ‘Panama Papers,’ which, over several decades, managed to evade taxes in the United States. This marks the first criminal case involving tax havens in the United States.
“As alleged, these defendants went to extraordinary lengths to circumvent U.S. tax laws in order to maintain their wealth and the wealth of their clients,” and they “shuffled millions of dollars through offshore accounts and created shell companies to hide fortunes,” the Manhattan Attorney Geoffrey Berman, said, regarding the charges.
Three individuals have been arrested, while the fourth remains at large. The most serious charges for these men, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy, carry a maximum sentence of 20 years.
Ramses Owen and Dirk Bauer are said to have “conspired to help [Monseca’s] clients” conceal assets as well as income and investments in off-shore banks. The scheme was carried out by setting up a fake foundation and shell companies, under Panama, Hong Kong and British island law.
Harald Joachim von Der Goltz, one of the three arrested, is one of the clients who benefited from such tax evasion schemes. Von Der Goltz, with the help of Owen and Bauer, set up shell companies with fake bank accounts under the name of his mother, a Guatemalan citizen who was not obliged to pay taxes in the United States.
Panama Papers
‘Panama Papers’ refers to the 2016 document leaks of Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, a company through which Owen and Bauer serviced clients, documents that linked hundreds of individuals and corporations to hidden tax activities.
In 2015, an unknown source leaked more than 11.5 million documents containing information for more than 214,488 offshore entities around the world. Prior to that, offshore banking received little attention. The documents were given to a German newspaper, before being passed on to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) to process and disseminate.
In the specific case of Panama, the country began to open its doors to the activity in 2009 when Standard Oil started registering ships on the isthmus nation in order to avoid heavy taxes and regulations in the United States. Many different types of businessmen and businesses, from all over the world, followed suit in later decades. The group included drug-cartels, dictators, like Augusto Pinochet and Ferdinand Marcos, among many others.
But, it was in the 1970s – with the boom of petrol and the growth of oil prices – that Panamanian authorities saw and harnessed the potential to amass the wealth generated by offshore finance afforded by tax havens. The trend spurred the implementation of strict laws to protect corporate and individual financial secrecy, with their corresponding confidentiality regulations.
Tax Havens
The key component of the law is a veil of secrecy over finance: the names of clients went unregistered in the public domain.
A haven is a place with little to zero tax imposition is designed for foreign capital, which attracts wealth-seekers to stash capital or investment to circumvent paying taxes in their respective countries.
Tax haven countries, like Panama for example, will now impose a government-sanctioned nominal “user fee” to establish and maintain social responsibility.
An individual or company which uses tax havens will create a “shell company,” that is, a company which exists only on paper, holds no assets of its own, has no employees, but generally has a bank account and serves to support business transactions in anonymity. The shell company allows for the source of capital to be hidden from the public domain.
The ‘veil of secrecy’ helps to protect legal and illegal transactions. Since secrecy regulations do not limit the origins, licit or illicit, of any capital. In general, independently of the origin of the money, tax havens are widely criticized for diminishing resources from an economy’s tax-base which could be used to fund public policy, particularly in resource-strapped developing countries.
According to a study conducted by Forbes in 2017, nearly 10 percent of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) is held in tax havens or offshore banks, a figure which is on the rise.
Tax havens are not a third world problem, they also operate in the heart of the world’s capitalist centers, such as the United States and the United Kingdom.
Attorneys seeking details about the U.S. government’s investigation into WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange argued Monday that the Department of Justice lacks justification for continuing to keep its case completely sealed.
Lawyers for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit organization representing journalists’ interests, raised the claim throughout a 12-page memorandum filed in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, where the group initiated legal proceedings last month seeking access to sealed documents related to the Justice Department’s pending prosecution of the Australian-born WikiLeaks boss.
“The Reporters Committee does not dispute that, in some cases, prior to an arrest the Government may have a compelling interest that justifies temporary sealing of court records subject to the First Amendment right of access,” attorney Caitlin Vogus wrote in the memo. “But such interests are not present prior to an arrest in all cases, and the Government cannot justify wholesale sealing of the Assange Prosecution, specifically, based on nothing more than the fact that Assange is not in U.S. custody.”
“The Government does not demonstrate a compelling interest that would justify keeping the entirety of the Assange Prosecution sealed by mulishly asserting the fiction that Assange—who has confined himself to the Ecuadoran Embassy in London—might attempt to evade arrest if the nature of the charges pending against him are made public,” she added. “Given the specific circumstances here, unsealing court records from the Assange Prosecution, including the ‘contents’ of the criminal complaint against Assange, would not ‘pose any extra threat’ that he will evade or avoid arrest, or implicate any other compelling interest of the Government.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Alexandria declined to comment.
The Reporters Committee filed a motion last month seeking access to court records related to Mr. Assange, 46, after his surname was spotted in a document entered by prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia in an unrelated case.
Bayer, the German drugmaker that bought U.S. seed company Monsanto earlier this year, announced on Thursday the sale of a number of businesses, around 12,000 job cuts and 3.3 billion euros ($3.8 billion) in impairments, Reuters reported.
NOTE: some very interesting “Related” stories (international resistance) from Sustainable Pulse at bottom.
Chief Executive Werner Baumann is under pressure to boost Bayer’s share price after a drop of more than 35 percent so far this year, dragged down by concern over more than 9,000 lawsuits it faces over the cancer-causing effect of Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer.
Sustainable Pulse Director, Henry Rowlands, commented on the shocking news on Thursday; “This just shows what happens when a company doesn’t do its homework before making a huge investment. Bayer will struggle to recover from the Monsanto fiasco and investors in the company are obviously now very concerned. The only way out of this mess for Bayer is to stop selling glyphosate-based herbicides.”
The group said it was looking at options – that could include a sale – for the Coppertone sunscreen and Dr. Scholl’s foot care products from the consumer healthcare division it bought from Merck & Co in 2014 for $14 billion.
It will also divest its animal health division, the number five player in the industry, which analysts have said could fetch 6-7 billion euros ($7.9 billion).
The unit, the largest maker of flea and tick control products for cats and dogs and a supplier of livestock veterinary drugs, had sales of 1.57 billion euros in 2017, accounting for about 4.5 percent of group revenues.
Bayer will also seek a buyer for its 60-percent stake in German chemical production site services provider Currenta.
Alan Rusbridger, former Editor-in-Chief of The Guardian, stressed the fundamental role of reporters in today’s world to a crowded Yale Law School room on Sunday evening.
In a conversation with Pilar Velasco, a journalist and current World Fellow from Spain, Rusbridger discussed his experience editing groundbreaking stories on WikiLeaks and Brexit, as well as highlighted the importance of bringing attention back to journalism as a public service. Rusbridger recently published his sixth book, “Breaking News: Remaking of Journalism and Why it Matters Now.”
“Having a world without reporters is like having a world without bees — society collapses,” Rusbridger said, “If people are to support journalism, we have to articulate the mission of public service. We are currently looking over the precipice of what this is to look like. People are questioning the credibility of facts — and this is where journalists need to step up.”
Rusbridger started the talk by discussing his transition from the fast pace and demands of a newsroom to devoting time to education and book writing. He said it was a good way “to step away from the stress.”
He then discussed what he called the highlight of his time as an editor — his conversations with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowden and the difficulties he encountered when deciding where the public interest lay in the story. WikiLeaks is a website that publishes obtained secret or classified information and news leaks.
“It’s hard,” he said. “People become whistleblowers for all kinds of reasons, so it is really helpful to start from concrete information, focus on what the documents tell you.”
He mentioned his suspicions behind Assange’s motives for getting the information out in the open, so he made sure to carefully work through all of the documents before publishing the story.
In his talk, Rusbridger called journalism a service to people. He said that it was necessary for people to view it as such not only for the survival of democracy, but also for the survival of news companies like The Guardian.
“There are not many professions where people are willing to risk their lives for something important, and journalism is one of them,” he said.
He followed this sentiment by discussion of the evolution of journalism in the United Kingdom. He said that advertising and journalism used to go hand in hand, so the work of reporters could be supported. But he said that today, in the age of Twitter and Facebook, when there is no longer a scarcity of information, it is harder to persuade people to pay for news.
Answering an audience member’s question on how to position oneself as a journalist in an industry saturated with voices of varying opinions, Rusbridger went on to highlight what he saw as a distinction between journalists as fact-checkers and opinion writers. He said that the first job of journalism is always to determine what is true and what is not, and to take one’s time to do it. Rusbridger added that a reporter’s job was to show all sides of the story and to encourage debate as opposed to deciding what the people should think.
“Even after 200 years of the craft’s existence, we do not yet know whether it is meant to be subjective or objective,” he said.
In an article he wrote for the New Statesman earlier this year, Rusbridger criticized BBC for its reporting on Brexit, claiming that “neutrality should not deny the proper function of journalism — to create an informed public.”
After the event, Velasco told the News that she thought his book “should be considered a modern history of journalism in times of crisis.” She added that since the book was written since 2016 during the time of the Brexit referendum and the election of President Donald Trump, the book offers perspective on how journalism should evolve with a focus on “the right issues” and the challenges ahead.
Darryl Laiu ’19, who called himself an aspiring journalist, said he was struck by the positivity with which Rusbridger talked about the future of the news industry.
“As someone stepping into the field soon, it was heartening to hear that even though we have challenges to overcome, there are ways for us to thrive and put good stories out there,” Laiu said.
Rusbridger serves as the chair of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.
Valmir Mota de Oliveira, also known as ‘Keno,’ was murdered by a private security company hired by Syngenta in 2007.
The Justice Court of Parana has convicted Swiss agrobusiness company Syngenta of the murder of Valmir Mota de Oliveira – also known as ‘Keno,’ a member of Via Campesino and the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) – and ordered compensation be paid to the victim’s family.
The court’s decision ratified the 2015 sentence, in which a court found Syngenta responsible for Mota de Oliveira’s murder and for the attempted murder of Isabel Nascimento de Souza, also a campesino, on Thursday.
NOTE: in 2018, a Chinese state business purchased Syngenta.
“Today justice prevailed. We know Syngenta is guilty. I’m very excited,” said Iris Maracaipe Oliveira, the leader’s widow, after hearing the sentence. “I thank God because I have never lost hope of Syngenta being condemned someday because of this tragedy. I would prefer a thousand times him to be here, but I’m sure that wherever he is, he is happy now.”
Mota de Oliveria was shot dead on October 21, 2007, at the Free Land Camp in Santa Tereza do Oeste by a security group hired by Syngenta. He was 34 years old.
About 150 members of Via Campesina, a group of social organizations including MST, were occupying a Syngenta field laboratory in which they claimed the agrobusiness transnational was carrying out illegal experiments.
The private security group shot at the demonstrators, killing Keno. Nascimento de Souza narrates she was forced to bow down to be executed but lifted her head at the time the shot was fired, losing an eye as a result.
“The bosses are responsible for the acts of their employees,” said Jose Augusto Anicero in reference to Syngenta and the private security firm. The court recognized their responsibility, but also blamed the MST and Via Campesino for occupying the land at their own risk, therefore reducing the required indemnization for the victims’ families.
“Even though the invasion of private property is blameworthy and illegitimate, they shouldn’t act on their own and impose the death penalty for their occupiers, but look for the legal means to solve the conflict,” said Judge Pedro Ivo Montero.
Judge Wellington Emanuel Coimbra de Moura was alone in making the Swiss company the sole culprit, claiming the security guards knew about the occupation and didn’t have good intentions when they decided to visit the encampment.
The lawyer who represented the activists, Fernando Prioste, said the ruling was a victory for social movements against a transnational agrobusiness giant at a time at which Brazil’s President-Elect Jair Bolsonaro has threatened to arm landlords against social movements.
“The tribunal decided that… armed attacked by a militia is illegal. Those who act in a violent manner should be held accountable,” Prioste declared.
Via Campesino has walked a long road in the legal fight for justice. In 2008, some of its members protested against the murder in front of the company’s headquarters in Switzerland. The Swiss Ambassador in Brazil, Rudolf Barfuss, later apologized to the widow.
Syngenta has been accused several times of violating Brazilian law with their use of GMO crops. In 2006, Campesino organization Tierra de Derechos (Land of Rights) denounced the company for using transgenic soy in the buffer zone of Iguazu Park, a protected area in which GMO are prohibited. The Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Resources (IBAMA) ruled against the company and fined them about US$250,000.
The MST decided to occupy a small fraction of the 123 hectares on which Syngenta planted GMO. After Keno’s murder, a court in Parana confirmed that the Swiss company had effectively violated the law.
My view of Hillary Clinton says nothing about my view of Trump, or of the Russians – – just want to make that clear. Those are totally separate conversations.
– – – – – –
RE: why it is necessary to convince people that Hillary is the enemy in order to (protect whistleblowers)? – – actually Assange is the PUBLISHER, not the whistleblower)
(invert your question: In order to protect Assange, why is it necessary to convince people that Hillary is the enemy?)
You are saying that I used a despicable tactic – – disparaging one person – – in order to protect another.
That is not what I did.
Hillary Clinton is VERY connected to Assange because of the leak of the DNC emails. And because of her time as Foreign Secretary (State Dept) for the US. Assange reminds people about her role in the bombing of Libya. And makes connections between multi-million dollar contributions by Foreign people and Foreign Governments to the Clinton Foundation and favour in the State Dept. One example of media coverage of the relationship between Hillary Clinton and Assange, from the Sydney Morning Herald – – appended.
– – –
I tried to made sense of what I regard as false statements in the Guardian (Assange and Manafort, Trump’s one-time campaign manager, met three times).
I have no need to convince anyone that Hillary is an enemy.
I think we would be in agreement: her sex is totally irrelevant in the question of conduct (behavior).
A crime committed by a man is still a crime when it’s committed by a woman.
– – –
The questions are:
does Assange construct lies? And
what other information is there upon which to form an opinion about Clinton’s conduct?
Re 1. Through the years I’ve listened to a number of interviews of Assange – – not everything, by any means. When he was vilified, I listened to original interviews of him, to try & sort out truth from fiction, to the extent that is possible. To me Assange is credible, very astute, and always has been. The interviews are very interesting, nothing hackneyed. He is an exemplary publisher; would be that other publishers performed their roles to the same standard. The corruption would not be as deep as it is.
So, does Assange construct lies? Not as far as I know. (I don’t know everything.)
Re 2. what other information is there upon which to form an opinion about Clinton’s conduct?
The acts of Hillary Clinton, described by Assange, are consistent with her conduct in the role of Foreign Secretary. We’ve gone over that before: She was the one who wanted to bomb Libya, not Obama. I’ve described to you her gleeful reaction (captured on video) when the news came that the bombs had started falling. The revulsion that arose in the centre of my being almost made me sick. Bad enough that Libya has no defence against the might of the US, bad enough that Libya poses no real threat to the US, Hillary Clinton orchestrated and was gleeful when bombs started falling on innocent women and children, utterly destroying the environment and their lives in their communities. Let’s call that what it is – – it’s evil. It’s the stupid bully who has no imagination beyond bombs. There’s lots of intelligent ways to deal with conflict. You’re hitting the bottom of the barrel when your single response is “bomb them”.
The Rattansi interview of Assange confirmed the opinion I had formed when I saw the war videos. Hillary Clinton is accountable for her actions, not me. Bush is equally accountable for the bombing of Iraq. As far as I’m concerned, they both belong in the same jail cell.
Hillary vis-à-vis Libya and vis-à-vis Assange is only part of the whole picture. There is more in the Rattsansi interview.
The Clinton Foundation is no sweet thing, either.
Question answered?!
/Sandra
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, INTERVIEW OF HILLARY CLINTON
In a wide-ranging interview granted in support of her new book What Happened, Mrs Clinton attacked Assange for playing a key role in undermining her bid to become president by colluding with Vladimir Putin and the Trump campaign.
She claimed Wikileaks didn’t merely release sensitive information, it played an active role in ensuring that information did maximum damage.
As I (Sandra) view it, the American public SHOULD know about the persons they might be voting for, to be their President. ONE of the reasons the information was DAMAGING, is because it revealed things being done by the DNC, in support of Hillary – – unlawful with respect to Bernie Sanders. Hillary was part of it.
“If all you did was publish it, that would be one thing,” she told the program. “But there was a concerted operation between Wikileaks and Russia and most likely people in the United States to, as I say, weaponise that information, to make up stories – outlandish, often terrible stories that had no basis in fact.”
Hillary’s credibility is shot. She’s smart; she’s a good word-smith. “Weaponise” the emails? Made up stories? Wikileaks’ modus operandi is to provide full data sets to the media outlets it works with. Different newspapers might have different focuses. But by providing access to original material to a number of media, there’s built-in safeguards against outlandish, often terrible stories that had no basis in fact.
Assange, she said, was “very clearly a tool of Russian intelligence. And he has done their bidding. You don’t see damaging, negative information coming out about the Kremlin on Wikileaks.
“I think Assange has become a kind of nihilistic opportunist who does the bidding of a dictator.”
Smear campaign? Where is the evidence? What’s the line by Goering? the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
Maybe I will be proven wrong about the motivator of the statements in The Guardian. It seems evident to me, from what Assange revealed about Clinton – – that the smearing, the discrediting, the pronouncements that Assange is a tool of Russian intelligence – – the statements made in The Guardian are an extension of that agenda. You use scare tactics – – “the enemy”, the Russians, to bring the people to the bidding of the leaders. In this case, to draw attention away from the actions of the would-be leader.
With this story, it has done what it regularly does when supposedly vital western foreign policy interests are at stake – it simply regurgitates an elite-serving, western narrative. (Photo: Carl Court/Getty Images)
It is welcome that finally there has been a little pushback, including from leading journalists, to the Guardian’s long-running vilification of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks.
Reporter Luke Harding’s latest article, claiming that Donald Trump’s disgraced former campaign manager Paul Manafort secretly visited Assange in Ecuador’s embassy in London on three occasions, is so full of holes that even hardened opponents of Assange in the corporate media are struggling to stand by it.
Faced with the backlash, the Guardian quickly – and very quietly – rowed back its initial certainty that its story was based on verified facts. Instead, it amended the text, without acknowledging it had done so, to attribute the claims to unnamed, and uncheckable, “sources”.
The propaganda function of the piece is patent. It is intended to provide evidence for long-standing allegations that Assange conspired with Trump, and Trump’s supposed backers in the Kremlin, to damage Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential race.
The Guardian’s latest story provides a supposedly stronger foundation for an existing narrative: that Assange and Wikileaks knowingly published emails hacked by Russia from the Democratic party’s servers. In truth, there is no public evidence that the emails were hacked, or that Russia was involved. Central actors have suggested instead that the emails were leaked from within the Democratic party.
Nonetheless, this unverified allegation has been aggressively exploited by the Democratic leadership because it shifts attention away both from its failure to mount an effective electoral challenge to Trump and from the damaging contents of the emails. These show that party bureaucrats sought to rig the primaries to make sure Clinton’s challenger for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, lost.
To underscore the intended effect of the Guardian’s new claims, Harding even throws in a casual and unsubstantiated reference to “Russians” joining Manafort in supposedly meeting Assange.
Manafort has denied the Guardian’s claims, while Assange has threatened to sue the Guardian for libel.
‘Responsible for Trump’
The emotional impact of the Guardian story is to suggest that Assange is responsible for four years or more of Trump rule. But more significantly, it bolsters the otherwise risible claim that Assange is not a publisher – and thereby entitled to the protections of a free press, as enjoyed by the Guardian or the New York Times – but the head of an organisation engaged in espionage for a foreign power.
The intention is to deeply discredit Assange, and by extension the Wikileaks organisation, in the eyes of right-thinking liberals. That, in turn, will make it much easier to silence Assange and the vital cause he represents: the use of new media to hold to account the old, corporate media and political elites through the imposition of far greater transparency.
The Guardian story will prepare public opinion for the moment when Ecuador’s rightwing government under President Lenin Moreno forces Assange out of the embassy, having already withdrawn most of his rights to use digital media.
It will soften opposition when the UK moves to arrest Assange on self-serving bail violation charges and extradites him to the US. And it will pave the way for the US legal system to lock Assange up for a very long time.
For the best part of a decade, any claims by Assange’s supporters that avoiding this fate was the reason Assange originally sought asylum in the embassy was ridiculed by corporate journalists, not least at the Guardian.
Even when a United Nations panel of experts in international law ruled in 2016 that Assange was being arbitrarily – and unlawfully – detained by the UK, Guardian writers led efforts to discredit the UN report. See here and here.
Now Assange and his supporters have been proved right once again. An administrative error this month revealed that the US justice department had secretly filed criminal charges against Assange.
Heavy surveillance
The problem for the Guardian, which should have been obvious to its editors from the outset, is that any visits by Manafort would be easily verifiable without relying on unnamed “sources”.
Glenn Greenwald is far from alone in noting that London is possibly the most surveilled city in the world, with CCTV cameras everywhere. The environs of the Ecuadorian embassy are monitored especially heavily, with continuous filming by the UK and Ecuadorian authorities and most likely by the US and other actors with an interest in Assange’s fate.
The idea that Manafort or “Russians” could have wandered into the embassy to meet Assange even once without their trail, entry and meeting being intimately scrutinised and recorded is simply preposterous.
According to Greenwald: “If Paul Manafort … visited Assange at the Embassy, there would be ample amounts of video and other photographic proof demonstrating that this happened. The Guardian provides none of that.”
Former British ambassador Craig Murray also points out the extensive security checks insisted on by the embassy to which any visitor to Assange must submit. Any visits by Manafort would have been logged.
In fact, the Guardian obtained the embassy’s logs in May, and has never made any mention of either Manafort or “Russians” being identified in them. It did not refer to the logs in its latest story.
Murray:
The problem with this latest fabrication is that [Ecuador’s President] Moreno had already released the visitor logs to the Mueller inquiry. Neither Manafort nor these ‘Russians’ are in the visitor logs … What possible motive would the Ecuadorean government have for facilitating secret unrecorded visits by Paul Manafort? Furthermore it is impossible that the intelligence agency – who were in charge of the security – would not know the identity of these alleged ‘Russians’.
No fact-checking
It is worth noting it should be vitally important for a serious publication like the Guardian to ensure its claims are unassailably true – both because Assange’s personal fate rests on their veracity, and because, even more importantly, a fundamental right, the freedom of the press, is at stake.
Given this, one would have expected the Guardian’s editors to have insisted on the most stringent checks imaginable before going to press with Harding’s story. At a very minimum, they should have sought out a response from Assange and Manafort before publication. Neither precaution was taken.
I worked for the Guardian for a number of years, and know well the layers of checks that any highly sensitive story has to go through before publication. In that lengthy process, a variety of commissioning editors, lawyers, backbench editors and the editor herself, Kath Viner, would normally insist on cuts to anything that could not be rigorously defended and corroborated.
And yet this piece seems to have been casually waved through, given a green light even though its profound shortcomings were evident to a range of well-placed analysts and journalists from the outset.
That at the very least hints that the Guardian thought they had “insurance” on this story. And the only people who could have promised that kind of insurance are the security and intelligence services – presumably of Britain, the United States and / or Ecuador.
It appears the Guardian has simply taken this story, provided by spooks, at face value. Even if it later turns out that Manafort did visit Assange, the Guardian clearly had no compelling evidence for its claims when it published them. That is profoundly irresponsible journalism – fake news – that should be of the gravest concern to readers.
A pattern, not an aberration
Despite all this, even analysts critical of the Guardian’s behaviour have shown a glaring failure to understand that its latest coverage represents not an aberration by the paper but decisively fits with a pattern.
Glenn Greenwald, who once had an influential column in the Guardian until an apparent, though unacknowledged, falling out with his employer over the Edward Snowden revelations, wrote a series of baffling observations about the Guardian’s latest story.
First, he suggested it was simply evidence of the Guardian’s long-standing (and well-documented) hostility towards Assange.
“The Guardian, an otherwise solid and reliable paper, has such a pervasive and unprofessionally personal hatred for Julian Assange that it has frequently dispensed with all journalistic standards in order to malign him.”
It was also apparently evidence of the paper’s clickbait tendencies:
“They [Guardian editors] knew that publishing this story would cause partisan warriors to excitedly spread the story, and that cable news outlets would hyperventilate over it, and that they’d reap the rewards regardless of whether the story turned out to be true or false.”
And finally, in a bizarre tweet, Greenwald opined, “I hope the story [maligning Assange] turns out true” – apparently because maintenance of the Guardian’s reputation is more important than Assange’s fate and the right of journalists to dig up embarrassing secrets without fear of being imprisoned.
Deeper malaise
What this misses is that the Guardian’s attacks on Assange are not exceptional or motivated solely by personal animosity. They are entirely predictable and systematic. Rather than being the reason for the Guardian violating basic journalistic standards and ethics, the paper’s hatred of Assange is a symptom of a deeper malaise in the Guardian and the wider corporate media.
Even aside from its decade-long campaign against Assange, the Guardian is far from “solid and reliable”, as Greenwald claims. It has been at the forefront of the relentless, and unhinged, attacks on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn for prioritising the rights of Palestinians over Israel’s right to continue its belligerent occupation. Over the past three years, the Guardian has injected credibility into the Israel lobby’s desperate efforts to tar Corbyn as an anti-semite. See here, here and here.
Similarly, the Guardian worked tirelessly to promote Clinton and undermine Sanders in the 2016 Democratic nomination process – another reason the paper has been so assiduous in promoting the idea that Assange, aided by Russia, was determined to promote Trump over Clinton for the presidency.
The Guardian’s coverage of Latin America, especially of populist leftwing governments that have rebelled against traditional and oppressive US hegemony in the region, has long grated with analysts and experts. Its especial venom has been reserved for leftwing figures like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, democratically elected but official enemies of the US, rather than the region’s rightwing authoritarians beloved of Washington.
The Guardian has been vocal in the so-called “fake news” hysteria, decrying the influence of social media, the only place where leftwing dissidents have managed to find a small foothold to promote their politics and counter the corporate media narrative.
The Guardian has painted social media chiefly as a platform overrun by Russian trolls, arguing that this should justify ever-tighter restrictions that have so far curbed critical voices of the dissident left more than the right.
Heroes of the neoliberal order
Equally, the Guardian has made clear who its true heroes are. Certainly not Corbyn or Assange, who threaten to disrupt the entrenched neoliberal order that is hurtling us towards climate breakdown and economic collapse.
Its pages, however, are readily available to the latest effort to prop up the status quo from Tony Blair, the man who led Britain, on false pretences, into the largest crime against humanity in living memory – the attack on Iraq.
That “humanitarian intervention” cost the lives of many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and created a vacuum that destabilised much of the Middle East, sucked in Islamic jihadists like al-Qaeda and ISIS, and contributed to the migrant crisis in Europe that has fuelled the resurgence of the far-right. None of that is discussed in the Guardian or considered grounds for disqualifying Blair as an arbiter of what is good for Britain and the world’s future.
The Guardian also has an especial soft spot for blogger Elliot Higgins, who, aided by the Guardian, has shot to unlikely prominence as a self-styled “weapons expert”. Like Luke Harding, Higgins invariably seems ready to echo whatever the British and American security services need verifying “independently”.
Higgins and his well-staffed website Bellingcat have taken on for themselves the role of arbiters of truth on many foreign affairs issues, taking a prominent role in advocating for narratives that promote US and NATO hegemony while demonising Russia, especially in highly contested arenas such as Syria.
That clear partisanship should be no surprise, given that Higgins now enjoys an “academic” position at, and funding from, the Atlantic Council, a high-level, Washington-based think-tank founded to drum up support for NATO and justify its imperialist agenda.
Improbably, the Guardian has adopted Higgins as the poster-boy for a supposed citizen journalism it has sought to undermine as “fake news” whenever it occurs on social media without the endorsement of state-backed organisations.
The truth is that the Guardian has not erred in this latest story attacking Assange, or in its much longer-running campaign to vilify him. With this story, it has done what it regularly does when supposedly vital western foreign policy interests are at stake – it simply regurgitates an elite-serving, western narrative.
Its job is to shore up a consensus on the left for attacks on leading threats to the existing, neoliberal order: whether they are a platform like Wikileaks promoting whistle-blowing against a corrupt western elite; or a politician like Jeremy Corbyn seeking to break apart the status quo on the rapacious financial industries or Israel-Palestine; or a radical leader like Hugo Chavez who threatened to overturn a damaging and exploitative US dominance of “America’s backyard”; or social media dissidents who have started to chip away at the elite-friendly narratives of corporate media, including the Guardian.
The Guardian did not make a mistake in vilifying Assange without a shred of evidence. It did what it is designed to do.
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NEW YORK, Nov. 19 /CSRwire/ – Roger Waters, the founder of Pink Floyd currently touring Latin America to sold-out stadiums, is arriving in Ecuador today to bear witness to Chevron’s “Amazon Chernobyl” disaster and to support Indigenous peoples and farmer communities who are fighting to force the oil giant to pay a landmark $12 billion liability to be used to clean up the world’s worst environmental disaster.
“I am honored to come to Ecuador to see the environmental damage firsthand and to listen to my brothers and sisters in the Amazon who have taken on a true corporate monster in Chevron,” said Waters, who recently won a humanitarian award from the city of Buenos Aries. (See here.) “Chevron must clean up the disaster it caused in Ecuador and do so immediately. Chevron shareholders must recognize this is a humanitarian disaster and act to hold Chevron management accountable for its toxic dumping and attempts to evade court judgments.
“I am also here to support my friend Steven Donziger, the American lawyer for the Ecuadorians whom the company has targeted with a demonization campaign designed to intimidate supporters and leave the Ecuadorians without legal counsel,” Waters added. “I stand by Steven and all human rights defenders in Ecuador and around the world who get attacked by large corporations who commit wrongdoing.”
Carmen Cartuche, the President of the Amazon Defense Coalition (the group hosting Waters), said: “We are honored and privileged to be hosting legendary artist and musician Roger Waters on our ancestral lands. Mr. Waters not only has been an inspiration to millions of people around the world, but to those of us in Ecuador he has been a supporter for many years and we are deeply grateful for his solidarity. We look forward to telling Roger the truth about Chevron’s ongoing destruction of the environment and about the company’s crimes and fraud committed on our sacred lands.”
Waters was the creative force and principal lyricist for Pink Floyd from 1968 to 1983 in one of the most successfully runs of a rock band in history. With Waters as the driving force, Pink Floyd produced the famed Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and The Wall (1979), among other successful albums. Touring later as a solo artist, Waters later broke the record for the highest grossing tour in history for his spectacular Wall Live tour in 2010.
In Ecuador, Waters will visit in an area of the Amazon rainforest mired in a humanitarian crisis. Chevron’s operational area in Ecuador – roughly the size of Rhode Island and comprising 400 production sites – is poisoned with life-threatening toxins and cancer rates have skyrocketed, claiming hundreds and possibly thousands of lives. One noted academic predicts 10,000 people in the area will die of cancer in the coming years because of Chevron’s failure to clean up its pollution. Several community leaders in the area have succumbed to cancer recently, including legendary nurse Rosa Moreno.
Waters will visit the Ecuadorian town of Lago Agrio, which means “Sour Lake” in English. Located on Indigenous Cofan territory, Lago Agrio was built by Chevron’s predecessor company Texaco in the 1970s and named after its headquarters in Texas. The Cofan, once a thriving band of 15,000 people, have been completely displaced by Chevron’s oil production with their traditional culture of hunting and fishing largely decimated. Chevron’s first well in Ecuador — known as Lago 1 — was built on Cofan territory and caused extensive pollution to a nearby farm and stream, according to court documents.
Waters has been a longtime supporter of the five Indigenous groups and 80 farmer communities in Ecuador who originally brought the pollution case in 1993 in U.S. courts. Chevron later shifted the case to Ecuador, but then lost a trial there based on 64,000 chemical sampling results, extensive witness testimony, and 105 expert evidentiary reports. The Ecuador verdict has been affirmed by four layers of courts in the country and 17 separate appellate judges. (See this summary of the evidence against Chevron.)
Last year, while on tour in Canada,
Waters attended court proceedings in Toronto to support the Ecuadorians in their attempt to seize Chevron assets to force compliance with the Ecuador court judgment. Chevron has an estimated $15 billion worth of assets in Canada, where it has come under sharp criticism for using its local subsidiary as a vehicle to send billions of dollars of annual payments to foreign governments as part of an apparent tax avoidance scheme. (See this summary of Chevron’s tax avoidance.)
Last week, Waters spoke to an academic conference in Alberta on Indigenous rights and the environment that focused in part on the litigation against Chevron. The pollution case – the first to result in a large environmental judgment against a U.S. oil company out of Latin America — was filed 25 years ago this month in U.S. federal court in New York before Chevron moved it to Ecuador.
When the evidence mounted in the Ecuador trial, Chevron sold its assets and threatened the Indigenous groups with a “lifetime of litigation” if they persisted. Chevron also hired 60 law firms to fight the Indigenous groups and launched an avowed “demonization” campaign targeting their lawyers. Donziger, a sole practitioner and graduate of Harvard Law School, has borne the brunt of Chevron’s attacks.
In the meantime, Chevron has suffered significant legal setbacks. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled unanimously in 2015 that the Ecuadorian communities could try to seize Chevron assets in that country, denying a Chevron jurisdictional challenge. The Ecuadorians also have won two unanimous decisions from the Ontario Court of Appeal denying other Chevron attempts to block the case. (See here for background on the Canada litigation.)
At the conference in Alberta two weeks ago, Waters criticized Chevron for what he called the “despicable” treatment of the Ecuadorian communities and their lawyers.
“We cannot allow Chevron to destroy Steven Donziger and 60,000 people in Ecuador,” Waters said. He later described the case against Chevron “as a matter of life and death for thousands of people” and said Chevron’s “ad hominem attacks against the Ecuadorians and Steven Donziger are utterly despicable.” Waters received a standing ovation after he talked, which took place via Skype from Santiago, Chile. (See here for studies documenting high cancer rates where Chevron operated.)
Chevron’s troubles from its Ecuador liability also have produced consternation in the financial markets.
Thirty-six Chevron institutional shareholders recently sent a letter to Chevron CEO Michael Wirth criticizing his mishandling of the litigation and asking that he explore a settlement. In the meantime, two shareholder resolutions relating to Wirth’s mishandling of the case received overwhelming support at the company’s 2018 annual meeting. (See here.)
For the last several months, Waters has been touring in Latin America while playing to large audiences in stadiums in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aries, Montevideo, Santiago, and Lima. He plays in Bogota on Wednesday night before closing his 18-month world tour in Costa Rica and Mexico. He previously played several cities in the United States, Canada, Europe, Russia, Australia and New Zealand.
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