Suit Over Legal Aid Advances in New York- This bears Watching it May help Parents who need Council when their children are stolen
May 7, 2010yvonnemason
Suit Over Legal Aid Advances in New York
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
Published: May 6, 2010
New York’s highest court ruled Thursday that a broad class-action suit challenging the state’s system of providing public defenders can move forward because there are enough signs that the system is failing poor people.
Related
Top New York Judge Urges Greater Legal Rights for the Poor (May 4, 2010)
Top Judge Sets Liberal Course for New York (February 18, 2010)
Times Topic: Jonathan Lippman
The 4-to-3 ruling by the State Court of Appeals came in a closely watched suit that civil liberties lawyers said could be a model for similar challenges across the country. It also set the stage for a sweeping battle in the courts and perhaps the Legislature.
Written by the state’s chief judge, Jonathan Lippman, the ruling said the suit, which had been bitterly opposed by the state, could proceed because it posed fundamental questions about the fairness of the criminal justice system.
“Wrongful conviction, the ultimate sign of a criminal justice system’s breakdown and failure, has been documented in too many cases,” the decision said.
The ruling was something of a milestone after decades of reports and findings by state commissions that New York’s locally financed system for meeting the constitutional requirement to provide lawyers for indigent defendants, which varies greatly by county, is inadequate, with inattentive, unavailable, poorly trained and supervised lawyers handling huge caseloads. In many counties, the ruling noted, poor defendants are routinely arraigned without lawyers at all during initial appearances, where bail is set and many defendants are sent to jail.
The way is now cleared for a trial or a settlement by New York, as has been the result in several other states that have faced such challenges. There have been similar class-action challenges over public defense systems in states like Connecticut, Indiana, Minnesota and Montana that have ended with inconsistent decisions and settlements. Last month, the Michigan Supreme Court permitted a similar challenge to proceed.
By some estimates, the improvements sought by the civil liberties lawyers could cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars.
“Nearly 50 years after the Supreme Court held that criminal defendants have a right to meaningful counsel, the state’s highest court has held that New York may well be violating that right every day,” said Daniel Greenberg, a lawyer at Schulte Roth & Zabel, which filed the suit with the New York Civil Liberties Union. Mr. Greenberg was referring to the landmark 1963 Supreme Court ruling, Gideon v. Wainwright, that declared poor people facing criminal charges have the right to a lawyer.
Gov. David A. Paterson’s office released a statement saying it was reviewing the decision. But the statement also noted that at an event with Judge Lippman on Monday, Mr. Paterson spoke publicly about working with him to improve public defender services in the state.
“We both agree that the current system is a disgrace,” the governor said at the event.
The suit was filed in the name of a Rochester woman, Kimberly Hurell-Harring, and 19 other people who were facing criminal charges in five counties: Onondaga, Ontario, Schuyler, Suffolk and Washington.
Ms. Hurell-Harring claimed that a public defender in Washington County, near the Vermont border, did little for her but pressure her to plead guilty after a felony arrest for trying to sneak marijuana to her husband, who was in prison.
The state fought the case, claiming it would be a judicial invasion of the authority of the Legislature and the governor. The three-judge dissent written by Judge Eugene F. Pigott Jr. echoed that argument. It acknowledged that “there is no doubt that there are inadequacies in the delivery of indigent legal services” but said that such a complaint should be addressed to the Legislature.
The majority decision said “there is a considerable risk that indigent defendants are, with a fair degree of regularity, being denied constitutionally mandated counsel” in the five counties, in every part of the state, named in the suit.
The state’s defender system consists of Legal Aid societies, private lawyers who are appointed by the courts and local public defender offices. With more than 80 percent of defendants facing criminal charges unable to afford to pay for lawyers, public defender systems have come to define most criminal-justice systems in the United States.
Generally in the criminal-justice system, defendants who claim they were not adequately represented must wait to make that argument in an appeal after a conviction. But the civil liberties lawyers in New York argued that a broad review was necessary in a class-action case because case-by-case appeals did not address systemic failings.
Law enforcement officials were divided over the class-action suit. Some prosecutors said the case overstated the problems with public defender programs, while others said poorly financed defender programs undermined the credibility of the entire criminal-justice system.
Mr. Paterson has proposed legislation that would create an Office of Indigent Defense to evaluate the current system. The bill would also provide a modest $7 million increase in state subsidies.
Last year, the Legislature passed a law intended to limit defenders’ caseloads inside New York City, where on average Legal Aid lawyers each handle more than 700 cases a year.
The 4-to-3 decision on Thursday was the latest in a series of liberal rulings by the state’s top court under Judge Lippman, who was appointed last year and has taken the court in a new direction with rulings that have been notably sympathetic to environmental, civil liberties and criminal-defense arguments.
As in numerous other rulings from the Lippman court, which has a majority of judges appointed by Republican governors, the judges voted along party lines, with one defection joining with the three Democratic-appointed judges to form a majority. Judge Victoria A. Graffeo, appointed by Gov. George E. Pataki, voted with the three Democratic judges in the majority.
http://protectingourchildrenfrombeingsold.wordpress.com/2010/05/07/suit-over-legal-aid-advances-in-new-york-this-bears-watching-it-may-help-parents-who-need-council-when-their-children-are-stolen/
Isabella Brooke Knightly and Austin Gamez-Knightly
In Memory of my Loving Husband, William F. Knightly Jr. Murdered by ILLEGAL Palliative Care at a Nashua, NH Hospital
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Great News! D.C. lays off child welfare workers
D.C. lays off child welfare workers
Good, Get rid of all of them!
More than 100 employees of the District's child welfare agency lost their jobs Thursday in a wave of layoffs prompted by citywide budget cuts and plans to restructure some jobs at the Child and Family Services Agency.
Social worker aides, who play a vital support role at the agency, were among the hardest hit with all 57 of them losing their jobs.
Social workers said the cuts would cripple the agency's work.
The agency plans to create a new position with higher qualifications to replace the social worker aides.
But even after the hires across the agency, it will be at least 52 positions short of current staffing levels.
-- Henri Cauvin
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/local-breaking-news/dc/dc-lays-off-child-welfare-work.html
Good, Get rid of all of them!
More than 100 employees of the District's child welfare agency lost their jobs Thursday in a wave of layoffs prompted by citywide budget cuts and plans to restructure some jobs at the Child and Family Services Agency.
Social worker aides, who play a vital support role at the agency, were among the hardest hit with all 57 of them losing their jobs.
Social workers said the cuts would cripple the agency's work.
The agency plans to create a new position with higher qualifications to replace the social worker aides.
But even after the hires across the agency, it will be at least 52 positions short of current staffing levels.
-- Henri Cauvin
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/local-breaking-news/dc/dc-lays-off-child-welfare-work.html
Important Message From Cheryl Boyer- Abuse Freedom United
Abuse Freedom United
www.abusefreedom.com
803 438 8119
CPS wins!!!!
If you listen to the Nay Sayers, This will be the headline instead of Federal Government moves to reform CPS nationwide. We know that it seems too good to be true that the government is at last paying attention to the voices that decry the policies of the CPS. Our attempt to gather documented stories of the atrocities committed by the various Children Protection agencies and the large body of parasitic individuals that feed on the results of the actions of the CPS,
There appear to be many that disbelieve this assertion directing individuals to follow their lead and do as they say.
We do not know if these individuals are actually the voice of CPS or if they are looking for a power trip by appearing to be in charge. We do know that we must all work together
We at Abuse Freedom United are only looking at changing a corrupt system that is endangering the lives of our children. We are not on a power trip. We have no paid members. We have no budget. We only have a burning desire to stop these atrocious agencies.
We need for everyone to think of this as building a bridge
To freedom for all the children who are prisoners of this horrible corruption that is happening in our country.
At this time it seems everyone is being divided by someone, something or what is happening? Remember†united we win, separated we lose.â€
Is someone promising you a miracle?
Only God can do that!
We have to build a grass roots membership with everyone in this, we all need to use the Rally in Washington DC this year to do it.
AS many people as possible need to attend it in great forces to show the number of people affected by this horrible corrupt entity known as child protection.
Cheryl Boyer /founder-President
www.abusefreedom.com
803 438 8119
www.abusefreedom.com
803 438 8119
CPS wins!!!!
If you listen to the Nay Sayers, This will be the headline instead of Federal Government moves to reform CPS nationwide. We know that it seems too good to be true that the government is at last paying attention to the voices that decry the policies of the CPS. Our attempt to gather documented stories of the atrocities committed by the various Children Protection agencies and the large body of parasitic individuals that feed on the results of the actions of the CPS,
There appear to be many that disbelieve this assertion directing individuals to follow their lead and do as they say.
We do not know if these individuals are actually the voice of CPS or if they are looking for a power trip by appearing to be in charge. We do know that we must all work together
We at Abuse Freedom United are only looking at changing a corrupt system that is endangering the lives of our children. We are not on a power trip. We have no paid members. We have no budget. We only have a burning desire to stop these atrocious agencies.
We need for everyone to think of this as building a bridge
To freedom for all the children who are prisoners of this horrible corruption that is happening in our country.
At this time it seems everyone is being divided by someone, something or what is happening? Remember†united we win, separated we lose.â€
Is someone promising you a miracle?
Only God can do that!
We have to build a grass roots membership with everyone in this, we all need to use the Rally in Washington DC this year to do it.
AS many people as possible need to attend it in great forces to show the number of people affected by this horrible corrupt entity known as child protection.
Cheryl Boyer /founder-President
www.abusefreedom.com
803 438 8119
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Fighting a broken heart to keep a broken family together
Fighting a broken heart to keep a broken family together
unhappygrammy-There is NO such thing as "Family Preservation"
SANDY BANKS
L.A. County's foster care system loses a safety net
Candie Sampson is trying to persuade L.A. County's Department of Children and Family Services that she should be allowed to raise her sister's four children, who are in foster care.
By Sandy Banks
May 6, 2010
A decade ago, every column I wrote about foster care yielded a torrent of phone calls, letters and messages from parents and social workers, carrying tales of heartless treatment, mindless judgments, unfair and unbending regulations.
The torrent slowed to a trickle over the years -- a sign of more enlightened leadership and fewer children in foster care?
Not if you listen to Candie Sampson, who wrote in response to my Saturday column on cuts to the county's child advocate system.
"Broken Heart -- Broken System -- Broken Children" the subject line in her e-mail read.
» Don't miss a thing. Get breaking news alerts delivered to your inbox.
The broken heart is hers.
The broken system, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services.
And the broken children would be her sister's four kids.
::
Sampson has an MBA, a university job, a construction-worker husband and a 1-year-old son. She spent part of her teen years in foster care. She and her sister didn't meet their father until they were adults and found him on Facebook.
Two years ago, DCFS took her sister's children away because of drug use and domestic violence, Sampson said. The children were placed with their father's mother, who died unexpectedly last month.
Sampson relayed the news to social workers, then brought the children to her two-bedroom Huntington Beach apartment.
She bought each child a bed from IKEA. "My husband assembled them that night," she said. Two days later, a social worker came by for an "assessment." Sampson opened her life to prying eyes.
"I informed social services that I want for the kids to remain with my family," she said. And I informed [the social worker] that my husband has a criminal background, due to an addiction in his past. … We completed all the paperwork, provided letters of character references and went to be fingerprinted in less than 24 hours."
Then she waited -- not very patiently, I might add -- through three weeks of "no one talking to me," she said.
She had no standing in the system; the children's stay was considered an "extended visitation" not a "placement," social workers said.
Her apartment wasn't big enough, with just two bedrooms for seven people. And her husband needed a "criminal clearance."
She began looking for a bigger place and pushing the children's social worker to seek a waiver that would clear her husband, who has not used drugs in six years, she said.
"I call her every day all day," Sampson told me. "I leave messages and do not get return calls. I have to keep calling and hope that she answers the phone."
Sampson had spent years as a paid advocate for disabled college students. In that world, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the students get services they need.
In this world of caseworkers and court orders, the squeaky wheel just gets extra scrutiny.
Sampson got a Monday-morning call from a DCFS supervisor, who promised to keep her in the loop, she said. Then she refused to take Sampson's calls.
By Tuesday night, three of the kids were gone. The 5- and 7-year-olds were placed together, and the 4-year-old went to a separate home, she said. He was crying when he left; she had to coax him out of his hiding place under the bed.
"The social workers won't tell me where they are," Sampson said. They did tell her to have the 14-year-old ready on Thursday to go.
» Don't miss a thing. Get breaking news alerts delivered to your inbox.
Confidentiality provisions won't let DCFS officials talk to me about the Sampson matter. Jackie Contreras, chief deputy director, would acknowledge only that rules about criminal records and housing requirements might have ruled them out as foster parents.
It's easy to imagine that Sampson's attitude may have rankled social workers. Who wants to deal every day with one pushy woman, when you have 40 other families with problems?
Was she dumped because she was tough to deal with? I asked Contreras.
"I'm not going to dismiss the human dynamics that occur in these kinds of situations, but that shouldn't happen," Contreras said.
Because DCFS policies favor family placements, more than half the children removed from their parents wind up living with relatives. Finger-pointing and personal feuds often come with the territory.
"These are very challenging cases. … We make an effort to listen to everybody, but it doesn't always happen," Contreras said.
If they listened to Sampson, I wonder what social workers heard: An overbearing woman willing to put kids at risk because she thinks she's above the rules? Or a loving aunt trying to cushion the pain of children who need security?
"I just wanted to keep the children from going to strangers," Sampson told me Tuesday afternoon, sobbing at all that was going wrong.
By Wednesday, things were looking better. She had found a three-bedroom apartment, with a convertible den for the fourth. And she connected with the children's lawyer; he might be willing to challenge the new placements in court.
"I'm angry, I'm upset, I'm hurt. But I'm not stopping," Sampson said. "These children are my family. I don't want them to think I'm giving up on them."
sandy.banks@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-banks-20100506-18,0,5643857.column
unhappygrammy-There is NO such thing as "Family Preservation"
SANDY BANKS
L.A. County's foster care system loses a safety net
Candie Sampson is trying to persuade L.A. County's Department of Children and Family Services that she should be allowed to raise her sister's four children, who are in foster care.
By Sandy Banks
May 6, 2010
A decade ago, every column I wrote about foster care yielded a torrent of phone calls, letters and messages from parents and social workers, carrying tales of heartless treatment, mindless judgments, unfair and unbending regulations.
The torrent slowed to a trickle over the years -- a sign of more enlightened leadership and fewer children in foster care?
Not if you listen to Candie Sampson, who wrote in response to my Saturday column on cuts to the county's child advocate system.
"Broken Heart -- Broken System -- Broken Children" the subject line in her e-mail read.
» Don't miss a thing. Get breaking news alerts delivered to your inbox.
The broken heart is hers.
The broken system, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services.
And the broken children would be her sister's four kids.
::
Sampson has an MBA, a university job, a construction-worker husband and a 1-year-old son. She spent part of her teen years in foster care. She and her sister didn't meet their father until they were adults and found him on Facebook.
Two years ago, DCFS took her sister's children away because of drug use and domestic violence, Sampson said. The children were placed with their father's mother, who died unexpectedly last month.
Sampson relayed the news to social workers, then brought the children to her two-bedroom Huntington Beach apartment.
She bought each child a bed from IKEA. "My husband assembled them that night," she said. Two days later, a social worker came by for an "assessment." Sampson opened her life to prying eyes.
"I informed social services that I want for the kids to remain with my family," she said. And I informed [the social worker] that my husband has a criminal background, due to an addiction in his past. … We completed all the paperwork, provided letters of character references and went to be fingerprinted in less than 24 hours."
Then she waited -- not very patiently, I might add -- through three weeks of "no one talking to me," she said.
She had no standing in the system; the children's stay was considered an "extended visitation" not a "placement," social workers said.
Her apartment wasn't big enough, with just two bedrooms for seven people. And her husband needed a "criminal clearance."
She began looking for a bigger place and pushing the children's social worker to seek a waiver that would clear her husband, who has not used drugs in six years, she said.
"I call her every day all day," Sampson told me. "I leave messages and do not get return calls. I have to keep calling and hope that she answers the phone."
Sampson had spent years as a paid advocate for disabled college students. In that world, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the students get services they need.
In this world of caseworkers and court orders, the squeaky wheel just gets extra scrutiny.
Sampson got a Monday-morning call from a DCFS supervisor, who promised to keep her in the loop, she said. Then she refused to take Sampson's calls.
By Tuesday night, three of the kids were gone. The 5- and 7-year-olds were placed together, and the 4-year-old went to a separate home, she said. He was crying when he left; she had to coax him out of his hiding place under the bed.
"The social workers won't tell me where they are," Sampson said. They did tell her to have the 14-year-old ready on Thursday to go.
» Don't miss a thing. Get breaking news alerts delivered to your inbox.
Confidentiality provisions won't let DCFS officials talk to me about the Sampson matter. Jackie Contreras, chief deputy director, would acknowledge only that rules about criminal records and housing requirements might have ruled them out as foster parents.
It's easy to imagine that Sampson's attitude may have rankled social workers. Who wants to deal every day with one pushy woman, when you have 40 other families with problems?
Was she dumped because she was tough to deal with? I asked Contreras.
"I'm not going to dismiss the human dynamics that occur in these kinds of situations, but that shouldn't happen," Contreras said.
Because DCFS policies favor family placements, more than half the children removed from their parents wind up living with relatives. Finger-pointing and personal feuds often come with the territory.
"These are very challenging cases. … We make an effort to listen to everybody, but it doesn't always happen," Contreras said.
If they listened to Sampson, I wonder what social workers heard: An overbearing woman willing to put kids at risk because she thinks she's above the rules? Or a loving aunt trying to cushion the pain of children who need security?
"I just wanted to keep the children from going to strangers," Sampson told me Tuesday afternoon, sobbing at all that was going wrong.
By Wednesday, things were looking better. She had found a three-bedroom apartment, with a convertible den for the fourth. And she connected with the children's lawyer; he might be willing to challenge the new placements in court.
"I'm angry, I'm upset, I'm hurt. But I'm not stopping," Sampson said. "These children are my family. I don't want them to think I'm giving up on them."
sandy.banks@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-banks-20100506-18,0,5643857.column
Texas CPS Caseworker Sexual Assault 14 YO Child in CPS Custody, Police Investigation 2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWruzDtZ9GE
FDA Abuse Reminiscent of Family Court Abuse
FDA Abuse Reminiscent of Family Court Abuse
Written by: Chris
From Angiemedia
Share
Use of Our Content (Reposting and Quoting)
May 4th, 2010
We sometimes get emails from our readers asking about the mix of information on our web site. Some readers wonder why we write about topics that seemingly have nothing to do with each other. Many of our readers are interested in the family law abuse and judicial corruption stories, others appreciate the coverage of health topics, and yet others find the stories about police abuse tactics match their own experiences. But what do they all have in common? The answer is they are all tied together by the involvement of government in abusing its duties to the public to uphold the law, avoiding conflicts of interest and bias, and staying away from corruption. In this article, I’ll be comparing examples of what I’ve learned about the abusive conduct of the FDA with the abusive conduct of family law courts. They are both excellent examples of how the United States has strayed a long distance down a very dark road that leads to becoming an abusive totalitarian state that views its citizens as slaves to be controlled for its own profit and power.
Violating Civil and Human Rights For Job Security, Power, and Profit
We prominently feature stories of abuse, corruption, and persecution by out of control government intent on building job security and power by crushing opponents and inventing fictional “crimes” and “crises” to “justify” their abuses and budgets. They commonly do all of this and more not only in violation of the law but also against any reasonable norm for moral and ethical behaviors for governments and government employees. While our readers may be familiar with the pattern of government abuse and corruption in their own experiences or those of family and friends who have been badly harmed by it, they may not be familiar with similar trangressions in other areas.
How the patterns of corruption and abuse in family law are very similar to those in other areas of government misconduct was recently driven home to me by a fascinating and rather upsetting book. I just finished reading a collection of essays on the US Food and Drug Administration entitled FDA: Failure, Deception, Abuse collected from about 14 years of the writings by the Life Extension Foundation. Alerting the public about FDA misconduct is just one of the many services this organization performs. I realized that several of the articles included in this book describe the same sorts of themes and violations of free speech laws, corrupt alignment of government officials with the interests of greedy and unethical parties, and total disregard for the interests of children and families that often appear in tales of broken family law courts and the malicious police actions they drive.
While it may appear at a glance that healthcare abuse and family abuse have nothing in common, they are really quite similar in many ways. Once you realize that the differences are mostly the players involved and the precise subject matter, you can see the tactics used by abusive government against its targets are often alike. In corrupt family law courts, you see judges and government agencies like CPS aligning with lawyers, service providers, psychological evaluators, and more to pad each other’s pockets by persecuting families. This book shows how in the FDA’s case, the players are the corrupt FDA and large pharmaceutical companies that align to pad each other’s pockets by covering up dangerous drugs, creating monopolies to drive up drug prices, and censoring important health information that could inexpensively save hundreds of thousands of lives and tens of billions of dollars per year in the US alone.
Family Law Judges and FDA Share Dislike for First Amendment
Both family law judges and their allies and the FDA and its allies attempt to use illegal violations of First Amendment protected free speech to silence their critics. Family law judges often threaten parents to shut up about their misconduct or the criminal actions of the other parent under threat of being banned from seeing their children. Yet what these parents are doing is not illegal, usually has significant basis in fact, and often is something they do only after being shown repeatedly how they will never get any justice in biased and corrupt family law courts. What the judges threaten as retaliation will definitely harm the children, so the motivations for doing this are questionable even if there was an ounce of legitimacy to the legal arguments.
Likewise, the FDA threatens companies and individuals who make factual claims backed by scientific evidence that support them and bans their products, arrests their employees, raids their facilities and seizes their products, and uses what amounts to government sponsored terrorism to ruin these people. That the information they are spreading and products they are selling are not harmful and in fact may be beneficial to millions of people is irrelevant to the FDA. They can see only the threat to their power and control and want to quash the messengers, just like corrupt family law judges do.
Family Law Judges and FDA Solicit Police Abuse
Both the family and juvenile law system and the FDA system employ abusive police actions with search warrants, false arrests, paramilitary actions, and intimidation designed to silence anybody who does not mindlessly obey their abusive and illegal orders. Tick off a family law judge or an FDA employee and you may find yourself staring at dozens of guns pointed in your face or being handcuffed and taken away by a jack-booted government law enforcement agent who follows illegal orders just like German soldiers once followed the genocidal commands of Nazi leaders.
Judicial Abuse by San Diego Family Law Judges Manipulating Police
As an example of family law judicial abuse using police powers for political purposes, take the case of California Coalition for Families and Children (CCFC) co-founder and president Cole Stuart. Stuart has been suffering from what appear to be biased and prejudicial rulings that violate the rights of his son and him. These were issued by San Diego Superior Court Judge Lisa Schall, an ill-reputed judge who is known for being in rehab for drunk reckless driving and for disciplinary action for repeated past judicial misconduct. In yet another example of how ridiculously abusive family law courts are, it appears that Schall’s collegue-in-court-crime Judge Christine Goldsmith stuck a temporary restraining order on Stuart per the request of his ex-wife, TV news reporter Lynn Stuart. She’s allegedly a malicious mom displaying behaviors indicative of Borderline Personality Disorder and engaging in parental alienation tactics to destroy the relationship between her son and his father. She claimed she was being harassed by annoying phone calls and stalking. As is common practice, the judge issued the order without any chance for defense, typical for judges like her.
Cole Stuart has explained that he tried to communicate with his ex via email to set up times for him to talk with their son on the phone but hasn’t talked with her on the phone because she blocks attempts to call, even when he just wants to talk with their son. The San Diego family law judges then apparently used the TRO as an enabler for politically motivated harassment. When they learned on April 14 that he and his CCFC group would be protesting against family court injustices on April 15, 2010, they got City Attorney Jan Goldsmith (the judge’s husband) to request an arrest warrant for him that day, even though the TRO was not yet served on him. Through apparently dishonest manipulation, they made the arrest warrant appear for a felony to allow for arrest during the protest when in actuality such “crimes” would be at most a misdemeanor. When he was sighted during the protest, the family law judges arranged for their allies in the San Diego County Bar Association to have their private security guards falsely arrest him during the protest and hand him over to police waiting outside, even though the protesters were not violating any laws and were well-behaved. The aim appears to be to shut up political enemies of the court and to intimidate them. After all, if reputable attorney Cole Stuart can be mistreated like this, will any protester be safe from abuse by San Diego family law judges?
Freedom of Speech Abuse and Harassment by FDA Threatening Police Actions
Likewise, when the FDA decides they don’t like a message, they have their own ways to shut up the messengers via harassment. For instance, cherry growers published references to information that cherries contain some compounds that can be beneficial to health as shown by various scientific studies. This upset the FDA, so they resorted to a variety of tactics as shown in the March 2006 article FDA Threatens to Raid Cherry Orchards that is included in FDA: Failure, Deception, Abuse. For starters, the FDA declared cherries to be illegal drugs.
These claims cause your product to be a drug as defined in section 201(g) . . . Because this product is not generally recognized as safe and effective when used as labeled, it is also defined as a new drug in section 201(p) . . . Under section 505 of the Act (21 USC 355), a new drug may not be legally marketed in the United States without an approved New Drug Application . . .
The FDA warned they could raid the growers and seize the cherries. Anybody who has been through an FDA raid knows that it is common for them to use heavily armed federal agents. They threatened to go through with their threats unless cherry growers stopped publishing references to scientific studies that show cherries can have beneficial health effects. Such scientific studies include ones that point out that cherries have been tied to suppressing inflammation that is responsible for joint pain in conditions such as arthritis.
If you were a cherry grower, would you really want to run the risk of having dozens of gun-toting agents showing up to scare your employees, possibly shoot one or more of them in some “accident” the government can spin to appear as defending themselves against violent criminal farmers, seize your products and warehouse them for so long they will go bad before you get get a court order for them to be returned, and to be hauled into court over and over again for possibly more than a decade at a cost of millions of dollars and substantial disruption in business as the FDA has done to many others for similar reasons? You will likely not get any compensation for such destructive abuse, even if you can afford to defend yourself and “win” in court months, years, or decades later. So the cherry farmers removed the references to the scientific studies. In America, FDA fascism almost always wins over constitutional free speech. That’s because even when the courts clearly tell the FDA they are violating the First Amendment, the FDA ignores them and does whatever it likes.
But what was wrong with those references you might ask? They were real studies, not frauds and cover-ups like the FDA has relied upon for approval of so many deadly drugs such as Vioxx. They said nothing intentionally deceptive or untruthful. They made no unrealistic claims. The FDA didn’t even dispute their accuracy. So why was the FDA so upset? It’s simple greed combined with a total lack of ethics. The FDA knows it owes its power and budget to big pharmaceutical companies that can afford to spend $200 million to $500 million and the better part of a decade going through the ineffective FDA drug approval process that keeps small companies from playing and ensures that big companies will get their blockbuster drugs approved even if they are deadly, not very effective, or have other problems. This process and the associated fees pay for many FDA workers and management.
The news that cherries might be more effective than some of the ineffective drugs the FDA approves is a threat to the FDA and its big money allies. In the minds of the abusive government employees who runs such agencies, money and power are the true mission, not protecting the health of US citizens. So the answer is to do everything possible to quash anything that might create an impression that they are not performing their mission or that something other than an FDA approved drug could be healthful.
You might think that was in 2006 and that perhaps things have changed. They haven’t. In 2010, the FDA is busying itself declaring walnuts are drugs and threatening walnut growers and vendors with raids on their facilities just like they did to the cherry growers in 2006.
“Dangerous messages” that turn walnuts into drugs include findings from such studies as one in which participants with high cholesterol ate walnuts and the result was a 64% increase in brachial artery dilation and a decrease in total and LDL cholesterol in just four weeks of eating 8 to 13 walnuts per day in place of one third of the monounsaturated fat in their diets. That walnut study was published by the American Heart Association in 2004.
(from Eating Walnuts Sharply Cuts Heart Disease Risk)
Research amply demonstrates that regular nut consumption may decrease the risk of heart disease by up to 50%. Traditional Mediterranean and Asian diets that are rich in nuts are associated with comparatively low rates of cardiovascular disease and mortality.
In their study published in the journal Circulation,* researchers in Barcelona, Spain, reported additional benefits of substituting walnuts for monounsaturated fatty acids in the Mediterranean diet. Twenty-one men and women with hypercholesterolemia were enrolled in a randomized crossover study in which approximately one-third of their monounsaturated fat-derived calories were substituted with walnuts (amounting to 8-13 walnuts per day). About half of the subjects ate a diet without walnuts for four weeks and then ate one with walnuts for four weeks, and vice versa.
After completing each four-week diet, the subjects underwent ultrasound testing of the arm’s brachial artery to assess endothelium-dependent vasodilation, a marker of endothelial dysfunction. When walnuts were part of the diet, endothelium-dependent vasodilation increased by 64%, consistent with marked improvement in cardiovascular health. The re-searchers also confirmed that the walnut substitution decreased levels of total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein (LDL), which are known to contribute to endothelial dysfunction.
According to the researchers, the cardioprotective properties of walnuts cannot be explained by their favorable impact on cholesterol profile alone. Because walnuts contain arginine, folic acid, fiber, and gamma-tocopherol, their cardioprotective effects may include: increased nitric oxide formation from arginine, improving vascular reactivity and inhibiting platelet aggregation; a reduction in LDL oxidation due to the presence of vitamin E and other antioxidants; and a decrease in homocysteine levels with folate.
Such information might threaten big-money statin drugs that earn tens of billions of dollars per year for FDA allies in big pharma plus fees and government jobs for FDA approvals. The FDA clearly had to act under its true mission of protecting its money and power by any means necessary. So they are going after Diamond Foods, one of the major distributors of packaged walnuts in the United States, to assert their power in a “kill the messenger” campaign.
(from FDA Says Walnuts Are Illegal Drugs)
Life Extension® has published 57 articles that describe the health benefits of walnuts.
Some of this same scientific data is featured on the website of Diamond Foods, Inc., a distributor of packaged walnuts.
The FDA has determined that walnuts sold by Diamond Foods cannot be legally marketed because the walnuts “are not generally recognized as safe and effective” for the medical conditions referenced on Diamond Foods’ website.
According to the FDA, these walnuts are now classified as “drugs” and the “unauthorized health claims” cause them to become “misbranded,” thus subjecting them to government “seizure or injunction.”
The FDA has decided it is illegal to promote that healthy foods have benefits according to scientific studies. After all, they might compete with FDA controlled drugs that big pharma and the FDA both profit from selling.
However, the FDA believes that it is quite acceptable to promote unhealthy foods with health claims that are misleading. They want you to eat the unhealthy foods because the more sick people there are, the bigger the market for FDA drugs and the more power and money the agency will have.
(from FDA Says Walnuts Are Illegal Drugs)
FDA allows potato chips to be advertised as “heart healthy”
Frito-Lay® is a subsidiary of the Pepsi-Cola company. Frito-Lay® sells $12 billion a year of products that include:
Lays® Potato Chips
Doritos®
Tostitos®
Cheetos®
Fritos®
You might not associate these mostly-fried snack foods as being good for you, but the FDA has no problem allowing the Frito-Lay® website to state the following:
“Frito-Lay snacks start with real farm-grown ingredients. You might be surprised at how much good stuff goes into your favorite snack. Good stuff like potatoes, which naturally contain vitamin C and essential minerals. Or corn, one of the world’s most popular grains, packed with Thiamin, vitamin B6, and Phosphorous – all necessary for healthy bones, teeth, nerves and muscles.
And it’s not just the obvious ingredients. Our all-natural sunflower, corn and soybean oils contain good polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, which help lower total and LDL “bad” cholesterol and maintain HDL “good” cholesterol levels, which can support a healthy heart. Even salt, when eaten in moderation as part of a balanced diet, is essential for the body.”44
Wow! Based on what Frito-Lay® is allowed to state, it sounds like we should be living on these snacks. Who would want to ingest walnuts, pomegranate, or green tea (which FDA now says are illegal drugs) when these fat-calorie laden, mostly-fried carbohydrates are so widely available?
According to the Frito Lay® website, Lays® potato chips are now “heart healthy” because the level of saturated fat was reduced and replaced with sunflower oil.45 Scientific studies do show that when a polyunsaturated fat (like sunflower oil) is substituted for saturated fat, favorable changes in blood cholesterol occur.46
Fatally omitted from the Frito-Lay® website is the fact that sunflower oil supplies lots of omega-6 fats, but no omega-3s.47 The American diet already contains too many omega-6 fats and woefully inadequate omega-3.
Excess omega-6 fats in the diet in the absence of adequate omega-3s produces devastating effects including the production of pro-inflammatory compounds that contribute to virtually every age-related disease including atherosclerosis.48-53
For the FDA to allow Frito-Lay® to pretend there are heart benefits to ingesting their high-calorie snack products, while censoring the ability of walnut companies to make scientifically-substantiated claims, is tantamount of treason against the health of the American public.
After reading FDA: Failure, Deception, Abuse, you’ll be aware of many dozens of examples of the FDA abusing its power to silence those who are trying to protect the health of people. In a particularly appalling display of hubris, the FDA even had the gall to try to silence those (including the US Centers for Disease Control) who spread the news of studies that show that folic acid supplements are highly effective at reducing the incidence of often deadly spinal tube defects in babies.
As legislators and even other agencies were getting fed up with these FDA abuses, they tried to force the FDA to stop its tactics.
(from FDA Threatens to Raid Cherry Orchards)
On November 10, 2005, a bill was introduced in the United States House of Representatives that would prohibit the FDA from denying consumers access to truthful health information. The name of this bill is the Health Freedom Protection Act (H.R. 4282).41
The original sponsors of this bill introduced it by exposing the FDA’s inappropriate censorship of life-saving scientific information. Here is an excerpt from this historic speech:
Because of the FDA’s censorship of truthful health claims, millions of Americans may suffer with diseases and other health care problems they may have avoided by using dietary supplements. For example, the FDA prohibited consumers from learning how folic acid reduces the risk of neural tube defects for four years after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended every woman of childbearing age take folic acid supplements to reduce neural tube defects. This FDA action contributed to an estimated 10,000 cases of preventable neural tube defects!
The FDA also continues to prohibit consumers from learning about the scientific evidence that glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate are effective in the treatment of osteoarthritis; that omega-3 fatty acids may reduce the risk of sudden death heart attack; and that calcium may reduce the risk of bone fractures.
In 2010, there’s yet another attempt to stop the FDA fascists from censoring free speech via their terrorist tactics. The US House of Representatives bill H.R. 4913 Free Speech About Science Act aims to help protect accurate information being published about scientific topics including health care. The FDA opposes this legislation for obvious reasons of its corrupt self-interest. If you’d like to contact your representative to support this legislation, you can click on over to Life Extension’s Legislative Action Website to do so.
Alarmingly, it appears that legislation to stop FDA abuses has to date been to no avail. The FDA has shown consistently for decades that legislation and court decisions will not stop it from violating the First Amendment and persecuting those who dare to threaten the FDA’s money and power by informing the public that a supplement or food has been shown in studies to have health benefits.
Is it any wonder the American health care system has exploding costs? The FDA wants it that way and does all they can to ensure it continues. Given a choice between cheap $2-3 per year folic acid supplements and billions in additional medical costs for dead and diseased babies, they will pick the dead and diseased babies every time. There is no profit in cheap supplements for the FDA, but deadly diseases are quite profitable for them if they can ensure that big pharma and big medicine will have a market ready and willing to pay sky-is-the-limit costs for FDA approved monopoly “treatments” when the illnesses can’t be prevented inexpensively due to FDA interference.
Government Abuse Pervasive in America
The FDA and family law courts are both prime examples of government institutions that do so much more damage than any benefits they create. The FDA views its mission is one of maintaining and building its own power and control at any expense to the public. Family law courts view their mission similarly.
Freedom of speech and people’s health do not matter to the FDA, just as they do not matter to family law judges. The American people are being abused by these government institutions in a way far worse than a nanny state. What might have once been a nanny state has transformed itself into groups of fascists armed with guns, police, and lawyers to crush any opponents, even ones who are honest, well-intentioned, are not violating any laws, and never wished to be opponents in the first place but were put in that position because they are trying to help the public.
Both the FDA and family law judges will use any means they can find, legal or not, to crush the people and companies they view as their opponents. “Kill the messenger” is one of the top priorities for both of these groups of fascist government employees. That’s why they are so focused on terminating the rights to free speech by any means they can find.
The FDA should be shut down permanently. Every attempt at reigning in the abusive nature of this agency by the courts and legislature have failed. It is time for the US Congress to kill the FDA. There are other means available to regulate drug safety that do not require a bureaucracy that views disease and death as the road to profits. Litigation for wrongful death is already used often, even for drugs that the FDA approved after failing to detect fraudulent studies and/or covering up clearly dangerous side effects. If a hypothetical “medical safety agency” were to operate by making it very easy for consumers and doctors to find information on medicines, supplements, treatments, foods, and the statistical track records of related illnesses and deaths, it would be possible for people to make their own informed decisions.
Even though the FDA has tried hard to shut off such informations flows, they still exist today. It is readily possible to find information on alternatives with some work. Yet because of the FDA, alternatives that work are often not available to people who need them. A patient who has already tried three or four mainstream cancer therapies and none worked should be able to try something else. Today, the FDA will keep that patient from being able to get to potentially life-saving therapies because it may be another 5 to 10 years before studies underway allow the FDA to earn enough revenue and protect enough government jobs that they are finally willing to rubberstamp the drug with an approval.
Similarly, family law courts should be removed from most of the divorces in this country. They are well-known to contribute to bankruptcy, child abuse, and turning reasonable parents into criminals. They cause massive damage to children and families at enormous costs. It is time for state legislatures to move to gut the family law courts and replace most of their functions with simple, inexpensive processes that do not encourage conflict.
Do-it-yourself divorce should be the norm, with no involvement from courts in any way, shape, or form other than to review and rubberstamp the settlement agreement reached by the parties. Only in those cases in which no agreement can be reached should there be any involvement by the court. Even then, that involvement should be very limited. As it stands to today, family law courts drive the conflict. The adversarial process they use creates more damage and destruction. The judges and their friends benefit from this via money, power, and job security. They also gain the tools to crush their opponents by judicial orders that can throw a person out of the home, ban contact with children, take all the income and assets, and destroy the person’s life without so much as a chance for defense. There is no common ground between the principles espoused by the founders of the United States and the methods used by family courts today. If these methods were being used in China or North Korea, they would be derided as inhuman and criminal. But because they are used by fascist Americans, they are covered up and defended.
http://angiemedia.com/2010/05/04/fda-abuse-reminiscent-of-family-court-abuse/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Angiemedia+(angiemedia)
Written by: Chris
From Angiemedia
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Use of Our Content (Reposting and Quoting)
May 4th, 2010
We sometimes get emails from our readers asking about the mix of information on our web site. Some readers wonder why we write about topics that seemingly have nothing to do with each other. Many of our readers are interested in the family law abuse and judicial corruption stories, others appreciate the coverage of health topics, and yet others find the stories about police abuse tactics match their own experiences. But what do they all have in common? The answer is they are all tied together by the involvement of government in abusing its duties to the public to uphold the law, avoiding conflicts of interest and bias, and staying away from corruption. In this article, I’ll be comparing examples of what I’ve learned about the abusive conduct of the FDA with the abusive conduct of family law courts. They are both excellent examples of how the United States has strayed a long distance down a very dark road that leads to becoming an abusive totalitarian state that views its citizens as slaves to be controlled for its own profit and power.
Violating Civil and Human Rights For Job Security, Power, and Profit
We prominently feature stories of abuse, corruption, and persecution by out of control government intent on building job security and power by crushing opponents and inventing fictional “crimes” and “crises” to “justify” their abuses and budgets. They commonly do all of this and more not only in violation of the law but also against any reasonable norm for moral and ethical behaviors for governments and government employees. While our readers may be familiar with the pattern of government abuse and corruption in their own experiences or those of family and friends who have been badly harmed by it, they may not be familiar with similar trangressions in other areas.
How the patterns of corruption and abuse in family law are very similar to those in other areas of government misconduct was recently driven home to me by a fascinating and rather upsetting book. I just finished reading a collection of essays on the US Food and Drug Administration entitled FDA: Failure, Deception, Abuse collected from about 14 years of the writings by the Life Extension Foundation. Alerting the public about FDA misconduct is just one of the many services this organization performs. I realized that several of the articles included in this book describe the same sorts of themes and violations of free speech laws, corrupt alignment of government officials with the interests of greedy and unethical parties, and total disregard for the interests of children and families that often appear in tales of broken family law courts and the malicious police actions they drive.
While it may appear at a glance that healthcare abuse and family abuse have nothing in common, they are really quite similar in many ways. Once you realize that the differences are mostly the players involved and the precise subject matter, you can see the tactics used by abusive government against its targets are often alike. In corrupt family law courts, you see judges and government agencies like CPS aligning with lawyers, service providers, psychological evaluators, and more to pad each other’s pockets by persecuting families. This book shows how in the FDA’s case, the players are the corrupt FDA and large pharmaceutical companies that align to pad each other’s pockets by covering up dangerous drugs, creating monopolies to drive up drug prices, and censoring important health information that could inexpensively save hundreds of thousands of lives and tens of billions of dollars per year in the US alone.
Family Law Judges and FDA Share Dislike for First Amendment
Both family law judges and their allies and the FDA and its allies attempt to use illegal violations of First Amendment protected free speech to silence their critics. Family law judges often threaten parents to shut up about their misconduct or the criminal actions of the other parent under threat of being banned from seeing their children. Yet what these parents are doing is not illegal, usually has significant basis in fact, and often is something they do only after being shown repeatedly how they will never get any justice in biased and corrupt family law courts. What the judges threaten as retaliation will definitely harm the children, so the motivations for doing this are questionable even if there was an ounce of legitimacy to the legal arguments.
Likewise, the FDA threatens companies and individuals who make factual claims backed by scientific evidence that support them and bans their products, arrests their employees, raids their facilities and seizes their products, and uses what amounts to government sponsored terrorism to ruin these people. That the information they are spreading and products they are selling are not harmful and in fact may be beneficial to millions of people is irrelevant to the FDA. They can see only the threat to their power and control and want to quash the messengers, just like corrupt family law judges do.
Family Law Judges and FDA Solicit Police Abuse
Both the family and juvenile law system and the FDA system employ abusive police actions with search warrants, false arrests, paramilitary actions, and intimidation designed to silence anybody who does not mindlessly obey their abusive and illegal orders. Tick off a family law judge or an FDA employee and you may find yourself staring at dozens of guns pointed in your face or being handcuffed and taken away by a jack-booted government law enforcement agent who follows illegal orders just like German soldiers once followed the genocidal commands of Nazi leaders.
Judicial Abuse by San Diego Family Law Judges Manipulating Police
As an example of family law judicial abuse using police powers for political purposes, take the case of California Coalition for Families and Children (CCFC) co-founder and president Cole Stuart. Stuart has been suffering from what appear to be biased and prejudicial rulings that violate the rights of his son and him. These were issued by San Diego Superior Court Judge Lisa Schall, an ill-reputed judge who is known for being in rehab for drunk reckless driving and for disciplinary action for repeated past judicial misconduct. In yet another example of how ridiculously abusive family law courts are, it appears that Schall’s collegue-in-court-crime Judge Christine Goldsmith stuck a temporary restraining order on Stuart per the request of his ex-wife, TV news reporter Lynn Stuart. She’s allegedly a malicious mom displaying behaviors indicative of Borderline Personality Disorder and engaging in parental alienation tactics to destroy the relationship between her son and his father. She claimed she was being harassed by annoying phone calls and stalking. As is common practice, the judge issued the order without any chance for defense, typical for judges like her.
Cole Stuart has explained that he tried to communicate with his ex via email to set up times for him to talk with their son on the phone but hasn’t talked with her on the phone because she blocks attempts to call, even when he just wants to talk with their son. The San Diego family law judges then apparently used the TRO as an enabler for politically motivated harassment. When they learned on April 14 that he and his CCFC group would be protesting against family court injustices on April 15, 2010, they got City Attorney Jan Goldsmith (the judge’s husband) to request an arrest warrant for him that day, even though the TRO was not yet served on him. Through apparently dishonest manipulation, they made the arrest warrant appear for a felony to allow for arrest during the protest when in actuality such “crimes” would be at most a misdemeanor. When he was sighted during the protest, the family law judges arranged for their allies in the San Diego County Bar Association to have their private security guards falsely arrest him during the protest and hand him over to police waiting outside, even though the protesters were not violating any laws and were well-behaved. The aim appears to be to shut up political enemies of the court and to intimidate them. After all, if reputable attorney Cole Stuart can be mistreated like this, will any protester be safe from abuse by San Diego family law judges?
Freedom of Speech Abuse and Harassment by FDA Threatening Police Actions
Likewise, when the FDA decides they don’t like a message, they have their own ways to shut up the messengers via harassment. For instance, cherry growers published references to information that cherries contain some compounds that can be beneficial to health as shown by various scientific studies. This upset the FDA, so they resorted to a variety of tactics as shown in the March 2006 article FDA Threatens to Raid Cherry Orchards that is included in FDA: Failure, Deception, Abuse. For starters, the FDA declared cherries to be illegal drugs.
These claims cause your product to be a drug as defined in section 201(g) . . . Because this product is not generally recognized as safe and effective when used as labeled, it is also defined as a new drug in section 201(p) . . . Under section 505 of the Act (21 USC 355), a new drug may not be legally marketed in the United States without an approved New Drug Application . . .
The FDA warned they could raid the growers and seize the cherries. Anybody who has been through an FDA raid knows that it is common for them to use heavily armed federal agents. They threatened to go through with their threats unless cherry growers stopped publishing references to scientific studies that show cherries can have beneficial health effects. Such scientific studies include ones that point out that cherries have been tied to suppressing inflammation that is responsible for joint pain in conditions such as arthritis.
If you were a cherry grower, would you really want to run the risk of having dozens of gun-toting agents showing up to scare your employees, possibly shoot one or more of them in some “accident” the government can spin to appear as defending themselves against violent criminal farmers, seize your products and warehouse them for so long they will go bad before you get get a court order for them to be returned, and to be hauled into court over and over again for possibly more than a decade at a cost of millions of dollars and substantial disruption in business as the FDA has done to many others for similar reasons? You will likely not get any compensation for such destructive abuse, even if you can afford to defend yourself and “win” in court months, years, or decades later. So the cherry farmers removed the references to the scientific studies. In America, FDA fascism almost always wins over constitutional free speech. That’s because even when the courts clearly tell the FDA they are violating the First Amendment, the FDA ignores them and does whatever it likes.
But what was wrong with those references you might ask? They were real studies, not frauds and cover-ups like the FDA has relied upon for approval of so many deadly drugs such as Vioxx. They said nothing intentionally deceptive or untruthful. They made no unrealistic claims. The FDA didn’t even dispute their accuracy. So why was the FDA so upset? It’s simple greed combined with a total lack of ethics. The FDA knows it owes its power and budget to big pharmaceutical companies that can afford to spend $200 million to $500 million and the better part of a decade going through the ineffective FDA drug approval process that keeps small companies from playing and ensures that big companies will get their blockbuster drugs approved even if they are deadly, not very effective, or have other problems. This process and the associated fees pay for many FDA workers and management.
The news that cherries might be more effective than some of the ineffective drugs the FDA approves is a threat to the FDA and its big money allies. In the minds of the abusive government employees who runs such agencies, money and power are the true mission, not protecting the health of US citizens. So the answer is to do everything possible to quash anything that might create an impression that they are not performing their mission or that something other than an FDA approved drug could be healthful.
You might think that was in 2006 and that perhaps things have changed. They haven’t. In 2010, the FDA is busying itself declaring walnuts are drugs and threatening walnut growers and vendors with raids on their facilities just like they did to the cherry growers in 2006.
“Dangerous messages” that turn walnuts into drugs include findings from such studies as one in which participants with high cholesterol ate walnuts and the result was a 64% increase in brachial artery dilation and a decrease in total and LDL cholesterol in just four weeks of eating 8 to 13 walnuts per day in place of one third of the monounsaturated fat in their diets. That walnut study was published by the American Heart Association in 2004.
(from Eating Walnuts Sharply Cuts Heart Disease Risk)
Research amply demonstrates that regular nut consumption may decrease the risk of heart disease by up to 50%. Traditional Mediterranean and Asian diets that are rich in nuts are associated with comparatively low rates of cardiovascular disease and mortality.
In their study published in the journal Circulation,* researchers in Barcelona, Spain, reported additional benefits of substituting walnuts for monounsaturated fatty acids in the Mediterranean diet. Twenty-one men and women with hypercholesterolemia were enrolled in a randomized crossover study in which approximately one-third of their monounsaturated fat-derived calories were substituted with walnuts (amounting to 8-13 walnuts per day). About half of the subjects ate a diet without walnuts for four weeks and then ate one with walnuts for four weeks, and vice versa.
After completing each four-week diet, the subjects underwent ultrasound testing of the arm’s brachial artery to assess endothelium-dependent vasodilation, a marker of endothelial dysfunction. When walnuts were part of the diet, endothelium-dependent vasodilation increased by 64%, consistent with marked improvement in cardiovascular health. The re-searchers also confirmed that the walnut substitution decreased levels of total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein (LDL), which are known to contribute to endothelial dysfunction.
According to the researchers, the cardioprotective properties of walnuts cannot be explained by their favorable impact on cholesterol profile alone. Because walnuts contain arginine, folic acid, fiber, and gamma-tocopherol, their cardioprotective effects may include: increased nitric oxide formation from arginine, improving vascular reactivity and inhibiting platelet aggregation; a reduction in LDL oxidation due to the presence of vitamin E and other antioxidants; and a decrease in homocysteine levels with folate.
Such information might threaten big-money statin drugs that earn tens of billions of dollars per year for FDA allies in big pharma plus fees and government jobs for FDA approvals. The FDA clearly had to act under its true mission of protecting its money and power by any means necessary. So they are going after Diamond Foods, one of the major distributors of packaged walnuts in the United States, to assert their power in a “kill the messenger” campaign.
(from FDA Says Walnuts Are Illegal Drugs)
Life Extension® has published 57 articles that describe the health benefits of walnuts.
Some of this same scientific data is featured on the website of Diamond Foods, Inc., a distributor of packaged walnuts.
The FDA has determined that walnuts sold by Diamond Foods cannot be legally marketed because the walnuts “are not generally recognized as safe and effective” for the medical conditions referenced on Diamond Foods’ website.
According to the FDA, these walnuts are now classified as “drugs” and the “unauthorized health claims” cause them to become “misbranded,” thus subjecting them to government “seizure or injunction.”
The FDA has decided it is illegal to promote that healthy foods have benefits according to scientific studies. After all, they might compete with FDA controlled drugs that big pharma and the FDA both profit from selling.
However, the FDA believes that it is quite acceptable to promote unhealthy foods with health claims that are misleading. They want you to eat the unhealthy foods because the more sick people there are, the bigger the market for FDA drugs and the more power and money the agency will have.
(from FDA Says Walnuts Are Illegal Drugs)
FDA allows potato chips to be advertised as “heart healthy”
Frito-Lay® is a subsidiary of the Pepsi-Cola company. Frito-Lay® sells $12 billion a year of products that include:
Lays® Potato Chips
Doritos®
Tostitos®
Cheetos®
Fritos®
You might not associate these mostly-fried snack foods as being good for you, but the FDA has no problem allowing the Frito-Lay® website to state the following:
“Frito-Lay snacks start with real farm-grown ingredients. You might be surprised at how much good stuff goes into your favorite snack. Good stuff like potatoes, which naturally contain vitamin C and essential minerals. Or corn, one of the world’s most popular grains, packed with Thiamin, vitamin B6, and Phosphorous – all necessary for healthy bones, teeth, nerves and muscles.
And it’s not just the obvious ingredients. Our all-natural sunflower, corn and soybean oils contain good polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, which help lower total and LDL “bad” cholesterol and maintain HDL “good” cholesterol levels, which can support a healthy heart. Even salt, when eaten in moderation as part of a balanced diet, is essential for the body.”44
Wow! Based on what Frito-Lay® is allowed to state, it sounds like we should be living on these snacks. Who would want to ingest walnuts, pomegranate, or green tea (which FDA now says are illegal drugs) when these fat-calorie laden, mostly-fried carbohydrates are so widely available?
According to the Frito Lay® website, Lays® potato chips are now “heart healthy” because the level of saturated fat was reduced and replaced with sunflower oil.45 Scientific studies do show that when a polyunsaturated fat (like sunflower oil) is substituted for saturated fat, favorable changes in blood cholesterol occur.46
Fatally omitted from the Frito-Lay® website is the fact that sunflower oil supplies lots of omega-6 fats, but no omega-3s.47 The American diet already contains too many omega-6 fats and woefully inadequate omega-3.
Excess omega-6 fats in the diet in the absence of adequate omega-3s produces devastating effects including the production of pro-inflammatory compounds that contribute to virtually every age-related disease including atherosclerosis.48-53
For the FDA to allow Frito-Lay® to pretend there are heart benefits to ingesting their high-calorie snack products, while censoring the ability of walnut companies to make scientifically-substantiated claims, is tantamount of treason against the health of the American public.
After reading FDA: Failure, Deception, Abuse, you’ll be aware of many dozens of examples of the FDA abusing its power to silence those who are trying to protect the health of people. In a particularly appalling display of hubris, the FDA even had the gall to try to silence those (including the US Centers for Disease Control) who spread the news of studies that show that folic acid supplements are highly effective at reducing the incidence of often deadly spinal tube defects in babies.
As legislators and even other agencies were getting fed up with these FDA abuses, they tried to force the FDA to stop its tactics.
(from FDA Threatens to Raid Cherry Orchards)
On November 10, 2005, a bill was introduced in the United States House of Representatives that would prohibit the FDA from denying consumers access to truthful health information. The name of this bill is the Health Freedom Protection Act (H.R. 4282).41
The original sponsors of this bill introduced it by exposing the FDA’s inappropriate censorship of life-saving scientific information. Here is an excerpt from this historic speech:
Because of the FDA’s censorship of truthful health claims, millions of Americans may suffer with diseases and other health care problems they may have avoided by using dietary supplements. For example, the FDA prohibited consumers from learning how folic acid reduces the risk of neural tube defects for four years after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended every woman of childbearing age take folic acid supplements to reduce neural tube defects. This FDA action contributed to an estimated 10,000 cases of preventable neural tube defects!
The FDA also continues to prohibit consumers from learning about the scientific evidence that glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate are effective in the treatment of osteoarthritis; that omega-3 fatty acids may reduce the risk of sudden death heart attack; and that calcium may reduce the risk of bone fractures.
In 2010, there’s yet another attempt to stop the FDA fascists from censoring free speech via their terrorist tactics. The US House of Representatives bill H.R. 4913 Free Speech About Science Act aims to help protect accurate information being published about scientific topics including health care. The FDA opposes this legislation for obvious reasons of its corrupt self-interest. If you’d like to contact your representative to support this legislation, you can click on over to Life Extension’s Legislative Action Website to do so.
Alarmingly, it appears that legislation to stop FDA abuses has to date been to no avail. The FDA has shown consistently for decades that legislation and court decisions will not stop it from violating the First Amendment and persecuting those who dare to threaten the FDA’s money and power by informing the public that a supplement or food has been shown in studies to have health benefits.
Is it any wonder the American health care system has exploding costs? The FDA wants it that way and does all they can to ensure it continues. Given a choice between cheap $2-3 per year folic acid supplements and billions in additional medical costs for dead and diseased babies, they will pick the dead and diseased babies every time. There is no profit in cheap supplements for the FDA, but deadly diseases are quite profitable for them if they can ensure that big pharma and big medicine will have a market ready and willing to pay sky-is-the-limit costs for FDA approved monopoly “treatments” when the illnesses can’t be prevented inexpensively due to FDA interference.
Government Abuse Pervasive in America
The FDA and family law courts are both prime examples of government institutions that do so much more damage than any benefits they create. The FDA views its mission is one of maintaining and building its own power and control at any expense to the public. Family law courts view their mission similarly.
Freedom of speech and people’s health do not matter to the FDA, just as they do not matter to family law judges. The American people are being abused by these government institutions in a way far worse than a nanny state. What might have once been a nanny state has transformed itself into groups of fascists armed with guns, police, and lawyers to crush any opponents, even ones who are honest, well-intentioned, are not violating any laws, and never wished to be opponents in the first place but were put in that position because they are trying to help the public.
Both the FDA and family law judges will use any means they can find, legal or not, to crush the people and companies they view as their opponents. “Kill the messenger” is one of the top priorities for both of these groups of fascist government employees. That’s why they are so focused on terminating the rights to free speech by any means they can find.
The FDA should be shut down permanently. Every attempt at reigning in the abusive nature of this agency by the courts and legislature have failed. It is time for the US Congress to kill the FDA. There are other means available to regulate drug safety that do not require a bureaucracy that views disease and death as the road to profits. Litigation for wrongful death is already used often, even for drugs that the FDA approved after failing to detect fraudulent studies and/or covering up clearly dangerous side effects. If a hypothetical “medical safety agency” were to operate by making it very easy for consumers and doctors to find information on medicines, supplements, treatments, foods, and the statistical track records of related illnesses and deaths, it would be possible for people to make their own informed decisions.
Even though the FDA has tried hard to shut off such informations flows, they still exist today. It is readily possible to find information on alternatives with some work. Yet because of the FDA, alternatives that work are often not available to people who need them. A patient who has already tried three or four mainstream cancer therapies and none worked should be able to try something else. Today, the FDA will keep that patient from being able to get to potentially life-saving therapies because it may be another 5 to 10 years before studies underway allow the FDA to earn enough revenue and protect enough government jobs that they are finally willing to rubberstamp the drug with an approval.
Similarly, family law courts should be removed from most of the divorces in this country. They are well-known to contribute to bankruptcy, child abuse, and turning reasonable parents into criminals. They cause massive damage to children and families at enormous costs. It is time for state legislatures to move to gut the family law courts and replace most of their functions with simple, inexpensive processes that do not encourage conflict.
Do-it-yourself divorce should be the norm, with no involvement from courts in any way, shape, or form other than to review and rubberstamp the settlement agreement reached by the parties. Only in those cases in which no agreement can be reached should there be any involvement by the court. Even then, that involvement should be very limited. As it stands to today, family law courts drive the conflict. The adversarial process they use creates more damage and destruction. The judges and their friends benefit from this via money, power, and job security. They also gain the tools to crush their opponents by judicial orders that can throw a person out of the home, ban contact with children, take all the income and assets, and destroy the person’s life without so much as a chance for defense. There is no common ground between the principles espoused by the founders of the United States and the methods used by family courts today. If these methods were being used in China or North Korea, they would be derided as inhuman and criminal. But because they are used by fascist Americans, they are covered up and defended.
http://angiemedia.com/2010/05/04/fda-abuse-reminiscent-of-family-court-abuse/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Angiemedia+(angiemedia)
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