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Monday, October 24, 2011

Investigation on chicken nuggets | UK news | The Guardian

Investigation on chicken nuggets | UK news | The Guardian: Fowl play

Fowl play

They are the ultimate 21st-century food - quick, easy and highly processed. But if you knew about the high percentage of skin, the water, and the pulped carcasses that go into some of them, would you be so keen to reach into the freezer for chicken nuggets? In a major investigation, Felicity Lawrence travels to processing plants in Britain and Thailand to uncover the disturbing truth about every kid's favourite food

The Guardian, Sunday 7 July 2002

Article history Europe is big on breasts. The Japanese prefer thighs, dark and gamey ones. Feet are a bit of a fetish in China. Gizzards go to Russia. But smooth, damp slabs of white flesh are what we British buy when we want chicken. That leaves the carcasses, and skin, mountains and mountains of it - pale, flaccid, pimply, raw, ripped off by 100,000 shift workers' hands, from Thailand to Brazil, from the Netherlands to Norfolk. The skin goes around the world for chicken nuggets.

I am watching an army of small, perfectly formed nuggets march along a conveyor belt, with manufacturer Gary Stiles, at his factory in Wiltshire. He has spent his life in the meat trade. At one end of the factory line is a pulp of half-frozen meat and skin in a giant stainless-steel hopper. Minced and mixed beyond recognition, it is being extruded through a small tube on to metal plates. These press it into pale pink nugget shapes which then trundle on down the belt. Through a dust bath of flour and seasoning they go, before being lowered under a sheet of constantly pouring batter. Then on in juddering formation through a tray of scattered breadcrumbs and into a vast vat of boiling oil for 30 seconds.

    As they emerge, workers in white coats, blue hairnets and white boots catch them, bag them in plastic, and post them back for the last rites. The belt carries them into a nitrogen tunnel to take them down to freezing and finally out into a cardboard box, labelled with his own brand Pure Organics For Georgia's Sake or Tesco organic chicken nuggets, according to the orders of the day.

    Above the roar of machinery, Stiles explains that you need some skin to keep the nuggets succulent; 15% is about right, he reckons. Mixed in that proportion with breast and dark meat, it matches what you would get if you were eating a whole bird, and he knows exactly where his comes from. Like the rest of his meat, his skin is bought from two organic farms that he knows personally, one in England, one in Wales. Unlike some manufacturers, he won't use more skin than that, and he won't use mechanically recovered meat (MRM), which is obtained by pushing the carcass through a giant teabag-like screen to produce a slurry of protein, then bound back together with polyphosphates and gums. Nor does he use other additives.

    Stiles likes to think that his nuggets, at £1.99 for 250g, are, like the beer, "reassuringly expensive". But the trouble is, once you've minced bits of a chicken to a pulp, that pulp could be anything from anywhere. With other manufacturers, sometimes it is. Recycled pet food, breasts injected with pig and cattle proteins, banned carcinogenic antibiotics - they've all been found by the authorities recently in chicken destined for processing.

    Denatured and deracinated, the chicken nugget is a symbol of the way we eat now. It is the epitome of our 21st-century system of globalised, industrial food production.

    Like much of our diet today, the nugget is processed so highly that its taste and texture depend as much on engineering and additives as on any raw ingredients, making it an easy way to disguise cheap or adulterated food. And just as the nugget's form is far removed from its contents, so we have become completely divorced from the source of those contents, from the animals that provide them and from the people who transform them. The nugget is, in fact, the product of a transnational chain so fragmented and complex that even those in the business do not fully understand how some parts of it work.

    It depends on the industrialisation of livestock, on an endless supply of uniform factory birds to fit standardised factory machines. It depends, too, on the mass migration of workers, both legal and illegal, since adding the value to it requires an equally endless supply of low-value labour.

    The rise of the nugget has been dizzying. We bought 42 million packs of them - that's £79m worth, or 21,000 tonnes - in the UK last year, just to eat at home, according to analysts Taylor Nelson Sofres. British adults also ate 73 million meals of them away from home in the same period. Children probably ate more. Served in school dining halls, fast-food outlets, at hospital bedsides, and on the tables of harassed parents, nuggets have become ubiquitous. Mass production has created a homogeneity in our diets at a time when the origins of our food are more varied than ever. If you want to know what goes into your nuggets, you need to look to the commodity markets, exchange rates and tariffs. The label is not the place to find out.

    One story earlier this year highlighted just how little we know about what lies inside the golden breadcrumb coating. When Leicestershire trading standards received a complaint from a member of the public about the quality of some nuggets, they decided to test 21 samples from 17 different shops, including the major supermarkets. In one-third of the samples, the label was misleading about the nugget's meat content. One pack of nuggets contained only 16% meat, 30% less than it claimed. (And skin, of course, counts as "meat"). The trading standards officials are unable to identify the brands involved for legal reasons. Instead, they gave a warning to the worst offender. Subsequent tests recently have shown that the manufacturer has not changed its ways. Look further back down the chain, and it becomes clear that doctoring has become routine.

    Even if the percentage of meat in a nugget looks reassuringly high, you may be surprised by what exactly counts as meat. Nugget manufacturers source their meat in various ways. Some use British chicken. Some buy high-quality meat direct from Thailand or Brazil. Some buy whatever is cheapest on the market, which is often frozen Thai and Brazilian chicken imported into the EU through Holland's ports.

    The Netherlands is the centre of the "tumbling" industry, a process in which chicken is bulked up with water and other additives. Dutch processors defrost the meat and then inject it with dozens of needles, or tumble it in giant cement-mixer-like machines, until the water is absorbed. Salted meat attracts only a fraction of the EU tariff applied to fresh meat. The tumbling helps dilute the salt to make the chicken palatable, so as well as making huge profits selling water, the processors can avoid substantial duties. Once it has been tumbled, the meat is refrozen and shipped on for further processing.

    The story gets less appetising still. One of the things that has puzzled observers of the poultry industry is how some processors manage to get so much water to stay in the chicken. Why doesn't it just flood out when it is turned into a takeaway or a ready meal or a chicken nugget? Hull trading standards officer John Sandford has spent over five years investigating. The answer he discovered was profoundly shocking.

    DNA tests specially developed by Sandford with the public analyst laboratory in Manchester enabled the English food standards agency to identify lots of water (in one case 43%) and traces of pork proteins in samples of Dutch chicken breasts labelled "halal". Six months later, Irish authorities made an even more unsettling discovery in chicken: undeclared bovine proteins. Seventeen samples from Dutch processors contained them. Some manufacturers were using a new technique - injecting so-called hydrolysed proteins. These are proteins extracted at high temperatures or by chemical hydrolysis from old animals or parts of animals which are no use for food, such as skin, feathers, hide, bone and ligaments, and rather like cosmetic collagen implants, they make the flesh swell up and retain liquid.

    These discoveries raised as many questions as they answered. What kind of cow products had been used to produce bovine proteins? If the processors were not declaring the presence of bovine proteins on the labels, could they be trusted to follow the regulations on removing certain high-risk cattle materials from the food chain? The possibility of BSE in chicken meat had raised its ugly head.

    Chicken from the Dutch processors named by the Irish authorities remains widely available in the UK. Industry sources say that some nugget manufacturers at the bottom end of the market buy tumbled Dutch chicken, although they would be unaware that some processors' meat contains bovine proteins.

    Others nuggets will be made from various bits of British chicken. Some are made from chunks of chicken breast and skin. Some are mostly skin, or skin and MRM. If tumbled meat is being used, the chicken is defrosted in microwaves before being minced into nuggets. Manufacturers can neutralise the salty taste by adding sugar in various forms, often as dextrose or lactose, and put flavour back in with chicken flavourings in the meat pulp, in the batter or in the breadcrumbs. Other additives can help restore the texture. Soya proteins are the commonest used, with gums as emulsifiers, to stop the whole mix separating out again. Phosphates also help glue up the proteins. Some nuggets are made in Britain, but increasingly nuggets are also imported ready-made from developing countries. If a manufacturer does anything to the chicken in this country, it can be legally labelled "produced in England". To get to the beginning of the nugget story, though, we must head east, to a land of chicken and cheap labour.

    The Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise near CP Towers in Bangkok is chilly, its automatic doors and air conditioning sealing it off from the blast of 40C heat outside - and the choking smog of east Asia's fastest-developing city. There is one family group sharing a tray of chicken nuggets - a Thai mother and father with a fat little boy bursting from a designer leather jacket, but the other patrons are all alone, disconnected, eating their fast food with silent efficiency. The nuggets slip down. Hot and crisp on the outside, soft and moist inside, they have that textureless, easy-on-the-jaw, flavoured "mouth feel" that children like.

    A McDonald's supplier claims the invention of the nugget in 1979. McDonald's, worried by the trend away from red meat towards "healthier" white meat, asked Keystone Foods if it could produce a boneless chicken finger food which would be in keeping with its other fast food. Keystone laboratories came up with McNuggets, little gobbets of minced, reconstituted chicken, battered and breaded.

    But it was the Vietnam war and US troops wanting R&R with familiar food which started Thailand off on its trajectory of breathtaking growth, producing food for export. The country is now one of the world's largest exporters of poultry and chicken products - $600m worth last year. Food exports are projected to grow to a staggering $25bn worth by 2007.

    KFC franchises in the UK source some of their meat for what they call chicken strips - made from pieces rather than minced chicken - direct from Thailand. Tesco has invested heavily in the country and owns the majority share of the retail arm of Thailand's leading chicken producer, Charoen Pokphand (CP).

    Grampian, supplier of fresh chicken and nuggets to all the main British supermarkets, has just closed down a factory in Scotland and ended its contract with some of its British farmers, while buying two huge factories outside Bangkok. Managing director Alistair Cox says it is very hard to compete in a world market in the UK. "The UK government puts an onerous regulatory framework around UK farms and factories, which add costs. Imports coming into the UK may not meet the same standards (although Grampian's aim is to have the same standards in its Thailand operations), but the main cost is labour, and it's cheaper over there."

    Driving north out of the sprawl of Bangkok, it takes over an hour to reach the Grampian Foods Siam factories, where 150,000 birds are killed a day and 120,000 a day can be turned into nuggets and other chicken products. Eventually, the traffic jams give way to marshy plains, criss-crossed by canals. Migrant workers, drawn from the poor rural areas in the north and east to work in the industrial belt around the capital, have built their wooden huts over the waterways, which double up as transport system and sewer.

    A powerful smell of raw meat and a procession of juggernauts loaded with blue and yellow crates of chickens, uncovered and exposed to the blistering temperatures of late morning, announce that you are close to an industrial chicken factory. A notice at the HQ main entrance says no children under 15 are allowed, while at the gate of a second factory up the road, where nuggets are made, accident figures are posted. (Thailand has the world's second-highest per capita industrial accident rate.)

    In many ways, Thai chicken factories are just like English ones - equipped with vast stainless-steel production lines to take the birds from slaughter to finished product, and fed by "crops" of chickens from large-scale intensive farms. They are inspected for hygiene and welfare standards by EU inspectors.

    It is in the lives of those who work in them that the gulf becomes apparent. Some of the 3,500 workers at Grampian Foods Siam live on the factory sites in huge dormitories under corrugated-iron roofs. Others spend hours each day travelling in from miles around. We have a rendezvous at the end of a shift with some of the workers who are bussed in the long journey from the outskirts of Bangkok to this and other chicken factories.

    The light, though not the heat, is fading as we pick our way through a dusty slum of half- finished concrete houses next to a small, open-air slaughterhouse where chickens are being killed for the domestic market. A row of windowless wooden shacks, built on a broken platform over marshland, open directly on to the six-lane highway. Old plastic supermarket bags clog the ground under the platform stilts and the smell of sewage is overpowering.

    Nine of us crowd into a small room and sit crosslegged in a circle on the floor, sharing a communal meal of noodles with slivers of pork, green leaves and papaya. This is home to Khun Neepa, who, together with half of those in the room, works at Centraco, a leading producer of frozen chicken for export to England for ready meals and nuggets. The others work for Grampian.

    We eat, then talk. Most of them are paid by the day, and earn the statutory minimum wage of 165 baht (£2.50) a day, six days a week, for a nine-hour day which includes a one-hour break. They work in two shifts, dawn till mid-afternoon or mid-afternoon into the night, depending on the orders. Overtime, which can be two or three hours a day, pays more, and they work it and days off whenever they can to send more money home. Most of them are the first of their families to go into the factories; their parents were rice farmers.

    The most labour-intensive part of the factories are the cutting rooms where it is as cold as a fridge and hundreds of workers wearing face masks and gloves cut, chop, debone and rearrange parts. This is where cheap raw animals begin their transformation into profitable "added value goods". Hygiene is very strict. The workers have to wash their hands and boards every hour. There are doctors at the sites in case there are accidents; they have all seen two or three - fingers caught in machines, knives going through nerves, that sort of thing.

    The company doesn't like to take on anyone over 40, and the supervisors are very quick to give you warnings - two and you lose seven days' work, any more after that and it's the sack. But Grampian's a good place to work, they say.

    At Centraco, Neepa has now organised a union, the first in a Thai chicken factory. Her filing cabinets are jammed in alongside her pots and pans. It's been a fight: she's been sacked and taken to court, but she won and now things are better, she says - they have clean drinking water and uniforms provided, though she doesn't see her children (a six-year-old girl and two-year-old boy) much. They live with her parents in another province.

    Khun Sril finds it harder to bear. She used to work in supermarkets and hotels but now she's 33, she has been told that she is too old and no longer attractive enough, so she is working at Centraco. It's hard when the chickens come really fast - her factory can process 190 birds a minute - and she's cut her finger a couple of times, and had to go to hospital when a knife fell on her foot. She has to spend 1,500 of the 4,300 baht she earns a month on rent for a small room without sanitation. She often goes hungry because she is sending money home to her parents in the north to look after her two children, aged two and four. She sees them once a year. Her voice trails off as she talks about them and we fall silent. The others gently make their excuses and leave: it is late, they have to be up early.

    Ricky and I are sipping fresh lime sodas in the cool of a five-star hotel in Bangkok. He is a smooth, besuited Thai executive from CP Foods who seems to think I am a broker and is rattling off sales figures in a mid-Atlantic accent: CP is the country's largest chicken exporter, producer of 2,200 tonnes of chicken breast a month for the UK; it owns 100 feedmills and processing factories in China, where labour is even cheaper; it supplies KFC in Europe, and Tesco; it owns large farms - 30,000 birds per shed, or 50,000 in two-storey houses, which meet Tesco-specification stocking densities, with chickens reared and killed on a 42-day cycle, nugget flavourings to different specifications, all hand-cut meat, battered and fried...

    I interrupt the flow to ask him about antibiotics found in Thai meat. The EU recently sent its veterinary inspectors to China and they were alarmed to find indiscriminate use of antibiotics in chicken and fish farming, including the use of drugs banned in Europe as cancer-causing. As a gesture of even-handedness, the commission tested Thai poultry, too, and was surprised to find nitrofurans and chloramphenicol residues in samples. Both are banned antibiotics in Europe. Now all Thai poultry imports to the EU are supposed to be checked. Ricky admits that the industry is anxious but argues that it is an isolated problem. He blames producers who are subcontracting, or buying in chicken from China and then relabelling it as Thai produce before selling it on, just as British factories buy in poultry from the Netherlands and relabel it as British.

    A steely grey dawn is breaking over Eastbourne, and while the windows of the smarter seaside hotels are still blank, the lights are flicking on in the seedier boarding houses in between. Outside the glazed verandah advertising banana splits, jam doughnuts and Sussex cream teas, two young men are having an argument in Russian. It is 5.35am and I am waiting alone at a bus stop on Seaside Road, next to a shop which is patriotically flying half a dozen union flags.

    Suddenly at 5.38am they appear, as if from nowhere, like apparitions, wreathed in rings of cigarette smoke. There is a quick exchange of "Buenos dias" between five or six Spanish- speaking middle-aged men, in trainers and old jeans. A man in an Afghan hat hangs back in a doorway. Two minutes later a dirty, unmarked white coach rolls up and eight or nine get on board, taking their places with a dozen others, already slumped in the old brown seats with their heavily used ashtrays, as they try to catch a last snatch of sleep.

    These are some of the foreign shift workers who are bussed each day for an hour or more between the south coast and the Grampian factory at Uckfield to kill and cut up chickens, packing pieces for Safeway, Somerfield and the Co-op, and supplying spare parts to the company's nugget factory in East Anglia.

    The coach stops several times to pick up more, and by the end there are about 50. How many nationalities, I ask? "20, no 22," someone thinks: "Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians, Kosovans, Bosnians, other eastern Europeans, Iraqis, Arabs, lots of Arabs, Afghans, Pakistanis, Spanish, Portuguese, many, many foreigners, not many English." English people do not want this kind of work. "There are many, many refugees." There was a problem a while ago at the factory when "they told all the Russians and Kosovans they had to go home".

    Carmen is Spanish, 50ish, smarter than the rest in black jacket and red lipstick. She worked 15 hours yesterday, and after the bus journey back, got home at 11pm and then was up again for work at 5am. "The money is too little, £4.20 an hour, only about £160 a week, unless you do the overtime. That's good, £7 an hour, so you have to do the overtime." She pays £50 a week rent to share a room she can hardly turn round in. She saw an advert in her local Spanish paper for packers in a factory in England and it sounded good - there are no jobs for her in Spain. "But they don't tell you it's hours on the bus each way and it's very cold, so cold in there, and food is so expensive here." We are driving along narrow country lanes now where commuters' dream cottages are still dreaming. The hawthorn is in full bloom and knee-high cow parsley is a shimmer of gauze in the early morning light. "Everyone is moving, England is not England, Spain is not Spain. Everyone moving for jobs," Carmen sighs.

    We arrive at the factory, tucked in a fold of Sussex down, at 6.30am. A white double-decker bus, also packed with foreigners, lurches in behind, then come vans and more coaches.

    This scene is replayed across Britain each day: from the centre of Derby to the cluster of chicken factories owned by other companies in the Midlands, from Great Yarmouth to the Grampian production lines in East Anglia, from Exeter to the Lloyd Maunder factory in Devon where 18 nationalities work cutting and packing chicken for Sainsbury's.

    Most big manufacturers, including Grampian, insist on checks on the paperwork of foreign workers, but inevitably some slip through the net. Where manufacturers employ subcontractors to provide labour, the responsibility in law for checking that the worker is entitled to work, devolves to the agent. Many of the illegal workers have forged papers and, according to immigration officers who have spoken to the Guardian, illegal labour operated by gangmasters is a significant and growing problem in the meat-processing business, as in other sectors of the food industry. Alistair Cox, managing director of Grampian, acknowledges that it is a problem across the industry. "We use agencies but we also check all their records and welcome immigration officials into the business."

    Don Pollard has made a study of migrant labour for the T&G union. "The supermarkets are dependent on illegal labour. By definition, figures are guesstimates, but about 40% of their food suppliers' workforces are tied up with gangmasters and illegal labour."

    A different kind of illegal activity has been absorbing Sue Sonnex for the last couple of years. In 2000, three Rotherham men were found guilty of laundering £3m worth of unfit chicken and turkey, supposedly destined for tins of Spillers and Pedigree petfood, back into supplies for human consumption. Sonnex, a chief environmental health officer, has been investigating the disposal of condemned meat following the Rotherham case and thinks it represents the tip of an iceberg. During her inquiries, she uncovered chicken nuggets made almost entirely of chicken skin. The industry's problems are endemic, she says, a symptom of a system in which it makes economic sense to ship raw meat hundreds of miles and disguise it with additives so its origin becomes impossible to trace. Once you accept this sort of legal adulteration of processed food, there is no end to it; the ingredients can just as well be pet food. Respectable manufacturers suffer; rogues get away with it.

    As a nugget manufacturer, Gary Stiles thinks that we have become too disconnected from our food and disconnection has bred fear and mistrust. He was forced to remake the connection between what he made and what he fed his children when his daughter, Georgia, the Georgia of his brand name, turned out to be autistic. He and his wife started to research the link between diet and illness. He now feels that "if you put junk in, you get junk out", and he's not prepared to do that any more.

    · Workers names have been changed to protect their identities.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

There are only seven nations left in the world that are not borrowing from a Rothschild cartel bank: Iran, Syria, Algeria, North Korea, Sudan, Iceland, and Cuba. Those countries create their own money for their own people; and interest rates are low or zero. National banks that recently fell to the Rothschild cartel include: Iraq, Afghanistan, and most recently, Libya (on day 4 of the recent invasion). http://www.wearechange.org/?p=9351 Libya, the untold story. A Debt Free nation ransacked! Some believe it is about protecting civilians, others say it is about oil, but MOST are convinced intervention in Libya is ALL about Gaddafi's PLAN TO INTRODUCE THE GOLD DINAR, a single African currency made from gold, a true sharing of the wealth AND THE END of the western world trying to controlling the middle east.. "It's one of these things that you have to plan almost in secret, because as soon as you say you're going to change over from the dollar to something else, you're going to be targeted," says Ministry of Peace founder Dr James Thring. "There were two conferences on this, in 1986 and 2000, organized by Gaddafi. Everybody was interested, most countries in Africa were keen." Source: http://www.RT.com/ Titled: 'Saving the world economy from Gaddafi'


Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Wall Street’s Second Occupation: The Rise of the NYPD's Homeland Security State | | AlterNet

Wall Street’s Second Occupation: The Rise of the NYPD's Homeland Security State | | AlterNet: Tomdispatch.com / By Tom Engelhardt

Wall Street’s Second Occupation: The Rise of the NYPD's Homeland Security State

Are drones above New York City next as the police militarize Lower Manhattan?
Photo Credit: Nick Turse
These last weeks, there have been two “occupations” in lower Manhattan, one of which has been getting almost all the coverage -- that of the demonstrators camping out in Zuccotti Park. The other, in the shadows, has been hardly less massive, sustained, or in its own way impressive -- the police occupation of the Wall Street area.

On a recent visit to the park, I found the streets around the Stock Exchange barricaded and blocked off to traffic, and police everywhere in every form (in and out of uniform) -- on foot, on scooters, on motorcycles, in squad cars with lights flashing, on horses, in paddy wagons or minivans, you name it. At the park’s edge, there is a police observation tower capable of being raised and lowered hydraulically and literally hundreds of police are stationed in the vicinity. I counted more than 50 of them on just one of its sides at a moment when next to nothing was going on -- and many more can be seen almost anywhere in the Wall Street area, lolling in doorways, idling in the subway, ambling on the plazas of banks, and chatting in the middle of traffic-less streets.

This might be seen as massive overkill. After all, the New York police have already shelled out an extra $1.9 million, largely in overtime pay at a budget-cutting moment in the city. When, as on Thursday, 100 to 150 marchers suddenly headed out from Zuccotti Park to circle Chase Bank several blocks away, close to the same number of police -- some with ominous clumps of flexi-cuffs dangling from their belts -- calved off with them. It’s as if the Occupy Wall Street movement has an eternal dark shadow that follows it everywhere.

At one level, this is all mystifying. The daily crowds in the park remain remarkably, even startlingly, peaceable. (Any violence has generally been the product of police action.) On an everyday basis, a squad of 10 or 15 friendly police officers could easily handle the situation. There is, of course, another possibility suggested to me by one of the policemen loitering at the Park’s edge doing nothing in particular: “Maybe they’re peaceable because we’re here.” And here's a second possibility: as my friend Steve Fraser, author of Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace, said to me, “This is the most important piece of real estate on the planet and they’re scared. Look how amazed we are. Imagine how they feel, especially after so many decades of seeing nothing like it.”

And then there’s a third possibility: that two quite separate universes are simply located in the vicinity of each other and of what, since September 12, 2001, we’ve been calling Ground Zero. Think of it as Ground Zero Doubled, or think of it as the militarized recent American past and the unknown, potentially inspiring American future occupying something like the same space. (You can, of course, come up with your own pairings, some far less optimistic.) In their present state, New York’s finest represent a local version of the way this country has been militarized to its bones in these last years and, since 9/11, transformed into a full-scale surveillance-intelligence-homeland-security state.

Their stakeout in Zuccotti Park is geared to extreme acts, suicide bombers, and terrorism, as well as to a conception of protest and opposition as alien and enemy-like. They are trying to herd, lock in, and possibly strangle a phenomenon that bears no relation to any of this. They are, that is, policing the wrong thing, which is why every act of pepper spraying or swing of the truncheon, every aggressive act (as in the recent eviction threat to “clean” the park) blows back on them and only increases the size and coverage of the movement.

Though much of the time they are just a few feet apart, the armed state backing that famed 1%, or Wall Street, and the unarmed protesters claiming the other 99% might as well be in two different times in two different universes connected by a Star-Trekkian wormhole and meeting only where pepper spray hits eyes.

Which means anyone visiting the Occupy Wall Street site is also watching a strange dance of phantoms. Still, we do know one thing. This massive semi-militarized force we continue to call “the police” will, in the coming years, only grow more so. After all, they know but one way to operate.

Right now, for instance, over crowds of protesters the police hover in helicopters with high-tech cameras and sensors, but in the future there can be little question that in the skies of cities like New York, the police will be operating advanced drone aircraft. Already, as Nick Turse indicates in a groundbreaking report “America’s Secret Empire of Drone Bases,” the U.S. military and the CIA are filling the global skies with missile-armed drones and the clamor for domestic drones is growing. The first attack on an American neighborhood, not one in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, or Libya, surely lurks somewhere in our future. Empires, after all, have a way of coming home to roost.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), will be published in November.

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Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Case of the Missing Blueberries

Fwd: FW: BLUEBERRIES - MUST SEE, comes with easy solution!!!
Fake blueberries - got to see this one!

This definitely will ingrain the need to read the labels when it comes to blueberries and other fruit additions to cereals...We know that real blueberries are full of antioxidents but look at what several BIG food companies are doing to make for huge profits. Quite the video. Isn't this something? Nothing but disregard and greed! Who would have thought Kellogg's or Betty Crocker products deceiving? Watch for yourself, they are killing us little by little.

Here is the link and please watch it and send it to your friends.
....talk about scamming us !!
Click Here To View:
http://www.naturalnews.tv/e.asp?v=7EC06D27B1 A945BE85E7DA8483 025962&s= 1_

Thursday, September 08, 2011

Processed Meats Declared Too Dangerous for Human Consumption | Natural Health

Processed Meats Declared Too Dangerous for Human Consumption | Natural Health: Processed Meats Declared Too Dangerous for Human Consumption By Mike Adams

Hot DogsThe World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) has just completed a detailed review of more than 7,000 clinical studies covering links between diet and cancer. Its conclusion is rocking the health world with startling bluntness: Processed meats are too dangerous for human consumption. Consumers should stop buying and eating all processed meat products for the rest of their lives.

Processed meats include bacon, sausage, hot dogs, sandwich meat, packaged ham, pepperoni, salami and virtually all red meat used in frozen prepared meals. They are usually manufactured with a carcinogenic ingredient known as sodium nitrite. This is used as a color fixer by meat companies to turn packaged meats a bright red color so they look fresh. Unfortunately, sodium nitrite also results in the formation of cancer-causing nitrosamines in the human body. And this leads to a sharp increase in cancer risk for those who eat them.

A 2005 University of Hawaii study found that processed meats increase the risk of pancreatic cancer by 67 percent. Another study revealed that every 50 grams of processed meat consumed daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 50 percent. These are alarming numbers. Note that these cancer risks do not come from eating fresh, non-processed meats. They only appear in people who regularly consume processed meat products containing sodium nitrite.

Sodium nitrite appears predominantly in red meat products (you won’t find it in chicken or fish products). Here’s a short list of food items to check carefully for sodium nitrite and monosodium glutamate (MSG), another dangerous additive:

  • Beef jerky
  • Bacon
  • Sausage
  • Hot dogs
  • Sandwich meat
  • Frozen pizza with meat
  • Canned soups with meat
  • Frozen meals with meat
  • Ravioli and meat pasta foods
  • Kid’s meals containing red meat
  • Sandwich meat used at popular restaurants
  • Nearly all red meats sold at public schools, restaurants, hospitals, hotels and theme parks

If sodium nitrite is so dangerous to humans, why do the FDA and USDA continue to allow this cancer-causing chemical to be used? The answer, of course, is that food industry interests now dominate the actions by U.S. government regulators. The USDA, for example, tried to ban sodium nitrite in the late 1970’s but was overridden by the meat industry. It insisted the chemical was safe and accused the USDA of trying to “ban bacon.” Today, the corporations that dominate American food and agricultural interests hold tremendous influence over the FDA and USDA. Consumers are offered no real protection from dangerous chemicals intentionally added to foods, medicines and personal care products.

You can protect yourself and your family from the dangers of processed meats by following a few simple rules:

  1. Always read ingredient labels.
  2. Don’t buy anything made with sodium nitrite or monosodium glutamate.
  3. Don’t eat red meats served by restaurants, schools, hospitals, hotels or other institutions.

And finally, eat more fresh produce with every meal. There is evidence that natural vitamin C found in citrus fruits and exotic berries (like camu camu) helps prevent the formation of cancer-causing nitrosamines, protecting you from the devastating health effects of sodium nitrite in processed meats. The best defense, of course, is to avoid eating processed meats altogether.

[Ed. Note: Mike Adams, the Health Ranger - a leading authority on healthy living -- is on a mission: to explore, uncover and share the truth about harmful foods and beverages, prescription drugs, medical practices and the dishonest marketing practices that drive these industries. For his latest findings, click here.]

Saturday, September 03, 2011

What's It Going to Take for Americans to Stop Eating Chemical-Laden Industrial Food? | | AlterNet

What's It Going to Take for Americans to Stop Eating Chemical-Laden Industrial Food? | | AlterNet/ By Kerry Trueman

What's It Going to Take for Americans to Stop Eating Chemical-Laden Industrial Food?

The simple act of sitting down together to eat real food on a regular basis can jumpstart the kind of lively discussions that get people engaged on the issues of the day.

Laurie David is a force of nature when it comes to lobbying on behalf of Mother Nature. An author, film producer and environmental advocate, she's best known as the producer who convinced Al Gore that his climate-change slide show could reach a lot more folks if he made it into a movie.

David's still concerned about melting glaciers. But her current campaign tackles another kind of erosion; the loss of community, civility and informed debate in our culture. Her latest book, The Family Dinner: Great Ways to Connect with Your Kids, One Meal at a Time, makes the case that the simple act of sitting down together to eat real food on a regular basis can jumpstart the kind of lively, enlightening discussions that get our friends and family engaged on the issues of the day. And isn't that the first step to pulling our civic discourse out of its muddied ditch?

She addressed this subject at the Omega Institute's Design By Nature conference in Rhinebeck, New York recently, and kindly agreed to answer a few questions while she was in my neck of the woods. So, with the historic Hudson River Valley--widely regarded as the birthplace of the modern environmental movement--as our backdrop, I sat down with David for a chat about where our country's at.

Kerry Trueman: How does this new mission to revive dinner table discussions mesh with your environmental advocacy? Is conversation the gateway drug to conservation?

Laurie David: There are all kinds of environments. But the very first one we learn anything at is our family environment. I have teenage daughters, and I see from my own personal experience, how grateful I am that I insisted on this ritual of family dinner. It's not just about eating, it's about all the things that happen at the table that we're not even conscious of.

Everything that you worry about as a parent is improved by sitting down to regular meals. This is how we raise civil children, this is how we pass on our values. If we let go of this, we'll be letting go of the very basic things that teach us how to become part of the community, and how to care about the world.

Kids are spending something like seven and a half hours a day looking at some form of screen, and that doesn't include texting time! I call it digital overload. They're not outside playing, they're not spending time with their family. We're not even watching TV together anymore, everyone's on their own separate computer.

That's why it's critically important to hold onto the one ritual that the day gives you, so that everyone can stop leading separate lives and come together. I hope that my book will help make it easy for them. There are some amazing recipes, but also great conversation starters. For some people, it's just as difficult to figure out what to talk about at dinner as it is what to make for dinner.

We have to alleviate the pressure on ourselves that dinner has to be this fancy affair, three courses and a homemade apple pie. If you're having peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on whole grain bread, that's good enough. The key to the whole thing is sitting down and connecting.

KT: I'd like to borrow a question that Prince Charles asked in a speech at the Washington Post's Future of Food conference earlier this year: "Why it is that an industrialized system, deeply dependent on fossil fuels and chemical treatments, is promoted as viable, while a much less damaging one is rubbished and condemned as unfit for purpose?"

LD: Why are we going down this industrial food supply road? I think the answer is money. This is part of what's exciting to me about the new food movement--we have the individual power to opt out of that system. And if we care about our health, if we care about the planet, we're going to have to do that.

But it's doable. And every piece of this, all the solutions to the factory farms, the industrialization of our food supply, and all the chemicals and antibiotics that are in our food, this is completely doable for us as individuals. We have to start cooking at home, again, we have to start buying fresh ingredients, organic if possible, locally, if possible.

We have to reject the trillion-dollar processed-food industry that's taken over our lives. Instead of buying salad dressing at the supermarket with 19 ingredients, we should be taking the three ingredients and the four minutes it takes to make salad dressings at home.

We have to just opt out of that system and start supporting food locally to the best of our ability. It's not about being perfect. "Perfect is the enemy of the good," I totally believe that.

It's about saying, you know what? I can decide for myself how many chemicals I'm putting in my body, how many preservatives. All the repercussions of supporting that system, I can choose to opt out of that, and I can educate my small circle of friends.

You can choose to do better. A perfect example is Meatless Monday. I have a chapter about it in my book, and I make all the arguments you can discuss at the dinner table. You can decide, as a family, we're going to get off this treadmill of eating too much meat. We can't sustain this, it's not healthy for our bodies, it's not healthy for the planet, and it's a big myth that this is the only source of protein we can consume.

You want to help global warming issues? Start eating a little less meat. That's a small but perfect example of how powerful the individual can be. And then educate your friends and family.

KT: Speaking of educating folks, Bill Gates is putting his faith and some of his considerable resources into promoting biotech, agribiz-as-usual solutions for feeding the world. If you happened to cross paths with him, how would you try to persuade him to scrap the GMOs and really get behind regenerative farming methods?

LD: I would ask him, what do you want to eat at the end of the day? What's interesting to me is to find out what people who are part of the industrial/chemical system of growing food are eating themselves. I once ran into a gentleman who worked for a huge tomato company. You know, if you buy tomatoes from Florida off-season, they're picked green and gassed to turn them red. This is a gazillion-dollar industry.

And I said, "Do you eat these tomatoes?" He said, "Oh, I could never eat those! We eat organic food."

I don't understand the arrogance we have as a country that we can do things better than Mother Nature can. We have to go back to being humble, to respecting what Mother Nature provides us, and stop screwing with the system because we think we can do it better.

The oceans are being depleted, the air is being destroyed, because of us. The climate--who ever thought you could screw with the climate? But we're doing it, and it's not an opinion, it's not a theory, it's not a belief, it's a fact. The globe is warming and humans are causing it.

And the fact that we're not running to solve this problem when all the solutions already exist is just mind boggling to me.

KT: Neil Young once sang that "even Richard Nixon has got soul." Well, at least he gave us the Environmental Protection Agency. Now Republicans want to abolish the EPA. Why don't today's conservatives embrace conservation? And how did contempt for science become so rampant?

LD: The EPA, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species act, they all had support from both sides. I don't understand it, honestly, I don't have an answer for it. You would think they would care just as much about clean air and water and protecting public lands as you and I do. The only explanation is that it comes down to greed and arrogance--arrogance that we're not going to run out of our natural resources.

The biggest problem we're facing is that people are getting misinformation from advertising, from politicians who are tied to lobbyists who are tied to corporations. It's very difficult to move forward on things when people are misinformed. We have to work on getting back to truth, inconvenient or not.


Friday, September 02, 2011

Three Things That Must Happen for Us to Rise Up and Defeat the Corporatocracy | Truthout

Three Things That Must Happen for Us to Rise Up and Defeat the Corporatocracy | Truthout:

Three Things That Must Happen for Us to Rise Up and Defeat the Corporatocracy

by: Bruce E. Levine, Alternet | Op-Ed

Union worker Mary Collins from Chicago protests against a budget bill in the State Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, on February 23, 2011. (Photo: Max Whittaker / The New York Times)

Most Americans oppose rule by the corporatocracy but don't have the tools to fight back. Here are three things we need to create a real people's movement.

Transforming the United States into something closer to a democracy requires: 1) knowledge of how we are getting screwed; 2) pragmatic tactics, strategies, and solutions; and 3) the “energy to do battle.”

The majority of Americans oppose the corporatocracy (rule by giant corporations, the extremely wealthy elite,

and corporate-collaborator government officials); however, many of us have given up hope that this tyranny can be defeated. Among those of us who continue to be politically engaged, many focus on only one of the requirements—knowledge of how we are getting screwed. And this singular focus can result in helplessness. It is the two other requirements that can empower, energize, and activate Team Democracy— a team that is currently at the bottom of the standings in the American Political League.

1. Knowledge of How We are Getting Screwed

Harriet Tubman conducted multiple missions as an Underground Railroad conductor, and she also participated in the Union Army’s Combahee River raid that freed more than 700 slaves. Looking back on her career as a freedom fighter, Tubman noted, “I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.” While awareness of the truth of corporatocracy oppression is by itself not sufficient to win freedom and justice, it is absolutely necessary.

We are ruled by so many “industrial complexes”—military, financial, energy, food, pharmaceutical, prison, and so on—that it is almost impossible to stay on top of every way we are getting screwed. The good news is that—either through independent media or our basic common sense—polls show that the majority of Americans know enough about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Wall Street bailouts, and other corporate welfare to oppose these corporatocracy policies. In the case of the military-industrial complex, most Iraq War polls and Afghanistan War polls show that the majority of Americans know enough to oppose these wars. And when Americans were asked in a CBS New /New York Times survey in January 2011 which of three programs—the military, Medicare or Social Security—to cut so as to deal with the deficit, fully 55 percent chose the military, while only 21 percent chose Medicare and 13 percent chose Social Security.

In the words of Leonard Cohen, “Everybody knows that the deal is rotten.” Well, maybe not everybody, but damn near everybody.

But what doesn’t everybody know?

2. Pragmatic Tactics, Strategies and Solutions

In addition to awareness of economic and social injustices created by corporatocracy rule, it is also necessary to have knowledge of strategies and tactics that oppressed people have historically used to overcome tyranny and to gain their fair share of power.

Even before the Democratic-Republican bipartisan educational policies (such as “no child left behind” and “race to the top”) that cut back on civics being taught in schools, few Americans were exposed in their schooling to “street-smart civics”—tactics and strategies that oppressed peoples have historically utilized to gain power.

For a comprehensive guide of tactics and strategies that have been effective transforming regimes more oppressive than the current US one, read political theorist and sociologist Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy, which includes nearly 200 “Methods of Nonviolent Actions.” Among Sharp’s 49 “Methods of Economic Noncooperation,” he lists over 20 different kinds of strikes. And among his 38 “Methods of Political Noncooperation,” he lists 10 tactics of “citizens’ noncooperation with government,” nine “citizens’ alternatives to obedience,” and seven “actions by government personnel.” Yes, nothing was more powerful in ending the Vietnam War and saving American and Vietnamese lives than the brave actions by critically thinking US soldiers who refused to cooperate with the US military establishment. Check out David Zeigler’s documentary Sir! No Sir! for details.

For a quick history lesson on “the nature of disruptive power” in the United States and the use of disruptive tactics in fomenting the American Revolution, the abolitionist movement, the labor movement, and other democratic movements, check out sociologist Frances Fox Piven’s Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America. Piven describes how “ordinary people exercise power in American politics mainly at those extraordinary moments when they rise up in anger and hope, defy the rules that ordinarily govern their daily lives, and, by doing so, disrupt the workings of the institutions in which they are enmeshed.” In the midst of the Great Depression when US unemployment was over 25 percent, working people conducted an exceptional number of large labor strikes, including the Flint, Michigan sit-down strike, which began at the end of 1936 when auto workers occupied a General Motors factory so as to earn recognition for the United Auto Workers union as a bargaining agent. That famous victory was preceded and inspired by other less well-known major battles fought and won by working people. Check out the intelligent tactics (and guts and solidarity) in the 1934 Minneapolis Truckers Strike.

For an example of “the nature of creative power” that scared the hell out of—and almost triumphed—over the moneyed elite, read The Populist Moment by historian Lawrence Goodwyn. The Populist movement, the late-19th-century farmers’ insurgency, according to Goodwyn, was the largest democratic movement in American history. These Populists and their major organization, commonly called the “Alliance,” created worker cooperatives that resulted in empowering economic self-sufficiency. They came close to successfully transforming a good part of the United States into something a lot closer to a democracy. As Goodwyn notes, “Their efforts, halting and disjointed at first, gathered form and force until they grew into a coordinated mass movement that stretched across the American continent ... Millions of people came to believe fervently that the wholesale overhauling of their society was going to happen in their lifetimes.”

In Get Up, Stand Up, I include the section “Winning the Battle: Solutions, Strategies, and Tactics.” However, a major point of the book is that, currently in the United States, even more ignored than street-smart strategies and tactics is the issue of morale, which is necessary for implementing these strategies and tactics. So, I also have a section “Energy to Do Battle: Liberation Psychology, Individual Self-Respect, and Collective Self-Confidence.”

3. The Energy to Do Battle

The elite’s money—and the influence it buys—is an extremely powerful weapon. So it is understandable that so many people who are defeated and demoralized focus on their lack of money rather than on their lack of morale. However, we must keep in mind that in war, especially in a class war when one’s side lacks financial resources, morale becomes even more crucial.

Activists routinely become frustrated when truths about lies, victimization and oppression don’t set people free to take action. But having worked with abused people for more than 25 years, it doesn’t surprise me to see that when we as individuals or a society eat crap for too long, we become psychologically too weak to take action. There are a great many Americans who have been so worn down by decades of personal and political defeats, financial struggles, social isolation and daily interaction with impersonal and inhuman institutions that they no longer have the energy for political actions.

Other observers of subjugated societies have recognized this phenomenon of subjugation resulting in demoralization and fatalism. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Ignacio Martin-Baró, the El Salvadoran social psychologist and popularizer of “liberation psychology,” understood this psychological phenomenon. So did Bob Marley, the poet laureate of oppressed people around the world. Many Americans are embarrassed to accept that we, too, after years of domestic corporatocracy subjugation, have developed what Marley called “mental slavery.” Unless we acknowledge that reality, we won’t begin to heal from what I call “battered people’s syndrome” and “corporatocracy abuse” and to, as Marley urges, “emancipate yourself from mental slavery.”

Whether one’s abuser is a spouse or the corporatocracy, there are parallels when it comes to how one can maintain enough strength to be able to free oneself when the opportunity presents itself—and then heal and attain even greater strength. This difficult process requires honesty that one is in an abusive relationship. One should not be ashamed of having previously believed in corporatocracy lies; and it also helps to forgive and have compassion for those who continue to believe them. The liars we face are often quite good at lying. It helps to have a sense of humor about one’s predicament, to nurture respectful relationships, and to take advantage of a lucky opportunity—often created by the abuser’s arrogance— when it presents itself.

For democratic movements to have enough energy to get off the ground, certain psychological and cultural building blocks are required. Goodwyn, from his study of the Populists in the United States, Solidarity in Poland, and other democratic movements, concluded that “individual self-respect” and “collective self-confidence” constitute the cultural building blocks of mass democratic politics. Without individual self-respect, people do not believe that they are worthy of power or capable of utilizing power wisely, and they accept as their role being a subject of power. Without collective self-confidence, people do not believe they can succeed in wresting power away from their rulers. There are “democracy battlefields” —in our schools, workplace and elsewhere—where such respect and confidence can be regained every day.

No democratic movement succeeds without determination, courage, and solidarity, but modern social scientists routinely ignore such nonquantifiable important variables, and so those trained only in universities and not on the streets can, as Martin-Baró pointed out, “become blind to the most important meanings of human existence.” Great scientists recognize just how important nonquantifable variables are in certain areas of life. A sign hanging in Albert Einstein’s office at Princeton stated: not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

The battle against the corporatocracy needs critical thinking, which results in seeing some ugly truths about reality. This critical thinking is absolutely necessary. Without it, one is more likely to engage in tactics that can make matters worse. But critical thinking also means the ability to think critically about one’s pessimism—realizing that pessimism can cripple the will and destroy motivation. A critical thinker recognizes how negativism can cause inaction, which results in maintaining the status quo. Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), an Italian political theorist and Marxist activist who was imprisoned by Mussolini, talked about “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” —a phrase that has inspired many critical thinkers, including Noam Chomsky.

Can one have hope without being an insipid Pollyanna? Until shortly before it occurred, the collapse of the Soviet empire seemed an impossibility to most Americans, who saw only mass resignation within the Soviet Union and its sphere of control. But the shipyard workers in Gdansk, Poland, did not see their Soviet and Communist Party rulers as the all-powerful forces that Americans did. And so Polish workers’ Solidarity, by simply refusing to go away, provided a strong dose of morale across Eastern Europe at the same time other historical events weakened the Soviet empire.

Today in Iceland, citizens have refused to acquiesce to the demands of global financial institutions, simply refusing to be taxed for the mistakes of the financial elite that caused their nation’s recent financial meltdown. In a March 2010 referendum in Iceland, 93 percent voted against repayment of the debt, and Icelandic citizens have been drafting a new constitution that would free their country from the power of international finance (this constitution will be submitted to parliament for approval after the next elections). Yes, participatory democracy is still possible.

The lesson from the 2011 Arab spring in and other periods of history is that tyrannical and dehumanizing institutions are often more fragile than they appear, and with time, luck, morale, and our ability to seize the moment, damn near anything is possible. We never really know until it happens whether or not we are living in that time when historical variables are creating opportunities for seemingly impossible change. Thus, we must prepare ourselves by battling each day in all our activities to regain individual self-respect, collective self-confidence, determination, courage, and solidarity.

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Bruce E. Levine

Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of "Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite" (Chelsea Green, April 2011). His web site is www.brucelevine.net.