Posts Tagged human rights
Rainwater Crimes: Man Gets Jail & Fines For Collecting On His Own Land
Posted by TheRedPillGuide in Control Grid, Natural Environment & Weather, News on July 30, 2012
via: ActivistPost
Monday, July 30, 2012
Water, water, everywhere – Nor any drop to drink.*
A case of the government seeking money and bondage from rural residents by purposely misconstruing an old law & bending definitions.
Gary Harrington had no idea that he was a water criminal under an obscure 1925 law until 2002 when state bureaucrats told him that his three reservoirs were illegal collection devices that were a crime against his community.
At first, Harrington complied and legally filed for three permits to keep the rainwater run-off within his 170-acre property, including one that had been on the property for 37 years. However, it appears that the Oregon government is adamantly against its citizens storing and using their own source of water. Although his permits were approved in 2003, the state court arbitrarily reversed their decision and was subsequently backed up by a county Circuit Court judge who ruled that he had illegally “withdrawn the water at issue from appropriation other than for the City of Medford.” (Source)
Even if the city of Medford did legitimately own all the water, Harrington has good standing when he points out that the law mentions only streams and tributaries, not water run-off formulated from the clouds.
Monsanto and Recruiter Sued Over U.S. Worker Exploitation Scam
Posted by TheRedPillGuide in Big Agriculture & Big Biotechnology, Health, Monsanto, News on July 24, 2012
via: ActivistPost
by: Joe Wright
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Seven Texas farm workers are alleging a wide range of crimes committed by biotech giant Monsanto.
Courthouse News Service is reporting that lead plaintiff Jose Cardenas has filed a lawsuit against Monsanto recruiter Milo Inc. and Milo Inc.’s president, as well as Monsanto itself.
Cardenas is one of seven field workers who are attempting to show a wide-ranging exploitation scam that made promises which were later withdrawn. According to the plaintiffs:
Monsanto promised (the) seven Texas field workers and their children free housing with kitchens in Indiana, then charged them $300 a room, exposed them to pesticides and underpaid them, the men claim in Federal Court.
The abuses also included unsanitary conditions that violated agricultural safety and health codes; among the violations, a school bus that was converted into a kitchen facility:
The workers say the bus did not have enough stoves for the number of laborers in the camp, lacked adequate sinks with hot and cold water, did not have sufficient lighting and ventilation or enough chairs and tables.
This is not the first lawsuit against Monsanto to make claims of horrific mistreatment; however, it seems to be the first lawsuit of its type filed inside the United States.
A report issued in early 2012 documented abuse of illegal workers held in ‘slave-like’ conditions on plantations in Argentina. According to the report conducted by Argentina’s tax agency, workers were subjected to 14-hour days, forced to buy from the Monsanto company store, were prevented from leaving, and in some cases received zero compensation. (Source)
Lawsuit filed against the U.S. military and CIA over drone assassination program
Posted by TheRedPillGuide in Control Grid, News, Police State & Police Brutality on July 19, 2012
via: ActivistPost
July 19, 2012
Madison Ruppert
The legality of America’s drone-based “targeted killing” program has recently come under fire in court, although mostly over the general basis on which the government can claim that meeting in secret to decide someone’s deathcounts as due process.
Unfortunately, lawyers for the government continue to invoke the privilege of state secrecy in order to avoid even having to confirm or deny that such a program exists to begin with, never mind actually addressing the legal basis for the practice.
Now the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have joined forces to fight on behalf of family members of three Americans who were murdered last year in drone strikes in Yemen.
The lawsuit targets top-ranking United States government officials, alleging that they actually killed the three Americans, including a 16-year-old boy.
They allege that this action violated international human rights law and the United States Constitution itself, a fact echoed by human rights layers stating that British civilians are actually “parties to murders” which are carried out by U.S. drones.
This lawsuit is groundbreaking, to say the least, and is the first lawsuit to actually challenge the legality of specific killings as well as the first to argue that the U.S. was not actually engaged in an armed conflict in Yemen at the time of the killing, thereby prohibiting the use of lethal force.
Torture Traffic – US throwing Afghans in banned prisons
Posted by TheRedPillGuide in News on March 20, 2012
An Afghan human rights report indicates torture in the country’s prisons is widespread, and detainees handed over by America are subjected to abuse. US officials say they’re looking into the allegations, which come just weeks after several atrocities were committed by American soldiers in the country.
Aborted Babies Are Being Chopped Up And Sold To Researchers All Over America With The Full Approval Of The Obama Administration
Posted by TheRedPillGuide in FDA, Health, News on March 20, 2012
Did you know that aborted babies are being chopped up and sold to medical researchers all over America? There is a federal law which is supposed to ban this practice, but it contains a gigantic loophole that abortion clinics are using to sell huge amounts of aborted baby parts to the scientific community. The loophole in the federal law allows “reasonable payments associated with the transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage of human fetal tissue.” But there are no guidelines as to what those “reasonable payments” should be and the Obama administration is not about to start prosecuting abortion clinics. So aborted baby parts from American babies will continue to be very quietly sold for profit to medical researchers and most Americans will never hear anything about it. But future generations will look back in horror at what we allowed to be done right under our noses.
With the full approval of the Obama administration, one company in the United States has plans to inject aborted baby brain cells into the eyes of patients to see if that will help improve their vision. The following is from a recent article on LifeNews.com….
Scott Fischbach, the director of Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life uncovered the information showing a clinical trial approved by the Food and Drug Administration uses brain tissue from aborted unborn babies to treat macular degeneration. StemCells Inc. will inject fetal brain stem cells into the eyes of up to 16 patients to study the cells’ effect on vision.
As Fischbach correctly notes, a fetus must be at a certain stage of development before brain tissue can be harvested for this kind of research….
“StemCells Inc. is not using embryonic stem cells. A five-day-old human being at the embryonic stage does not have a brain, but a fetus at 10 or 20 weeks of development with visible fingers, toes and ears has a functioning brain,” said Fischbach. “Developing human beings in the womb are treated simply as raw material for laboratory experimentation by StemCells Inc. and other companies seeking to monetize aborted unborn children.”
But the harvesting of tissue and organs from aborted babies is definitely not new. It has been going on for a long time.
For example, a recent article posted on worldmag.com describes the very big business that the Birth Defects Research Laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle does in aborted baby parts….
It’s known within the research community as a top government distributor of fetal tissue. Last year the Puget Sound Business Journal stated the lab “in 2009 filled more than 4,400 requests for fetal tissue and cell lines.”
The lab’s grant records indicate it received $579,091 from the NIH last year. To date, it has retrieved the products of 22,000 pregnancies. According to a description the lab provided in its most recent grant applications, an increase in nonsurgical abortion methods has “created new obstacles to obtaining sufficient amounts of high quality tissue. To overcome these problems and meet increasing demand, the Laboratory has developed new relationships with both local and distant clinics.”
Once again, it is supposed to be against federal law to buy aborted baby parts from abortion clinics. But this “problem” is avoided by taking advantage of the loophole that allows for “reasonable payments associated with the transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage of human fetal tissue.”
An article posted on LifeDynamics.com describes how this system works….
1) A baby parts “wholesaler” enters into a financial agreement with an abortion clinic in which the wholesaler pays a monthly “site fee” to the clinic. For this payment, the wholesaler is allowed to place a retrieval agent inside the clinic where he or she is given access to the corpses of children killed there and a workspace to harvest their parts. In most cases, this retrieval agent is an employee of the wholesaler. In other instances, the retrieval agent is a clinic employee who was trained by the wholesaler.
2) The buyer – usually a researcher working for a medical school, pharmaceutical company, bio-tech company or government agency – supplies the wholesaler with a list of the baby parts wanted.
3) When such orders are received by the wholesaler, they are faxed to the retrieval agent at the clinic who harvests the requested parts and ships them to the buyer via FedEx, Airborne or a similar common carrier.
4) These parts are “donated” by the clinic to the wholesaler who turns around and “donates” them to the buyer. The buyer then “reimburses” the wholesaler for the cost of retrieving the parts.
In the end, nobody is technically “buying or selling” anything but they all get what they want and a lot of money changes hands.
A number of years ago an abortion industry insider came forward with shocking details of how this organ harvesting operation actually functions. The following is from a very eye-opening InvestigateDaily article….
It was an interview that shocked America. An Insider, spilling the beans on massive malpractice to a reporter on ABC’s 20/20. Only this time, it wasn’t Big Tobacco in the gunsights, it was the US abortion industry, exposed as harvesting the organs from aborted babies. According to former abortion clinic technician Dean Alberty, clinics were harvesting eyes, brains, hearts, limbs, torsos and other body parts for sale to the scientific market: laboratories wanting to test new drugs or procedures, or researchers trying to find the causes of genetic disorders or discover new ways of treating disorders like Parkinsons.
Sometimes babies actually survive the initial abortion procedure and workers actually have to kill the babies themselves before harvesting the organs….
Alberty worked for a Maryland agency called the Anatomic Gift Foundation, which essentially acted as a brokerage between universities and researchers seeking body parts, and the abortion clinics providing the raw material. Alerted by the clinics about the races and gestations of babies due to be aborted each day, AGF technicians would match the offerings with parts orders on their client lists. Alberty and his colleagues would turn up at the abortions that offered the best donor prospects to begin dissecting and extracting what they needed before decay set in.
“We would have a contract with an abortion clinic that would allow us to go in…[to] procure fetal tissue for research. We would get a generated list each day to tell us what tissue researchers, pharmaceuticals and universities were looking for. Then we would go and look at the particular patient charts—we had to screen out anyone who had STDs or fetal anomalies. These had to be the most perfect specimens we could give these researchers for the best value that we could sell for.
“We were taking eyes, livers, brains, thymuses, and especially cardiac blood…even blood from the limbs that we would get from the veins” he said.
Alberty told of seeing babies wounded but alive after abortion procedures, and in one case a set of twins “still moving on the table” when clinicians from AGF began dissecting the children to harvest their organs. The children, he said, were “cuddling each other” and “gasping for breath” when medics moved in for the kill.
You can read the rest of that shocking article right here.
So are you sick to your stomach yet?
This is a hard article to write, but the American people need to be confronted with the truth. If we ignore the horrors going on right under our noses, then that would make us just like so many of the other nightmarish societies throughout history that we rightly condemn.
Sadly, most Americans don’t even realize that large numbers of consumer products on our supermarket shelves contain ingredients which have been cultivated using aborted human fetal cell lines.
This information is not hard to find.
But people do not like to talk about it.
There are price lists for human fetal tissue all over the Internet. You can find one example right here.
So does it bother you that aborted babies are being chopped up and sold to researchers all over America?
Or are you perfectly fine with it?
Source: TheAmericanDream
Obama agency rules Pepsi’s use of aborted fetal cells in soft drinks constitutes ‘ordinary business operations’
Posted by TheRedPillGuide in Big Food & Beverage Giants, FDA, Health, News on March 18, 2012
TheRedPillGuide
Blogger’s Note:
A week and a half ago we posted here that the Obama agency rules that PepsiCo cannibalizing aborted fetus was ‘ordinary business’.
Now, more people are realizing the audacity of this abomination taking place. It cannot be described in any other way. Please do your own due diligence in respect to your health. The establishment cares not – as seen from the articles shared above and below – about [y]our health. As they say, each one teach one.
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Natural News
Saturday, March 17, 2012
By: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
[NaturalNews] The Obama Administration has given its blessing to PepsiCo to continue utilizing the services of a company that produces flavor chemicals for the beverage giant using aborted human fetal tissue. LifeSiteNews.com reports that the ObamaSecurity and Exchange Commission (SEC) has decided that PepsiCo’s arrangement with San Diego, Cal.-based Senomyx, which produces flavor enhancing chemicals for Pepsi using human embryonic kidney tissue, simply constitutes “ordinary business operations.”
The issue began in 2011 when the non-profit group Children of God for Life (CGL) first broke the news about Pepsi’s alliance with Senomyx, which led to massive outcry and a worldwide boycott of Pepsi products. At that time, it was revealed that Pepsi had many other options at its disposal to produce flavor chemicals, which is what its competitors do, but had instead chosen to continue using aborted fetal cells — or as Senomyx deceptively puts it, “isolated human taste receptors” (http://www.naturalnews.com).
A few months later, Pepsi’ shareholders filed a resolution petitioning the company to “adopt a corporate policy that recognizes human rights and employs ethical standards which do not involve using the remains of aborted human beings in both private and collaborative research and development agreements.” But the Obama Administration shut down this 36-page proposal, deciding instead that Pepsi’s used of aborted babies to flavor its beverage products is just business as usual, and not a significant concern.
“We’re not talking about what kind of pencils PepsiCo wants to use — we are talking about exploiting the remains of an aborted child for profit,” said Debi Vinnedge, Executive Director of CGL, concerning the SEC decision. “Using human embryonic kidney (HEK-293) to produce flavor enhancers for their beverages is a far cry from routine operations!”
To be clear, the aborted fetal tissue used to make Pepsi’s flavor chemicals does not end up in the final product sold to customers, according to reports — it is used, instead, to evaluate how actual human taste receptors respond to these chemical flavorings. But the fact that Pepsi uses them at all when viable, non-human alternatives are available illustrates the company’s blatant disregard for ethical and moral concerns in the matter.
Back in January, Oklahoma Senator Ralph Shortey proposed legislation to ban the production of aborted fetal cell-derived flavor chemicals in his home state. If passed, S.B. 1418 would also reportedly ban the sale of any products that contain flavor chemicals derived from human fetal tissue, which includes Pepsi products as well as products produced by Kraft and Nestle (http://www.naturalnews.com).
Obama agency rules PepsiCo cannibalizing aborted fetus is “ordinary business”
Posted by TheRedPillGuide in Big Food & Beverage Giants, FDA, Health, News on March 6, 2012
Cogforlife
For Immediate Release: March 5, 2012
Shareholders will not be informed or allowed to vote on resolution.
[Largo, FL] In a shocking decision delivered Feb 28th, President Obama’s Security and Exchange Commission ruled that PepsiCo’s use of aborted fetal remains in their research and development agreement with Senomyx to produce flavor enhancers falls under “ordinary business operations”.
The letter signed by Attorney Brian Pitko of the SEC Office of Chief Counsel was sent in response to a 36-page document submitted by PepsiCo attorneys in January, 2012. In that filing, PepsiCo pleaded with the SEC to reject the Shareholder’s Resolution filed in October 2011 that the company “adopt a corporate policy that recognizes human rights and employs ethical standards which do not involve using the remains of aborted human beings in both private and collaborative research and development agreements.”
PepsiCo lead attorney George A. Schieren noted that the resolution should be excluded because it “deals with matters related to the company’s ordinary business operations” and that “certain tasks are so fundamental to run a company on a day-today basis that they could not be subject to stockholder oversight.”
Debi Vinnedge, Executive Director of Children of God for Life, the organization that exposed the PepsiCo- Senomyx collaboration last year (see http://www.cogforlife.org/senomyxalert.htm ) was appalled by the apathy and insensitivity of both PepsiCo executives and the Obama administration.
“We’re not talking about what kind of pencils PepsiCo wants to use – we are talking about exploiting the remains of an aborted child for profit”, she said. “Using human embryonic kidney (HEK-293) to produce flavor enhancers for their beverages is a far cry from routine operations!”
PepsiCo also requested the resolution be excluded because it “probed too deeply into matters of a complex nature upon which shareholders cannot make an informed judgment.”
“In other words, PepsiCo thinks its stockholders are too stupid to understand what they are doing with the remains of aborted children”, Vinnedge stated. “Well they are about to find out just how smart the public really is when they turn up the heat on the world-wide boycott!”
Vinnedge is warning consumers to be on guard for the roll-out of PepsiCo’s newest beverage that claims to cut sugar and calories by 50%. The product is called Pepsi Next and is anticipated to hit the market in the coming weeks.
PepsiCo stated that their goal with Senomyx is to produce new beverages with reduced sugars and calories. So is Pepsi Next the new Senomyx-PepsiCo creation?
While fetal components are currently not in the final product, there is growing concern among consumers that it could happen in the near future. With the explosion of health foods on the market, there is nothing to stop companies from using fetal remains as protein ingredients.
Impossible, you say? Actually because of GRAS rules (Generally Recognized as Safe) it might not even trigger FDA oversight. And that has consumers plenty worried about just what might be “next” from the industry!
It also makes Oklahoma Senator Ralph Shortey’s SB1418 banning the sale of products that are developed with or contain aborted fetal remains, critically important for consumer protection. See http://cogforlife.org/oklahomasenator.htm
“We commend the Senator for his courageous move,” noted Vinnedge. “The public is already saying no thanks to all Pepsi beverages and Pepsi Next is just that – the “next” product to avoid!”
To date, the world-wide boycott has expanded to include Canada, Germany, Poland, UK, Ireland, Scotland, Spain, Portugal, Australia and New Zealand.
Obama tweaks NDAA
Posted by TheRedPillGuide in News, Police State & Police Brutality on March 2, 2012
In December of last year, the US Congress voted to pass the National Defense Authorization Act. The bill will allows the indefinite detention and torture of American citizens without a trial. This week President Obama has tweaked the highly controversial bill making it discretionary for the military to detain suspects, but it still gives him the authority to detain suspects. So does this change restore liberties that were originally stripped? David Seaman, journalist and host of the DL Show, joins us to analyze the changes.
Supreme Court to decide if corporations can be sued for human rights abuses
Posted by TheRedPillGuide in News on February 28, 2012
By Reuters
Friday, February 24, 2012 22:03 EST
WASHINGTON [Reuters] – The Supreme Court will weigh next week whether corporations can be sued in the United States for suspected complicity in human rights abuses abroad, in a case being closely watched by businesses concerned about long and costly litigation.
The high court on Tuesday will consider the reach of a 1789 U.S. law that had been largely dormant until 1980, when human rights lawyers started using it, at first to sue foreign government officials. Then, over the next 20 years, the lawyers used the law to target multinational corporations.
The case before the court pits the Obama administration and human rights advocates against large companies and foreign governments over allegations that Royal Dutch Shell Plc helped Nigeria crush oil exploration protests in the 1990s.
Administration attorneys and lawyers for the plaintiffs contend corporations can be held accountable in U.S. courts for committing or assisting foreign governments in torture, executions or other human rights abuses.
Attorneys for corporations argue that only individuals, such as company employees or managers involved in the abuse, can be sued, a position adopted by a U.S. appeals court in New York. Other courts ruled corporations can be held liable.
The justices will hear an appeal by a group of Nigerians who argue they should be allowed to proceed with a lawsuit accusing Shell of aiding the Nigerian government in human rights violations between 1992 and 1995.
California attorney Paul Hoffman, who will argue on behalf of the plaintiffs, said corporations, under the 1789 law, were permissible defendants and that corporate civil liability was a general principle of international law.
“Businesses involved in genocide, crimes against humanity or other serious human rights violations deserve no exemption from tort liability,” he said in a brief filed with the court.
NO EXEMPTION FOR GENOCIDE
The Obama administration supported the corporate liability argument, as did international human rights organizations and Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Representing Shell at the arguments, Kathleen Sullivan, a former dean of the Stanford Law School in California, said U.S. and international law do not allow corporate liability for the alleged offenses. She said the post-World War Two Nuremberg tribunals covered prosecutions of individuals, not corporations.
She warned of the consequences of allowing such lawsuits.
“Even a meritless … suit against a corporation can take years to resolve,” she said in a brief, adding that corporations may reduce their operations in less-developed nations where such abuses tend to arise.
The British, Dutch and German governments supported Shell and said it violates international law to apply a U.S. law from more than 200 years ago to acts that take place in other countries and have no connection to the United States.
Also backing Shell are various multinational corporations and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce business lobby. Robin Conrad, head of the group’s legal arm, said that if the Supreme Court upholds corporate liability, “the global business community will face yet another wave of frivolous and expensive litigation.”
In the past two decades, more than 120 lawsuits have been filed in U.S. courts against 59 corporations for alleged wrongful acts in 60 foreign countries, lawyers in the case said.
Many of the lawsuits have been unsuccessful, though there have been a handful of settlements, the lawyers said. Many of the cases, having dragged on for years, are still pending.
Among the cases: Indonesia villagers accused Exxon Mobil Corp’s security forces of murder, torture and other abuses in 1999-2001; Firestone tire company was accused of using child labor in Liberia; and Ford Motor Co and other firms were accused of aiding South Africa’s apartheid system.
The Alien Tort Statute from 1789 states that U.S. courts shall have jurisdiction over any civil lawsuit “by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”
In its first substantive look at the law in 2004, the Supreme Court ruled it can be used for certain well-established international law violations, but did not determine who may be held liable.
A ruling in the case is expected by the end of June.
The Supreme Court case is Esther Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co, No. 10-1491.
