In the Case against Sugar, Science Journalist Gary Taubes talks about Endocrine Disruptors, Empty Calories and the link between the rise in diabetes and obesity and the adoption of a western diet.
Endocrine Disruptors increase your family’s cancer risk and can be found in practically everything from plastic wrapping to Monsanto’s controversial Roundup Glyphosate pesticide of which traces can be found in supermarket fruit, vegetables, and processed foods.
But as there isn’t a fully fledged government in Berlin right now, Chancellor Merkel’s acting Agriculture Minister Christian Schmidt was able to vote to renew the EU licence behind Merkel and SPD Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks’ back.
Despite being politically toxic only 18 months ago it somehow sneaked through and so the enormous German resistance to TTIP & pesticides finally came to nothing.
It shouldn’t feel that weird to see Germany voting to kill people — when it comes to chemical weapons, they wrote the book.
But that’s not to say no-one else tried :
Better Living Through Chemistry
Du Pont’s Slogan “Better Living Through Chemistry” was co-opted by DJ Norman Cook aka Fatboy Slim whose fans popped countless chemicals including MDMA, Cocaine, Ketamine and Ecstasy. .
Bayer
German mega-corporation Bayer are in the middle of buying up US-owned Monsanto.
Under the IG Farben label they made Zyglon B, the gas used by the Nazis in the Gas Chambers.
Zyglon B was originally just another pesticide — invented by Fritz Haber’s research group at the IG Farben-owned Degecsh pest control company.
Fritz Haber was German, originally of Jewish background, and won the 1918 Nobel Prize for chemistry for his invention of the Haber-Bosch process which was used for both fertilisers and chemical weapons.
Immerwahr was the first woman in Germany to obtain a PhD in Chemistry. She contributed to Haber’s work but was a pacifist and woman’s rights activist.
She committed suicide in 1915 apparently upset about the role her husband played in overseeing the killing of thousands of soldiers in Belgium in the first known use of chemical weapons as a weapon of mass destruction.
Many of Monsanto and Bayer’s pesticide products double up as chemical weapons.
In the 1930s, chemists working for the German company Bayer discovered the highly poisonous properties of organophosphate compounds. By then, Bayer had already merged with BASF, Hoechst and other companies to form
the huge chemical conglomerate I.G. Farben; today Bayer is poised to become the worlds largest manufacturer of herbicides and pesticides and a leading source of genetically engineered seed varietieswith its recent takeover of the biotech giant Aventis CropScience. (Aventis is the company responsible for the Starlink variety of insecticidal GE corn, which was never approved for human consumption and thus forced the recall of some 300 name-brand processed food products during 2000-01.) As all of German industry became absorbed into the growing Nazi war machine, Bayers organophosphate compounds were developed simultaneously
as agricultural pesticides and as nerve gases for military use.
Agriculture — War by Other Means
Back in 1998, the Economist didn’t hide it’s enthusiasm for Better Living Through Chemistry.
The EU is still trying to limit its citizens’ exposure to Endocrine Disruptors but given the enormous food and agriculture industry lobby, the path has been rocky.
EU plan to Regulate Endocrine Disruptors
Some progress was reported last week, but it’s far too early to celebrate.
All this talk of chemistry, the military, and the clown like approach to information management reminds me of another international laughing stock from way back in 2003: Ali Hassan Al-Majid aka Chemical Ali
Sweet Home Alabama
According to the Times, Tate & Lyle switched out of its historic sugar operation in 2010 and now focuses on developing new products including sweeteners, many of which are made in Alabama and delivered to Mexico to go into soft drinks.
Tate & Lyle diversified into biomaterials in 2007. They currently specialise in plastics, biofuel and processed foods.
It looks as though, as usual, they are using the same chemicals for both purposes. All of which seem to have an endocrine disruption / metabolic disorder inducing aspect.
Maybe David Davis’s old firm has had a hand in giving Theresa May type 1 diabetes, a metabolic disorder that can be brought on by poor diet.
The chemicals mentioned in their wikipedia entry include:
Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism & Lipid Research
This whole Brexit thing is starting to look like a game of Endocrinopoly.
Capital Without Borders
Brooke Harrington’s excellent 2016 book, Capital Without Borders, about the world of Trust and Estate Professionals reminds us that there is more to Brexit than pesticides and sugar.
Next month former President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso will speak at a Financial Times conference on the Business of Luxury in Lisbon (see bottom of image below).
Barroso’s Lisbon speech will be in stark contrast to his role as Chairman of the UEFA Foundation for Children, designed to help underprivileged kids around the world.
Football can play crucial role in integration of children in society. Honoured to be Chairman of the UEFA Foundation For Children @UEFA
The May speaking engagement is much more in line with his role as Chairman of another organisation — the mega-powerful US Investment Bank for the Ultra Ultra High Net Worth: Goldman Sachs aka Government Sachs aka the Vampire Squid.
Goldman was first labelled the Vampire Squid, due to their parasitic nature, in this 2010 Matt Taibbi article for Rolling Stone Magazine:
The conflict of interests have not gone unnoticed:
@JMDBarroso Crucial role?? @UEFA is just as corrupt as the #FIFA and just as corrupt as you are now working for the corrupt #GoldmanSachs
— 1 tribe of diversity (@UniversalMinded) July 16, 2016
Barroso was severely criticised for joining a bank that had so mercilessly profited from destabilising the Euro, particularly through its dealings with Greece, only 20 months after leaving the top job in European politics..
Revolving Door
Tony Blair received some stick for working for JP Morgan after leaving office.
And Mario Draghi, current head of the European Central Bank was at Goldman while they were making mega profits out of hiding Greece’s debt from the Greek public and from the ECB itself.
At yesterday’s press conference May talked about NATO and ISIS but chose not to mention the bonfire of rights and regulations and the deeper privatisation of NHS services and imminent entry of GM food, pesticides, cloned meat and growth hormones in UK supermarkets if Britain increases trade with America.
The Prime Minister talked about family ties and kinship when referring to the Special Relationship with the US but conveniently forgot, despite posing in front of the Churchill bust, that Churchill was passionately pro EU and that the English language that Britain apparently shares with the USA is derived from French, German and Scandinavian countries that happen to also be in the EU.
Allowing deeper co-operation with the US is a great idea on many levels but at what price? Allowing free movement of workers between the UK and the US could be even more catastrophic for public services than the unpreparedness with which UK allowed almost unlimited EU expansion and other commitments from 2004.
Just as Trump has banned citizens from poorer Muslim countries from seeking political asylum in the US, UK is now telling Trump how important it is to have a strong EU and NATO while telling EU citizens they’re no longer welcome.
So May gets Trump to help her stop EU citizens working in the UK and begs Turkey to stop victims of Islamic extremism and various bombing campaigns from living and working in the EU.
Looks like we’re going back to the same Ronnie and Maggie hypocritical neo-liberal logic of supporting Israeli and South African Apartheid while telling Communist countries to tear down walls and open up in the name of freedom.
Sir Michael Fallon has been unmasked as one of the UK’s biggest security threats.
The FT has dug up a document addressed to the Defence Minister by General Sir Richard Barrons, the recently-retired head of the country’s Joint Forces Command, in which Fallon was told “There is no military plan to defend the UK in a conventional conflict.”
But instead of directly responding to this weekend’s revelations, Fallon has taken the rather bizarre step of claiming the UK will block an EU army for as long as it remains a member.
It’s hard to imagine why Fallon would not be ok with an EU Army that fights ISIS and patrols EU borders.
He says that NATO already looks after this.
It is known that Fallon has had substantial dealings with the private sector over the years.
Questions now have to be asked about Fallon’s judgement, his loyalty to the country, and his personal business interests.
Is he simply feathering his own nest or, like with Zac Goldsmith in the 2016 London mayoral election, could it be that he has gone completely insane?
In this radio interview after the London Mayoral election, Fallon refuses to backtrack on his comments that London Mayor Sadiq Khan is a security threat who ought not to be trusted with Londoners’s safety:
Until he addresses these fears, widespread concern that Sir Michael Fallon may have become the single biggest security threat to the UK looks increasingly justified.
Two groups of EU countries are banding together to call for stricter internal and external border controls and an end to austerity at the first full post-Brexit EU meeting in Bratislava on Friday.
Club Med
Last Friday in Athens, the Club Med Countries told German Chancellor Angela Merkel that austerity is killing the EU and that they want stronger border control to deal with the ‘Migrant Crisis’.
Tax-avoidance-as-a-service (TAAAS) is Dublin’s most famous export.
The Irish government long ago designed Irish law to allow global corporations to split, funnel,and park their profits to avoid paying tax on most of their global profits.
Whoever pays the bills around Dublin likes things as they are.
Yes, a country — as a customer — can be sued by a company.
In that sense Holland — like London — are a bit like a global bailiff.
They want corporations to go ‘treaty shopping’ and arrange their legal affairs to be able to sue countries from Amsterdam.
Visegrad Group
Meanwhile, the Visegrad Group are calling for further recognition of distinct national identities, borders, and Christianity in the face of the ‘migrant crisis’.
Having transitioned from Communism to the neo-liberal market state it looks like many are interested in revisiting the age before communism in which countries were grouped together as empires under a strong leader.
Andrew Marr wrote a piece about the Visegrad Group in the Sunday Times yesterday. All a bit scary!
Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.
Handing €1.1 trillion of public money to ANONYMOUS bankers with no publicly available audit trail is an act so corrupt as to be beyond comprehension.
Yet that is what has happened to residents of that well known museum — the European Union.
Inventing Money
The European Central Bank, owner of the world’s third biggest money printing machine — behind the Federal Reserve’s and the People’s Bank of China’s — has already printed and distributed the best part of a trillion Euros to private financial institutions in exchange for various bonds over a two year period.
In November 2014 just as they started what became known as their Quantitative Easing (ECB QE) programme, I asked them to publicly state exactly which bonds they were printing money to buy.
Seeing as they were spending billions of euros of public money per month during a time of extreme austerity – it felt normal that EU citizens be told how the money was being spent.
Disclosure
The only information the public had been told at that time was that the ECB were buying repackaged bank loans (Covered Bonds) and Asset Backed Securities (ABSs) in order to stop deflation and maintain inflation at 2%.
But the question remains: What happened to the money?
Groupthink
Bizarrely the woman who runs the European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, has a reputation for being a fair-minded adjudicator.
This week the Irish papers portrayed O’Reilly as a friend of transparency who had rebuked the Irish Central Bank and the ECB for not publishing their correspondence during the Irish Bailouts of 2010.
If only those newspapers had known how O’Reilly has sided with commercial confidentiality and non-disclosure of the multibillion Euro QE recipients.
O’Reilly ruled in favour of the ECB without once consulting me — the complainant — to find out why I had brought the case or to let me challenge the groupthink logic of her flawed judgment.
Too little, too late
Ironically on the date of the ruling (18th July 2016) the ECB itself announced that another slice of its QE programme, the Corporate Bond Purchase Programme, would publish its ISIN codes.
This is a screenshot of the paywalled Financial Times story with the announcement about the new stance on ISIN codes.
How funny that I had to wait 18 months to get a definitive ‘no’ on receiving the ISIN codes for the Covered Bond and ABS QE programme, only for the Corporate Bond Purchase Programme to publish its ISIN codes on the very same day.
A Pyrrhic Victory perhaps?
Time will Tell.
Corruptissima respublica, plurimae leges
The most corrupt state, the most laws – Tacitus
My feeling is that the ECB don’t want to the public to know how much they are protecting the very same German financiers that benefited from the ECB’s imposition of austerity, deregulation and privatisation policies in southern Europe.
Just as the IRA and Baader Meinhoff are known for their politically inspired terror campaigns in the 1970s so has Deutsche Pfandbriefe exported financial terrorism throughout Europe from its tax avoiding, financial engineering Dublin Headquarters as of the early 2000’s when it re-domiciled to save cash.
ECB QE and commercial confidentiality for public money are the very definition of double standards and, in this case, perpetuate the myth that North Europeans are honest and that everyone else is corrupt.
I appreciate that this is not something many people are willing to accept – such is the scale of our programming.
Just as with PPP / PFI in the UK, commercial confidentiality and financial engineering remain the respectable face of corporate fascism and fraud.
Jeremy Corbyn delighted Remain Boss, Roland Rudd, with his multiple TV appearances & speeches in the run-up to the EU referendum vote.
Rudd admitted this on Bloomberg TV two days before the vote.
The exact quote is at 3m 37s:
Yet Angela Eagle, Hillary Benn, Chuka Umunna, & Seema Malhotra have repeatedly claimed Corbyn did not do enough.
They can’t all be right.
Iraq Cover Up
So many Labour MPs voted for the Iraq war, Tuition Fees, and for airstrikes on Syria — they all wanted Corbyn out of the way before last week’s Chilcot Iraq Inquiry.
Therefore ‘Blairites’ blame Corbyn for their own inability to defend the EU.
Disdain for Democracy
New Labour’s disdain for democracy becomes clearest when nominating successors.
Coming up with a challenger to Corbyn, has put them in total disarray.
Indecision
How ironic that — given their individual ambition — New Labour dinosaurs are incapable of leadership or collective decision-making.
What Next?
What will they do next to persuade the country to vote for them?
More Project Fear?
No Charisma
Angela Eagle is an experienced parliamentarian but has no charisma and was never more than a junior minister.
Stitch-Up
Her wooden PMQ’s performance in December 2015 against the equally wooden George Osborne was obviously stage-managed with both sides’s lines seemingly written by the same team.
Perhaps a clue lies in the fact that Angela Eagle shared the same Pro-EU platform with Roland Rudd’s sister Amber Rudd in the week before the Referendum.
Paxo blissfully unaware of the media and especially Newsnight’s role in all this. 
Check out Clive’s case. It’s shocking!
Breitbart 
KPBS Public Media 
www.spiegel.de 
the Guardian 
www.thetimes.co.uk 
Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism & Lipid Research 
The Atlantic 
Rolling Stone 
POLITICO 
Virgin.com 
WSJ 
The Independent 
independent 
London Conversation 
