By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 09/2019

In addition to not paying taxes and putting the entire brick and mortar retail industry out of business single-handedly, Amazon has now opened itself up to even more criticism. The company is being accused of using a Chinese assembly plant that relies on temporary workers, including high school interns, and overtime limits set beyond law, according to Bloomberg.

In fact, Foxconn fired two executives from the plant, which assembles Echo speakers and Kindle e-readers, in response to a labor group’s allegation that it cut wages and broke labor laws. This marks the second time that Amazon and its Taiwanese peer have been under scrutiny for the treatment of workers at the Hengyang plant.

The plant’s chief and head of human resources were fired, while managers at the plant who were responsible for using interns were “punished”, according to Foxconn.

China Labor Watch said:

 “Amazon and Foxconn responded that they would make improvements to the factory’s working conditions. However, CLW’s 2019 investigation found that Foxconn’s working conditions did not improve, and instead deteriorated.”

The labor group deemed the factory’s wages too low to support a “decent standard of living last year”. Since then, they’ve been slashed another 16% in 2019.

The poor salary hasn’t been enough to fill the company’s 58 assembly lines, which require 7,000 people to operate during peak production, which begins in July. To fill the void, Foxconn instead tapped interns as young as 16 from vocational schools, some of which were forced to work overtime.

One 17 year old computing major at a vocational school, who was responsible for putting protective film over Amazon Echo Dots, said she worked 40 hour work weeks. She was then asked to start working overtime and put in 60 hour work weeks. When she complained to the manager, she reportedly was warned by her teacher that turning down the work could jeopardize her graduation. 

Foxconn admits that its proportion of contract workers and student interns had “on occasion exceeded legal thresholds and that some interns had been allowed to work overtime or nights”.

“We were not in full compliance with all relevant laws and regulation,” Foxconn said. The company continued, in a statement:

“Effective immediately, the percentage of interns assigned to that facility will be brought into full compliance with the relevant labor law.”

The specific allegations made by the China Labor Watch report included:

• Interns from local vocational schools accounted for more than 20% of the plant’s current workforce, double the levels permitted by law
• Such student workers were forced to work night shifts and overtime, in violation of the law, and that some interns were physically and verbally abused by teachers overseeing their work
• The factory used “dispatch workers” — similar to temporary staff in the U.S. — for around one in three positions at the plant, in excess of the 10% permitted by law
• Some 375 workers had been asked to work overtime on Sunday without receiving makeup days off, contrary to labor rules that stipulate at least one scheduled day off per week

Foxconn has battled criticism of how it has treated its workers for over a decade now. Those critiques came to a head in 2010 when a rash of suicides by workers at the company forced it to make a major overhaul of how it treated workers.

A report from China Labor Watch last year once again shone a spotlight on the company, as well as on Amazon. Amazon claims that it asked Foxconn to make changes in 2018 after a labor audit of the Hengyang facility showed similar overtime violations. Amazon’s investigators arrived on site Wednesday and the company says it has started doing “weekly audits” of the labor issue. Let’s see how long that lasts.

Amazon commented: “We are urgently investigating these allegations and addressing this issue with Foxconn at the most senior level” […]

via Amazon Plant In China Accused Of Forcing High School Interns To Work 60 Hour Weeks

by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

Del Bigtree, producer of the film VAXXED, and host of the weekly show HighWire, interviewed Jorge Araujo, a scientist who worked for the pharmaceutical company Merck as a lead supervisor on vaccine sterile quality this week.

Araujo’s wife is a nurse, and they didn’t even question the science behind vaccines until they were expecting their first child, when Araujo’s wife began asking him questions about vaccines.

Araujo relates that as he began to ask questions about vaccine efficacy and safety, the answers were not there. His research showed him that the robust science and quality controls present in regular drug manufacturing did not seem to be present with vaccine manufacturing.

So he and his wife decided not to vaccinate their children, and today they are all “super healthy.”

Araujo states that he is not alone in his skepticism regarding the lack of science and quality controls for vaccine manufacture, and that other scientists he knows who worked for Merck are also deciding not to vaccinate their children […]

via Former Merck Scientist Explains Why He Doesn’t Vaccinate His Children Due to Lack of Vaccine Safety Studies — Madison Area Lyme Support Group

via Toxic Soup Flooding Through Consumer Products and Toys Made of Recycled Plastics — DES Daughter Network

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | August 6, 2019

The U.S. Empire, which controls much of the world through hundreds of military bases in foreign countries, through foreign regimes run by domestic U.S. puppets, and through foreign dependency on U.S. foreign aid, got its start in 1898 during the Spanish American War. It was that war that enabled the Empire to acquire its imperialist domain in Cuba known as Guantanamo Bay, which is now the Empire’s premier international indefinite-detention prison, torture center, and kangaroo judicial system.

The late 1800s were a time of worldwide empires. Great Britain, France, Spain, and others were empires, possessing and oftentimes brutally controlling people in faraway colonies. Although the U.S. Constitution had called into existence a limited-government republic, by the time the latter part of the 19th century had arrived, many Americans had been swept up in the pro-empire fervor, owing largely to the Progressive movement, which was also influencing America toward embracing the worldwide move toward socialism and interventionism. The Progressive idea was that in order for the United States to become a great nation, it needed to become an empire, just like other empires.

In 1898, Cuba and other possessions of the Spanish Empire were fighting for their freedom and independence. Since this was a time in which U.S. officials were still following the Constitution’s declaration-of-war requirement, President William McKinley sought and secured a declaration of war against Spain, with the ostensible aim of helping the Spanish colonies win their freedom and independence.

It was a lie and a double cross of those who were fighting for their freedom and independence. In fact, the real aim was to replace the Spanish Empire by defeating it and taking possession and control over its colonies, with the aim of making America great by converting it into an empire.

Upon winning the war, the U.S. took control of Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. The Filipinos kept fighting, this time against the world’s newest empire, the United States. For a good account of that war and what it did to American values, see “America’s Other Original Sin” by Andrew J. Bacevich, which appeared this week in the American Conservative.

The Cubans, on the other hand, surrendered to U.S. power. As part of its victory, the new U.S. Empire forced Cuban officials to enter into a lease that granted the empire a perpetual lease of the 45-square-mile property known as Guantanamo Bay.

The lease provided for payment of $2,000 per year in gold coin. After President Franklin Roosevelt nationalized gold in the United States, in 1934 U.S. officials forced Cubans to accept a modification of the lease that enabled the Empire to pay Cuba $4,000 in U.S. paper money, an amount that, needless to say, has significantly decreased in value over the decades owing to the Empire’s inflationary financial policies.

The Cubans don’t cash the checks the Empire sends them because their position is that the lease isn’t valid anyway.

From a legal standpoint, the Cubans are right. Since the lease agreements for Gitmo were made under conditions of force, fraud, and duress, they have been null and void from their inception. Moreover, since the leases provide for no fixed expiration date, that also makes them null and void under the law.

Of course though, the law is irrelevant. All that matters is force. Since the U.S. Empire is much more powerful than the Spanish Empire was, there is absolutely nothing the Cubans can do to regain their property.

Beyond the illegality of the U.S. Empire’s control of Gitmo, Americans need to ask a critically important question: What business does the U.S. government have owning and operating an imperialist military outpost in a foreign country? America was founded as a limited-government republic, not an empire […]

via Give Guantanamo Back to Cuba

Jonathan Turley

Below is my column in The Hill newspaper on the growing calls from Democratic presidential candidates for “wealth taxes” targeting the increasingly demonized “super rich.” Putting aside serious questions over the constitutionality of such wealth taxes (despite being the core cause of candidates like Elizabeth Warren), Democrats appear to be moving from from Rousseauian to a Robespierrean rhetoric in this new class warfare.

Here is the column with a few of the underlying facts beyond the rhetoric:

“When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.” Philosopher Rousseau said those words about the French Revolution more than 200 years ago, but they could well have been a talking point in the Democratic debates this week. The candidates brushed aside repeated questions about raising taxes to pay the trillions promised for free college, universal health care, reparations and new homes for African Americans, free health care for the undocumented, massive investment in traditionally black colleges, and other “big ideas” that various candidates pledged.

What they all agreed on was that the “rich” would pay for much of it. The loudest in this declaration of class warfare was New York Mayor Bill De Blasio, who promised that “we will tax the hell out of the wealthy.” The growing Rousseauian chant to “tax the rich” is, of course, hardly new in politics. However, the current age of rage makes this call more menacing. Suddenly, the wealthiest citizens are being portrayed as virtual predators of the poor.

Senator Elizabeth Warren even seemed to be poking the chest of an imaginary tycoon in declaring that she was coming after  “your Rembrandts, your stock portfolio, your diamonds and your yachts.” I previously wrote that Warren’s concept of a wealth tax appears unconstitutional. Nevertheless, Warren continues to pledge to impose taxes on the most wealthy (2 percent for more than $50 million in assets, and 3 percent for more than $1 billion). Not to be outdone, De Blasio promised to top her tax plan, with a wealth tax on everyone worth $10 million or more.

The demonization of the wealthy continued as candidate after candidate spoke of how the top 1 percent was a virtual class of robber barons who are avoiding taxes or paying little back to society. Other Democrats like Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez have called to increase the tax rate to 70 percent from the current 37 percent for income over $10 million. Just for the record, the top 1 percent of federal taxpayers paid 37.3 percent of taxes, more than the bottom 90 percent combined that paid 30.5 percent. The top 50 percent of taxpayers paid 97 percent of total individual income taxes. That means that the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers are paying virtually no income taxes.

To qualify as the top 5 percent of earners, your household needs to make $300,000 or more. To qualify as one of the top 10 percent, the cut-off is around $118,000. That does not mean that the wealthy should not pay more in taxes. However, Democrats are undermining their push for higher taxes by pledging trillion-dollar programs as if those would involve chump change. Want a house? Senator Kamala Harris will help pay for it if you are African American. Want free college tuition? Virtually all of the candidates are guaranteeing it. Hate your college loans? Gone, by order of Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders.

Warren created a lasting gift during the debate when she gleefully rubbed her hands together after saying that she would take some of the wealth of fellow presidential candidate and former congressman John Delaney, a self made millionaire worth $65 million. For Republicans, it is the gift that will keep on giving well into the 2020 election. Warren relished the idea of grabbing the wealth of Delaney and others as she promised freebees to every swing group of voters. Like many politicians referring to “my” programs, the glee is in the spending, not the making of the money […]

via Eat The Rich: Democratic Candidates Plunge Party Into Class Warfare Politics — JONATHAN TURLEY

Covert Geopolitics

Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire who now sits in jail on federal charges for the sex trafficking of minors, has continued to draw media scrutiny in the weeks after his arrest on July 6. Part of the reason for this continued media interest is related to Epstein’s alleged relationship to the intelligence services and new information about the true extent of the sexual blackmail operation Epstein is believed to have run for decades.

As MintPress reported last week, Epstein was able to run this sordid operation for so long precisely because his was only the latest incarnation of a much older, more extensive operation that began in the 1950s and perhaps even earlier.

Starting first with mob-linked liquor baron Lewis Rosenstiel and later with Roy Cohn, Rosenstiel’s protege and future mentor to Donald Trump, Epstein’s is just one of the many sexual blackmail operations involving children that are all tied to the same network, which includes elements of organized crime, powerful Washington politicians, lobbyists and “fixers,” and clear links to intelligence as well as the FBI.

This report, Part II of this series titled “The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal: Too Big To Fail,” will delve into Cohn’s close ties to the Reagan administration, which was also closely tied to the same organized crime network led by the infamous mob figure Meyer Lansky, which was discussed in Part I. Of particular importance is the “Iran Contra” network, a group of Reagan officials and associates who played key roles in the Iran Contra scandal. Though it has remained relatively unknown for years, many key figures in that same network, and several fronts for the CIA that were involved in funneling money to the Central American Contra paramilitaries, were also trafficking minors for their sexual exploitation and use in sexual blackmail rings.

Several of these rings made headlines at one point or another over the years — from the “call boy ring” run by Washington lobbyist Craig Spence, to the Franklin child-sex and murder ring run by Republican operative Larry King, to the scandal that enveloped the Catholic charity Covenant House in the late 1980s.

Yet, as this report will show, all of these rings — and more — were connected to the same network that involved key figures linked to the Reagan White House and linked to Roy Cohn — revealing the true scope of the sordid sexual blackmail operations and sex rings that involved the trafficking of children within the U.S. and even in Central America for their exploitation by dangerous and powerful pedophiles in the United States.

Appalling for both the villainous abuse of children itself and the chilling implications of government by blackmail, this tangled web of unsavory alliances casts a lurid light on the political history of the United States from the Prohibition Era right up to the present day and the Age of Trump, a fact made increasingly clear as more and more information comes to light in relation to the Jeffrey Epstein case.

“Roy could fix anyone in the city”

Since Donald Trump burst onto the political scene in 2015, the legacy of his mentor, Roy Cohn – as well as Cohn’s influence on his most famous protege — have begun to garner renewed media attention. Many of the profiles on Cohn following Trump’s rise have focused solely on certain shadowy aspects of Cohn’s history, particularly his association with major figures in New York organized crime, his corrupt dealings, and his eventual disbarment. Some of these portrayals even went so far as to label Cohn as politically impotent. While Cohn was known to deal with a sizable amount of sleaze in his career, such depictions of the man fail to note that he had created an influence machine of unrivaled power that included some of the most prominent people in media and politics as well as a cadre of celebrities […]

via Government by Blackmail: Epstein, Trump’s Mentor and the Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era — Covert Geopolitics

By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 07/25/2019

Progressive Democrat presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, who has long been under fire from mainstream media and establishment voices in her own party for her vehemently anti-war and anti-interventionist stance, is suing Google, The New York Times reports, in what is said to be the first time in history a presidential candidate has sued a major technology firm.

It must be remembered that though considered a “long shot” by party insiders based on her outlier stances (for which she’s been called a popular Ron Paul type unorthodox figure among the Dems), from criticizing the Democrats’ ‘Russiagate’ fixation to calling for an end to “regime change wars” abroad to being willing to meet with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, Google searches for her named surged across the US during last month’s first round  of presidential nominee debates. And now, as the Times reports, she says Google infringed on her free speech by suspending her campaign’s ability to get its message out:

Tulsi Now Inc., the campaign committee for Ms. Gabbard, said Google suspended the campaign’s advertising account for six hours on June 27 and June 28, obstructing its ability to raise money and spread her message to potential voters.

Google and other major US tech companies like Facebook have faced an avalanche of scrutiny and criticism of late for censoring and/or manipulating the visibility of those with unorthodox political views.

The new lawsuit claims Google took steps to “interfere” with Gabbard’s chances in the upcoming 2020 presidential election.

“Google’s arbitrary and capricious treatment of Gabbard’s campaign should raise concerns for policymakers everywhere about the company’s ability to use its dominance to impact political discourse, in a way that interferes with the upcoming 2020 presidential election,” the lawsuit stated.

Specifically the lawsuit suggests Google diverted Gabbard campaign emails to be sent to spam folders on Gmail at “a disproportionately high rate” compared to her Democratic rival candidates […]

via Anti-War Democratic Candidate Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google For Campaign “Interference”

Kurt Nimmo

If you search the news, you will find very little to nothing in the corporate media about pedo Jeffrey Epstein’s connection to Israeli intelligence. This connection is obvious—from Epstein’s connection to the Zionist Les Wexner and especially his Mossad handler, Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of documented Mossad operative and double agent Robert Maxwell.

It’s said Ghislaine had a romantic relationship with Epstein in 1992. This is likely a cover story. Maxwell was Epstein’s Mossad liaison. She also procured and trained teenage girls to work as honey traps.

The story in the corporate media following Epstein’s arrest is that Ghislaine recruited girls for Epstein and his associates, many rich and influential. It is described as simply a pedophile sex ring when it is obviously much more—a blackmail operation designed to compromise politicians and others when and if they deviated from the Zionist agenda.

This has already swirled and descended into the memory hole. Headlines focus instead on the appeal of Epstein’s bail denial, the red flags raised about his jail records and work release, his close ties to Wall Street and Barclays, and the taint on the money he gave to Harvard and other institutions over the years. Much attention dwells on the salacious nature of Epstein’s pedophilia.

Meanwhile, disgraced former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta’s remark on Epstein’s intelligence connections (which Acosta has since denied) fade as corporate media sensationalism and miasma dominate and shape the story.

Leslie Wexner is described as the “most prominent client” of Epstein’s alleged money management firm. However, it appears Wexner was the only client—and he wasn’t so much a client as a conduit for money poured into a Zionist blackmail operation.

A Twitter account under the handle “Quantian” theorized that Epstein’s main purpose was to blackmail politicians and wealthy perverts […]

via Why the Epstein-Mossad Honey Trap Story Has Disappeared —

Western medicine has some good points, and is great in an emergency, but it’s high time people realized that today’s mainstream medicine (western medicine or allopathy), with its focus on drugs, drugs, radiation, drugs, surgery, drugs and more drugs, is at its foundation a money spinning Rockefeller creation.

People these days look at you like a weirdo if you talk about the healing properties of plants or any other holistic practices. Much like anything else, politics and money have been used to warp people’s minds and encourage them to embrace what is bad for them.

It all began with John D. Rockefeller (1839 – 1937) who was an oil magnate, a robber baron, America’s first billionaire, and a natural-born monopolist.

By the turn on the 20th century, he controlled 90% of all oil refineries in the U.S. through his oil company, Standard Oil, which was later on broken up to become Chevron, Exxon, Mobil etc.

World Affairs reports: At the same time, around 1900, scientists discovered “petrochemicals” and the ability to create all kinds of chemicals from oil. For example, the first plastic — called Bakelite — was made from oil in 1907. Scientists were discovering various vitamins and guessed that many pharmaceutical drugs could be made from oil.

This was a wonderful opportunity for Rockefeller who saw the ability to monopolize the oil, chemical and the medical industries at the same time!

The best thing about petrochemicals was that everything could be patented and sold for high profits.

• Time Is Running Out Like Rothschild Rockefeller’s 1920 Baku!

But there was one problem with Rockefeller’s plan for the medical industry: natural/herbal medicines were very popular in America at that time. Almost half the doctors and medical colleges in the U.S. were practicing holistic medicine, using knowledge from Europe and Native Americans […]

via How Rockefeller Founded Deep State Pharma And Waged War On Natural Cures — Political Vel Craft — New Human New Earth Communities

Sputnik – July 19, 2019

Nevada state authorities have voiced fears that radioactivity could be released into the environment by powerful tremors, regularly hitting the proposed site of a nuclear waste repository, set to store thousands of tonnes of hazardous reactor fuel, according to the federal government’s plans.

Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak and the state’s six Congressmen and Congresswomen have confronted the country’s Department of Energy over plans to license a nuclear waste repository in Yucca Mountain in the Mojave Desert. The letter addressed to Energy Secretary Rick Perry followed powerful earthquakes in California in early July that hit an area just 100 miles northeast of the proposed waste dump site. It insisted that the seismic hazards in Yucca Mountain showed “one of the many geologic problems with the site as a nuclear waste repository”.

He stated that the quakes have only strengthened his “resolve to fight any continued federal effort to use Nevada as the nation’s nuclear dumping ground”.

“I’m proud to join our bipartisan group of federal representatives in once again sending the loud and clear message that Yucca has never been, and will never be, good for Nevada”, the letter from 16 July published by The Nevada Current reads.

The governor, joined by Senators and Representatives, threatened to challenge the DOE’s license application if its licensing resumes and criticised the federal government for considering proceeding with the development of the repository “at a location that evidences serious safety concerns and mounting uncertainties regarding its geological status”.

The letter cites the conclusions of the expert teams from the University of Nevada, Reno, and UNLV (University of Nevada in Las Vegas). In a separate letter to the governor from Reno’s experts, Nevada State Geologist James Faulds and Nevada State Seismologist Graham Kent noted that the proposed site “lies in a very dynamic, seismically active region, as evidenced by the Ridgecrest earthquakes as well as other historical temblors” […]

via Quakes Prompt Fears of Devastating Consequences of Proposed Nuclear Waste Dump in Nevada