US Plots Conquest of Venezuela in Wake of Chavez' Death

Chavez, Beyond the Caricatures

By Tony Cartalucci

March 07, 2013 "Information Clearing House" - (LD) - US corporate-financier funded think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), declared in its "post-Chávez checklist for US policymakers," that the US must move quickly to reorganize Venezuela according to US interests.  Upon its checklist were "key demands":  

• The ouster of narco-kingpins who now hold senior posts in government 
• The respect for a constitutional succession 
• The adoption of meaningful electoral reforms to ensure a fair campaign environment and a transparent vote count in expected presidential elections; and 
• The dismantling of Iranian and Hezbollah networks in Venezuela 

In reality, AEI is talking about dismantling entirely the obstacles that have prevented the US and the corporate-financier interests that direct it, from installing a client regime and extracting entirely Venezuela's wealth while obstructing, even dismantling the progress and geopolitical influence achieved by the late President Hugo Chavez throughout South America and beyond.   

The AEI "checklist" continues by stating:  

Now is the time for US diplomats to begin a quiet dialogue with key regional powers to explain the high cost of Chávez’s criminal regime, including the impact of chavista complicity with narcotraffickers who sow mayhem in Colombia, Central America, and Mexico.  Perhaps then we can convince regional leaders to show solidarity with Venezuelan democrats who want to restore a commitment to the rule of law and to rebuild an economy that can be an engine for growth in South America.

 
Of course, by "Venezuelan democrats," AEI means Wall Street-backed proxies like Henrique Capriles Radonski and his Primero Justicia (Justice First) political front, two entities the Western media is already gearing up to support ahead of anticipated elections.  


West Has Positioned Proxies to Strip Venezuela to the Bones After Chavez' Passing

Primero Justicia (Justice First) was co-founded by Leopoldo Lopez and Julio Borges, who like Radonski, have been backed for nearly a decade by the US State Department.  Primero Justicia and the network of foreign-funded NGOs that support it have been recipients of both direct and indirect foreign support for at least just as long.  



Image:  US State Department document (archived) illustrating the role National Endowment for Democracy (NED)-funded NGOs play in supporting US-backed opposition figures in Venezuela.  The US regularly fails to transparently list who is included in extensive funding NED provides opposition groups in Venezeula, so documents like this give a rare glimpse into the names and dynamics actually involved.  As was suspected, NED money is going into networks providing support for current presidential candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonski.   In this particular document, NED-funded Sumate's legal trouble is described in relation to its attempted defense of Radonski.  At the time this document was written, Radonski was in jail pending trial for his role in facilitating the 2002 US-backed failed coup against President Hugo Chavez.  The document may still be online at the US State Department's official website here.  


All three co-founders are US educated - Radonski having attended New York's Columbia University (Spanish), Julio Borges attending Boston College and Oxford (Spanish), and Leopoldo Lopez who attended the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (KSG), of which he is considered an alumni of (and here).  

The Harvard Kennedy School, which hosts the notorious Belfer Center, includes the following faculty and alumni of Lopez, co-founder of the current US-backed opposition in Venezuela:

John P. Holdren, Samantha Power, Lawrence Summers, Robert Zoellick, (all as faculty), as well as Ban Ki-Moon ('84), Paul Volcker ('51), Robert Kagan ('91), Bill O'Reilly ('96), Klaus Schwab ('67), and literally hundreds of senators, ambassadors, and administrators of Wall Street and London's current global spanning international order.  Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (KSG) is clearly one of several universities that form the foundation of both creating corporate-financier driven globalist-international policy, as well as cultivating legions of administrators to execute it.  

To understand fully the implications of Lopez' education it helps to understand the leadership and principles guiding Harvard's mission statements, best exemplified by KSG' Belfer Center, which to this day, lends its public support to Lopez and his Primero Justicia opposition party.   

Image: John P. Holdren (bearded, left), an advocate for population reduction through forced sterilization overseen by a "planetary regime," is just one of many "colorful" characters to be found within the halls of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government from which Primero Justicia co-founder Leopoldo Lopez of Venezuela graduated.  To this day, KSG provides forums in support of US-backed opposition bids at seizing power in Venezuela.


Named after Robert Belfer of the Belco Petroleum Corporation and later, director of the failed Enron Corporation, the Belfer Center describes itself as being "the hub of the Harvard Kennedy School's research, teaching, and training in international security affairs, environmental and resource issues, and science and technology policy." Robert Belfer still sits in as an International Council Member.   

Belfer's director, Graham Allison provides an example of self-serving corporatism steering US policy.  He was a founder of the Trilateral Commission, a director of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a consultant to the RAND Corporation, Director of the Getty Oil Company, Natixis, Loomis Sayles, Hansberger, Taubman Centers, Inc., and Belco Oil and Gas, as well as a member of the advisory boards of Chase Bank, Chemical Bank, Hydro-Quebec, and the shady International Energy Corporation, all according to his official Belfer Center bio.   

Other questionable personalities involved as Belfer alumnus are Goldman Sachs, CFR member, and former-World Bank president Robert Zoellick.  Sitting on the board of directors is CFR member and former Goldman Sachs consultant, Ashton Carter.  There is also former director of Citigroup and Raytheon, former Director of Central Intelligence and CFR member John Deutch, who required a pardon by Clinton to avoid prosecution over a breach of security while fumbling his duties at the CIA.  Meanwhile, Nathaniel Rothschild of Atticus Capital and RIT Capital Partners, Paul Volcker of the Federal Reserve, and former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff all serve as Belfer Center's "advisers."  

Last but not least, there is John P. Holdren, also a Council on Foreign Relations member, science adviser to both President Clinton and President Obama, and co-author with Paul Ehrilich, of the now notorious "Ecoscience." When Holdren isn't brand-building for "Climate Disruption," he is dreaming of a Malthusian fueled totalitarian global government that forcibly sterilizes the world's population.  He feared, erroneously, that overpopulation would be the end of humanity.  He claimed in his hubris filled, fact deficient book, "The No Growth Society," that by the year 2040, the United States would have a dangerously unsustainable population of 280 million he called "much too many."  The current US population is over 300 million, and despite reckless leadership and policies, it is still sustainable.   

One could argue that Lopez' education is in his past, independent of his current political activities, however, the interests driving the agenda of the Belfer Center are demonstrably still backing his Primero Justicia party's bid for seizing power in Venezuela.  Lopez, Radonski, and Borges are to this day still receiving substantial funding and support through NGO networks funded directly by the US State Department's National Endowment for Democracy, and is clearly favored by the Western press.  Furthermore, the CFR, Heritage Foundation, and other corporate-financier driven think-tanks have all come out in support of Radonski and Primero Justicia, in their bid to "restore democracy" American-style in Venezuela.   

With Chavez' passing, the names of these opposition figures will become mainstays of Western reporting ahead of anticipated elections the West is eager to have held - elections the West is well positioned to manipulate in favor of Lopez, Radonski, and Borges.   

Whatever one may have thought about Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his policies, he nationalized his nation's oil, forcing out foreign multinational corporations, diversified his exports to reduce dependency on Western markets (with US exports at a 9 year low), and had openly opposed corporate-financier neo-imperialism across the globe.  He was an obstruction to Western hegemony - an obstruction that has provoked overt, depraved jubilation from his opponents upon his death.   

And while many critics are quick to claim President Chavez' policies are a "failure," it would be helpful to remember that the US, on record, has arrayed its vast resources both overtly and covertly against the Venezuelan people over the years to ensure that any system outside the West's sphere of influence inevitably fails.   

Dark Days Ahead.   

Dark days indeed lay ahead for Venezuela, with the AEI "checklist" foreshadowing an "uprising," stating:  

As Venezuelan democrats wage that struggle against chavismo, regional leaders must make clear that Syria-style repression will never be tolerated in the Americas.  We should defend the right of Venezuelans to struggle democratically to reclaim control of their country and its future. Only Washington can make clear to Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and Cuban leaders that, yes, the United States does mind if they try to sustain an undemocratic and hostile regime in Venezuela.  Any attempt to suppress their self-determination with Chinese cash, Russian arms, Iranian terrorists, or Cuban thuggery will be met with a coordinated regional response.   

US military contractors and special forces had been caught operating in and around Venezuela.  Just as there were warning signs in Syria years before the 2011 conflict began, the US' intentions of provoking bloodshed and regime change in Venezuela stretch back as far as 2002.  Just as Syria is now facing a Western-engineered proxy war, Venezuela will too, with the AEI already declaring US plans to wage a Syria-style proxy war in South America.  

The AEI also reminds readers of the West's faux-human rights, "economic development," and "democracy promotion" racket Hugo Chavez had ejected from Venezuela and displaced across parts of South America, and the West's desire to reestablish it:  

US development agencies should work with friends in the region to form a task force of private sector representatives, economists, and engineers to work with Venezuelans to identify the economic reforms, infrastructure investments, security assistance, and humanitarian aid that will be required to stabilize and rebuild that country.  Of course, the expectation will be that all the costs of these activities will be borne by an oil sector restored to productivity and profitability.  

Finally, we need to work with like-minded nations to reinvigorate regional organizations committed to democracy, human rights, anti-drug cooperation, and hemispheric solidarity, which have been neutered by Chávez’s destructive agenda.   

As the US openly funds, arms, and backs Al Qaeda in Syria, conducts global renditions, operates an international archipelago of torture dungeons, and is only now wrapping up a decade of subjugation and mass murder in Iraq and Afghanistan that is still claiming lives and jeopardizing the future of millions to this day, it is difficult to discern just who the AEI's target audience is.  It is most likely those who can read between the lines - the corporate-financier vultures waiting for the right moment to strip Venezuela to the bone.   

The fate of Venezuela lies in its people's hands.  Covert destabilization must be faced by the Venezuelan people, while the alternative media must do its best to unravel the lies already being spun ahead of long-planned operations in "post-Chavez Venezuela." For the rest of us, we must identify the corporate-financier interests driving this agenda, - interests we most likely patronize on a daily basis, and both boycott and permanently replace them to erode the unwarranted influence they have used, and will continue to use against the Venezuelan people, as well as people across the globe.   

Find this article here.  

Evaluating the Legacy of President Hugo Chávez From One PROUT Worker's Perspective

Chavez, Beyond the Caricatures

Hugo Chavez with article author

President Hugo Chávez dedicated his life to the poor people of Venezuela.  He transformed their lives and transformed their country.

On March 6, the day after his death, I spent 11 hours waiting with friends to pay my respects as his body was slowly transported through the city.  It took much longer than expected, as hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets and the giant stadium where the procession ended to get a glimpse of the passing casket.  The crowds sang and clapped along with popular songs about “El Comandante”, shouting:  "Chávez lives, the struggle continues!"  "The people united will never be defeated!" “I am Chávez!”  When the body finally arrived at night in the National Military Academy for viewing, the line of people waiting was almost two kilometers (one mile) long!

Why did so many people go?  Why were they willing to wait so long?  And instead of being a somber occasion with everyone dressed in black, why did so many wear bright red T-shirts, or headbands with the national colors, and why were they singing and shouting slogans?

Venezuela is an example of a country that seems to have undergone a class change through a nonviolent electoral process.   Lieutenant-Colonel Hugo Chávez, a career military officer, organized 130 officers and nearly 900 soldiers, approximately ten percent of the Venezuelan military, to attempt a military rebellion in 1992 to overthrow dictator President Carlos Andrés Pérez and end his reign of corruption, censorship and abuse of human rights.  Though they failed, Chávez became a popular hero.  After two years in prison he received amnesty, starting an electoral campaign among the poor that won him the presidency at the end of 1998.  As of December 2012, his coalition has won 16 out of 17 national elections due to his successful consciousness-raising and politicization among the masses.

The capitalist-led opposition attempted a military overthrow of Chávez in 2002 with U.S. government knowledge and support; yet two days later the masses and the military united and brought him back from the island naval base where he was held prisoner.  After that, Chávez became much more strident in his rhetoric about class warfare against the oligarchy, calling them “squalids.”  Socialist and military values have influenced the masses to a great extent in terms of participatory democracy, grassroots communal councils, the new national police force and other initiatives.

The heads of the Venezuelan Central Bank and economic ministry are not bankers, but revolutionaries, orchestrating government buyouts of key industries at an accelerating rate, with more than 200 expropriations of private enterprises in 2010 alone.  Chávez has announced that he is committed to “the elimination of capitalism”.  Government-owned and community media influence the masses with values of solidarity, people’s power and socialism for the twenty-first century.  Many capitalists have fled to Miami and elsewhere, and while others remain, they are frustrated and nervous because they are no longer in power.

For the first time in the history of Venezuela, a president used the profits from the country's petroleum sales to fund social programs, such as building schools and hiring teachers so every child would go to school, starting free universities, building hospitals and health clinics in every barrio and country village that have saved thousands of lives each year.

In the hills of Vargas, a group of rural women told me how in the past when someone in their village got sick and died, it would take them two days to carry the body down to the cemetery for burial, and when they returned, sometimes there was another dead body waiting for them, because there was no clinic they could go to.  Now there are clinics everywhere.  With the help of the Women's Bank, they have formed successful agricultural cooperatives that give them all a steady income.  They swore they would never go back to the terrible poverty they suffered before Hugo Chávez changed their lives.

Chávez pioneered barter trade, signing bilateral barter agreements with developing countries, swapping Venezuelan oil for other products or services the country needed, including 50,000 Cuban doctors and dentists who provide free medical care in city slums and remote rural villages.

Chávez put the condition of the poor people on the national agenda.  Voter registration has dramatically increased, and polling places have increased.  More than 80 percent of eligible voters went to the polls in the 2012 presidential election (compared to less than 59 percent of voters in the United States who cast their ballot that year).  Today even the anti-Chávez candidates say that if elected they, too, will continue the social projects in order to try to win the majority of voters.  In 1998, when Chávez was first elected, all the houses in the villages of Barlovento in Miranda, were made of mud and in very bad condition due to regular flooding.  The state governor, Henrique Capriles, who ran against Chávez in 2012, made significant loans to the poor people so that now nearly all the houses in the villages are built with cement blocks.

Ten years ago, on June 1, 2003, I was invited to meet Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez on his weekly television show to present the Spanish edition of my first Prout book, which was published in Caracas.  I told him that I was inspired by the words of Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, the founder of Prout, at the end of his 1979 visit to Caracas, in which he said, “Venezuela needs good spiritual political leaders.  If Venezuela can produce spiritual political leaders, it will not only be the leader of Latin America, it will also be the leader of the planet.  Venezuela is a blessed country.”

President Chávez said, “Dada Maheshvarananda has given us a book that we appreciate very much.  Your visit has come at such an opportune moment....  Thank you very much, brother, and let’s continue with spirituality, spirit, good faith, morality, and the mystical force that moves the world.  Dada Maheshvarananda and other citizens of the world are welcome to visit, especially those who come in good faith and offer their ideas, their spirit and their moral flame to the Bolivarian Revolution.  This has attracted the attention of the whole world, especially those that struggle and dream of a better world, just as it says in After Capitalism: Prout’s Vision for a New World.”

In December 2003 and again in 2005 the national petroleum company of Venezuela (PDVSA) contracted for me and other Proutists to give a series of training courses and lectures about the Prout model.  Then in 2007 we founded the Prout Research Institute of Venezuela in Caracas as an independent, not-for-profit foundation.  A major reason we did this was because of how closely the goals of Prout's socio-economic model were shared by the Bolivarian Revolution initiated by President Chávez.

Prout asserts that the first priority of any economy should be to guarantee the minimum requirements of life (food, clothing, housing, education and medical care), the right to live, to all people.  Subsidized food staples are sold very cheaply in government supermarkets throughout the country, and public schools now provide free lunches to all students, both of which significantly reduce the money spent by poor people to feed their families.  Free education and health care for all has been achieved, too, with college enrollment doubling.  During 2012 the government built more than 200,000 houses and gave them to needy families, and it plans to build a total of two million homes by 2018.  His government reduced poverty by half and extreme poverty by 70 percent.  Eligibility for public pensions tripled.  As someone who has spent his life working with the poor, I am deeply grateful for these very impressive accomplishments – so are the masses who poured out to the streets yesterday.

Community empowerment is another key component of Prout's economic democracy; Chávez initiated the system of communal councils with cooperative banks that decide for themselves which local projects they will fund – 33,000 are now running throughout the country.

Though many complaints have been made in the world media about how Chávez has “destroyed” the Venezuelan economy, economic growth actually increased to 5.6 percent in 2012.  The conservative International Monetary Fund calculates the country’s gross public debt last year at 51.3 percent of GDP, but Europe has more than 90 percent! The foreign part of this debt was only 4.1 percent of Venezuela’s export earnings.  Inflation is high, but lower than before he came to office.

Food sovereignty, to produce enough food to feed the entire population, has not yet been achieved, but it is another goal common to both the Bolivarian government and Prout.

Chávez wanted to transform the profit-oriented capitalist economy into one oriented towards endogenous and sustainable social development by involving those who had been marginalized or excluded.  From 2002 he inspired the phenomenal creation of 262,904 registered cooperatives by the end of 2008, but many of these never became active or collapsed.  The national cooperative supervision institute, SUNACOOP, recognizes about 70,000 as functioning, which is still the highest total for any country after China.

The majority of Venezuelan cooperatives have few members who are unskilled.  Because of the high rate of failure among the registered cooperatives, in 2005 the president shifted the government’s support from cooperatives to socialist enterprises and worker takeovers of factories.  In this way, the government pays the salaries, but keeps the ownership.  Prout, on the other hand, supports cooperatives that are worker-owned as well as worker-managed.

Of course there are problems in Venezuela; a couple of them are very serious.  Corruption and crime hurt everyone.  Their causes are many; to solve these problems requires the help of all the people – for this a major consciousness-raising campaign is required in every level of education, through the mass media and in every government office.  Consciousness-raising and popular education are also key to reducing pollution and protecting the environment, another serious problem.

If the impact of these problems was reduced, many more people of the middle class could be inspired to support this revolution.  Unfortunately the revolutionary rhetoric of Chávez was often insulting towards his opponents – listening sincerely to valid complaints is necessary to open dialog and build bridges so that an ever greater majority of Venezuelans participate constructively in the Bolivarian project.

Hugo Chávez was a very strong man who led his people through a tremendous social transformation.  He has died, but his vision of a more just and more democratic society continues to inspire the masses of Venezuela and remains very much alive.  

Find this article here.

Who Owns The Federal Reserve?

The Fed is privately owned.  Its shareholders are private banks.

by Ellen Brown

“Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions.  They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lenders.”  

– The Honorable Louis McFadden, Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee in the 1930s  

The Federal Reserve (or Fed) has assumed sweeping new powers in the last year.  In an unprecedented move in March 2008, the New York Fed advanced the funds for JPMorgan Chase Bank to buy investment bank Bear Stearns for pennies on the dollar.  The deal was particularly controversial because Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, sits on the board of the New York Fed and participated in the secret weekend negotiations.1 In September 2008, the Federal Reserve did something even more unprecedented, when it bought the world’s largest insurance company.  The Fed announced on September 16 that it was giving an $85 billion loan to American International Group (AIG) for a nearly 80% stake in the mega-insurer.  The Associated Press called it a “government takeover,” but this was no ordinary nationalization.  Unlike the U.S. Treasury, which took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the week before, the Fed is not a government-owned agency.  Also unprecedented was the way the deal was funded.  The Associated Press reported:  

“The Treasury Department, for the first time in its history, said it would begin selling bonds for the Federal Reserve in an effort to help the central bank deal with its unprecedented borrowing needs.”2  

This is extraordinary.  Why is the Treasury issuing U.S.  government bonds (or debt) to fund the Fed, which is itself supposedly “the lender of last resort” created to fund the banks and the federal government? Yahoo Finance reported on September 17:  

“The Treasury is setting up a temporary financing program at the Fed’s request.  The program will auction Treasury bills to raise cash for the Fed’s use.  The initiative aims to help the Fed manage its balance sheet following its efforts to enhance its liquidity facilities over the previous few quarters.”  

Normally, the Fed swaps green pieces of paper called Federal Reserve Notes for pink pieces of paper called U.S. bonds (the federal government’s I.O.U.s), in order to provide Congress with the dollars it cannot raise through taxes.  Now, it seems, the government is issuing bonds, not for its own use, but for the use of the Fed! Perhaps the plan is to swap them with the banks’ dodgy derivatives collateral directly, without actually putting them up for sale to outside buyers.  According to Wikipedia (which translates Fedspeak into somewhat clearer terms than the Fed’s own website):  

“The Term Securities Lending Facility is a 28-day facility that will offer Treasury general collateral to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s primary dealers in exchange for other program-eligible collateral.  It is intended to promote liquidity in the financing markets for Treasury and other collateral and thus to foster the functioning of financial markets more generally. . . . The resource allows dealers to switch debt that is less liquid for U.S. government securities that are easily tradable.”  

“To switch debt that is less liquid for U.S. government securities that are easily tradable” means that the government gets the banks’ toxic derivative debt, and the banks get the government’s triple-A securities.  Unlike the risky derivative debt, federal securities are considered “risk-free” for purposes of determining capital requirements, allowing the banks to improve their capital position so they can make new loans. (See E. Brown, “Bailout Bedlam,” webofdebt.com/articles, October 2, 2008.)

In its latest power play, on October 3, 2008, the Fed acquired the ability to pay interest to its member banks on the reserves the banks maintain at the Fed. Reuters reported on October 3:

“The U.S. Federal Reserve gained a key tactical tool from the $700 billion financial rescue package signed into law on Friday that will help it channel funds into parched credit markets. Tucked into the 451-page bill is a provision that lets the Fed pay interest on the reserves banks are required to hold at the central bank.”3

If the Fed’s money comes ultimately from the taxpayers, that means we the taxpayers are paying interest to the banks on the banks’ own reserves – reserves maintained for their own private profit. These increasingly controversial encroachments on the public purse warrant a closer look at the central banking scheme itself.  Who owns the Federal Reserve, who actually controls it, where does it get its money, and whose interests is it serving?

Not Private and Not for Profit?

The Fed’s website insists that it is not a private corporation, is not operated for profit, and is notfunded by Congress.  But is that true? The Federal Reserve was set up in 1913 as a “lender of last resort” to backstop bank runs, following a particularly bad bank panic in 1907.  The Fed’s mandate was then and continues to be to keep the private banking system intact; and that means keeping intact the system’s most valuable asset, a monopoly on creating the national money supply. Except for coins, every dollar in circulation is now created privately as a debt to the Federal Reserve or the banking system it heads.4 The Fed’s website attempts to gloss over its role as chief defender and protector of this private banking club, but let’s take a closer look.  The website states:

* “The twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, which were established by Congress as the operating arms of the nation’s central banking system, are organized much like private corporations – possibly leading to some confusion about “ownership.” For example, the Reserve Banks issue shares of stock to member banks.  However, owning Reserve Bank stock is quite different from owning stock in a private company.  The Reserve Banks are not operated for profit, and ownership of a certain amount of stock is, by law, a condition of membership in the System.  The stock may not be sold, traded, or pledged as security for a loan; dividends are, by law, 6 percent per year.”

* “[The Federal Reserve] is considered an independent central bank because its decisions do not have to be ratified by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branch of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by Congress, and the terms of the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms.”

* “The Federal Reserve’s income is derived primarily from the interest on U.S. government securities that it has acquired through open market operations. . . . After paying its expenses, the Federal Reserve turns the rest of its earnings over to the U.S. Treasury.”5

So let’s review:

1. The Fed is privately owned.

Its shareholders are private banks.  In fact, 100% of its shareholders are private banks.  None of its stock is owned by the government.

2. The fact that the Fed does not get “appropriations” from Congress basically means that it gets its money from Congress without congressional approval, by engaging in “open market operations.”

Here is how it works: When the government is short of funds, the Treasury issues bonds and delivers them to bond dealers, which auction them off.  When the Fed wants to “expand the money supply” (create money), it steps in and buys bonds from these dealers with newly-issued dollars acquired by the Fed for the cost of writing them into an account on a computer screen.  These maneuvers are called “open market operations” because the Fed buys the bonds on the “open market” from the bond dealers.  The bonds then become the “reserves” that the banking establishment uses to back its loans.  In another bit of sleight of hand known as “fractional reserve” lending, the same reserves are lent many times over, further expanding the money supply, generating interest for the banks with each loan.  It was this money-creating process that prompted Wright Patman, Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee in the 1960s, to call the Federal Reserve “a total money-making machine.” He wrote:  

“When the Federal Reserve writes a check for a government bond it does exactly what any bank does, it creates money, it created money purely and simply by writing a check.”

3. The Fed generates profits for its shareholders.

The interest on bonds acquired with its newly-issued Federal Reserve Notes pays the Fed’s operating expenses plus a guaranteed 6% return to its banker shareholders.  A mere 6% a year may not be considered a profit in the world of Wall Street high finance, but most businesses that manage to cover all their expenses and give their shareholders a guaranteed 6% return are considered “for profit” corporations.

In addition to this guaranteed 6%, the banks will now be getting interest from the taxpayers on their “reserves.” The basic reserve requirement set by the Federal Reserve is 10%.  The website of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York explains that as money is redeposited and relent throughout the banking system, this 10% held in “reserve” can be fanned into ten times that sum in loans; that is, $10,000 in reserves becomes $100,000 in loans.  Federal Reserve Statistical Release H.8 puts the total “loans and leases in bank credit” as of September 24, 2008 at $7,049 billion.  Ten percent of that is $700 billion.  That means we the taxpayers will be paying interest to the banks on at least $700 billion annually – this so that the banks can retain the reserves to accumulate interest on ten times that sum in loans.  

The banks earn these returns from the taxpayers for the privilege of having the banks’ interests protected by an all-powerful independent private central bank, even when those interests may be opposed to the taxpayers’ — for example, when the banks use their special status as private money creators to fund speculative derivative schemes that threaten to collapse the U.S. economy.  Among other special benefits, banks and other financial institutions (but not other corporations) can borrow at the low Fed funds rate of about 2%.  They can then turn around and put this money into 30-year Treasury bonds at 4.5%, earning an immediate 2.5% from the taxpayers, just by virtue of their position as favored banks.  A long list of banks (but not other corporations) is also now protected from the short selling that can crash the price of other stocks.  

Time to Change the Statute?

According to the Fed’s website, the control Congress has over the Federal Reserve is limited to this:

“[T]he Federal Reserve is subject to oversight by Congress, which periodically reviews its activities and can alter its responsibilities by statute.”

As we know from watching the business news, “oversight” basically means that Congress gets to see the results when it’s over.  The Fed periodically reports to Congress, but the Fed doesn’t ask; it tells.  The only real leverage Congress has over the Fed is that it “can alter its responsibilities by statute.” It is time for Congress to exercise that leverage and make the Federal Reserve a trulyfederal agency, acting by and for the people through their elected representatives.  If the Fed can demand AIG’s stock in return for an $85 billion loan to the mega-insurer, we can demand the Fed’s stock in return for the trillion-or-so dollars we’ll be advancing to bail out the private banking system from its follies.

If the Fed were actually a federal agency, the government could issue U.S. legal tender directly, avoiding an unnecessary interest-bearing debt to private middlemen who create the money out of thin air themselves.  Among other benefits to the taxpayers, a truly “federal” Federal Reserve could lend the full faith and credit of the United States to state and local governments interest-free, cutting the cost of infrastructure in half, restoring the thriving local economies of earlier decades.  

Ellen Brown, J.D., developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.” She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back.  Her eleven books include the bestselling Nature’s Pharmacy, co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker, and Forbidden Medicine.  Her websites are www.webofdebt.com  and www.ellenbrown.com .

Find this article here.  

Defense Firm's Spy Software Tracking You on Social Media

Software tracking people on social media created by defense firm  

by Ryan Gallagher of The Guardian 

A multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable of tracking people's movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.  

A video obtained by the Guardian [see below] reveals how an "extreme-scale analytics" system created by Raytheon, the world's fifth largest defence contractor, can gather vast amounts of information about people from websites including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.  

Raytheon says it has not sold the software – named Riot, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology – to any clients.  

But the Massachusetts-based company has acknowledged the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analysing "trillions of entities" from cyberspace.  

The power of Riot to harness popular websites for surveillance offers a rare insight into controversial techniques that have attracted interest from intelligence and national security agencies, at the same time prompting civil liberties and online privacy concerns.  

The sophisticated technology demonstrates how the same social networks that helped propel the Arab Spring revolutions can be transformed into a "Google for spies" and tapped as a means of monitoring and control.  

Using Riot it is possible to gain an entire snapshot of a person's life – their friends, the places they visit charted on a map – in little more than a few clicks of a button.  

In the video obtained by the Guardian, it is explained by Raytheon's "principal investigator" Brian Urch that photographs users post on social networks sometimes contain latitude and longitude details – automatically embedded by smartphones within "exif header data."  

Riot pulls out this information, showing not only the photographs posted onto social networks by individuals, but also the location at which the photographs were taken.  

"We're going to track one of our own employees," Urch says in the video, before bringing up pictures of "Nick," a Raytheon staff member used as an example target.  With information gathered from social networks, Riot quickly reveals Nick frequently visits Washington Nationals Park, where on one occasion he snapped a photograph of himself posing with a blonde haired woman.  

"We know where Nick's going, we know what Nick looks like," Urch explains, "now we want to try to predict where he may be in the future."  

Riot can display on a spider diagram the associations and relationships between individuals online by looking at who they have communicated with over Twitter.  It can also mine data from Facebook and sift GPS location information from Foursquare, a mobile phone app used by more than 25 million people to alert friends of their whereabouts.  The Foursquare data can be used to display, in graph form, the top 10 places visited by tracked individuals and the times at which they visited them.  

The video shows that Nick, who posts his location regularly on Foursquare, visits a gym frequently at 6am early each week.  Urch quips: "So if you ever did want to try to get hold of Nick, or maybe get hold of his laptop, you might want to visit the gym at 6am on a Monday."  

Mining from public websites for law enforcement is considered legal in most countries.  In February last year, for instance, the FBI requested help to develop a social-media mining application for monitoring "bad actors or groups".  

However, Ginger McCall, an attorney at the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Centre, said the Raytheon technology raised concerns about how troves of user data could be covertly collected without oversight or regulation.  

"Social networking sites are often not transparent about what information is shared and how it is shared," McCall said.  "Users may be posting information that they believe will be viewed only by their friends, but instead, it is being viewed by government officials or pulled in by data collection services like the Riot search."  

Raytheon, which made sales worth an estimated $25bn (£16bn) in 2012, did not want its Riot demonstration video to be revealed on the grounds that it says it shows a "proof of concept" product that has not been sold to any clients.  

Jared Adams, a spokesman for Raytheon's intelligence and information systems department, said in an email:  "Riot is a big data analytics system design we are working on with industry, national labs and commercial partners to help turn massive amounts of data into useable information to help meet our nation's rapidly changing security needs.  

"Its innovative privacy features are the most robust that we're aware of, enabling the sharing and analysis of data without personally identifiable information [such as social security numbers, bank or other financial account information] being disclosed."  

In December, Riot was featured in a newly published patent Raytheon is pursuing for a system designed to gather data on people from social networks, blogs and other sources to identify whether they should be judged a security risk.  

In April, Riot was scheduled to be showcased at a US government and industry national security conference for secretive, classified innovations, where it was listed under the category "big data – analytics, algorithms."  

According to records published by the US government's trade controls department, the technology has been designated an "EAR99" item under export regulations, which means it "can be shipped without a licence to most destinations under most circumstances".  

How Raytheon software tracks you online

In this video obtained by the Guardian, Raytheon's 'principal investigator' Brian Urch explains how the Rapid Information Overlay Technology (Riot) software uses photographs on social networks.  These images sometimes contain latitude and longitude details – automatically embedded by smartphones within so-called 'exif header data'.  Riot pulls out this information, analysing not only the photographs posted by individuals, but also the location where these images were taken.  

Anti-Choicers Get Real About Their Loathing of Female Sexuality

by Amanda Marcotte, RH Reality Check
February 24, 2013


Anti-choicers aren’t even trying to sound reasonable anymore.  Since the seventies, the anti-choice movement has gone to great lengths to try to spin their fear and loathing of female sexuality as anything but what it is.  Obviously, the most popular gambit has been to claim to have concern for fetal life, but there have been other popular variations: Pretending to have public health motivations for removing evidence-based information from sex education, pretending to believe condoms don’t work, pretending to be concerned about women’s mental health if they exert control over their own bodies.  While these derailing tactics are sadly not going anywhere soon, it does seem lately like there’s an uptick in anti-choicers just straight up admitting that they don’t think women should be having sex for any other reason but procreation.    

This past week have been a veritable buffet of incidents that demonstrate that anti-choicers simply have a problem with female sexuality and that everything else is noise.  

Example #1: Only virgins have a right to control their own bodies.  Indiana is looking at passing a mandatory trans-vaginal ultrasound law, which has the added bonus of requiring two if you use the abortion pill.  (I guess if you want to minimize your time with your feet in the stirrups and people sticking stuff in your vagina by opting for the pill over the surgical abortion, Indiana will just require you to get back into those stirrups, young lady.) Voters tend to have serious problems with the state requiring women to be penetrated against their will, but Indiana Right to Life legislative director Sue Swayze tried to calm those concerns by arguing that once a penis has been in your vagina, the rest of the world get an all-access pass: “I got pregnant vaginally,” she said, causing me to wonder if we’re expected to congratulate her.  “Something else could come in my vagina for a medical test that wouldn’t be that intrusive to me.  So I find that argument a little ridiculous.”  

One does wonder how far Swayze is willing to go with her contention that once you say yes to a penis, you can’t say no to anything else anyone would want to put in there.  Do we have to look forward to new anti-choice bills requiring that tennis balls and toothbrushes be shoved up in there?  One does hope that Swayze doesn’t learn what oral sex is, because new laws requiring unwieldy objects to be shoved in the sinner’s mouth could get downright dangerous.  

Example #2: Always be ovulating.  Oklahoma, presumably as a favor to Oklahoma-based Hobby Lobby—a surprisingly misogynist organization for having a mostly-female customer base—is considering an (illegal) law that allows employers to refuse to cover contraception.  The bill was brought forward at the request of Dr. Dominic Pedulla, because he believes birth control is “poison.” “Part of their identity is the potential to be a mother,” he argued, forgetting the part in medical school where they taught you that the pill does not actually render a woman permanently infertile.  “They are being asked to suppress and radically contradict part of their own identity,” he added, because he believes that if women can buy birth control, they must buy it, much in the same way he is required to buy a new car every time he drives by the lot.  “And if that wasn’t bad enough,” he continued, “they are being asked to poison their bodies,” stretching the definition of “poison” to include “safe drugs that improve your life,” a definition that encompasses everything from caffeine to aspirin.  Needless to say, I’m skeptical that Dr. Pedulla opposes ingesting other safe drugs for life improvement that don’t lead to scary, scary opportunities for women to have sex without worrying about getting pregnant.


Example #3: The female orgasm is unholy, unholy I tell you! As reported by Katie J.M. Baker at Jezebel, Allegheny College hosted a sex education seminar called “I Heart the Female Orgasm” in the Ford Memorial Chapel on campus.  Chapels are a popular place to hold all sorts of lectures and classes—even my atheist self has had the pleasure of giving talks inside their hallowed halls—for the obvious reason that you can hold a lot of people inside them.  In the grown-up world, no big deal.

In the wingnut world, however, it’s time to cue the outrage, because while you filthy feminists may “heart” the female orgasm, anti-choicers strongly believe that God does not.  (Which does make one wonder why, if God is so strongly anti-lady-orgasm, he didn’t just make women so they can’t have them in the first place?)  Conservative blog The College Fix claimed that open “hearting” of the shameful, shameful female orgasm turned the chapel into a “boudoir of sorts.” Clearly, better sex education is needed on Allegheny campus if students such as blogger Katie McHugh think that talking about sex in public is the same thing as having sex in public.  Fox News and The Daily Mail were equally disturbed.

As Baker notes at Jezebel, the only way the outrage makes sense is if you think it’s a given that female sexuality is depraved, unholy, and evil.  None of the outraged folks straight up said that, but mostly because they seemed to believe it was a given and that everyone “knows” that the female orgasm is too awful to be discussed in public, much less in the home of the deity they believe invented it.  But of course, the rest of us do not actually take it as a given that it’s terrible to be a fan of the female orgasm.  On the contrary, some of us actually think female orgasms are nifty and that women are 100 percent entitled to finding consensual, appropriate ways to have as many as they damn well please.

So there you have it, folks: Anti-choicers aren’t even pretending that this isn’t about sex anymore.  Which is fine by me! I’m a big fan of honesty, and believe that the debate over reproductive rights would be much more pleasant if the opposition was straightforward and honest about their beliefs.  Of course, honesty tends to hurt their cause’s popularity, but that’s a small price to pay in order to be honest, moral people, I’d think.

This article originally appeared at RealityCheck.org

Purposeful Solutions Offered by the Venus Project

While PROUT organizations have not specifically subscribed to the Venus Project concepts and precepts, I can say that much of what Jacque Fresco has to convey is germane to PROUT concerns, both of exploitation and lasting solutions, other than specificity of city design, of which PROUT gives maximum flexibility within the parameters of its fundamental principles in the contexts of time, place and persons, explorable from the column on your right.  

The Non Zero-Sum Society

by Robert Reich
January 28, 2013


As President Obama said in his inaugural address last week, America “cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.”  

Yet that continues to be the direction we’re heading in.  

A newly-released analysis by the Economic Policy Institute shows that the super-rich have done well in the economic recovery while almost everyone else has done badly.  The top 1 percent of earners’ real wages grew 8.2 percent from 2009 to 2011, yet the real annual wages of Americans in the bottom 90 percent have continued to decline in the recovery, eroding by 1.2 percent between 2009 and 2011.  

In other words, we’re back to the widening inequality we had before the debt bubble burst in 2008 and the economy crashed.  

But the President is exactly right.  Not even the very wealthy can continue to succeed without a broader-based prosperity.  That’s because 70 percent of economic activity in America is consumer spending.   If the bottom 90 percent of Americans are becoming poorer, they’re less able to spend.  Without their spending, the economy can’t get out of first gear.  

That’s a big reason why the recovery continues to be anemic, and why the International Monetary Fund just lowered its estimate for U. S. growth in 2013 to just 2 percent.  

Almost a quarter of all jobs in America now pay wages below the poverty line for a family of four.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates 7 out of 10 growth occupations over the next decade will be low-wage — like serving customers at big-box retailers and fast-food chains.  

At this rate, who’s going to buy all the goods and services America is capable of producing?  We can’t return to the kind of debt-financed consumption that caused the bubble in the first place.  

Get it?  It’s not a zero-sum game.  Wealthy Americans would do better with smaller shares of a rapidly-growing economy than with the large shares they now possess of an economy that’s barely moving.  

If they were rational, the wealthy would support public investments in education and job-training, a world-class infrastructure (transportation, water and sewage, energy, internet), and basic research – all of which would make the American workforce more productive.  

If they were rational they’d even support labor unions – which have proven the best means of giving working people a fair share in the nation’s prosperity.  

But labor unions are almost extinct.  

The decline of labor unions in America tracks exactly the decline in the bottom 90 percent’s share of total earnings, and shrinkage of the middle class.  

In the 1950s, when the U. S. economy was growing faster than 3 percent a year, more than a third of all working people belonged to a union.  That gave them enough bargaining clout to get wages that allowed them to buy what the economy was capable of producing.  

Since the late 1970s, unions have eroded – as has the purchasing power of most Americans, and not coincidentally, the average annual growth of the economy.  

Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that as of 2012 only 6.6 percent of workers in the private sector were unionized.  (That’s down from 6.9 percent in 2011.) That’s the lowest rate of unionization in almost a century.  

What’s to blame?  Partly globalization and technological change.  Globalization sent many unionized manufacturing plants abroad.  

Manufacturing is starting to return to America but it’s returning without many jobs.  The old assembly line has been replaced by robotics and numerically-controlled machine tools.  

Technologies have also replaced many formerly unionized workers in telecommunications (remember telephone operators?) and clerical jobs.  

But wait.  Other nations subject to the same forces have far higher levels of unionization than America.  28 percent of Canada’s workforce is unionized, as is more than 25 percent of Britain’s, and almost 20 percent of Germany’s.

Unions are almost extinct in America because we’ve chosen to make them extinct.

Unlike other rich nations, our labor laws allow employers to replace striking workers.   We’ve also made it exceedingly difficult for workers to organize, and we barely penalized companies that violate labor laws.  (A worker who’s illegally fired for trying to organize a union may, if lucky, get the job back along with back pay – after years of legal haggling.)  

Republicans, in particular, have set out to kill off unions.  Union membership dropped 13 percent last year in Wisconsin, which in 2011 curbed the collective bargaining rights of many public employees.  And it fell 18 percent last year in Indiana, which last February enacted a right-to-work law (allowing employees at unionized workplaces to get all the benefits of unionization without paying for them).  Last month Michigan enacted a similar law.

Don’t blame globalization and technological change for why employees at Walmart , America’s largest employer, still don’t have a union.  They’re not in global competition and their jobs aren’t directly threatened by technology.  

The average pay of a Walmart worker is $8.81 an hour.  A third of Walmart’s employees work less than 28 hours per week and don’t qualify for benefits.

Walmart is a microcosm of the American economy.  It has brazenly fought off unions.   But it could easily afford to pay its workers more.   It earned $16 billion last year.   Much of that sum went to Walmart’s shareholders, including the family of its founder, Sam Walton.  

The wealth of the Walton family now exceeds the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of American families combined, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.  

But how can Walmart expect to continue to show fat profits when most of its customers are on a downward economic escalator?  

Walmart should be unionized.   So should McDonalds.  So should every major big-box retailer and fast-food outlet in the nation.  So should every hospital in America.

That way, more Americans would have enough money in their pockets to get the economy moving.  And everyone – even the very rich – would benefit.

As Obama said, America cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton.  Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century.  He has written thirteen books, including his latest best-seller, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future; The Work of Nations; Locked in the Cabinet; Supercapitalism; and his newest,Beyond Outrage.  His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each week.  He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause.  His widely-read blog can be found at www.robertreich.org.

Editor's Note:  It is the perspective and purpose of PROUT to move commerce toward worker-owned co-operatives within economic decentralization and economic democracy.  The labor/management, and labor/owner bifurcations are garishly obsolete, viciously exploitive, and demonstrably parasitic like a malignant carcinoma on the body of humanity and the planet at large.  PROUT's economic democracy paradigm is progressively homeostatic, positively affecting every realm of life, both for humans and all other life forms conjugating the mysteries as to why they and we exist on this magnificent planet.  Explore PROUT further.  

Israel Shaking the World with Tesla Technology: Target Iran

Is Israel playing with Tesla quake technology?

by Wayne Madsen

January 30, 2013 

The White House has stated on the record that reports of a crippling and deadly explosion at the Iranian uranium enrichment facility at Fordow, near the holy city of Qom, are baseless. Referring to the reports of a disaster at Fordow, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters at a January 28 press conference, "we have no information that would confirm them and do not believe that those reports or that report is credible."

The Fordow facility is dug deep into a mountain bunker and is believed to be impregnable to bunker buster bombs and air-to-ground missiles.
Iran also dismissed the reports of an explosion as propaganda. The reports are emanating from right-wing Israeli media sources and their echo chamber in the neo-conservative American media, namely World Net Daily. There are suggestions from Israeli sources that a 5.4 magnitude quake on January 21 in Kerman province may be related to the reported explosion but Kerman province is 566 miles from Fordow and the Kerman quake appears to be unrelated to the event at Fordow.

Although quakes are extremely common in Iran, there has been a steady spate of measurable seismic activity reported in Iran recently. There is also a report out of Guam that a recent quake there went unreported by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which is occurring with that agency's track record more frequently.

The denials and claims about a seismic event at Fordow may be indicative of something more troubling: that Israel is using earthquake-producing technology first developed by Nikola Tesla at the turn of the last century to cripple Iranian nuclear production activity not from outside the earth's surface but from within.

There are reports that over 250 Iranian and North Korean engineers and other personnel are trapped inside the facility after what was said to be an "explosion" that shook the facility to its "core." The reports are consistent with those that result from mine disasters, many of which are caused by seismic disturbances.

On August 28, 2009, WMR reported on Israeli earthquake-producing technology: "On August 27, Israel's Seismologic Division of its Geophysical Institute of the Ministry of National Infrastructure conducted, along with the U.S. Defense Department and the University of Hawaii, a joint earthquake research experiment in Israel's Negev Desert. The experiment simulated an earthquake in the southern Negev designed to improve not seismological warning and acoustic reading systems in either Hawaii or earthquake-prone California or Alaska, but in Israel.

The cover story is that the simulated earthquake was designed to improve Israel's earthquake advance warning system. The simulated earthquake, created with 80 tons of explosives, created a 3.0 earthquake on the Richter scale.

The involvement of the Pentagon with Israeli 'earthquake' research may involve a much more classified purpose. In 1995, this editor was told by an individual close to Mossad that Israel's intelligence agency was concerned about the Japanese Aum Shrinkyo movement arriving in Belgrade as Yugoslavia was collapsing. Agents of the cult movement were, according to the Mossad, trying to obtain Tesla earthquake-producing technology from notes and papers produced by the scientist on high-energy wave amplification maintained at the Nikola Tesla Institute in Belgrade. Nikola Tesla, a contemporary and one-time employee of Thomas Edison, died in 1943 and is considered the pioneer of alternating current machinery.

The Japanese cult members, who represented to institute officials that they were scientists, photocopied 100,000 Tesla documents. Tesla discovered that by altering the earth's magnetic field with electrical currents, earthquakes could result.

Israel's defense research community has also been interested in Tesla's earthquake- producing technology, which may have been at the heart of the recent Israeli-U.S. earthquake 'sensor' test in the Negev. In 1998, Los Alamos National Laboratory produced a super-magnet code-named 'Godzilla' that was the world's most powerful repeatable pulsed field magnet. Los Alamos had plans to create a more powerful magnet, twenty times more powerful than Godzilla, code-named Atlas. Atlas was designed with a magnetic field strength of 1000 tesla, 20 million times more powerful than the Earth's natural magnetic field and a potential weapon that could be used to alter the earth's magnetic field creating earthquakes.



Tesla's quake machine: of interest to Japanese suicide cultists and Mossad.

There are suspicions that such technology was what was being tested in Israel's Negev Desert on August 27.
One indication is that the Israel and U.S. explanation for the test in the Negev was an intelligence cover story is that the U.S. Geological Survey, which records earthquakes all around the world, has no record of a 3.0 earthquake in the Negev on August 27."

Last year, Iran accused Israel of possessing quake-producing technology and of using it against Iran. Quake-producing technology has reportedly advanced from the days of Tesla to now include high-powered radio frequency and magnetic applications.
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

Chinese Medical System Goes Cannibalistic

Could you do with a boost of stamina some times?  The secret ingredient in Chinese stamina pills are baby fetuses.  DNA tests confirm pills are 99.7% human DNA.  Perhaps that's what happens when a one-child policy prohibits additional children.

From InfoWars.com 

A South Korean SBS TV documentary accused Chinese pharmaceutical companies in 2011 of selling “stamina pills” that contain ground up dead babies. The report claims that certain hospitals and abortion clinics sell baby corpses to the companies, who then use their bodies to grind up for their stamina pill ingredients. The team ran a DNA test, and found that the pills were 99.7 percent human. They were even able to tell the gender of the baby. 

 

'Soylent Viagra'? Chinese stamina pills contain human flesh

 South Korea cracks down on the trafficking of gross supplements smuggled from China.

From Mother Nature Network
By Cy Tottleben

WHAT'S IN YOUR SUPPLEMENT? Or, dare I ask, who's in your supplement? (Photo: worak/Flickr)

In news reports that sound more horrifying than true, South Korea is staging its own war against drugs, combating a sickening influx of pills from China that promise to cure ailments of every variety.

Instead of snake oil, these often unknowing smugglers are selling a powdered tonic rendered from human fetuses.

The story was first reported in a documentary developed by South Korean television station SBS last August. According to their research, these "dietary supplements" are made by pharmaceutical companies in northeastern China and utilize the corpses of babies that are miscarried, stillborn, and the millions that are aborted each year to keep in line with the country's population regulations. The bodies are also allegedly transported to refrigerated holding areas, many in private homes, and later chopped up, dried in an industrial microwave, and ground into the powder that serves as a folk remedy for everything from circulation problems to sexual stamina.

The broadcast crew from SBS claims to have conducted DNA tests on the capsules that proved the powder was 99.7 percent human, with skin and nail remnants detected in the mix as well.

China has long revered the human placenta for its supposed medicinal uses, and still engages in placentophagy (the consumption of the placenta after childbirth). Cultural beliefs support the thought that the placenta contains life-supporting nutrition that will restore a woman's health after child birth and keep her from developing post-partum depression. People throughout the world also see the placenta as a window back in time, feeling it will restore youth and preserve beauty. In fact, you might even be smearing some stranger’s placenta on your face when you use your moisturizing cream.

But this definitely surpasses the gross factor of placentophagy and crosses into the plot boundaries of some creepy B-movie that can have nothing but a tragic end.

Since no one is certain how the pills are produced, they could pose a serious health, if not moral, risk. Not knowing the condition of the corpses, who handled them, what diseases the mother might have passed on, if anything was sanitized or if any infection was present, makes the pills a horrendous health risk for consumers. Korean authorities have surmised that many of the pills contain super bacteria and have the potential to pass along Hepatitis and HIV.

Custom officials in South Korea have seized over 17,000 of these human pills since the documentary aired. Most of the tourists bringing them into the country are unaware of their contents, just that they thought the supplements would give them better health and increased sexual stamina.

If this is an ancient Chinese secret, it's one I never wanted to hear.