The McDonalds Falling US Dollar Menu

Besides shrinking the size of the servings, I’ll bet they’ll start using cheap ingredients like soy flour in addition to wheat in their buns. I’ve noticed that some regular breads at the supermarket now contain it. One staple at the Kandylini household is Trader Joe’s organic sprouted bread, whose price has gone up a full dollar in the last six months. It may be time to invest in a grain grinder!

By: Michael Pento, The Market Oracle.

McDonalds Corp (MCD) held its annual meeting last Thursday, May 22 nd , and stated it has no plans to tamper with its highly successful dollar menu, which accounts for 14% of the company’s sales. However, The Golden Arches must wish that its dollar menu was on the McGold standard instead of being based on a currency that has fallen 40% in the last 6 years. That dollar decline is putting the squeeze on the Oak Brook, Illinois-based firm, as agricultural input prices are surging while consumer food prices are only up about 4% since last year.

Indeed, the price of food ingredients has risen sharply in recent years. Since the start of 2006, rice is up more than 200%, wheat more than 130% and corn has increased 125%. Meanwhile, the World Bank has stated that average food prices are up 250% since 2002.

Unfortunately, the future also looks bleak. According to projections from McDonald’s itself, the price of cheese should increase another 13-14% in 2008 alone. While it is true the higher input cost of agricultural commodities is partly due to wealthier consumer’s diets in developing economies as well as the ethanol phenomenon, the falling dollar is responsible for much of the elevated prices in many commodities. For example, if the US dollar kept parity with the Euro the price of oil would be just over $80 a barrel instead of $133 where it is today.

One must wonder how much longer the dollar menu can be priced in dollars. Perhaps a suggestion would be to price the menu in Euros. However, what is more likely to occur is that they will keep the menu at par and use something akin to reverse hedonics.

Hedonics, of course, is a method used in the calculation of the Consumer Price Index which reduces prices for improvements made in the quality or features of a good or service. In the case of McDonald’s it may be necessary to reduce the quantity or quality of items on the dollar menu in order to maintain the price. If neither of those methods is employed, it is reasonable to deduce that a serious compression of the company’s margins would occur and impact their earnings going forward. The bottom line is that the consumer will most likely be hurt by reduced quality, higher prices or a combination of both.

The company’s CEO Jim Skinner said last week that they would try to allay higher food costs by speculating in the futures market. While I’m not at all confident investors can count on the trading skills of Ronald McDonald to defray higher input costs, Skinner himself admits that not all costs can be offset. Under this environment of pricing pressure, it is astonishing that the company’s stock is up 15% year over year and has a trailing P/E multiple of nearly 20. Aside from its international growth prospects, the most plausible explanation is that the highly stressed consumer is downsizing his cuisine standards and switching from more upscale dining.

Still, the company faces very difficult choices as it struggles to maintain cost and quality. Will McDonalds’ costumers soon borrow a slogan from Wendy’s and ask, “Where’s the beef”? To maintain its dollar menu, diners at McDonalds may have to look forward to eating hamburgers containing a series of ever-smaller concentric circles as their patties suffers from the dreaded “shrinkage.” Unfortunately, to maintain its dollar menu, the company may have to become a microcosm of America ‘s shrinking standard of living.

We all have a lot to worry about indeed when the US dollar loses value against the Happy Meal.

Is it Mental or is it Dental?– Cranial & Dental Impacts on Total Health

Modern America abounds with living examples of Physical Degeneration, as explained by nutrition researcher Weston Price. It’s sad that most people think health problems like tooth problems and weak immunity are caused by “genetics.” They are partly right—epigenetics research now shows you are what your grandmother ate, but it’s never too late to start eating nutrient-dense foods.

By Raymond Silkman, DDS, via The Weston A. Price Foundation.

The widely held model of orthodontics, which considers developmental problems in the jaws and head to be genetic in origin, never made sense to me. Since they are wedded to the genetic model, orthodontists dealing with crowded teeth end up treating the condition with tooth extraction in a majority of the cases. Even though I did not resort to pulling teeth in my practice, and I was using appliances to widen the jaws and getting the craniums to look as they should, I still could not come up with the answer as to why my patients looked the way they did. I couldn’t believe that the Creator had given them a terrible blueprint –it just did not make sense. In four years of college education, four years of dental school education and almost three years of post-graduate orthodontic training, students never hear a mention of Dr. Price, so they never learn the true reasons for these malformations. I have had the opportunity to work with a lot of very knowledgeable doctors in various fields of allopathic and alternative healthcare who still do not know about Dr. Price and his critical findings.

These knowledgeable doctors have not stared in awe at the beautiful facial development that Price captured in the photographs he took of primitive peoples throughout the globe and in so doing was able to answer this most important question: What do humans look like in health? And how have humans been able to carry on throughout history and populate such varied geographical and physical environments on the earth without our modern machines and tools?

The answer that Dr. Price was able to illuminate came through his photographs of beautiful, healthy human beings with magnificent physical form and mental development, living in harmony with their environments.

WHAT IS HAPPENING?

It has been well documented and Nobel prizes have been awarded to researchers that have established the relationship between proper form and development and proper physical functioning of the body. The changes in facial structure that we observe in our children today is an extremely serious matter. I would like to explore the consequences of what is happening to human physical form.

Let’s evaluate what happens to our children or adults who have faces that are narrow and long, who have lower jaws that are not developed properly, or who have a profile view showing a very weak chin. What happens when we see jaws so narrow and small that the teeth are crowded and overlapping. What happens when the cranium is underdeveloped in various dimensions and the eyes are not level with one another?

What is the physical health legacy of these individuals going to be? What happens when we see children and adults with forward head posture–necks that are holding the head in a forward position?

There’s an old saying, that someone “has his head on his shoulders.” The translation: well-grounded minds require well-grounded and well-supported physical forms and bodies. Unfortunately today a lot of people don’t have their heads on their shoulders–their heads are positioned in front of the shoulders.

Since a normal adult cranium weights between 12 to 18 pounds, the musculo-skeletal strain in the neck or cervical region to support a forward head posture can cause a cascade of events leading right down to the feet. The forward head posture in most individuals creates improper spinal alignment and lack of proper curvature to the spine at critical areas.

There is also an alarming trend in hip and knee replacement surgeries and many individuals have improper or mostly flat arches in the feet necessitating orthotics in their shoes or, even worse, corrective surgeries.

What happens to people when they don’t have their heads on their shoulders? What is causing this effect and why does the body support this apparently futile posture? We will answer that question.

THE CRANIUM OR SKULL

Let’s discuss the significance of the skeletal structures in the head. The human cranium is made up of roughly 22 cranial bones not including the ones responsible for sound transmission. One of the key bony structures in the cranium is the maxilla, or the upper jaw. The cranium also houses the extremely important glands of the endocrine system. Two of these glands, the pituitary and the hypothalamus, are housed in another very important bony structure known as the sphenoid bone residing directly and in close contact with the maxilla.

The entire brain, and all of the structures or glands housed in the cranial cavity as well as the spinal cord and all of the peripheral and accessory nerves in the entire body are covered by a continuous-membranous sheath called the dural membrane. In dissections, it has been demonstrated and documented that pressure or force on the dural membrane in the cranial cavity or at the brain level will create pulsation or an opposite force at the end of the spinal cord, and vice versa.

If the cranium is not developed properly, the dural membrane can become twisted and torqued, thus possibly creating nerve conduction issues, hormonal imbalances or pain. You can imagine the effects that this can have on the nervous system and on an individual’s overall health and well being.

Interestingly, medical research has demonstrated the presence of constant and rhythmic movement of the cranial bones at the contact areas, also known as the sutures. Just as in breathing, when the lungs fill with air and then empty, so there is a movement of cerebral spinal fluid up and down the spinal cord and around the brain. So, unlike the popular belief that “it’s good to have a solid nogger,” we now know that this does not mean an immovable head or cranium. The inherent motion in the cranial bones is very important to overall health. Various accidents or trauma or surgical interventions of the face and head can have a negative effect on this motion.

There are also various foramina or openings in the bones of the skull which allow nerves and blood or lymphatic vessels to pass from the cranium to the lower areas and vice versa. If any of the cranial bones is under-developed or misshapen, as often happens to be the case, then these foramina can also be malformed. For example, they may be ovoid rather than circular because of underdevelopment, which may cause an impedance to flow of circulatory or neurological vessels going through that particular foramen. Improper drainage of our waste products through our lymphatic system or lack of oxygenation or nourishment of cranial tissues and organs may be experienced as negative effects on brain function and mental clarity.

THE MAXILLA

This bony structure provides visible structure to the whole mid-facial area. Eleven of the cranial bones directly contact the maxilla and the rest of the cranial bones have an intimate contact with the bones directly in contact with the upper jaw or maxilla. Therefore the position and size of the upper jaw has quite a lot to do with proper cranial development and facial aesthetics.

The entire floor of the orbit or eye sockets, where the visual globes or the eyeballs are housed, is made up of the upper jaw or maxilla. When the maxilla is not well developed, and the face is long and skinny, the eye sockets do not develop properly; the eyeballs cannot develop as a sphere, but may take on a football shape. The resultant developmental pattern can create various ophthalmic issues such as astigmatism or myopia. We can treat astigmatism with corrective lenses but the treatment does not really address the root of the issues.

The most serious consequence of under development of the maxilla is airway obstruction and mouth breathing. Eighty five percent of the nasal airway is made up of the maxilla, which provides the floor of the nasal cavity and houses all of the nasal sinuses typically referred to as the sinus cavities. Therefore, an individual with a narrow or improperly formed maxilla will have extremely narrow nasal passages, which limit flow of air and breathing capabilities, and will thus experience difficulty in having proper sinus health and drainage.

It is an important fact that the soft tissues develop to their genetic size, even when the bones do not! You might think of the head as a box that must house all of the structures that the genetic code needs to express and that will develop, but lack of proper dimensions to the cranial bones and the cranial cavity causes overcrowding, overlapping or deviation of some soft tissue areas. This can be illustrated by the example of overpacking a suitcase.

An example of this “overpacked suitcase” in humans occurs in the nose. How often have you heard someone say, “I have a deviated septum”? The septum is the cartilaginous tissue membrane that separates the two nostrils vertically. Imagine this soft tissue developing to its normal size, but the maxilla remains under-developed. The developing septum has to express its dimension somewhere, so it has two choices—it either deviates or bends to one side or the other (the deviated septum) or it grows through the maxillary suture and creates the condition known as palatal tori. These are bumps or ridges in the middle of the palate and most people have them to some degree or another.

A deviated septum blocks proper nasal air flow causing the individual to take up mouth breathing most of the time. There are a variety of other soft and hard tissue conditions associated with the nasal cavity such as polyps, enlarged turbinates and muscosal conditions that also serve to restrict air flow.

Breathing through the nose creates an avenue of air that’s moisturized, humidified and even somewhat filtered. Furthermore, when we breathe through our nose, the air passing through the nasal airway and contacting the turbinates–shelf- like bony structures–is slowed down. This allows the proper mixing of the air with an amazing gas produced in the nasal sinuses called nitric oxide (NO). Nitric oxide is secreted into the nasal passages and is inhaled through the nose. It is a potent vaso-dilator, and in the lungs it enhances the uptake of oxygen. NO is also produced in the walls of blood vessels and is critical to all organs.

MOUTH-BREATHING

Let’s evaluate the differences in mouth breathers and nose breathers. The consequences of mouth breathing can occur from the moment of birth because all infants are obligate nose breathers. That is the mechanism by which breast feeding and breathing can occur simultaneously. If a baby has obstructed airways, he may turn away from the breast due to lack of air and prefer a bottle, which allows him to consume his food more quickly.

A mouth breather will not be humidifying the air, or slowing it down to allow the proper mixing of NO with it. The lungs will have difficulty providing maximum oxygenation for the body with this dry, unhumidified, unfiltered and, most importantly, NO-lacking air. This constant and chronic condition affects the cardiovascular system and the heart because the smooth muscles that line all of the arteries react to this poorly oxygenated air with a kind of tightness, a kind of permanent tension, which can be very stressful and depleting to the body. Furthermore it has been clinically shown that blocking NO production in healthy individuals results in moderate hypertension and reduced heart output as well as shortened bleeding times by activation of platelet blood-clotting factors.

Due to the lack of proper oxygenation, the ability to deliver fully oxygenated blood to the cells is also much reduced. Thus mouth breathing has a negative effect on every cell in the body as it deprives them of oxygen. Overall wellness and health requires proper oxygen as every particle of our being requires oxygen. Cancer cells, by the way, are anaerobic by design. Other manifestations of mouth breathing include snoring and cessation of breathing (also known as sleep apnea), some types of headaches, hypertension without other known clinical causes, bed wetting, chronic ear or sinus infections, TMJ pain, sleep disorders and dark patches under the eyes.

VISUAL DIAGNOSIS

Much valuable information can be obtained by looking at and studying the faces of traditional peoples with proper physical development and form. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Price and all of the photographers and cinematographers who have provided us with such valuable clues and information.

We can tell a lot about an individual’s physical development just by looking at the face. One of the things I look at in profile view is the nasal-labial angle. In a well developed person, this angle is an acute angle, that is, less than 90 degrees. A nasal-labial angle that is obtuse, that is greater than 90 degrees, is a sign that the maxilla is not well developed or positioned in the front-to-back dimension of the skull. The proper development of the maxilla is absolutely critical to the formation of the entire head and to the health of the entire body—and not just physical health but spiritual and emotional health as well.

In the photograph at left we see an individual with a nasal-labial angle of about 110 degrees, a sure sign that the maxilla is underdeveloped. As a consequence, he will not have an optimal development of the rest of head. Predictably, he has a narrow palate and in this case, he has had four premolar teeth extracted.

Another sign of poor facial development can be detected in the eyes. When someone is looking straight at you and you can see the sclera or white of the eye, that is a tip off to a very, very under developed upper jaw and mid-facial area.

Another area of interest is the soft tissues and skin. Sagging and wrinkles are minimal or non-existent in people with good physical development as they age. Their faces don’t sink back into their craniums. Wrinkles happen when the scaffolding—the bony structure—becomes diminished in comparison to the muscles and skin.

As I mentioned, the soft tissues of the body grow to their genetic size, even when the bony structures do not. The skin, the tongue, the tonsils and the nasal tissues grow to their genetic size but when the nutrition is missing, the bony structures are compromised. So the face will have an excess of skin and musculature, the tongue and tonsils will be too large for the mouth. Nasal bumps can also result–the nasal tissues are out of proportion to the facial structure so they protrude. People who have proper facial development do not have nasal bumps.

THE TMJ AND THE LOWER JAW

When we look at the skull from the profile view we observe the temporo-mandibular joint, the TMJ. Most joints will go through normal hinge motion, and some of them like the shoulder and hip joint will have a rotational motion that is more complex. However, in these joints, the two bony members stay in contact with one another throughout the motion of the joint. The TMJ is unique in that it is designed to provide both hinging and sliding motion. In order to accomplish this compound hinge-and-sliding movement, the TMJ has a disc that slides in concert with the lower jaw or mandible. When the lower jaw is not positioned forward enough, the TM Joints do not develop very well, and the discs can get jammed behind or in front of the joint. They can even become perforated and cause some of the “clicks and pops” that can be heard when people open and close their mouths. Immediately behind the TM Joints we also have the ear canals and important vascular and neurological structures, which can become impinged upon as well.

What we call an overbite or overjet should really be called an underbite, because it is caused by the mandible, the lower jaw, that is too far back, not the maxilla that is too far forward. But when children come to the orthodontist with what the public calls an overbite, they are often treated by removing some of the teeth in the upper jaw and then with a device known as neck gear or headgear to pull the maxilla back. The thinking is that the apparatus will stunt the growth of the maxilla and allow the lower jaw to grow and catch up, or that the maxilla has grown too far forward and must be pulled back.

But the maxilla is already stunted due to poor nutrition and so you can imagine how this type of treatment may cause more compression, more jamming of the bones in the head with possible detrimental whole body effects. The correct treatment for this condition is to widen the palate with an appliance so the lower jaw position can be corrected forward and allow proper physiological form and function as our ancestors have enjoyed throughout the millennia.

MORE VISUAL CLUES

When children or adults are not breathing properly they tend to develop dark patches and bags under their eyes. This is due to lack of adequate circulation as well as venous blood pooling in these areas.

Kids that are mouth breathers will always have chapped lips and typically the line separating the inner lining of the lip and the outside lining , known as the vermilion border, will be visible. Also mouth breathers in profile tend to have very weak chins and elongated faces. Typically these individuals will suffer from chronic sinusitis or sinus infections, colds, respiratory problems and lung-related issues.

Typically children with bags under their eyes have short attention spans because they do not have good circulation and oxygenation of the head and can tire easily. They are literally suffocating.

Furthermore, they don’t sleep very well–they are always tossing and turning and they wake up tired. Your body recuperates during sleep and sleep is especially important for teenagers. Teenagers need to go to bed before 10:00 pm because certain brain cycles designed for recuperation of the body kick in at around that time. These cycles will be interrupted if sleep mode is delayed to after 10:30-11:00 pm. The recuperation and rebuilding necessary to cope with stressful daily activities will then be compromised. These are the tired, sleepless kids who tend to have a diet high in sugar, trans fats and grains. They may end up labeled as ADD or ADHD and treated with drugs.

Airway capacity is the biggest and most important part of the well-being of a human being. It is important to stress the fact that breathing through the mouth and breathing through the nose have extremely disparate effects on the body. We are not designed to breathe through our mouths. The body is able to live by breathing through the mouth, but it suffers greatly for doing it.

EXAMPLES OF POOR FACIAL DEVELOPMENT

The structures that hang off the mandible or lower jaw include the tongue and the nasal pharyngeal areas, which eventually lead down into the lungs.

Other structures that can affect the airways further back in the throat area or the pharyngeal airway space are the tonsils and adenoids. About 85 percent of the children I see in my practice have extremely large tonsils and do you think they can breathe very well? It is not possible to breathe very well when tonsils, which are typically supposed to be almost unnoticeable, are so inflamed that they are almost touching and practically closing off the airway in the back of the throat, right where air is supposed to pass on its journey towards the lungs.

These structures also become swollen due to food allergies, especially allergies to pasteurized dairy. Every time I’ve had a kid and a mom convinced that they should stop everything pasteurized and processed and then eventually go to raw dairy products I have seen some reduction in tonsillar size, although this doesn’t happen overnight.

(Interestingly, I have had two cases of children who stopped having epileptic seizures as soon as they had their extremely massive tonsils taken out. Please note that I usually do not recommend removal of organs and body parts.)

Almost invariably a narrow or under-developed maxilla can cause the effect of holding back the lower jaw or the mandible. This improper positioning of the mandible and its inherent retrusion causes a lack of physical and physiological space for the tongue and the pharyngeal tissues, which again will provide an impedance to the airways, causing breathing difficulties and lowered oxygen uptake by all of the tissues.

The most important orthodontic appliance that you all have and carry with you twenty-four hours a day is your tongue. People who breathe through their nose also normally have a tongue that postures up into the maxilla. When the tongue sits right up behind the front teeth, it is maintaining the shape of the maxilla every time you swallow. Every time the proper tongue swallow motion takes place it spreads up against maxilla, activating it and contributing to that little cranial motion, that cranial pumping that we discussed earlier. Individuals who breathe through their mouths have a lower tongue posture and the maxilla does not receive the stimulation from the tongue that it should.

When the tongue doesn’t fit inside the jaws or dental arches it retracts back into the throat and pushes on the floor of the mouth. The result is something that looks like a double chin, even in women who are very thin. When we begin palate-widening procedures, this problem disappears–without plastic surgery.

And then what happens when orthodontists treat these problems by removing teeth? If he takes out eight teeth out of a total of 32 (four first molars and then later on four wisdom teeth), the patient ends up missing one-fourth of his teeth. What are the consequences of this? Can you take out 25 percent of anything that’s supposed to be whole and expect it to be okay? I consider the teeth as organs and do not recommend the removal of teeth for tooth crowding or orthodontic treatments.

And what happens when a child is given head gear or neck gear, when you put a force on a cranium to pull it back? There can be serious consequences.

THE FINAL ANSWER: ADAPTIVE CAPACITY

Our bodies have an adaptive capacity to deal with shortcomings. Those of you who have studied CPR know about the ABCs of resuscitation. The A stands for airways and what are you supposed to do when someone needs assistance? You tilt the head back to open the airway. Similarly, when the airways are chronically blocked, the body tilts the head back. But humans cannot walk around with their noses up in the air for too long. The eyes must be parallel with the horizon, so the body then leans the head forward. Forward head posture in essence is a chin lift procedure with the eyes corrected to the horizon in a vertical or standing position.

That’s where that characteristic forward head posture comes from. This chin-lift, head-tilt-forward posture helps open up the airways. As I mentioned, craniums on adults weigh 12-18 pounds. Imagine a bowling ball. If I carry the bowling ball close to my body, I can carry it without becoming tired, but if I carry the bowling ball out in front of my body, what happens? I am going to suffer from fatigue. So then, in order to balance the head tilted forward, I may extend my butt out a bit, which creates a misalignment of the hips, but helps to balance the extra forward weight of the ball. How many people do you know that have hip and lower back problems? Most of those people also have airway problems. Also, there are limbs attached to the hips–we call them legs–so when the hips go out of alignment, the knees have to adjust to this weird hip posture.

These adjustments are all very subtle. One doesn’t wake up and feel that he or she is going to walk differently. Can you imagine that all of these issues and events can start with a baby who is chronically breathing through its mouth? So airway capacity is the most important hallmark of the well-being of a human being. If you have good airway capacity, you will go through life with a strong immunity to illness.

SYMPATHETIC OVERLOAD

When the bones in the head are underdeveloped or misaligned, the soft tissues are over-crowded and unable to assume their normal shapes and positions and the air way is obstructed. When, in addition, the diet is not nourishing and lacks proper fats, the nervous system also suffers.

Let me explain: as you may know, there are two types of autonomic nerves, sympathetic and parasympathetic. The parasympathetic nervous system works to calm us down and to heal. The sympathetic nervous system is the part used when one needs to get out of a dangerous situation. It operates when we are under a lot of stress, and we are not meant to be under constant physical stress. When the sympathetic nervous system is activated it places the body and mind in an alert mode and this mode and the constant stress depletes the bodily reserves and nutrients.

Sympathetic nervous system overload also occurs when the airway is obstructed and the input or sense to the nervous system is akin to a hand or choker around the neck. What type of response do you think the nervous system will have? It’s on high alert at all times. This is why kids who are mouth breathers have a strong gag reflex, for example. For them, the mouth is the source of air as well as the source of food, and the mouth was not designed to perform both of these functions. So kids and adults who are mouth breathers have strong gag reflexes, sometimes so strong that they can’t get near their mouths without difficulty, not even with their own toothbrushes or eating utensils. This, of course, precludes certain psychological issues that can also create a strong gag reflex but can be ruled out during an assessment.

So mouth breathers tend to have amped-up sympathetic nervous systems, always on alert, and they have a hard time getting their physical or mental bodies to relax. Many have found an avenue of dealing with this issue subconsciously, namely exercise and physical exertion. This is because during physical exertion large volumes of air are inhaled, which may give the body the input it needs to make up for the lack of proper oxygenation during rest periods.

LONG-TERM CONSEQUENCES

People who are not well oxygenated and who have poor posture often suffer from fatigue and fibromyalgia symptoms, they snore and have sleep apnea, they have sinusitis and frequent ear infections. Life becomes psychologically and physically challenging for them and they end up with long-term dependence on medications—and all of that just from the seemingly simple condition of crowded teeth.

In other words, people with poor facial development are not going to live very happily. They’re always going to be in and out of treatment, hopefully with a more holistic alternative practitioner—but you can take all the herbs in the world, you can take all the homeopathic medicines for these conditions, but the truth is, you cannot have proper function without the proper structure. If you don’t have the proper form how do you expect proper function even with the best alternative care?

So, as you can see, airway capacity is extremely important and many times when we do the procedures that widen the palate, correct the head tilt and allow a person to breath through the nose, that person suddenly becomes happy. It is amazing to see the things that happen when we take steps to expand the palate and the upper jaw. The patients go through a literal expansion, but they also open up in many ways–they open up their hearts and their personalities and relationships change. They become more pleasant, more contented. A lot of amazing things can come about just from changing the shape of the maxilla for a human being.

WELL-FORMED AND HARDY

My friends think I am nuts but I can stare for hours at photographs of well-formed individuals and just marvel at the beauty of proper physical form and function and the capabilities for hard work and functioning that these individuals tend to have.

Let’s ask a question: who can perform better in jobs or sports with very difficult physical requirements and conditions? Generally you will find the well-developed (that doesn’t mean large muscle mass), well-formed individuals who are capable of such physical feats and they tend to come from rural or isolated areas or from families that have consumed more traditional diets and therefore had much better development than the average city child growing up these days. Many of these individuals are people who come from other parts of the world and are involved with professional sports and or jobs we consider menial, such as doing our gardening, housework and construction work, and even raising our children–people who are able bodied and capable.

Therefore if we are looking for the magic period to help a child grow into an individual with amazing physical capabilities then we must acknowledge that the most important developmental period is preconception and the nine months in utero or in the womb–this is when the foundation is laid for living a full 120 years. The parents should prepare themselves well in advance of conception by eating a nutritionally supportive diet, based on the principles discovered by Weston Price, and continue that diet during pregnancy. If, through out the individual’s life, such nutritional practices are continued, then the possibility to have excellent physical form and function is highly likely, with great rewards to that individual. Please take into consideration the fact that over the last 100 to 120 years in this country, many events and conditions have slowly weakened the offspring born in each successive generation. Modern medicine classifies some of the physical symptoms encountered in the younger generations as genetic; however, even though there may be genetic aberrations occurring due to toxicity of the environment, these symptoms are a reflection of the improper human development due to poor nutrition.

The people who were born in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s tended to drink and smoke. They had teeth extracted, root canals and metal fillings, yet they are generally not the chemically sensitive individuals we see in our population today, young people in their twenties who can’t handle even a little bit of lavender scent in the room.

SOURCES OF ENERGY

We must also briefly discuss other sources of input or energy besides diet needed to create proper physical form and mental function. There is a concept that views a human being as a sort of battery or capacitor. We are the sum of all that goes into us, not only our physical diet but also the input of an emotional or spiritual nature, including our connections to one another, to nature and animals, to art, to the Creator and also, most importantly, to ourselves.

A connection that more than 90 percent of individuals lack is the connection to the earth. Historically, humans have had some form of physical contact with the earth and its electro-magnetic field. We worked on the land and collected our sustenance with our feet or bodies in contact with the earth and without the interference of man-made materials and building structures. So it’s important to literally stay connected with the earth by walking barefoot outside and letting all of our senses recalibrate themselves to what our body knows as normal.

Finally, we get energy from our belief systems and from our beliefs about ourselves. When something goes wrong, do we berate ourselves or do we see our troubles as important lessons given to us because we are worthy to receive them?

HUMANS RECOGNIZE PROPER FACIAL FORM

While very few people have heard of the work of Weston Price these days, we haven’t lost our ability to recognize proper facial form. To make it in today’s society, you must have good facial development. You’re not going to see a general or a president with a weak chin, you’re not going to see coaches with weak chins, you’re not going to see a lot of well-to-do personalities in the media with underdeveloped faces and chins. You don’t see athletes and newscasters with narrow palates and crooked teeth.

Unfortunately the trends in cosmetic facial and body enhancement procedures make one believe that all can be bought with money and surgery, but a word of caution: avoid implantation of objects or removal of organs as they interfere with normal and natural processes of the body, mind and soul. Great research has demonstrated that cells communicate with one another via a form of light and surgery tends to disrupt these light pathways, also called meridians or chi pathways.

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Dr. Raymond Silkman has a private practice in holistic dentistry and orthodontics in West Los Angeles, California. This article is based on his presentation at 2006, the 6th annual conference of the Weston A. Price Foundation.

The Looting of Social Security

New Book Faults Both Clinton and Bush for Empty Social Security Trust Fund

FROSTPROOF, Fla., December 4, 2007—Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have spent every dime of the surplus Social Security revenue flowing into the Treasury during their terms in office, according to economist Allen W. Smith, Ph.D. in his new book, *Demystifying Economics: The Book That Makes Economics Accessible to Everyone. Smith points out that the 1983 legislation, which substantially raised Social Security taxes, was designed specifically for the purpose of building up a surplus in the Social Security trust fund in preparation for the staggering new obligations the fund would face when the baby-boom generation begins retiring about 2010. Instead, Smith reports that the government began using the surplus to pay for other government programs as soon as it first appeared in 1983, and it has continued to do so ever since.

Although the first President Bush and President Clinton both violated the intent of the law in using Social Security revenue for non-Social Security purposes, Smith makes a distinction between their actions and those of President George W. Bush. According to Smith, both George W. Bush and Al Gore entered into a new covenant with the American people when they both emphatically and unconditionally pledged to end the looting of Social Security during the 2000 presidential campaign. Gore promised to put every penny of Social Security revenue into a “Social Security lockbox,” to be used for Social Security alone, and Bush pledged to do the same. Even after becoming President, Smith says that Bush continued to insist that he would not touch the surplus Social Security revenue. In a speech on March 3, 2001, Bush emphatically stated,

“We’re going to keep the promise of Social Security and keep the government from raiding the Social Security surplus.”

Bush never rescinded that pledge to the American people, Smith claims, but he has consciously and systematically used the Social Security surplus as a giant slush fund to help pay for his huge tax cuts for the rich and the war in Iraq, among other things. By early 2007, the amount of money looted from the Social Security trust fund by the Bush administration had surpassed the $1 trillion mark, and Bush continued to loot, and spend, Social Security money at the rate of $500 million per day.

According to Smith, during his failed attempt to push through his Social Security privatization plan in 2005, Bush’s frustration over his inability to convince the American people that Social Security was in deep trouble led him to openly admit the role of his administration in looting Social Security. On Thursday, April 28, 2005, during a nationally televised news conference, President Bush said,

“Our system is called pay as you go. You pay into the system through your payroll taxes and the government spends it. It spends the money on current retirees and with the money left over, it funds other programs. And all that’s left behind is file cabinets full of IOUs.”

____________

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Allen W. Smith is Professor of Economics Emeritus, Eastern Illinois University. He is the author of numerous other books including, The Looting of Social Security: How the Government is Draining America’s Retirement Account; The Alleged Budget Surplus, Social Security, and Voodoo Economics; and Understanding Economics. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Indiana University.

CNNMoney.com’s ‘Great Depression Comparisons Misguided’ Conflicts with Historical Fact

By: Paul Lamont, The Market Oracle.

After reading CNNMoney.com Editor Paul La Monica’s piece on the comparisons to the Great Depression , we felt compelled to respond. Unfortunately for Mr. La Monica, the article regurgitates common beliefs about the Depression which conflict with historical fact and basic economics. We hope to set things straight. We begin with Mr. La Monica’s words:

“ The unemployment rate skyrocketed during the Depression, peaking at nearly 25% in 1933. The current unemployment rate is just 5%. And that’s only up from 4.5% a year ago. Contrast that with the far more explosive spike at the beginning of the Great Depression – from about 3% in 1929 to nearly 8.7% in 1930, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census.”

These numbers are accurate. However Mr. La Monica’s use of a lagging indicator for his strongest point is telling. The economy won’t experience the highest unemployment numbers until it hits bottom. At that point, his commentary would be too late to be of any use.

“ Another hallmark of the Depression was deflation, which is obviously not happening today. Wages are rising – albeit by less than many would like .”

Once again we agree. Deflation was the hallmark of the Depression. But deflation is evident by the fall in the general price level, not just wages. Today a larger, more widely held asset class is falling in value than coincided with the beginning of the Great Depression. Does that mean it could be worse? The rise in wages is not good news either. According to Murray Rothbard, real wages were increasing into 1931, “thereby greatly aggravating the unemployment problem as time went on.” Perhaps this could cause the ‘explosive spike’ in unemployment that Mr. La Monica first cites. He continues with a description of how different it is today:

“The main fear is inflation in the cost of food and oil. And there’s reason to believe that inflation pressures may eventually ease since there is a bit of a speculative bubble going on in commodities. Plus, if the Federal Reserve can stabilize the dollar, that could cool off the recent run-up in gas and food costs.”

Inflation fears were the main concern during 1930-1933 as well. It was given by investors as the ‘excuse’ for the U.S. corporate bond sell-off. Simultaneously, the CPI was falling. A speculative commodity bust (see chart below) and a rising U.S. dollar would also fit with the onset of the Great Depression. Mr. La Monica’s analysis of today’s environment could have been given in 1930.

“ Finally, there’s the issue of the stock market. I’ve taken a lot of flack for mentioning the bounceback in stocks since many readers seem to think that what happens on Wall Street does not affect Main Street .”

This is where similarities are even more exact.

As you can see from the chart above, after the initial Crash of 1929, the DJIA bottomed out in November. Its ‘bounceback’ lasted until April of 1930, (a typical .618 retracement, check your S&P500 chart of the recent rally, yes same .618 rebound) at which time it was generally accepted that the ‘worst was over.’ Even Hoover remarked in a speech on December 5 th that the worst was behind them (according to Murray Rothbard, America’s Great Depression ). What occurred next is related to us by Fredrick Lewis Allen in Only Yesterday :

“During the first three months of 1930 a Little Bull Market gave a very plausible imitation of the Big Bull Market. Trading became as heavy as in the golden summer of 1929, and the prices of the leading stocks actually regained more than half the ground they had lost during the debacle . For a time it seemed as if perhaps the hopeful prophets at Washington were right and prosperity was coming once more and it would be well to get in on the ground floor and make up those dismal losses of 1929. But in April this brief illusion began to sicken and die. Business reaction had set in again. By the end of the sixty-day period set for recovery by the President and his Secretary of Commerce, commodity prices were going down, production indices were going down, the stock market was taking a series of painful tumbles, and hope deferred was making the American heartsick.”

This ‘third leg of the bear market’ (1930 to 1933) was characterized by the failure of the banking system to provide credit and money for the proper functioning of the economy. With bank failures currently looming , ignore history at our own peril.

Mr. La Monica continues:

“Keep in mind that the Depression was kicked into gear, if not necessarily caused, by the stock market crash of October 1929… The Depression was a product of a one-time shock that took years to recover from.”

Today’s credit markets have not recovered from this ‘one-time shock’ either. The main crash has already occurred in the value of real estate loans held by financial institutions. Writedowns have already totaled $380B. However rating agencies and financial guarantors have allowed bankers to prevent realization of most of the losses and subsequent forced increases in reserves. As Warren Buffet recently stated , “You’ve got a lot of leeway in running a bank to not tell the truth for quite a while.” According to Homer Hoyt in One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago ; “Real-estate loans, not failed stockbrokers’ accounts, were the largest single element in the failure of 4,800 banks in the years from 1930 to 1933.” As Mr. La Monica goes onto say:

“The massive plunge in the value of an asset, in this case stocks, sent the economy spiraling into its most severe downturn in history.”

Replace ‘stocks’ with ‘real estate’. Mr. La Monica then cites Chris Probyn, chief economist of Global State Street Advisors, for the reason ‘why today is different.’

“’ But the Fed has cut interest rates. Congress has responded aggressively with a fiscal stimulus package,’ Probyn added.’ One of the problems in the Great Depression was that there was no fiscal policy employed preemptively to stop it.’”

This is easily dismissed, because it is factually incorrect. According to Murray Rothbard, before October 1929, the rediscount rate was at 6%. It was lowered to 4% in November 1929, 2% by December 1930, and finally 1.5% in mid-1931. At the same time, President Hoover “increased expenditures by $130 million of which $50 million was new construction.” State and local governments increased expenditures by $700M. The Hoover Dam began construction in 1931. Despite (relatively) greater fiscal stimulus as well as drastic rate cuts, the fractional reserve banking system collapsed in 4 years. Why? Bankers were unable or unwilling to lend, either because of continued losses on real estate loans or because of a run on deposits. The unavailability of credit and money caused the deflationary spiral of the Great Depression.

Nothing New Under The Sun

Currently, the Federal Reserve is providing banks access to half of its balance sheet as the lender of last resort. This is to keep the banking system lending. However further mortgage downgrades, financial guarantor failures or the complete use of the Federal Reserve balance sheet could force banks into crises similar to that of 1930-33.

We don’t like the similarities either. But we also can’t ignore them. Mr. La Monica’s article represents the current widespread belief that is so commonly wrong at major market turning points.

SITE red-faced as Islamist ‘Washington ruin’ image turns out to be from Fallout 3 game

Source: The Telegraph. See video game picture from my earlier post about this story.

Published: May 30, 2008; however it is no longer there, and there is no Google cache of the story. I got the following text from LibertyPost.org. Now you know why I post articles in their entirety!

This image of Washington after a nuclear holocaust, which a US intelligence group claimed showed the ambition of Islamic extremist terrorists, was actually lifted from a computer game.

The SITE Intelligence Group said that the image, showing a ruined Capitol Building in Washington, was created by extremists as part of discussions about the feasibility of nuclear strikes against the US and Britain.

The images appeared in a video, called Nuclear Jihad: The Ultimate Terror, posted on two password-protected websites, al-Ekhlass and al-Hesbah, believed to be affiliated with al-Qa’eda.

SITE also released translated several chatroom threads from al-Ekhlass and al-Hesbah, discussing the possibility of nuclear attacks on the West.

However, it has transpired that far from being a detailed simulation created by terrorist masterminds, the apocalyptic vision is in fact lifted from the computer game Fallout 3, by US game designers Bethesda Softworks.

The game bills itself as “America’s first choice in post-nuclear simulation”, with players roaming a ruined landscape some time after a nuclear war in 2077.

Even Fort Detrick Scientists Themselves Think the Killer Anthrax Came from their Facility

Source: George Washington’s Blog.

Even experts at the U.S. bioweapons facility at Fort Detrick think that the anthrax which was used in the 2001 attacks came from their facility:

“In an e-mail obtained by FOX News, scientists at Fort Detrick openly discussed how the anthrax powder they were asked to analyze after the attacks was nearly identical to that made by one of their colleagues.

“Then he said he had to look at a lot of samples that the FBI had prepared … to duplicate the letter material,” the e-mail reads. “Then the bombshell. He said that the best duplication of the material was the stuff made by [name redacted]. He said that it was almost exactly the same … his knees got shaky and he sputtered, ‘But I told the General we didn’t make spore powder!’”

Indeed, 3 of the 4 suspects the FBI is investigating are employees of Fort Detrick, which is run by the Army.

This new information verifies that the anthrax came from the Fort Detrick military base (confirmed here).

Some people are pretending that someone unconnected with the army bioweapons facility at Fort Detrick stole the anthrax. However, as the above-quoted article states:

“Fort Detrick is run by the United States Army. It’s the most secure biological warfare research center in the United States,” a bioterrorism expert told FOX News.”

It is not very likely that someone could steal anthrax from the most secure facility in the U.S., run by the Army.

Indeed, the FBI apparently knew in 2002 who mailed the anthrax letters. See this, this, and this.

And yet government investigators and prosecutors have covered up and refused to disclose who did it for 6 years. Initially, the FBI tried to frame an innocent man for the attacks.

More importantly, “The FBI has completely shut Congress out of its now five-year investigation into anthrax attacks on Capitol Hill and around the nation”. In other words, Congress — which legally has every right to know what really happened, and which was the main victim of the attack — is being kept in the dark. If the FBI really didn’t know who did it, and was really conducting an honest investigation, why would it stonewall Congress?

There is strong evidence that the anthrax attacks were a false flag attack. Indeed, the bioweapons expert who actually drafted the current bioweapons law (the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989) while working for President George H.W. Bush has said that he is convinced the October 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people were perpetrated and covered up by criminal elements of the U.S. government. The motive: to foment a police state by killing off and intimidating opposition to post-9/11 legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the later Military Commissions Act. See also this.

At the very least, the FBI and the White House are actively covering up for the person who really did it.

BUSTED : Murdoch Media Uses Online Game Art For War Propaganda, Claims It Came From Al Qaeda

By Darryl Mason, Your New Reality.

UPDATE : The Australian newspaper has illustrated a thoroughly discredited story about Al Qaeda and WMDs with a piece of art from an online video game. The Australian newspaper claimed the above was “supplied”. But supplied by who? Al Qaeda? News agencies? Corporate American intelligence agencies? Or someone in The Australian’s own art department?

Previously : According to Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian, the above image turned up on an Al Qaeda website. Or on a website populated by people who claim to be Al Qaeda. Or it was ‘supplied’ to The Australian newspaper by the corporate American intelligence agency that claims to monitor Al Qaeda websites, and then sells what they find for big dollars to the world’s media? It’s hard to keep track.

The Australian newspaper is supposed to Murdoch’s ‘quality broadsheet’ down under, but clearly they are more than happy to pump Al Qaeda propaganda as much as the dozens of trash Murdoch tabloids in the US, the UK and Australia.

But don’t worry about that massive credibility gap. This imagery (we now know comes from a video game – ed) came with a terrible warning of doom…. or as it’s more commonly known, complete and utter bullshit :

Groups that monitor Islamic websites say al-Qaeda will post a new video in the next 24 hours urging jihadists to use biological, chemical and nuclear weapons to attack the West, the FBI said.

The FBI warning came as the US-based monitoring group SITE said the video encouraging terrorists to develop and detonate weapons of mass destruction in the US and Europe was posted on an Islamist militant forum.SITE also released a computer-generated image, showing Washington DC in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, which reportedly appeared on an Islamist forum.

The 39-minute, documentary-style video, titled Nuclear Jihad: The Ultimate Terror, was posted on the al-Ekhlaas forum on May 25, SITE said in a statement.

“The idea of killing lots of people, this idea is available to us, and it must be used under the idea of treating others the same, so I say that terror in their countries must involve human losses and these human losses must be with WMDs,” the video says, according to SITE’s translation.

Paul Joseph Watson has some very interesting information on American ‘intelligence specialists’ who have turned the distribution of all but meaningless Al Qaeda propaganda into a very profitable business, and explains why we don’t see anymore beheading videos from ‘Al Qaeda’ :

Nearly four years after Benjamin Vanderford hoodwinked the global media by manufacturing a fake Al-Qaeda beheading tape, America’s corporate press whores are once again gearing up to fearmonger about the prospect of mushroom clouds over American cities by instantly ascribing gospel status to a dubious “Al-Qaeda fan” Internet videotape that encourages the use of WMD in a terrorist attack.

Since the dubious series of beheading videos, which coincidentally came to a stop when one of our readers managed to expose the ludicrousness of accepting such propaganda at face value by hoodwinking the world media with a fake beheading tape, “Al-Qaeda” has been resigned to spreading its message through Mossad agents like Adam Pearlman and alleged sketchy Bin Laden audio recordings…

Now Al Qaeda ‘fan made’ videos, as this ‘documentary’ is being described, are getting mass media exposure. The MSM is petrified that if they don’t pump any and all AQ propaganda that comes their way, and there is another attack on the US, they will be seen as being guilty of not having informed the public of what they knew might have been coming.

Whatever Al Qaeda is, the American (and Australian) mainstream media is doing their job of spread the threat of terror for them, and making money at the same time utilising dramatic free content supposedly supplied by terrorists.

It doesn’t matter how absolutely crap and ridiculous the supposed Al Qaeda videos are, the mainstream media gives them all front page and lead evening news story exposure, almost seven years after the United States was last attacked.

How much longer can this Al Qaeda crapfest be kept up? Not much longer. The bitter cynicism from reader-commenters across the American media spectrum in reaction to this ‘documentary’ has been almost unanimous, and many are disgusted and furious. Not at Al Qaeda necessarily, but at the MSM for once again doing the terrorists’ job of trying to spread fear and unease.

Rupert Murdoch, and the rest of the MSM, should give this shit a fucking rest, Or at the very least start mocking the creators of this propaganda for being absolutely crap at what they do.

All the great enemies of the West were mocked relentlessly during the wars of the 20th century. But for this war we are told, by President Bush in particular, that we must listen closely to and believe every word that Osama Bin Laden, or one of his lackey arseholes, have to say.

The scary truth is that the American war machine has as much interest in prolonging this war as Al Qaeda, or whatever passes for Al Qaeda, has. Neither side wants it to end.

We don’t seem to get to have a say in this. No matter who we vote for, the war goes on. And on. And onandonandon.

If you preach hatred, violence and intolerance, you should not expect the mainstream media to do most of your work for you in getting out your vile message.

Enough is enough.

Uranium Enrichment: The Bushes, The Saudis and The Bomb

By Chris Floyd, Empire Burlesque.

Did you hear the alarming story about a country led by draconian Muslim religious extremists acquiring enriched uranium for their nuclear plants — plants which could be weaponized anytime in the future, putting weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Sharia law fanatics who repress women, chop off heads and throttle all dissent? What’s more, they were given this weapons-grade material by a rogue nation led by a goonish tyrant who gained power only because he was the wastrel son of the former leader. Break out the regime change machinery right away; this evil must be stopped!

What’s that? No, we’re not talking about Iran getting souped-up nukestuff from North Korea. We’re talking about George W. Bush’s bestowal of enriched uranium on his pals and business partners, the Saudi royals, the most draconian religious tyrants in the world. Harvey Wasserman has the goods at Democracy Now:

You know, I’d like to know the insane asylum in which this policy was concocted. The idea of giving enriched uranium to the Saudis while threatening war with the Iranians for enriching uranium is astonishing. The idea that the Saudis are going to somehow lower the price of oil on the basis of possibly getting nuclear reactors in the future is just almost staggering to think about. It’s something, I guess, we’ve come to expect with the Bush administration.

But the nuclear power industry is trying desperately to spread itself all over the world, and we have proliferation problems. As you may recall, the Clinton administration cut a deal with the North Koreans to build a reactor there, and of course now suddenly, when Bush comes in, they’re a nuclear threat. We have to put this in perspective. We have to remember that when the Shah was in power in Iran so many years ago, he was in the process of buying thirty-six reactors, and had those reactors been completed before he fell to the Ayatollah, Iran would now have thirty-six reactors. So what the Bush administration is telling us is that this current Saudi government is always going to be in power and it’s perfectly fine for them to have nuclear reactors. We know that India and Pakistan built—both built nuclear weapons from their commercial atomic power programs, as perhaps did South Africa. And it’s just almost staggering to think about this prospect.

How strange: Bush and the many beaters of drums for war with Iran tell us over and over that Tehran’s nuclear program must be aimed at building weapons, for why else would a country awash in oil want to pursue nuclear energy? Yet when Bush’s smooching buddy King Fahd and his immensely corrupt court of baksheeshers — led, of course, by the billion-dollar bribe maven, Prince Bandar Ibn Sultan (or as he is known in America’s own two-bit royal family, “Bandar Bush”) — say they want to supplement their oil resources with nuclear power, why, that’s perfectly logical. Enriched uranium? By all means, be our guest!

The truth is that the Saudis have been trying to get hold of nuclear weapons for decades, with the active help of their business partners, the Bush Family. As the New Yorker reported years ago, the Saudis paid Saddam Hussein at least $5 billion from 1985 to 1990 to support his nuclear weapons program, with the understanding that they would get some of the big bombs for themselves. What’s more, this sinister transaction was carried out with the full knowledge and tacit approval of, among others, a certain president named George Bush:

What the defector did not know was that the Fahd-Saddam nuclear project was also a closely held secret in Washington. According to a former high-ranking American diplomat, the C.I.A. was fully apprised. “I knew about it,” the diplomat says matter-of-factly, “and so did they.” A senior White House official, asked about the Saudi government’s involvement and American complicity, told us, “They did spend billions on the Iraqis. It was a different world. We were ready to overlook a lot of things the Saudis were doing for the Iraqis. It’s consistent with all the other terrible things we did at the time” — to shore up Saddam.

Then Saddam did a bad thing: he messed around with another set of Bush Family business partners: the Kuwaiti royals. [See the postscript after the jump for more details.] That was the end of his . (The Reagan-Bush administrations had also helpfully supplied Saddam with materials for chemical weapons too, then provided him with military intelligence to help him direct this CW at the Iranians). But it was not the end of Saudi Arabia’s quest for an “Islamic bomb.” They simply turned to Pakistan, which, wisely, has never upset a Bush Family business partner. As Greg Palast reports:

How did a berserker like North Korea’s Kim Jong Il get the bomb in the first place? Answer: He bought it from the Dr. Strangelove of Pakistan [A.Q. Khan] in 2001 — while all our President’s men ordered our intelligence agents to keep their eyes shut tight….

Why would Team Bush pull back our agents from nabbing North Korea’s bomb connection? The answer in two words: Saudi Arabia.

The agent on the line said, “There were always constraints on investigating the Saudis.” Khan is Pakistani, not Saudi, but, nevertheless, the investigation led back to Saudi Arabia. There was no way that the Dr. Strangelove of Pakistan could have found the billions to cook up his nukes within the budget of his poor nation.

We eventually discovered that agents knew the Saudis, who had secretly funded Saddam’s nuclear weapons ambitions in the eighties, apparently moved their bomb-for-Islam money from Iraq to Dr. Khan’s lab in Pakistan after Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990.

But, said the insider, our agents had to let a hot trail grow cold because he and others “were told to back off the Saudis.” If you can’t follow the money, you can’t investigate. The weapons hunt was spiked.

Whether the Saudis had the same arrangement with Khan as they did with Saddam — “Here’s the loot, go make bombs, then give us some” — is not known. (Well, the Bushes probably know, but not us peons) The Saudis’ current yen for enriched uranium would tend to indicate that there was some other pro quo for their layout of quid. But even if Dr. Khan has not already given the Saudis a couple of nukes to play with, someone else has provided them (and the rest of the world) with handy-dandy blueprints for building a bomb. And who might that be? Why, that nation-devouring scourge of WMD everywhere, of course: George W. Bush.

As we noted here in November 2006, the Bush Administration dumped thousands of captured Iraqi documents on the internet, including, as the New York Times put it, “detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.” Just hours after this story broke, six Arab nations formally announced they were launching nuclear programs of their own: Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates — and Saudi Arabia. From the November 2006 post:

As the Times [London] notes, arms experts view the announcement as “a stunning reversal of policy” in the Arab world, which has long called for a nuclear-free Middle East – a stance aimed at dismantling Israel’s large if nominally secret nuclear arsenal and preventing Iran from acquiring atomic weaponry….

It’s true that the six Arab nations told the IAEA they wanted nuclear capability solely for peaceful purposes: to run desalinization plants, for example, or to provide cheap, abundant energy for their economies. (Perhaps the supposedly oil-glutted Saudis, who trotted out the latter rationale, know something they’re not telling us about “peak oil” and such.) But it’s also true that this technology can always be weaponized – as the Bush Administration never ceases to remind us when lambasting Iran for its nuclear program.

Of course, converting a peaceful, public energy program into a covert weapons development scheme is much easier if you have a “cookbook” showing you how to do it. And that’s exactly how the Bush Administration’s Iraqi data dump was described by European experts. With six new entrants in the nuclear sweepstakes – just a fraction of the 30 nations that IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei says “have the capacity to develop nuclear weapons in a short time” – the ramifications of the Administration’s nuke blogging are far more serious than the near-total media and political silence that has followed the revelations would indicate…

Last March, in a bid to generate media smoke from overheated right-wing bloggers flailing their way ignorantly through raw intelligence data, the Bush Faction dumped thousands upon thousands of captured Saddam-era Iraqi documents into a public web archive. There was absolutely zero intelligence value to be gained from the exercise, as the Administration’s own intelligence experts repeatedly warned. Then again, history has shown us just how scantly the Bush Gang regards careful intelligence analysis; as in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, what they wanted was cherry-picked garbage that could be used for partisan propaganda.

And so the sewage pipe of the unsifted Iraqi intel was opened, in hopes of generating a few stories that might dominate a news cycle here and there with “revelations” that could provide even the most tenuous “justification” for the Administration’s pre-war mendacities about Iraq’s non-existent WMD threat and its equally spurious ties to 9/11 and al Qaeda. As we’ve seen in many other cases – such as the long-running spy fiction thriller, “Atta in Prague” – the barest micron of a hint of a whisper from some unnamed, uncorroborated source is enough for the warmongers and their sycophants to feast upon for years.

But this trove of dross has produced no propaganda gold, and with good reason: the archives cannot yield what is not there. There are no records documenting active WMD programs, or even dormant WMD programs, because there had been no such programs in Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War – a fact that the western intelligence agencies, and the Clinton and Bush White Houses, knew very well, because they had been told of this in 1995 by the man in charge of the programs and their destruction: Saddam’s own son-in-law, Hussein Kamel.

However, as the New York Times reports, there was a good deal of material in the archives on Iraq’s pre-1991 WMD programs. These included, says the NYT, “detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.” They contain “charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums.”

One of the most important aspects of the information is that it spells out many of the mistakes and wrong turns that Iraqi scientists encountered on their road to the bomb. The handy roadmap provided by Bush will allow new aspirants for atomic weaponry to avoid these pitfalls and accelerate their programs accordingly. Secret nuclear weapons programs once took decades to complete, as in Pakistan, India and North Korea, or else simply sputtered out from technical ignorance, as in Libya. Now much of this knowledge gap has been bridged by the Bush Administration, cutting years of trial and error out of the process.

As we further noted at the time, these nuclear bomb blueprints were dumped on a world where

long-effective non-proliferation structures are either collapsing or already dead. From the very beginning, the Bush Administration deliberately set out to overthrow the old “containment” treaties that had held the demon of nuclear war at bay for decades. The Administration was adamant that no shackles should hold back its expansion of the entirely ineffective but crony-enriching boondoggle known as “missile defense.” Plans for “enhancing” the nation’s nuclear arsenal with new, more “useable” tactical nukes and weaponizing the global commons of outer space were also stated goals of the militarists who dominate the Administration: the “Project for a New Century” crowd, led by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who spelled out their disdain for arms treaties and their plans for an aggressive nuclear weapons revamp in speeches and publications well before the unelected Bush was shoehorned into the White House by the Supreme Court.

Once in office, Bush “unsigned” the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty and ashcanned the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty – the cornerstone of nuclear containment for a generation. In their place, Bush and his “unitary executive” counterpart in Russia, Vladimir Putin, signed the ludicrous “Moscow Treaty” in 2002. This worthless rag – which covers less than a single, typewritten page – is perhaps the most cynical sham in international diplomacy since the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

The treaty sets a nominal limit on the number of nuclear warheads actually mounted on working missiles and bombers, as the National Resources Defense Council reports. But this limit is operative for one day only – December 31, 2012, the day the treaty expires. “Before and after that date, the number of deliverable nuclear warheads could exceed the treaty’s maximum ‘limit’ of 2,200 ‘operational’ warheads,” the NRDC notes. “Both countries would be free to keep thousands of ‘reserve’ warheads in storage, which could be remounted on delivery systems within weeks or months.”

There were no other limits placed on the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals, nor does the treaty require “the destruction of a single nuclear warhead, missile, silo, bomber or submarine,” the NRDC reports. It places no restrictions at all on tactical nuclear weapons: the ones most likely to be used in battle — and the ones most likely to be pilfered by “non-state actors.”

….Meanwhile, the Administration has made a mockery of the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As noted, Bush has embraced the nuclear weapons programs of three renegade nations that remained outside the NPT – India, Pakistan and Israel – while attacking nations that have remained within the Treaty’s allowances for carefully monitored peaceful nuclear energy programs. And Bush has of course continued the practice of all of his predecessors in arrogantly ignoring the obligations which the treaty placed on existing nuclear powers to liquidate their own stockpiles and work toward an international disarmament agreement….

Only a sociopathic idiot of the highest order would dump raw intelligence about weapons systems onto the Internet without even examining it first. What’s more, the Bush Party knew for a certainty that there was very dangerous material lurking in the archive. As the NYT reports: “Last spring, after the site began posting old Iraqi documents about chemical weapons, United Nations arms-control officials in New York won the withdrawal of a report that gave information on how to make tabun and sarin, nerve agents that kill by causing respiratory failure.”

Those particular documents were finally pulled – after finding their way into how many hard drives of Islamic extremists, homegrown white-power nuts, or freakish death cults like Aum Shinrikyo? – but the archive stayed wide open. Why? Because the Bush Party fanatics still hoped to squeeze some propaganda value out of it. And even after the IAEA complained about the nuclear data on the site late last month, the Administration took no action. Not until the New York Times story was about to appear did the Bushists finally take down the site, to lessen the political embarrassment….Had some intelligence agent or other government official posted such incendiary material on a website on the sly, they would rightly be condemned as criminals, even traitors.

So here are your “National Security” stalwarts in action. This is how much they really care about restraining nuclear proliferation and keeping nightmare weaponry out of the hands of tyrants, terrorists and extremists. In their endless, ruthless, relentless quest for blood money — for the power and privilege that war and fear and human suffering bring — our militarist elites are more than happy to put the whole world at risk.

(There is a postscript after the jump.)

***
Here’s more on how the Bush Family used the U.S. military as its own private militia to help out their Kuwaiti business partners. From a piece written in 2005:

Isn’t this where we came in?

Iraqis Accuse Kuwait of Stealing Oil (AP):

“Iraqi legislators accused Kuwait of stealing their oil as well as chipping away at their national territory on the border – allegations similar to those used by Saddam Hussein to justify his invasion of Kuwait that began 15 years ago Tuesday..

‘”There have been violations such as digging horizontal oil wells to pump Iraq oil,” legislator Jawad al-Maliki, chairman of the parliament’s Security and Defense Committee, told the National Assembly on Tuesday….

“In such horizontal wells, instead of drilling straight down, Kuwaitis would drill at an angle either going into subterranean Iraqi territory or sucking oil out of pools from Iraqi territory. He also said Kuwaitis have taken territories up to half a mile inside Iraq.”

As the story notes, this is precisely the same thing that Saddam alleged before the first Gulf War — allegations that happened, by and large, to be true. There was also a huge financial conflict between the two countries: Kuwait had given Saddam some $10 billion during the Iran-Iraq war to help him keep the “Persian horde” (and revolutionary Shiite tide) from sweeping through the region. In those days, Saddam was seen as the bulwark of the Arabs against this threat to their regimes. After the war, the Kuwaiti royals decided that money had been a loan, and they wanted it back; Saddam insisted that it had been a straight-forward payment for services rendered.

All of this — the oil theft, border encroachments, the debt row — dovetailed with the long-standing (pre-Saddam) belief among Iraqis that Kuwait was actually part of their national territory, unfairly gouged out by the British colonial map-makers to give their court favorites, the al-Sabahs, a nice accessible oily playground. Of course, the whole region — including the creation of Iraq itself — was carved up in similar fashion by a few bureaucrats in London, setting the stage for what will obviously be centuries of rancour and conflict in the region. (The same way the arbitrary, unnatural borderlines throughout much of Africa have led to decades of chaos and war.)

But this is not the place to get into the merits, if any, of these various conflicts. The point is, they existed, and were the root causes of the first Gulf War — which was itself the spark not only for the second, current war but also for the “war on terror.” For it was the installation of American troops on the “sacred” soil of Saudi Arabia that led Osama bin Laden to turn against his former allies and paymasters in the Reagan-Bush administrations, and declare “war” on the United States.

And here’s an historical footnote you don’t often see — or rather, you NEVER see it in the mainstream media: another reason for bin Laden’s pique is that HE wanted to fight Saddam in Kuwait. Here’s how it happened.

Negotiations brokered by the Arab League had come very close to resolving the immediate conflict between Saddam and Kuwait. The talks finally foundered on the Kuwaitis’ insistence on getting their $10 billion loan/gift back from Saddam. When a desperate, last-ditch effort by the League was put on the table, with Saddam massing troops on the border, the Kuwaiti royals were unruffled: “We will call in the Americans.” (This at a time when Bush officials were testifying under oath before Congress that the US had no obligations or agreement with Kuwait to defend it from attack. This was also the time when Bush’s woman in Baghdad, April Glaspie, famously told Saddam that the US would not take sides in this dispute between Arab nations.)

Ah, but you see, there was one other very important connection in the tangled web that led to war: President George H.W. Bush had been a long-time business partner of the Kuwaiti royals, a connection going back 30 years, since the days that his CIA-connected company, Zapata Oil, had drilled Kuwait’s first offshore wells. Despite the fact that there was no compelling American interest in jumping into this regional conflict, Bush had no compunction about shedding American blood to protect his partners and his investments.

But how to convince the American people to intervene in a falling out among thugs in the far-off desert? Hit them in the pocketbook, of course. The internal Arab struggle was pitched as a dire threat to the American economy. After the invasion of Kuwait, Cheney solemnly announced that Saddam had massed a huge military force on the Saudi border. In a matter of days, Cheney said, Saddam could seize the Saudi fields and cut off the main U.S. oil supply. Only war would save American jobs.

But it was all a lie. The St. Petersburg Times (Florida) obtained satellite imagery of the Kuwaiti-Saudi border: there were no troop concentrations there, just miles of empty desert. Military intelligence reports confirmed the absence. Yet this phantom border build-up was given as the main reason for ditching negotiations and moving to war. Cheney refused to explain the anomaly.

Then came the atrocity stories. A comely Kuwaiti lass testified before Congress that she had seen Saddam’s evil minions ripping innocent babies from hospital incubators. Outraged Congressmen repeatedly cited this abomination in their calls for war. Bush I cried that Saddam was “worse than Hitler.” (And given the fact that Bush’s father did business with Hitler – even after Germany declared war on America – he perhaps had some unique insights in this regard.)

But the atrocity stories were also a lie, part of a $10 million PR campaign to “sell” the idea of war to the public. The comely lass was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington – where she had safely passed the invasion, having seen neither incubators, dead babies nor a single Iraqi marauder.

Where does Osama come in? After Saddam crossed the border into Kuwait, Osama went to his patrons, the Saudi royals, and offered the services of his CIA-trained army of holy warriors from the Afghan war. Let me fight Saddam and drive him from Kuwait, Osama said. But the Saudis and Kuwaitis refused. They preferred the services of a more powerful warlord: George Bush, who used U.S. forces as his own private militia to bail out his royal business partners. The rest, as they say, is history.

Now we see that — surprise, surprise! — the same old national interests and concerns and conflicts have re-emerged in the “new” government of Iraq. Doubtless in good time the new government of Iraq — of whatever political or religious stripe — will the feel the pressing need to acquire weapons of mass destruction to defend itself from outside threats and assert its importance in the region. And the whole ungodly bloody mess can start anew.

History doesn’t just repeat itself: it comes back up again and again, like a bad case of botulism from gobbling raw meat.

BEST OF WEB: Where Is the Outrage Over Torture?

By Robert Scheer, TruthDig.

©AP photo / Mary Altaffer
Protesters dressed as inmates demonstrate against the
Guantanamo Bay detentions in front of Manhattan Supreme Court
in January 2007 in New York.

Are we Americans truly savages or merely tone-deaf in matters of morality, and therefore more guilty of terminal indifference than venality? It’s a question demanding an answer in response to the publication of the detailed 370-page report on U.S. complicity in torture, issued last week by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Because the report was widely cited in the media and easily accessed as a pdf file on the Internet, it is fair to assume that those of our citizens who remain ignorant of the extent of their government’s commitment to torture as an official policy have made a choice not to be informed. A less appealing conclusion would be that they are aware of the heinous acts fully authorized by our president but conclude that such barbarism is not inconsistent with that American way of life that we celebrate.

But that troubling assessment of moral indifference is contradicted by the scores of law enforcement officers, mostly from the FBI, who were so appalled by what they observed as routine official practice in the treatment of prisoners by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo that they risked their careers to officially complain. A few brave souls from the FBI even compiled a “war crimes file,” suggesting the unthinkable – that we might come to be judged as guilty by the standard we have imposed on others. Superiors in the Justice Department soon put a stop to such FBI efforts to hold CIA agents and other U.S. officials accountable for the crimes they committed.

That this systematic torture was carried out not by a few conveniently described “bad apples” but rather represented official policy condoned at the highest level of government was captured in one of those rare media reports that remind us why the Founding Fathers signed off on the First Amendment.

“These were not random acts,” The New York Times editorialized. “It is clear from the inspector general’s report that this was organized behavior by both civilian and military interrogators following the specific orders of top officials. The report shows what happens when an American president, his secretary of defense, his Justice Department and other top officials corrupt American law to rationalize and authorize the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners.”

One of those top officials, who stands revealed in the inspector general’s report as approving the torture policy, is Condoleezza Rice, who in her capacity as White House national security adviser turned away the concerns of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft as to the severe interrogation measures being employed. Rice, as ABC-TV reported in April, chaired the top-level meetings in 2002 in the White House Situation Room that signed off on the CIA treatment of prisoners – “whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called water boarding. …” According to the report, the former academic provost of Stanford University came down on the side of simulated drowning.

As further proof that women are not necessarily more squeamish than men in condoning such practices, the report offers examples of sexual and religious denigration of the mostly Muslim prisoners by female interrogators carrying out an official policy of “invasion of space by a female.” In one recorded instance observed by startled FBI agents, a female interrogator was seen with a prisoner “bending his thumbs back and grabbing his genitals … to cause him pain.” One of the agents testified that this was not “a case of a rogue interrogator acting on her own.” He said he witnessed a “pep rally” meeting conducted by a top Defense Department official “in which the interrogators were encouraged to get as close to the torture statute line as possible.”

That was evidently the norm, according to FBI agents who witnessed the interrogations. As The New York Times reported, “One bureau memorandum spoke of ‘torture techniques’ used by military interrogators. Agents described seeing things like inmates handcuffed in a fetal position for up to 24 hours, left to defecate on themselves, intimidated by dogs, made to wear women’s underwear and subjected to strobe lights and extreme heat and cold.”

In the end, what seems to have most outraged the hundreds of FBI agents interviewed for the report is that the interrogation tactics were counterproductive. Evidently the FBI’s long history in such matters had led to a protocol that stressed gaining the confidence of witnesses rather than terrorizing them into madness. But an insane prisoner is the one most likely to tell this president of the United States what he wants to hear: They hate us for our values.

Robert Scheer’s new book, “The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America,” will be released June 9 by Twelve.

Got Milk? Get Investigated

I get raw milk from a couple living in the boondocks, and although they run their operation as a legal herd share, I worry that they’ll get prosecuted for something or other, and have agents pull up gestapo-style to their little ranch.

By David E. Gumpert, The Nation.

As consumers increasingly seek out farmers who raise organic and unpasteurized food, suddenly energized regulators claim they want to “protect” us from pathogens and other dangers. What gives?

The undercover agent takes two guises in our national consciousness. At one extreme is the highly trained professional who risks his or her life to go after the worst drug dealers and mobsters. At the other extreme is the apolitical and poorly trained apparatchik, designated by a bureaucratic superior to infiltrate a group deemed subversive or otherwise troublesome to authorities. The infiltrator may even become a provocateur as a way to give the authorities an excuse to crack down. Government agents did a lot of this during the 1960s, while monitoring civil rights and far-left organizations. At this end of the spectrum, the work is not only unglamorous but ethically questionable. Who wants to rat on their fellow citizens asserting rights guaranteed by the Constitution, like free speech, assembly and those not even mentioned because they seem so obvious, like consuming the foods of their choice?

This latter extreme was on display in early May in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, where Mennonite dairy farmer Glenn Wise was charged with three counts of selling unpasteurized milk without a license.

In a tiny magisterial district courtroom filled with about forty of Wise’s friends and supporters, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture’s case relied primarily on the testimony of an undercover agent, in real life a low-level PDA employee with the title “food sanitarian.” The agent-employee, Joe Goetz, painted a picture of an employee forced into distasteful undercover actions against a small farmer, the father of nine children.

“I was directed by my supervisor to make a purchase of raw milk and kefir” from Wise, Goetz stated under questioning by the PDA’s attorney. So Goetz infiltrated the Communities’ Alliance for Responsible EcoFarming (CARE), a private Pennsylvania buying club that serves as an umbrella organization for many of the state’s farmers who sell raw dairy products to consumers. He described how he went to the Wises’ Shady Acres Dairy Farm on three occasions in 2007 and 2008, each time purchasing half a gallon of raw milk and a quart of kefir.

When it was the defense’s turn, the slender, soft-spoken Wise, who handled his own defense, quickly showed himself to be a sharp inquisitor.

“So you did sign a CARE contract?”

“Yes.”

“Did you read that contract?”

“Yes.”

The CARE contract, it turns out, bounds members “under penalty of perjury” that they are “not acting under color of law to entrap, hurt, prosecute, or otherwise trespass/and/or gather information for any agency, corporation, person or other entity to in any way negatively affect the CARE Alliance/Association, its board of directors, members or its purpose.”

Magisterial District Judge Jayne Duncan dismissed two of the citations, and reduced the fine on the third from $300 to $50, saying the PDA had been “unfair” by using secretive methods, including an undercover agent, to go after Wise. The farmer was relieved, but vowed to appeal the $50 fine to a higher court, to get a further ruling on not only the PDA’s tactics but on his right to sell unpasteurized dairy products privately to consumers. The agency currently allows raw milk sales by licensed dairies, but prohibits all sales of unpasteurized yogurt, kefir, butter and other similar products.

The case against Glenn Wise is only the latest in a troubling series of legal cases in which both state and federal authorities are relying on undercover agents to entrap dairy farmers. “They’re relying on undercover agents more than in the past,” says veteran agriculture attorney Gary Cox, who has represented a number of dairy farmers around the country on behalf of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund. “My take is that since there is more and more raw milk consumption, the regulators are going undercover more and more.”

One of the first of these cases occurred in Ohio in 2005, when an Ohio Department of Agriculture undercover agent visited the dairy farm in Millersburg owned by Amish farmer Arlie Stutzman. Stutzman ran a herdshare operation, whereby area residents bought shares in his cows in exchange for unpasteurized milk. The agent pretended to be a building contractor, and asked to purchase a gallon of raw milk. After much back-and-forth, Stutzman agreed to accept a $2 “donation.” According to testimony at an ODA hearing on revoking Stutzman’s dairy license, Stutzman “testified that he had been taught that if any person asks for food, one should give it if he has such.”

The hearing examiner allowed that Stutzman’s explanation was “a noble exercise,” but revoked his license nonetheless. A few months later, he was allowed to apply for another, and received it. In late 2006, a state judge ruled in a related case that the state’s campaign against herdshare programs was illegal.

In 2006, the Michigan Department of Agriculture dispatched an undercover employee to join an Ann Arbor food cooperative for six months, and used the agent’s information about the distribution of unpasteurized milk to launch a sting operation against farmer Richard Hebron. State officials searched Hebron’s home and confiscated thousands of dollars of dairy products and business records. Though he could potentially have been tried on felony charges, Hebron was let off with a $1,000 fine as part of a settlement some months later when a local prosecutor declined to seek a criminal indictment.

Late last year, the owners of upstate New York raw milk dairy Meadowsweet Farm inadvertently discovered an undercover agent among the more than 200 members of their limited liability company (LLC), organized to arrange raw milk sales to members in the Ithaca area. When the dairy was hit with a citation and ordered to appear at a hearing in January by New York’s Department of Agriculture and Markets, the owners, Barb and Steve Smith, subpoenaed the undercover agent as a witness, hoping to score points with the hearing officer. No decision from the hearing has yet been reported by the agency.

In California earlier this year, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) agents allegedly sought to recruit a dairy employee to go undercover. Amanda Hall, an employee of California’s largest producer of raw milk, Organic Pastures Dairy Co., says that two FDA criminal agents visited her at her home in Fresno one evening in March after work. A few weeks earlier, she had received a subpoena to testify before a federal grand jury, and the agents said their visit was in connection with an investigation into out-of-state sales of raw milk.

After questioning her about her role in taking phone orders for raw dairy products, “One of them asked me, ‘Would you ever consider wearing a wire? If you would wear it, you would be getting information from Mark [McAfee, the dairy's owner]. You could benefit. You wouldn’t be paid millions, but it would sure help you out.’ ” Amanda declined, and the agent left a card, saying that if she changed her mind, she should call.

She told McAfee the next day about the confrontation, and he broadcast it to the local media, cutting Hall’s undercover career short before it even started. The FDA agent who left his card, Stephen Jackson, refused to comment on the investigation.

When undercover agents come under cross examination, things can get a embarrassing. One of the first questions defense lawyer Gary Cox asked Dennis Brandow Jr., the undercover agent for New York’s Department of Agriculture and Markets, in the Meadowsweet Farm hearing, was this: “When you became a member of the LLC, did you tell them that you were going to be a snitch?” The objection from the Agriculture and Markets lawyer was upheld, but Cox’s point had been made.

The day before Glenn Wise went on trial in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, earlier this month, another Mennonite dairy farmer, Mark Nolt, was put on trial on similar charges about fifty miles west, in Mount Holly Springs. In this case, two PDA employees testified they had purchased milk undercover from Nolt at farmers markets.

Nolt also served as his own lawyer, and it didn’t take him long to crack one of the undercover agents, Anthony Russo, who is a microbiologist when he’s not working undercover. Nolt, in his cross examination, inquired about who drove the car and where Russo parked on each of two occasions he secretly purchased dairy products.

Russo was obviously uncomfortable about having to confront the victim of his subterfuge, because he volunteered: “I was nervous about going. I don’t like doing that kind of stuff. I was hoping you weren’t there because I didn’t want to get any [dairy] samples.”

What are these cases really about? It might be argued that, individually, these are mostly harmless cases of low-level bureaucrats gathering evidence by posing as consumers. But taken together, something more is definitely going on.

For one thing, the use of undercover agents tends to be accompanied by other questionable investigative techniques. Meadowsweet Farm has filed suit against the New York Department of Agriculture and Markets, alleging in part that a search warrant used by the agency before filing its undercover-agent-inspired complaint was deficient because of its open-ended time frame and vague language about the amount of force that could be used in confiscating evidence.

The week before Mark Nolt’s trial, a caravan of law enforcement vehicles arrived unannounced at his farm, carrying eleven PDA employees and four state police officers. The officers secured a perimeter around the farm to prevent any neighbors, including Nolt’s elderly father who lives down the road, from gaining entrance. They handcuffed Nolt and took him away in a police car to be arraigned without allowing him to alert his family. And while a search warrant limited the officials to confiscating milk processing equipment, the authorities also took Nolt’s expensive cheese-making equipment and cream separator.

A PDA spokesperson declined to explain those seizures, except to say, “Because this is an ongoing criminal prosecution, we cannot go into detail about how certain items seized during the execution of the search warrant will be used as evidence.”

While the undercover agents are often uncomfortable, citizen targets are rattled even more. The buying groups and cooperatives being formed by many small dairies have already become less trusting of outsiders, sharply quizzing prospective new members, which discourages the very sense of community that draws consumers to these farms.

Cox of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund thinks the current campaign against raw dairy products is being orchestrated among state agriculture departments by the FDA as part of a concerted effort to intimidate the growing number of dairies producing unpasteurized milk, which are nearly always small farms (see “Milk Wars”).

He suspects it’s also related to the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), the highly controversial US Department of Agriculture program to require computer tags on all farm animals (see “USDA Bets the Farm on Animal ID Program”.) “NAIS helps big business and will put small farmers out of business,” he says.

That may be the ultimate goal of a growing undercover-agent tactic–get rid of ever more troublesome small farms and let agribusiness entirely have its way.

About David E. Gumpert

David E. Gumpert is a columnist with BusinessWeek.com, specializing in health and business. He covers nutrition and food issues at his blog. more…