October 3, 2011
Contact: Glenn Turner, 917-817-3396
glenn@ripplestrategies.com
Corn vs. Sugar Industries Legal Battle Heats Up Over “High Fructose Corn Syrup” Name Change
New Website FoodIdentityTheft.com Provides Background for Reporters and Consumers
Expert Legal Spokesperson Available For Interviews
WASHINGTON, October 3, 2011 High-Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is a man-made sweetener used in thousands of grocery store products and it has a serious image problem. Consumers are avoiding it. Food companies are taking it out of the products they make. Some supermarkets have banned it. Demand for this highly-processed ingredient is falling fast.
The Corn Refiners Association comprised of corporations that make HFCS -decided that changing the name was a way to fix this problem. They are petitioning the FDA so that HFCS can legally be called “corn sugar” and ultimately just “sugar². An official decision hasn¹t yet been made, but in 2008 the Corn Refiners Association began a $50 million dollar marketing campaign labeling HFCS as ³corn sugar². They are now being sued by a group of sugar farmers and refiners who believe the name change will confuse consumers and harm the sugar industry.
To better understand the Palestinian bid for membership in the United Nations, it is important to understand the original 1947 U.N. action on Israel-Palestine.
The common representation of Israel’s birth is that the U.N. created Israel, that the world was in favor of this move, and that the U.S. governmental establishment supported it. All these assumptions are demonstrably incorrect.
In reality, while the U.N. General Assembly recommended the creation of a Jewish state in part of Palestine, that recommendation was non-binding and never implemented by the Security Council.
Second, the General Assembly passed that recommendation only after Israel proponents threatened and bribed numerous countries in order to gain a required two-thirds of votes.
Third, the U.S. administration supported the recommendation out of domestic electoral considerations and took this position over the strenuous objections of the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon.
The passage of the General Assembly recommendation sparked increased violence in the region. Over the following months the armed wing of the pro-Israel movement, which had long been preparing for war, perpetrated a series of massacres and expulsions throughout Palestine, implementing a plan to clear the way for a majority-Jewish state.
It was this armed aggression, and the ethnic cleansing of at least three-quarters of a million indigenous Palestinians, that created the Jewish state on land that had been 95 percent non-Jewish prior to Zionist immigration and that even after years of immigration remained 70 percent non-Jewish. And despite the shallow patina of legality its partisans extracted from the General Assembly, Israel was born over the opposition of American experts and of governments around the world, who opposed it on both pragmatic and moral grounds.
Phi Beta Iota: The specifics demonstrate with great clarity that at the time the U.S. Government had intelligence but lacked integrity. Today the U.S. Government lacks both intelligence and integrity. Electoral Reform is the sole possible demand that can resolve the crisis of US democracy and US capitalism run amok–inverted into velvet theatrical facism.
How Real is Versailles on the Potomac?
Chuck Spinney, 11 October 2011
Barcelona, Catalunya
I began using the phrase Versailles on the Potomac in the late 1990s as a metaphor for the ‘let-them-eat-cake’ politics of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex or MICC. The MICC’s pervasive practices of front loading and political engineering evolved insensibly during the Cold War to create a dysfunctional majority faction in the Congress that undermined the checks and balances of the Constitution by gradually transferring Congress’s power of the purse to the President. By 1990, it was clear the insatiable greed of MICC would prevent a sensible adaptation to the end of the Cold War.1 In my view, which I think has been borne out by events, the MICC’s greed not only undermined our nation’s adaptation to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but drove the United States into a reckless policy of adventurism and war warmongering, a policy that benefitted a few at the expense of the many. I summed up this viewpoint last January in my essay, The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War, which is also the first chapter in the Defense Labyrinth, a short handbook written by insiders to help interested citizens understand how the Pentagon really operates.2
Fast forward to the fall of 2011: The economic crash that began in 2007, the government's response to it, and the moral collapse of a one of the most promising presidents in American history make it clear that the metaphor Versailles on the Potomac should not have been limited to the MICC, because the MICC is but one thread in a larger fabric of degenerate political mutation. Since the late 1970s, democratic governance in the United States has been mutating into what can now be characterized as an intolerant neo-fascist oligarchy, where an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth is destroying the American middle class by enriching a tiny minority with unprecedented wealth. It is also clear that this super-rich minority is using its wealth to entrench and perpetuate its power by destroying our traditional institutions.
Think my statement is a little too wild?
Read the essay Debt and Dumb, published by the current issue of Vanity Fair. The authors, Simon Johnson and James Kwak, are hardly radicals,3 but they end their essay on in the same place: on the larger question of the ongoing political mutation of the United States into a Versailles on the Potomac.
Are the current demonstrations triggered by the Occupy Wall Street movement, and more importantly, the Oligarchy's hysterical reaction to them, in any way indicative of pre-revolutionary instabilities similar to those that emerged spontaneously in France during the late 18th Century?
Only time will tell, but massive forces may be afoot, and if they are afoot, they may well spin out of control.
1 James Madison explained the dangers of a majority faction in Federalist #10, where he laid out the logic of the system of checks and balances in the design of the Constitution. My pamphlet, Defense Power Games (1990), explained how the gaming strategies evolved by the MICC during the Cold War undermined these checks and balances and explained why the end of the Cold War would not result in a real peace dividend.
2 Defense Labyrinth was written by 10 pentagon insiders, retired military officers and specialists with over 400 years of defense experience and is available free of charge in pdf format, downloaded here or here.
3 They are editors of the influential financial blog, The Baseline Scenario. Johnson is a professor at MIT and a former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund.<
Phi Beta Iota: A tough read, getting through it twice confirms that the US Government and its ability to borrow are of concern to the 1% only in relation to their selfish interests. There is a chasm between those that pay taxes and those that steal their tax funds so great as to warrant a revolution.See Also:
It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.
And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.
Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.
Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.
September 2006. Violence levels are spiking in Iraq. Every day brings reports of more suicide bombings, more IEDs, more death and destruction. So bad has it gotten that the Washington Post reveals that a senior Marine intelligence officer has concluded “that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there.”
This was the situation when I was among a dozen conservative pundits escorted into the Oval Office for a chat with President George W. Bush. I asked him why he didn't change a strategy that was clearly failing. He replied that he had no intention of micromanaging the war like Lyndon Johnson, who was said to have personally picked bombing targets in Vietnam. This commander in chief vowed to respect the judgment of his chain of command.
Phi Beta Iota: Full text with added links below the line. This review and the book are largely crap. Viet-Nam was lost for two reasons: because all historical and indigenous influences were for the residents and against the occupiers; and because the US Government was corrupt and was in direct support of a Catholic mandarin and his sister who took corruption, torture, and exploitation of a Buddhist et all land to new heights. The review misses two of the most important books on the matter, one, Triumph Foresaken that supports the “we could have won” argument, the other, Who the Hell Are We Fighting? that makes it clear that the corruption of intelligence and the corruption of military and political planning were at the heart of America's failure in Viet-Nam. Westmoreland was not a bad man, but he represented–as most Army leaders do today–the orthodox, the West Point Protective Association, the Army above Republic, the “go along to get along,” and of course the toxic brew of “leadership” that is arrogant, inattentive, poorly educated, and not at all concerned about the welfare or their troops. In the US Army today, “education” is for show or ticket punching, not to actually learn anything useful to the future.
First I met with Alexa O'Brien, one of the brilliant minds behind U.S. Day of Rage and its focus on Electoral Reform and non-violence as an absolute. [My memo that Fox news still has not read is here.]
Although they are also focused on a Constitutional Convention, as Lawrence Lessig has been, I reiterated the point that Electoral Reform is the one thing that can be demanded today (no later than 6 November, one year prior to Election Day), with severe consequences for every elected person if Congress fails to pass Electoral Reform by President's Day (February 2012), to include recall or impeachment, and camp-outs at their offices and in public spaces near their homes through to Election Day 2012.
This morning, Mitt Romney used his foreign policy address at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina to criticize what he called the Obama administration's “feckless policies of the last three years.”
“I believe we are an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in the world,” Romney said, with an audience of cadets sitting behind him. “Not exceptional, as the president has derisively said, in the way that the British think Great Britain is exceptional or the Greeks think Greece is exceptional. In Barack Obama’s profoundly mistaken view, there is nothing unique about the United States.”
Romney criticized the president on cutting the defense budget, as well. “I will reverse President Obama’s massive defense cuts,” he said. “I will begin reversing Obama-era cuts to national missile defense and prioritize the full deployment of a multilayered national ballistic missile defense system.”
