via Natural Blaze

A new study soon to appear in the Faculty of Public Health’s Journal of Public Health suggests that participating in local food projects may have a positive effect on wellbeing and psychological health.

Local food is a growing movement, and includes initiatives such as allotments, community gardens, community supported agriculture, farmers’ markets, and food buying cooperatives.

Consumers are increasingly interested in where their food comes from. Retail sales of local food have grown significantly over the past decade, as has participation in farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture schemes, and buying cooperatives.

Research has explored the physical health benefits of growing food, but has not so far systematically explored how local food projects may influence psychological well-being. Mental illness presents a growing global public health crisis.

In the United Kingdom, mental health contributes to 28% of the total financial cost of healthcare. Psychological wellbeing generates important benefits for people and societies, including good health, longevity, improved personal relationships, better productivity, and civic engagement.

Using an on-line survey, researchers compared participants of local food initiatives across three English counties – Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk – with members of the wider public. They found that those who participated in local food initiatives scored higher on standardised measures of well-being than those who did not participate […]

via Participating in Local Food Projects May Improve Mental Health — Openhearted Rebellion

By Matthew Ehret
Source: Oriental Review

With the nearly weekly revelations that the British Foreign Office, MI6, and GCHQ have been behind the long standing agenda to undermine the Presidency of Donald Trump and undo the peaceful alliance between nationalist leaders in America, Russia, China and elsewhere, a new focus on the British hand in undermining the United States has become a serious thought for many citizens. In the first week of the new year, fuel was added to this fire when internal memos were leaked from the British-run Integrity Initiative featuring a startling account of the techniques deployed by the anti-Russian British operation to infiltrate American intelligence institutions, think tanks and media.

For those who may not know, The Integrity Initiative is an anti-Russian propaganda outfit funded to the tune of $140 million by the British Foreign office. Throughout 2019, leaks have been released featuring documents dated to the early period of Trump’s election, demonstrating that this organization, already active across Europe promoting anti-Russian PR and smearing nationalist leaders such as Jeremy Corbyn, was intent on spreading deeply into the State Department and setting up “clusters” of anti-Trump operatives. The documents reveal high level meetings that Integrity Initiative Director Chris Donnelly had with former Trump Advisor Sebastien Gorka, McCain Foundation director Kurt Volker, Pentagon PR guru John Rendon among many others.

The exposure of the British hand behind the scenes affords us a unique glimpse into the real historical forces undermining America’s true constitutional tradition throughout the 20^th century, as Mueller/the Five Eyes/Integrity Initiative are not new phenomena but actually follow a modus operandi set down for already more than a century. One of the biggest obstacles to seeing this modus operandi run by the British Empire is located in the belief in a mythology which has become embedded in the global psyche for over half a century and which we should do our best to free ourselves of.

Debunking the Myth of the “American Empire”

While there has been a long-standing narrative promoted for over 70 years that the British Empire disappeared after World War II having been replaced by the “American Empire”, it is the furthest thing from the truth. America, as constitutionally represented by its greatest presidents (who can unfortunately be identified by their early deaths while serving in office), were never colonialist and were always in favor of reining in British Institutions at home while fighting British colonial thinking abroad.

Franklin Roosevelt’s thirteen year-long battle with the Deep State, which he referred to as the “economic royalists who should have left America in 1776″, was defined in clear terms by his patriotic Vice-President Henry Wallace who warned of the emergence of a new Anglo-American fascism in 1944 when he said:

“Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.”

The fact is that already in 1944, a policy of Anglo-Saxon imperialism had been promoted subversively by British-run think tanks known as the Round Table Movement and Fabian Society, and the seeds had already been laid for the anti-Russian cold war by those British-run American fascists. It is not a coincidence that this fascist Cold War policy was announced in a March 5, 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri by none other than Round Table-follower Winston Churchill.

The Empire Strikes

When the Round Table Movement was created with funds from the Rhodes Trust in 1902, a new plan was laid out to create a new technocratic elite to manage the re-emergence of the new British Empire and crush the emergence of American-inspired nationalism globally. This organization would be staffed by generations of Rhodes Scholars who would receive their indoctrination in Oxford before being sent back to advance a “post-nation state” agenda in their respective countries.

As this agenda largely followed the mandate set out by Cecil Rhodes in his Seventh Will who said “Why should we not form a secret society with but one object: the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, and for the making of the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire?”

With the help of an anglophile, racist president in America, leading’ figures organizing these think tanks first advanced a program to create a “League of Nations” as the solution to the “nationalist problem” which humanity was told “caused” World War One. Nationalist forces in America rejected the idea that the constitution should be rendered obsolete and the plan for global governance failed. However that did not stop the Round Table Movement from trying again. Leading Round Table controller Lord Lothian (British Ambassador to the USA) complained of the “American problem” in 1918.

“There is a fundamentally different concept in regard to this question between Great Britain and the United States as to the necessity of civilized control over politically backward peoples…. The inhabitants of Africa and parts of Asia have proved unable to govern themselves…. Yet America not only has no conception of this aspect of the problem but has been led to believe that the assumption of this kind of responsibility is iniquitous imperialism.

They take an attitude towards the problem of world government exactly analogous to the one they [earlier] took toward the problem of the world war. If they are slow in learning we shall be condemned to a period of strained relations between the various parts of the English-speaking world. [We must] get into the heads of Canadians and Americans that a share in the burden of world government is just as great and glorious a responsibility as participation in the war”.

A Chinese leader of the American-inspired republican revolution of 1911 named Sun Yat-sen warned of the likes of Lord Lothian and the League of Nations in 1924 when he said:

“The nations which are employing imperialism to conquer others and which are trying to maintain their own favored positions as sovereign lords of the whole world are advocating cosmopolitanism [aka: global governance/globalization -ed] and want the world to join them… Nationalism is that precious possession by which humanity maintains its existence. If nationalism decays, then when cosmopolitanism flourishes we will be unable to survive and will be eliminated”.

New Name. Same Beast

By 1919, the Round Table Movement changed its name to the Royal Institute for International Affairs (aka: Chatham House) with the “Round Table” name relegated to its geopolitical periodical. In Canada and Australia, branches were created in 1928 under the rubrics of “Canadian and Australian Institutes for International Affairs” (CIIA, AIIA). However in America, where knowledge of the British Empire’s subversive role was more widely known, the name “American Institute for International Affairs” was still too delicate. Instead the name “Council on Foreign Relations” was chosen and was chartered in 1921.

Staffed with Rhodes Scholars and Fabians, the CFR (and its International Chatham House counterparts) dubbed themselves “independent think tanks” which interfaced with Rhodes Scholars and Fabians in academia, government and the private sector alike with the mission of advancing a foreign policy agenda that was in alignment with the British Empire’s dream of an Anglo-American “special relationship”. One such Rhodes Scholar was William Yandall Elliot, who played a major role mentoring Henry Kissinger and a generation of geo-politicians from Harvard, not the least of whom include Zbigniew Brzezinski, Pierre Elliot Trudeau and Samuel (Clash of Civilizations) Huntington.

The Round Table in Canada and the Coup Against FDR

In Canada, five leading Rhodes Scholars were busy creating the League of Social Reconstruction as a self-described “Fabian Society of Canada” in 1931 which was meant to be a fascist/technocratic answer to the chaos of “greedy nationalism” that supposedly caused the economic collapse of Black Friday in 1929. During the same time in America, a different path to fascism was taken by these networks during the early 1930s. This plan involved installing a General named Smedley Butler into power as a puppet dictator steered by the Anglo-American establishment. Luckily for America and the world, General Butler blew the whistle on the coup against Franklin Roosevelt at the last minute […]

via The British Roots of the Deep State: How the Round Table Infiltrated America — Astute News

by Chauencey K. Robinson

People’s World | June 27, 2019

Fugitive Slaves, Virginia, 1862/Library of Congress

“Enslavement was about the devil’s work of predatory capitalism.” — economist Julianne Malveaux

For the first time in over a decade, on June 19, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties held its first congressional hearing on reparations. Though it’s a discussion that’s taken many forms over the years, the current talk surrounding reparations for the descendants of Black slaves needs to go beyond cash payouts and speak more to the dire need to address the ramifications of the slave trade on Black Americans.

Some context to keep in mind for all this: The enslavement of Black people in the United States officially came to an end only 154 years ago—that’s just a few generations. So much of the wealth of the United States was built on the backs of enslaved Black labor. When this country refuses to give reparations or even consider them, it’s a continuation of the false narrative that systemic racism is a thing of the past which has no bearing on our society today.

As we head into the 2020 presidential elections, issues of wealth inequality and oppression have been pushed to the forefront. According to a variety of polls, the topics voters seem most concerned with are healthcare, the economy, and immigration. In this regard, the issue of reparations is really not an outlier, as the call for them deals with the adverse effects in wealth and prosperity on Black people and their communities.

A number of Democratic presidential hopefuls have come out in support of reparations. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris have endorsed some form of reparations that address the racial wealth gap. Sen. Cory Booker has proposed commissions to study reparations, like the one outlined in H.R. 40, along with policies to address wealth inequality. Sen. Bernie Sanders has in the past dismissed reparations as merely a paycheck that won’t deal with inequality, but has since come out in support of Congresswoman Jackson Lee‘s bill. As studies continue to show the racial wealth gap widening, candidates and commentators can no longer turn a blind eye to what the realities that discussion of reparations brings to light.

40 acres and a mule

The call for reparations is not a new demand. Nor is the fight against it. On January 16, 1865, as the U.S. Civil War was winding down, Union General William T. Sherman issued his Special Field Order No. 15. It confiscated and redistributed nearly 400,000 acres of land to newly freed Black families in forty-acre segments. In popular culture, we know this decree as “40 acres and a mule.”

A year later, President Andrew Johnson reversed the order and returned the land back to white owners who took a loyalty oath to the nation. There was resistance to this reversal, such as when Union Army general and abolitionist, Rufus Saxton, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, refused Johnson’s orders. He was later removed by the president from his position.

In the late 19th century, there was a movement to create pensions for former slaves to repay them, even if in a small way, for their years of unpaid labor. Known as “ex-slave pensions,” the concept came about at a time when most newly-freed slaves had no financial resources, stability, or property.

In 1890, Nebraska Republican William Connell introduced the first ex-slave pension bill in Congress, called H.R. 11119. It resembled the military pension system that had been set up for Civil War veterans. Although the ex-slave pension never came to fruition, it proves that there was already a historical acknowledgment that there were years of unpaid Black labor that still went uncompensated.

The Reconstruction era, also known as “Radical Reconstruction,” was the period from 1863 to 1877 that saw a number of gains for the legal rights of Black people in the U.S. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was the first U.S. federal measure affirming that all citizens are equally protected by the law. The Fourteenth Amendment was adopted during this time. Promulgated in response to the treatment of former slaves, it addressed citizenship rights and equal protection. During this time, great strides were made in enfranchising Black people. It was not to last.

Domestic terrorist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, and politicians who aligned themselves with its ideology of racism and white supremacy, used corruption, violence, and terror to undermine the progress made during. Those tactics, coupled with political maneuvering, voter suppression, and the economic depression of 1873 resulted in the effective overthrow of Radical Reconstruction, leaving Black Americans more vulnerable to exploitation and poverty.

Convict leasing, a practice that provided prison labor to private companies and individuals, such as plantation owners and corporations, began targeting African Americans—thus amounting to a new form of slavery. Jim Crow segregation laws, modeled after the Black Codes immediately following the official end of slavery, attacked the newly-won civil rights of Black people, limiting their access to proper education, financial resources, voting, jobs, and more. These laws only came to an end in 1965—a mere 54 years ago.

The maintenance and expansion of the legal oppression and systemic racism that we’ve seen since the official end of slavery have been the work of those in power who want to continue their super-exploitation of Black labor.

The ramification of reparations

Although the specifics of how reparations would be implemented have yet to be thoroughly defined, it should be understood that it goes beyond some one-time cash payout. The recent congressional hearing, where the likes of Sen. Cory Booker, actor Danny Glover, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, and economist Julianne Malveaux spoke, dealt with the passing of the H.R. 40 bill, which in actuality isn’t even an implementation of reparations, but rather a commission to study the continued effects of slavery and racial discrimination and recommend ways to combat it. Yet, that bill alone has continued to be passed over since it was first introduced by former Congressman John Conyers in 1989.

Why is there such intense opposition to even studying the effects of slavery on our current generation? The answer to that is that our past greatly affects our present, and to acknowledge this would be a condemnation of modern day capitalism […]

via The truth about reparations: They’re a condemnation of U.S. capitalism

Everything We Know About Inhumane Conditions at Migrant Detention Camps

A Central American migrant family recently released from federal detention waits to board a bus in McAllen, Texas, on June 12.Photo: LOREN ELLIOTT/AFP/Getty Images

The third week in June began with a broad political discussion on whether Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s designation of migrant detention centers as “concentration camps” was the correct nomenclature for holding rooms in which 41 detainees live in a cell built for eight. It ended with heinous reports of the conditions at said camps, where undocumented migrant children are being held away from their families in conditions “worse than jail,” according to physician Dolly Lucio Sevier, who wrote up a medical declaration obtained by ABC News after visiting Border Patrol holding facilities along the border in Texas. Here’s everything we know about conditions in the detention camps.

Conditions in a McAllen, Texas Facility “Could Be Compared to Torture Facilities”

Sevier, a private-practice physician in the Rio Grande Valley, was granted access to a facility in McAllen, Texas, after attorneys discovered a flu outbreak that sent five infants to a neonatal intensive-care unit. At the detention center — the largest such Border Patrol facility in the country — Sevier examined 39 children under the age of 18 facing conditions including “extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food.” All 39 exhibited signs of trauma.

Sevier told ABC News that the teenagers she observed were not able to wash their hands while in custody, which she called “tantamount to intentionally causing the spread of disease.” Teen mothers in custody described to her not being able to clean their children’s bottles: “To deny parents the ability to wash their infant’s bottles is unconscionable and could be considered intentional mental and emotional abuse,” Sevier wrote. In summary, she determined that “the conditions within which they are held could be compared to torture facilities.”

Children “Had to Sleep on the Floor … as Punishment for Losing the Comb”

Outside of El Paso, attorney and children’s-rights advocate Warren Binford gained access to a Border Patrol facility where 351 migrant children were detained; over 100 were under 13, and the youngest was just over 4 months. Binford reported that many of the kids had been held for three weeks or longer, and that guards had created a “child boss” who was rationed extra food in an attempt to control the other children.

Binford told The New Yorker about the Clint, Texas facility’s treatment of a lice outbreak.

So, on Wednesday, we received reports from children of a lice outbreak in one of the cells where there were about twenty-five children, and what they told us is that six of the children were found to have lice. And so they were given a lice shampoo, and the other children were given two combs and told to share those two combs, two lice combs, and brush their hair with the same combs, which is something you never do with a lice outbreak. And then what happened was one of the combs was lost, and Border Patrol agents got so mad that they took away the children’s blankets and mats. They weren’t allowed to sleep on the beds, and they had to sleep on the floor on Wednesday night as punishment for losing the comb. So you had a whole cell full of kids who had beds and mats at one point, not for everybody but for most of them, who were forced to sleep on the cement.

Speaking with ABC News, Binford also described a devastating example of a 2-year-old without diapers who had “several other little girls” looking after him. “When I asked where his diapers were, she looked down and said, ‘He doesn’t need them,’ and then he immediately peed in his pants right there on the conference chair and started crying,” Binford said. “So children are being required to care for other very young children, and they are simply not prepared to do that.”

Almost 300 Children Removed From the Clint Facility, Though a Third Were Brought Back

After reports of the appalling conditions at the detention center outside of El Paso, close to 300 children were removed on June 24, according to the Department of Homeland Security. According to NBC News, some of the children who were removed “were wearing dirty clothes covered in mucus or even urine, said Elora Mukherjee, the director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. Teenage mothers wore clothing stained with breast milk. None of the children had access to soap or toothpaste.”

But the next day, June 25, 100 of the detained children were brought back to the Clint detention center […]

 

via Concentration Camps For Illegal Immigrant Children In the Good Ole’ U.S.A.

via Environmental and Public Interest Groups Demand EPA Revoke Monsanto’s License to Pollute

According to a new poll from Reuters and Ipsos, almost 70 percent of Americans want climate change to be addressed with aggressive action.

But the poll found that people in the US don’t want the decades of corporate greed and malfeasance to be a burden put on the backs of the poor and working class. They don’t want regressive “green” taxes that put the onus on the poor instead of corporate oligarchs. The French government tried that plan and the people rose up as the yellow vest movement. Americans, like the French, are willing to make personal sacrifices to improve the planet, but they do not want to pay for the greed of others.

The poll did not mention people’s opinions on the importance of seizing power and control of the means of production and automation.

The results of the recent poll underscore a crucial challenge for the authoritarian overlords to make a convincing argument that the working poor and not the rich must shoulder the bill to save the planet.

The majority of the people polled want the US to move to 100% clean energy in the next ten years and they want that industry to “create new jobs and growth” and they don’t want clean energy to “hurt jobs and the economy.”

People don’t support climate action plans that place the burden on them rather than corporate oligarchs who are causing the most damage to the environment—and have the money and the means of production and automation […]

via People in the US Demand Climate Action, Just Not on Their Backs, Poll Finds — ANARCHIMEDIA

These Three Countries Are the Real Troika of Evil — Against the Grain

Once again, the Central Intelligence Agency has been caught financing a group of grifters and fraudsters at the expense of the American taxpayers. In the latest case, just another in the agency’s 72-year history, the Trump administration-appointed ad hoc board of CITGO, the US subsidiary of the state-owned Venezuelan oil company, PDVSA, stands accused of steering $70 million of escrowed funds, earmarked for PDVSA’s fiscal year 2020 bond, to the pockets of CIA-supported officials of the Venezuelan opposition “Popular Will” party headed by the so-called “interim president” of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó.

In addition to Guaidó, who is accused by the legitimate Venezuelan government of money laundering, treason, and corruption, other Popular Will leaders under investigation by both the Venezuelan Attorney General and the US Justice Department include Carlos Vecchio, Guaidó’s envoy in Washington; Rossana Barrera and Kevin Rojas, Guaidó’s emissaries in Cucuta, a Colombian-Venezuelan border town; Sergio Vargara, Barrera’s brother-in-law and a Member of the Venezuelan Congress; Guaidó’s “ambassador” to Colombia, Humberto Calderon Berti, opposition businessman Miguel Sabal; and Guaidó’s chief of staff, Roberto Marrero. Over two dozen other Popular Will leaders are also under investigation for fraud involving money earmarked by the Trump administration, particularly Iran-Contra scandal felon and current Trump special envoy for regime change in Venezuela, Elliot Abrams.

Barrera and Rojas are accused of spending money given to the Popular Will by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a longtime CIA financial pass-through, for “humanitarian relief” for alleged massive numbers of Venezuelan refugees in Colombia. The Popular Will grifters reportedly used the aid money, including that which was raised by Virgin Group’s billionaire founder and obvious CIA dupe Richard Branson, for expensive hotels, fancy restaurants, nightclubs, prostitutes, and clothing.

It comes as little surprise that Abrams, with his history of “sticky fingers” around US and foreign assistance money, has played a hand in the Venezuelan opposition fraud. As Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs during the Ronald Reagan administration Abrams was involved in the illegal raising of funds for the CIA-supported right-wing Contras fighting against the socialist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. In 1991, facing a felony perjury conviction for lying to Congress, Abrams pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information to Congress about his fundraising activities for the Contras. In 1992, Abrams and other Iran-Contra criminals were pardoned by President George H. W. Bush, one of the unindicted Iran-Contra co-conspirators. Abrams surfaced again in 2001 in the George W. Bush administration. He was involved in the abortive 2002 CIA coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as well as in cooking US intelligence to justify the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Abrams’s involvement in any US covert activities in always an indication of massive fraud. Abrams’s backing of Guaidó and his operatives and recent reports of fraud are not much different than the notorious Republican Party neo-con’s sordid record with such Contra leaders as Adolfo Calero, the president of the Nicaraguan Democratic Forces (FDN); Arturo Cruz; Alfonso Robelo; Edén Pastora; and Enrique Bermúdez.

CIA funds directed to the Contras for the purchase of weapons soon found their way into the hands of Colombian drug lords, including Pablo Escobar and Carlos Lehder of the Medellin Cartel. An elaborate scheme was worked out that saw the Contras buying, with CIA funds, weapons and cocaine, with the former ending up in the hands of the Medellin Cartel and the latter being shipped to the United States with a very handsome financial return. Everyone made out nicely, including Contra leaders who spent much of their time in Miami donating funds to Republican coffers through the offices of top Cuban-American leaders like Jorge Mas Canosa [. . .]

via CIA Finances Another Group of Fraudsters: the Venezuelan ‘Opposition’ By Wayne Madsen — The New Dark Age