From Australian Business Insider:

A Utah biotech company Myriad Genetics owns the patent to BRCA1, the so-called “breast cancer gene” responsible for Angelina’s Jolie’s decision to have a preventative double mastectomy. They also on the patent on a similar breast cancer gene called BRCA2. Moreover these gene patents also give Myriad a monopoly on testing for these genes.

At present a suit cancer groups have filed to invalidate these patents is being heard in the U.S. Supreme Court. Cancer advocates argue that it’s illegal and unethical for biotech companies to patent nature. Joseph Stiglitz has written in Slate that allowing Myriad to hold exclusive patents for BRCA1 and BRCA2 removes the opportunity for other scientists to come up with better and cheaper tests. In this way, they make the tests less widely available and possibly prevent women from knowing they carry these genes and taking preventive measures.

Surprisingly, Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the courts most conservative and pro-corporate justices, seems to be siding with Stiglitz.  “You haven’t created a type of gene that does not exist in the body,” he told a lawyer for Myriad.

Read how other justices argued here. A decision is expected next month.

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It’s hard to read any investment or economics blogs without being bombarded with recommendations to buy gold. The conventional wisdom is that it’s the only safe investment when banks stop paying interest and stock prices vastly overinflated with the current Wall Street bubble. While real estate and other investments linked to specific currencies (such as the US dollar) can become virtually worthless when the currency collapses, gold supposedly has intrinsic value as a precious metal. Unless, of course, food and other necessities are in such short supply that no one will trade them for gold. With so many Americans, and governments such as China, India and Russia buying gold, investors have been baffled that the price of gold has been dropping. According to supply and demand, the price should rise. In a recent essay in Global Research, former Reagan economic adviser Paul Craig Roberts reveals that the Federal Reserve has been actively suppressing the price of gold through “naked” short selling.  In short selling an investor sells a stock or commodity he expects to drop in price, then buys it back at the lower price. In “naked” short selling, an investor sells a stock or commodity he doesn’t own. The effect of a large number of investors selling short is to drive the price of a stock or commodity down. According to Roberts, the Fed short sold 500 tons of gold on April 12th, at a cost of $1.16 billion (remember they didn’t own the gold to begin with).  No individual or bank could handle that kind of loss, but it’s no problem for the Fed. They just print the money, via Quantitative Easing, to cover it.

In the video below, Greg Hunter interviews Roberts about his recent article. Roberts explains that the US government has no choice but to suppress the price of gold to protect the value of the US dollar. In the last four years the Fed has “printed” one trillion dollars pure year, using “quantitative” easing to purchase bad bank debt. This would be fine if there were sufficient demand with the US economy or overseas to soak up $5 trillion and thus prevent inflation. Thus to prevent a run on the dollar, through massive conversion of dollars to gold, the Fed discourages investors from buying good by effectively capping the price.

According to Roberts, attacking the price of gold helps the dollar by propping up bond prices (especially of bonds based on derivatives) that are the life blood of investment banks. Because private banks, rather than government, have primary responsibility for issuing money (by issuing loans not covered by reserves) the health of the US dollar is intimately connected to the health of investment banks and the bonds they issue and hold.

Other mechanisms the US uses to prop up the dollar include persuading other governments to inflate their own currencies by printing more money. If the euro and yen are also over inflated, currency traders aren’t tempted to exchange all their dollars for European and Japanese currency.

He mentions that Australia, which has much closer ties with China than the US, has refused to print money by engaging in the quantitative easing game. All you need to do is look at the exchange rate to get a real sense how rapidly the US dollar is losing value. When I first moved to New Zealand, $1.00 Aus sold for $0.90US. Now it sells for $1.03 US.

The change in New Zealand’s exchange rate (China has just exceeded Australia has our major export partner) is even more extreme. In 2002 $1.00 NZ sold for $0.50 US. Now it sells for $0.88 US.

The most interesting part of the interview is toward the end, in which Hunter and Roberts discuss the likelihood the US dollar will collapse and the US government will seize depositors’ savings accounts (like they did in Cyprus) and private pensions. Hunter asks if this is why the government is trying to restrict citizens’ access to guns. Roberts makes the very astute observation that no police state can operate in a society with an armed population.  “As we move closer and closer to a police state, they’re going to have to take the guns away. . . The police state has doomed the 2nd amendment. It’s just a question of time.”

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BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast published a fascinating article in Vice Magazine this week (Nicolas Maduro Did Not Steal the Venezuelan Election) about being hired by Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro in 2004 to investigate the possibility the US might tamper with Venezuela’s elections (following Palast’s 2001 expose detailing how Florida governor Jeb Bush stole the election for his brother).

The article describes how he presented Chavez and Maduro with a collection of secret FBI memos revealing that ChoicePoint Corp – under a no-bid contract (from the US government) – had “shoplifted” Venezuela’s voter rolls, as well as the voter rolls of Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Mexico and Honduras, all of whom were on the verge of electing presidents from the political left.

By coincidence it was a subsidiary of ChoicePoint Jeb Bush engaged in 2000 to illegally “purge” more than 56,000 voters, the vast majority black and poor, from Florida’s voter rolls. A maneuver which would ultimately give George Bush the US presidency by just 537 ballots.

After reading Palast’s report, Chavez moved swiftly to establish a virtually tamper-proof electoral system. In Venezuela every voter gets TWO ballots. One is electronic; the second is a paper print-out of the touch-screen ballot, which the voter reviews, authorizes and places in a locked ballot-box. Fifty-four percent of the boxes are opened at random and checked against the computer tally – making the system virtually tamper proof.

When Maduro’s opponent Henrique Capriles officially challenged the recent outcome, he was allowed to add as many precincts as he wanted (12,000) to this automatic audit.

It would appear the US State Department doesn’t have a leg to stand on in backing opposition claims that Maduro’s win is fraudulent. Thus, according to Palast, they have turned to another old CIA trick, violent street demonstrations protesting the electoral outcome. He points out that most, but not all, of the voters killed in street protests are Chavistas.

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Crossposted at Daily Censored

No, this isn’t spam. It’s actually a novel form of crowdfunding, the latest fad in raising funds for new movies and community projects.

The Philippine government is asking for “kind hearted individuals” to assist in raising the 512,066.35 Saudi Arabian Riyals (approximately $1 million US) the Saudi government is demanding as blood money to halt the execution of a Filipino guest worker named Joselito Zapanta, convicted of killing his landlord in 2009. According to Filipino in death row, the man’s family and the Philippine government have raised approximately one-eighth of the required amount.

I see a clear moral dilemma here, especially for death penalty opponents. It seems similar to the dilemma western governments face in deliberating whether to ransom kidnap victims of Somali pirates. If we reward brutal thugs by paying them off, doesn’t it just encourage them?

The ability to “buy” justice is totally antithetical to most Americans’ thinking about the rule of law. Yet the reality is that justice in the US is bought and sold. Rich people hire the best lawyers available and get off. While the poor, stuck with badly paid, overworked public defenders, get long sentences and the death penalty.

Under the Obama administration, the US remains Saudi Arabia’s strongest ally in the developed world. In 2010, the Obama administration approved the biggest arms sale in American history: an estimated $60.5 billion purchase by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

 Here are the contact details for the Office of the President of the Philipines: http://www.president.gov.ph/contact-us-2/

I recommend you do as I did and email them first. Ask about getting your money back if this fundraising endeavor fails and the Saudis proceed with the execution. And be sure to get a receipt.

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Ethos

Peter McGrain 2011

Film Review

The hour-long documentary Ethos, narrated by actor/activist Woody Harrelson, is now available free online.

In my opinion, it has powerful take home lessons for Americans across the political spectrum. Largely because it addresses what I view as the two main obstacles to political change in the US 1) the immense power private banks enjoy via their control over the money supply and 2) the enormous power the corporate media exerts over public information. Much of this is elucidated through excellent cameo interviews with prominent dissidents such as Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn, Edward Said, Cynthia McKinney, Norman Solomon, Benjamin Barber and Chalmers Johnson.

The main goal of the film is to clearly articulate the current political crisis Americans face in the 21^st century, which it does by exploring the historical context in which the crisis has developed. The documentary describes a number of significant historical events that are usually omitted from history textbooks.

It starts out with a general overview of the ways in which corporations have steadily increased their control over our supposedly democratic government.

There is special emphasis on the power private banks wield by controlling the money supply. Harrelson starts back in 1910 with the secret “conspiracy” by J.P. Morgan and other major bankers to create the Federal Reserve. Contrary to popular belief, the Fed isn’t a branch of the federal government. What it is, in essence, is a cartel of private banks.

Harrelson also devotes a long section to the use of the corporate media to manipulate public opinion and instigate Americans’ overwhelming drive to consume. He begins by describing the work, in the early 20^th century, of Edward Bernays. Bernays, considered the father of the public relations industry, held the view common to many corporate elites that the wider public must be controlled because they’re incapable of meaningful participation in democratic government. Bernays perfected the technique of manipulating unconscious fears and desires, not only to help corporations sell people stuff they don’t need, but to assist government in social control.

In the final part of the film, Harrelson reveals how the Bush administration used the science of public relations to 1) convince the American people of the need for the US to invade and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan and 2) generate sufficient fear in the population to pass legislation stripping Americans of most civil liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

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Crossposted at Daily Censored

The mission statement of Alex Abramoff in his bid for student body president of Santa Monica College in California

Guest post by Dr Danny Weil

(This is the Part 3 of a 3-part article about Alex Abramoff’s campaign for student body president at Santa Monica College. While this might seem incredibly trivial, this is precisely how his father Jack Abramoff and his cronies got their start, by organizing Reagan’s Young Turks on college campuses. At the end I insert two comments from the Daily Censored site where the article was originally posted).

Below is the mission statement put out by the Corsairs Connected, the slate that includes Abramoff. As you can see, the mission statement is full of spelling errors and is grammatically unsound. But hey, in the post-literate environment where reading and writing are being phased out in order to make room for on-line ‘earning’ and low-paying jobs, one should not be surprised. The whole thing is a whopping embarrassment for students who attend the college and work hard for an education. Anyone interested in ridding community colleges of special interests and political operatives should take heed and assure they do not vote for these candidates.

“We are STUDENTS, running for AS government positions. organizing and connecting so all can benefit. Mission The Corsairs Connected strive toward creating a strong campus community for all of us at SMC. We recognize the lack of involvement from the majority of the Associated Students, and we plan to change that by spreading the awareness of everything SMC! Through relationship building and positive idea sharing, we are focused on creating a more transparent veiw of the amazing educational and extra-carricular activities our school has to offer. Description We are Corasairs Connected: AS President: Alex Abramoff AS Vice President: Angie Nhung Vo Director of Publicity: Ryan M. Downer” (https://www.facebook.com/CorsairsConnected?ref=ts&fref=ts#!/CorsairsConnected/info).

Summary

A cursory reading of the vapid and ill-penned mission statement indicates that neither Alex Abramoff nor his merry band of cohorts have the intelligence nor the education to be on any student body board. They should concentrate on learning how to make their thinking intelligible to those who might wish to vote for them, if this is even possible. But more than the uninspiring and watery mission statement, students should be very leery of electing any Abramoff to any seat on any government, be it student or otherwise. For as this article and a perusal of the sites offered reveals, this is how criminals and sloth sleek their way into the corridors of power under the facade of “community service”, when in fact it is self-aggrandizement and supremacy that motivates them — this and their shiftless and sycophantic yearning to cuddle in the laps of the likes of college president, Dr. Chui Tsang, himself an incorrigible scallywag in the service of corporate benefactors. The whole thing is one big disgrace that has a high probability of leading to another political scandal.

Buyers beware of Young Turks and political gunslingers.

END

Comments:

David Mendez-Yapkowitz • a day ago

Hold up here, my name is David Yapkowitz and I’m the Sports Editor for The Corsair. We are in NO way “Tsang psychophants” that “back the privatization of the college” as you so ignorantly describe us as. We have a responsibility to the student body to report the truth, if our articles portray someone or some group in negative light, that’s their own damn fault, maybe they should clean their shit up. We do not endorse any candidates for AS elections, we merely report on who’s running. We are independently run, Dr Tsang has NO control over what we publish. At the same time, we do not exist as a means for people to spread their propaganda. My suggestion? You step foot in our office and see what really goes on instead of running off at the mouth about issues you clearly have no understanding of.

Police pepper spray Santa Monica protestors

Guest post by Dr Danny Weil

(This is the Part 1 of a 3-part article about Alex Abramoff’s campaign for student body president at Santa MonicaCollege. While this might seem incredibly trivial, this is precisely how his father Jack Abramoff and his cronies got their start, by organizing Reagan’s Young Turks on college campuses. Despite their defeat in November, the criminal branch of the Republican Party never sleeps. )

Getting his start on College Campuses – The Abramoff way

What are important and salient issues for this article are not the misadventures of criminal Jack Abramoff, but how he got his start down the road of iniquitous double-dealing that led to his eventual arrest and conviction for felonious activity. For you see, a quarter of a century ago, Abramoff and anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist were fellow Young Turks of the so-called Reagan revolution. They organized Massachusetts college campuses in the 1980 election — Abramoff while he was an undergraduate at Brandeis and Norquist while at Harvard Business School — to help Ronald Reagan pull an upset in the state. They then moved to Washington, maneuvered to take over the College Republicans — at the time a sleepy establishment organization — and transformed it into a reactionary right-wing activist group.

They were then joined by oily Ralph Reed, the ambitious Georgian whose later Christian conversion would fuel his rise to national political prominence with the Christian Coalition that he helped gain prominence. Abramoff and his gang, which included Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed (neither of whom went to prison), busted the College Republicans’ budget with a 1982 national direct-mail fundraising campaign that ended up “a colossal flop,” according to Rich Bond, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and then deputy director of the party’s national committee. Bond later told the Washington Post reporters that he eventually banished Norquist, Reed and Abramoff from GOP headquarters, telling Abramoff: “You can’t be trusted” ((http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/28/AR2005122801588.html).

Getting a start on college campuses is a time honored trick for those seeking to get into the pockets of the well heeled power brokers who continue to run the US of CIA.  Many ‘Young Turks’ have used the college as a platform for gaining power with the ruling elites that control America. And this brings us to the substantive point of this article.

Now, Casino Jack Abramoff’s son, Alex Abramoff, has just announced as of yesterday, he is running for student body president of the Santa Monica College (once called a community college before the word was trundled up and thrown in the garbage due to its “collectivist” implications. The college has spent over $150,000 to develop a corporate logo to replace any semblance of public good or the public commons, as they privatize everything on campus from bookstores to cafeteria services. A recent Public Records Act request I made late last year show that the school newspaper, The Corsair, receives ad revenue from for-profit predatory colleges). Alex seems to be on the same path his father once was.

Santa Monica College: Crime Scene for the Lumina Foundation

Readers might recall that Santa Monica College is the site of the April 2012 pepper spraying [see video below] that took place under the tutelage of Dr. Chui Tsang who, himself a Lumina member, sought to implement a toll booth system for education at the college which would have set up a two-tiered tuition system giving priority to those with money, further privatizing the college. Tsang subsequently commissioned a report on the pepper spraying incident, led by the sycophantic attorney for the college, a report and its findings that worked to seek refuge for Tsang’s illegal violation of the Brown Act in denying public input into his sordid plans which led to the pepper spraying.

Certainly one cannot blame the sins of the father for the present actions of the son, in this case Alex Abramoff , but the irony of his running for student body president cannot go unnoticed in light of his father’s crimes. As the old quote goes, “As the tree is bent so bends the twig” or if you prefer, “The acorn does not fall far from the oak tree”. The game plan of taking over colleges through running for student body president seems to follow the insidious elder, Casino Jack. In fact, my sources tell me that Alex Abramoff has met privately with Dr. Chui Tsang at his private residence! Not once, but many times. Why?

Below you can read the mission statement that Alex Abramoff is running on with his merry band of students. Nowhere is mentioned the accrediting agency, ACCJC and its attack on all community colleges in California in an attempt to get them to adopt privatization plans, fire tenured teachers, do away with shared governance by retiring department chairs and thus create the Lumina controlled wet dream that is now haunting college campuses throughout the state of California. Nowhere is mentioned the pepper spraying incident or the attempt on the part of President Chui Tsang to implement the toll booth educational system. Nowhere is mentioned the rancid student learning outcomes (SLO’s) that are being pushed both by Obama and his educational Kitchen Cabinet made up of Bill Gates and the Lumina Foundation.

Now, with Casino Jack out of prison and in control of his own radio show run by reactionary right wing Clear Channel and Fox News (The Jack Abramoff show), one can expect he will come to the aid of his son with ceaseless airtime propaganda (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/07/11/jack-abramoff-gets-radio-show-with-clear-channel/).

If this all sounds familiar it should. Corruption and power have now entered into what were once public institutions where students were once to be part of the governance of their institutions. Now, those like Alex Abramoff run for office with money and power in their naked eyes and with the full support of college officials.

Below you can see the illiterate and hollow mission statement from Alex Abramoff and his counterparts who seek power and control for their sycophantic plans to play into the hands of Lumina and Gates. Is this all planned, perhaps a conspiracy hatched by Papa Abramoff, Dr. Tsang and their political cohorts? Maybe; Casino Jack sure knows how to do pull it off as you read above. Add to this the Santa Monica College student newspaper, The Corsair, that is run by Tsang-sycophants who back the privatization of the college, the ACCJC plans, the SLO’s and the toll booth system of education and one can begin to see clearly the ginned up propaganda effort being constructed in broad daylight.

To be continued.

Dr. Danny Weil is an investigative journalist, author and public interest attorney who practiced public interest law for more than twenty years and has been published in a case of first impression in California. He now lives in Ecuador.

Reposted from Daily Censored

Kevin Spacey as Casino Jack

Guest post by Dr Danny Weil

(This is the Part 1 of a 3-part article about Alex Abramoff’s campaign for student body president at Santa Monica College. While this might seem incredibly trivial, this is precisely how his father Jack Abramoff and his cronies got their start, by organizing Reagan’s Young Turks on college campuses. Despite their defeat in November, the criminal branch of the Republican Party never sleeps. )

Readers might remember the horrific Jack Abramoff who, with his surly counterparts such as Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist and a host of crooked politicians, milked American Indians out of millions in consultant fees. Abramoff eventually went to prison but exited with a tell-tale book and a radio show. Doing time is nothing for these scoundrels who reap rewards for their sundry crimes. Abramoff had mammoth ambitions when he was a Washington D.C. kingpin on ‘K Street’.

As Susan Schmidt and James V. Grimaldi, reporters for the Washington Post stated back in December 29th, 2005. “Casino Jack”, as he was known, sought to build the biggest lobbying portfolio in D.C. He opened two restaurants close to the Capitol. He bought a fleet of casino boats. He produced two Hollywood movies. He leased four arena and stadium skyboxes and dreamed of owning a pro sports team. He was a generous patron in his Orthodox Jewish community, starting a boys’ religious school in Maryland. Lawmakers and their aides packed his restaurants and skyboxes and jetted off with him on golf trips to Scotland and the Pacific island of Saipan. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/28/AR2005122801588.html).

What’s more, Casino Jack collected unprecedented sums of money– tens of millions of dollars — from casino-rich Indian tribes who fallaciously thought the felon was attempting to help them when in actuality he was using his perfidious charm to swindle them while literally laughing all the way to the bank. Abramoff also offered jobs and other favors to well-placed congressional staffers and executive branch officials. He pushed his own associates for government positions, from which they, too, could help him swindle more and more money while building his power hungry reputation (ibid).

Readers can read more about Abramoff’s political connections, his support for apartheid in South Africa in the 1980’s, his gun running to Zionist settlers and other such crimes. As one insidious example, Casino Jack was a member of the International Freedom Foundation that in the 1980’s had branches in Johannesburg, South Africa and London, England. The International Freedom Foundation was actually a front for intelligence operators who worked on psycho-political operations to prolong apartheid. People involved included United States Department of State Officials, United States Congressmen, and US Intelligence agents. The South African government secretly paid $1.5 million a year to the International Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit group that Abramoff operated out of a townhouse in the 1980s (http://www.bilderberg.org/roundtable/lhiff.html).

There was nothing that the despicable Abramoff would not do for money and the people he hurt all over the world through his corruption and fine taste for money and power were simply thrown under the bus at no expense to the crooked, arrogant thug. Front for Apartheid, an article from the despicable International Freedom Foundation appeared in Newsday, Sunday, July 16, 1995. The article was reported by Dele Olojede in South Africa and Timothy M. Phelps in Washington. The article says “jobs” for South African intelligence provided at least half of the total IFF revenue, and South African military intelligence would send fees from the “jobs” directly to the IFF Washington office. The article was a limited hangout that didn’t mention the South African Institute of International Affairs, The Royal Institute of International Affairs, or the Council on Foreign Relations.

The article has a picture of Secretary of State George Shultz shaking hands with Oliver Tambo, the late exiled leader of ANC, at the State Department in 1987. The article mentions that people like Henry Kissinger were invited to International Freedom Foundation seminars to deliver keynote speeches. Among those in attendance was former CIA director William Colby. Shultz, Kissinger and Colby were members of the Council on Foreign Relations. The article talks about Americans who were on the board of Directors of the IFF, and who worked for the IFF in South Africa. Nearly every man mentioned was a United States Intelligence agent at one time or another. You can see a list of the criminal members at (http://www.bilderberg.org/roundtable/lhiff.html).

To be continued.

Dr. Danny Weil is an investigative journalist, author and public interest attorney who practiced public interest law for more than twenty years and has been published in a case of first impression in California. He now lives in Ecuador.

Reposted from Daily Censored

Below is a fascinating excerpt from Part 8 of Louis Farrakhan’s lecture series The Time and What Must Be Done. Farrahkan is the present leader of the Nation of Islam (NOI), best known for its most famous member Malcolm X.

It’s been more than ten years since I heard Farrakhan speak. He has made remarkable progress from his overt antisemitism and talk of white people as blue-eyed devils. I still have a slight problem with the “666” symbolism of the year 2013, which he links with the “beasts” (America, England, Germany and France).

Otherwise his analysis is remarkably similar to that of white economist, journalist and former Reagan official Paul Craig Roberts. The NOI leader is highly critical of Obama’s murderous policies in Libya and Syria and his use of drones for targeted assassinations, as well as his apparent willingness to support an Israeli-inspired war with Iran. He also condemns the President’s destruction of American democracy. He describes the US as an oligarchy leading the American people into fascism.

More information about the full 52 week series at Farrakhan promises god has execution planned for america

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Cross posted at Daily Censored