Goldman Sachs: Investing In Political Influence

April 16, 2012

Natural News

By David Gutierrez

A Venn diagram released by Harvard law professor and political activist Larry Lessig reveals the shocking connections between our government and banking and investment giant Goldman Sachs.

 

Goldman Sachs was a major contributor to (and beneficiary of) the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis that helped initiate the current depression. The bank then proceeded to heavily avail itself of bailout payments and other monetary assistance from the federal government.

In 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging that it had deceived investors about the nature of one of its products, costing them a total of $1 billion.

Goldman Sachs was defended in the lawsuit by its longtime legal firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, LLP. One of its advisors on defense strategy was a partner in the firm by the name of Gregory Craig, who had left his job as White House Counsel only months before. When observers raised ethical concerns, some of them pointing out that the Obama Administration prohibits its former members from lobbying it for at least two years, Craig responded by saying, “I am a lawyer, not a lobbyist.”

Craig is a classic example of the “revolving door” in this country between industry and government. He has moved back and forth over the years between government positions — he served as foreign policy advisor to both Senator Edward Kennedy and to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright — and legal work, often taking on major corporate clients like Goldman Sachs.

Click here for the report.

Kofi Annan Handpicked By The CIA

April 2, 2012

Global Research

By Thierry Meyssan

Although Kofi Annan’s track record at the UN is an indisputable success in terms of management and efficiency, he has been sharply criticized for his political shortcomings. As Secretary General, he aspired to bring the Organization into line with the unipolar world and the globalization of U.S. hegemony. He called into question the ideological foundations of the UN and undermined its ability to prevent conflicts. Notwithstanding, he is today in charge of resolving the Syrian crisis.

Former UN Secretary General and Nobel Peace Prize, Kofi Annan, has been designated by Ban Ki-moon and Nabil El Arabi as joint special envoy to negotiate a peaceful solution to the Syrian crisis. With Annan’s extraordinary experience and shiny brand image, his appointment was welcomed by all.

What does this top international official really represent? Who propelled him to the highest-ranking positions? What were his political choices, and what are his current commitments? These questions are met with a discreet silence, as if his previous functions were in themselves a guarantee of neutrality.

His former colleagues praise him for his thoughtfulness, his intelligence and subtlety. A very charismatic personality, Kofi Annan left a strong imprint behind him because he did not behave simply as the “secretary” of the UN, but more like its “general,” by taking initiatives that revivified an organization that was mired in bureaucracy. All that is known and has been repeated ad nauseam. His exceptional professional qualities earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, although this honor in theory should have been bestowed for personal political commitment, not a management career.

Kofi and his twin sister Efua Atta were born on 8 April 1938, into an aristocratic family of the British colony of the Gold Coast. His father was the tribal chief of the Fante people and the elected governor of Asante province. Although he opposed British rule, he was a faithful servant of the Crown. With other notables, he took part in the first decolonization movement, but looked upon the revolutionary fervor of Kwame Nkrumah with suspicion and anxiety.

In any event, Nkrumah’s efforts led to the independence of the country in 1957 under the name of Ghana. Kofi was then 19 years old. Though not involved in the revolution, he became vice-president of the new National Student Association. It was then that he was spotted by a headhunter from the Ford Foundation who incorporated him into a program for “young leaders.” From there, he was invited to follow a summer course at Harvard University. Having noticed his enthusiasm for the United States, the Ford Foundation offered to sponsor his complete studies, first in economics at Macalester College in Minnesota, followed by international relations at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.

After the Second World War, the Ford Foundation, created by famous industrialist Henry Ford, became an unofficial instrument of U.S. foreign policy, providing a respectable facade for the activities of the CIA.

Kofi Annan’s overseas study period (1959-1961) coincided with the most difficult years of the African-American civil rights movement (the start of Martin Luther King’s Birmingham campaign). He saw it as an extension of the decolonization he had witnessed in Ghana, but once again did not get involved.

Impressed with Annan’s academic achievements and political discretion, his U.S. mentors opened for him the doors of the World Health Organization, where he landed his first job. After three years at WHO headquarters in Geneva, he was appointed to the Economic Commission for Africa based in Addis Ababa. However, not sufficiently qualified to pursue a career at the UN, he returned to the United States to take up management studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (1971-1972). He then attempted a comeback in his home country as director of tourism development, but found himself perpetually at odds with the military government of General Acheampong; he gave up and returned to the United Nations in 1976.

There, he held various positions, initially within UNEF II (the peacekeeping emergency force established to supervise the cease fire between Egypt and Israel at the end of the October 1973 war), then as Director of personnel at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). It was at this time that he met and married Nane Lagergren Master, his second wife. The Swedish lawyer is the niece of Raoul Wallenberg, Sweden’s special envoy in Budapest during World War II. Wallenberg is famous for having saved hundreds of persecuted Jews by issuing them protective passports. He also worked for the OSS (forerunner of today’s CIA) as a liaison with the Hungarian resistance. He disappeared at the end of the war, when the Soviets allegedly captured him to stem US influence in the country. In any event, Kofi Annan’s successful marriage opened the doors that he could not have passed through on his own, especially those of Jewish organizations.

Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar chose Kofi Annan as Assistant Secretary-General in charge of human resources management and staff safety and security (1987-90). With the annexation of Kuwait by Iraq, 900 UN employees remained stranded in that country. Kofi Annan was able to negotiate their release with Saddam Hussein, a feat that boosted his prestige within the Organization. He was then successively put in charge of the budget (1990-92) and peacekeeping operations under Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1993-96), with a brief interlude as a special envoy for Yugoslavia.

According to Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, Kofi Annan failed to respond to his many appeals and carries the primary responsibility for UN inaction during the genocide (800,000 dead, mainly Tutsis, but also Hutu opponents).

A similar scenario was repeated in Bosnia, where 400 peacekeepers were taken hostage by Bosnian Serb forces. Kofi Annan remained deaf to the calls of General Bernard Janvier and allowed the perpetration of predictable massacres.

In late 1996, the United States vetoed the reappointment of the Egyptian Boutros Boutros-Ghali as Secretary General, regarded as dangerously Francophile. They succeeded in imposing their candidate: a senior official from within the international organization itself, Kofi Annan. Far from playing against him, his failures in Rwanda and Bosnia blossomed into assets after he candidly confessed to them and promised to reform the system so that they wouldn’t recur. He was elected on this basis and took office on 1 January 1997.

Click here for the full report from Global Research.

Pasteurized Milk From Industrial Dairies Linked To Cancer

February 27, 2012

NaturalNews.com

By Jonathan Benson

The truth has once again shaken the foundation of the ‘American Tower of Babel’ that is mainstream science, with a new study out of Harvard University showing that pasteurized milk product from factory farms is linked to causing hormone-dependent cancers. It turns out that the concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO) model of raising cows on factory farms churns out milk with dangerously high levels of estrone sulfate, an estrogen compound linked to testicular, prostate, and breast cancers.

Dr. Ganmaa Davaasambuu, Ph.D., and her colleagues specifically identified “milk from modern dairy farms” as the culprit, referring to large-scale confinement operations where cows are milked 300 days of the year, including while they are pregnant. Compared to raw milk from her native Mongolia, which is extracted only during the first six months after cows have already given birth, pasteurized factory milk was found to contain up to 33 times more estrone sulfate.

Evaluating data from all over the world, Dr. Davaasambuu and her colleagues identified a clear link between consumption of such high-hormone milk, and high rates of hormone-dependent cancers. In other words, contrary to what theU.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC), theU.S. Department of Agriculture(USDA), and the conventional milk lobby would have you believe, processed milk from factory farms is not a health product, and is directly implicated in causing cancer.

Click here for the full report from NaturalNews.com

 

Is Your Doctor Lying To You? New Study Says It’s Likely

February 9, 2012

CBSNews.com

Do you trust your doctor? A survey finds that some doctors aren’t always completely honest with their patients.

More than half admitted describing someone’s prognosis in a way they knew was too rosy. Nearly 20 percent said they hadn’t fully disclosed a medical mistake for fear of being sued. And 1 in 10 of those surveyed said they’d told a patient something that wasn’t true in the past year.

The survey, by Massachusetts researchers and published in this month’s Health Affairs, doesn’t explain why, or what wasn’t true.

“I don’t think that physicians set out to be dishonest,” said lead researcher Dr. Lisa Iezzoni, a Harvard Medical School professor and director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Mongan Institute for Health Policy. She said the untruths could have been to give people hope.

But it takes open communication for patients to make fully informed decisions about their health care, as opposed to the “doctor-knows-best” paternalism of medicine’s past, Iezzoni added.

The survey offers “a reason for patients to be vigilant and to be very clear with their physician about how much they do want to know,” she said.

The findings come from a 2009 survey of more than 1,800 physicians nationwide to see if they agree with and follow certain standards medical professionalism issued in 2002. Among the voluntary standards are that doctors should be open and honest about all aspects of patient care, and promptly disclose any mistakes.

Click here for the full report

Free Market Education vs. The NWO

February 8, 2012

Lew Rockwell.Com

By Gary North

In my report, “The Crucial Pillar of the New World Order,” I argued that education is the key to the modern New World Order, or Superclass, as David Rothkopf calls it. The system of about 20 elite universities, plus a handful of exclusive four-year private colleges, is the crucial institutional means of screening entry into the inner ring of power.

I argued that a great shift has been in progress since 1960. The best universities began to screen by means of a specific kind of intellect, namely, the ability to take written examinations. I described this as the Prussian system. It is a system based on merit, but a peculiar form of merit: performance on exams. Writing well also counts. As these formal criteria have been made the barriers to entry, legacy sons from the Old World Order have not gained entry.

The Prussian system is replacing the Oxford-Cambridge-Harvard system. The Prussian system extends its way into the K-12 educational system. There, two tracks existed until 1950: the Prussian and the vocational. What is formal and unbreakable in Germany is less formal and less unbreakable in the United States. But it exists. Today, there is a third track. There are the vocational students, the community college-bound students, and the Advanced Placement exam students. Not many students cross over.

The dreams of those Utopian Unitarians of the nineteenth century who pioneered tax-funded K-12 education are no longer taken seriously. The messianic character of American education has slowly morphed into the caretaker mentality described by John Taylor Gatto.

BREAKING INTO THE INNER RING

From the day that the Irish got off the boats in New York City and Boston in 1848, they set up parochial schools. German Lutherans did the same. So did Dutch Calvinists. They recognized the threat posed to their confessions by the supposedly Protestant but in fact Unitarian public school system. They chose to pay taxes and then fund their own school systems. They did not want their children to strive to enter the inner rings of power in the New Country. They were content to remain outside the New World Order.

If there is a symbol of the capitulation of the Irish to the NWO it is the Kennedy family. John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald was a master politician in Boston. The Irish were very good at politics. But they were outside the inner ring of Boston high society, where family connections and Harvard connections had reigned supreme since 1636. Harvard went Unitarian after 1805, but it lost none of its prestige. The Boston Brahmins were well named. The Irish were initially the untouchables.

That irked Honey Fitz’s son-in-law, Joe Kennedy. He wanted in. He knew he could not get in. So, he primed his sons to get in. Joe. Jr. Went to Harvard. Jack went to Harvard. Bobby went to Harvard. Teddy went to Harvard. When Jack became JFK, he hired the scions of the Harvard-Yale axis to serve as his courtiers.

When Lyndon Johnson replaced him in 1963, he got rid of as many of them as he could. He had no plans to enter their inner ring. The only inner ring he cared about was the one he controlled. He was a true son of Southwest Texas State Teachers College. He let the pointy-headed liberals from Harvard stick around for only as long as he could use their pointy heads to stick into his enemies’ backs.

Click here for the full report.

Coffee Cuts Depression Risk In Women

September 27th, 2011

The Huffington Post

By: Catherine Pearson

Coffee may provide more than a momentary pick-me-up, says new research suggesting daily java consumption is tied to a lower risk of depression in women.

Researchers from Harvard University found that women who consumed two to three cups of caffeinated joe per day had a 15 percent lower risk of depression than non-coffee drinkers, while those who drank four-plus cups daily had a 20 percent lower risk. In general, women are more likely than men to be diagnosed with depression.

“Our results support a possible protective effect of caffeine, mainly from coffee consumption, on risk of depression,” the researchers wrote Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The researchers followed more than 50,000 participants in the Nurses Health Study — one of the largest women’s health studies in the U.S — for 10 years.

But the study’s authors cautioned that their results must be replicated before it’s possible to draw any firm conclusions about caffeine and depression risk — particularly in terms of any causal mechanisms that might be at play.

“Caffeine is known to affect the brain,” study co-author Dr. Albert Ascherio, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, offered as one possible explanation. “It modulates the release of mood transmitters.” He pointed out that previous studies have shown a link between coffee and decreased suicide risk, though as the National Institute of Health points out, caffeine may cause or worsen anxiety issues.

Dr. John Greden, executive director of the University of Michigan’s Comprehensive Depression Center, agreed that the Harvard study — as well as others that have come before it — suggest interesting possibilities in terms of a link.

“Clinical depression is found in one out of every six people, roughly, and caffeine is one of the most widely used stimulants in the world,” he said. “If you put those two together, it has always been a logical question to ask, ‘Is there a connection?’”

But Greden cautioned that the current study has its limitations, too, particularly in terms of the participant pool.

“The women they studied had an average age of above 60, and most depressions start young,” he said. “So in a strange way, this is probably a very protected group, given the fact that none had depression at the start of the study.”

The results of the new study center on the potential impact of caffeine from coffee — not caffeine in general — namely because among the participants, the amount of caffeine consumed from other sources was too small for any stable results.

Ascherio said this should be just one of many additional considerations in future research that looks at possible caffeine and depression links.

In the meantime, he said the study should not prompt non-coffee drinkers to take up the habit. It could, however, offer current coffee drinkers some reassurance.

“I’m not saying we’re on the path to discovering a new way to prevent depression,” he said. “But I think you can be reassured that if you are drinking coffee, it is coming out as a positive thing.”

Click here for the full report from The Huffington Post

Should Parents Lose Obese Kids?

July 14th, 2011

ABC News

By: Dan Harris

Harvard University child obesity expert Dr. David Ludwig’s recent claim that some parents should lose custody of their severely obese children has sparked outrage among families and professionals across the country.

The national outcry led one family to share how its personal experience with the matter damaged their lives.

Ludwig, an obesity expert at Children’s Hospital Boston and associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, shared his divisive idea in an opinion piece that ran in the Journal of the American Medical Association Wednesday: that state intervention can serve in the best interest of extremely obese children, of which there’re about 2 million across the United States.

“In severe instances of childhood obesity, removal from the home may be justifiable, from a legal standpoint, because of imminent health risks and the parents’ chronic failure to address medical problems,” Ludwig co-wrote with Lindsey Murtagh, a lawyer and researcher at Harvard’s School of Public Health.

The topic has quickly generated controversy, and the majority of experts contacted by ABC News disagreed with Ludwig and Murtagh’s ideas.

Dr. David Katz, founder of the Yale Prevention Center, said that there was no evidence that the state would do a better job of feeding children than their parents.

Dr. David Orentlicher, co-director of Hall Center for Law and Health at Indiana University of School Law, also disagreed, saying that based on past instances, child protective service agencies might be far too quick to place overweight children in foster care.

A family in Albuquerque, N.M., disagreed with the idea, based not on any medical expertise but on a painful personal experience that they say tore the family apart more than a decade ago.

In a case that shocked many people across the country, 3-year-old Anamarie Regino, weighing 90 pounds, was taken from her outraged parents by government officials and placed in foster care.

“Literally, it was two months of hell. It seemed like the longest two months of my life,” mother Adela Martinez said.

As it turned out, it was two unnecessary months of hell. Anamarie didn’t improve at all in foster care, and she was returned to her parents. The young girl was later diagnosed with a genetic predisposition.

“They say it’s for the well-being of the child, but it did more damage that any money or therapy could ever to do to fix it,” Martinez said.

Anamarie, who is now 14, agreed.

“It’s not right, what [Dr. Ludwig] is doing, because to get better you need to be with your family, instead of being surrounded by doctors,” she said.

When told of the Regino case, Ludwig said his solution of state intervention did not always work.

“Well, state intervention is no guarantee of a good outcome, but to do nothing is also not an answer,” Ludwif said.

Ludwig said he believes that children should only be removed in the most extreme cases, and that state officials should first offer counseling and education to parents.

“It should only be used as a last resort,” he said. “It’s also no guarantee of success, but when we have a 400-pound child with life threatening complications, there may not be any great choices.”

Click here for the full report from ABC News

The Kevin Trudeau Show: 9-22-10

Today, Kevin explains the significance of the Unites States dropping to the 50^th best country to start a business and why banks around the world are failing at record rates!

Self Help:
Lose A Pound A Day
Help Others
Switch To Grass Fed Beef
Make Your Voice Heard

Health:
FDA’s Real Agenda Behind The Massive Amount of Food Recalls
Study Finds Nearly 1 Million Kids Misdiagnosed With ADHD
Drug-Resistant Superbugs Found in 3 States
HFCS Getting Rebranded To Deceive Customers

Government:
Tea Party Fear
Four Al-Qaeda-Linked Prisoners Escape US Custody In Iraq
New 1099 Requirements for B2B Transactions

Wealth:
Unemployment Rates Rise… AGAIN!
US Falling Behind In The Markets

NWO:
Monsanto Contracted Blackwater Spies to Infiltrate Opposition

Everything Kevin:
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Pentagon Develops Shape-Shifting Robots

June 30, 2010

Telegraph

By Tom Chivers

At the moment the tiny robot – a sheet just half a millimetre thick, scarcely thicker than a piece of paper – only folds itself into a boat, like a child’s toy, or a “paper glider” plane shape. But it is anticipated that in future it will be used to create full-sized cars and aircraft that morph as they move, or robots that can “flow” like mercury into small openings, or multipurpose military uniforms that can adapt to different environments.

Researchers at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) launched the project in 2007 in conjunction with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a small sheet of stiff tiles and “joints” of elastomer, “studded with thin foil actuators and flexible electronics. The demonstration material contains 25 total actuators, divided into five groupings. A shape is produced by triggering the proper actuator groups in sequence,” according to a statement by Robert Wood, the head of the Harvard research team.

Click here for the full report.

Constitution In Danger If Kagan Is OK’d

June 30, 2010

Investors

By Phyllis Schlafly

Barack Obama revealed his goal for the Supreme Court when he complained on Chicago radio station WBEZ-FM in 2001 that the Earl Warren Court wasn’t “radical” enough because “it didn’t break free from the essential constraints placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution” in order to allow “redistribution of wealth.”

Now that Obama is president, he has the power to nominate Supreme Court justices who will “break free” from the Constitution and join him in “fundamentally transforming” America. That’s the essence of his choice of Elena Kagan as his second Supreme Court nominee. She never was a judge, and her paper trail is short. But it’s long enough to prove that she is a clear and present danger to the Constitution.

When Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School, she presented a guest speaker who is known as the most activist judge in the world: Judge Aharon Barak, formerly president of the Israeli Supreme Court.

Click here for the full report.

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