Just how deep does the rabbit hole go?
Posts tagged regulations
Landslide Vote for GMO Labeling in Maine Legislature
0Source: https://www.commondreams.org
By Lauren McCauley
Landslide Vote for GMO Labeling in Maine Legislature
Representative: “The people want to know what’s in their food, and they want to be able to make a choice that’s right.”
In a landslide 141-4 vote, the Maine House of Representatives voted Tuesday to advance bill LD 718, which would require special labeling for seeds and foods made with genetically modified (GMO) ingredients.
(Image via Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association)
The Bangor Daily News reports that during debate there was “little disagreement” about the importance of GMO labeling.
“The consumers have a right to know,” said Rep. Craig Hickman, D-Winthrop. “The people want to know what’s in their food, and they want to be able to make a choice that’s right.”
As supporters of the bill celebrate, they are also braced for what they say is an inevitable battle between the wishes of the people and Ag Giant Monsanto, who has already threatened to sue states that pass similar labeling laws.
“You’re challenging a biotech industry that’s operated on the basis of throwing their weight around,” said Rep. Lance Harvell (R-Farmington), who sponsored the bill. “Somebody once said that Monsanto isn’t a seed company, it’s a law firm that makes seeds.”
Jim Gerritsen, president of the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA), believes the state is in “excellent position” to combat any legal challenges. What they are promoting is “factual, uncontroversial information which is valid for state interest.”
He added that Mainers will “not be bullied” by out-of-state biotech firms, saying, “It’s an outrageous abuse of the democratic process. For out-of-state trade groups to threaten a state acting in the best interest of its people, that is abuse.”
The measure now advances to the state Senate, however, should it become law, the regulations will not take effect until five other contiguous states (or one state with a population of over 20 million people) enact similar labeling laws.
The New England state is one of a coalition of thirty-seven states currently mobilizing for GMO labeling. Of these, twenty now have legislation slated for introduction this year. Last week, Connecticut became the first state to require GMO labeling.
WHICH INTERNET COMPANY HASN’T GIVEN THE U.S. GOVERNMENT ITS RECORDS?
06 days ago
Source: https://startpage.com
WHICH INTERNET COMPANY HASN’T GIVEN THE U.S. GOVERNMENT ITS RECORDS?
NEW YORK: Outraged Internet users searching for an alternative to the privacy-busting companies they’d trusted are turning to a company that provides what it calls, “the world’s most private search engines.”
StartPage and its sister search engine Ixquick were launched in 2006 to staunchly defend their users’ privacy and civil liberties. StartPage provides a private portal to Google results, while Ixquick provides private results from other search engines.
The services have not participated in PRISM, nor have they ever provided user data to the U.S. government or to any other government or agency in the U.S. or anywhere in the world.
That is more than nine of the biggest Internet companies — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube, PalTalk, AOL and Skype — can say.
“The Privacy of our users rests on three important foundations,” explains StartPage and Ixquick CEO Robert Beens. “We are based in the Netherlands, we use encrypted connections, and — most importantly — we don’t store or share any of our users’ personal search data.”
- No User Data Stored: StartPage and Ixquick never store user data, including IP addresses and search queries, so government agencies have no incentive to ask for these. This privacy is so complete; the company doesn’t even know who its customers are, so it can’t share anything with Big Brother.
- Encrypted (HTTPS) Connections: StartPage and Ixquick were the first search engines to use automatic encryption on all connections to prevent snooping. When searches are encrypted, third parties like ISP’s and the NSA can’t avesdrop on Internet connections to see what people are searching for.
- Not Under U.S. Jurisdiction: StartPage and Ixquick are based in the Netherlands, so they are not directly subject to U.S. regulations, warrants, or court orders. They can’t be forced to participate in spying programs like PRISM. The company has never turned over a single bit of user data to any government entity in the 14 years it has been in business, which is not surprising since there is no data in the first place.
StartPage and Ixquick are also the only search engines whose privacy practices have been independently verified and third-party certified through the European Union’s Privacy Seal program.
“Unfortunately, it takes a scandal like PRISM to wake people up to the erosion of privacy”, says Harvard-trained privacy expert Dr. Katherine Albrecht, who helped develop StartPage. “As people get fed up with being spied on, they look for alternatives. We already serve nearly 3 million private searches each day, and we expect that number to grow as people seek shelter from search engines that store and share their private information.”
The company will expand its privacy services this summer with the addition of a new private email product called StartMail. StartMail will offer a paid, private email platform with strong encryption. Anyone interested in beta testing the program on its release can sign up at www.StartMail.com
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My choice since mid 2009, thanks to Katherine Albrecht.
GM’s $9,800 Car . . . The One We’re Not Allowed To Buy
01 week ago
Source: http://libertycalling.net
Posted by Judy Morris
GM’s $9,800 Car . . . The One We’re Not Allowed To Buy
How much is the EPA and DOT costing you?
One way to quantify this is to consider a car GM builds – but which you can’t buy. Well, not unless you move outside the United States – and beyond the diktats and fatwas of the EPA and DOT.
It is called the Sail – and GM makes it in China. It retails for 60,000 yuan – equivalent to about $9,800 in “federal” reserve notes.
Read the rest at Daily Paul, here.
Basel III: How The Bank For International Settlements Is Going To Help Bring Down The Global Economy
02 weeks ago
Source: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com
Basel III: How The Bank For International Settlements Is Going To Help Bring Down The Global Economy
A new set of regulations that most people have never even heard of that was developed by an immensely powerful central banking organization that most people do not even know exists is going to have a dramatic effect on the global financial system over the next several years. The new set of regulations is known as “Basel III”, and it was developed by the Bank for International Settlements. The Bank for International Settlements has been called “the central bank for central banks”, and it is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. 58 major central banks (including the Federal Reserve) belong to the Bank for International Settlements, and the decisions made in Basel often have more of an impact on the direction of the global economy than anything the president of the United States or the U.S. Congress are doing. All you have to do is to look back at the last financial crisis to see an example of this. Basel II and Basel 2.5 played a major role in precipitating the subprime mortgage meltdown.
Now a new set of regulations known as “Basel III” are being rolled out. The implementation of these new regulations is beginning this year, and they will be completely phased in by 2019. These new regulations dramatically increase capital requirements and significantly restrict the use of leverage. Those certainly sound like good goals, the problem is that the entire global financial system is based on credit at this point, and these new regulations are going to substantially reduce the flow of credit. The only way that the giant debt bubble that we are all living in can continue to persist is if it continues to expand. By restricting the flow of credit, these new regulations threaten to burst the debt bubble and bring down the entire global economy.
Not that the current global financial system is sustainable by any means. Anyone with half a brain can see that the global financial system is a pyramid scheme that is destined to collapse. But Basel III may cause it to collapse faster than it might otherwise have.
So precisely what is Basel III? The following is a definition from the official website of the Bank for International Settlements…
“Basel III” is a comprehensive set of reform measures, developed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, to strengthen the regulation, supervision and risk management of the banking sector. These measures aim to:
- improve the banking sector’s ability to absorb shocks arising from financial and economic stress, whatever the source
- improve risk management and governance
- strengthen banks’ transparency and disclosures.
All of that looks good at first glance. But when you start looking into the details you start realizing what it is going to mean for the global financial system. Banks are going to be required to have higher reserve ratios and use less leverage. Banks are going to have to be more careful with their money, which is a good thing, but it is also going to mean that credit will not flow as freely. Unfortunately, the only way for a debt bubble to survive is if it keeps expanding. Anything that restricts the flow of easy money threatens to bring a debt bubble to an end.
These new regulations are going to be phased in between 2013 and 2019. You can see a chart which shows the implementation schedule for the Basel III regulations right here.
So why is bringing the debt bubble to an end a bad thing?
Well, because it will cause the false prosperity that we have been enjoying to disappear, and that will be an exceedingly painful adjustment.
Sadly, most people have no idea what is happening. Most people have never even heard of “Basel III” or “the Bank for International Settlements”. Most people just assume that the people they voted into office know what they are doing and have everything under control.
Unfortunately, that is not the case at all.
The truth is that an unelected, unaccountable body of central bankers is making decisions which deeply affect us all, and there is not much that we can do about it.
This unelected, unaccountable body of central bankers played a major role in bringing about the last financial crisis. The following is a brief excerpt from a recent article posted on Before It’s News…
If you have any questions about the power of these Basel Banking Regulations you can also see the effects that Basel II and 2.5, mark to market accounting, had on the Housing Markets in the United States of America in 2008. There were many causes for that housing bubble, then housing crisis, but Basel II and 2.5 was most assuredly the pin that popped the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis of 2008-09.
But do most people know about this?
Of course not. Most people want to blame the Republicans or the Democrats or Bush or Obama, and they have no idea about the financial strings that are being pulled at the highest levels.
It is so important that we get people educated about how the global financial system actually works. The following is a summary of how the Bank for International Settlements works from one of my previous articles entitled “Who Controls The Money? An Unelected, Unaccountable Central Bank Of The World Secretly Does“…
An immensely powerful international organization that most people have never even heard of secretly controls the money supply of the entire globe. It is called the Bank for International Settlements, and it is the central bank of central banks. It is located in Basel, Switzerland, but it also has branches in Hong Kong and Mexico City. It is essentially an unelected, unaccountable central bank of the world that has complete immunity from taxation and from national laws. Even Wikipedia admits that “it is not accountable to any single national government.“ The Bank for International Settlements was used to launder money for the Nazis during World War II, but these days the main purpose of the BIS is to guide and direct the centrally-planned global financial system. Today, 58 global central banks belong to the BIS, and it has far more power over how the U.S. economy (or any other economy for that matter) will perform over the course of the next year than any politician does. Every two months, the central bankers of the world gather in Basel for another “Global Economy Meeting”. During those meetings, decisions are made which affect every man, woman and child on the planet, and yet none of us have any say in what goes on. The Bank for International Settlements is an organization that was founded by the global elite and it operates for the benefit of the global elite, and it is intended to be one of the key cornerstones of the emerging one world economic system.
Even though most people have never even heard of the BIS, the truth is that the global elite have had big plans for it for a very long time. In another article I included a quote from a book that Georgetown University history professor Carroll Quigley wrote many years ago entitled “Tragedy & Hope”…
[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.
Today we have such a system, and most of the public does not even know that it exists.
And when the next great financial crisis strikes, there will probably be very little ever said about the Bank for International Settlements in the mainstream media.
But right now the BIS is helping set the stage for the great credit crunch that is coming.
Get prepared while you still can, because time is running out.
This article first appeared here at the Economic Collapse Blog. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.
Ambulance in DC stalls because its emissions are too high, Patient dies because of EPA regs?
02 weeks ago
Source: http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org
Ambulance in DC stalls because its emissions are too high, Patient dies because of EPA regs?
I heard this story on the way home from Washington DC yesterday. What is unclear is whether the engine died because of actual failure or whether the engine was programmed to die because it reached a certain level of emissions as determined by the EPA. Sadly it sounds like the latter.
This simply can not happen. What if the patient who passed in the back of that ambulance was your son or daughter? That they may have died because of such an asinine regulation is outrageous.
*Apparently because of complaints in other jurisdictions due similar situations the EPA recently issued a pass for EMS vehicles on the emissions regulation. The DC fire chief said he was unaware of this exception.
(From FoxDC.com)
When the D.C. fire department began buying these diesel engine ambulances a few years ago, officials knew they would have to manage them with a new emission control system that would automatically shut the engine down if it wasn’t allowed to what’s called “regenerate.”
It was a mandate from the Environmental Protection Agency.
Free Market Physician Makes Health Care Affordable – Dr. Keith Smith
01 month ago
Posted by NextNewsNetwork
http://NextNewsNetwork.com | The official name of the Obamacare law is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The more we learn about that program, the clearer it becomes that it offers no protection for patients — and that it will cause health care costs to escalate dramatically.
The new regulatory burdens and economic restrictions in the law will accelerate the ongoing exodus of qualified doctors and other medical practitioners from the profession. And, yes, we will indeed see the emergence of the much-dreaded death panels — unless we can prevent Obamacare from being fully implemented.
Why are health care costs so high? What can be done to make them more reasonable? Is there anywhere people can go to receive high-quality, personal medical care at reasonable cost?
For answers we turn to Dr. Keith Smith, co-founder and managing partner of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, a fee-for-service medical practice that delivers top-rate care at a fraction of what conventional hospitals charge.
Peter Schiff & Doug Casey On Gold, Investor Cluelessness, And The “Escape From America” Plan
04 months ago
Source: http://www.zerohedge.com
By Tyler Durden
In just under 30 minutes, Peter Schiff and Doug Casey muse on many facets of the crumbling edifice of the status quo that is our current world.
From Gold’s relatively imminent rise to $5,000 and beyond, to investor ignorance of reality, Casey & Schiff swing from discussions of the US as political entity going forward to ‘escape from America’ plans for personal and wealth assets, and the realization that the biggest casualty (of US indebtedness), aside from individual liberty, is the value of the dollar – as taxing the middle class is unpopular with both parties – leaving only one route for the government – the inflation tax. Owning gold, silver, and foreign assets is preferred and while the rest of the world is also printing, the US is likely to beat them all.
People “are clueless with respect to the true state of the global economy,” with regard to inflation, fiat currencies, and specifically what will happen to the dollar. The conversation is wide-ranging and absolutely must-see as they remind market-watchers that “the whole thing is artificial,” as you can’t just keep printing money and monetizing debt without the dollar imploding with monetary policy descending (along with its trillion dollar coin) into ‘Three Stooges’ comedy.
The conversation weaves to some endgame discussions which bring Peter to discuss his father, who he sees as a political prisoner, and his views on the future…
“the biggest change that is coming to the global economy is a realignment of global living standards.”
There is something here for everyone…
10 Signs We Live in a False Economy
16 months ago
Source: http://www.activistpost.com
Credit: http://www.economist.com/node/13527329
It’s time to admit that we live in a false economy. Smoke and mirrors are used to make us believe the economy is real, but it’s all an elaborate illusion.
Out of one side of the establishment’s mouth we hear excitement about “green shoots”, and out of the other side comes breathless warnings of fiscal cliffs and the urgent need for unlimited bailouts by the Fed.
We hear the people begging for jobs and the politicians promising them, but politicians can’t create jobs. We see people camped out to buy stuff on Black Friday indicating the consumer economy is seemingly thriving, only to find out everything was bought on credit.
The corporate media does their best to distract us from seeing anything real. We see the media glorify Kim Kardashian who got rich by being famous, and became famous merely by being rich. She got front page coverage on Huffington Post this week because her cat died. Enough said.
Meanwhile the financial media makes the economy seem complicated and they ban anyone who speaks truthfully about the economy from their airwaves.
Is it any wonder why people are angry and confused about the economy?
Well, hopefully these signs that we live in a false economy will help clear up some of that confusion.
TSA creating all new watch list for Americans
06 months ago
Source: http://rt.com
(Reuters / Mike Segar)
Being absent from a federal no-fly list might not mean you won’t be hassled the next time you enter an US airport. The Transportation and Security Administration is constructing a new list of known “low risk” passengers.
According to the November 19 Federal Register newsletter put out by the US government, the TSA is trying to put together a new roster of airport patrons who may be a cause for concern but not necessarily dangerous enough to be added to the no-fly list that contains suspected terrorists and other persons of interest.
This is a work in progess, a self learning tool and fun little project. Please excuse the slow development as it seems the needed proper time is always lacking. It is my hope that the combination of content and links to other sources of information in this simple blog may help awaken a few of the sleeping masses and encourage and inspire others to initiate their own research, ultimately for each person to be a light to help awaken others. Opinions expressed belong to me, myself and I. Also, a big thank you to all that take the time to visit, it is appreciated :)
