You're here because you know something. What you know, you can't explain; you can just feel it - something's wrong with the world.
Our scorched, flooded earth, greenhouse sky and strangled seas can't be hidden any more. Even the hyper-economy is now a non-living corporate "person", stalking another jugular vein of oil.
We didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. But we can tear away the veils and see the desert of the real. Welcome to the ShiftShapers tribe.
"...What a great time to be born, what a great time to be alive, because this generation gets to essentially completely change the world."-Paul Hawken "Blessed Unrest"
All of this, just to evict a 63-year old disabled woman
from her home. What's worse than a police state? What's worse than the
corrupt banks? It's their grotesque, hybrid offspring: the police state
doing the bidding of a corrupt bank.
You might ask, how is an article from 3 years ago still factual and what difference does it make now?
Because ShiftShapers contacted some GMO safety whistleblowers connected with the University of California who had done the research, and still today decline to talk.
Because these truthtellers have been taken to the woodshed by Monsanto and its surrogate bullies at the UC, and don't want to talk about it any more. Because the University of California still insists that genetically modified (GMO) crop seeds are the safe, sane salvation of the world's food supply and by the way, UC biotech students' career aspirations. All this, while in the back room where the GMO safety research is being done, the UC threatens with legal action any researcher who attempts to reveal the true negative results of their findings.
Still not convinced? Check out this one, published Oct. 2, 2012.
This letter appeared in the periodical Independent Science News:
"A new paper by the French group of Gilles-Eric Seralini describes harmful effects on rats fed diets containing genetically modified maize (GMO corn, variety NK603), with and without the herbicide Roundup, as well as Roundup alone...
"The Seralini publication, and resultant media attention, raise the profile of fundamental challenges faced by science in a world increasingly dominated by corporate influence. These challenges are important for all of science but are rarely discussed in scientific venues.
"History of Attacks on Risk-finding Studies. Seralini and colleagues are just the latest in a series of researchers whose findings have triggered orchestrated campaigns of harassment.
"Examples from just the last few years include Ignacio Chapela, a then untenured Assistant Professor at Berkeley, whose paper on GM contamination of maize in Mexico sparked an intensive internet-based campaign to discredit him. This campaign was reportedly masterminded by the Bivings Group, a public relations firm specializing in viral marketing – and frequently hired by Monsanto.
"The distinguished career of biochemist Arpad Pusztai, came to an effective end when he attempted to report his contradictory findings on GM potatoes. Everything from a gag order, forced retirement, seizure of data, and harassment by the British Royal Society were used to forestall his continued research. Even threats of physical violence have been used, most recently against Andres Carrasco, Professor of Molecular Embryology at the University of Buenos Aires, whose research identified health risks from glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup.
"Regulator Culpability. In our view a large part of the ultimate fault for this controversy lies with regulators.
"Regulators, such as EFSA (the European Food Safety Authority) in Europe and the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and FDA (Food and Drug Administration) in the US, have enshrined protocols with little or no potential to detect adverse consequences of GMOs.
"GMOs are required to undergo few experiments, few endpoints are examined, and tests are solely conducted by the applicant or their agents. Moreover, current regulatory protocols are simplistic and assumptions-based (RSC, 2001), which by design, will miss most gene expression changes..."
The letter is signed by more than 60 scientists, connected with different universities world wide, including Neil J. Carman PhD, representing the Sierra Club. (To read in detail the supporting information and footnotes, please use the link provided above.)
“A society without the means to detect lies and theft soon squanders its liberty and freedom.”―Chris Hedges
War is Peace. Selfishness is a virtue. Only the wealthy know what is good for the rest of us. Democracy is tyranny, if we let the poor take part in it. Charity is an evil weakness. The wealthy deserve everything, including our tax money; the rest of us can live off the crumbs they leave along the road to the next Wall Street crash.
A cynical take on life? A stark political landscape? Welcome to world view of Ayn Rand. It is also the enthusiastically held world view of Paul Ryan, chosen this week as the Republican party's vice-presidential nominee for 2012.
Ryan has gone pubic on video many times promoting the ideas of Rand, 20th century author of Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and The Virtue of Selfishness. Her rather lengthy books pit self-made characters against the forces of Collectivism. The rich do everything for the poor, and the poor have no gratitude. Government poverty programs not only are a problem, they are the enemies of liberty. You get the picture.
Flash forward to 2012, and Ryan the VP candidate now has to bring forth a "regular guy" image and and deny his real plan to take our elders' Social Security and Medicare and throw it down on the Wall Street gambling table. Get ready for lots of veils to be thrown over us.
Several well-researched reports have come out during the past week about Paul Ryan's strange ideology and radical actions in Congress. Enjoy asDavid Sirota pulls a veilfrom Paul Ryan's "I'm For the Little Guy" song & dance.
Understand here, that ShiftShapers takes very little interest in the daily, ugly, money-engorged horse race of 2-party campaign politics in the U.S. Candidates on both sides have broken promises. Some get in office and make so many concessions to their opponents that we may as well have voted for their opponents and been done with it.
What concerns us and interests us is the work of pulling apart our denial of the disasters we are creating, and tearing away the veils put over us by people who would have us create even new ones.
We aren't dealing any more with old-time corruption- being hoodwinked by snakes in the grass, working in cahoots. We've got people picking our pockets while leaving us - and much of the world - sick, broke, hungry, and one suspicious look away from pepper spray or prison.
“The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid.
Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated
military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in
power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we
are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of
security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that
wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like
livestock.”
―
Chris Hedges,
The Death of the Liberal Class
Here's an everyday scene in the 'hood: Police in Anaheim see a young man running away from them, and shoot him in the hip. He goes down. Had this been 20 years ago, an ambulance would have been called and that would have been the end of the story, other than making up some excuses for discharging a weapon on a fleeing suspect.
Here's what things have come to, in the United States of today: Police shoot the young man, he goes down, then they come up from behind and finish the job by putting a bullet in the back of his head.
No ambulance is called. For a brief eternity, witnesses in the neighborhood shout pleas to the officers to call an ambulance. More neighbors gather, astonished by the scene.
Police do make a call, but it is for the riot squad and a SWAT team. The neighbors, including children, are subjected to a barrage of rubber bullets and the attacks of a police dog.
Later, on the news, the report is all about how the police "stood off an unruly crowd."
Welcome to the new century. Or, as the narrator in this video says, welcome to the New World Order.
Events are still unfolding in Anaheim, but this is by far not the only community to experience execution-style police shootings.
Try googling on"police shoot unarmed man in head", and you will see dozens of incidents across the country. Only in one of those incidents - the BART shooting of Oscar Grant - is an officer charged with anything more than an improper procedure.
Some questions are waiting to be asked, like why the executions?
Are all those officers lone gunmen, or are they performing hit-man duty?
Just askin'...
“Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause.”
―
Chris Hedges - Posted by: Jor-El
(Listen to this interview by clicking on the link above, to Blog Talk Radio.)
What happens when the very thing that has fueled the global economy for more than 100 years - fuel itself - gets past its peak and begins a sure, steady decline?
Author, educator and peak oil authority Richard Heinberg has a prediction for us, in the title of his latest book: The End of Growth. He visited "Shift Shapers" on KBBF-FM 89.1,which we have podcast on Blog Talk Radio (see link, above)
Heinberg is a Senior Fellow at Post Carbon Institute.In this 55-minute interview, he says global oil production peaked about 6 years ago, and is now declining as demand escalates. Growth requires resources, so it is no coincidence that banks and even governments have plunged into financial collapse.
Since the U.S. hit peak oil production in 1970, its growth has been propped up by computer innovations, the use of 3rd world labor to replace U.S. workers, and recently by a toxic soup of financial schemes pumped out by Wall Street.
Those new schemes caused a series of bubble-&-bust cycles, each trading on debt. The latest one had investors betting that U.S. real estate values would grow forever, so fast that even bad loans would soon be made good by the property backing them. The bubble burst, leaving a global economy poisoned by trillions in bad mortgages, and declining resources for generating a recovery.
So, don't expect that new smart grid or solar & wind farms to curb our use of fossil fuels. Expect paralysis as the fuel supply winds down and prices soar.
What do we do when we can't count on government and global corporations to provide what we need? Be the kind of community that provides its own needs, suggests Heinberg. Local currencies are promoting local trade. "Transition" groups are growing food on former lawns. Wise city councils are making sure water and other essentials will be provided as oil declines. Widespread shock turns to community preparedness and people helping each other. We become Shift Shapers!
Note: This blog posting includes an audio introduction from our podcast on this subject.
What do you do when you discover there's a bull market on wall street - for prisons?
What do you do when you find out the parent company of your local bank branch, is investing in private prisons, betting on a growth of inmates in a time of declining crime rates? - And they are supporting new laws designed to bring in fresh inmates and more profit every year - starting with immigrants and climate change refugees?
Once you've connected those dots, you might not want business as usual. You might want to stand up and shout about it. When thousands of people stand up with you, it's a movement.
On January 6, the Occupy Movement in Santa Rosa, California, joined up with immigrants rights advocacy organizations, and called a halt to business as usual, at Wells Fargo Bank.
It was a day when the spirit of Mario Savio-- a campus occupier in 1964 who spoke up and became the fiery orator of the Free Speech movement - once again called for people to throw themselves over the levers of the machine, and bring it to a halt. Activists closed two branch offices that day, with seven among them arrested.
It was not so much a demonstration as a community. Mario Savio wasn't accompanied by a marching brass band, nor did the Free Speech Movement draw people from all walks of life and across four generations. But these are days when people from all walks of life, if thry're willing, see things through new eyes are moved to occupy.
Chicano farm worker organizer Cesar Chavez said that a march is a prayer n motion. And in keeping with the view of spiritual intentions, this march was led by a group of Aztec dancers named Coyolxauqui.
It was a day to tell the world to look and listen, and find out what "business as usual" means when your bank holds stock in private detention centers.
How does a private prison company grow its business when crime rates are declining?
Advertise on TV, persuading people to commit more crimes, so they can come and enjoy your accommodations? No, what you do is contributing to racist state senators, who pass laws designating new crimes, that target an scapegoated group of outsiders - undocumented immigrants.
Being undocumented wasn't a crime in Georgia, Arizona, or Alabama, until those states were lobbied by private imprisonment firms, such as GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Now anyone who only looks undocumented can be picked up and detained, in private prisons that - by the way - get funded by the same laws.
Round up your scapegoats, fill up the prisons, and watch their Wall Street stock prices go up. Stock owned and managed - by the way - by Wells Fargo. To the tune of $100 million dollars CLICK HERE to see Yahoo Finance Report.
"Corrections" and "incarceration" are user-friendly euphemisms for throwing people into jail. An even better one is "detention."Oh, we're just keeping you late after school, taking a little of your time.
The new community stamps GEO Group and CCA with the real nature of their business: They are imprisonment companies. And their brand of imprisonment has a record of abuse, according to government records obtained by the ACLU and Frontline news program.
According to government documents obtained by the FRONTLINE news program and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).”immigrants held in U.S. immigration detention facilities filed more than 170 allegations of sexual abuse over the last four years, mostly against guards and other staff at the centers."
We're seeing a new community move forward - one in which everybody is somebody. One that tears away the veils of deception and abuse, putting in their place a localized culture where everyone works together for common intentions.
In this special edition of Shift Shapers we hear a Evelina Molina and Mauricio Velasquez interview Kareem Sanchez and Bianca Jordan, with background music of the Occupy Santa Rosa band. They also interview Rick Theis and Kim Caldeway.Mario Savio and George Carlin show up in spirit - possibly summoned by the Aztec dancers. In the studio, Daniel Kerbein interviews two people who were arrested that day: Jesse (who only gave his first name), and Tony Del Monte.
The “Santa Rosa Seven” were arrested, some involved with Occupy Santa Rosa, some involved with the other affinity groups in solidarity that day. Jesse calls it "getting their feet wet."
We call it throwing your body on the machine. Si Se Puede!
