Re-Occupy Your Body
"My body's nobody's body but mine. You run your own body. Let me run mine … " – Peter Alsop, 1983
The Occupy Wall Street movement has frequently been criticized as having no discernible strategy. That may turn out to be the secret of its eventual success. This movement is not another plan by somebody to save the world, but an invitation to everybody to come to grips with reality. Indeed, this world-wide phenomenon conspicuously lacks empty political sound bite solutions. Those have an unholy way of arousing our most primitive instincts, fuelling demagoguery, because sound bites lack intellectual nutrients from which to build clear understanding of complex issues.
The movement's assertion that 99% of us are essentially working to keep 1% of us in control of everything, reminds me of the 1980's when the equally simple assertion was made that all forms of physical trespass are unacceptable – requiring no justifying explanation. Any unpermitted move into another person's physical space was suddenly understood as potentially abusive. The insight had arrived that we own our bodies absolutely and that this constitutes a very special kind of property right: fundamental, like a law of nature. The strategies to help prevent sexual abuse of children in particular arose out of this insight, as the words of that famous song describe.
Similarly, the Occupy Wall Street movement brings new attention to the fact of extreme economic imbalance and points to its associated abuse of human rights. Undoubtedly, strategies to correct this situation will follow, once enough of us truly understand that it is absurd that the wealth of the world, created by us all from the resources of our jointly owned home planet, is controlled by just 1% of the human family.
Interestingly, on November 13, 170 economists from some of the most prestigious universities in the world, expressed their solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement, stating in their joint press release: "We support the efforts of the Occupy Wall Street movement across the country and across the globe to liberate the economy from the short-term greed of the rich and powerful 'one percent' … We extend our support to the vision of building an economy that works for the people, for the planet, and for the future, and we declare our solidarity with the Occupiers who are exercising our democratic right to demand economic and social justice."
Importantly, once something has been understood, it is not possible to go back to the time of ignorance and forget what is known. The process of change is unstoppable. A status quo recognized as insupportable never regains its original hold. Enlightenment, curiously, is a one-way street. So it may not be totally surprising that one of the world’s richest men, Warren Buffet (net worth $47 billion), recently called upon the U.S. Congress to "stop molly-coddling the super rich" and start taxing them properly.
How GMOs Violate Our Genetic Integrity
In medicine, the struggle to safeguard individual biological integrity and autonomy today has become polarized between governments that obey every wish voiced by Big Pharma and the science showing that the primary causes of disease and death are bad food, most prescription drugs, and a poisoned environment. Significantly, recent research from Chinese universities has shown that crucial segments of the DNA of plant foods survive the digestion process, travel into the blood stream, and take up residence in the liver from where they target various cells in the host to alter gene expression (ideally to enhance survival of the organism). This means that genetically modified plant DNA can do so too, as indeed we know it does. We literally become what we eat – including healthy, sick or dead. In the same way, animal products tainted by genetically altered drugs can cause cancer and birth defects in humans, such as milk from cows treated with bovine growth hormone, a genetically modified substance.
Whistle Blowers Receive Award from CJFE
On November 24, three former Health Canada scientists, famous for refusing to approve bovine growth hormone and other drugs for consumption in Canada, were honoured at the 14th annual award ceremony by the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE): Anna Maria Tremonti of CBC's "The Current" was the host, and the recipients were Shiv Chopra, Margret Haydon, and Gerard Lambert, who had worked together at Health Canada to uphold the Food and Drugs Act and spent a decade trying to prevent carcinogenic and endocrine disrupting drugs from entering Canada's food supply. For their determination to save us from our government's disregard for the health of its citizens, then Prime Minister Paul Martin fired them in 2004 for "insubordination." Mainly due to these Canadian scientists, who blew the whistle right around the globe, these drugs were stopped worldwide.
Dr. Chopra, in a CBC interview prior to the award ceremony, made the point that in a democracy we all must insist on "re-occupying our bodies" and refusing this corporate trespass. It is now generally known that we eat, drink, breathe and handle materials all day long that contain thousands of toxic substances or radiate us with DNA-zapping microwaves about which we were never informed and for which we never gave permission to be used in us.
Shiv Chopra's book, Corrupt to the Core – Memoirs of A Health Canada Whistleblower, tells the story of how successive governments, led by Health Canada, colluded with drug manufacturers (in complete violation of the law) to allow harmful chemicals into our food supply, and how many of them were stopped here and abroad. That book, which was also distributed in India, was key in establishing an indefinite moratorium on GM foods in that country last year.
The struggle is certainly not over against those corporate bullies who trespass against our bodies, but India has begun the re-occupation process by suing Monsanto for attempting to force GM vegetables onto its people, calling it "bio-piracy." Similarly, in November a Canadian court ordered Health Canada to study the impact of Monsanto's pesticide Roundup (glyphosate) on amphibians, especially frogs. Biological integrity depends on the context in which it evolved and thrives. Personal autonomy is not possible without the protection of the web of life. Whatever causes the frogs to die out will undoubtedly kill us too.
Asbestos Production Banned in Spite of Canadian Government’s Protests
One of the longest-running battles to protect human health involves asbestos, the sole cause of mesothelioma – one of the deadliest of cancers (see my article in March Vitality; 2008). Exposure to asbestos microfibres ensures virtual certainty of developing that type of lung cancer. Yet Canada scuttled the recent Rotterdam Treaty which would have made warning labels on exported asbestos mandatory so that workers in poor countries (provided they can read) could make a choice as to what goes into their lungs. Now, as reported in the Globe and Mail on November 24, all asbestos production in Canada was suspended due to international pressures.
Escalating Vaccination Wars
And significant developments are now taking place on the vaccine front of aggravated medical assault. Some 77% of doctors report that parents now request delays in the vaccination schedules for their children or outright refuse to have them vaccinated. While it has been known for some time that about one in ten parents refuse vaccination, what is surprising is the fact that the majority of these polled doctors expressed their readiness not to push vaccination.
The truly disturbing aspect of the escalating vaccine wars is that the science underlying the concept of vaccination does not get a chance to be properly conducted because the criminality of lucrative vaccine pushing has contaminated the whole enterprise. The entire May 26, 2011, issue of Nature was devoted to "Vaccines – Standing up to the Skeptics." Nature's articles explored problems in science (how to make new vaccines), problems with activists (skeptics) who believe vaccines are harmful, problems with fraud in vaccine development, ethical issues such as killing a lot of people in vaccine trials that weren’t registered and were conducted in Third World countries, the challenge of developing and deploying vaccines that work and get beyond all the fraud and legitimate ethical issues, and what new vaccines might be possible to develop.
Those activist skeptics got support from the EU, which found that many vaccines were associated with too many serious side effects, such as narcolepsy in children, and thus restricted their use. Furthermore, as Nature's authors admitted, the unethical practices in vaccine trials done in Third World countries are unacceptable and don't help to build confidence, nor does the fact that key researchers into the safety of MMR vaccines took off with the grant money after having doctored their data by falsifying autism statistics.
Finally, some astounding revelations recently arrived in the public domain: documents from May 2008 show that the US Centers for Disease Control and the vaccine manufacturer Merck knew that "the rubella virus (in the MMR vaccine) is one of the known causes of autism" since the 1960s when the World Health Organization published the relevant research. But this did not stop Big Pharma from developing the MMR vaccine and adding neurotoxic mercury as a preservative.
While the use of mercury as a preservative is now outlawed, vaccines distributed in the Third World still contain it. Also, the biological pathways by which certain predisposed children develop autism when injected with the rubella virus vaccine are now well known. The entire list of mainstream research published up to June 2011 containing this proof of harm and the legal actions that succeeded in establishing the direct causal link between MMR vaccines and autism is posted on http://www.childhealthsafety.wordpress.com (see June 30, 2011).
The abuse of our bodies in the name of some hypothesized greater public good has reached a level so ridiculous, it takes one's breath away. The U.S. government has approved mass anthrax vaccine trials on children, though unlikely to get started any time soon as the public is outraged already. The chair of the National Biodefense Science Board, Daniel B. Fagbuy, defended his decision by opining: "Do we want to wait for a [terrorist] attack and give it to millions and millions of children and collect data at that time?" when it is presumably too late. However, even the most dedicated supporter of vaccines knows that anthrax does not spread like the flu from person to person and is, therefore, localized and self-limiting. Anything that does not spread between people is not a realistic vaccine target. To "protect" those millions, they all would have had to have been exposed to anthrax spores singly and individually. Dr. William C. Douglass Jr. observed on November 28: "To test safety you would have to inject a bunch of children and babies [with anthrax] and see how many are left standing – or crawling. Then, if you have enough kids left, you can start tinkering with the dose and test for effectiveness. And if you think our government would never, never do something like that – well, you just don’t know our government very well."
The 1% Get Richer As The Medical Cartel Pursues Profits Ahead of the Public Good
Being assured by a doctor that a drug is good and then becoming a statistic of the collateral damage stemming from fraudulent research, usually not even known to the doctor, is an example of being sacrificed to the interests of the 1%; they gain financially but need take no responsibility for the means by which wealth was generated from the 99% duped or pressured into taking those drugs.
We now know, from research done at Harvard Medical School, that antipsychotic drugs given to children significantly increase the odds of these kids developing diabetes. (Why children are being given antipsychotics is in itself incomprehensible.) As reported in The Medical Post on July 12, 2011, the Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program reported severe, usually irreversible, often deadly and never seen before adverse drug events in children from entire classes of drugs – especially anticonvulsants, antibacterials, psychoanaleptics and psycholeptics. Dr. Danielle Grenier observed that "It's impossible for clinical trials to identify all these adverse reactions before drugs are marketed, but premarketing trials are not always done on children." Health Canada and the FDA admit that fewer than 25% of all drugs can be advertised as safe for children. "I feel very, very bad that we’re giving kids drugs that are not tested. We would never dare do that to an adult."
Well, actually modern medicine does horrible things like that to adults, too. Adults are told lies about drugs that were found to be dangerous when tested but were marketed nevertheless. Then, when the funerals are over, the bank accounts fattened, and critical thought and troubling questions arise, the truth eventually comes out and those who speak for the dead and maimed go to court. GlaxoSmith Kline agreed to pay fines to the tune of $3 billion in November for wrongful advertising, untruthful marketing practices, defrauding Medicare, and the like.
This is the second such agreement in just one year. A few months earlier the fines were in the hundreds of millions.
Also in November, the Whole Life Expo celebrated its 25th anniversary. What struck me as most interesting and encouraging at the Expo was the fact that so many attendees were aware of all this corporate corruption, and the good science as well. Ten years ago people only asked questions at my booth – now they tell me things that I write down for further follow-up! Public trust in the system – any system – appears to be fading fast. More and more people are taking charge of their health, asking questions, and refusing to cooperate blindly. The support for the Charter of Health Freedom written by lawyer Shawn Buckley, of the Natural Health Products Protection Association, is a good measure for this shift in public opinion. Signatures are close to 100,000 now (to sign go to http://www.NHPPA.org).
Back in the 1970s, it took 600,000 names on that famous petition that resulted in us getting our constitution in the 1980s, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
A great many of us have decided to re-occupy our bodies and lives and assert our birthright – freedom of choice. May 2012 continue this trend!