Government announces deadline for phasing out paper benefit checks including Social Security
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER , Associated Press
Last update: December 21, 2010 - 6:45 AM
WASHINGTON - Before too long, the government check will no longer be in the mail.
Officials have settled on the dates when millions of people will no longer be able to get their Social Security and other benefit checks by mail.
New recipients of benefits will have to accept paperless payments starting on May 1 of next year, three months later than first proposed.
Those already on Social Security will have until March 1, 2013 to make the switch to direct deposits or a debit card.
More than 58 million retirees, disabled people and surviving family members receive Social Security or Supplemental Security benefits. Already eight out of 10 people getting federal benefits receive those payments electronically, officials say.
The switch to electronic payments will eliminate the problem of lost or stolen checks and also the problems faced by people displaced from their homes who have to worry about getting their checks mailed to them, said Richard L. Gregg, the Treasury Department's assistant fiscal secretary.
"Even though we have done a good job of encouraging people to switch over, we still are making 120 million payments by mail for Social Security every year and another 15 million annually for veterans and other types of benefits," Gregg said.
Every year, the government has to process about 600,000 claims for lost or stolen checks. Social Security will save $1 billion over the next decade from phasing out paper checks, he said.
The final rules, scheduled to be unveiled Tuesday, are very similar to the proposal the government put forward in June.
But in response to public comments, the government has decided to allow people who are 90 and over and are still getting Social Security benefit checks to continue to receive their benefits the same way. The government estimates there are 275,000 people who fall into that category.
For people who do not have accounts at a bank or credit union, the government has an option that allows them to use a Direct Express debit MasterCard issued by Comerica Bank, Treasury's financial agent. More than 1.5 million people have obtained these cards, which were first issued in 2008.
In addition to the automatic waiver from electronic payments for those 90 and over, people living in remote areas who might have trouble getting to a bank can also petition for a waiver from the new rules. Gregg said that the government expects fewer than 1 percent of current benefit recipients will petition for a waiver.
Social Security Commissioner Michael J. Astrue said that people should not wait until the deadlines to make the switch to electronic payments.
"Switching now eliminates the risks of lost and stolen checks and provides immediate access to your money on payment day," Astrue said.
The new deadlines for the switchover were announced by Treasury's Financial Management Service, the agency that processes payments for the federal government.
Congress passed a law in 1996 giving the agency the power to halt mailing paper checks for all government payments outside of refund checks from the Internal Revenue Service.
To help with the switchover for those still getting paper checks, the government has created a website, http://www.godirect.org/ and a toll-free phone number, 1-800-333-1795, that people can call for assistance.
http://www.latimes.com/business/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-us-government-checks,0,4628337.story
Government announces deadline for phasing out paper benefit checks including Social Security
MARTIN CRUTSINGER AP Economics Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — Before too long, the government check will no longer be in the mail.
Officials have settled on the dates when millions of people will no longer be able to get their Social Security and other benefit checks by mail.
New recipients of benefits will have to accept paperless payments starting on May 1 of next year, three months later than first proposed.
Those already on Social Security will have until March 1, 2013 to make the switch to direct deposits or a debit card.
More than 58 million retirees, disabled people and surviving family members receive Social Security or Supplemental Security benefits. Already eight out of 10 people getting federal benefits receive those payments electronically, officials say.
The switch to electronic payments will eliminate the problem of lost or stolen checks and also the problems faced by people displaced from their homes who have to worry about getting their checks mailed to them, said Richard L. Gregg, the Treasury Department's assistant fiscal secretary.
"Even though we have done a good job of encouraging people to switch over, we still are making 120 million payments by mail for Social Security every year and another 15 million annually for veterans and other types of benefits," Gregg said.
Every year, the government has to process about 600,000 claims for lost or stolen checks. Social Security will save $1 billion over the next decade from phasing out paper checks, he said.
The final rules, scheduled to be unveiled Tuesday, are very similar to the proposal the government put forward in June.
But in response to public comments, the government has decided to allow people who are 90 and over and are still getting Social Security benefit checks to continue to receive their benefits the same way. The government estimates there are 275,000 people who fall into that category.
For people who do not have accounts at a bank or credit union, the government has an option that allows them to use a Direct Express debit MasterCard issued by Comerica Bank, Treasury's financial agent. More than 1.5 million people have obtained these cards, which were first issued in 2008.
In addition to the automatic waiver from electronic payments for those 90 and over, people living in remote areas who might have trouble getting to a bank can also petition for a waiver from the new rules. Gregg said that the government expects fewer than 1 percent of current benefit recipients will petition for a waiver.
Social Security Commissioner Michael J. Astrue said that people should not wait until the deadlines to make the switch to electronic payments.
"Switching now eliminates the risks of lost and stolen checks and provides immediate access to your money on payment day," Astrue said.
The new deadlines for the switchover were announced by Treasury's Financial Management Service, the agency that processes payments for the federal government.
Congress passed a law in 1996 giving the agency the power to halt mailing paper checks for all government payments outside of refund checks from the Internal Revenue Service.
To help with the switchover for those still getting paper checks, the government has created a website, http://www.godirect.org/ and a toll-free phone number, 1-800-333-1795, that people can call for assistance.
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x61717.xml
Next the statement asserts that, "Without changes, by 2041 the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted…" This comment is incorrect. Either the SSA Commissioner Michael J. Astrue is incompetent, or he is afraid to tell the truth. The fund will actually run out of money around 2017.
The balance sheet of the trust funds at December 31, 2007 showed assets of $2,238 billion and shows growth. But, anybody with even a minimal amount of financial understanding can look at those assets and see that the funds are in serious trouble. Virtually all of the assets in the trust funds are special issues of federal government securities. But, they are not securities in any usual sense of the term. They do not provide an equity stake, nor do they lend money in any business sense, as they do not specify when they are paid and they do not stipulate any interest. Even if they were securities, they should be written down to fair value, which is zero.
In plain English, when Congress looted the Social Security funds, it avoided bad press by giving IOUs to the trust funds and calling them securities. What is the value of these receivables? How much should we put into the Allowance for Doubtful Accounts? If economic times were good, maybe Congress could repay these debts and the trust funds collect the money. But, with a budget that spends more and more on interest (a major non-value added cost), supports the war on terror, and attempts to pay off all those entitlements (corporate as well as personal welfare), members of Congress will have great difficulty in finding enough wealth to tax that supplies all their lusts. At that point, approximately in 2017, social security will devolve rapidly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_J._Astrue
EXCERPT:
Michael James Astrue (born 1956) is an American lawyer and, under the pen name A. M. Juster, a poet and critic. He serves as Commissioner of the Social Security Administration since 2007.
[edit] Career
After his secondary education at The Roxbury Latin School, Astrue earned a bachelor's degree from Yale University, where he served as President of the Yale Political Union, and a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard University.[1]
Astrue, who previously served in the Social Security Administration as Counselor to the Commissioner, served in the US Department of Health and Human Services as General Counsel and as Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Leigislation. He also served as Associate Counsel to the President of the United States at the White House in the Reagan and George Bush Sr administrations. In the private sector, he practiced law and was as a senior executive at several biotechnology companies.[2]
Astrue was nominated as Commissioner of the Social Security Administration by President George W. Bush on September 14, 2006 and confirmed by the US Senate on February 2, 2007. He was sworn in on February 12, 2007 to serve a six-year term.[2]
[edit] Poetry
In the June/July 2010 issue[3] of First Things magazine, Astrue was profiled by poet Paul Mariani, who revealed him as the personage behind the pseudonym and anagram A. M. Juster, the poet and translator associated with New Formalism.
As Juster, Astrue has published a book of Petrarch translations, a translation of The Satires of Horace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) , Longing for Laura (Birch Brook Press, 2001), and a book of original poetry, The Secret Language of Women (University of Evansville 2003).[4] Juster was also the first moderator for Eratosphere, the largest on-line site for formal poetry.
http://www.poemhunter.com/am-juster/
Long Strange Trips
The flower children gone to seed
Bake brownies for the PTA
And give to liberals in need.
Their ponytails display some gray
And nothing tie-dyed ever fits
Despite the tofu and sorbet.
Now they are mocked as "hippie-crits"
By free-range children who refuse
To heed their parents' tired views
On love and peace and endless summer.
What a bummer.
AM Juster
Cancer Prayer
Dear Lord,
Please flood her nerves with sedatives
and keep her strong enough to crack a smile
so disbelieving friends and relatives
can temporarily sustain denial.
Please smite that intern in oncology
who craves approval from department heads
Please ease her urge to vomit; let there be
kind but flirtatious men in nearby beds.
Given her hair, consider amnesty
for sins of vanity; make mirrors vanish.
Surround her with forgiving family
and nurses not too numb to cry. Please banish
trite consolations; take her in one swift
and gentle motion as your final gift.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/us/politics/11benefits.html
Lawmakers Defend Social Security’s Chief Actuary in Clash With Commissioner
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: July 10, 2010
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In interviews and in letters to the administration, lawmakers said they relied on the actuary, Stephen C. Goss, for objective analysis of proposals to change Social Security. And they made clear that he should not be reassigned or demoted as Congress prepared for a re-examination of the program, now celebrating its 75th anniversary.
Two Congressional committees are scheduled to hold hearings on Social Security this week.
As chief actuary, Mr. Goss helps write the annual trustees’ reports on the solvency of Social Security, which pays $700 billion a year in benefits to 53 million people.
The reports, filled with facts and figures from Mr. Goss’s office, are the starting point for debate on the program and its financial problems.
Mr. Goss’s responsibilities have suddenly increased. Leaders of a presidential commission seeking ways to reduce the federal budget deficit said they would rely exclusively on his estimates to measure the financial effects of proposals to overhaul Social Security.
Lawmakers said they had learned of tensions between Mr. Goss, a civil servant who has worked at Social Security for 37 years, and Michael J. Astrue, the commissioner of Social Security, who was appointed by President George W. Bush to a six-year term that ends on Jan. 19, 2013.
People close to Mr. Goss and Mr. Astrue said the disagreements involved personal chemistry, Social Security policy and the technical quality of Mr. Goss’s work on disability programs — not political ideology.
Relations have been strained since late 2008, when the two men clashed over the scope of the actuary’s independence. Basically, aides said, the commissioner views Mr. Goss as a conscientious employee and agrees that he is free to make calculations and use data as he sees fit.
But, they said, in an effort to keep the agency out of politics, Mr. Astrue has sometimes tried to limit what Mr. Goss can say publicly about Social Security, and Mr. Goss has sometimes bridled at the restraints.
By expressing confidence in Mr. Goss, lawmakers said, they hope to protect him.
Representative Earl Pomeroy, a Democrat from North Dakota and chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security, said: “Steve Goss personifies the meaning of public service. He is viewed broadly in the halls of Congress as a vital asset — a trustworthy source for confidential and honest analysis on which Congress relies to make sound policy decisions.
“While the recession has had devastating effects on other sources of retirement income, like private savings, investments and employer-provided pensions, Social Security remains strong,” Mr. Pomeroy said, in part because lawmakers have relied on Mr. Goss’s projections.
Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat and chairman of the Finance Committee, said: “The Social Security actuary plays the critical role of providing the real numbers and straight facts about the program and its trust fund, which is why it’s so critical for the actuary to be independent. For more than 30 years, Mr. Goss has produced valuable work trusted by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.”
Representative David R. Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said he shared that view.
In an interview, Mr. Goss said: “My goal is to maintain the absolute independence and integrity of the actuary’s office. We don’t countenance any influence of any type on our assumptions or our prognostications. Our estimates may not always be right, but they will never be biased.”
Mr. Astrue has expressed reservations about Mr. Goss’s performance in annual evaluations that could be used to justify action against him, lawmakers said.
The commissioner has complained, on occasion, of insubordinate conduct by Mr. Goss, who insists that he is simply trying to preserve the independence and integrity of the actuary’s office.
Mark Lassiter, a spokesman for Social Security, said he could not discuss confidential personnel matters. In a written statement, he said, “Everyone, including the commissioner, appreciates the work Steve and his office do for the agency.”
Like partners in a bad marriage, Mr. Goss and Mr. Astrue may be stuck with each other for a while. Under federal law, the chief actuary has an unusual degree of autonomy. The law says he shall perform his duties “in accordance with professional standards of actuarial independence” and can be removed from office “only for cause.”
The commissioner can be removed before his term ends only if the president finds “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
The guarantees have never been tested. The degree of White House authority over the agency is also unclear, even to some government lawyers.
Actuaries often run into difficulty because they can deliver an unwelcome analysis that carries great weight.
In 2004, a furor erupted when lawmakers learned that a Bush administration official had threatened to fire the chief Medicare actuary if he provided Democrats with details of his cost estimates for a new prescription drug benefit.
Besides measuring the solvency of Social Security, Mr. Goss analyzes the cost of regulations developed by the Social Security Administration and legislative proposals drafted by the White House and members of Congress.
Two Congressional committees are scheduled to hold hearings on Social Security this week.
As chief actuary, Mr. Goss helps write the annual trustees’ reports on the solvency of Social Security, which pays $700 billion a year in benefits to 53 million people.
The reports, filled with facts and figures from Mr. Goss’s office, are the starting point for debate on the program and its financial problems.
Mr. Goss’s responsibilities have suddenly increased. Leaders of a presidential commission seeking ways to reduce the federal budget deficit said they would rely exclusively on his estimates to measure the financial effects of proposals to overhaul Social Security.
Lawmakers said they had learned of tensions between Mr. Goss, a civil servant who has worked at Social Security for 37 years, and Michael J. Astrue, the commissioner of Social Security, who was appointed by President George W. Bush to a six-year term that ends on Jan. 19, 2013.
People close to Mr. Goss and Mr. Astrue said the disagreements involved personal chemistry, Social Security policy and the technical quality of Mr. Goss’s work on disability programs — not political ideology.
Relations have been strained since late 2008, when the two men clashed over the scope of the actuary’s independence. Basically, aides said, the commissioner views Mr. Goss as a conscientious employee and agrees that he is free to make calculations and use data as he sees fit.
But, they said, in an effort to keep the agency out of politics, Mr. Astrue has sometimes tried to limit what Mr. Goss can say publicly about Social Security, and Mr. Goss has sometimes bridled at the restraints.
By expressing confidence in Mr. Goss, lawmakers said, they hope to protect him.
Representative Earl Pomeroy, a Democrat from North Dakota and chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security, said: “Steve Goss personifies the meaning of public service. He is viewed broadly in the halls of Congress as a vital asset — a trustworthy source for confidential and honest analysis on which Congress relies to make sound policy decisions.
“While the recession has had devastating effects on other sources of retirement income, like private savings, investments and employer-provided pensions, Social Security remains strong,” Mr. Pomeroy said, in part because lawmakers have relied on Mr. Goss’s projections.
Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat and chairman of the Finance Committee, said: “The Social Security actuary plays the critical role of providing the real numbers and straight facts about the program and its trust fund, which is why it’s so critical for the actuary to be independent. For more than 30 years, Mr. Goss has produced valuable work trusted by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.”
Representative David R. Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said he shared that view.
In an interview, Mr. Goss said: “My goal is to maintain the absolute independence and integrity of the actuary’s office. We don’t countenance any influence of any type on our assumptions or our prognostications. Our estimates may not always be right, but they will never be biased.”
Mr. Astrue has expressed reservations about Mr. Goss’s performance in annual evaluations that could be used to justify action against him, lawmakers said.
The commissioner has complained, on occasion, of insubordinate conduct by Mr. Goss, who insists that he is simply trying to preserve the independence and integrity of the actuary’s office.
Mark Lassiter, a spokesman for Social Security, said he could not discuss confidential personnel matters. In a written statement, he said, “Everyone, including the commissioner, appreciates the work Steve and his office do for the agency.”
Like partners in a bad marriage, Mr. Goss and Mr. Astrue may be stuck with each other for a while. Under federal law, the chief actuary has an unusual degree of autonomy. The law says he shall perform his duties “in accordance with professional standards of actuarial independence” and can be removed from office “only for cause.”
The commissioner can be removed before his term ends only if the president finds “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
The guarantees have never been tested. The degree of White House authority over the agency is also unclear, even to some government lawyers.
Actuaries often run into difficulty because they can deliver an unwelcome analysis that carries great weight.
In 2004, a furor erupted when lawmakers learned that a Bush administration official had threatened to fire the chief Medicare actuary if he provided Democrats with details of his cost estimates for a new prescription drug benefit.
Besides measuring the solvency of Social Security, Mr. Goss analyzes the cost of regulations developed by the Social Security Administration and legislative proposals drafted by the White House and members of Congress.
A version of this article appeared in print on July 11, 2010, on page A18 of the New York edition.
NIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA NSTITUTE ON AGING
Thursday, March 25th, 2010
The world is full of crooks and liars...
And no ordinary con-man, Charles Ponzi was perhaps the most famous swindler of them all.
A nearly penniless Italian immigrant, Ponzi bilked thousands of investors out millions in 1920.
His bait, however, was as old as the hills. He promised his investors a 40% return in just 90 days. Naturally, it worked like a charm.
In fact, at his peak, Ponzi's promise became so irresistible that he was making $250,000 a day in a time when that kind of haul was off the charts.
But as everyone later came to learn, King Ponzi had no clothes. Behind the curtain there was nothing...absolutely nothing.
The promised investments in postal stamps were never made and Ponzi's scheme collapsed on its own weight. Ponzi's magic, as it turns out, was in simply using the money he stole from new investors to pay off the old. He robbed Peter to pay Paul.
And when no more greater fools could be found, Ponzi's investors lost everything and Charles eventually went to jail. Nice mug shot huh?
But unfortunately, Ponzi's scheme was really never put to rest. Others like Bernie Madoff just picked up where Charles left off. One of them is your Uncle Sam, who is now running the greatest Ponzi scheme of them all.
It's called Social Security and for suckers like me who will never see a dime in return, it's the national scam writ large—one of many.
And while I have no problem with keeping promises to retired folks, the way the program has been bankrupted by politicians irks me to no end. What's more, they continue to insist to the gullible that there is "nothing to see here" when everyone else knows otherwise.
The funny thing is the whole mess is now starting to blow up in their faces-just like it did with Mr. Ponzi himself.
The bad news is that the growing recession is making it happen well ahead of schedule since unemployed people can't be fleeced.
As result, the Social Security system is now paying out more than it receives.
EXCERPT:
TIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20506
April 24, 1974
National Security Study Memorandum 200
--------------------------------------
TO: The Secretary of Defense
The Secretary of Agriculture
The Director of Central Intelligence
The Deputy Secretary of State
Administrator, Agency for International Development
SUBJECT: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S.
Security and Overseas Interests
The President has directed a study of the impact of world popula-
tion growth on U.S. security and overseas interests. The study
should look forward at least until the year 2000, and use several
alternative reasonable projections of population growth.
In terms of each projection, the study should assess:
- the corresponding pace of development, especially in poorer
countries;
- the demand for US exports, especially of food, and the trade
problems the US may face arising from competition for re-
sources; and
- the likelihood that population growth or imbalances will
produce disruptive foreign policies and international insta-
bility.
The study should focus on the international political and economic
implications of population growth rather than its ecological, socio-
logical or other aspects.
The study would then offer possible courses of action for the United
States in dealing with population matters abroad, particularly in
developing countries, with special attention to these questions:
- What, if any, new initiatives by the United States are needed
to focus international attention on the population problem?
- Can technological innovations or development reduce
growth or ameliorate its effects?
- Could the United States improve its assistance in the popu-
lation field and if so, in what form and through which agen-
cies -- bilateral, multilateral, private?
The study should take into account the President's concern that
population policy is a human concern intimately related to the
dignity of the individual and the objective of the United States is to
work closely with others, rather than seek to impose our views on
others.
The President has directed that the study be accomplished by the
NSC Under Secretaries Committee. The Chairman, Under Secre-
taries Committee, is requested to forward the study together with
the Committee's action recommendations no later than May 29,
1974 for consideration by the President.
HENRY A. KISSINGER
cc: Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff
and
L
EONARD DAVIS INSTITUTE OF HEALTH ECONOMICS present
Living Longer and Paying the Price?
Healthcare Costs and Longevity in America
Wednesday, October 26, 2005 ~ BRB II/III Auditorium
S
PEAKERS William D. Novelli, MA
Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer
American Association of Retired Persons (AARP)
S. Jay Olshansky, PhD
Professor, School of Public Health, University of Illinois at Chicago;
Research Associate, Center on Aging at the University of Chicago
Stephen C. Goss, MS
Chief Actuary
United States Social Security Administration
Olivia S. Mitchell, PhD
International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor,
Wharton School; Senior Fellow, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics,
University of Pennsylvania
O
PENING REMARKS John Q. Trojanowski, MD, PhD
William Maul Measey-Truman G. Schnabel, Jr. MD Professor of Geriatric
Medicine and Gerontology; Director, Institute on Aging,
University of Pennsylvania
M
ODERATOR David A. Asch, MD, MBA
Robert D. Eilers Professor of Medicine, Health Care Systems and Economics;
Executive Director, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics,
University of Pennsylvania
Living Longer and Paying the Price?
Healthcare Costs and Longevity in America
Wednesday, October 26, 2005, 8:15
AM BRB II/III Auditorium - 421 Curie Boulevard
A
GENDA 8:15– 8:45
AM Registration 8:45 – 9:00
AM Welcome and John Q. Trojanowski, MD, PhD Opening Remarks
Director, Institute on Aging 9:00 – 10:00
AM Longevity, Health William D. Novelli, MA and Long-Term Care
Chief Executive Officer, AARP
Executive Director and 10:00 – 10:15
AM Break 10:15 – 11:15
Two Points of View
A Possible Decline in Life
Expectancy in the United States
in the 21st Century
~
AM Will Life Expectancy Continue to Increase? S. Jay Olshansky, PhD
Professor, School of Public Health
University of Illinois at Chicago
U.S. Life Expectancy in the 21st
Century is Highly Likely to
Continue to Increase
~
Stephen C. Goss, MS
Chief Actuary
U.S. Social Security Administration
11:15
Moderator:
AM – 12:15 PM Panel DiscussionDavid A. Asch, MD, MBA Executive Director, Leonard Davis Institute
Panelists:
S. Jay Olshansky, PhD
Stephen C. Goss, MS
Olivia S. Mitchell, PhD
William D. Novelli, MA International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans
Professor, Wharton School
12:15 – 12:30
PM Wrap-Up & David A. Asch, MD, MBA Looking Ahead
12:30 – 1:30
PM Lunch (Provided)
John Q. Trojanowski, MD, PhD
Dr. Trojanowski obtained his MD/PhD in 1976 from Tufts
University in Boston. After a medicine internship at Mt.
Auburn Hospital and Harvard Medical School, he began
pathology/neuropathology training at Massachusetts General
Hospital and Harvard Medical School (1977-1979), and
completed training at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1980
and rose to tenured full professor in 1990. Dr. Trojanowski holds major leadership
positions at the University of Pennsylvania including: Director of a National
Institute of Aging (NIA) Alzheimer’s Disease Center (1991-present), Principal
Investigator of a NIA Program Project Grant on Alzheimer’s (AD) and Parkinson’s
(PD) disease (1990-present), Director (2002-present) of the Institute on Aging, and
Co-Director (1992-present) of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research.
He was named the first William Maul Measey–Truman G. Schnabel, Jr., MD,
Professor of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology in 2003 and Co-director of the
Marian S. Ware Alzheimer Drug Discovery Program. For more than 15 years, Dr.
Trojanowski has conducted research on AD, PD, motor neuron disease, dementia
with Lewy bodies (DLB), frontotemporal dementias (FTDs) and related disorders.
Most of his more than 500 publications focus on the pathobiology of
neurodegenerative disorders, especially the role of abnormal filamentous protein
aggregates in these diseases. Dr. Trojanowski was elected to the Institute of
Medicine (2002), and he has served and continues to serve on local and national
aging research committees and present research findings around the world.
David A. Asch, MD, MBA
David Asch is Executive Director of the Leonard Davis
Institute of Health Economics, University of Pennsylvania,
where he is the Robert D. Eilers Professor of Medicine and
Health Care Management and Economics at the School of
Medicine and the Wharton School. Dr. Asch’s research aims to
understand how physicians and patients behave and make medical choices in
clinical, financial, and ethically charged settings. He has special expertise in
understanding how physicians and patients incorporate perceptions of financial
cost and health risk into their decisions, including the adoption of new
pharmaceuticals or medical technologies or the purchase of health or life insurance.
His research combines elements of economic analysis with moral and psychological
theory and marketing. He teaches health policy at the Wharton School, and he
practices internal medicine at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center,
where he is Chief of Health Services Research and Co-Director of the Center for
Health Equity Research and Promotion. He also directs the Robert Wood Johnson
Health & Society Scholars Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Asch
received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, his MD from Cornell
University and his MBA in Health Care Administration and Decision Sciences from
the Wharton School.
Olivia S. Mitchell, PhD
Dr. Olivia S. Mitchell is the International Foundation of
Employee Benefit Plans Professor of Insurance and
Risk Management, and the Executive Director of the
Pension Research Council at the Wharton School of the
University of Pennsylvania. At the University, Mitchell is also the
Director of the Boettner Center on Pensions and Retirement Research, a
Fellow of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center and the Leonard
Davis Institute, and a Research Associate as well as Board member of the
Penn Population Aging Research Center. Concurrently Dr. Mitchell is a
Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a
Co-Investigator for the Health and Retirement Study at the University of
Michigan. She also sits on the Executive Committee for the American
Economic Association. Dr. Mitchell's main areas of research and teaching
are private and public insurance, risk management, public finance and
labor markets, and compensation and pensions, with a U.S. and an
international focus. Her extensive research analyzes public and private
retirement pensions as well as links between wealth, health, and
retirement. She recently served on President Bush’s Commission to
Strengthen Social Security.
Dr. Mitchell received a PhD and MA in Economics from the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a BA in Economics from Harvard
University. Her coauthored study on Social Security reform won the Paul
Samuelson Award for “Outstanding Writing on Lifelong Financial
Security” from TIAA-CREF. In 2004, Dr. Mitchell received the Premio
Internazionale Dell'Istituto Nazionale Delle Assicurazioni (INA) from the
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome, Italy ex aqueo Elsa Fornero. She
served as a public member of the U.S. Department of Labor’s ERISA
Advisory Council. Dr. Mitchell has served on the Board of Directors of
Alexander and Alexander Services, Inc. and the National Academy of
Social Insurance; she co-chaired the Technical Panel on Trends in
Retirement Income and Saving for the Social Security Advisory Council;
she sat on the Board for the Committee on the Status of Women in the
Economics Profession and the GAO Advisory Board. She has spoken for
many groups, including the World Economic Forum; the International
Monetary Fund; the Investment Company Institute; the International
Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans; the White House Conference on
Social Security and the President’s Economic Forum. She has provided
testimony to committees of the US Congress, the UK Parliament, the
Australian Parliament, and the Brazilian Senate. Dr. Mitchell speaks
Spanish and Portuguese, having lived and worked in Latin America,
Europe, and Australasia.
William D. Novelli, MA
Bill Novelli is Executive Director and CEO of AARP, a
membership organization of over 35 million people age
50 and older, half of whom remain actively employed.
He joined AARP in January 2000 as Associate Executive
Director, Public Affairs (Legislation and Public Policy,
Public Policy Institute, Communications, Publications, Organizational
Relations and International Activities).
Mr. Novelli co-founded and was President of Porter Novelli, now one of
the world’s largest public relations agencies and part of the Omnicom
Group, an international marketing communications corporation. He
directed numerous corporate accounts as well as the management and
development of the firm. Porter Novelli was founded to apply marketing to
social and health issues, and grew into an international marketing/public
relations agency with corporate, not-for-profit and government clients. He
retired from the firm in 1990 to pursue a second career in public service.
Prior to joining AARP, Mr. Novelli was President of the Campaign for
Tobacco-Free Kids, whose mandate is to change public policies and the
social environment, limit tobacco companies’ marketing and sales practices
to children, and serve as a counterforce to the tobacco industry and its
special interests. Before this, he was Executive Vice President of CARE, the
world’s largest private relief and development organization. CARE helps
impoverished people in Africa, Asia and Latin America through programs
in health, agriculture, environmental protection and small business
support, and emergency relief to people in need. He was responsible for all
operations in the U.S. and abroad. In 1999, he was named one of the 100
most influential public relations professionals of the 20
industry’s leading publication.
Mr. Novelli is a recognized leader in the international emergence of
social marketing and managed programs in cancer control, diet and
nutrition, cardiovascular health, reproductive health, infant survival, pay
increases for educators, charitable giving and other programs in the U.S.
and the developing world. He holds a BA from the University of
Pennsylvania and an MA from Penn’s Annenberg School for
Communication, and pursued doctoral studies at New York University. He
taught marketing management for 10 years in the University of Maryland’s
M.B.A. program and also taught health communications there. He has
lectured at many other institutions. He has written numerous articles and
chapters on marketing management, marketing communications, and
social marketing in journals, periodicals and text books, and serves on a
number of boards and advisory committees.
th century by the
S. Jay Olshansky, PhD
S. Jay Olshansky is Professor of Epidemiology and
Biostatistics in the School of Public Health at the
University of Illinois at Chicago and Research Associate at
the Center on Aging at the University of Chicago and the
Centre for Ageing and Public Health at the London School of Hygiene
and Tropical Medicine.
The focus of his research to date has been on estimates of the upper
limits to human longevity, exploring the health and public policy
implications associated with individual and population aging and global
implications of the re-emergence of infectious and parasitic diseases.
During the last ten years, Dr. Olshansky has been working to develop
the modern “biodemographic paradigm” of mortality – an effort to
understand the biological nature of the dying out process of living
organisms.
Dr. Olshansky is President of the Society for the Study of Social
Biology, an Associate Editor of the
Science and Biogerontology
the Advancement of Science and the New York Academy of Sciences and
is on the editorial board of several other scientific journals.
Dr. Olshansky is the first author of
Science at the Frontiers of Ageing.
from the University of Chicago and a BA in Psychology from Michigan
State University.
Journal of Gerontology: Biological, a member of the American Association forThe Quest for Immortality:He holds a PhD and MA in Sociology
Stephen C. Goss, MS
Stephen C. Goss, Chief Actuary at the Social Security
Administration, has been with SSA for over 30 years. He
joined the Office of the Actuary after receiving his Masters
in Science in Mathematics from the University of Virginia.
He also received a Bachelors of Science in Mathematics and Economics
from the University of Pennsylvania.
Goss has been a staff participant representing the Office of the Actuary
at the President's Commission on Pension Policy, the 1979, 1991, and 1995
Advisory Councils, the National Commission on Social Security, and the
National Commission on Social Security Reform. He has also been a
member in task forces and inter-governmental groups in the field of social
insurance, health insurance, and long-term care insurance.
Goss worked closely with Congressional staff on the 1983 Social
Security Amendments, testified at Committee hearings, and was
instrumental in the development of the provision for increasing the normal
retirement age. He represented the United States at the Third International
Social Security Seminar for Actuaries and Statisticians in Rome in 1988.
A member of the National Academy of Social Insurance since 1990,
Goss is a member of the Society of Actuaries and the American Academy of
Actuaries. He served on the National Academy of Social Insurance study
panel on “Evaluating Issues in Privatizing Social Security” and currently
serves on its Study Panel on “Uncharted Waters: Paying Benefits from
Individual Accounts in Federal Retirement Policy.”
The Social Security Ponzi Scheme
Surprise...Surprise...Surprise...
By Steve ChristThursday, March 25th, 2010
The world is full of crooks and liars...
And no ordinary con-man, Charles Ponzi was perhaps the most famous swindler of them all.
A nearly penniless Italian immigrant, Ponzi bilked thousands of investors out millions in 1920.
His bait, however, was as old as the hills. He promised his investors a 40% return in just 90 days. Naturally, it worked like a charm.
In fact, at his peak, Ponzi's promise became so irresistible that he was making $250,000 a day in a time when that kind of haul was off the charts.
But as everyone later came to learn, King Ponzi had no clothes. Behind the curtain there was nothing...absolutely nothing.
The promised investments in postal stamps were never made and Ponzi's scheme collapsed on its own weight. Ponzi's magic, as it turns out, was in simply using the money he stole from new investors to pay off the old. He robbed Peter to pay Paul.
And when no more greater fools could be found, Ponzi's investors lost everything and Charles eventually went to jail. Nice mug shot huh?
But unfortunately, Ponzi's scheme was really never put to rest. Others like Bernie Madoff just picked up where Charles left off. One of them is your Uncle Sam, who is now running the greatest Ponzi scheme of them all.
It's called Social Security and for suckers like me who will never see a dime in return, it's the national scam writ large—one of many.
And while I have no problem with keeping promises to retired folks, the way the program has been bankrupted by politicians irks me to no end. What's more, they continue to insist to the gullible that there is "nothing to see here" when everyone else knows otherwise.
The funny thing is the whole mess is now starting to blow up in their faces-just like it did with Mr. Ponzi himself.
The bad news is that the growing recession is making it happen well ahead of schedule since unemployed people can't be fleeced.
As result, the Social Security system is now paying out more than it receives.
That's called cash flow negative and 78 million baby boomers are only going to make it worse. The numbers in this case will never add up.
Of course, if this story sound a bit familiar to you there is a reason for that: I wrote it almost two months ago.But since apparently nothing is official until it appears in the pages of The New York Times, I feel its my duty to do it all over again....
From The New York Times by Mary Williams Walsh entitled: Social Security to See Payout Exceed Pay-In This Year
"The bursting of the real estate bubble and the ensuing recession have hurt jobs, home prices and now Social Security.
This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Stephen C. Goss, chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, said that while the Congressional projection would probably be borne out, the change would have no effect on benefits in 2010 and retirees would keep receiving their checks as usual.
The problem, he said, is that payments have risen more than expected during the downturn, because jobs disappeared and people applied for benefits sooner than they had planned. At the same time, the program's revenue has fallen sharply, because there are fewer paychecks to tax.
Analysts have long tried to predict the year when Social Security would pay out more than it took in because they view it as a tipping point - the first step of a long, slow march to insolvency, unless Congress strengthens the program's finances.
Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office's projection shows the ravages of the recession easing in the next few years, with small surpluses reappearing briefly in 2014 and 2015.
After that, demographic forces are expected to overtake the fund, as more and more baby boomers leave the work force, stop paying into the program and start collecting their benefits. At that point, outlays will exceed revenue every year, no matter how well the economy performs."
Surprise...Surprise....Surprise.....
Call me a cynic if you will....but I have come the conclusion that we are a race of children administered to by a group of power mad thieves.
Related Articles:
University of Pennsylvania Institute on Aging
The Mess that Greenspan Made
http://themessthatgreenspanmade.blogspot.com/2010/03/alan-greenspan-on-social-security.html
The Mess that Greenspan Made
http://themessthatgreenspanmade.blogspot.com/2010/03/alan-greenspan-on-social-security.html
Alan Greenspan on Social Security
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Toward the end of this New York Times story about the Social Security "trust fund" experiencing net withdrawals this year for the first time are a few words from former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan about the system that he helped "fix" back in the early 1980s.
Although Social Security is often said to have a “trust fund,” the term really serves as an accounting device, to track the pay-as-you-go program’s revenue and outlays over time. Its so-called balance is, in fact, a history of its vast cash flows: the sum of all of its revenue in the past, minus all of its outlays. The balance is currently about $2.5 trillion because after the early 1980s the program had surplus revenue, year after year.Recall that payroll taxes were raised back in 1983 and the Federal Government has been spending the Social Security surplus every year since that time, in the process making the government's annual budget look a lot better than it actually is. This no doubt helped to make the former Fed chairman quite popular with elected officials, that is, until the whole financial system melted down a couple years ago.
...
Mr. Greenspan recalled in an interview that the sour economy of the late 1970s had taken the program close to insolvency when the commission he led set to work in 1982. It had no contingency reserve then, and the group had to work quickly. He said there were only three choices: raise taxes, lower benefits or bail out the program by tapping general revenue.
The easiest choice, politically, would have been “solving the problem with the stroke of a pen, by printing the money,” Mr. Greenspan said. But one member of the commission, Claude Pepper, then a House representative, blocked that approach because he feared it would undermine Social Security, changing it from a respected, self-sustaining old-age program into welfare.
The University of Pennsylvania Institute on Aging is a national center for
excellence, supporting pioneering research in biologic and clinical
pathways of disease, treatment and care, as well as prevention and health
promotion for the aging population. Founded in 1978, the mission of the
IOA is to improve the health of the elderly by increasing the quality and
quantity of clinical and basic research as well as educational programs
focusing on normal aging and age-related diseases at the University of
Pennsylvania School of Medicine and across the entire Penn campus.
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/food_for_peace/kiss_nssm_jb_1995.html
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/food_for_peace/kiss_nssm_jb_1995.html
FOOD FOR PEACE“Farmers and Eaters Unite!” | |||||||||||||
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This article appeared as part of a feature in the December 8, 1995 issue of Executive Intelligence Review, and was circuclated extensively by the Schiller Insitute Food for Peace Movement. It is reprinted here as part of the package: “Who Is Responsible for the World Food Shortage?” Kissinger’s 1974 Plan for Food Control Genocideby Joseph Brewda Dec. 8, 1995 On Dec. 10, 1974, the U.S. National Security Council under Henry Kissinger completed a classified 200-page study, “National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” The study falsely claimed that population growth in the so-called Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs) was a grave threat to U.S. national security. Adopted as official policy in November 1975 by President Gerald Ford, NSSM 200 outlined a covert plan to reduce population growth in those countries through birth control, and also, implicitly, war and famine. Brent Scowcroft, who had by then replaced Kissinger as national security adviser (the same post Scowcroft was to hold in the Bush administration), was put in charge of implementing the plan. CIA Director George Bush was ordered to assist Scowcroft, as were the secretaries of state, treasury, defense, and agriculture. The bogus arguments that Kissinger advanced were not original. One of his major sources was the Royal Commission on Population, which King George VI had created in 1944 “to consider what measures should be taken in the national interest to influence the future trend of population.” The commission found that Britain was gravely threatened by population growth in its colonies, since “a populous country has decided advantages over a sparsely-populated one for industrial production.” The combined effects of increasing population and industrialization in its colonies, it warned, “might be decisive in its effects on the prestige and influence of the West,” especially effecting “military strength and security.” NSSM 200 similarly concluded that the United States was threatened by population growth in the former colonial sector. It paid special attention to 13 “key countries” in which the United States had a “special political and strategic interest”: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Turkey, Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. It claimed that population growth in those states was especially worrisome, since it would quickly increase their relative political, economic, and military strength. For example, Nigeria: “Already the most populous country on the continent, with an estimated 55 million people in 1970, Nigeria's population by the end of this century is projected to number 135 million. This suggests a growing political and strategic role for Nigeria, at least in Africa.” Or Brazil: “Brazil clearly dominated the continent demographically.” The study warned of a “growing power status for Brazil in Latin America and on the world scene over the next 25 years.” Food as a weapon There were several measures that Kissinger advocated to deal with this alleged threat, most prominently, birth control and related population-reduction programs. He also warned that “population growth rates are likely to increase appreciably before they begin to decline,” even if such measures were adopted. A second measure was curtailing food supplies to targetted states, in part to force compliance with birth control policies: “There is also some established precedent for taking account of family planning performance in appraisal of assistance requirements by AID [U.S. Agency for International Development] and consultative groups. Since population growth is a major determinant of increases in food demand, allocation of scarce PL 480 resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production. In these sensitive relations, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion.” “Mandatory programs may be needed and we should be considering these possibilities now,” the document continued, adding, “Would food be considered an instrument of national power? ... Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?” Kissinger also predicted a return of famines that could make exclusive reliance on birth control programs unnecessary. “Rapid population growth and lagging food production in developing countries, together with the sharp deterioration in the global food situation in 1972 and 1973, have raised serious concerns about the ability of the world to feed itself adequately over the next quarter of century and beyond,” he reported. The cause of that coming food deficit was not natural, however, but was a result of western financial policy: “Capital investments for irrigation and infrastucture and the organization requirements for continuous improvements in agricultural yields may be beyond the financial and administrative capacity of many LDCs. For some of the areas under heaviest population pressure, there is little or no prospect for foreign exchange earnings to cover constantly increasingly imports of food.” “It is questionable,” Kissinger gloated, “whether aid donor countries will be prepared to provide the sort of massive food aid called for by the import projections on a long-term continuing basis.” Consequently, “large-scale famine of a kind not experienced for several decades—a kind the world thought had been permanently banished,” was foreseeable—famine, which has indeed come to pass. To read the entire NSSM 200 document, click here. To read the full report from EIR Magazine, follow the link below: Who Is Responsible for the World Food Shortage? Related Pages: | |||||||||||||
EXCERPT:
TIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20506
April 24, 1974
National Security Study Memorandum 200
--------------------------------------
TO: The Secretary of Defense
The Secretary of Agriculture
The Director of Central Intelligence
The Deputy Secretary of State
Administrator, Agency for International Development
SUBJECT: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S.
Security and Overseas Interests
The President has directed a study of the impact of world popula-
tion growth on U.S. security and overseas interests. The study
should look forward at least until the year 2000, and use several
alternative reasonable projections of population growth.
In terms of each projection, the study should assess:
- the corresponding pace of development, especially in poorer
countries;
- the demand for US exports, especially of food, and the trade
problems the US may face arising from competition for re-
sources; and
- the likelihood that population growth or imbalances will
produce disruptive foreign policies and international insta-
bility.
The study should focus on the international political and economic
implications of population growth rather than its ecological, socio-
logical or other aspects.
The study would then offer possible courses of action for the United
States in dealing with population matters abroad, particularly in
developing countries, with special attention to these questions:
- What, if any, new initiatives by the United States are needed
to focus international attention on the population problem?
- Can technological innovations or development reduce
growth or ameliorate its effects?
- Could the United States improve its assistance in the popu-
lation field and if so, in what form and through which agen-
cies -- bilateral, multilateral, private?
The study should take into account the President's concern that
population policy is a human concern intimately related to the
dignity of the individual and the objective of the United States is to
work closely with others, rather than seek to impose our views on
others.
The President has directed that the study be accomplished by the
NSC Under Secretaries Committee. The Chairman, Under Secre-
taries Committee, is requested to forward the study together with
the Committee's action recommendations no later than May 29,
1974 for consideration by the President.
HENRY A. KISSINGER
cc: Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff
LDI was established in 1967 at the University of Pennsylvania as the
center for research, policy analysis and education in health care. It is a
cooperative venture among Penn’s School of Medicine, Wharton School,
School of Nursing, Annenberg School for Communication, and School of
Dental Medicine, and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, with
additional linkages to Penn’s Arts and Sciences, Education, Social Work,
Communication, Engineering and Law Schools. LDI works to improve
the health of the public through interdisciplinary studies in the
evaluation, organization, financing, management and delivery of health
care.
LDI is also formally designated as the center of Penn’s health policyrelated
activities. In this capacity, our objectives include developing
linkages with national, state, and local policymakers, agencies and other
policy centers and communicating to them the results of policy-related
http://www.mindfully.org/GE/2005/Geopolitics-GM-Food6mar05.htm
Seeds of Destruction:
The Geopolitics of GM Food
WILLIAM ENGDAHL / Current Concerns (Zurich) n.5, 6mar2005
In June 2003, President George W. Bush made the issue of lifting an 8-year European Union ban on genetically modified (GM) plants a matter of US national strategic priority. This came only days after the US occupation of Baghdad. The timing was not accidental. Since that time, EU resistance to GM plants has crumbled, as has that of Brazil, and other key agriculture producing nations. One year before, the future of GM crops was in doubt.
terminator seeds - Seeds of Destruction: The Geopolitics of GM Food WILLIAM ENGDAHL / Current Concerns WILLIAM ENGDAHL / Current Concerns (Zurich) n.5, 6mar2005
Now, some months and enormous pressure later, the strategists of GM food hegemony are on the verge of a control over the global human and animal food chain never held by any single nation or power.
The present debate over the nature of biotechnology and genetic modification of basic food such as maize or soybeans, misses the most essential point. The conversion of world agriculture by a small elite of biotech companies, most US-based, has little to do with corporate greed. It has very much to do with geopolitics and plans of some people to control world population growth over the coming decades.
The nature of American power projection in the world today rests on the development of key strategic advantages which no other combination of nations can challenge, what the Pentagon planners term, "full spectrum dominance." This includes global military dominance. It includes dominance of the world's limited, and rapidly depleting petroleum supplies. It includes control of the world's reserve currency, the dollar. And today it most definitely includes future control of world agriculture through control of GM patents and GM crops.
Before the end of the decade, if present trends continue, US global dominance will be based on control of the food supply of most of this planet, far more than military or even energy control. The geopolitical dimension of this prospect bears careful examination.
A Rockefeller Trojan horse
The agency at the center of the GM controversy is the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. Over the past decade, this influential private foundation has spent more than $100 million in sponsoring research and development of GM crops to be deployed in world food production. They have specifically targeted key developing nations in their effort.
More on Monsanto
Their public statements suggest noble motives: "The Rockefeller Foundation is a global foundation with a mandate and a commitment to enrich and sustain the lives of the poor and excluded throughout the world," said foundation president, Gordon Conway, in a 1999 speech to the Monsanto Company, the world's largest producer of GM seeds and pesticides. Conway cites as justification for the GM revolution in agriculture the projections of an added 2 billion people in the world by 2020, amid a decline in existing agriculture yields, and increased degradation of soils and ecology. All indications suggest this is not the real reason GM plants are being promoted with a fervor.
Over the past 18 years, the Rockefeller Foundation has played a decisive role worldwide in spreading the acceptance of radical practices of genetic modification to countries and laboratories where a direct US Government research program would be greeted with greatest suspicion. The Rockefeller Foundation is, in effect, the Trojan Horse of GM proliferation.
It has gained entry in key countries in part by selecting key scientists from select developing countries to be educated and trained in the US or other industrial countries under foundation programs and auspices. It has done this by funding GM research and by using its influence in government and other agencies and NGO's. To date more than 400 leading scientists from the Philippines to Thailand to Kenya to China have been trained and cultivated by the foundation.
The Rockefeller Foundation has a murky past, since its creation in 1914 out of the Rockefeller family Standard Oil Trust fortune. Well before 1945, the foundation had been a leading funder of eugenics research, work made infamous by the Nazi race purity experiments. This included Rockefeller support to the American Eugenics Society and the Population Council. As the race breeding policies of the German Third Reich came to light after the war, Rockefeller strategists shifted profile to champion the causes of environment, resource scarcity and over-population. The policy remained one of global population reduction. (1).
Kissinger and NSSM 200
Since more than a quarter century, Rockefeller Foundation energy has been focused on biotechnology and genetic engineering research and promotion. This comes after decades of involvement in various population control schemes for the developing world. There is no contradiction.
In 1972 President Nixon named foundation board member, John D. Rockefeller III, to chair a Presidential Commission on "Population and the American Future." The same Rockefeller created the Population Council in 1952, and openly called for "zero population growth."
Rockefeller's Commission on Population and the American Future laid the foundation for Henry Kissinger's National Security memorandum, NSSM 200, of April 1974, which cited population growth in strategic, raw materials rich developing countries as a US national security concern of the highest priority.
During the 1970's, when Kissinger was National Security Council director as well as Secretary of State, food and oil emerged as strategic US national security commodities. Kissinger initiated the controversial "oil-for-food" strategy in which a food-deficient USSR imported vast sums of US grain and paid it with large export of Soviet oil for dollars. US domestic oil production, outside Alaska, had peaked in 1970 and began a steady decline. The US was becoming increasingly an oil import nation. National security became tied to security of cheap imported oil, and food was a weapon in the US security arsenal from that time on. Kissinger's Cabinet colleague, Agriculture Secretary, Earl Butz, reflected the Kissinger policy when he stated, "Hungry men listen only to those who have a piece of bread. Food is a tool. It is a weapon in the US negotiating kit." Kissinger was then chief negotiator.
In 1974, Kissinger submitted the NSSM 200 memorandum to President Nixon, naming population growth in key raw-materials rich developing countries as, a US "national security threat." Since that time, control of economic growth rates and population growth in key developing countries has been US national security priority.
Kissinger owed his political career since the late 1950's to his stint as a researcher for the Rockefeller family, and owed his rise to power to their backing. The Rockefeller family had been at the center of US oil and raw materials geopolitics since early in the 1900's, when the Standard Oil Trust was built. Kissinger was well aware of the importance of food and energy to US national interests.
With Kissinger's NSSM 200, Washington official policy was to impose restrictions on fast-growing developing countries, policies which would significantly cut population growth. In NSSM 200, Kissinger implied that famine might be an effective way to reduce population: "…large-scale famine of a kind not experienced for several decades - a kind the world thought had been permanently banished," was foreseeable, he wrote. He remarked that the US and other donor countries would not be likely to provide necessary food export to the afflicted regions.
In 1975, Kissinger's successor as National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, later a Kissinger business partner, wrote, "United States leadership is essential to combat population growth, to implement the World Population Plan of Action and to advance United States security and overseas interests. The President endorses…NSSM 200…," Scowcroft added.
Kissinger's NSSM 200 document, classified secret and not made public until 1989, took estimates of world population growth to the end of the century and beyond, and the impact on the need for food and raw materials, notably energy. "Growing populations will have a serious impact on the need for food especially in the poorest, fastest growing LDC's," Kissinger stated. "World needs for food rise by 2.5% or more a year at a time when readily available fertilizer and well-watered land is already largely being utilized. Therefore, additions to food production must come from higher yields," the Government memo declared. It was at this time that the Rockefeller Foundation also began large research in genetic engineering of plants, including rice, ostensibly to raise yields.
With NSSM 200, Washington made implementation of population control programs a pre-condition for US financial aid, even famine relief. Washington ensured that birth reduction was adopted as official policy by the IMF, World Bank and the UN. Beginning the mid-1970's all IMF and World Bank aid to developing target countries was tied to their willingness to accept population control policies dictated by Washington.
NSSM 200 explicitly listed 13 countries as "key countries" in which the US held a "special political and strategic interest." These were: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand, Nigeria, Philippines, Turkey, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. Their population growth was deemed especially worrisome to US national interests, according to Kissinger. Notably, every key country has been subjected to major social, economic and military upheaval since 1974. US food aid, even in famine, was withheld from countries refusing to adopt US-mandated birth control or population reduction policies. (2).
NSSM 200 continues as unofficial US Government policy to the present day, despite public Bush Administration concessions to Catholic Right to Life groups. In this, the role of the Rockefeller Foundation is central to Washington policy regarding genetic engineering in world agriculture, especially that in key developing nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Rockefeller's GM proliferation network
In 1971 the Rockefeller Foundation, together with the Ford Foundation and the World Bank, established the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which runs 16 research centers around the world, most in developing countries, spending some $350 million annually. The focus of CGIAR is the spread of GM crops in the developing world.
CGIAR today operates under the umbrella of the World Bank, and has drawn 20 developing countries in as sponsors. World Bank aid is administered on the basis of a recipient agreeing to impose population control policies, the present form of NSSM 200, but with Washington officially in the background. Thus, the Rockefeller Foundation, World Bank, Monsanto and other agri-giants and the US Government, all meet under CGIAR auspices.
The CGIAR mission is to promote "sustainable agriculture for food security." To do this, CGIAR has used its funds and government influence to take control of one of the world's largest collections of plant genetic resources. CGIAR then makes the materials available to companies like Monsanto and Syngenta, "so that new gene combinations can be used to increase productivity, sustainably," as they state. In turn, CGIAR mobilizes biotechnology proliferation in developing countries. CGIAR trains the most promising national scientists and researchers in biotechnology, insuring that cadre of pro-GM national researchers will promote the spread of GM agriculture and biotechnology back home.
In addition to its role in establishing CGIAR, the Rockefeller Foundation has been a major donor to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications or ISAAA.
Every US President since George H.W. Bush in 1992, has made support of genetically engineered crops a matter of highest national priority. The example of US-AID backing for the Rockefeller Foundation's ISAAA is exemplary.
The ISAAA was originally founded with Rockefeller Brothers' Fund money for the sole purpose to "facilitate the delivery of proprietary biotechnologies from the corporate labs of the industrialized world into the food and farming systems of the South."
How this works becomes clear when the current financial sponsors of the ISAAA are known. In addition to the Rockefeller Foundation, sponsors include Monsanto (USA), Syngenta (Swiss), Dow AgroSciences (USA), Pioneer Hi-Bred (USA), Cargill (USA), Bayer CropScience (Germany), and a mysterious "Anonymous Donor "(USA), and US-AID of the State Department.
The argument of the institutions behind ISAAA is that the developing world is where a rising population makes growing food demand most acute, but where economic resources are least able to meet the needs. Hence, ISAAA enables the introduction of corporate GM technologies and crops from the industrial world into the South, acting as "honest brokers" in their words.
As the Kissinger NSSM 200 targeted 13 developing countries in 1974 for population reduction, the ISAAA targets 12 countries for introduction of GM crops. Six of these countries are the same as Kissinger listed in 1974: Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Egypt. In addition, ISAAA lists Malaysia, Vietnam, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Argentina and Costa Rica.
By their own admission, the ISAAA launches propaganda offensives to counter hostility to GM crops, and they train science elites from the target countries, often bringing them to USA or other leading GM research centers such as the Monsanto Life Sciences Research Center, to learn the world of GM elite research. Randy Hautea is head of the group's SEAsia Center in the Philippines, based in the center established by the Rockefeller Foundation's International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).
Hautea recently stated that his group has targeted Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam because, "they all have the political will to pursue and adopt biotechnology applications." What Hautea did not say was that introduction of GM seeds means introduction of costly GM pesticides and other policies which only global agribusiness companies are able to carry out.
Food production of target countries is being transformed into the global agribusiness market, not longer available for national food security. Hautea does not say how biotechnology brought in to, say, Indonesia or Malaysia by Syngenta or Monsanto, contributes to the benefit of small farmers, the heart of their food production. To date, in fact, there exists no proof of any benefit from GM crops for family farmers. In fact the opposite is the case. Farmers are often coerced or forced to buy Monsanto GM seeds or other GM seeds by their governments.
Through ISAAA and related networks of organizations, the Rockefeller Foundation is at the center of the worldwide actions of Monsanto, DuPont, Cargill and Dow Agri-sciences, Syngenta, Bayer AG and other major biotech giants, dominating the ongoing "new Green Revolution" as Rockefeller's Conway terms it. (3).
Spreading the GM control
The list of major GM plants today includes GM rice, soybeans, corn, oilseeds, and numerous other basic food crops. The Rockefeller Foundation has played a key fostering role in the development of most major new types.
More than 70% of all processed foods Americans consume comes today from GM products. Almost all the animal feed used to feed cattle, and other animals in the US and in major world markets today is GM feed, mainly soymeal and corn.
Most Americans are ignorant of what they eat. The US government has refused to label food that contains GM inputs. A new EU food labelling law also does not require producers to identify animal products fed on GM feed, leaving consumers ignorant of what GM products they eat. In 2003, the total acreage planted to GM seeds worldwide was 167 million acres or 68 million hectares according to ISAAA data. This was a 15% rise in one year. The United States is the largest GM grower with 106 million acres of genetically modified soybeans, corn and cotton. Worldwide, 55% of all soybeans grown now are GM crops. Soymeal is one of the most essential and richest protein sources for animal and human consumption. Every bite of a McDonald's hamburger contains as much as 30% of GM soyameal.
Without even realizing, most people in North America, East Asia and Europe regularly eat products or animals fed from GM crops. What is most remarkable is the fact that farmers in North America, Australia, Argentina, and more recently after a long battle, in Brazil, have surrendered their control over seeds to a handful of multinational biotech giants who have a deliberate strategy to dominate and control the planting of basic food crops worldwide.
The terminator not dead
If emerging nations from China to India to Indonesia and beyond, were to manage to create a food self-sufficiency independent of reliance on US or OECD food suppliers, the ability of the United States to remain the dominant power would diminish, regardless of military might.
What better way to control the destiny of China, India, East Asia and the rest of the world than to establish permanent control over their ability to grow food? Enter Monsanto and the agriculture biotechnology cartel, who dominate GM crops globally. Just two years ago it seemed Monsanto might be headed into financial ruin. Today, it is on the verge of becoming the one of the single most powerful corporations in the world.
Interestingly, it was the direct intervention of the Rockefeller Foundation in October 1999, which was responsible for the widely-touted decision of Monsanto "not to commercialize" its 'terminator technology' for GM seeds. Monsanto president Robert Shapiro wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation that it would "shelve" or put on hold its "sterile seed" technology, formally called Genetic Use Restriction Technology (GURT). The Monsanto decision was a tactical ploy, taken on advice of Rockefeller's Conway, to defulse growing opposition to GM crops, especially in Europe. Monsanto's terminator seed technology, in which the US Department of Agriculture also holds part patent rights, has been called the ultimate weapon, the 'neutron bomb' of agriculture, rightly so.
Terminator seeds would solve a major problem for Monsanto and other GM giants in collecting seed fees in the developing world for patented GM seeds, something made possible a few years ago by GATT trade talks on patent rights.
Free trade in agriculture is today at the heart of the WTO. Under the treaty of the World Trade Organization, created by the GATT Uruguay trade round in the early 1990's, multinational corporations now have the right, enforced by WTO sanctions, to collect royalty payments for "intellectual property."
The Uruguay agreement, ratified by all GATT member countries under enormous US pressure, allows a corporation for the first time, to patent a specific plant variety, even though that plant sort might have been in the public domain in a country such as Pakistan or Peru for thousands of years. The WTO term is Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, TRIPs. Washington pushed the controversial TRIPs agreement through GATT, accusing developing countries of 'piracy' in not paying due royalties to multinationals, claiming US companies were losing hundreds on millions in unpaid fees for fertilizer and seeds or drugs. Mickey Kantor, US Trade Representative who negotiated the Uruguay Round talks, today sits on the board of Monsanto.
The TRIPs WTO agreement includes patent rights on GM plants. Under TRIPs the Swiss agri-tech company, Syngenta, holds control potentially of most of the rice in Pakistan, India and Asia. Monsanto dominates patents on soybeans, corn, cotton and other major crops. Their only problem is how to collect royalty payments from millions of small peasant farmers. Collecting patent payments for GM seeds in many developing countries is extremely difficult.
Not so, if terminator seeds are sold. Terminator technology, which Monsanto paid $1.6 billion to acquire, allows introduction of a 'suicide gene' into plants such as corn or cotton or soya or potentially, even wheat. A farmer using terminator seeds no longer will be able to share seeds with other farmers or plant his own in following years. He will be forced to turn to Monsanto each season to buy his existence, in the form of more suicide seeds, as well as the special herbicides Monsanto has developed to be used with it. The original developers of terminator technology, Delta & Pine Land Seed, which Monsanto bought in 1998, specifically noted that the rice and wheat markets of China, India, Pakistan and such major population countries was the target of terminator. The political implications of such a development are easy to imagine.
Rockefeller Foundation funds vaccines with hidden birth-control hormones
The Rockefeller Foundation is among the funders of a WHO program in "reproductive health" which has developed a tetanus vaccine that allegedly contains hidden birth-control hormones.
According to a report from the Global Vaccine Institute, the WHO has overseen massive vaccination campaigns against tetanus in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines since the early 1990's. Comite Pro Vida de Mexico, a Catholic organization, tested numerous vials of the vaccine and found them to contain human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG), a natural hormone needed to maintain a pregnancy. When combined with a tetanus toxoid carrier, it stimulates formation of antibodies against hCG, rendering a woman incapable of maintaining a pregnancy. Similar reports of vaccines laced with hCG hormones have come from the Philippines and Nicaragua.
The organization confirmed several other curious facts about the WHO vaccination programs. Tetanus vaccine was given only to women, between ages 15-45, not men or children. The presence of hCG is a clear contamination of the vaccine. It does not belong. With financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, the Population Council, Ford Foundation, among others, the WHO has been working for 20 years to develop an anti-fertility vaccine using hCG with tetanus and other vaccines, according to scientific articles published on the effort by WHO. This has been documented by WHO and others, including the respected British medical journal, The Lancet, June 11, 1988, "Clinical Trials of a WHO Borth Control Vaccine."
To mid-1993 the WHO had spent a total of $365 million of such research funds on "reproductive health" including research on implanting hCG into tetanus vaccine. WHO has been unable to answer why women vaccinated were found with anti-hCG antibodies. They feebly replied it was "insignificant." The vaccine was produced by Connaught Laboratories Ltd of Canada and Intervex and CSL Laboratories of Australia.
Since the 1920's the Rockefeller Foundation has been among the leading sponsors of population reduction programs worldwide. If the reports of birth control vaccines are true, it is not difficult to suspect the Rockefeller Foundation is also among those planning to use genetically modified seeds technology as a potential means to control world population growth through future control of food supply.
The Rockefeller-Monsanto public relations maneuver "not to commercialize" terminator seeds was clearly designed to defuse growing opposition to proliferation of GM seeds, to buy time while allowing them to spread GM crops to the world's largest growing areas - North America, Argentina, Brazil and now, the EU. Once spread, it is simple to shift to terminator.
In February 2003, at a meeting of the International Seed Federation in Lyon France, Monsanto's Roger Krueger released a paper titled, "The Benefits of GURTs." It argued that terminator in fact would benefit poor farmers. Monsanto argues in a new ploy, that terminator would in fact hinder spread of unwanted GM genes to non-GM plants, promoting the same idea in new clothes as a "biosafety" tool. Clearly they believe opposition to terminator and GM is falling. Reports are that Monsanto would be ready to introduce commercial terminator or GURT seeds in 3-4 years.
Dual use and GM crops: Biowarfare?
The days are long past when the USDA represented the interests of America's family farmers. Today, US agri-business, dominated by a dozen or more giant international concerns, is the second most profitable industry next to pharmaceuticals, and has annual value of well over $800 billion. The USDA today is the organized lobby of agri-business giants, none more influential than Monsanto. Bush Administration official, Ann Veneman, USDA Secretary, is a former board member of a Monsanto company and, not surprisingly, a strong advocate of GM. Several other Bush officials have ties to Monsanto as well.
Terminator and related GM technologies in the hands of Monsanto and less than half-a-dozen corporations worldwide, backed by the USDA, Defense Department and State Department, could open the door to potential forms of biological warfare against entire populations not imagined before. A recent US Air Force study states that "biological weapons offer greater possibilities for use than do nuclear weapons."
Washington US-AID food assistance for Africa in recent months has been linked to willingness of a country to accept US GM crops. US assistance to combat AIDS in Africa has similar strings. GM has clearly become a strategic, geopolitical tool for Washington.
Defenders of GM technology argue that no one in their right mind would consider such a drastic use of GM crops as to control entire areas of world food supply. "We're tempted to say that nobody in their right mind would ever use these things." Stanford biology professor Steven Block stated in another context. Block hastened to add, "But not everybody is in their right mind!" Block, a leading consultant to the US Government, went on to warn, "Any technology that can be used to insert genes into DNA can be used for either good or bad." Genetic engineering can create rice with enhanced vitamin A, but can just as well create seeds containing highly toxic bacteria. US researchers first did this in 1986. Genetic engineering of more toxic and harder to detect bioweapons was a major motivation for nations to call for a stronger convention on bioweapons.
The US Government's controversial drug eradication program in Colombia, since discontinued, would spray crops with deadly glyphosate. Glyphosate, under the patent name, Roundup, is the GM herbicide sold by Monsanto also for its GM plants. The Bush Administration has repeatedly refused to back a legally binding Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, arguing it needs the freedom to develop defense against biowarfare. Freedom can work both ways however.
Genetic manipulation opens the possibilities in the hands of a malevolent power, to unleash untold harm on the human species. Even were it to be the case that GM plants increase yields, which is not at all proven, this potential for control of the food supply of entire nations is too much power to give to any single corporation or government. Essential foods, like fresh water, are no ordinary commodities to be sold under rules of an imposed free market. They are basic human rights as the right to breathe. We should not tempt any government with the power that present GM strategists advocate over our food security.
References
1. B.K. Eakman, "The Cloning of the American Mind," gives information on Rockefeller Foundation funding of eugenics.
s. Jim Heron, "Population Politics and the Shambles of Africa in http://catholiceducation.org/articles/population/pc0005.html.
2. National Security Strategy Memorandum, NSSM 200, "Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests," National Security Council, April 24, 1974, Henry Kissinger, director, National Security Council. "The Over-population cabal" in Mindszenty Report, Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, April 1999, www.mindszenty.org.report/1999/April1999.html .
3. "ISAAA in Asia promoting corporate profits in the name of the poor," October 2000, in www.grain.org/publications/reports/isaaa.html.
4. The Monsanto terminator seed plans are described in "Monsanto Breaks Promise to Abandon Terminator Technology," April 23, 2003, http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/promise042403.cfm. "Biological warfare against crops," by Simon Whitby, reviewed in www.rainbowbody.net/Ongwhehonwhe/plantwar.htm notes the US use of Roundup against crops in Colombia. "Biological warfare emerges as 21st Century threat," by Mark Schwartz in Stanford Report, January 11, 2001, details the warnings of Block, a member of the top-secret Government research group, Jason. The US Air Force has published on the subject, "Biological Weapons for Waging Economic Warfare," by Lt. Col. Robert Kadlec who speaks of "using biological warfare to attack livestock, crops or ecosystems." In www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/battle/chp10.html, also www.sunshine-project.org/bwintro/gebw.html.
source: http://www.currentconcerns.ch/archive/2004/05/20040505.php 5mar2005
Seeds of Destruction:
The Geopolitics of GM Food
WILLIAM ENGDAHL / Current Concerns (Zurich) n.5, 6mar2005
In June 2003, President George W. Bush made the issue of lifting an 8-year European Union ban on genetically modified (GM) plants a matter of US national strategic priority. This came only days after the US occupation of Baghdad. The timing was not accidental. Since that time, EU resistance to GM plants has crumbled, as has that of Brazil, and other key agriculture producing nations. One year before, the future of GM crops was in doubt.
terminator seeds - Seeds of Destruction: The Geopolitics of GM Food WILLIAM ENGDAHL / Current Concerns WILLIAM ENGDAHL / Current Concerns (Zurich) n.5, 6mar2005
Now, some months and enormous pressure later, the strategists of GM food hegemony are on the verge of a control over the global human and animal food chain never held by any single nation or power.
The present debate over the nature of biotechnology and genetic modification of basic food such as maize or soybeans, misses the most essential point. The conversion of world agriculture by a small elite of biotech companies, most US-based, has little to do with corporate greed. It has very much to do with geopolitics and plans of some people to control world population growth over the coming decades.
The nature of American power projection in the world today rests on the development of key strategic advantages which no other combination of nations can challenge, what the Pentagon planners term, "full spectrum dominance." This includes global military dominance. It includes dominance of the world's limited, and rapidly depleting petroleum supplies. It includes control of the world's reserve currency, the dollar. And today it most definitely includes future control of world agriculture through control of GM patents and GM crops.
Before the end of the decade, if present trends continue, US global dominance will be based on control of the food supply of most of this planet, far more than military or even energy control. The geopolitical dimension of this prospect bears careful examination.
A Rockefeller Trojan horse
The agency at the center of the GM controversy is the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. Over the past decade, this influential private foundation has spent more than $100 million in sponsoring research and development of GM crops to be deployed in world food production. They have specifically targeted key developing nations in their effort.
More on Monsanto
Their public statements suggest noble motives: "The Rockefeller Foundation is a global foundation with a mandate and a commitment to enrich and sustain the lives of the poor and excluded throughout the world," said foundation president, Gordon Conway, in a 1999 speech to the Monsanto Company, the world's largest producer of GM seeds and pesticides. Conway cites as justification for the GM revolution in agriculture the projections of an added 2 billion people in the world by 2020, amid a decline in existing agriculture yields, and increased degradation of soils and ecology. All indications suggest this is not the real reason GM plants are being promoted with a fervor.
Over the past 18 years, the Rockefeller Foundation has played a decisive role worldwide in spreading the acceptance of radical practices of genetic modification to countries and laboratories where a direct US Government research program would be greeted with greatest suspicion. The Rockefeller Foundation is, in effect, the Trojan Horse of GM proliferation.
It has gained entry in key countries in part by selecting key scientists from select developing countries to be educated and trained in the US or other industrial countries under foundation programs and auspices. It has done this by funding GM research and by using its influence in government and other agencies and NGO's. To date more than 400 leading scientists from the Philippines to Thailand to Kenya to China have been trained and cultivated by the foundation.
The Rockefeller Foundation has a murky past, since its creation in 1914 out of the Rockefeller family Standard Oil Trust fortune. Well before 1945, the foundation had been a leading funder of eugenics research, work made infamous by the Nazi race purity experiments. This included Rockefeller support to the American Eugenics Society and the Population Council. As the race breeding policies of the German Third Reich came to light after the war, Rockefeller strategists shifted profile to champion the causes of environment, resource scarcity and over-population. The policy remained one of global population reduction. (1).
Kissinger and NSSM 200
Since more than a quarter century, Rockefeller Foundation energy has been focused on biotechnology and genetic engineering research and promotion. This comes after decades of involvement in various population control schemes for the developing world. There is no contradiction.
In 1972 President Nixon named foundation board member, John D. Rockefeller III, to chair a Presidential Commission on "Population and the American Future." The same Rockefeller created the Population Council in 1952, and openly called for "zero population growth."
Rockefeller's Commission on Population and the American Future laid the foundation for Henry Kissinger's National Security memorandum, NSSM 200, of April 1974, which cited population growth in strategic, raw materials rich developing countries as a US national security concern of the highest priority.
During the 1970's, when Kissinger was National Security Council director as well as Secretary of State, food and oil emerged as strategic US national security commodities. Kissinger initiated the controversial "oil-for-food" strategy in which a food-deficient USSR imported vast sums of US grain and paid it with large export of Soviet oil for dollars. US domestic oil production, outside Alaska, had peaked in 1970 and began a steady decline. The US was becoming increasingly an oil import nation. National security became tied to security of cheap imported oil, and food was a weapon in the US security arsenal from that time on. Kissinger's Cabinet colleague, Agriculture Secretary, Earl Butz, reflected the Kissinger policy when he stated, "Hungry men listen only to those who have a piece of bread. Food is a tool. It is a weapon in the US negotiating kit." Kissinger was then chief negotiator.
In 1974, Kissinger submitted the NSSM 200 memorandum to President Nixon, naming population growth in key raw-materials rich developing countries as, a US "national security threat." Since that time, control of economic growth rates and population growth in key developing countries has been US national security priority.
Kissinger owed his political career since the late 1950's to his stint as a researcher for the Rockefeller family, and owed his rise to power to their backing. The Rockefeller family had been at the center of US oil and raw materials geopolitics since early in the 1900's, when the Standard Oil Trust was built. Kissinger was well aware of the importance of food and energy to US national interests.
With Kissinger's NSSM 200, Washington official policy was to impose restrictions on fast-growing developing countries, policies which would significantly cut population growth. In NSSM 200, Kissinger implied that famine might be an effective way to reduce population: "…large-scale famine of a kind not experienced for several decades - a kind the world thought had been permanently banished," was foreseeable, he wrote. He remarked that the US and other donor countries would not be likely to provide necessary food export to the afflicted regions.
In 1975, Kissinger's successor as National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, later a Kissinger business partner, wrote, "United States leadership is essential to combat population growth, to implement the World Population Plan of Action and to advance United States security and overseas interests. The President endorses…NSSM 200…," Scowcroft added.
Kissinger's NSSM 200 document, classified secret and not made public until 1989, took estimates of world population growth to the end of the century and beyond, and the impact on the need for food and raw materials, notably energy. "Growing populations will have a serious impact on the need for food especially in the poorest, fastest growing LDC's," Kissinger stated. "World needs for food rise by 2.5% or more a year at a time when readily available fertilizer and well-watered land is already largely being utilized. Therefore, additions to food production must come from higher yields," the Government memo declared. It was at this time that the Rockefeller Foundation also began large research in genetic engineering of plants, including rice, ostensibly to raise yields.
With NSSM 200, Washington made implementation of population control programs a pre-condition for US financial aid, even famine relief. Washington ensured that birth reduction was adopted as official policy by the IMF, World Bank and the UN. Beginning the mid-1970's all IMF and World Bank aid to developing target countries was tied to their willingness to accept population control policies dictated by Washington.
NSSM 200 explicitly listed 13 countries as "key countries" in which the US held a "special political and strategic interest." These were: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand, Nigeria, Philippines, Turkey, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. Their population growth was deemed especially worrisome to US national interests, according to Kissinger. Notably, every key country has been subjected to major social, economic and military upheaval since 1974. US food aid, even in famine, was withheld from countries refusing to adopt US-mandated birth control or population reduction policies. (2).
NSSM 200 continues as unofficial US Government policy to the present day, despite public Bush Administration concessions to Catholic Right to Life groups. In this, the role of the Rockefeller Foundation is central to Washington policy regarding genetic engineering in world agriculture, especially that in key developing nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Rockefeller's GM proliferation network
In 1971 the Rockefeller Foundation, together with the Ford Foundation and the World Bank, established the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which runs 16 research centers around the world, most in developing countries, spending some $350 million annually. The focus of CGIAR is the spread of GM crops in the developing world.
CGIAR today operates under the umbrella of the World Bank, and has drawn 20 developing countries in as sponsors. World Bank aid is administered on the basis of a recipient agreeing to impose population control policies, the present form of NSSM 200, but with Washington officially in the background. Thus, the Rockefeller Foundation, World Bank, Monsanto and other agri-giants and the US Government, all meet under CGIAR auspices.
The CGIAR mission is to promote "sustainable agriculture for food security." To do this, CGIAR has used its funds and government influence to take control of one of the world's largest collections of plant genetic resources. CGIAR then makes the materials available to companies like Monsanto and Syngenta, "so that new gene combinations can be used to increase productivity, sustainably," as they state. In turn, CGIAR mobilizes biotechnology proliferation in developing countries. CGIAR trains the most promising national scientists and researchers in biotechnology, insuring that cadre of pro-GM national researchers will promote the spread of GM agriculture and biotechnology back home.
In addition to its role in establishing CGIAR, the Rockefeller Foundation has been a major donor to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications or ISAAA.
Every US President since George H.W. Bush in 1992, has made support of genetically engineered crops a matter of highest national priority. The example of US-AID backing for the Rockefeller Foundation's ISAAA is exemplary.
The ISAAA was originally founded with Rockefeller Brothers' Fund money for the sole purpose to "facilitate the delivery of proprietary biotechnologies from the corporate labs of the industrialized world into the food and farming systems of the South."
How this works becomes clear when the current financial sponsors of the ISAAA are known. In addition to the Rockefeller Foundation, sponsors include Monsanto (USA), Syngenta (Swiss), Dow AgroSciences (USA), Pioneer Hi-Bred (USA), Cargill (USA), Bayer CropScience (Germany), and a mysterious "Anonymous Donor "(USA), and US-AID of the State Department.
The argument of the institutions behind ISAAA is that the developing world is where a rising population makes growing food demand most acute, but where economic resources are least able to meet the needs. Hence, ISAAA enables the introduction of corporate GM technologies and crops from the industrial world into the South, acting as "honest brokers" in their words.
As the Kissinger NSSM 200 targeted 13 developing countries in 1974 for population reduction, the ISAAA targets 12 countries for introduction of GM crops. Six of these countries are the same as Kissinger listed in 1974: Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Egypt. In addition, ISAAA lists Malaysia, Vietnam, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Argentina and Costa Rica.
By their own admission, the ISAAA launches propaganda offensives to counter hostility to GM crops, and they train science elites from the target countries, often bringing them to USA or other leading GM research centers such as the Monsanto Life Sciences Research Center, to learn the world of GM elite research. Randy Hautea is head of the group's SEAsia Center in the Philippines, based in the center established by the Rockefeller Foundation's International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).
Hautea recently stated that his group has targeted Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam because, "they all have the political will to pursue and adopt biotechnology applications." What Hautea did not say was that introduction of GM seeds means introduction of costly GM pesticides and other policies which only global agribusiness companies are able to carry out.
Food production of target countries is being transformed into the global agribusiness market, not longer available for national food security. Hautea does not say how biotechnology brought in to, say, Indonesia or Malaysia by Syngenta or Monsanto, contributes to the benefit of small farmers, the heart of their food production. To date, in fact, there exists no proof of any benefit from GM crops for family farmers. In fact the opposite is the case. Farmers are often coerced or forced to buy Monsanto GM seeds or other GM seeds by their governments.
Through ISAAA and related networks of organizations, the Rockefeller Foundation is at the center of the worldwide actions of Monsanto, DuPont, Cargill and Dow Agri-sciences, Syngenta, Bayer AG and other major biotech giants, dominating the ongoing "new Green Revolution" as Rockefeller's Conway terms it. (3).
Spreading the GM control
The list of major GM plants today includes GM rice, soybeans, corn, oilseeds, and numerous other basic food crops. The Rockefeller Foundation has played a key fostering role in the development of most major new types.
More than 70% of all processed foods Americans consume comes today from GM products. Almost all the animal feed used to feed cattle, and other animals in the US and in major world markets today is GM feed, mainly soymeal and corn.
Most Americans are ignorant of what they eat. The US government has refused to label food that contains GM inputs. A new EU food labelling law also does not require producers to identify animal products fed on GM feed, leaving consumers ignorant of what GM products they eat. In 2003, the total acreage planted to GM seeds worldwide was 167 million acres or 68 million hectares according to ISAAA data. This was a 15% rise in one year. The United States is the largest GM grower with 106 million acres of genetically modified soybeans, corn and cotton. Worldwide, 55% of all soybeans grown now are GM crops. Soymeal is one of the most essential and richest protein sources for animal and human consumption. Every bite of a McDonald's hamburger contains as much as 30% of GM soyameal.
Without even realizing, most people in North America, East Asia and Europe regularly eat products or animals fed from GM crops. What is most remarkable is the fact that farmers in North America, Australia, Argentina, and more recently after a long battle, in Brazil, have surrendered their control over seeds to a handful of multinational biotech giants who have a deliberate strategy to dominate and control the planting of basic food crops worldwide.
The terminator not dead
If emerging nations from China to India to Indonesia and beyond, were to manage to create a food self-sufficiency independent of reliance on US or OECD food suppliers, the ability of the United States to remain the dominant power would diminish, regardless of military might.
What better way to control the destiny of China, India, East Asia and the rest of the world than to establish permanent control over their ability to grow food? Enter Monsanto and the agriculture biotechnology cartel, who dominate GM crops globally. Just two years ago it seemed Monsanto might be headed into financial ruin. Today, it is on the verge of becoming the one of the single most powerful corporations in the world.
Interestingly, it was the direct intervention of the Rockefeller Foundation in October 1999, which was responsible for the widely-touted decision of Monsanto "not to commercialize" its 'terminator technology' for GM seeds. Monsanto president Robert Shapiro wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation that it would "shelve" or put on hold its "sterile seed" technology, formally called Genetic Use Restriction Technology (GURT). The Monsanto decision was a tactical ploy, taken on advice of Rockefeller's Conway, to defulse growing opposition to GM crops, especially in Europe. Monsanto's terminator seed technology, in which the US Department of Agriculture also holds part patent rights, has been called the ultimate weapon, the 'neutron bomb' of agriculture, rightly so.
Terminator seeds would solve a major problem for Monsanto and other GM giants in collecting seed fees in the developing world for patented GM seeds, something made possible a few years ago by GATT trade talks on patent rights.
Free trade in agriculture is today at the heart of the WTO. Under the treaty of the World Trade Organization, created by the GATT Uruguay trade round in the early 1990's, multinational corporations now have the right, enforced by WTO sanctions, to collect royalty payments for "intellectual property."
The Uruguay agreement, ratified by all GATT member countries under enormous US pressure, allows a corporation for the first time, to patent a specific plant variety, even though that plant sort might have been in the public domain in a country such as Pakistan or Peru for thousands of years. The WTO term is Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, TRIPs. Washington pushed the controversial TRIPs agreement through GATT, accusing developing countries of 'piracy' in not paying due royalties to multinationals, claiming US companies were losing hundreds on millions in unpaid fees for fertilizer and seeds or drugs. Mickey Kantor, US Trade Representative who negotiated the Uruguay Round talks, today sits on the board of Monsanto.
The TRIPs WTO agreement includes patent rights on GM plants. Under TRIPs the Swiss agri-tech company, Syngenta, holds control potentially of most of the rice in Pakistan, India and Asia. Monsanto dominates patents on soybeans, corn, cotton and other major crops. Their only problem is how to collect royalty payments from millions of small peasant farmers. Collecting patent payments for GM seeds in many developing countries is extremely difficult.
Not so, if terminator seeds are sold. Terminator technology, which Monsanto paid $1.6 billion to acquire, allows introduction of a 'suicide gene' into plants such as corn or cotton or soya or potentially, even wheat. A farmer using terminator seeds no longer will be able to share seeds with other farmers or plant his own in following years. He will be forced to turn to Monsanto each season to buy his existence, in the form of more suicide seeds, as well as the special herbicides Monsanto has developed to be used with it. The original developers of terminator technology, Delta & Pine Land Seed, which Monsanto bought in 1998, specifically noted that the rice and wheat markets of China, India, Pakistan and such major population countries was the target of terminator. The political implications of such a development are easy to imagine.
Rockefeller Foundation funds vaccines with hidden birth-control hormones
The Rockefeller Foundation is among the funders of a WHO program in "reproductive health" which has developed a tetanus vaccine that allegedly contains hidden birth-control hormones.
According to a report from the Global Vaccine Institute, the WHO has overseen massive vaccination campaigns against tetanus in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines since the early 1990's. Comite Pro Vida de Mexico, a Catholic organization, tested numerous vials of the vaccine and found them to contain human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG), a natural hormone needed to maintain a pregnancy. When combined with a tetanus toxoid carrier, it stimulates formation of antibodies against hCG, rendering a woman incapable of maintaining a pregnancy. Similar reports of vaccines laced with hCG hormones have come from the Philippines and Nicaragua.
The organization confirmed several other curious facts about the WHO vaccination programs. Tetanus vaccine was given only to women, between ages 15-45, not men or children. The presence of hCG is a clear contamination of the vaccine. It does not belong. With financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, the Population Council, Ford Foundation, among others, the WHO has been working for 20 years to develop an anti-fertility vaccine using hCG with tetanus and other vaccines, according to scientific articles published on the effort by WHO. This has been documented by WHO and others, including the respected British medical journal, The Lancet, June 11, 1988, "Clinical Trials of a WHO Borth Control Vaccine."
To mid-1993 the WHO had spent a total of $365 million of such research funds on "reproductive health" including research on implanting hCG into tetanus vaccine. WHO has been unable to answer why women vaccinated were found with anti-hCG antibodies. They feebly replied it was "insignificant." The vaccine was produced by Connaught Laboratories Ltd of Canada and Intervex and CSL Laboratories of Australia.
Since the 1920's the Rockefeller Foundation has been among the leading sponsors of population reduction programs worldwide. If the reports of birth control vaccines are true, it is not difficult to suspect the Rockefeller Foundation is also among those planning to use genetically modified seeds technology as a potential means to control world population growth through future control of food supply.
The Rockefeller-Monsanto public relations maneuver "not to commercialize" terminator seeds was clearly designed to defuse growing opposition to proliferation of GM seeds, to buy time while allowing them to spread GM crops to the world's largest growing areas - North America, Argentina, Brazil and now, the EU. Once spread, it is simple to shift to terminator.
In February 2003, at a meeting of the International Seed Federation in Lyon France, Monsanto's Roger Krueger released a paper titled, "The Benefits of GURTs." It argued that terminator in fact would benefit poor farmers. Monsanto argues in a new ploy, that terminator would in fact hinder spread of unwanted GM genes to non-GM plants, promoting the same idea in new clothes as a "biosafety" tool. Clearly they believe opposition to terminator and GM is falling. Reports are that Monsanto would be ready to introduce commercial terminator or GURT seeds in 3-4 years.
Dual use and GM crops: Biowarfare?
The days are long past when the USDA represented the interests of America's family farmers. Today, US agri-business, dominated by a dozen or more giant international concerns, is the second most profitable industry next to pharmaceuticals, and has annual value of well over $800 billion. The USDA today is the organized lobby of agri-business giants, none more influential than Monsanto. Bush Administration official, Ann Veneman, USDA Secretary, is a former board member of a Monsanto company and, not surprisingly, a strong advocate of GM. Several other Bush officials have ties to Monsanto as well.
Terminator and related GM technologies in the hands of Monsanto and less than half-a-dozen corporations worldwide, backed by the USDA, Defense Department and State Department, could open the door to potential forms of biological warfare against entire populations not imagined before. A recent US Air Force study states that "biological weapons offer greater possibilities for use than do nuclear weapons."
Washington US-AID food assistance for Africa in recent months has been linked to willingness of a country to accept US GM crops. US assistance to combat AIDS in Africa has similar strings. GM has clearly become a strategic, geopolitical tool for Washington.
Defenders of GM technology argue that no one in their right mind would consider such a drastic use of GM crops as to control entire areas of world food supply. "We're tempted to say that nobody in their right mind would ever use these things." Stanford biology professor Steven Block stated in another context. Block hastened to add, "But not everybody is in their right mind!" Block, a leading consultant to the US Government, went on to warn, "Any technology that can be used to insert genes into DNA can be used for either good or bad." Genetic engineering can create rice with enhanced vitamin A, but can just as well create seeds containing highly toxic bacteria. US researchers first did this in 1986. Genetic engineering of more toxic and harder to detect bioweapons was a major motivation for nations to call for a stronger convention on bioweapons.
The US Government's controversial drug eradication program in Colombia, since discontinued, would spray crops with deadly glyphosate. Glyphosate, under the patent name, Roundup, is the GM herbicide sold by Monsanto also for its GM plants. The Bush Administration has repeatedly refused to back a legally binding Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, arguing it needs the freedom to develop defense against biowarfare. Freedom can work both ways however.
Genetic manipulation opens the possibilities in the hands of a malevolent power, to unleash untold harm on the human species. Even were it to be the case that GM plants increase yields, which is not at all proven, this potential for control of the food supply of entire nations is too much power to give to any single corporation or government. Essential foods, like fresh water, are no ordinary commodities to be sold under rules of an imposed free market. They are basic human rights as the right to breathe. We should not tempt any government with the power that present GM strategists advocate over our food security.
References
1. B.K. Eakman, "The Cloning of the American Mind," gives information on Rockefeller Foundation funding of eugenics.
s. Jim Heron, "Population Politics and the Shambles of Africa in http://catholiceducation.org/articles/population/pc0005.html.
2. National Security Strategy Memorandum, NSSM 200, "Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests," National Security Council, April 24, 1974, Henry Kissinger, director, National Security Council. "The Over-population cabal" in Mindszenty Report, Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, April 1999, www.mindszenty.org.report/1999/April1999.html .
3. "ISAAA in Asia promoting corporate profits in the name of the poor," October 2000, in www.grain.org/publications/reports/isaaa.html.
4. The Monsanto terminator seed plans are described in "Monsanto Breaks Promise to Abandon Terminator Technology," April 23, 2003, http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/promise042403.cfm. "Biological warfare against crops," by Simon Whitby, reviewed in www.rainbowbody.net/Ongwhehonwhe/plantwar.htm notes the US use of Roundup against crops in Colombia. "Biological warfare emerges as 21st Century threat," by Mark Schwartz in Stanford Report, January 11, 2001, details the warnings of Block, a member of the top-secret Government research group, Jason. The US Air Force has published on the subject, "Biological Weapons for Waging Economic Warfare," by Lt. Col. Robert Kadlec who speaks of "using biological warfare to attack livestock, crops or ecosystems." In www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/battle/chp10.html, also www.sunshine-project.org/bwintro/gebw.html.
source: http://www.currentconcerns.ch/archive/2004/05/20040505.php 5mar2005
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