When you change the way the ‘forces that be’ control you and the society you live in, you know your strategy is working when you get attacked, impersonated and are the target of sustained (and skillful) disinformation. While it is not pleasant to be attacked, if the attacks follow a particular pattern, it gives you powerful confirmation that you are on the right track and that what you are doing is having an impact. That’s what appears to be happening with Natural Solutions Foundation!
The Four Classic Disinformation Drains: Deceit, Deflection, Distortion, Defamation
For example, I recently got an email accusing the Natural Solutions Foundation of opposing licensing of Naturopaths in Virginia. We take no such position, of course. The person who wrote it said he was a strong supporter of ours until we took that position. Turns out that we never said any such thing (I really believe in Naturopathy) and that it was another, similarly titled group that was opposing it. He said that a lot of his friends who used to be our supporters had “joined the bandwagon against Natural Solutions Foundation”.
In his letter of apology for thinking we were really the bad guys, my correspondent said, “Unfortunately a lot of friends of mine got the email and joined the bandwagon opposing [Natural Solutions Foundation] without realizing what they were opposing. The gist of the email was that if naturopaths were licensed, they would have a monopoly on supplements, etc….”
Of course we did not write any such thing! Ever since we became the leading voice of health freedom, the Natural Solutions Foundation has been attacked with a variety of spurious, specious and just downright silly allegations. It’s called “Disinformation” and it’s a classic way to disrupt an effective force for change. The idea is to destroy confidence and credibility by a continuing stream of smear, deceit, innuendo and lies of all kinds.
The intent is to drain funding, and energy it takes to respond to the disinformation and, ultimately, drain credibility – the “Death by a Thousand Cuts”.
The Natural Solutions Foundation has no intention of dying, however, whether by cuts or cold or croup or anything else. I recently noted with great interest that someone has set up an “organization” and an eBlast that looks a lot like ours, claiming to be a health freedom communication fighting for your rights and asking you for money.
Now, it is fine to set up organizations and seek funding. In fact, the more people fighting the health freedom battle, the better. But in this case, imitation may be the sincerest form of … disinformation. It looks to me like the idea is to siphon off much needed funding by pretending to be the Natural Solutions Foundation!
Let’s face it: funding is the limiting factor in the health freedom battle. Sufficient funding allows us to do our work. This “organization” (and the other disinformation circulating about us) tries to make it seem as if what we are doing is driven by fraudulent motives, or worse!
At the same time, a person claiming to be both angry and a scientist has been savaging us in the blogisphere. That is very odd because virtually every response we get in the blogosphere is strongly positive. This person’s not only unfriendly, he (or she) is downright libelous!
Here is a note which our counsel, Ralph Fucetola, just sent me a few minutes ago on this very issue:
“Well, Rima, we must be doing something right, since some shady characters and some “quackbuster” skeptic types have recently targeted us. I note we were scammed by a pro, by the King of Online Spam, as this person is frequently called. At the same time, we’ve been attacked by someone who calls himself ” the Angry…” something or other. Interestingly, there may be a link between these two events!
“So, first to the scam: the security of our list appears to have been breeched. We are, of course, taking strong legal action to prevent further damage and to compel the King of Spam to refrain from any further use of our list. After all, we have the members of our community to protect and we are doing exactly that.
When [deleted] came to us last year offering to help our health freedom fight, he was both sincere-seeming, knowledgeable and helpful. He even helped us design the format we often still use for our eblasts. He gave us this design service as a gift and we certainly appreciated it. In fact, the design he is using now was an earlier version of our email blast which we have the rights to!
We believed we could trust this person so we eventually gave him access to our web site and to our list in order to, he said, “help us out…” with communication strategies to help us get our message out more effectively. Then we discovered to our horror that he was apparently keeping a large amount of money for himself that one of our supporters was contributing and keeping money people paid for products they purchased through the Natural Solutions Foundation. We were really distressed. The purchasers got their product (we never got the money, of course), the merchant was badly hurt and we, of course, immediately cut [deleted] completely out of our lives.
That was, more or less, the last we heard from him – until now. This took place shortly before the Holidays last year. Now, though, we see he has a “new health freedom group”, an “alliance”, out there, with eblasts very similar to ours, sent, we fear, to an earlier copy of our elist. This “new group” has nothing to do with us.”
Ralph asked me to let you know that “While the Natural Solutions Foundation has set up Yahoo!Group forums and are working with a very special group of health and freedom advocates to create a lobbying Health Freedom Strategic Alliance uniting the vitamin industry with health freedom advocates, we have NOT authorized any spin-off or “look alike” groups. Please let your friends know that if anyone receives suspicious information that counterfeits our efforts, we need to know. It would help us greatly if people would forward whatever you get from this other group to us at dr.laibow@gmail.com .”
Then Ralph goes on to say, “Back to the second event, the “Angry” person. Natural Solutions Foundation is often cited on blogs in a favorable light; those references are reported to us by our web host and we always post our thanks. Well, the Angry man is upset with two sentences from your landmark video,’Nutricide: the DVD‘ (https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=156), which exposes the genocidal results of the Illness Industry. Hundreds of thousands have seen it on Google Video and I suppose it was inevitable that eventually someone would fail to get the point and try to waste our time nitpicking – or worse. AND there is a strong, but unconfirmed, indication on Angry’s blog that he is working with Mr. Spam King! [You can watch “Nutricide on our website, www.HealthFreedomUSA.org– REL]
So we are being attacked by someone who impugns our veracity and says that because HE cannot find something in the huge mass of Codex documents (and maybe does not know how to read the ‘bureaucratese’) what you said is somehow false, a lie, a deception, a fraud. Not logical, this, but perhaps he is driven by some other motivation. Oddly, perhaps, Mr. Angry has also blogged about a forced chemotherapy drugging case in CA. We’ve learned that there appears to be a connection between that case and the [deleted]. What is going on here? It sure has me perplexed.
What I do know though, is that we appear to have been had. The lesson is clear: only trust people like you and General Bert who have been in the struggle for decades.
Disinformation and deception come in a surprising variety of flavors and they all taste very bitter!”
Natural Solutions Foundation’s privacy policy is clear, and is clearly stated on our website: we NEVER sell, rent, barter or share our email list. NEVER.
What we did not account for was having a trusted person in our midst who may have decided to use our list for his own purposes. If you get something from this phony “health freedom alliance” (and it looks somehow familiar to you) please send it our way. It will provide evidence for the legal action we are taking in this situation and will help us greatly!
We are working hard on your protection!
You may find it interesting to know that we have new secure servers (which cost us the best part of $1000 per month) and a much stronger site being hosted there.
Dr. Laibow and Gen. Stubblebine continue their trip through several African nations, bringing the natural solutions message to opinion leaders and decision makers. Her Internet connection is sporadic, but she sent me this message for her blog, while her connection lasted.
Here is her report:
We met with a direct underling to the Minister of Health in this poor African country who is responsible for all preventive health in that country. She is very excited about the fact that concerted action by Health Conscious Nations (HCNs) can turn Codex Alimentarius (the World Food Code) to the advantage of food consumers, especially in areas like Africa. Codex responsibility is shared by several Ministries.
This is really astonishing and heartening. Here in this developing country they really understand what is going on and believe that a meeting needs to be organized by them to develop a coordinated strategy for the HCNs before the meeting of CAC (the Codex governing body). Recalling that last week in Accra, Ghana, it was the African nations that pushed back against the US – successfully – I have reminded them that the game of GM labeling is FAR from over and they need to attend CCFL (food labeling committee) in full force with an effective strategy in place to win this battle.
Our contact has risked his whole career for this so he is really counting on us to come through for him. She is fantastic.
I do not want to announce publicly which country we are in to prevent the likelihood of extreme pressure by the US and others on this struggling nation but we do want to tell our Netroots it would appear that the Natural Solutions Foundation interventions and connections on the ground here in Africa over the last 3 years are bearing fruit in helping to change the mindset of Codex delegates and therefore the will of the countries in the developing world to take the power back to protect their people.
These countries banded together, for the first time in our knowledge of Codex since 1963, to stand together to counter the chess moves being set up by the US.
Let me repeat that: these countries banded together for the first time, to stand together to counter the Big Agra/Big Pharma agenda last week at the Working Group on Labeling of Foods Derived from Biotech and BioEngineering in Accra, Ghana.We were there for you and so we saw the African nations decide to work together – just as we have been urging them to do for the last 3 years!
Realizing that the seemingly innocuous language used by the US to create a heading that would ordinarily seem quite innocent (“foods are considered safe if they are on the market”), would mean that, in an international trade dispute, say before the WHO, the refusing (or labeling) country could be found to be creating “a barrier to trade†because they were keeping out foods that were already known to be “safe.â€
But GM foods are NOT known to be safe and are on the market in ever increasing numbers. The FDA prevents their labeling in the US and wants to do the same all over the world.
Presuming their safety once on the market might be allowable IF the US actually either established their safety (which it does not) or reviewed the safety characteristics and studies by the companies that own the patent on the food (which it does not). Therefore, just because the food is on the market in the US or elsewhere merely indicates that the FDA is such a broken institution that it has absolutely no will or ability to protect the health of the consumer or the wholesomeness of the food (or drug) supply. It is truly time to divest the FDA!
Africa got it and led the revolt that took the “safety†words out of their proposed heading!
The US Delegate, Barbara Schneeman, PhD, head of the FDA Office of Dietary Supplements, was suave at first. I assume that she assumed that the force of the US position and economic strength would carry the day as it usually does in Codex. When that did not happen, she became more and more strident until, after a dozen repetitions, she wound up petulant, red faced and with what sounded to me and to other observers, like a shaking voice.
Barbara Schneeman is probably a great neighbor and would bring you a bowl of chicken soup (with MSG and aspartame in it) if you were sick. I can hope she loves kids and may even be a very nice grandmother. She is, none the less, through her work as the US Delegate at many Codex meetings, perpetrating huge disasters on the peoples of the world (US included) through her corporate service via her employment at the FDA and her deployment by it to attend numerous Codex meetings. I have yet to hear Barbara, and hence the US, come down on the right side of any issue. I am still waiting.
Nutrients? Treat them as if they were dangerous industrial chemicals and subject them to “risk analysis” to select clinically meaningless doses that cannot be increased above. Now that one is great for Big Pharma. It will help it get much bigger since it eliminates the single greatest economic competitor to the pharmaceutical profit structure: Natural health and supplementation.
Unnatural Hormones: Treat them as if they were benign or even, absurdly, good for us, the animals raised on them and the environment suffering the ill effects of drug-laced excrement in the downstream waterways of industrial factory farms, now spreading to every country in the world for poultry raising in order to deal with ‘Avian Flu’ (of which there were 26 cases among birds, not people) in India. You see, the game is close your eyes to reality, turn around three times and yell out “avian flu” and then kill all the birds that belong to the poor peasant or subsistence farmers. Then you can put all the remaining birds indoors under the roofs of factory poultry farms and grow high tech, low taste, high drug, low safety barely edible birds. (And, speaking of hormones, the FDA is in the process of banning the use of the same hormones created by every woman’s body leaving the field clear for a monopoly of synthetic ones so dangerous that a huge US study on them was halted prematurely because of the increased risk to the women taking the synthetic hormones!)
Codex wants to let the farmers of the world know that their cows need to be treated with Monsanto’s Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH), that there is no upper limit to the amount they can use, but not tell them that their cows will become chronically ill and will need expensive and, in many places, unavailable antibiotics and other drugs, that they will not be able to use the milk they take from their animals unless they follow this and so they, like the chicken farmers before them, will be driven off the land and will be forced to gravitate to the slums of the world where abject poverty and hopelessness for themselves and their children await them in place of the independence and pride that they once had.
Overused Antibiotics ? see Hormones. Good for Big Pharma. Disaster for humanity.
Irradiation? All fruit and veggies imported into the US must be irradiated. Perhaps, and I say only “Perhaps” that does indeed kill agricultural pests.
How about all the nutrients it kills (disrupts) too, and the fact that it engenders huge populations of lipid peroxides (rancid and dangerous molecules, causing untold misery through the creation of both acute and chronic diseases and disorders) and those molecular terrorists, ‘free radicals.’ Known for decades as the source of cancer, diabetes, macular degeneration and a host of other serious diseases, this electrical terrorist steals from one neighbor to balance another nearby atom with the electron it just stole from the first. Sounds like the political process…
Irradiation increases free radical populations hugely. Free radicals are a causative agent, as I said above, in many of the world’s deadliest (and expensive) diseases.
But the FDA, although it knows this as well as it knew BEFORE IT APPROVED GARDASIL, the vaccine for girls to “prevent” cervical cancer is active (to the extent that a vaccine can act against any virus effectively) against 4 strains of HPPV which the FDA admits in its own documentation, have little or nothing to do with cervical cancer and that the vaccine actually increases cervical cancer in girls and women who receive it! Repeat: they knew the vaccine causes the cancer they claim it prevents. Dr. Mengele anyone?
Unlike even the FDA, which robs the public to pay the (Pharma/Big Food) piper (if you will allow me a mixed simile) Codex sets no upper limit on the amount of radiation a food can receive in packing, shipping, importation, processing, etc. If a little radiation is “good†a lot must be… better? Like multiple, untested vaccines?
With each go-round of irradiation, the problems in the food, the free radicals and lipid peroxidase, which have no flavor or color you can detect, get worse as the irradiation gets to a higher cumulative dose.
Health Claims? Nah, forget it. Even the provision of information which is accurate and science based cannot be given to the public. The Codex Food Labeling Committee Meeting determined in 2007, with the abundant help from the US, that any communication which gave the consumer information about what he could expect through the taking of foods (or food supplements) was to be banned as “advertising”.
Advertising is just fine when it is used for fluoridated toothpaste (Colgate commercial just seen on TV two hours ago on a French channel in this African Country: “Pour La Monde san dental caries!”, or, in English, “For the world without dental cavities” and for the unnatural Baby Formula and children’s food in Africa but apparently it’s not fine at all when it comes to health groups giving the truth to those who are interested.
No, as I told the health conscious civil servant in this developing country, the war is not over yet. And our side has just begun to fight!
Donations, including signing up for recurring donations:
Thank you,
Ralph Fucetola JD
for Dr. Laibow
To read Dr. Rima’s blog on Day One of the Ghana Codex Working Group on the Labeling of Foods Obtained from Genetic Modification/Genetic Engineering, go to: https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=512
Day Two, January 29, 2008 passed much the same way as Day One. There was a mixture of excruciating (to me) trivia intermingled with decisions that could have life and death impact on the lives of people all over the world.
As a US Citizen, I was not proud of the side that my government, through the person of the FDA’s Barbara Schneeman, consistently took. But I was proud and thrilled by the position that Norway, Japan, Russia, the EU and others consistently took in response when they defended and inserted mention of the rights of consumers to have the information they wanted against the constant pressure of the US and its allies to prevent consumer access to truthful information. (By the way, although I took verbatim notes of the 3 days, my computer will not go on line at this hotel so I do not have access to those notes right now. When I can get that computer back on line, I will post them in their entirety for you to read if you like. Some of you will find the nitty gritty of a Codex meeting fascinating, some will find it laughable. I find it both.)
See Day 1 for details of the new unilateral “background” document the US sought to use to control the event. The Working Group’s thrust was powerful to find a way to make this Background Paper an official Codex document and while other options for forward movement toward consensus would come to the floor, there was no other option presented which had so much traction or forward momentum. The other options kept flopping, as it were, off the table and gasping for air on the floor. Fish out of water.
On the afternoon of the second day, during the lunch break, the EU and other interested countries came up with some proposals to give the background paper a proper “chapeau†(French for “hatâ€) or heading. The US helped to craft a proposal for a chapeau which quickly became two chapeaux. The wording and concepts proposed by the US seemed benign enough: ‘Foods are safe when they come to market and labeling is not a substitute for safety.’ ‘This document was for the use of countries as they developed their own framework for the labeling of GM foods’ and other balsamic-sounding phrases. But if an official Codex document says that foods on the market (like GM “foodsâ€) are safe by the time they get there, then a nation keeping GM foods out because of safety concerns might be creating a barrier to trade in the eyes of the WTO, mightn’t it?
If the document was for use by Codex member countries, might the use of anything not in that document constitute a barrier to trade since this document was the one that they were supposed to be guided by in such regulations? And so on. It all sounded wonderfully friendly but, looked at from the point of view of Codex/WTO trade sanction strategy which could be used to force an end to the mandatory labeling which the US opposes so strongly, it was a very dangerous document, indeed.
Yes, the day ended with the purveyors of half truths and distortions quite satisfied.
Day 3: January 30, 2008 Africa to the Rescue!
By the time the third day dawned, things were different. Norway continued to insist that the background document preamble (the “chapeauâ€) HAD to include the fact that preferences of consumers was a reason for regulatory requirements for labeling (the labels exist to inform consumers… duh). The US continued to reject any mention of the consumer’s needs and preferences and said that they were not relevant (Hmm, if not for the consumer, why have any label… the US position is quite batty).
Norway, in the spirit of conciliation, suggested changing “consumers†to “countries†in the statement that said that their preferences were different in different places. The US objected. But so did Nigeria, one of the authors of the Background Paper. “Noâ€, said the Codex Contact Point of Nigeria, a fine lady who really cares about what she is doing at Codex. “No!†, Mrs. Eschiet repeated. “The issue here is not countries. The mandate of Codex is first to protect the health of consumers and it is consumers, not countries, who should be protected here. Let us change the word back to ‘consumers’ †she said. There was nothing the US could do at that point except to state that they did not support this wording. But the US had an even bigger surprise in store. It was just about time to get out those “queasy stomach” prescriptions that Big Pharma likes to sell by the ton.
Member nations started presenting other Codex texts that the US sponsored “background” paper had left out… fancy that, people who didn’t want to inform the consumers not informing their Codex colleagues! And then the delegates began to suggest that they be included!
They began to introduce principles from CCGP, the Codex Committee on General Principles and from other Codex documents which supported the right of countries to make their own decisions, and of consumers to make theirs through adequate information.
The US delegation appeared to become quite unhappy. Sitting where I was I could see the vigorous head-shakes and the vigorous consultations between members of the Delegation including the people from the Department of Commerce, the biotech and grocery manufacturer’s people and others on the delegation whose identify I did not learn. This is not the usual demeanor of the US delegation, to say the least.
Things got more difficult for the no-right-to-know contingent as the session progressed. It was so encouraging to see people from around the world defending the consumer’s right to know.
The Natural Solutions Foundation has long maintained that concerted effort on the part of the developing nations and those who also do not see multinational corporate interests as their own can change the direction of Codex radically. We have also maintained that if this happened, Codex might become the greatest force for health and well being on the planet that the world has ever seen. If what we saw during this meeting, particularly at the end of it, is any indication of the beginning of a trend, we are right!
At the same time, we believe that, left unchanged as a playground for the greed (and worse) of the corporate interests which the US serves in all of its dealings within Codex, the impact of that organization can be disastrous to the lives and well-being of literally billions of people.
Well, what happened today, on the last day of the deliberations of this Working Group, was a confirmation that the first outcome is, in fact, a real possibility. We have been working with developing countries reminding them that, as a group, they are incredibly powerful. Acting in concert, they can control what happens at Codex and act in their own best interest, not be dragged along to act in the best interest of the developed world and the multinational corporations. That is part of the message we have been delivering at Codex meetings in our conferences with the delegates of the developing countries and on the ground, in their home countries. That is, in fact, one of the biggest reasons that we travel to these places and meet with their decision makers. The other, of course, is to promote their use of the Codex Two Step Process so that they can protect their health and avoid crippling World Trade Organization trade sanctions at the same time.
You see, many of the African states, who understand how dangerous GM foods are and fear their impact on their people and on their land, had met and had come up with absolutely brilliant modifications to the “chapeaux†(background document heading) that the US proposed. By taking out many of the future WTO mine fields (that the no-right-to-know gang had included in the initial draft of the document) while quoting from the Codex texts to get the wording precisely correct, they created a preamble to the document that protected their choices for labeling but cut the cheese from the carefully crafted mouse trap. They left out the provision about safety, leaving open the very real possibility that a food could have been brought to market which turns out not to be safe. Other countries supported them strongly. The US said that if this modification were to be adopted by the Working Group they would not be able to support the document and reiterated this several times.
When the group showed no signs of backing down, Dr. Schneeman had what would be classified, in my professional and personal opinion, as a “hissy fitâ€. She became (literally) red in the face and complained strongly to the chair persons that all the hard work of the past year was wasted in the face of this modification and that she was personally upset. And, indeed, she sounded personally upset. In fact, we overheard one member of the US delegation saying as he walked out for a break that the US was “getting slammedâ€. Dr. Schneeman certainly appeared to be aware that she, her paper, the US position and, by my estimate, its future WTO strategy, were, indeed, getting slammed.
That is not the same thing as the American people getting slammed; in fact, if the Right to Know countries succeed, Americans will be closer to having “truthful and not misleading” food labels regarding such matters as GM status, irradiation and the like. Codes, it seems, can be a double edged sword.
As they provided support for the African position, other countries as well noted relevant Codex texts which the US/Canadian/Nigerian background document did not mention, allude to or acknowledge. Principles for safety and labeling, for Risk Assessment of GM foods and for other strategies to protect the consumer’s health were brought forward to give countries latitude to protect its people and not be assaulted legally via trade sanctions. Africa became stronger and stronger and the US lost, it seemed to me, more and more ground.
At the end, the document’s chapeaux and the document itself were left for further consideration at CCFL this coming April in Ottawa. So the battle continues.
With your continuing financial help (urgently needed, by the way – make your generous tax deductible recurring donation at the link below) we can, indeed, continue to support the emergence of these alliances which can give strength to the push back against the multinational agendas. It happened here. It can happen everywhere in Codex. We need your continued support to be able to attend the Codex food labeling committee in Ottawa, where the battle will continue.
Donate here: https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189
We had the opportunity to speak at significant intensity and length to African delegates and tell them about our International Decade of Nutrition to help them feed themselves and to help them use the Codex Two Step process to make sure that their laws and food supply support health, not profit for the corporations which will exploit them… to death. We passed out our materials, the Codex Book and “Nutricide: the DVD†– the indispensable story of what Codex is, and how it came to be. The updated version contains the special video made specifically to explain the Codex Two Step to Codex delegates. You can find them on our web site, www.healthfreedomusa.org
And some wonderful news, thanks to your support!
The Natural Solutions Foundation was told that it can expect two more official letters of invitation from two more African governments to bring not only the International Decade of Nutrition, our technology and our assistance in producing clean and abundant food to these countries, but to bring our Codex information and strategy as well. We were invited by the host country, Ghana, to the Codex Committee for Africa, CCAfrica, in 2009, a year from now.
As you may recall, we will be in Ghana for a few days and then traveling to another West African country, followed by a middle eastern one and then an East African one for exactly these purposes. We are recording it all for the Codex documentary. You can easily understand that we do not want to advertise our travel plans right now since we do not want the considerable weight of the US’ 5000 lb ‘trade gorilla†to sit on these countries before they have developed their strategy for dealing with that consequence. But there is something that I will share with you. As of today, right here, right now, we do not have enough money to complete the trip. I cannot believe, however, that you will let us down. We need your generous support and we need it now.
Donate here: https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189
• We need it to build health freedom in the US and the rest of the world.
• We need it to reclaim food for you and your brothers and sisters around the world.
• We need it to change Codex into the most potent health force the world has ever seen.
You can be sure, by the way, that as that happens, the multinationals will try to kill it.
So think carefully about how much your health freedom is worth to you. $1 per week? $10 per week? $100 per month? How about a matching grant? All of your donations to the Natural Solutions Foundation are tax deductible since we are a tax exempt 501 ( c ) (3) organization.
Donate here: https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189
Oh, yes, one other thing: if you donate $100 or more to help fund our Codex/Health Freedom Video, we’ll give you a really nice “Thank you!†in the final version of this made for TV full length documentary! There is a special link on the donation page for that. Our wonderful videographers Mary Beth and Jim are getting some excellent footage and we’ll be able to show you what it is like to be where your heath and freedom are at stake.
Thanks.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Good News From Codex
Day One: Attending the Codex Working Group on Labeling GM Foods, Accra, Ghana
January 28, 2007
The Revolt of the Health Conscious Nations…
General Stubblebine and I have been traveling for days, now, and we finally arrived in Accra to attend the Working Group on labeling of foods obtained through Genetic Modification (GM) or Genetic Engineering (GE).
First, a definition: what is GE? I have no idea. As far as I can tell, it is another term for Genetic Modification (inserting a gene into the DNA of something to make that something into something else so you can patent it and then, if you are in the US, getting the FDA [if it is food] and USDA [if it is food that now produces drugs or vaccines] to collude with you in order to pretend that it is the same as the thing that it used to be before you changed it so that you could patent it in the first place.
Of course, if it were really the same thing as it was before you messed with its genome, you would not be able to patent it and make vast profits from selling it to people who do not realize –YET – that it is bad for them and the environment). While you are at the GM/GE process, you will insert some bacterial genes, too, that are resistant to some antibiotic or other so that you can check whether your insertions have worked (spreading antibiotic resistant genes around, of course) and will probably use some other types of handy-dandy DNA, like viral stuff, for example, while you are at it. Don’t worry about the fact that bacteria pick up and share DNA, like the stuff you introduced into the food in the first place, or the antibiotic resistant gene you inserted for your laboratory convenience.
Those shared DNA bits can, of course, make ordinary, beneficial bacteria (“pro-bioticsâ€) drug resistant and their anaerobic cousins, the pathogens or disease causing ones, drug resistant, too. After all, unless you get an infection and want to have it treated with antibiotics (say, for example, Multi Drug Resistant Tuberculosis or MSRA (methycillin resistant Staph Aureus) which was apparently created in a Big Pharma lab in Europe and dumped down the sink into the sewers of the world by the same careful, caring type of lab workers who have brought you GM/GE foods.
And then, not only do the new genes do what you want, maybe, they also do things that no biological thing has ever done before and create (“code forâ€) substances in your body that no living creature has ever created before. These Franken Molecules (from Franken Foods) are the Biotech industry’s great, and to me, illegal experiment: you have not given them your signed informed consent for the great program of “Let’s see what happens when we adulterate 80% + of the American Diet with these Franken Genes and not tell anybody that they are eating them because we have convinced the FDA to declare Franken Foods administratively identical to natural ones without examining the science behind them or conducting their own tests.
We will also convince our dear friends at the FFDDA (that’s the Franken Food and Deadly Drug Administration) that they will NOT ALLOW, that’s right, NOT ALLOW, people who make foods to label food that do contain Franken Molecules. And, showing that those health friendly folks at the FDA have a great sense of humor, they indicate on their website that the issue of liability (that is, payment if you are harmed by this Franken Food, will be determined “by the Courtsâ€. Neat trick, of course, if there is no labeling since without it, there is NO traceability and therefore NO liability. By the way, according to the World Medical Association’s Helsinki Declaration, experimenting on people without fully informed, voluntary consent is a gross violation of basic Human Rights.
While the good people of the US have stood still for this (remember that fluoride in their water made the political prisoners of Stalin’s Russia so complaint that their keepers could do anything they wanted with them without their putting up a fuss), a good deal of the rest of the world has not bought into this “Better living through GM†routine.
The European Union, for example, although it imports huge amounts of GM corn and soy from the US to feed its animals (which get the foreign DNA stuck in their own genes and then transfer them to you when you eat them!) still insists that food containing GM components MUST be labeled so the consumer – that would be you if you are buying or eating food in Paris or Rome or Bratislava – can decide if they want to eat it or not. Norway believes that the right of the consumer to know what they are getting when they buy food is so compelling that the government requires that food be labeled if it has any GM ingredients.
Brazil, Japan, Russia and a host of other countries have mandatory labeling requirements for GM foods which the US opposes with all of its corporate-directed might. It has been opposing the right of countries to self-determine in this way through Codex for the best part of two decades. And in one of the most inspiring displays of national autonomy and decision making that I am aware of in Codex history, a consortium of nations have been opposing the US’s bitter battle to make sure that they can not, may not, must not, inform their consumer’s of the GM components in their food. Why? Because, as the US delegate told the assembled folks last year at the same meeting we are attending this year, the FDA’s own research and independent research both confirm that consumers will reject food if they know it is GM’d or GE’d. In fact, research all over the world shows the same thing. People instinctively know that turning food into “food†is not OK with them and they don’t want to eat it if they can help it.
The FDA wants to “protect” you from making a “bad” decision about what to put into your own body… no matter that its “concern” for us food consumers is just a cover for its real agenda; no matter it is acting contrary to US law. The US Supreme Court held in 2002 in the case of Thompson v Western States Medical Centers, “If the First Amendment means anything, it means that regulating speech must be a last – not first – resort. … We have previously rejected the notion that the Government has an interest in preventing the dissemination of truthful commercial information in order to prevent members of the public from making bad decisions with the information.” [535 U.S. 357]
More and more people also know that the foods that the FDA has administratively decided are safe is, in fact, more and more clearly dangerous in a big way. [Link to: Mae Wan Ho article]. Click here (link) to read the latest summary of why you really don’t want to eat this stuff written by a gifted and dedicated independent scientist. By the way, organic food is actually your only defense. Yes, it is more expensive but how much does cancer, auto immune disease or infertility cost?
So two years ago, at the 2005 Codex Committee on Food Labeling (CCFL) in Ottawa, the US tried something new. It proposed to CCFL that they drop the discussion totally and let countries do whatever they wanted. Its bid to compel the rest of the world to adopt its own weird (and potentially deadly) prohibition on consumer right to know about GM foods had failed miserably to attract adherents on a global basis. True, the usual cast of suspects, Argentina, Australia, Mexico, Canada, New Zealand, supported the US in dismissing the rights of consumers to know what they are eating, but more and more countries have passed what they call “mandatory labeling regulations†which say that foods MUST list their GM ingredients. Now, at first blush that might seem like a great thing. The reality is that the mandatory labeling countries realized that without some international agreement, the US could ship them whatever they wanted and they would not be able to keep it out of their countries even if, like the EU and Norway, they have the sophisticated labs necessary to detect the contamination. If they did keep it out, the World Trade Organization (WTO) could well imposed huge trade sanctions against them for creating a “Barrier to Tradeâ€.
Norway, figuratively, leaped to its feet and said, “NO! Let’s keep talking! Let’s hold a working group (semi formal group often used in Codex to work out problems which the full committee cannot seem to solve or accomplish a special task) to find what Codex loves to call “a Way Forwardâ€. Ghana agreed to co chair and so did Argentina.
A year ago next week, the Working Group session was held for 2 days in Oslo. The US was there, and so was the Natural Solutions Foundation. You may recall that the US delegate famously explained why the US forbids the labeling of GM “foods†in order to prevent consumers from knowing the truth about the food since it might lead them to reject it when they should not and therefore, said Dr. Barbara Schneeman, the truth would be “false and misleadingâ€. This year, the meeting is being held in the home country of a co-chair, Ghana. And instead of two days, it was a 3 day meeting since more time was needed. And, of course, the Natural Solutions Foundation was there representing your interests, making contacts with nations who, in turn, need to know that they have support in opposing the US and the multinational corporations in order to protect their people and their land. And, oh by the way, the world food supply is increasingly planetary. As long as “cheap” oil lasts, many of these countries are, or are about to be, food exporters so you will be eating what they produce. If it is laden with pesticides and contaminated by wandering DNA, you’ll be eating it. If it is clean and wholesome, you’ll be eating that, too.
So General Stubblebine and I left Thailand, where we were working on alliances with other like-minded people and NGOs and went to Panama to find the land for the Panama project. We found that land and if you would like to know more, and perhaps get involved, use the link below to read more.
https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=511
Then we got on a plane, had a long enough stop over in New York to have a No Forced Vaccine lunch with a group of vigorous and committed activists and then got on the plane for Ghana.
Want to know more about why forced vaccination is on your horizon and your children’s and what you can do about it? Click the link below to join the No Forced Vaccination Forum –
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/no-forced-vaccination/join
We got to Ghana and got picked up by the GIMPA Executive Hostel folks (that’s where the meeting was being held. That was the good news. The bad news was that internet was only a figment of someone’s imagination. Over the next 3 days, despite paying a lot of money (now refunded) for connection and waiting literally hours for pages to load (which they never did) there was no way for me to reach out and touch anyone (or write to you or pay bills, etc.)
What happened? Well, Day 1 was a day like all other days in Codex. The US tried mightily to control the process to the ends of its multinational friends. Among those friends were the Biotech Industry and the International Grocery Manufacturers Association whose representatives, as near as I could make out, were once again on the US delegation. The US and Canada, along with Nigeria, presented a background paper as “a Way Forward†which contained selected Codex texts to guide countries which wanted to determine their own labeling strategy (voluntary or mandatory). Although I did not have internet access in (or out of ) the meeting room and could therefore not check the cited texts or others, it seemed pretty clear to me that these three countries had rather carefully chosen just those texts which helped them in the chess game by planning several moves ahead. What chess game? The WHO tournament where the stakes are high enough to destroy the fragile economy of a developing (read “poorâ€) country. You see, it looks to me as if the US were carefully choosing only those sections which could be interpreted against a mandatory labeling country seeking to keep unlabeled US products out of their country in their “Background paper†and carefully defining things in ways which seemed benign on the surface but which were booby trapped from here to Kingdom Come once adopted.
The “Background Paper†was so useful to a variety of nations that they wanted to see it become an official Codex document (score 1 for the US). Once that happens, its contents could then be the basis for forcing countries to admit unlabeled GM foods since there a pot full of essential principles (like the protective – in this case – Precautionary Principle that says that if something is not known to be safe, you cannot use it under Codex, like any mention of how to evaluate GM foods for safety, which is weak enough in Codex but completely absent from this document, etc.)
The US modestly accepted the praise of the other states and agreed that “the Way Forward†could include getting this very lop sided document (as I see it) into the process of making it an official Codex document. It was a bit weird procedurally, I thought, to try to make things that were already part of Codex a separate Codex text, but, then, I am not in the “12-moves-ahead-get-ready-for-the-WTO-dispute-resolution-process†game.
Norway continually reminded the group that the Right of Consumers to Know was paramount and the US opposed that notion in a variety of ways. People raised safety issues and the US said that the safety issue was already settled by the time a food came to market so there was no safety issue to be considered… (!)
That’s all for now.
Rima E. Laibow, MD
PS – We are on the scene for you and your health. To be able to be here, we need your support. Please make your donation to help us bring you reports such as the above –
https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189
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Days Two and Three:
https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=513
Memorandum from Dr. Laibow
January 30, 2008
As many of you know, as we’ve been traveling around the US and the world for health and freedom, we’ve been looking for places where we can demonstrate the benefits of natural solutions. We’re working with people in countries such as Thailand, India and several African countries on advanced natural remedies, increased farm production and similar projects. Along the way, we visited the famed Valley of the Ancients in Ecuador, where many inhabitants live to very old age and have explored the Vulcan Baru temperate forests of the Panama – Costa Rico border area. We’re hoping to find the right place to establish our ARC – our Advanced Renewal Community. This project will demonstrate natural solutions to food (better than organic), energy (off the grid) and health (a advanced wellness center) in an intentional community setting.
I have wonderful news for all of us! We found THE land, not just land, but THE land. Yesterday, I wrote a list of the things that we need the land to be:
High altitude
Cool micro climate
Decent access road
Water on the land which does not dry up
Never had pesticides or other chemicals on the land
Virgin soil with outstanding fertility
Astonishing, heart-lifting vistas
Neighbors who do not use pesticides to eliminate the possibility of drift
Borders on a National Forest to prevent development
Reasonable price
Secluded location
We have seen a number of places but none that met most, let alone all, of our requirements. Until today, that is! The land is verdant and full of wonderful, rich greens… a high altitude (4,000 to over 5,000 feet above rising sea level…) temperate forest with a very pleasant climate.
Here’s what happened last week: Our contractor/local guru Kenneth is back in town and has been helping us a great deal. He found a person with land who said that his cousin had land and showed us what the land would look like by taking us to the other side of the mountain range where his cousin’s land is located and asking if we liked what we saw. We loved it. It was high (at least 4000 feet), verdant and beautiful, so we said that we wanted to go see the actual finca (farm) the next day.
The next day was everything we could have imagined. Julio, the man with the cousin with the finca, met us in at the base of the access road to the finca and we got into a 4 wheel drive vehicle to make the climb. And climb we did! By the time we got to the base of the finca, we were at 4007 feet according to Steven’s altimeter. We changed 4 wheel drive trucks and went on up the first hill of the finca. It is spread over all or part of 5 mountains which are either pastures which have been used to graze cattle but never treated with herbicides (unlike the first piece we saw) or wooded areas of magnificent trees or, on a small protion, an organic coffee plantation. Backing it, at its rear boundary, is a Panamanian National Forest: no worries about development here. On the first flat area, there is a docile herd of bulls which really did not want to give us the right of way but the horn on the truck
convinced them to saunter off.
Moving along, we saw magnificent slopes and heard the gurgle of a river/stream. In the rainy season, it is a river. In the dry season, just beginning it is a considerable stream. It arises just above the land in a waterfall and falls down in more water falls to a steep gorge which it has created when it is in spate during the rainy season. The sound is lovely. It is crystal clear and, after we test it, I will be willing to kneel by its side and drink from if. After we test it. The potential for hydro-power is very real.
So we walked with the mountains and pastures at our left side and the river valley on our right. Across the river valley is another set of hills rising up with either trees or pastures on them. In one of the photos, when you look closely, you can see a horizontal line that might be a road. It is. It is about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way up the hill in front of you. That is the upper limit of the property on that hill but it goes to the top of the hill on the left and the one on the right. Again, the land is brilliant greens and not at all dry!
So we climbed up a short way again and found ourselves in the most magnificent grove of old growth trees on the side of the river. There are some coffee plants there which are organic. We learned today that coffee grown lower than a certain elevation gets fungi and pests and that is why it is fumigated and pesticide. Coffee at this elevation, however, is immune to these hazards and does not need to be sprayed with chemicals. Oh, a correction: there is a small amount of coffee plantation lower down which has been fumigated. We will tear it out. The flat area where the bulls were hanging out (about 7 hectares or 17.5 acres) is a great place for us to begin the organic + farm and farm school. The Panama Organic Growers are wonderful people and we expect to have a great cooperative relationship with them.
The grove could be almost anything and the sites for community and individual houses are varied and beautiful, allowing many different construction possibilities. There is ample sun, wind and, with the cooperation of the neighbors from whom we will buy the land (a very high possibility: more about that later), there is a huge hydraulic head which can power hydroelectric when the dry season reduces the flow of water in the river. There are also two springs that rise on the land and do not go dry, but they are rather scanty right now.
One of the mountains includes property on the other side of the ridge and, in fact, has a wide, flat area on the top. We were promised that the views would be astonishing.
We got back into the 4 wheel drive truck and headed off for a 10 minute ride. (There are two dimensions to time and space in Panama: everything is either 10 minutes or 2 kilometers. This was both. So off we went. However, the presence of a very big tree across the road meant that we had to get out and walk. The road would have been fine for a 4 wheel drive car. For us, it was easy walking but went up and up and up and up and up…. By the time we had been walking for at least 30 minutes, I had no more stamina to continue because I have not been at the top of my form physically with all the traveling we’ve had to do (I am fine, just tired) so I said that I would go back down while the others continued. You see, I knew what was up there. I had seen it in a dream that morning and had total certainty of what was up there. So the others went up and I went down and started to meditate. The result of that was very positive for me in the context of what we were considering: buying this land.
When Bert, leading the others, came down, he showed me the pictures he had taken of the vistas (I will mount them on forum when I can) and I was not surprised to see exactly what I had seen in my dream. That gets your notice. It sure got mine and, I dare say, Bert’s.
In a nut shell, the vistas are breathtaking. You can see Volcan Baru and its mountain range. You can see the Pacific Ocean. They are in different directions. Imagine what it is like. You can see the ranges of mountains as they march to the horizon. You can see the clouds and the blue sky. You can see to the end of the known world. And the air and light are truly magnificent.
The finca is owned by a young man named Carlos. When Kenneth said that Bert was a General and I was a doctor practicing Natural Medicine and that we were “concerned with developments in the US”, Carlos said, “They should be! The US is poisoning the air to poison the people to give the pharmaceutical companies more profit!” So he gets it I didn’t have to rant even a little bit!
He also, along with his mother, who owns the rest of the 300 Hectares from which our 100 hectares will be sold, is a land preservationist, conservationist and organic farmer. Nice neighbors. When he heard what we were doing, he got very interested and said that he would like to help in any way possible.
Incredible find. By the way, the elevation goes from 4007 to 5707 feet. The climate is eternal spring. The name of the area, Santa Clara, can be translated as Sacred Light…
Now for the nitty gritty: They offered the land to another group for $30,000 per hectare because they did not want to sell it to them! The price they are asking of us is $15,000 per Hectare but they may come down a bit more, maybe $12,000 per hectare or perhaps a little lower. The land will thus cost about $1.2 Million (or perhaps a bit less) and the infrastructure (roads, electric cables, internet cables, water pipes, etc.) is estimated very
roughly to cost about 3 to 4 Million (but could be somewhat less) The money we have to raise works this way: Stage 1: 10% of purchase price (approximately $120,000) Stage 2: Remaining 90% to purchase land Infrastructure can either be paid for by funds we raise or by loans from the bank once we own the land. We will be able to raise approximately 40% of the purchase price of the land as a loan. Clearly, it is better to self fund.
The way purchase is done here is as follows: we put up 10% of the agreed upon price (let us say we agree to $1.2 Million US). That means we put up $120,000 as earnest money. We tell them that we need, say 120 days to make our arrangements. During that time, according to the contract, we have the soil tested, the water tested, any borings for footings, etc., that we need, we make sure that the boundaries are as represented, we test the aquafer, we make sure that the title is clear, etc., etc. If everything checks out, then we are responsible to give them the rest of the money and the land is ours. If things do not check out, then we get our money back. If we fail to come up with the rest of the money, we either loose all of our deposit or half of it, depending on the contract. Obviously, we need to be serious about doing his if we put down the earnest money.
I need to hear from anyone who is interested in moving forward with this project. We are looking for an Angel or two and know that our Angel is out there, in cyberspace. There has been some excellent discussion during the week here in Panama of questions that we have not yet covered. Later I will try to post a summary of these discussions on the forum. If we are, in fact, interested in this project in a real way, we need to hammer out any questions we have and find the answers. We also need to commit to either financial capital in multiples of $50K Beneficial Interest Shares or social capital or a combination of both to allow us to buy this land, build its infrastructure and create the community we have talked about.
There is real time pressure on this. Americans and other people are crawling over this area to buy land before the value shoots up like Boquete, 30 minutes south of here (a town that has about 20% of its inhabitants from the US.
This really is, according to my best judgment, and Bert’s, a phenomenal opportunity. I hope you choose to make this your reality, too! If you want to be invited to join our NSF-Panama Yahoo!Group forum, please email me at dr.laibow@gmail.com and put “PANAMA” in the subject line.
Rima Laibow, MD