CDC Attempts To Punish Whistle Blower Toxicologist

http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/stories/2008/03/28/cdc_0328.html

By ALISON YOUNG
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 03/28/08

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has begun a process that could lead to the firing of an Atlanta scientist who tried to make public environmental dangers in the Great Lakes region and in trailers housing Hurricane Katrina’s victims, congressional investigators said.

In a letter dated Thursday, lawmakers warned CDC Director Julie Gerberding to immediately stop all personnel actions against toxicologist Christopher De Rosa — and any other staff involved in a report about environmental health issues in Great Lakes states.

“Courageous individuals who are willing to go public with evidence of wrongdoing are critical to ferreting out waste, fraud and abuse in government agencies,” U.S. Rep. John Dingell, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said in a statement.

“The committee will fully investigate how CDC has treated Dr. De Rosa to determine whether it has violated federal whistle-blower laws and whether their behavior has been otherwise proper,” said Dingell (D-Mich.).

CDC spokesman Tom Skinner, reached late Thursday, said the agency has been cooperating with the committee’s investigators and will respond to the letter. Skinner said it’s against CDC policy to comment on a specific personnel action.

De Rosa could not be reached for comment. Last fall, De Rosa was removed as director of the division of toxicology and environmental medicine in the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a position he’d held since 1992. Since that time, he’s been given a title of “special assistant,” but lacks any responsibilities, congressional investigators have said.

In an interview with the Journal-Constitution last month, De Rosa said he was demoted for insisting the CDC thoroughly investigate the long-term health risks of formaldehyde in trailers the federal government purchased to house victims of Hurricane Katrina. The CDC and the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced in February that thousands of Katrina victims need to be moved out of trailers because of dangerous levels of formaldehyde, a colorless gas used in the production of plywood.

Also playing a role in his demotion, De Rosa said, was his effort to have the CDC release the Great Lakes draft report, which identified abnormally high rates of health problems in areas near toxic waste sites around Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and other cities and called for further study.

Another congressional committee — the House Committee on Science and Technology — is investigating whether the CDC until last year intentionally avoided examining the cancer threat posed by formaldehyde fumes inside the trailers. It has scheduled a hearing Tuesday titled, “Have the Centers for Disease Control failed to protect public health?” That committee warned Gerberding in a Feb. 6 letter not to retaliate further against De Rosa.

On Feb. 21, the CDC put De Rosa on a 90-day Personal Improvement Plan, “which is a formal step toward termination,” Dingell said in his letter to Gerberding. CDC officials have denied any retaliation or suppression of science. They said the release of the Great Lakes report was delayed because of flawed science.

Letter to the Editor: “We should think before we vaccinate”

http://www.press-citizen.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080330/OPINION05/803300309

Although Center for Disease Control director Julie Gerberding recently claimed childhood vaccines are safe, there is vast disagreement among some members of Congress.

In a press release responding to the positive adjudication for the family of a 9-year-old, vaccine-damaged daughter who claimed that thimerosal (mercury) in the childhood vaccines caused her autism, Congressman, Dr. Dave Weldon (R-Fla.), said, “The CDC is the principle federal agency charged with vaccine safety research, but they are seriously conflicted. Their top priority is maintaining high immunization rates, while vaccine safety ranks near the bottom both in priorities and funding.”

Although many of us successfully fought on behalf of the Iowa bill to ban mercury from vaccines, these legislations for the most part have been rendered lifeless via cleverly embedded loopholes deftly put into place under the strategic guidance of medical and pharmaceutical lobbyists. The CDC currently recommends the flu shot, whose ineffectiveness is widely noticed. This flu shot contains high levels of thimerosal and is being aggressively marketed and publicized by the CDC with taxpayer money toward the elderly, pregnant women and children — none of whom can afford to bear the risk of damage from thimerosal such as Alzheimer’s Disease, ADD, ADHD and autism.

Yet last session, Iowa legislators refused to ban mercury from the flu shot. It is really up to parents and families to do their due diligence when considering vaccinating those they love.

It must give us pause that over the past 25 years we have blindly injected upwards of 25 vaccines into our children between the very tender ages of 12 hours and two years while at the same ADHD, ADD, autism and Alzheimer’s Disease have skyrocketed like never before.

Eileen Danneman

How Things Work: FTC Chair to Join Procter & Gamble

From Multinational Monitor.

By Robert Weissman

March 26, 2008

The chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Deborah Platt Majoras,
is leaving her job. She's going to become vice president and general
counsel for Procter & Gamble (P&G).

Should it raise eyebrows for the head of the leading U.S. consumer
protection agency to leave and take a job with the largest consumer
products company?

Not in Washington, D.C.

Asked about the propriety of the move, FTC spokesperson Nancy Judy
explains that Majoras will need to abide by a year-long "cooling off"
period. She'll never be able to represent P&G before the Commission on
matters on which she worked while at the FTC. And once she announced
that she would be taking a job with P&G, she removed herself from any
matters that might affect the company.

Shira Mintz, who is the assistant general counsel for ethics at the FTC,
says that Majoras is "extremely conscientious" about ethical matters,
and that everything she has done is above board.

OK, but is there any concern about appearances here? Or is this just how
things work?

"It is how things work," says Mintz. "The nature of the business is the
revolving door."

Wow.

"You get extremely qualified people to come into government, and then
they go back into the real world," says Mintz. "Real world" means
well-paying corporate work.

Majoras came to the FTC from the Bush Justice Department. Prior to that,
she worked for the corporate law firm Jones Day. Jones Day claims more
than half of the Fortune 500, including P&G, as clients.

Procter & Gamble is the largest consumer goods company in the United
States (not counting Altria/Philip Morris, which is breaking itself
apart later this week). It makes Old Spice deodorant, Charmin toilet
paper, Pampers diapers, Duracell batteries, Ivory soap, CoverGirl
cosmetics, Dawn dish washing soap, Clairol hair dye, Pepto-Bismol, Tide
laundry detergent, Crest toothpaste, Bounty paper towels, Gillette
shaving products, Folgers coffee and Pringles potato chips, among many
other products.

The FTC is an independent federal agency with authority over both
consumer protection and competition policy. Given the breadth of the
FTC's jurisdiction and the breadth of P&G's product line, what the FTC
does -- and does not do -- is of potentially enormous importance to P&G.

Under the Bush administration, including the period since 2004, when
Majoras became chair, the FTC hasn't done much.

Consider just a few of the issues that touch on Procter & Gamble's
interests:

* P&G is the leading company involved in "buzz marketing" -- employing
regular people to talk up company products, often in exchange for free
merchandise. P&G says it has 250,000 teens working for its Tremor
division. P&G sends them stuff, and they are supposed to talk to friends
about the products.

The head of the Tremor division told USA Today in 2005, “If we’ve done
our work correctly, they talk to their friends about" the gifts. Tremor
doesn’t tell members to say they are part of Tremor, he explained,
“because you never tell a [panelist] what to say.”

An organization with which I work, Commercial Alert, petitioned the FTC
in 2005 to investigate whether buzz marketing operations violate federal
rules on deceptive advertising. The basic FTC rule is that paid
marketers must disclose that they are paid.

The Commercial Alert petition asked the FTC to review evidence that
“companies are perpetrating large-scale deception upon consumers by
deploying buzz marketers who fail to disclose that they have been
enlisted to promote products. This failure to disclose is fundamentally
fraudulent and misleading.”

The petition specifically focused on P&G, arguing that “the Commission
should carefully examine the targeting of minors by buzz marketing,
because children and teenagers tend to be more impressionable and easy
to deceive. The Commission should do this, at a minimum, by issuing
subpoenas to executives at Proctor & Gamble’s Tremor and other buzz
marketers that target children and teenagers, to determine whether their
endorsers are disclosing that they are paid marketers.”

A year later, the FTC responded. The Commission agreed with the thrust
of Commercial Alert's argument: "In some word of mouth marketing
contexts, it would appear that consumers may reasonably give more weight
to statements that sponsored consumers make about their opinions or
experience with a product based on their assumed independence from the
marketer." But then the Commission declined to undertake an
investigation or rule-making, saying it would consider matters only a
case-by-case basis. The P&G case -- involving a quarter of a million
teens who are not instructed to disclose their relationship to the
company -- apparently was not noteworthy enough.

Said Gary Ruskin, Commercial Alert's executive director at the time,
"Instead of acting like a watchdog, the Commission is more like a docile
lapdog nestled in the lap of its corporate masters."

* A major emerging technology for consumer products is RFID (Radio
Frequency Identification) systems. These systems, involving the
attachment of tiny, trackable electronic chips to products (or people,
pets and cars), offer the possibility of precise inventory control and
management. They also portend some major privacy concerns.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) warns of the
possibility of "an Orwellian world where law enforcement officials and
nosy retailers could read the contents of a handbag -- perhaps without a
person's knowledge -- simply by installing RFID readers nearby." There
are concerns about retailers and manufacturers being able to track
consumers once they leave the store.

These issues are being taken seriously in Europe. There, says EPIC
executive director Marc Rotenberg, "the European Commission has
undertaken an extensive public consultation and has recently held
several high-level events." The European Commission is now soliciting
comments on proposed privacy standards for RFID technologies.

In the United States, in 2004, the Federal Trade Commission held a
workshop on RFID issues. P&G presented at the workshop, detailing the
company's privacy policies and how it would ensure that RFID
technologies were not abused. EPIC also presented.

"EPIC submitted very detailed comments with clear recommendations," says
Rotenberg. "No action since."

* Childhood obesity rates in the United States have more than tripled
over the past four decades. The childhood rate of type 2 diabetes, once
known as "adult-onset" diabetes, has more than doubled in the past
decade. No serious person believes skyrocketing childhood obesity rates
are unrelated to the onslaught of junk food marketing targeting kids.
The staid Institute of Medicine finds, "food and beverage marketing
practices geared to children and youth are out of balance with healthful
diets and contribute to an environment that puts their health at risk."

It has been impossible for the FTC to completely ignore this issue. But
the FTC has doubly worked to protect the junk food marketers. It
emphasized that many factors besides marketing are driving the obesity
epidemic -- which is true, but a way to divert attention from the
agency's regulatory role. And, as Majoras said in 2007, "the focus of
the FTC/HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] joint initiative
on childhood obesity has been on marketing and industry self-regulation."

In recent years, facing the threat of litigation, federal legislation,
state and local regulation, and citizen pressure campaigns -- just about
everything but serious FTC action -- the junk food companies have
adopted some modestly helpful marketing guidelines to curb some of their
most aggressive practices. But the guidelines remain voluntary and are
non-enforceable. Although it has held some interesting meetings, the FTC
has been absent on the regulatory front.

These are just three among many examples. Other FTC policy issues
implicating Procter & Gamble include online marketing to kids, product
placement on TV, and mergers (the FTC in 2005 approved a controversial,
$57 billion P&G takeover of Gillette, a decision from which Majoras
recused herself.) There are many others.

There's no reason to suspect Majoras is violating any laws in going to
work for Procter & Gamble, or that she will in the future. There is no
reason to believe she did favors for P&G in anticipation of a job with
the company. From her new, high post, she personally may never take up a
matter before the FTC.

But the deep corruption inside the beltway is not the illegal,
Jack-Abramoff stuff. The real corrupting influences are the things that
are legal. The things that Washington insiders view as just "how things
work."

Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational
Monitor, <http://www.multinationalmonitor.org> and managing director of
Commercial Alert <http://www.commercialalert.org>.

When a Great Power Goes Mad

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/032808.html

An obvious reason why the mainstream US press can’t handle the Iraq truth is that to do so would mean that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, a host of other US officials and even some prominent journalists could be regarded as war criminals, says Robert Parry.

With the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War and the grim milestone of 4,000 US dead, the nation has been awash with news retrospectives on the war and speeches by politicians, mostly offering sanitized versions of what’s transpired.

So, you have President George W. Bush, the chief author of this catastrophic war, declaring that “normalcy is returning back to Iraq” even as fighting rages across much of the country and rockets rain down on the highly fortified Green Zone in Baghdad.

Bush’s comment invited comparisons to the acronym coined by U.S. Army soldiers during World War II: SNAFU for “situation normal, all f*cked up.”

In the news media, there were specials, including a much-touted PBS Frontline two-parter on “Bush’s War” which followed the mainstream line of mostly accepting the Bush administration’s good intentions while blaming the disaster on policy execution – a lack of planning, bureaucratic rivalries, rash decisions and wishful thinking.

The chief interviews for the program were with former Bush administration officials and with journalists – such as Michael Gordon and John Burns of the New York Times whose influential reporting helped set the stage for the war – and with Bob Woodward, whose Bush at War was a generally flattering account of Bush’s decision-making.

Remaining outside the frame of mainstream U.S. debate was any serious examination of the war’s fundamental illegality.

During the post-World War II trials at Nuremberg, the United States led the world in decrying aggressive war as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Yet, Frontline and other mainstream U.S. news outlets shy away from this central fact of the Iraq War: by invading Iraq without the approval of the U.N. Security Council and under false pretenses, the Bush administration released upon the Iraqi people “the accumulated evil of the whole” – and committed the “supreme” war crime.

An obvious reason why the mainstream U.S. press can’t handle this truth is that to do so would mean that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, a host of other U.S. officials and even some prominent journalists could be regarded as war criminals.

To accept that reality would, in turn, create a moral imperative to take action. And that would require a great disruption in the existing U.S. power structure, which hasn’t changed much since Bush won authorization from Congress in October 2002 to use force and then invaded Iraq in March 2003.

Not only are Bush and Cheney still in office – and two of the three remaining presidential candidates, John McCain and Hillary Clinton, voted for the war – but the roster of top Washington journalists remains remarkably intact from five years ago.

Iraq War hawk Fred Hiatt still runs the Washington Post’s editorial pages where you can still read the likes of Charles Krauthammer, David Ignatius, Richard Cohen and a bunch of other columnists who pushed for the war.

The same is true for the New York Times’s op-ed page, where writers like Thomas Friedman have prospered despite their erroneous war judgments and where one of the few changes has been to recruit prominent neoconservative William Kristol, who has used his column to chide Americans who won’t hail Bush’s courageous war leadership.

Deeper Trends

In evaluating this corrupt political/media elite, a historian might want to go back even further and wonder how someone as eminently unqualified and unfit as George W. Bush became president of the most powerful nation on earth.

How did a technologically sophisticated country like the United States with a relatively free press get led down this dangerous path? Why did so many American voters in 2000 believe made-up stories about Al Gore’s supposed delusions, like the apocryphal quote, “I invented the Internet”?

Indeed, how did a seemingly endless supply of myths and half-truths take root in the American psyche?

Going back even a bit further, how were Americans sold on the happy tales of Ronald Reagan’s presidency as the blood of U.S.-supported dirty wars in Central America and elsewhere was washed from the nation’s memory bank?

Why in a media environment with 24-hour cable news programming has intelligent dissent against U.S. foreign policy been so marginalized and excluded? Why are editors and producers so afraid of allowing some of these voices to be heard? How has such a destructive “group think” been allowed to take hold?

One of the obvious answers is fear – at least fear that one’s career would be irreparably damaged by wandering too far outside the safety of the herd.

And while running with that herd, it’s understood that there’s much greater safety in veering right, given the well-funded conservative attack groups that have devoured the careers of many independent-minded journalists who refused to bend.

(I’ve tried to address this history in my books, including Lost History, Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, as well as at Consortiumnews.com.)

Well-Spoken Madness

While many Americans – both inside and outside Washington – recognize these real-world constraints on how politicians and journalists address issues, the larger consequences are less understood.

What these trends have done over the past three decades is not just shift the dominant U.S. political/media system to the right. Nor have they just constructed a “group think” that excludes reasonable points of view that challenge the conventional wisdom.

The cumulative effect of this willful conformity and this informal censorship has been to engender a form of collective madness at the decision-making levels of the U.S. government — and within the upper echelons of the news media.

But it is a flexible form of insanity in which reality is alternatively banished – as it was in the early phases of the Iraq War, from WMD “mushroom clouds” through “Mission Accomplished” – and then is brought in for retooling when matters get too far out of control, when the jarring gap between the official line and the truth starts to destabilize the national political consensus.

In listening to the measured tones of the Frontline narration – not to mention the well-dressed ex-government officials and the well-spoken mainstream journalists – I was left with the feeling that a new synthetic “reality” was being lowered in to replace the older discredited version.

It was as if the bloody madness that President Bush inflicted on the people of Iraq – aided and abetted by many witting and unwitting American accomplices – was being drained of its crimson hue and stripped of its human horrors.

Forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead and maimed. Forget the innumerable lives destroyed and the millions displaced. Forget the bizarre forms of torture at Abu Ghraib and the widespread mistreatment of detainees at other Iraqi prisons.

After all, we were being told, the war’s architects were honorable and reasonable men and women who were trying to do the right thing, but sadly they were undermined by bureaucratic inertia, back-biting and, yes, incompetence. It was just one big SNAFU.

But, with a few changes here and there – a new general or two, a tweaked counter-insurgency strategy, some more U.S. soldiers and a bit more patience – everything will work out just fine.

No need for national guilt. No need for accountability. No reason to purge the editorial offices of leading newspapers and TV networks. No reason to talk about impeachment or war-crimes tribunals for committing the “supreme” crime against world peace. No need for any of that.

As President Bush said on March 27, “normalcy is returning back to Iraq,” if you don’t take note of the mayhem all around. One might add that a similar form of “normalcy is returning back to Washington,” if you don’t take note of all the lies and the self-deceptions.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, “Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush”, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, “Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq” and “Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ }are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

Cheap Wine, Grilled Rat and Woody Guthrie, Down by the River

http://smokingmirrors.blogspot.com/2008/03/cheap-wine-grilled-rat-and-woody.html

You knew it had to come… an unseen hand of circumstance has ripped the smiling Kabuki mask away and it’s clear that there is no Iraqi government. There is no Iraqi army, there is no Iraqi police. The surge didn’t work. There is never going to be any ‘mission accomplished’. It’s as empty of substance as the space between Bush’s ears and as much of a pumped up fantasy as the crotch-shot on the deck of the carrier.

Now they are offering money for weapons in Iraq. Let’s see, you got a job working for a powerful crime boss from across the water who took over your country and you thought you’d flex your muscles and go after one of the big guys in your back yard and then he not only kicks your ass but some of your guys take off their uniforms and go over to the other side. The big crime boss sends in some tactical help; some on site, out of town boys with heavy artillery and… the financial comptroller for the powerful crime boss who took over your country and who is across the water in another direction sends in some heavy hitters too and they wack some families that are ‘connected’ to the big guy in your back yard but that doesn’t mean anything because that happens every day anyway and… you, you decide that you’ll offer the guys who kicked your ass some money in exchange for the weapons they used to defend themselves against you. Have I got it right?

Yeah, that’ll work. How about some short term, no interest loans for houses? It worked in the United States. Of course, the United States doesn’t have an insurgency unless you count an entire nation of people with their heads turned, scuttling down the street like crabs looking for a hole in the ground.

America, “land of the free, home of the brave” should be called, “Land of… who me? Home of the slave.” It’s got a nice ring to it.

For a long time now I have been trying to trouble shoot my way around, under, through, any which way, to understand how three hundred million people turned into ambulatory lumps of Jello that tremble and shake like rats on Warfarin every time somebody coughs in the back of the subway tunnel.

America has had trouble before and risen to the challenge. Even if the Civil War was caused by European bankers there was a mad rush to save the country from itself. People were willing to give their lives. When the bankers went to work again to create the First World War, everybody pitched in again to help them out. When they engineered the Second World War, Johnny went and got his gun again. Now they’re working on the Third World War and this time Johnny Anonymous is shouting in all caps across the new frontier of the internet.

The way they do it is they mess with the money and create fear and turmoil just like you are reading about now. Did you think I was coming to some kind of a point? Actually I was but the point was to make a sharp right turn without signaling and pull into this empty parking lot here so that we could have a little chat. You see, this post is not about what it was supposed to be about, just like everything you are being told is not what it is about.

You’re being squeezed by these same money men so that life will become so intolerable that you’ll be glad to run through the bloody trenches and razor wire to free yourself from the conditions created by the people who sent you running in the first place.

There’s too many of you. You’re taking up too much space. Over here and over there people are breeding like rabbits because that is what people do when they are starving and short of resources, shelter, food, opportunity and the value of their labor has disappeared because they already dug up and sold everything they had to the people who bought off their leaders and created the unbearable debt they find themselves in. Maybe they’ll get lucky and these people will find something else they want and they can start all over again.

Yeah, yeah… I’ve got a point. It’s in here somewhere. Let’s just sit here for awhile. It’s quiet here in the back-lot of Best Buy; just you and me and the homeless, foraging in the dumpsters behind the Sack and Save. I’ve eaten in a lot of fine restaurants in my life but I’ll tell you, some of the happiest days of my life were spent barbecuing rats on an old refrigerator grill down by the river. Afterwards we’d share a gallon of wine and sing Woody Guthrie songs.

Well, I may be back down by that river one of these days singing my own songs. The Recording Industry Association of America thinks I’m getting too much money but I understand we’re all going to be okay if we just shake like Jello and let them tap our trembling for a new energy source. They’ve already put generators between the legs of all the obese people who now make electricity from the friction of their legs rubbing together and that’s all going to Las Vegas. They solved the water problem too. Did I tell you about that? They’re going to harvest all the human tears and can you imagine what that’s going to come to?

Well… it didn’t take that long. Everybody in the car with me has fallen asleep so I’m going to run a hose from the exhaust in through one of the windows. I’m glad I gassed up before I started this composition. I’ll just close the door softly and walk away. It will be a kindness I think.

I don’t know how much space I’ve got left to say something meaningful here or how long anybody reading this anywhere is going to be able to stay away with that gigantic hose that’s pumping carbon monoxide through the vents of the nation.

Okay… let’s pretend it’s not like this. I know it’s a bummer when I talk this way. I want to end on a high note, let the right hand travel some distance over from middle C.

We could have had a better world and I suppose we still can but it’s so much harder to accomplish it when so many of us with the talent to lead and inform are working for the people who made things the way that they are. I don’t know what their payoff is. They’re going to wind up down by the river too. It may be a better section of the river with a better class of grilled rat. They might have paper cups for their wine but… they’re still down by the river.

What did they promise all of those congressmen and senators when they agreed not to impeach the president for high crimes and treason? Did they promise them blowjobs or just show them some of the photos of their own blowjobs in the past? What did they do to stop everyone who might have made a difference from pointing out that 9/11 was an inside job? What goes on in the minds of everyone who knows the truth as they go thought their days on their way to the river?

I hope you can hear me speaking right now. I’m telling you, you need to get out of the car because something doesn’t smell right. Is that true that you can’t smell carbon monoxide? Just take my word for it. You need to learn what Al Sadr knows. You can’t reason with these people and you can’t trust these people. You’ve got to learn what Al Sadr knows, you’re stronger than these people. I do believe a lot of you are getting out of the car. I don’t know where it’s coming from but there’s fresh air coming in from somewhere. We just need to get a little distance and clear our heads for a moment. Then I think we’ve got to see that the right people head down to the river and don’t come back.

UN Could Lead New 9/11 Investigation, Says Japanese MP

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/march2008/033108_un_investigation.htm

Japanese member of Parliament Yukihisa Fujita told the Alex Jones Show yesterday that a potential new investigation of the 9/11 cover-up could be led by global parliamentarians he has been in contact with, or even by the United Nations itself.

Fujita, an MP for the Japanese Democratic Party, and a member of the House of Councillors in the Diet (national legislature), presented evidence which contradicted the official 9/11 story during a widely publicized Japanese Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee meeting in January of this year.

Following Fujita’s presentation in the Japanese Diet, he also took part in a 9/11 truth conference at the EU Parliament in Brussels on February 26th which was hosted by Italian MEP Giullietto Chiesa (both presentations can be viewed at the end of this article).

“This is something Parliamentarians of various countries could ask – I was in Europe meeting with European MP’s and they are also thinking about asking the UN to investigate, so these kind of efforts need to be done internationally,” said Fujita, adding that he had visited eleven different European countries in an attempt to garner support for the move.

Fujita said the reaction to his presentation of the evidence during a session of the Japanese Parliament was encouraging, adding that several members of his party were already aware of some of the issues surrounding the incredulity of the official story.

The Japanese MP said that he first began researching 9/11 around two years ago after watching documentaries and looking at evidence online.

“At the beginning I thought I couldn’t believe, this can’t be true, but then last year when I heard more about various facts and photos of the collapse of the seven building (WTC 7) and the put options conducted before 9/11 – I began to see that there was serious evidence that a cover-up might have been involved,” Fujita told the Alex Jones Show.

The MP personally visited the former President of Germany’s Bundesbank (presumably Ernst Welteke), who admitted that suspicious insider trading on American and United Airlines did take place immediately before 9/11.

Fujita said the deaths of 24 Japanese citizens during as a result of the attack in New York spurred him to ask why no cause of death had been properly ascertained by the Japanese government as would be routine, and why no DNA records had been recovered.

Fujita said he was currently engaged in a back and forth question and answer process with the Japanese Prime Minister in an attempt to get questions about 9/11 answered.

The MP said that people had warned him to be careful about asking questions about 9/11 because it could put his life in danger.

Fujita will today report back on his meetings in Europe and Sydney to fellow members of his party in an attempt to achieve further momentum in attaining consensus for a comprehensive investigation of 9/11 led by independent global Parliamentarians and not by Bush administration cronies, as was the case with the 9/11 Commission.

—————————————–

9/11 Truth Conference at EU Parliament in Brussels, February 26th, 2008.

 

 

Yukihisa Fujita’s 9/11 Presentation to the Japanese Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, January 11th, 2008.

 

As Jobs Vanish and Prices Rise, Food Stamp Use Nears Record

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/us/31foodstamps.html?_r=2&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1206929080-T1nWta1S+xNL5uA16620wA&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

By ERIK ECKHOLM

Driven by a painful mix of layoffs and rising food and fuel prices, the number of Americans receiving food stamps is projected to reach 28 million in the coming year, the highest level since the aid program began in the 1960s.

The number of recipients, who must have near-poverty incomes to qualify for benefits averaging $100 a month per family member, has fluctuated over the years along with economic conditions, eligibility rules, enlistment drives and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, which led to a spike in the South.

But recent rises in many states appear to be resulting mainly from the economic slowdown, officials and experts say, as well as inflation in prices of basic goods that leave more families feeling pinched. Citing expected growth in unemployment, the Congressional Budget Office this month projected a continued increase in the monthly number of recipients in the next fiscal year, starting Oct. 1 — to 28 million, up from 27.8 million in 2008, and 26.5 million in 2007.

The percentage of Americans receiving food stamps was higher after a recession in the 1990s, but actual numbers are expected to be higher this year.

Federal benefit costs are projected to rise to $36 billion in the 2009 fiscal year from $34 billion this year.

“People sign up for food stamps when they lose their jobs, or their wages go down because their hours are cut,” said Stacy Dean, director of food stamp policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, who noted that 14 states saw their rolls reach record numbers by last December.

One example is Michigan, where one in eight residents now receives food stamps. “Our caseload has more than doubled since 2000, and we’re at an all-time record level,” said Maureen Sorbet, spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Human Services.

The climb in food stamp recipients there has been relentless, through economic upturns and downturns, reflecting a steady loss of industrial jobs that has pushed recipient levels to new highs in Ohio and Illinois as well.

“We’ve had poverty here for a good while,” Ms. Sorbet said. Contributing to the rise, she added, Michigan, like many other states, has also worked to make more low-end workers aware of their eligibility, and a switch from coupons to electronic debit cards has reduced the stigma.

Some states have experienced more recent surges. From December 2006 to December 2007, more than 40 states saw recipient numbers rise, and in several — Arizona, Florida, Maryland, Nevada, North Dakota and Rhode Island — the one-year growth was 10 percent or more.

In Rhode Island, the number of recipients climbed by 18 percent over the last two years, to more than 84,000 as of February, or about 8.4 percent of the population. This is the highest total in the last dozen years or more, said Bob McDonough, the state’s administrator of family and adult services, and reflects both a strong enlistment effort and an upward creep in unemployment.

In New York, a program to promote enrollment increased food stamp rolls earlier in the decade, but the current climb in applications appears in part to reflect economic hardship, said Michael Hayes, spokesman for the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance. The additional 67,000 clients added from July 2007 to January of this year brought total recipients to 1.86 million, about one in 10 New Yorkers.

Nutrition and poverty experts praise food stamps as a vital safety net that helped eliminate the severe malnutrition seen in the country as recently as the 1960s. But they also express concern about what they called the gradual erosion of their value.

Food stamps are an entitlement program, with eligibility guidelines set by Congress and the federal government paying for benefits while states pay most administrative costs.

Eligibility is determined by a complex formula, but basically recipients must have few assets and incomes below 130 percent of the poverty line, or less than $27,560 for a family of four.

As a share of the national population, food stamp use was highest in 1994, after several years of poor economic growth, with an average of 27.5 million recipients per month from a lower total of residents. The numbers plummeted in the late 1990s as the economy grew and legal immigrants and certain others were excluded.

But access by legal immigrants has been partly restored and, in the current decade, the federal and state governments have used advertising and other measures to inform people of their eligibility and have often simplified application procedures.

Because they spend a higher share of their incomes on basic needs like food and fuel, low-income Americans have been hit hard by soaring gasoline and heating costs and jumps in the prices of staples like milk, eggs and bread.

At the same time, average family incomes among the bottom fifth of the population have been stagnant or have declined in recent years at levels around $15,500, said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

The benefit levels, which can amount to many hundreds of dollars for families with several children, are adjusted each June according to the price of a bare-bones “thrifty food plan,” as calculated by the Department of Agriculture. Because food prices have risen by about 5 percent this year, benefit levels will rise similarly in June — months after the increase in costs for consumers.

Advocates worry more about the small but steady decline in real benefits since 1996, when the “standard deduction” for living costs, which is subtracted from family income to determine eligibility and benefit levels, was frozen. If that deduction had continued to rise with inflation, the average mother with two children would be receiving an additional $37 a month, according to the private Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Both houses of Congress have passed bills that would index the deduction to the cost of living, but the measures are part of broader agriculture bills that appear unlikely to pass this year because of disagreements with the White House over farm policy.

Another important federal nutrition program known as WIC, for women, infants and children, is struggling with rising prices of milk and cheese, and growing enrollment.

The program, for households with incomes no higher than 185 percent of the federal poverty level, provides healthy food and nutrition counseling to 8.5 million pregnant women, and children through the age of 4. WIC is not an entitlement like food stamps, and for the fiscal year starting in October, Congress may have to approve a large increase over its current budget of $6 billion if states are to avoid waiting lists for needy mothers and babies.

America’s Silent Killing Fields

http://spktruth2power.wordpress.com/

America’s silent killers are deadly, and do not discriminate. They target babies, the elderly, teenagers, young adults, middle-age housewives, and businessmen alike. They poison livestock, pets, and wildlife, and the people behind them deny complicity in the carnage. Who or what are these silent, deadly killers? They are the beautiful, green, uniform, and seemingly beneficial, killing fields of GMO crops. The people behind them are the U.S. government, the Rockefellers, Monsanto, Dow, DuPont, and Syngenta.

 

How it Began

Eugenics is a dirty word, yet particularly applicable to America’s killing fields and their inception: Henry Kissinger drafted the controversial NSSM-200 in 1974, called “the foundational document on population control issued by the United States government.”

According to NSSM-200, elements of the implementation of population control programs could include:

a) the legalization of abortion;

b) financial incentives for countries to increase their abortion, sterilization and contraception-use rates;

c) indoctrination of children; and

d) mandatory population control, and coercion of other forms, such as withholding disaster and food aid unless an LDC implements population control programs

NSSM-200 also specifically declared that the United States was to cover up its population control activities and avoid charges of imperialism by inducing the United Nations and various non-governmental organizations to do its dirty work.
(Human Life International, 2008)

In 1970, Henry Kissinger said, “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.” How do you control food? By consolidating agricultural interests into what was to be termed agribusiness, creating genetically modified organisms out of heritage seeds with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, patenting the new seeds, and making sure that these new seeds are force-fed to U.S. farmers as well as the rest of the world. By holding the patents on these seeds and requiring farmers to purchase new seeds every year, the control is complete. Also, by controlling how these GMO seeds are created, other more sinister uses come to mind. But first, you must convince the world of your good intentions. This is accomplished through lies, deception, and a bit of media manipulation. By promising farmers that this technology was safe, and would result in increased yields at less cost, they were more than happy to give it a try. The fact that in most cases this claim was false had yet to be proven by the innocent farmers that believed the lie. By the time independent studies started revealing that GMO is harmful, it was too late, and the freight train called agri-business was on its way to fulfilling its purpose – to make as much money as possible by spreading GMO seeds as far as possible, and thus gaining control of the population via food.

The U.S. Farmland Takeover

It is now 2008, and the U.S. is in the midst of a deadly trend. From time-tested agricultural processes that involve tilling the land, planting, and harvesting both produce and seed, to mass-produced, genetically engineered seed injection requiring less workers and more pesticides, agribusiness has taken hold and is strangling the country with its GMO crops and farming methods. The end-result? The family farmer is squeezed out in favor of agribusiness’ mass-production methods using genetically engineered crops grown with poisoned seeds, good for one harvest only. Here are some statistics that show how GMO crops are taking over U.S. farmland:

The adoption of HT [herbicide-tolerant] corn, which had been slower in previous years, has accelerated, reaching 52 percent of U.S. corn acreage in 2007…

Plantings of Bt [insect-resistant] corn grew from 8 percent of U.S. corn acreage in 1997 to 26 percent in 1999, then fell to 19 percent in 2000 and 2001, before climbing to 29 percent in 2003 and 49 percent in 2007… Plantings of Bt cotton expanded more rapidly, from 15 percent of U.S. cotton acreage in 1997 to 37 percent in 2001 and 59 percent in 2007.

Adoption of all GE [genetically engineered] cotton, taking into account the acreage with either or both HT and Bt traits, reached 87 percent in 2007, versus 91 percent for soybeans. In contrast, adoption of all biotech corn was 73 percent.

(USDA, 2007)

The Killing Fields go Worldwide

Not content to restrict the use of GMO to the U.S., a larger, more ambitious plan was in the making.

By Presidential Executive Order [1992], the US had defined GMO seeds as harmless and hence not needing to be regulated for health and safety.

It made sure this principle was carried over into the new WTO in the form of the WTO’s Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement (SPS), which stated, ‘Food standards and measures aimed at protecting people from pests or animals can potentially be used as a deliberate barrier to trade’…

Other WTO rules in the Agreement to Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) forbid member countries from using domestic standards or testing, food safety laws, product standards, calling them an ‘unfair barrier to trade.’

The impact of those two US-mandated WTO rulings meant that Washington could threaten that any government restricting import of GM plants on grounds they might pose threats to health and safety of their population, could be found to be in violation of WTO free trade rules! (Engdahl, 2006)

This resulted in a long awaited plan by the multinational GMO pushers to take over global agriculture, as represented in the following chart that outlines just how many hectares of land were devoted to GMO crops from 1996 to 2006:

(GMO Compass, 2007)

Take a good look at the chart above, and let’s do the math. Keep in mind that all figures are approximate.

 

1 hectare = 2.4711 acres. In 2006, there were 102 million hectares of land on planet earth devoted to GMO crops, or 252.05 million acres. 1 square mile = 640 acres. Therefore, by 2006, there were approximately 393,828 square miles of GMO crops.

The earth’s total landmass is approximately 92,229,476 square miles. In 2005, Taipei Times reported that 40% of the earth’s land mass was being used for farmland. Not accounting for any increase from 2005 to 2006, the amount of land being used for farmland was, in 2006, 40% of 92,229,476 square miles, or 36,891,790 square miles, and this includes grazing land for livestock production.

According to Science Daily, “grazing occupies 26 percent of the Earth’s terrestrial surface.” 26% of earth’s total landmass of 92,229,476 square miles = 23,979,664 square miles. So, subtract that from the total amount of land being used for farmland, and we get 12,912,126 square miles of farmland devoted to raising crops.

Of this total amount of farmland that is being used to raise crops, 393,828 square miles are devoted to GMO crop production as of 2006.

Let’s look a bit further:

According the chart above, in 1996, there were 1.7 hectares, or 4.2 million acres, which equates to approximately 6,563 square miles of farmland devoted to GMO crops. In 2006, there were 393,828 square miles of farmland devoted to GMO crops, which was 387,265 square miles more in 2006 than in 1996. Using a rate of increase calculation, this equates to

A 5900% INCREASE IN LAND DEVOTED TO GMO CROPS IN A 10-YEAR PERIOD!

 

 

If you think that this trend cannot continue, think again.

 

 

In 2007, the cultivation of genetically modified plants also increased. The area dedicated to such plants rose by 12 million hectares to reach a total of 114 million hectares. The greatest increase was shown by maize, which added 10 million hectares to its area. Genetically modified plants are commercially employed in 23 countries, twelve of which are developing nations. (GMO Compass, 2008)

 

(GMO Compass, 2008)

It looks like the agri-giants are right on schedule, with an average yearly increase of approximately 10 million hectares of land. The increase from 2006 to 2007 was 102 to 114 hectares. At this rate, the amount of land dedicated to the growth of GM killing fields will double in another 10 years.

 

GMO – What Harm Can it Do?

Contrary to claims by the U.S. government and Monsanto et al, who claim that GMO crops are beneficial, independent studies have been conducted with shocking results.

In a 2005 report by Regnum, a Russian news agency,

 

On October 10, during the symposium over genetic modification, organized by the National Association for Genetic Security (NAGS), Doctor of Biology Irina Ermakova made public the results of the research led by her at the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). This is the first research that determined clear dependence between eating genetically modified soy and the posterity of living creatures.

 

 

“The morphology and biochemical structures of rats are very similar to those of humans, and this makes the results we obtained very disturbing,” said Irina Ermakova to NAGS press office. (Regnum, 2005)

 

Another glaring example is that of Syngenta and the German farmer, Gottfried Glockner of North Hessen. As William Engdahl explains in Seeds of Destruction,

 

This farmer found evidence that planting Syngenta Bt-176 genetically engineered corn to feed his cattle in 1997 had been responsible for killing off his cattle, destroying his milk production, and poisoning his farmland. Syngenta’s Bt-176 corn had been engineered to produce a toxin of Bacillus thuringiensis, which they claimed was deadly to a damaging insect, the European Corn Borer. (pg. 230)

 

Evidently, Syngenta’s GMO corn was deadly to a lot more than the corn borer.

 

Is anything more important?

To make a distinction between the health effects of GMO on animals and humans is reckless at best. If rats that eat GMO soy, and cattle that eat GMO corn have severe health effects and die, then what happens to humans that eat GMO soy and corn, drink milk from GMO-fed cows, and eat beef from GMO-fed cattle? Don’t we deserve more? If GMO killing fields are poisoning the animals whose products we consume, then they are poisoning us also.

What does it matter about the issues we fight about if we are being slaughtered slowly and silently by the foods we eat? Not only are we being killed off, but the diseases that we get because of this consumption keep the medical establishment in Ferraris and Penthouses while doctors treat the symptoms of the diseases we contract, while never addressing the cause.

 

Can it be stopped?

GMO killing fields are taking over our farms and stores, as well as our very lives. These silent, deadly killers have been hiding in anonymity since “1992…when George H.W. Bush…issued an Executive Order proclaiming GMO plants such as soybeans or GMO corn to be ‘substantially equivalent’ to ordinary corn or soybeans, and, therefore, not needing any special health safety study or testing” (Engdahl, 2006). Even labeling foods containing GMO ingredients is not allowed. With the proliferation of GMO ingredients, it is no wonder that companies do not want to be responsible for labeling their products. They probably do not know if what they are getting is GMO or not! How can you label something if you do not know what it is?

Planting individual gardens with organic seeds, then harvesting these seeds from one year to the next is one way to combat the GMO revolution. Also, local groups devoted to growing organic produce for the communities in which they live can stem the tide of personal GMO consumption one community at a time, at least for a while.

 

The Endgame

The U.S. government, Monsanto, Dow, Dupont, and Syngenta are not in business to keep people healthy. They are in business to make money. Unless this is understood, these corporations will continue using the public as guinea pigs for their experiments in population control, and in so doing, glean ever-increasing profits from the unsuspecting and naive. It is time to stand up and resist these giants by demanding accountability, and using what resources are left to become self-sufficient and say NO WAY to GMO! If we don’t, America’s silent killing fields will do their job, and we will no longer have a choice.

Copyright 2008, Barbara H. Peterson

References:

ECO World. (2008). Earth. Retrieved from http://www.ecoworld.com/earth/ecoworld_earth_home5.cfm

Engdahl, F.W. (2007). Seeds of Destruction. Global Research.

Engdahl, F.W. (2006). WTO, GMO and Total Spectrum Dominance:WTO rules put free-trade of agribusiness above national health concerns. Global Research. Retrieved from http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=2202

GMO Compass. (2008). Further Increase for GM Plants: Cultivation Risen to 114 Million Hectares. Global Cultivation Areas 2007. Retrieved from http://www.gmo-compass.org/eng/agri_biotechnology/gmo_planting/257.global_gm_planting_2007.html

GMO Compass. (2007). Transgenic Crops by Trait. GM Trait Statistics. Retrieved from

http://www.gmo-compass.org/eng/agri_biotechnology/gmo_planting/145.gmo_cultivation_trait_statistics.html

Human Life International. (2008). Kissinger Report 2004. Population Control: NSSM 200 – Exposed. Retrieved from http://www.hli.org/nssm_200_exposed.html

Regnum. (2005). Genetically modified soy affects posterity: Results of Russian scientists’ studies. Retrieved from http://www.regnum.ru/english/526651.html

Science Daily. (2007). Harmful Environmental Effects of Livestock Production on the Planet Increasingly Serious says Panel. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070220145244.htm

Taipei Times. (2005). Earth is All Out of New Farmland. Retrieved from http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2005/12/07/2003283384

USDA. (2007). Adoption of Genetically Engineered Crops in the U.S.: Extent of Adoption. Economic Research Service. Retrieved from http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/BiotechCrops/adoption.htm

Who Owns the Fed?

http://www.libertyunbound.com/archive/2004_10/woolsey-fed.html

by Bill Woolsey

The Federal Reserve System prints $100 bills at a cost of 6¢. So who pockets the $99.94 profit?

It was in the late eighties. I was a new faculty member at The Citadel, teaching Money and Banking. A memo was in my box. There was a phone number and a note that someone had questions about the Federal Reserve.

Being dutiful (and not tenured), I returned the call. A man answered. I said that I was from The Citadel and understood that he had some questions about the Fed. An interrogation then began.

“Isn’t it true,” he demanded, “that the Federal Reserve pays the Treasury three cents for each dollar bill printed?” I replied that this was pretty much true.

He continued, “Isn’t it true that the Federal Reserve lends this money to ordinary banks and charges 3% interest?” I noted that while the discount rate was currently at 3%, it has sometimes been higher or lower. I added that the Fed doesn’t really lend out currency directly and that these Federal reserve advances aren’t very important. He interrupted, “Is it true or not?” I said, “Pretty much so.”

His next question was a bit different. He asked, “Isn’t it true that the Federal Reserve is privately owned?” I agreed that it was, “kind of.”

The rest came out in a bit of a rush. “So, isn’t it true that, for every dollar printed, the Federal Reserve covers the three cent cost of printing the currency with the interest and so makes a one dollar profit for the owners. And that’s how the international bankers get their money to rule the world.”

I said that no, that wasn’t true, but I had no quick and easy explanation. And my conspiracy theorist wasn’t interested in anything other than a confirmation of the first three premises. His logical deduction of a one dollar profit and his alleged bankers’ conspiracy weren’t things he needed to have confirmed.

I had never heard anything like it. Now, don’t get me wrong. I have been a libertarian since I was a teenager in the mid-’70s. The notion that the Federal Reserve, as an engine of inflation, was nefarious seemed natural. It was just this particular approach to the evils of the Fed that was new to me.

Soon after, a former student visited and asked me about Pat Robertson’s discussion of the Federal Reserve in his book “The New World Order.”1 As my student relayed the story, the Fed pays three cents for each dollar, lends it out at 3% interest and so on. Another student reported on a story about a Washington call girl. She claimed that all the politicians had credit cards. Where did they get the money? The Fed pays three cents per dollar bill and so on. A year later, at a local Libertarian Party meeting, a newcomer was distributing issues of The Spotlight, a publication of the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby. Among the articles about the dual loyalists in the State department was one about the Fed. It pays three cents per dollar bill, lends it out at 3% interest, and so on. This time, however, it was the international Jewish bankers making all the profit.

A Google search on the Federal Reserve and ownership will generate several hundred thousand hits, many of which allege that the private owners of the Fed are making huge profits from the issue of currency. There are quite a few links to sites that specifically debunk the conspiracy theory. Some links are to Federal Reserve sites that describe the system’s ownership structure.

The conventional wisdom among libertarian economists is that central banking is the modern means by which governments continue their traditional policy of debasement — using inflation as a means of public finance. The government prints money and spends it. The result is price inflation, which is often blamed on the greed of businessmen who actually set the prices. Could economists be wrong? So I did some research.

The conspiracy theorists have a point regarding the ownership of the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve system is made up of twelve Federal Reserve banks. According to the Atlanta Federal Reserve bank, “They were to be quasi-private bankers’ banks, owned by the member banks, which would buy all the stock of the Reserve Banks and receive dividends for it.”2

Any Principles of Economics or Money and Banking text describes the situation, usually in similarly ambiguous terms. Baumol and Blinder state, “Technically, each Federal Reserve bank is a corporation; its stockholders are its member banks.”3 Mishkin explains, “Each of the Federal Reserve banks is a quasi-public (part private, part government) institution owned by the private commercial banks in the district that are members of the Federal Reserve system.”4

The courts have taken notice of the Fed’s peculiar status. In the 1982 case, Lewis v. United States (see “The Lewis Decision”), the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals opined, “Federal reserve banks are not federal instrumentalities for purposes of a Federal Torts Claims Act, but are independent, privately owned and locally controlled corporations.” On the other hand, the opinion notes, “The Reserve Banks have properly been held to be federal instrumentalities for some purposes.”5

Apparently, there is something unusual about the status of these Federal Reserve banks. Some libertarian economists describe claims about the “private” nature of the Fed with an attitude of “if only.” In the context of a proposal to privatize the Federal Reserve banks, Richard Timberlake explains that “The member commercial banks already ‘own’ the twelve Fed banks,” but adds that, “they have no property rights.”6 Murray Rothbard notes that “[c]entral banks are often nominally owned by private individuals or, as in the United States, jointly by private banks, but they are always directed by government-appointed officials, and serve as arms of the government.”7

According to the Federal Reserve Act, a Federal Reserve bank is a special type of corporation chartered by the Federal government.8 Shortly after the act was passed, the United States was divided into twelve districts and a Federal Reserve bank was organized in each district.9 National banks (private commercial banks chartered by the Federal government) were forced to join the Federal Reserve system. State chartered banks could join if they chose, though most did not.10 Any newly chartered national bank must still join the system and existing or new state chartered banks can still choose to join.

One requirement of membership was for a bank to purchase stock in its district Federal Reserve bank. The amount purchased was fixed by the Act. Each member bank must purchase stock equal to 3% of its capital.11

Take a bank’s total assets — vault cash, loans, investments, building, and equipment. Then subtract its liabilities — checking accounts, savings accounts, bonds. The difference is the bank’s capital, which, in banking lingo, is another term for net worth. Multiply by 3% and that is the dollar value of the Federal Reserve stock a bank must hold.

The par value of the Federal Reserve stock was fixed by the Act at $100 per share.12 As a bank’s net worth changes and deviates from the 3% requirement, its Federal Reserve bank issues it new shares or buys back excess shares — always at the $100 par value. If any bank joins the system, its district Federal Reserve bank issues new shares. If any member bank fails, its district Federal Reserve bank pays off the shares.

The Federal Reserve Act contained a provision for selling shares to the general public or even to the U.S. Treasury if necessary to meet a minimum capitalization for each district bank. These provisions weren’t needed, and so all shares are held by member banks.13

All member banks are U.S. chartered banks — chartered by the federal government as national banks, or by one of the states. However, the stockholders of the various banks can be U.S. citizens or foreigners.

So, private investors, including foreigners, own the member banks which in turn seem to own Federal Reserve banks. That is the element of truth in the conspiracy theory.

The member banks’ “ownership” of the Fed is consistently described as “quasi,” technical, or nominal. The key reason is that owning stock in a Federal Reserve bank does not provide the usual benefits of stock ownership.

One of the key benefits of the corporate form of business relative to partnerships is that the owners can sell part or all of their interest in a business by selling some or all of their shares. But Federal Reserve banks aren’t like ordinary corporations. Aside from the transactions with their Federal Reserve banks to maintain the 3% ratio to capital, the member banks cannot buy additional shares or sell off their shares. They cannot pledge the shares as collateral for loans.14

Most investors purchase stock to earn capital gains, in the hope that it will increase in value. There is no market for Federal Reserve stock — its price remains at the par value of $100. It is impossible for the shareholders of Federal Reserve banks to earn capital gains or suffer capital losses on their stock.

Of course, stockholders in ordinary corporations can also hope for dividends. As the owners of the business, all profits belong to them. In most corporations, the board of directors decides if and when to pay dividends on common stock. But the Federal Reserve banks are different. The Federal Reserve Act fixes dividends at 6% per year.15 That is $6 per year per $100 share. Any additional earnings go to the U.S. Treasury.

If an ordinary corporation is liquidated, any remaining assets belong to the stockholders. But that isn’t the situation with the Federal Reserve banks. If the Federal Reserve is liquidated, the member banks get back their $100 per share and pending dividends and anything left over goes to the U.S. Treasury.16

Stockholders generally vote for their corporation’s board of directors, and that is true of the stockholders of the Federal Reserve banks. But there are some very unusual voting rules. Usually, stockholders vote their shares, so that the largest stockholders get the most votes. Each member bank, however, gets just one vote regardless of the number of shares it owns in its Federal Reserve bank.17

Each Federal Reserve bank has nine board members. They are divided into three groups. There are three Class A directors, three Class B directors, and three Class C directors.18

The Class A directors can be involved in the banking industry and usually are. The member banks are divided into three groups — large, medium, and small banks. While this is measured by their stockholdings, stock holding is proportional to net worth, which is closely associated with total bank size. The large banks elect one Class A director, the medium-sized banks elect another, and the small banks elect the third.19

Class B directors are elected in much the same way, except that none of them can be bank employees or stockholders. Each member bank gets one vote and the large, medium, and small banks elect one director each.

Class C directors cannot be involved in the banking industry either, but they aren’t chosen by the stockholders. They are instead appointed by the Board of Governors in Washington D.C.20

To sum up, the stockholders of each Federal Reserve Bank elect two-thirds of its board of directors. They don’t vote by shares, but rather each bank gets one vote. Bank size does influence voting, however, with large, medium, and small banks getting two directors each — one banker and one nonbanker.

For most corporations, the board of directors selected by the stockholders is free to choose top management. While the board of directors of each Federal Reserve bank chooses its president, that decision is subject to approval by the Board of Governors in Washington, D.C.21

There are seven members of the Board of Governors and they are appointed by the president of the United States with the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate. They are appointed for 14-year terms. The chairman is appointed by the president with approval by the Senate for a four-year term.22 The current chairman is Alan Greenspan.

The Board of Governors is clearly a federal government agency. Its members have substantial independence from the president and Congress because of their long terms — less than federal judges, but more than those serving on most federal regulatory commissions.

The Board of Governors dominates the twelve Federal Reserve banks. Not only does it appoint one-third of their boards of directors, it has an effective veto power over the selection of the twelve Federal Reserve bank presidents.

The Federal Reserve Act authorized the board of directors of each Federal Reserve bank to set its own discount rate in consultation with the Board of Governors. This was the interest rate at which Federal Reserve banks made loans (called advances) to member banks.23 While some of those supporting the Federal Reserve Act thought that there would be different discount rates across the United States depending on local conditions, the consultation process with the board of governors resulted in the twelve boards of directors setting a uniform discount rate.24 During the Great Depression, the Banking Act of 1933 changed consultation to a requirement that Federal Reserve banks obtain Board of Governors approval for their discount rates.25 There continued to be a single discount rate for the Federal Reserve system, though it was routinely approved by each Federal Reserve Bank’s board of directors.

In 2003, the Fed changed its lending policy. Today, any financially sound bank (member or not) can obtain loans from its district Federal Reserve bank at the primary credit rate. It is set at 1% above the Federal Funds rate.26 Since the Federal Funds rate is the interest rate at which banks borrow from and lend to other banks for overnight loans, there is little motivation to borrow from the Fed. Financially troubled banks can obtain loans at the secondary credit rate. That rate is set at .5% above the Federal Funds rate and entails added supervision.27 Given this new policy, the “power” of the board of directors of a Federal Reserve bank to set the discount rate has become a dead letter.

While the Federal Reserve Act implies that lending at the discount rate would be the key element of monetary policy, that approach was long ago superseded by open market operations. Open market operations are the purchase or sale of government bonds by the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee directs open market operations. It is made up of the seven members of the Board of Governors and five Federal Reserve Bank presidents. The president of the New York Federal Reserve always serves and the other four slots rotate among the other eleven Federal Reserve bank presidents.28

The committee sets a target for the Federal Funds rate.29 The open market trading desk at the New York Federal Reserve buys or sells government bonds. Generally, they purchase them at either a faster or slower rate so that surpluses or shortages of funds in the market cause private traders to agree to interest rates on overnight loans close to the target.

When the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee sets its target for the Federal Funds rate, it is also determining the primary and secondary credit rates for loans by the Federal Reserve banks. Today, monetary policy is controlled entirely by the Open Market Committee.

The politicians appoint the Board of Governors, which makes up seven of the twelve members of the committee. That same Board of Governors appoints one-third of the boards of directors, which select the Federal Reserve bank Presidents that make up the remaining five-twelfths of the committee. And the Board of Governors has an effective veto over the selection of Federal Reserve bank presidents.

Because of the 14-year terms for the members of the Board of Governors, today’s monetary policy mostly depends on the appointments made by politicians in the past. Short of rewriting the Federal Reserve Act, appointments by today’s politicians will only gradually effect future monetary policy. That is why the Federal Reserve System is described as an independent agency within the federal government.

Many of the conspiracy theories claim that the private owners of the Fed are making large profits from the issue of currency — Federal Reserve notes. The twelve Federal Reserve banks are responsible for issuing Federal Reserve notes, but they don’t print currency themselves. They pay the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, a division of the U.S. Treasury, for the service. Estimates for the amount the Fed pays for printing each note vary from 2 cents to 6 cents. In 2003, about 8 billion notes were printed. The Fed purchased currency with a face value of $143 billion30 and then paid the U.S. Treasury $508 million.31 That amounts to about 6 cents per note and .3 cents per dollar printed.

It is like having copies made at Kinko’s, and even more like the cost of printing checks. The printing cost doesn’t have much to do with the amount the checks will be worth when they are written and spent.

While paying less than one cent per dollar issued sounds profitable, the Federal Reserve Banks do not treat this as profit. The Fed accounts for Federal Reserve notes as a liability — a debt of a Federal Reserve bank.32

When the Fed was formed, the United States was on a gold standard and the Fed was obligated to pay off Federal Reserve notes on demand with lawful U.S. money — mostly gold coins and gold certificates. While the Fed no longer pays off Federal Reserve notes with anything, it continues to account for them as liabilities.

After the Fed has currency printed and before it is issued, it is just paper — like a blank check. When the currency is issued to banks or ends up in the hands of other firms or households, it becomes a liability for the Fed. When the currency is deposited by a bank back into the Fed, it is again meaningless paper — like a cancelled check. Unlike a used check, however, the Fed can issue out currency again.

While the Fed accounts for Federal Reserve notes as liabilities, the U.S. government guarantees them as well. If a Federal Reserve bank were to fail, then the U.S. government would pay off the outstanding currency. To protect the U.S. government from losses, it requires that Federal Reserve banks set aside U.S. government bonds or gold certificates as collateral.33 When the United States left the gold standard, there was no longer any possibility of the Fed defaulting on Federal Reserve notes, so the secondary U.S. government guarantee became meaningless. Still, the Federal Reserve banks pledge collateral for Federal Reserve notes.

The Federal Reserve doesn’t directly lend currency to banks. When a bank gets an “advance” from the Fed, the Fed just makes an entry into its computer and credits the bank’s deposit account. So rather than paying less than one cent per dollar for the money they lend to banks, the Fed actually pays nothing.

Of course, banks can withdraw currency from their deposit accounts at the Federal Reserve banks whenever they want. And they do so regularly, to cover currency withdrawals by their depositors and to stock ATM machines. The Federal Reserve banks have currency printed up as needed to cover withdrawals by the banks. And while the total stock of currency is usually expanding, a substantial portion of the Fed’s printing cost is for new currency to replace worn currency that has been withdrawn from circulation and shredded. In 2003, the Fed increased the stock of Federal Reserve notes by $42 billion and replaced $101 billion of worn currency.34

Suppose the Fed lent money to a bank, charging 2.25% annual interest (the primary credit rate in August 2004).35 The bank might withdraw the funds and the Fed would be obligated to issue it currency which would cost .3 cents per dollar (or 6 cents per note). When the bank repaid the loan (probably the next day), the Fed would earn a tiny fraction of a cent per dollar. The returned Federal Reserve note, however, wouldn’t be revenue. And the Fed could issue it out (perhaps by lending) again and again until it wears out.

Total outstanding loans by the Fed to the banks was $245 million in July 2004.36 At 2.25% interest, that would earn the Fed an income of about $5.5 million per year. But since the total amount of Federal Reserve notes is approximately $700 billion,37 it is apparent that Fed lending to banks does not play a significant role in the creation of currency.

Conspiracy theorists, like Thomas Schauf38 and Eustace Mullins,39 complain that the private owners of the Federal Reserve are profiting from the national debt. Since the Federal Reserve creates money out of thin air through open market operations — purchasing government bonds — they are at least looking in the right direction.

As of July 2004, the Fed held government bonds worth $693 billion.40 Contrary to the claims by some conspiracy theorists that the entire national debt is associated with the issue of currency, the Fed’s holdings are about 9% of the $7.5 trillion gross national debt.41 After subtracting securities held by various federal government trust funds, the Fed’s holdings are about 15% of the remaining $4.5 trillion net national debt.42

When Fed bond holdings are added to the small amount of its lending to banks, the $11 billion gold reserve, $40 billion in holdings of foreign exchange, along with repurchase agreements, Federal Reserve bank premises, and the like, the Fed’s assets cover its liabilities — Federal Reserve notes issued, the $25 billion that banks have deposited at the Fed, the government’s $4 billion deposited in the Fed, and various other small items.43

Since government bonds make up the bulk of the Fed’s assets, the interest from those bonds provides most of its revenue. In 2003, the Federal Reserve’s total income was $24 billion, of which $22 billion came from holdings of government securities.44 While that is a substantial amount of money, the total interest expense for the U.S. government was $153 billion45 and total government spending was $2.157 trillion.46 The Federal Reserve’s earnings on bonds were a bit over 14% of the government’s interest expense and 1% of total government spending.

Some conspiracy theorists have claimed that personal income tax funds are earmarked to pay interest to the Fed, and if no such interest was paid, there would be no need for the income tax. Fed interest earnings amount to a bit over 2% of the $987 billion in personal income collections in 2003.47 Total interest payments by the government are about 15% of income tax revenues.

The chief problem with the theory that the private owners are making huge profits from the Fed is that the Fed transfers large amounts of money back to the U.S. Treasury each year. In 2003, the amount transferred was $22 billion.48 Since that is exactly how much interest the Fed earned from U.S. securities, the net cost of the Federal Reserve to the U.S. taxpayers was zero.

Zero? The conventional view among economists is that the Fed makes money for the government. How? One way to look at it is that if the Fed didn’t own these government bonds, then someone else would. Those investors would not transfer their earnings back to the Treasury. By having the Federal Reserve own a portion of the national debt, the U.S. government saved $22 billion in interest expense in 2003.

Conspiracy theorists like Schauf have proposed that the government replace Federal Reserve notes with “greenbacks” — U.S. Treasury notes that bear no interest.49 They claim that this would free the government from paying interest on part (or even all) of the national debt.

If the government replaced Federal Reserve notes with that sort of currency and retired interest-bearing debt, then the government would not have paid the Federal Reserve $22 billion in interest. But neither would the Fed have transferred the $22 billion back to the Treasury. An exact match doesn’t occur every year. In 2002, the Fed earned $25 billion on government bonds and transferred back only $24 billion.50

Still, that didn’t create an additional $1 billion “profit” for the member banks that “own” the Federal Reserve. The member banks make six cents on each dollar they are forced to have invested in the Federal Reserve system. In 2003, the total dividends to the member banks were $518 million.51 That amounts to .02% of U.S. government spending. It amounts to about .5% of the $100 billion in total commercial bank earnings.52

The rough equivalence between the interest the Fed earns from the government and the amount it transfers to the U.S. Treasury causes most economists to see these financing issues as a shell game. Since nearly all the interest paid on debt sold to the Fed is transferred back to the U.S. Treasury, there isn’t really any interest paid. The government uses the Fed to partly finance its deficit by creating money and spending it. The end result is no different than if the U.S. Treasury just printed up “greenbacks” and spent them. The process is just a bit more “efficient” than the ancient practice of melting down silver coins and mixing in lead. Most economists would argue that the Fed created $36 billion for the government in 2003.53 That is the change in the monetary base (currency and reserves) less the expenses of operating the Federal Reserve system.

Do shady international bankers control the Federal Reserve? Perhaps, but not because they “own” the Federal Reserve system. The politicians have control, in the same sense that they control the federal judiciary. Government appointees make up the majority of the Open Market Committee and those same appointees have an effective veto in selecting the Federal Reserve presidents who make up the remainder of the body. Further, they appoint one-third of each Federal Reserve bank’s board of directors, which in turn choose those presidents.

However, if one begins with an understanding that the Fed is fundamentally a political operation, then it is unusual in that bankers have an extra avenue of influence. Like everyone else, they can vote, lobby, and make campaign contributions and so influence the politicians. Unlike everyone else, they can own shares of stock in member banks that “own” the Federal Reserve banks and so influence directors, Federal Reserve bank presidents, and the Open Market Committee.

Do shady international bankers make large profits from the Federal Reserve? It depends on what is meant by “large.” Since there is little or no risk in stock whose value remains at par, and the interest rate earned by the Fed on its government securities portfolio is closer to 3% than the 6% dividend, perhaps a substantial cut in payments to the member banks is in order. If the dividend rate were reduced to reflect the current return on the Fed’s portfolio, the taxpayers could save as much as $250 million a year in financing the national debt.

However, this potential gain depends on the low levels of interest rates for the last few years. Since 1960, the rate on Treasury bills has been greater than 6% almost 40% of the time. It was consistently above 6% from the fall of 1977 to the summer of 1986. When the T-bill rate peaked at 15% in March of 1980, the Fed was earning substantially more on its security portfolio than the dividend rate it was paying the member banks.54

Further, from a libertarian perspective, there are any number of ways in which regulations associated with the Federal Reserve system impose unjustified costs on banks. Reserve requirements force banks to tie up more funds than they believe necessary in vault cash and Federal Reserve deposits. The banks earn less interest and the Fed and the U.S. Treasury collect roughly what the banks lose. More importantly, by taking away the right of banks to issue redeemable, dollar-denominated banknotes, the Fed’s compulsory monopoly on currency issue reduces bank earnings by tens of billions of dollars. How a competitive banking system would distribute those funds between bank stockholders and customers is difficult to predict, but there is a cost to having the government finance its budget deficits by issuing currency.

Who owns the Fed? The owners of a business typically have ultimate authority over operations and serve as residual claimant. Stockholders elect directors, who appoint top management. Stockholders receive the profits — excess revenues after all other claims on funds are paid.

For the Fed, final authority is in the hands of the politicians. They appoint the Board of Governors, who dominate the Federal Reserve banks. Further, any earnings of the Federal Reserve banks beyond expenses, including the 6% dividend to the member banks, goes to the U.S. Treasury. Since the U.S. government has final authority and serves as residual claimant, the most reasonable view is that the Federal Reserve system is government-owned.

The conspiracy theorists’ claim that private owners of the Fed are making bundles of money is false. The conventional view among economists (including libertarian ones) that the Fed is a government operation that partially finances fiscal deficits by money creation is fundamentally correct. The live question among libertarians is how to get the government out of the banking system — perhaps by truly privatizing the Fed’s operations — in a way that prevents inflation and macroeconomic instability.

Footnotes

1. Pat Robertson, “The New World Order,” (G.K. Hall and Co., 1992), pp. 171–85
2. Richard Gamble, “A History of the Atlanta Federal Reserve 1914–1989,” (Atlanta Federal Reserve, 1989), http://www.frbatlanta.org/publ.cfm
3. William Baumol and Alan Blinder, “Principles of Macroeconomics,” (Tomson-Southwestern, 2004), p. 225
4. Frederic S. Mishkin, “The Economics of Money, Banking, and Financial Markets,” (Pearson-Addison-Wesley, 2004) p. 338
5. Lewis v. United States, 680 F.2d 1239 (1982)
6. Richard Timberlake, “Monetary Policy in the United States,” (The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 417
7. Murray N. Rothbard, “What has the Government Done to Our Money?” (The Mises Institute, 1980), http://www.mises.org/money/3s8.asp
8. United States Code, Title 12, Chap. 3, SubChap. IX, Sec. 341
9. Ibid., Subchap. I, Sec. 222
10. Ibid., Subchap. XIII, Sec. 321
11. Ibid., Subchap. XI, Sec. 282
12. Ibid., Sec. 287
13. The Federal Reserve Act, Sec. 2, 8–13, http://www.federalreserve.gov/GeneralInfo/fract/sect02.htm
14. United States Code, op. cit., Subchap. XI, Sec. 287
15. Ibid., Sec. 289
16. Ibid., Sec. 290
17. United States Code, op. cit., Subchap. XII, Sec. 304
18. Ibid., Sec. 302
19. Ibid., Sec. 304
20. Ibid., Sec. 305
21. U.S. Code, op. cit., Subchap. IX, Sec. 341
22. U.S. Code, op. cit., Subchap. II, Sec. 241–2
23. U.S. Code, op. cit., Subchap. IX, Sec. 347
24. Richard Timberlake, “Money, Banking, and Central Banking” (Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 189–90. This was not always the case. In its early years, the Fed’s different banks did have different rates. See p. 213 of “Monetary History of the United States” by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz.
25. U.S. Code, op. cit., Subchap. IX, sec. 347
26. The Federal Reserve Discount Window, http://www.frbdiscountwindow.org
27. Ibid.
28. U.S. Code, op. cit., Subchap. IV, Sec. 263
29. The Federal Reserve Board, http://www.federalreserve.gov/fomc/fundsrate.htm
30. Bureau of Printing and Engraving, http://www.moneyfactory.com/section.cfm/2/51
31. 90th Annual Report, (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, 2003), p. 129
32. Ibid., p. 129
33. U.S. Code, op. cit., Subchap. VII, sec. 411–12
34. 90th Annual Report, op. cit., p. 279
35. Economic Data, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MPCREDIT/118
36. Economic Data, op. cit., http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BORROW/45
37. 90th Annual Report, op. cit., p. 260
38. Thomas Schauf, “The Federal Reserve is Privately Owned,” http://www.worldnewsstand.net/today/articles/fedprivatelyowned.htm
39. Eustace Mullins, “The Secrets of the Federal Reserve,” (Bankers Research Institute, 1984), p. 164
40. Economic Data, http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GFDEBTN/5
41. Ibid.
42. Economic Data, op. cit., http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FDHBATN/5
43. Factors Affecting Reserve Balances, (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System,, Aug. 2004), http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/Current/
44. 90th Annual Report, op. cit., p. 270
45. Economic Data, op. cit., http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FYOINT/5
46. Economic Data, op. cit., http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FYONET/5
47. Tax Stats at a Glance (Internal Revenue Service, 2003) http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/article/0,,id=102886,00.html
48. 90th Annual Report, op. cit., p. 129
49. Schauf, op. cit.
50. 90th Annual Report, op. cit., p. 125–6
51. Ibid., p.129
52. Governor Mark Olson, (Federal Reserve Bank Board of Governors, 1983), http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2004/20040301/default.htm
53. Economic Data, op. cit., http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BOGUMBNS/45
54. Economic Data, op. cit., http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TB6MS/116

Poverty Kills

http://www.parkridgecenter.org/Page78.html

For Want of Resources, Millions Face Early Death and Ill Health

by Meredith Minkler

In 1993, a landmark survey calculated the leading causes of premature death and disability in the United States not by disease—cancer, heart disease, stroke, and so on—but by actual cause. Smoking topped the list, accounting for more than 400,000 deaths annually, followed by poor diet, lack of exercise, and alcohol.

Although this article, written by public health leaders William Foege and Michael McGinnis, and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association provided a refreshingly frank look at the prominent role of socio-behavioral factors underlying health problems, it unfortunately missed one of the most important. Poverty increasingly is recognized as perhaps the single most important risk factor for premature death and disability. Indeed, even the pronounced race differences in health in the U.S. appear to be very largely—though not exclusively—a function of class.

The pervasive impact of poverty on health is evident regardless of how poverty is measured. David Williams and his colleagues at the University of Michigan thus found that people with annual incomes of under $10,000 had more than three times the risk of dying in a given year as those who made more than $30,000. Dozens of other studies have produced similar findings, regardless of whether income, education, or occupation was used as the marker of low socioeconomic status. Finally, and moving the unit of analysis from the individual to the community, the now-classic Alameda County Study in California demonstrated that residence in a poor neighborhood itself, regardless of the individual’s income, resulted in a risk of dying 40 percent higher than would be expected on the basis of age, gender, and even smoking history.

But might not most of the high mortality and morbidity among the poor simply be a reflection of the high rates of smoking, poor dietary habits, and other unhealthy behaviors in this group? The answer appears to be no. One recent national study found that of the threefold excess deaths among the poor, at most just 13 percent could be accounted for by higher rates of smoking, drinking, diet and exercise, and other traditional risk factors. Other studies have corroborated such findings, suggesting that there’s something about poverty itself that is decidedly bad for one’s health.

Chronic Deprivation
Public health experts debate just how poverty “gets under the skin” to so dramatically worsen health, but researchers have identified several plausible pathways. For Harvard’s Richard Levins, these include, but are not limited to:

• chronic deprivation and limited access to resources such as food, housing, and education
• exposure to environmental toxins
• physical threats to health and safety
• unsafe jobs, or those involving high demands and low resources for coping
• chronic psychological stress

Two other possible reasons deserve special mention. One of these, elucidated by scholars in many parts of the world, suggests that the adverse effects of poverty on health are magnified in countries where there is a high degree of income inequality. It’s not just being poor, but being poor in a country where many others are rich, that seems to exacerbate the effects of poverty on health. A raft of studies demonstrates that the very fact of being around others who are higher on the socioeconomic ladder causes individuals to experience elevated stress, lower feelings of control over their lives, and a lack of trust in society and their surroundings. Researchers theorize that these factors contribute to ill health, and that the greater the difference between rich and poor (or even rich and middle class), the more these factors are exacerbated.

Still another possibility suggests that people at progressively lower levels of socioeconomic status have correspondingly less opportunity to control the circumstances and events that affect their lives. In the words of epidemiologist S. Leonard Syme, this lack of “control over destiny” may be the mediating concept that helps explain why the poor are less healthy in almost every disease and disability category, regardless of their particular habits and behaviors.

In stressing the profound impact of poverty on health, it is vital not to underestimate the importance of other factors, such as racism. Racial discrimination’s impact on heart disease, depression and other illnesses has been well documented, and disturbing studies continue to demonstrate the persistence of racism in medical decision-making about who gets what kind of care, even when all other factors are controlled for. It was in light of these facts that when preparing the criteria for the next edition of the nation’s “health report card,” public health officials set as twin goals reducing health inequeties by race and class. Neither poverty nor race should predict who lives and who dies, who gets ill and who remains well in this most blessed of the world’s nations.