‘Pink Slime’ Manufacturer Files For Bankruptcy

April 5, 2012

Activist Post

By Madison Ruppert

“It serves them right for trying to sell us tainted and dangerous food.” –KTRN

AFA Foods, a leading American processor of ground beef, has filed for bankruptcy, citing the wave of negative media coverage surrounding their so-called “pink slime” product.

The huge amount of media coverage that has recently been devoted to the Boneless Lean Beef Trimmings (BLBT), better known as “pink slime,” can be chalked up almost entirely to the attention of countless activists across the United States.

The USDA was a major purchaser of the pink slime product, recently purchasing some seven million pounds of the highly unappetizing product.

This pushed over 250,000 Americans to sign a petition online which demanded a complete stop to the use of pink slime in school food.

The USDA’s response was especially lackluster given the fact that even fast food chains who are infamous for using incredibly unhealthy products renounced the product.

This is hardly surprising given the fact that supposed regulatory bodies are increasingly run by those who they are supposed to regulate as evidenced by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) refusing to ban Bisphenol-A (BPA) as well as spying on the emails of employees who expose the agency’s malfeasance.

Click here for the report.

Criminal Trail Going Cold At MF Global

February 13, 2012

Reuters

By Grant McCool and Nick Brown

When commodities brokerage MF Global imploded, the FBI and federal prosecutors were quick to launch an investigation to pursue what seemed obvious to outspoken regulators and lawmakers: laws were broken and crimes were committed.

More than three months later, it is far from clear that anyone will face criminal charges over the disappearance of more than $600 million in customer money as MF Global spiraled towards bankruptcy in the brokerage’s final, frantic days in the last week of October.

So far, the MF Global investigation is not tracking the early progress of other high-profile financial scandals such as RefCo, where former Chairman Phil Bennett was arrested within days of the disclosure that the futures firm had been hiding losses for years.

Lawyers and people familiar with the MF Global investigation of the firm that was run by former Goldman Sachs head Jon Corzine say that even though the hunt is still on to find out whether or not officials at MF Global intended to pilfer customer money in a desperate bid to keep the brokerage from failing, the trail at this point is growing cold.

To date, scant evidence of criminal intent has emerged in company emails, no former or current employees have sought to cut a deal to provide testimony about potential wrongdoing and seasoned defense lawyers say they are not seeing the tell-tale signs of a hot criminal investigation.

A source familiar with the work of Louis Freeh, trustee for the MF Global holding company that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, says investigators have yet to find evidence of fraud in the multi-faceted and complex investigation.

The source, who declined to be identified because Freeh’s office is still conducting its inquiry, says there was plenty of “chaos” at MF Global in its waning days, but “no evidence of fraud.” Freeh is a former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Ellen Davis, a spokeswoman for the office of the Manhattan U.S. Attorney, declined to comment. Randall Samborn, a spokesman for the office of the U.S. Attorney in Chicago, also declined to comment.

Criminal and regulatory investigations can of course shift gears at any time if new information comes to light. But adding up the pieces at this stage of the inquiries, the odds look long of criminal charges ever stemming from the collapse of MF Global because of the lack of bad motives or an intent to steal or deceive, the legal standard for a criminal case.

Click here for the full report from Reuters.

The End of Borders and the Future of Books

November 17, 2011

Bloomberg

By Ben Austen

“A friend of mine loves to read. He has recently discovered the Kindle. He loves it. I tried to warn him that a draconian agency could easily edit and chance the contents of a digital file, forever altering an author’s words. My friend didn’t seem to care. he loves being able to carry around 100 books in this little device. It sounds like a good thing – especially for college students who are raped at the book store. I am torn on the Kindle. I like the concept, but I hate it too.” –Chris Davis KTRN

In September, just days before Borders Group met its end, one of the chain’s last retail holdouts, in the Nashville suburb of Brentwood, Tenn., was being liquidated, with prices slashed by 90 percent. It was difficult in the stark surroundings not to think of a battle waged and lost, of the armies of Kindle owners and e-book peddlars off celebrating victory while all around lay the carnage—two copies of a Paul Reiser memoir, the suspect Greg Mortensen book Stones into Schools, a still-brimming manga section. A couple of professional scavengers picked over the DVDs, cataloging them with their own scanners. Empty shelves were being stacked in the store’s growing hollows and themselves tagged with prices ranging from $25 to $50. The defeat felt so stunning because it seemed so nearly complete, not just for Borders but also for bookselling in general. A two-story Borders in Nashville proper, about 10 miles north, had shut its doors four months earlier. In November 2010, a 30,000-square-foot outlet of a bookstore chain called Davis-Kidd Booksellers, in business in the city for 30 years, had closed as well. With the shuttering of the Brentwood Borders, there wasn’t a store within 22 miles of Nashville that specialized in new books.

Nashville might seem like an archetype of the death-of-the-bookstore-everywhere narrative, but its story turns out to be different. The cashier who checked me out at the Brentwood store, Nancy DeVille, had transferred from the Nashville location when it closed, and she said both outlets were constantly packed with regulars drawn to the sight, feel, and smell of books. David Beddow, a supervisor at the Nashville store from 2005 to 2008, remembered costumed crowds snaking around the corner for the release of the latest Harry Potter. He said revenue there had actually increased during his tenure, from $5.5 million to around $7 million a year.

Click here for the full article.

Personal Bankruptcy Filings Fall, But That’s Nothing to Cheer About

October 6th, 2011

DailyFinance

By: Sheryl Nance-Nash

In the current cloudy economy, finance experts and everyday folks are constantly hunting through the news and statistics for silver linings. So it would surely seem a good thing that in the first nine months of this year, personal bankruptcy filings decreased 10% compared to a year earlier, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute — but experts say hold the applause.

While we might want to take some comfort in the fact that bankruptcies declined from last year — which had the highest number of filings since 2005 — truth is, it’s not necessarily good news.

“People file bankruptcy because of financial distress,” explains David Leibowitz, co-chair of the Consumer Bankruptcy Committee of the ABI. “They are afraid of losing their houses, getting their wages garnished or losing their personal property. If the personal property is exempt, as is often the case for people who have little in the way of assets, if they no longer own their own home as is more and more frequently the case, if the home has no equity, which is very often the case, or if they are unemployed, then people who owe money for credit cards, medical bills and the like are said to be judgment-proof. There’s no need for them to file bankruptcy.”

Then too, once you file a bankruptcy case, you can’t file again under Chapter 7 for eight years. With well over 10 million bankruptcy cases in the past eight years, that’s a lot of people who are ineligible to file again, says Leibowitz.

“The fact is, bankruptcy cases continue to be filed at high levels. This is reflective of the very poor economy and does not necessarily reflect a leading economic indicator of better times to come,” says Leibowitz.

A Range of Economically Unhealthy Explanations

Something else could be going on too. Creditors are working with consumers more than they ever have in an effort to just collect something. “I see a lot of people at all income levels that are a paying a fixed monthly payment on credit cards which they negotiated better rates with the credit card companies,” says Julie Murphy Casserly, president of JMC Wealth Management.

Also, she says, consumers are able to easily walk away from bad home purchases though short sales or foreclosures, either of which can shore up their financial position a lot. And thanks to the sheer volume of home loans in default, homeowners are able to skip paying their mortgages for 18 to 24 months before a bank gets around to kicking them out.

David McClough, assistant professor of economics at Ohio Northern University, certainly sees nothing in the numbers to cheer about either. “Consider, for example, how the financial crisis, recession, housing crisis, and jobless recovery undoubtedly moved forward many bankruptcies that would have been delayed,” he says. “In this case, the decline implies that more people declared bankruptcy sooner and thus have struggled with the consequences longer. This is not a good thing.”

The 2005 Bankruptcy Act, made it more difficult for individuals to file personal bankruptcy and see a full discharge of their debts. Consequently, many who file will have to pay some of their debts over time. That means filing bankruptcy is no longer the golden parachute it once was.

“This could discourage the greater number of filers,” points out Jeffrey Verdon, a tax and estate planning attorney with the Jeffrey M. Verdon Law Group. He has another suspicion: “The extension of unemployment benefits may have had an affect on the number of those who file for personal bankruptcy.”

Others suggest the dip may be temporary. “As foreclosure filings again reach lofty levels, the bankruptcy filings will again spike as people file to slow down the foreclosure sale,” predicts Ted Connolly, a bankruptcy lawyer with Duane Morris and author of Road Out of Debt.

Simply put, there are better tea leaves for reading the economy than the bankruptcy numbers. “Mortgage foreclosures and depressed real estate values continue to be a drag on the economy,” says the ABI’s Leibowitz. “The best indicator of better times to come is the level of unemployment, which remains persistently high. Interestingly, temporary employment is increasing. This might be a leading indicator of better times to come.”

Connolly, keeping it real, says: “The decrease in filings is too insignificant to portend an improving economy. Instead, the filing numbers continue to show a weak economy, teetering on the brink of a downward fall.”

Click here for the full report from DailyFinance

Want To Fix The Economy? Try Bankruptcy

September 13, 2011

Market Watch

By: Brett Arends

You want to fix this economic crisis? You want to put people back to work? You want to light a fire under the economy?

There’s a way to do it. Fast. And relatively simple.

But you’re not going to like it. You’re not going to like it at all.

Default. A national Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The fastest way to fix this mess is to see tens of millions of homeowners default on their mortgages and other debts, and millions more file for bankruptcy.

Fears of recession, tough trading conditions, an ocean of unresolved litigation and the worsening euro-zone mess have delivered a real pounding to bank stocks this summer. Former Goldman Sachs partner Roy Smith joins Mean Street to offer a solution: Break up the banks.

I told you that you wouldn’t like it.

I don’t like it much either. It sticks in the craw that people got to borrow all that money and won’t have to pay it back.

But you know what? The time to stop that was five or 10 years ago, when the money was being lent.

It’s gone.

And mass Chapter 11 is, by far, the least obnoxious solution to our problems.

That’s because the real cause of our economic slump isn’t too much government or too little government. It isn’t red tape, high taxes, low taxes, the growing divide between the rich and the poor, too much government debt, too little government debt, corporations, poor people, “greed,” “socialism,” China, Greece, or the legalization of gay marriage. It isn’t, in short, any of the things all the various nitwits say it is.

It’s the debt, stupid.

We’re hocked up to the eyeballs, and then some. We’re at the bottom of a lake of debt, lashed to an anchor. American households today owe $13.3 trillion. That has quadrupled in a generation. It has doubled just in the last 11 years. We owe more than any other nation, ever. And for all the yakking about how people are “repairing their balance sheets,” they’re not. From the peak, four years ago, they’ve cut their debts by a grand total of 4%.

And a lot of that was in write-offs.

More than a quarter of American mortgages are underwater. Many are deeply underwater. In states like Nevada and Florida the figures are astronomical.

The key thing to understand is that most of that money has gone to what a fund manager friend of mine calls “money heaven.” Most of these debts will never, ever be repaid in real money. Not gonna happen.

Think how corporations handle this kind of situation.

It happens all the time. Banks and bondholders find they have lent, say, $1 billion to a company whose assets and earning capacity will only repay, say, $300 million. What happens? Does the company soldier on with $1 billion in debt it can never repay? Do the stockholders send back their dividend checks? Do they sell their homes to pay off the bonds?

Not a chance. The company goes through Chapter 11. The creditors ‘fess up to their blunder, they face up to their losses, and they fix it. They write down the loans and take the equity instead. The balance sheet is cleaned up, and the company starts again.

Why not homeowners?

Most of the objections to this idea are well-meant, but misinformed.

A fund manager I asked raised the issue of “moral hazard.” Why should anyone pay their mortgage if some people were getting a pass, he asked?

Click here for the full report at Market Watch

The Kevin Trudeau Show: 8-16-11

Today, from a top secret location in Europe, Kevin reveals why journalists are really being thrown in jail and what excuses the government is currently coming up with to institute Martial Law in the near future.

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We’ve Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers

April 4th, 2011

The Wall Street Journal

By: Stephen Moore

If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.

It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?

Every state in America today except for two—Indiana and Wisconsin—has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees—twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida’s ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York’s.

Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital, have more government bureaucrats than people making things. The leaders in government hiring are Wyoming and New Mexico, which have hired more than six government workers for every manufacturing worker.

Now it is certainly true that many states have not typically been home to traditional manufacturing operations. Iowa and Nebraska are farm states, for example. But in those states, there are at least five times more government workers than farmers. West Virginia is the mining capital of the world, yet it has at least three times more government workers than miners. New York is the financial capital of the world—at least for now. That sector employs roughly 670,000 New Yorkers. That’s less than half of the state’s 1.48 million government employees.

Don’t expect a reversal of this trend anytime soon. Surveys of college graduates are finding that more and more of our top minds want to work for the government. Why? Because in recent years only government agencies have been hiring, and because the offer of near lifetime security is highly valued in these times of economic turbulence. When 23-year-olds aren’t willing to take career risks, we have a real problem on our hands. Sadly, we could end up with a generation of Americans who want to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The employment trends described here are explained in part by hugely beneficial productivity improvements in such traditional industries as farming, manufacturing, financial services and telecommunications. These produce far more output per worker than in the past. The typical farmer, for example, is today at least three times more productive than in 1950.

Where are the productivity gains in government? Consider a core function of state and local governments: schools. Over the period 1970-2005, school spending per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized achievement test scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period, public-school employment doubled per student, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington. That is what economists call negative productivity.

But education is an industry where we measure performance backwards: We gauge school performance not by outputs, but by inputs. If quality falls, we say we didn’t pay teachers enough or we need smaller class sizes or newer schools. If education had undergone the same productivity revolution that manufacturing has, we would have half as many educators, smaller school budgets, and higher graduation rates and test scores.

The same is true of almost all other government services. Mass transit spends more and more every year and yet a much smaller share of Americans use trains and buses today than in past decades. One way that private companies spur productivity is by firing underperforming employees and rewarding excellence. In government employment, tenure for teachers and near lifetime employment for other civil servants shields workers from this basic system of reward and punishment. It is a system that breeds mediocrity, which is what we’ve gotten.

Most reasonable steps to restrain public-sector employment costs are smothered by the unions. Study after study has shown that states and cities could shave 20% to 40% off the cost of many services—fire fighting, public transportation, garbage collection, administrative functions, even prison operations—through competitive contracting to private providers. But unions have blocked many of those efforts. Public employees maintain that they are underpaid relative to equally qualified private-sector workers, yet they are deathly afraid of competitive bidding for government services.

President Obama says we have to retool our economy to “win the future.” The only way to do that is to grow the economy that makes things, not the sector that takes things.

Click here for the full report from the Wall Street Journal

The Kevin Trudeau Show: 1-12-11

Today, Kevin reveals what his insider friends are telling him regarding the state of the US dollar and how extraterrestrial beings may not be considered a science fiction myth much longer.

Self Help:
The Herpes Cure
Be Prepared

Motivation:
Muse – Uprising

Health:
What’s In Your Food? You Made Be Surprised!
Company Recalls 113 Tons of Old Beef

Wealth:
Is America Heading Towards Bankruptcy?
Baby Boomers Will Force Economic Catastrophe

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JP Morgan Bank Fires Woman Over Whistleblower Complaint

December 22nd, 2010

Daily Finance

By: Abigail Field

Linda Almonte, a former employee of JPMorgan Chase (JPM) who is suing the bank for wrongful termination, has just upped the ante: She has now also filed a whistleblower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The core allegations add context to her lawsuit, and they charge Chase with grotesque and illegal practices involving its credit card debt processes, including robo-signing. Chase denies her claims.

Almonte’s allegations are detailed in the Nov. 30 letter sent to the SEC. In the letter, she says:

1. Chase Bank sold to third party debt buyers hundreds of millions of dollars worth of credit card accounts. . .when in fact Chase Bank executives knew that many of those accounts had incorrect and overstated balances.

3. Chase Bank executives routinely destroyed information and communications from consumers rather than incorporate that information into the consumer’s credit card file, including bankruptcy notices, powers of attorney, notice of cancellation of auto-pay, proof of payments and letters from debt settlement companies.

4. Chase Bank executives mass-executed thousands of affidavits in support of Chase Banks collection efforts and those Chase Bank executives did not have personal knowledge of the facts set forth in the affidavits.

5. When senior Chase Bank executives were made aware of these systemic problems, senior Chase Bank executives — rather than remedy the problems — immediately fired the whistleblower and attempted to cover up these problems.

When I reached Almonte’s lawyer, George Pressly, for comment, he was shocked that I had the letter because it was supposed to be confidential. While Pressly was willing to confirm Almonte was a client, beyond that he had no comment. Pressly, who was clearly trying to figure out how to handle the letter’s disclosure, said he was suddenly getting a “firestorm” of calls and seemed unprepared for the onslaught. While he has filed many SEC complaints before — he operates the website http://www.secwhistleblowerprogram.org/, which is how Almonte found him — her letter is the first one he’s filed that went public.

The bank, through spokesman Paul Harwick, says “Chase is aggressively defending itself against the allegations made by this former employee. We have thoroughly researched these allegations and are confident that the sales of these loans were handled properly. We have strong internal controls and processes for managing credit card debt-sales transactions.”

The SEC says it never comments on such letters.

In the letter, Almonte’s lawyer explains the reason she contacted the SEC: “Her disclosures may bring into question Chase Bank’s representations regarding Chase Bank’s own securities but may also bear on certain asset-backed securities where the underlying assets are Chase Bank credit card accounts.”

Almonte’s Evidence

To support her claims, Almonte says she has “a large volume of documents in her possession available for review by the SEC” and offers her first-hand observations as well.

Those direct observations allegedly include witnessing the head of Chase’s pre-litigation group “shred” material communications from borrowers, such as “bankruptcy notices, settlement communications, and debt settlement company communications” rather than entering the information into Chase’s database. She also claims that senior Chase Bank executives instructed Chase Bank employees remove important information and data from Litigation Accounts because the retention of the information would have resulted in increased computer hardware costs. Both types of record destruction rendered the accounts inaccurate, she says.

Concerning robo-signing, Pressly wrote:
“On numerous occasions, Ms. Almonte witnessed these Affidavit Signers work through at times 3-feet tall stacks of Judgment Affidavits at once during weekly multi-hour long, non-related company meetings. The notaries were not present at these meetings. The Affidavit Signers simply relied on hourly workers to reconcile amounts owed and then treated the actual execution of the affidavits as busy work to be performed while the Affidavit Signers could focus on other matters.”

According to Almonte, determining the amounts owed wasn’t easy: Chase had a number of “legacy” databases from its various acquisitions that were not well integrated. So, perhaps the executives should have looked more closely at the documents. “Indeed, Ms. Almonte determined that as many as 20% of the Judgment Accounts to be sold failed an internal test to check for accuracy.”

Who Is Linda Almonte?

During her time at Chase, Almonte was a “mid-level executive” who “supervised employees across the litigation and post-judgment functions” of the credit card litigation department.

In March, she sued the bank, claiming that she was fired for refusing to participate in the sale of 23,000 credit card accounts Chase had packaged for sale. Almonte says 5,000 of the accounts listed the wrong amount owed, and thousands more had other problems. By going forward with the sale after being informed of the problems, Almonte says, Chase was breaking the law.

Almonte’s whistleblower complaint provides big-picture context for the sale she refused to participate in, providing background on how so many credit card accounts could contain flawed data.

Robo-signing and other problems with credit card debt collection aren’t new, as David Segal’s October article for The New York Times detailed. What is new is that someone in Almonte’s position is willing to make such charges publicly.

Click here for the full report from the Daily Finance

75% of Americans Obese or Overweight by 2020

October 10th, 2010

Natural News

By: Mike Adams

America is already on the verge of drowning in sick-care bankruptcy, but the situation is about to get even worse. According to a new study released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, three-fourths of Americans will be obese or overweight by 2020. That puts America in first place for the world competition to see which nation can create the most obese population.

We’re number one!

Seriously, according to the research, America is No. 1 on the world obesity rankings, meaning a higher percentage of the U.S. population is obese (or overweight) than in any other country in the world.

Not surprisingly, why this is happening brings up all sorts of different explanations ranging from entirely valid to completely bizarre. But the simple truth of the situation is that Americans are fat because of these three simple reasons:

Reason #1) We don’t get much exercise.
Reason #2) We eat too much food.
Reason #3) The food we eat is mostly processed dead food of marginal nutritional value.

These three reasons largely explain why America has become the fattest nation in the world.

Why do we eat so much junk food?
Knowing this, the next question seems obvious: WHY do we eat so much junk food? The answer may seem complex, but it really isn’t. Americans eat junk food because that’s what’s available and that’s what they’re told to eat by their television sets.

You can buy junk foods at any convenience store, gas station or vending machine in America. But getting something that’s actually healthy for you is far more challenging. Most people opt for the quick, easy and cheap solution: Drive-through burgers or genetically modified tacos! Why bother with real food when factory-made imitation food is so much cheaper (and more convenient)?

Why don’t we get much exercise?
The sad, simple answer is that most Americans are just flat-out sedentary. A recent study revealed that an astonishing 95% of Americans never do anything strenuous — ever! The people you see in the gyms or jogging in public are the 5% who actually engage in some form of exercise.

The other 95% of Americans just do don’t much in terms of physical activity, yet at the same time Americans tend to eat huge meal portions that would be considered obscene in many other countries. When I lived in South America, for example, I quickly learned that South American meal portions are about one-fourth the size of a typical North American meal portion (in terms of what restaurants serve you, anyway). A typical one-person meal at a family Mexican restaurant in the United States, in other words, would feed a family of four in Ecuador.

This combination of eating larger meals while avoiding most exercise is the “perfect storm” for exploding obesity. It is accelerated even more by the lack of nutritional density in the food people do choose to eat.

The nutritional depleted foods we eat
Most foods consumed by Americans are heavily processed, factory-made foods. Just check out the grocery carts of the average American shopper — they’re loaded up with the most heavily processed, chemically adulterated imitation food products you can possibly imagine. And there’s a not-so-surprising correlation between the health of the person shopping and the quality of the foods in their cart. Healthy people shop primarily for fresh produce and food staples like legumes and beans.

The least healthy people are the ones purchasing canned soups, dinner “helper” products, macaroni and cheese, sweet pastries, cow’s milk, processed meats and cheeses. Not surprisingly, these are the same people who end up in the drive-thru pharmacies, buying their latest round of diabetes drugs. They’re also the same ones driving up your health care costs by destroying their own health and racking up billions of dollars in disease maintenance costs.

Think about it: When people buy and eat processed foods, they are not only destroying their own health; they’re passing along the sick-care costs to all the other people who share the cost burden of either private health insurance, Medicaid or Medicare. When a person buys a 99 cent hamburger, they may actually be generating five dollars in future health care costs to be paid by all the rest of us.

That’s one reason why obesity is bankrupting America. Many of the junk food eaters seem to think someone else is going to pay for their disease. Someone else is going to fix the broken health care system. Someone else is going to find a cure someday. So why bother changing their own dietary habits anyway?

Too many people dismiss their own role in creating the very disease and bankruptcy from which they’re suffering. This is happening at both the personal level and the national level. When America as a nation has its food supply regulated by a corrupt, criminal agency called the FDA that actively censors the truth about healing foods which prevent disease — and then the same country asks “Why are our people so diseased?” — you gotta just shake your head in disbelief.

America is obese and diseased precisely because that’s the kind of outcome you’d naturally expect when you imprison the herbalists, shut down the nutritional supplement companies and ban honest health claims about healthy food products while allowing toxic chemicals and GMOs into the food supply. The FDA sure deserves a round of applause here, eh?

And then when people actually do get sick, instead of teaching them how to be well, the government pushes an agenda of dangerous chemical medications and vaccine injections that only further compromise health (while driving up health care costs even more).

When companies can sell infant formula made with over 50% sugar and state food stamp programs actually cover such products by making them free to low-income mothers, then of course you’re going to end up raising a generation of obese diabetics!

This isn’t rocket science, folks. If you feed a whole generation of people junk foods, liquid sugars (HFCS) and heavily processed foods while promoting chemicals and pharmaceuticals as the answer to health care, you cannot possibly get any result other than widespread obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart disease. It’s no coincidence that’s exactly what we see in America today. The answer is so simple that even a fifth grade could figure it out.

We must choose between the People or the corporations
If America really wants to get healthy, it’s not a difficult thing. Just put a dozen natural health and nutrition advocates in charge of regulating food, drugs and personal care products. We would clean house and put a whole slew of junk food companies out of business, and then we would restore health freedom to natural product companies so they could communicate the truth about how their products can help people prevent disease.

Make no mistake: The American people can never be healthy if Big Pharma and the junk food companies stay in business as they operate today. You literally have to bankrupt all the toxic product industries (or force them to shift to completely different products) in order to save America from the medical bankruptcy that now seems inevitable.

But these toxic product industries are very powerful and very influential. They fund political election campaigns and hire armies of lobbyists to get things passed like the recent health care reforms that effectively lock in a Big Pharma monopoly for decades to come. Disease pays big bucks to these powerful corporations, and they’re not about to see Americans get healthier if that would eat into their profits.

It would quite literally take some sort of temporary dictator in America to clean house and shut down all the consumer product companies that are right now causing widespread obesity and disease. Although I don’t support dictatorships, if such a dictator did exist and he really wanted to improve the health of the American people, he would have to radically reform or force the shutting down of companies like Coca-Cola, Monsanto, Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and Pepsico. All the top pharmaceutical companies would be next: Merck, Pfizer, GSK, Astrazeneca, etc.

If you shut down all these companies, seized their products, halted their operations and arrested and prosecuted their top executives for their various crimes against the People, then you might have a shot at improving the long-term health of the American people. Note carefully that this is almost exactly what the FTC and FDA do right now against natural product companies, so this kind of action actually takes place quite regularly (although it’s directed at the wrong companies). This isn’t “something that would never happening in America.” It’s happening right now!

It’s all just a matter of national priorities. If America’s politicians would rather protect the health of the profits of giant drug companies and food conglomerates than the health of the working people, then they should just keep doing what they’re already doing… it’s working beautifully! But if they actually want to help Americans get healthy and stay healthy — while saving literally trillions of dollars in long-term health care costs — they’ve got to be willing to put these toxic product companies out of business for good while promoting sensible nutrition and exercise programs through public education campaigns.

In other words, the United States government needs to be doing what NaturalNews.com is already doing: Educating people about nutrition, promoting personal health responsibility, teaching disease prevention and fitness.

Maybe one day they’ll figure out that the way to have a healthy nation is to start with creating healthy people.

Click here for the full report from Natural News

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