“We believe there is compelling evidence that damage to humans and the worldwide environment, is of such magnitude and seriousness that new principles for
conducting human activities are necessary.” Wingspread Conference Center. January 1998.
It is a given that our environment is in grave trouble. Although the window is now small, we still have the luxury to discuss it, and even continue to change our wasteful behavior. Not so, for the great majority of poor people around our planet who have to deal day-to-day with bare survival. The causes are many but primarily include human-created environmental devastation, at least 60 illegal Clandestine Weather Modification programs (including dispersal of highly toxic aerosol Chemtrails that poison every breath we take), massive destruction of habitats, unsustainable uses of fuels, logging, mining, and overfishing, to name some of the major ones. These are all done with gargantuan technologies that leaves behind unmitigated devastation.
Added to these environmental crises are the toxic legacies from Bhopal, Three-Mile Island, and the ExxonValdez oil spill that all continue to wreck havoc. Chernobyl and other nuclear-related accidents also keep on exposing all life on our planet to various types of nuclear radiation fall-out (for example, from radioactive uranium, plutonium, cesium, going back more than 60 years to US World War II bombings; and they persist now with accidents and illegal uses of DU –depleted uranium– and other heinous weapons tested on citizen guinea pigs and used illegally by governments, including the US and Israel). (1)
Nuclear radiation does not go away. Some of it is short lived, some of it stays forever. The half-life of uranium 238, for example, is 4.5 billion years (i.e., the amount of time it takes for half of the uranium to decay). The fallout from US atomic bombs (dropped tragically on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl accident [and both still continue to be monitored by Japanese and Russian scientists], as well as the DU bombing of innocent civilians in Iraq and now Gaza, all go far past these tragically harmed people then to be carried on the winds and distributed around the entire globe. Ours is closed-loop system: what happens one place eventually travels to other global areas. Our entire planet is enveloped in on-going nuclear radiation fallout. Yes, of course, we get radiation for the sun, too. However, the criminal use by governments of nuclear warfare is illegal and unethical. Nuclear energy, too, is completely unsafe.
Until last year, the United States was the leading country in greenhouse gas releases –30 percent of it with the daily use of our cars, trucks, buses, and the toxic spew of power plants. China now surpasses us with their own fuel use (oil, natural gas, and coal). It drives global energy, but these are finite resources. Our dependency on and extravagant use of oil, natural gas, and coal are not sustainable. Decades ago, we thought that the planet had limitless natural resources. It does not. Today, we are using 20 percent more of these resources than actually exist. These natural resources also come with a heavy price tag: massive industrial pollution and little-to-no governmental oversight. We all bear a heavy body burden –literally thousands– of poisons in our bodies.
When they treat their patients, doctors take an oath first “to do no harm.” As with humans, so it must also be with our fragile environment. This is the basis of the Precautionary Principle: first, do no harm.
Dr. Peter Montague, Executive Director of Environmental Research Foundation and Editor of “Rachel’s Democracy and Health News,” noted in a 2006 speech, there are three elements in taking a precautionary approach (2):
1. When we have reasonable suspicion of harm
2. When there is scientific uncertainty
3. We then have a duty to take action to prevent harm
Unfortunately, after publishing almost 1,000 issues of “Rachel’s News” (since 1986), the outstanding Environmental Research Foundation [ERF] will close on Feb. 26. This is an enormous loss for so many of us who have often read “Rachel’s” environmental news (first in print and later on-line) that was not reported elsewhere. ERF’s website (www.rachel.org) has become a vital beacon for the latest news about the Precautionary Principle as well as for its outstanding reporting on a wide array of environmental issues with its high standard of excellence. There will be an archive; but the important up-to-date contributions will be greatly missed.
In an historic moment, when sanity and true humanity prevailed, the Precautionary Principle came into existence in 1998 at the Wingspread Conference Center, Racine, Wisconsin. It was authored by 32 people, including Dr. Montague, from various disciplines and countries. (3) Generally, the world runs on an askew “risked-based” model: how many people will die or suffer grave consequences, before it is considered too much of a policy risk. It is all about economics and manipulating the numbers. How much harm can humans endure, for corporate profits? How many children will be poisoned by mercury in vaccines or unsafe drugs, or lead in paint, before some vague and corrupt system calls a halt to this? How many children or adults will die, before this stops? This is how governments and insurance companies make decisions. With this Precautionary Principle Wingspread Statement, in theory, “the proponent of an activity, rather than the public bears the burden of proof.”
In reality, however, human health and safety are at the whim of broken government policies (with true public health decisions at the bottom, if at all) and insurance companies (that regularly anticipate what they can charge/gouge us). The US government has spent more than $2 trillion to kill people a half a world away in two illegal wars (costing in excess of $1-billion per month!), while our social services (health care, provisions for the elderly, education, etc.) are cut to the bone. These kinds of war-oriented priorities leave our well-being trashed and the Precautionary Principle mute.
Many of our most formidable technological advances come at a very heavy price for our Collective Soul: genetically modified crops that poison the soil, contaminate the food that is grown in it, and grievously harm the farmers; extracting, at great human cost, the last of fossil fuels and precious metals, such as copper or gold –“peeling away the skin of the Earth!” as one Indonesian islander recently put it (4); and, over many decades, the marketing of unsafe pharmaceuticals without long-term testing, resulting in one serious medical crisis after another (while the companies took in windfall profits, their customers were often critically ill with drugs, then belatedly taken off the market). None of this massive harm speaks of any ethical concern. It bespeaks only of the corporate short-term bottom line: profit.
Almost 50 years ago, Rachel Carson warned us about the dangerous chemicals that were causing harm to all living beings. Asleep at the wheel, while corporations metastasized into behemoths with personhood, we ignored that clarion call. Decades later, with corporate profits at record highs, our well being is not of any concern. The only priority for any corporation is profit – no matter what the cost. The result? We now have cancers, birth defects, multiple chronic illnesses, and other serious health problems that have sky-rocketed to epidemic proportions.
We urgently need a new paradigm; one that will place our health and the safety of those we love as The Top Priority. We must DEMAND this of all our officials. The real questions are: Do we have the courage to do this? Will a broken Congress, no longer working for “we the people,” even listen?
Dr. Peter Montague has noted that: “We must heed early warnings, when we are not sure of the effects of our actions. We must act as trustees for the world that we inherited.” This means we must be good stewards, so that we pass on to our children and grandchildren a world that is not so enormously polluted. There must be corporate and governmental accountability [is there any difference?], instead of what passes for “public policy” when the public and common good and the general welfare are all ignored.
The Precautionary Principle is not only an admirable ethical necessity, it is vital to our very survival. When it is thought of at all, it is within the framework of environmental considerations. However, there are other aspects of the Precautionary Principle that also must be integrated into governmental policies, if we are to survive as a nation: ethical and fiscal responsibility –neither of which is anywhere to be found now in public policy or discourse. All we have is one massive fraud after another.
As Lawrence Velvel noted: “Much of the problem would almost surely have been avoided if the titans of Wall Street, the federal agencies, and the venal Congress which can be and is bought for the price of some campaign contributions, had not sought and granted exceptions to, and then ultimately repealed, Glass-Steagall, and if anti-trust had not been eliminated as a significant factors by theories of the economic boys” [i.e., the late economist Milton Friedman and far too many of his students who now have jobs where they can use his greed-oriented theories that have put us where we are]. (5)
According to the US National Debt Clock, on February 11, 2009, our horrific and unpayable debt was: $10,721,462,195,373.35. The US National Debt increases every day by $3.45 billion, making each citizen’s share about $35,080.58. With these horrendous figures, was any fiscal precaution even considered? (6) Eight years ago, the United States had a surplus.
The United States Government is bankrupt. Economically. Morally. Ethically. The state of California, the eighth largest world economy, declared bankruptcy at the end of January. Other states will follow. Those who were paying attention knew this would happen. How the “governator” expects to issue worthless paper IOU’s, that banks are supposed to accept –of basically fiat dollars– with a straight face, shows the gullibility of the public. Print all the green paper you want, but does it have any real value, as our economy is deliberately trashed? Disabled and blind citizens rely on money from the state to survive. When these monthly checks did not arrive for them, rent or utilities cannot be paid. More than 1-million Californians will be affected (the figure will actually be much higher). Effective this month, California is now shutting down government business and going to a four-day-work week to save money.
Fiscal responsibility? There is none either in California or in Washington, D.C. Those supposedly in charge of government finances are unfit to manage the country’s finances. All the so-called “stimulus” packages –what economic analyst Bob Chapman calls “PPP” (Political Payoff Plan) and “PPPP” (Paulson Ponzi Plunder Plan) (7)– will only be used to pay corporations that should not be in business. This is white-collar crime of epic proportions. Yet, there is neither federal accountability nor any documentation of spending of tax-payer money. There is absolutely no transparency. Every decision to bankrupt our country further happens behind closed doors. This unmitigated financial debacle will only exacerbate the grave monetary troubles that have been created. Very little tax relief or any other kind help, if any, will ever be given to the average person who is in deep financial trouble. These fraudsters and banksters will continue to bail out more CEOs and give them money to buy $26-million homes with our hard-earned tax dollars. Only the less-than-one-percent rich will get our tax-payer largesse. This is deliberately planned by insiders and an elite cabal bent on destroying our country. Bob Chapman calls them “a den of vipers.”(8)
In this regard, investigative author Peter Dale Scott has written vividly of what he calls historic “deep events.” These are not generally known by most citizens or young students who learn a sanitized version of US history that does not include the real political reasons behind the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, or how they also link historically with current events since 9/11. His writings detail a continuing under-current of rogue governmental and corporate elements by insiders and others who manipulate and profit tremendously by violence and mayhem. Professor Scott’s writings also can be connected today to three additional and concomitant “deep events” –besides the false-flag tragedy of 9/11 [the real causes of which continue to be deliberately obfuscated by corporate-controlled media] that has illegally destroyed much of our Constitutional liberties. (9)
These current events, not generally known, are:
1. A deliberate financial Ponzi-scheme debacle that is now worldwide to facilitate insider trading and a plan (some of which is already in the works) to dismantle individual governments, including the United States, Canada, and Mexico. (10)
2. Clandestine Weather Modification programs and the global (but mostly unreported) scope of this toxicity. In 2006, Congress passed a Weather Modification Bill; and it was signed into law without any public discussion. Given the extreme dangers of the chemicals used and the massive aerosol dispersal by US military and commercial planes on all of us without our consent, we remain guinea pigs for their war crimes. (11) How much of the dramatic drought conditions and other climate changes around the entire globe are actually created or greatly exacerbated by this constant aerosol spraying of a secret brew of poisons from various altitudes? (12)
3. A cover-up by all three branches of the US government and most of the media regarding Obama’s Constitutional ineligibility to hold the office of president (since it appears that he is not “a natural born citizen”). Since last summer, there have been numerous legal challenges, all dismissed. The latest, issued on Feb. 5, is from Brigadier General Charles E. Jones, US Air Force, Retired, who wants Obama to state his qualifications. (13)
What happens when public officials are in office illegally and the reasons are covered up and supported by others in charge? If this is not reported by mainstream media, then they are also complicit in this cover-up. It perpetrates fraud and de facto Constitutionally illegal actions at the highest level. Any academic who applies for a university job must show his/her qualifications: grades, citizenship, etc. Why has Obama had his grades sealed and refused to show his real birth certificate? What ever happened to telling the truth? Here, is another “deep event” where a third national election has been stolen.
With all these on-going crises-events, there is barely any real news coverage to inform the majority of millions of Americans. So, here we are in both Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” reality and in a culture of Orwellian “neverspeak” [my term]. We now have a Constitutional Crisis that is (generally) not being reported, except on the internet.
Also, while these “deep events” persist, Americans will continue to face enormous losses: unemployment is really 17.5 percent (14). This translates into: 2.6 million jobs lost last year, as each month, 500,000 jobs vanished. However, for the first week in February, the unemployment figure rose dramatically to 626,000 –a “26-year record” according to the US Labor Department. (15) Many large businesses are continuing to downsize and fire employees, including Home Depot, Panasonic (closing 27 plants worldwide and sacking 15,000 employees), GM (cutting an additional 10,000 jobs), Macy’s (cutting 7,000 jobs), while others are going out of business, including Circuit City and Linens ‘n Things.
Whether or not it is reported: the US is in a Depression. The only difference between this one and the one set in motion by insiders for the 1929 Stock Market Crash, is that we now have a global economy. Yet, none of this financial collapse had to have happened, if had we actually had responsible and ethical public officials managing things. In an incisive essay, Webster Tarpley writes that if the US citizens ended the Fed and the rule of criminal Wall Street banksters, our economy could be restored to health. (16) However, now we are in totally uncharted waters being navigated by amoral insiders. The financial domino effect is taking effect around the rest of the world; and it is another planned demolition.
On top of this, there is more ominous news: More than 50-million Americans are without any medical care; and bankruptcies and foreclosures are also sky-rocketing. According to a Feb. 3 report by Bloomberg News (17), there are a record 19-million homes vacant, in “the worst US housing slump since the Great Depression.” Many mortgage companies refuse to negotiate with their customers who are in arrears. The likelihood of any real governmental help for struggling homeowners seems dim. While CEO’s have been getting instant billions from the Fed, home foreclosures did not slow down or stop. There was no instant fix for millions of Americans in enormous trouble, while companies are fraudulently rewarded with our tax-payer money by the government.
For many decades, but accelerated over the past 15 years, chronic gouging of the American consumer by corporations has replaced any ethos of precaution. Or as Dean Lawrence Velvel has written: “Colossal mergers, legalized price fixing, forcing unwanted products upon buyers [such as toxic GMOs] as the price of purchasing other products which they do want, are the order of the day. The consumer…exists to be screwed over [and] Wall Street greed took over. …The big shots knew what they wanted and got it.” (18)
All of this deliberate unraveling of our society indicates a complete lack of any Precautionary Principle. This is an intentional and planned destruction of everything for which Americans and others around the world have worked so hard. The American Dream is alive and well only for the small percentage of rich living in gated communities or in their McMansions; but not for the rest of us. Corruption and fraud are rampant.
In Jared Diamond’s 2005 book, “Collapse: How Societies Fail or Succeed,” the UCLA professor discusses how some ancient and contemporary societies have gone the way of the proverbial dodo bird, because of basic issues (often with an environmental base) that usually transcended each individual society’s knowledge [e.g., the Maya or Easter Islanders]. While he does discuss how some societies have succeeded, the majority have not. Over thousands of years of recorded history, empires have risen and fallen. Today’s leaders, however, do not care about lessons from the past. In addition, Professor Diamond does not address the enormous crisis of the assault of aerosol Chemtrails and other illegal Clandestine Weather Modification programs. This daily poisoning of all of us exacerbates every other crisis, because these toxins have made billions of people ill.
We are now on that precipice, as everything we used to know is in a state of collapse. The leaders in charge, often illegally here and elsewhere, have no concern for telling citizens the truth. It is manipulated doublespeak. These people and their henchmen are part of a corrupt military-industrial-complex that Eisenhower warned us about more than half-a-century ago. Their heinous closed-door plans are not for our benefit. Only insider elites, hell-bent on a global police state, will profit from the deliberate destruction of our country and the last of our planet’s finite resources.
Out-of-control corporate greed, aided and abetted by an amoral government, is the only priority. It has seeped into every crevasse of society. The political core is rotted. The only thing now that drives our deliberately wrecked economy is enormous military expenditures. Killing and violence never work…but we have never learned that lesson. Fear is the order of the day: you scare people with deliberate lies (of which they are unaware), and the population is acquiescent.
Feb. 12, 2009, is the 200th anniversary of the birth, not only of Abraham Lincoln, but also of the great scientist Charles Darwin –one born to a dirt-poor Kentucky family, the other to a privileged British family. Even after 150 years of additional research, Darwin’s theory of evolution remains a cornerstone of science. In an insightful article in this month’s issue of “Smithsonian” magazine, Dr. William Jungers of Stony Brook University is quoted as saying: “There have been many experiments in human evolution, and all of them but us have ended in extinction.” (19) Given that we are now in what is called the “Sixth Extinction” (where humans have so accelerated the demise of thousands of other species), with Homo sapiens at the top of a very poisoned and collapsing food chain, the likelihood of humans wiping everything off this planet takes on a far greater reality. The rapacious nature of our species has given rise to a new name: “Homo rapians.” There is far more than a grain of truth to this tongue-in-cheek nomenclature (20), since those in charge of governments and corporations are showing the very worse of human behavior –at a time where our planet and every living species is in crisis. Power does corrupt.
Certainly, with our collapsing planetary-wide scenario, there is no thought of any kind of precaution.
The Orwellian façade, under which we are now living, continues the denial that we are, in fact, in multiple crises. There is not any real concern for our well being and safety –let alone a true, functioning republic. Instead, all we have now is empty rhetoric, a Hollywood illusion, while everything we knew is being dismantled. Before there was even a chance for the Precautionary Principle to be an integral part of our society, as it is in parts of Europe, our country is now driven asunder. Another nail has been hammered into our collective coffin.
If we are to save whatever little bit may be left of “these United States,” then it is crucial that the Precautionary Principle must be an intrinsic part of any realistic plan. Do we think there really is one? Will there ever be criminal indictments for this massive financial fraud? Dean Velvel [see Note 18] has written: “it also wouldn’t hurt if we tried to curb (and punish) greed…” Realistically, do we think there will be help from any of our three branches of corrupt government? “We must therefore fight to take our government out of the hands of the bankers. Any other strategy amounts to surrender…[to a] fascist corporate state.” (21) Can we wake up from our apathy and slumber before the New World Order, that Henry Kissinger is publicly urging, destroys the last fragments of our country?
NOTES:
1. Leuren Moret. “Populations Exposed to Environmental Uranium.” “Namaste” magazine. 2008, Vol. 10, issue 4:
www.namastepublishing.co.uk/Populations%20Exposed%20to%20Environmental%20Uranium.htm
2. Peter Montague. Key Note speech. Global Warming Conference, University of Maine, Farmington. May 6, 2006.
3. See: “Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle” at www.gdrc.org/u-gov/precaution-3.html; and “The Precautionary Principle. A Common Sense Way to Protect Public Health and the Environment” at www.mindfully.org/Precaution/Precautionary-Principle-Common-Sense.htm
4. Brook Larmer. “The Price of Gold. In dollars and suffering, it’s never been higher.” “National Geographic.” Cover Story. Vol. 215, No. 1. January 2009: 45.
5. Lawrence Velvel. Dean, Massachusetts School of Law. “Wall Street: Unprecedented Concentration of Financial Power. Huge Entities Being Formed.”
Nov. 18, 2008: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=11028
6. National Debt Clock. See: www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
7. Bob Chapman. “Along With Everything Else Taxpayers Stuck With Billions in Losses.” Feb. 7, 2009. www.theinternationalforecaster.com
8. Bob Chapman. “Wars and Economic Failure Have Been Marching Us Toward One World Government.” Jan. 31, 2009. www.theinternationalforecaster.com
9. Peter Dale Scott. “9/11, Deep State Violence and the Hope of Internet Politics.” June 11, 2008:
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9289 ; and
“The JFK Assassination and 9/11.” July 5, 2008:
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9511
10. North American Union (NAU): Jerome R. Corsi. “’Declaration of North American Union Integration’ unearthed.” July 25, 2007. www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=42732; Patrick Wood, Editor. “Toward a North American Union.” “August Review” June 9, 2005: www.augustreview.com/issues/regionalization/toward_a_north_american_union_200608181 ; and Andrew G. Marshall. “Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP). Security and prosperity for whom?” March 17, 2008: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8375
11. See: Clifford Carnicom’s research at: www.carnicom.com; www.nyskywatch.com; www.californiaskywatch.com; and Perlingieri. “Ten Years into the Chemtrail Wars.” www.heyokamagazine.com/heyoka_magazine.25.chemtrails…htm
12. See the maps accompanying: Eric deCarbonnel. “Catastrophic Fall in 2009 Global Food Production. Feb. 10, 2009. www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12252 ]
13. “Brig. Gen. Wants Obama to State His Qualifications” at: www.rense.com/genreal85/qual.htm
14. Bob Chapman. “The Shrinking World Economy.” Jan. 28, 2009. www.theinternationalforecaster.com
15. Patrick O’Connor. “US jobless claims hit 26-year high.” Feb. 7, 2009:
www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=12188
16. Webster Tarpley. “End the Fed, End Wall Street Bankster Rule, End the Derivatives Depression.” Nov. 23, 2008: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?a.rticleID=11103
17. Kathleen M. Howley. “Record 19 million US homes Stood Vacant in 2008.” www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a0IfdN5GEvcQ
18. Lawrence Velvel. Dean, Massachusetts School of Law. “Wall Street: Unprecedented Concentration of Financial Power. Huge Financial Entities Being Formed.” Nov. 18, 2008.
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11028
19. Thomas Hayden. “What Darwin Didn’t Know.” “Smithsonian” Feb. 2009, Vol. 39, No. 11: 48
20. Jason Miller. “Homo rapians be damned. Savagery is not programmed into our DNA.” Feb. 3, 2009. www.heyokamagazine.com/ heyoka_magazine.26.jasonmiller.homrapiens.htm
21. See Note 15, above.
Educator and environmental writer Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri is the author of “The Uterine Crisis,” which London’s “The Ecologist” notes is “a must read.”
