Latest Attempt to Discredit Vitamin Therapies: Is it Criminal?

Managers of the I.G. Farben pharmaceutical and chemical cartel, sitting in the dock at the WWII Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. Charged with crimes including mass murder and crimes against humanity, thirteen of them were given prison terms ranging from eighteen months to eight years.

(Source)

In August 1947, two years after the end of the Second World War, twenty-four managers of the I.G. Farben pharmaceutical and chemical cartel appeared before an international war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, to be charged with crimes including mass murder and crimes against humanity. The tribunal’s verdicts, delivered 11 months later, resulted in thirteen of the Farben defendants being given prison terms ranging from eighteen months to eight years.

Jump forward sixty years, to April 2008, and we find that much of the world’s media is awash with stories claiming that taking vitamin supplements could lead to a premature death. According to a review conducted on behalf of the Cochrane Collaboration by researchers at Copenhagen University in Denmark, studies using beta-carotene, vitamin A and vitamin E showed “significantly increased mortality”, whilst trials of vitamin C “found no significant effect.”

Read on to discover what the world’s media didn’t tell you about this Cochrane review, including its potential historical parallel with crimes committed by the managers of the I.G. Farben cartel.

Predetermined conclusions
with potentially genocidal results

With the World Health Organization attributing 15.3 million deaths to cardiovascular disease and 6 million deaths to cancer annually, it is clear that the genocidal potential of the Cochrane researchers’ recommendations – were they to be implemented into national health policies via restrictions on the sale of vitamin supplements – could ultimately exceed the total number of deaths caused by the I.G. Farben managers, above, by an order of magnitude.

The first thing that one needs to understand about the recent Cochrane Collaboration review is that it was not a clinical study but a meta-analysis. This distinction is an important one in that whilst a clinical study is a scientific test of how a treatment works in people, a meta-analysis is merely a statistical evaluation of the data taken from several hand-picked existing studies, pooled together and presented as a separate piece of work.

This meta-analysis utilized 67 randomized trials with antioxidant supplements (vitamins A, C, E, beta carotene and selenium) and concluded that vitamins A, E and beta carotene increase mortality risk by up to 16%. However, despite the extensive media coverage it received, very little attention was given to the fact that this analysis was not even a new one. In fact, the same topic, the same studies and the same authors from Serbia, Denmark and Italy, were published a year ago in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Predictably therefore, and as has similarly been the case with this year’s version, the JAMA meta-analysis attracted much criticism from scientists, nutritionists and the dietary supplement industry. As a result, the authors later admitted that their paper contained errors and JAMA subsequently published corrections to it.

Now, however, we find that the same study has been “massaged” again and republished as “new”.

Moreover, and as the following article will show, this meta-analysis is simply the latest in a growing succession of anti-supplement publications by the same authors. In all of these publications, it is clear that the conclusions reached were essentially predetermined before so much as a single word had even been typed. As such, we are confident that the evidence we present here shows beyond reasonable doubt that the authors concerned are intent upon convincing national governments and the medical establishment that urgent political action should be brought to regulate vitamins as dangerous drugs.

However, with Cellular Health research having clearly identified the optimum daily intake of vitamins as a basic preventive and therapeutic measure against cardiovascular disease, cancer and many other health conditions, and the World Health Organization attributing 15.3 million deaths to cardiovascular disease and 6 million deaths to cancer annually, it is clear that the genocidal potential of these researchers’ recommendations – were they to be implemented into national health policies via restrictions on the sale of vitamin supplements – could ultimately exceed the total number of deaths caused by the aforesaid I.G. Farben managers by an order of magnitude.

Conclusions not consistent
with those of the studies analyzed

From a total of 815 vitamin studies considered for evaluation, the authors selected a mere 68 of them for their analysis in the 2007 JAMA publication and 67 for this year’s Cochrane review. As such, it is interesting to note that while the researchers were studying the effects of selected antioxidants on mortality, they failed to include any studies in which no one died during either the trial period or the follow-up period. In addition, the selected studies differed vastly from each other in a number of important aspects that have impact on the results:

• The meta-analysis included 20 trials conducted on healthy subjects and 47 studies in which vitamins were taken by people suffering from a variety of diseases, such as Alzheimer’s; heart disease; macular degeneration; various cancers and other diseases. The analysis did not investigate the details of the causes of death, which not only included heart disease, cancer and broken hips, but also accidents, suicides and other causes. It is likely that deaths occurred due to previously diagnosed diseases, not antioxidant supplementation. If a true risk of mortality was apparent in any of the trials with antioxidants, the study would have been stopped. None, in fact, were stopped and such conclusions were not even indicated by the authors of the trials.
• In many studies, the participants were taking not only tested nutrients but also a long list of other supplements and pharmaceutical drugs. It is apparent that the underlying health problems, as well as various medical interventions, drug and supplement treatments could all interfere or mask the effects that the authors attributed to one or a selected combination of chosen antioxidants.
• The doses of supplements in different trials used for the analysis were significantly different. For example, vitamin E was used in doses of 10 IU (U.S. RDA is 22IU) and 5,000 IU per day. Similarly, vitamin A was used in the amounts of 1333 IU daily (U.S. RDA is 2333 IU for women and 3000 IU for men) as well as in doses of 200,000 IU (well above the upper tolerable limit of 10,000 IU). It is known that mega-doses of vitamin A, taken for a long period of time, can cause side effects. Worse still, the duration of supplement use varied widely: in some trials it was 28 days in others, 12 years.

It is a well-known principle that the more similar the chosen studies are, the more valid the meta-analysis. It’s rather like saying that one gets more accurate results when comparing apples with apples instead of apples with oranges, for example. In this meta-analysis however the studies analyzed were very divergent and the conclusions drawn by the authors are not consistent with the findings of the actual studies.

As such, it is particularly notable that only after the authors divided these 67 studies into groups of “high risk bias” and “low risk bias,” using their own criteria, did they observe a statistically significant effect on mortality. Otherwise there was no effect. The authors even acknowledged that their results are in conflict with observational studies, which show benefits of antioxidant supplementation and with secondary prevention trials, such as cancer prevention studies published in journals such as Nutrition and Cancer, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, and Diseases of the Colon & Rectum. This exemplifies how the conclusion reached (antioxidant supplements increase mortality) was predetermined and that the authors just conducted a search for a method to support it.

Conclusions not consistent with real-world evidence

Statistical research shows that consumers of vitamin supplements have more chance of dying from being struck by lightning or from a wasp or bee sting than they have from dying as a result of ingesting their vitamin tablets. Photo: Axel Rouvin, "CG lightning strike" Some rights reserved. Source: www.piqs.de

Statistics show that the conclusions reached in this meta-analysis bear no relation whatsoever to real-world evidence.

For example, data from the 2003 annual report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers Toxic Exposure Surveillance System, published in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine in September 2004, states that in 2003 there were a total of only 4 deaths in the United States from the ingestion of vitamin supplements.

To put this number into perspective, a review published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2005 estimated that approximately 70 percent of the US population uses dietary supplements at least occasionally, with around 40 percent using them on a regular basis. Given that the US population currently numbers 300 million people, this means that with 210 million Americans using dietary supplements occasionally and 120 million using them on a regular basis, dietary supplements are extraordinarily safe.

Moreover, setting aside the issue as to whether or not vitamins were even responsible for these 4 deaths – and in our opinion, in at least two of them, this is questionable - it is highly significant that none of them occurred due to the ingestion of either beta carotene, vitamin A or vitamin E – all three of which nutrients the Cochrane review claims increase mortality when ingested as supplements.

Statistical data from New Zealand and Canada provides still further confirmation that the risk of death from supplements relative to other factors is astonishingly small. In both of these countries, the research shows that consumers of vitamin supplements have more chance of dying from being struck by lightning or from a wasp or bee sting than they have from dying as a result of ingesting their vitamin tablets.

As such, in response to the claim that antioxidant vitamin supplements increase mortality, we must therefore ask a simple question: where are the bodies?

Clearly, our hospitals are not full of people suffering and dying from the effects of vitamins and other natural therapies. Instead, with adverse drug reactions being known to cost the British National Health Service £2 billion ($4 billion / €2.5 billion) annually and research showing that such reactions are now between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death in hospitalized patients in the United States and the seventh most common in Sweden, it can be seen that the global pharmaceutical industry’s sales of toxic patented synthetic chemical drugs are already responsible for mass murder on a scale almost unprecedented in human history.

And yet, if the researchers responsible for this Cochrane review get their way, it is scientifically-researched vitamin supplements, not the pharmaceutical industry’s deadly drugs, that would be the subject of political action to enact draconian restrictions upon their free availability. Without any doubt therefore, the deaths that resulted from such restrictions would be a crime against humanity of truly unimaginable proportions.

Given this potential outcome, and with leading pharmaceutical and chemical industry managers already having been found guilty of mass murder in the past, we find ourselves wondering whether the Cochrane researchers’ seeming attempts to aid the modern-day multi-trillion dollar pharmaceutical industry in its efforts to ban non-patentable vitamin therapies might ultimately lead to them, too, being found guilty of such a crime?

Why the review was conducted in Denmark

It was no accident that the Cochrane Collaboration chose the Knowledge and Research Centre for Alternative Medicine (ViFAB) in Denmark, and the Copenhagen Trial Unit’s Centre for Clinical Intervention Research, located at the Copenhagen University Hospital, Rigshospitalet, also in Denmark, as its sources of support for this meta-analysis.

Danish legislation covering food supplements is notorious for being harsh and restrictive. So much so, in fact, that, in recent years, Danish pro-natural health campaigners have been voicing concerns that their government’s totalitarian assaults on free choice and liberty - disguised as “consumer safety” - will ultimately eliminate the concept of supplements entirely in that country.

Notably therefore, the two supporting Danish organizations concerned have a number of conflicts of interest - both in terms of their sources of funding and their institutional bias – that raise serious questions regarding the outcome of this meta-analysis.

For example, the Knowledge and Research Centre for Alternative Medicine’s operational expenditure is funded by an appropriation stipulated in the Danish Finance Act. Its board members include representatives of the Danish Medical Association; the Danish National Board of Health and the Danish Ministry of Health and Prevention.

As for the Copenhagen University Hospital , it is notable that its specialist units include the Finsen Laboratory, which specialises in cancer research; a Department of Radiation Biology , whose research is carried out with support from state funds, cancer societies, and private foundations; the Bartholin Institute, which hosts research groups within Cancer/Immunology and Diabetes; a Department of Haematology, which treats disorders including malignant lymphoma, multiple myeloma, acute leukaemias as well as chronic lympho and myeloproliferative disorders; and a Laboratory of Gene Therapy Research; amongst others.

As such, far from being independent and non-biased, it can be seen that the funders of this study have a strong bias towards pharmaceutical medicine and a close affiliation to the decidedly anti-supplement Danish government.

Drummond Rennie, a director of the Cochrane Center in San Francisco and a deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, has long recognized the dangers that result from conflicts of interest of this nature. In 2004, for example, quoted in the British Medical Journal, he described it as “naive to think that those who have a financial conflict of interest will not be influenced when they do a review.” More to the point, he added that “there are avalanches of studies showing that studies and reviews are influenced by financial conflicts of interest, always in the direction that favours the commercial sponsor’s view.”

As we shall see next therefore, in the case of at least one of the authors of the Cochrane meta-analysis, Christian Gluud, MD, it turns out that Rennie’s observations are highly relevant.

Cochrane reviewer Christian Gluud’s conflicts of interest

Cochrane reviewer Christian Gluud’s scientific focus area is pharmaceutical research and development. Given that he is also an Ambassador and Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Biologue, a Danish organization that is closely integrated with the Danish Pharma Consortium and whose members include pharmaceutical companies such as AstraZeneca, is it any wonder that he wants antioxidant supplements to be regulated as drugs?

Whilst media interest has tended to centre around Goran Bjelakovic, MD , the leader of the team authoring the anti-supplement meta-analysis, we find it unfortunate that far less attention has been paid to his main co-author, Christian Gluud, MD - especially so given that the latter would appear to have numerous conflicts of interest and connections to organizations having a strong institutional bias towards orthodox (i.e. pharmaceutical) medicine.

Along with his work at the Copenhagen University Hospital, for example, Gluud is an Ambassador and Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of BioLogue, where his scientific focus area is listed as being pharmaceutical research and development. Closely integrated with the Danish Pharma Consortium, the BioLogue network consists of several academic, governmental and regulatory partners; member companies - including pharmaceutical companies such as AstraZeneca Denmark; and the vast majority of biomedical researchers in Denmark. The members of BioLogue’s Steering Committee include representatives of the Danish Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry and the Danish Medicines Agency, amongst others. Significantly therefore, so far as the JAMA (2007) version of the meta-analysis is concerned, Gluud is stated as having been responsible for having obtained the funding for it. Moreover, and as we shall discover later, some sources even appear to infer that Gluud, rather than Bjelakovic, is the Cochrane review’s main author.

The Cochrane Collaboration’s conflicts of interest

The Cochrane Collaboration published a review of the migraine drug Eletriptan that was funded largely by Pfizer, Eletriptan’s manufacturer, at a time when Pfizer’s then president and chief executive officer, Henry McKinnell, above, was simultaneously a director of the Cochrane Library’s publishers, John Wiley and Sons.

The Cochrane Collaboration describes itself as an “independent organisation”, saying that it was established “to ensure that up-to-date, accurate information about the effects of healthcare interventions is readily available worldwide.” It also states that its central functions are funded by royalties from its publishers, John Wiley and Sons Limited, and that these come from sales of subscriptions to The Cochrane Library. The individual entities of The Cochrane Collaboration, meanwhile, are stated as being funded by a large variety of governmental, institutional and private funding sources, bound by an organisation-wide policy limiting uses of funds from corporate sponsors.

As we shall see however, behind these claims lie a number of important and uncomfortable facts that Big Media - in its apparent eagerness to inform us that taking vitamin supplements could lead to a premature death - has curiously neglected to make mention of.

Regarding Cochrane’s widely-trumpeted claim to be “independent,” for example, it turns out that the validity of this assertion has long been highly questionable. As long ago as October 2003, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) pointed out that the Cochrane website contains two reviews of migraine drugs - Eletriptan and Rizatriptan – that were funded largely by Pfizer, the manufacturer of Eletriptan.

Whilst the lead researcher on both these reviews, Andrew Moore, has been quoted as saying that he “strongly defends” their sponsorship by Pfizer, the fact is that both he and another of the Eletriptan reviewers have worked as consultants for pharmaceutical companies and other bodies, and have received research grants from industry, government, and charities. As such, there is clearly an argument to be made that Moore’s defence of the two migraine drug reviews is anything but independent.

To make matters even worse however, Cochrane published the review of Eletriptan at a time when Pfizer’s then president and chief executive officer, Henry McKinnell, was simultaneously a director of the Cochrane Library’s publishers, John Wiley and Sons.

Nevertheless, despite these serious conflicts of interest, at the time of writing (May 2008) both the Eletriptan and the Rizatriptan reviews remain available on the Cochrane website.

By November 2003 therefore, with the BMJ having openly stated that Cochrane had reached a crossroads over its drug company sponsorship, and Cochrane participants sharing stories of being offered cash for good reviews by drug companies, Cochrane’s leadership had no alternative but to announce that it was acting to allay fears over the influence of industry.

However, although the drug company sponsorship issue subsequently dominated Cochrane’s 2003 annual conference in Barcelona – the key sponsors of which included the drug makers Merck Sharpe & Dohme, Novartis, and AstraZeneca, whose logos were prominently displayed on the first page of the conference’s programme booklet - the Cochrane leadership failed to make a decision and opted instead for a complex consultation with its members.

Limits on commercial funding were subsequently proposed in February 2004, resulting in a new policy being issued in April 2004. Nevertheless, close examination of Cochrane's current policy on commercial sponsorship reveals that several highly significant anomalies remain.

For example, people who are employed by a pharmaceutical company are still not prohibited from taking part in reviews relating to the products of that company. Just as crucially, there is nothing to prevent people employed by pharmaceutical companies, people working as consultants for pharmaceutical companies, or people who have received research grants from pharmaceutical companies from taking part in reviews of competing products or systems of medicine such as vitamin therapies.

In addition, Cochrane’s current policy specifically states that government departments, not-for-profit medical insurance companies and health management organizations are not defined as commercial sources. As such, despite the fact that the vast majority of these have close links to, and tend to be strongly supportive of, the pharmaceutical industry, they are still permitted to sponsor Cochrane reviews. So, for example, although it is widely known that the US Food and Drug Administration has a close relationship with the pharmaceutical industry, Cochrane’s policy does not prevent it – or its counterparts in other countries – from sponsoring reviews. Revealingly therefore, Cochrane’s Report and Financial Statements for the year ended 31 March 2006 show that fully 79 percent of its funding for the preparation of reviews comes from “National and transnational government funding (including EU), typically from health and related ministries.”

As such, Cochrane’s stated claim that it was “established to ensure that up-to-date, accurate information about the effects of healthcare interventions is readily available worldwide” has to be balanced against the fact that the majority of its funding comes from bodies with close links to, and strong support for, the pharmaceutical industry. In light of this, it seems hardly surprising that the majority of its reviews deal with the evaluation of drug-based therapies. Indeed, bearing this in mind, it is particularly notable that the members of the Cochrane Collaboration’s Steering Group, who direct its activities, are themselves virtually all employed by either university medical departments, hospitals or government health departments, all of whom by their very nature have extremely close connections to the world of orthodox (i.e. pharmaceutical) medicine.

As a result, given that natural therapies such as vitamin supplements are increasingly now coming under heavy attack worldwide from governments and their health-related ministries, it is not difficult to imagine that the Cochrane Collaboration would not want to bite the hands that feed it financially – especially so given the revealing statements in its Report and Financial Statements that “a significant number” of the Cochrane Collaboration’s Review Groups and Centres “are facing severe financial pressures” and that “others are struggling to maintain all or part of their funding.”

Pharma and chemical interests of the
Cochrane Library’s publishers, John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The Cochrane Collaboration states that its central functions are funded by royalties from its publishers, John Wiley and Sons Ltd., which come from sales of subscriptions to The Cochrane Library. Even here however, it turns out that things are not quite as simple as they might initially seem.

For instance, Wiley's scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly business is known as Wiley-Blackwell and publishes over 300 medical journals, examples of which include: Cancer, the flagship journal of the American Cancer Society; Cancer Science, the official journal of the Japanese Cancer Association; the European Journal of Cancer Care; Diabetic Medicine, the journal of Diabetes UK; HIV Medicine, the official journal of the British HIV Association (BHIVA) and the European AIDS Clinical Society (EACS); the International Journal of Gynaecological Cancer, the official journal of the International Gynaecologic Cancer Society and the European Society of Gynaecological Oncology; and the Journal of Interventional Cardiology.

Moreover, it is also notable that Wiley’s acquisition in 1996 of VCH Publishing Group, the publishing arm of the German Chemical and Pharmaceutical societies, made it one of the largest chemistry publishers in the world.

As such, there is clearly an argument to be made that Wiley, as the Cochrane Library’s publisher, has a vested interest in the promotion of pharmaceutical and chemical medicine. From its perspective, any promotion of natural non-patentable alternatives - such as vitamin therapies – could likely be seen as a threat to its future profits.

The Cochrane reviewers’ ultimate aim:
“urgent political action” to bring in stiffer regulation of antioxidant supplements

Surprisingly, amidst the predictable media frenzy that resulted from the publication of this Cochrane review, there was very little attention paid to the reviewers’ ultimate aim.

Quoted in a Medical News Today article however, the reviewers made a "plea for urgent political action" to bring in stiffer regulation of antioxidant supplements. Even more interestingly, the Medical News Today article appears to infer that Christian Gluud - rather than Goran Bjelakovic – was the review’s main author and specifically quotes Gluud as saying “in no uncertain terms” that: "We should request that the regulatory authorities dare to regulate the industry without being financially dependent on the very same industry."

Of course, had Gluud’s criticism been levelled at pharmaceutical companies – in that regulatory agencies virtually the world over are highly dependent on licensing fees and other income from the drug industry - then it would clearly have been a reasonable one. By comparison, however, in most countries vitamin companies have traditionally contributed either very little or next to nothing, financially speaking, to the government agencies that regulate them. Notably therefore, Gluud neglected to make any mention of this important fact.

As such, enterprising journalists – and by this we mean journalists who prefer to do their own research, as opposed to those who took the lazy option and merely used the Cochrane Collaboration’s press release as the basis for their articles – should further take note that the call by these reviewers for stiffer regulation is not even a new one as they have been making similar statements for some four years now.

In an earlier Cochrane review, published in October 2004, for example, the same reviewers similarly contrived to show that there was no convincing evidence that antioxidant supplements have a beneficial effect on the occurrence of gastrointestinal cancers or on overall mortality and that beta-carotene, vitamin A, vitamin C, and/or vitamin E increase overall mortality. Significantly therefore, they were openly of the opinion in this review that “antioxidant supplements should be regulated as drugs.” Similarly, that very same month, Bjelakovic, Gluud and two of the other members of their team had a study published in the Lancet in which they claimed they “could not find evidence that antioxidant supplements can prevent gastrointestinal cancers” and that “on the contrary, they seem to increase overall mortality.”

The timing of these two October 2004 publications was highly significant, as they were brought to the attention of the worldwide media only weeks before a crucial meeting of the Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU), whose agenda on which occasion included consideration of a proposed restrictive global guideline on vitamin and mineral supplements. Sponsored by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the main functions of Codex committees revolve around drawing up standards and guidelines for the global food and food supplement industries. Codex texts carry binding authority under the World Trade Organization (WTO), which uses them as the benchmarks when adjudicating on international trade disputes involving food products. Because of this, WTO member countries almost invariably base their domestic food laws upon Codex’s standards and guidelines, not only as a means of promoting international trade but also to avoid having expensive trade dispute cases brought against them at the WTO.

Significantly therefore, the proposed Codex vitamin and mineral supplement guidelines had been subject to vehement worldwide protests for many years, and, as a result, their adoption had essentially been stalled since the mid-1990s. Nevertheless, perhaps due in no small part to the efforts of Bjelakovic, Gluud and their team, the CCNFSDU’s 2004 meeting resulted in the guidelines being advanced for final adoption at Step 8.

Finally, with respect to the Cochrane reviewer’s ultimate aims, it is also notable that Bjelakovic and Gluud wrote a particularly revealing editorial in the May 16, 2007 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Discussing a study claiming that taking multivitamins may be associated with an increased risk for advanced or fatal prostate cancers, they stated that the study’s authors "add to the growing evidence that questions the beneficial value of antioxidant vitamin pills in generally well-nourished populations and underscore the possibility that antioxidant supplements could have unintended consequences for our health." In their editorial’s conclusion, Bjelakovic and Gluud suggested that supplements should be tested for benefits and harms before they come to the market and infer that they should be treated in the same way as pharmaceutical drugs. Predictably, of course, in doing so they neglected to mention that such testing would be prohibitively expensive for non-patentable substances such as vitamins and that only patentable substances, i.e. synthetic chemical drug medicines, offer the possibility of recouping the huge costs involved.

As such, bearing in mind Gluud’s absurd inference that regulatory authorities are “financially dependent” upon “the [vitamin] industry”, as opposed to the multi-trillion dollar patented synthetic chemical drug industry, it would appear that both he and Bjelakovic are developing something of a habit of ignoring not only relevant studies, but also relevant facts.

The influence of Big Media

Journalist Rachel Johnson wrote an article entitled ‘Not so vital vitamins’ for the Sunday Times in the UK in which she cited the Cochrane review, stated that vitamins are a waste of money and claimed that taking them may shorten life expectancy. She later confessed however that she “knew there was something fishy” about the Cochrane review but that she “was under pressure to back it” even though she “thought it was simply impossible to pin any of the outcomes on taking vitamins.”

Following the storm of protest that erupted after the recent Cochrane review’s publication, it didn’t take long for evidence to emerge that certain newspaper editors had put their journalists under pressure to back it .

The British journalist and writer Rachel Johnson, for example, had written an article entitled ‘Not so vital vitamins’ for the Sunday Times in which she cited the review, stated that vitamins are a waste of money and claimed that taking them may shorten life expectancy.

Subsequently however, upon being presented with an article – citing research published in the International Journal of Cancer – showing that a researcher who claimed vitamins can speed up the development of cancer has essentially admitted she got it wrong, Johnson confessed that she “knew there was something fishy” about the Cochrane review but that she “was under pressure to back it” even though she “thought it was simply impossible to pin any of the outcomes on taking vitamins.”

But why might Johnson have been put under pressure? Could it have anything to do with the fact that recent advertisers in the Sunday Times’ magazines have included companies such as Garnier, a division of L'Oréal – the latter of which is the world's largest cosmetics firm and currently holds an 8.7 percent stake in one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, Sanofi-Aventis; Boots, the UK’s dominant pharmaceutical retailer and wholesaler; and BUPA, the UK's leading provider of private health care insurance?

Conclusion

If people are prevented from accessing safe natural health therapies, pharmaceutical-based medicine will essentially be the only option left available to them.

As was similarly the case with the 2004 Cochrane review and Lancet study, the publication of this latest Cochrane meta-analysis comes at a critical time in the global battle to maintain free access to non-patentable vitamin therapies.

The European Commission, aided and abetted by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), is currently in the final stages of setting maximum permitted levels for vitamins and minerals in supplements. At present, it is currently expected that these levels will be announced sometime before January 2009 and that in many cases the permitted dosages will be far less than those that are necessary to prevent chronic diseases and promote optimum health.

Meanwhile, in Canada, New Zealand, the United States and many other countries, similar regulatory efforts are also underway to enact restrictions upon the availability of natural health therapies. Clearly therefore, should these actions be successful and patients subsequently be forced to worship at the deadly alter of pharmaceutical medicine, countless millions of deaths will occur that could otherwise have been prevented by the application of Cellular Health research.

Bearing all of this in mind, the question has to be asked as to whether the deliberate actions of the Cochrane researchers - in aiding and abetting those who want to bring in draconian regulations for vitamin supplements - are potentially criminal.

In considering this question, let us briefly summarize the evidence.

Firstly, we know that Cellular Health research has the potential to save millions of lives. Similarly, we also know that most prescription drugs don't work for most people and that adverse drug reactions are now between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death in hospitalized patients in the United States. And yet, if people are ultimately prevented from accessing safe natural health therapies, pharmaceutical drugs will essentially be the only option left available to them.

As regards the recent Cochrane meta-analysis, we know that the two organizations who supported it - the Knowledge and Research Centre for Alternative Medicine (ViFAB) in Denmark, and the Copenhagen Trial Unit’s Centre for Clinical Intervention Research, located at the Copenhagen University Hospital, Rigshospitalet, also in Denmark - have a strong bias towards pharmaceutical medicine and a close affiliation to the decidedly anti-supplement Danish government.

In addition, we also know that the majority of the Cochrane Collaboration’s funding comes from bodies with close links to, and strong support for, the pharmaceutical industry and that Wiley, the Cochrane Library’s publishers, has a vested interest in the promotion of pharmaceutical and chemical medicine.

Finally, and perhaps most seriously of all, we know that the scientific focus area of Christian Gluud, one of the leading authors of the Cochrane meta-analysis, is pharmaceutical research and development and that he has numerous conflicts of interest and connections to organizations having a strong institutional bias towards orthodox medicine.

As such, given all of the above, when Gluud and his colleagues make their pleas for “urgent political action" to bring in stiffer regulation of supplements, what are we to conclude? Are we supposed to believe that the various conflicts of interest described above are all merely coincidental and that the ongoing efforts of Gluud and his colleagues to discredit non-patentable vitamin therapies are somehow not intended to protect the interests of the multi-trillion dollar global pharmaceutical industry and its Investment “Business With Disease”?

Frankly, we think that the evidence presented here is already too strong for any reasonable person to dismiss out of hand. So much so, in fact, that we are confident the organizers of the “vitamins lead to a premature death” campaign will eventually be called to account for their actions.

Justice will prevail - the health and lives of countless millions of people are depending on it.

Full story/Permalink

Why Oil Prices Are So High

A Weak Dollar, Bad Fed Policies and Hedge Fund Speculators
By Paul Craig Roberts

6-14-8

How to explain the oil price? Why is it so high? Are we running out? Are supplies disrupted, or is the high price a reflection of oil company greed or OPEC greed. Are Chavez and the Saudis conspiring against us? In my opinion, the two biggest factors in oil's high price are the weakness in the US dollar's exchange value and the liquidity that the Federal Reserve is pumping out. The dollar is weak because of large trade and budget deficits, the closing of which is beyond American political will. As abuse wears out the US dollar's reserve currency role, sellers demand more dollars as a hedge against its declining exchange value and ultimate loss of reserve currency status. In an effort to forestall a serious recession and further crises in derivative instruments, the Federal Reserve is pouring out liquidity that is financing speculation in oil futures contracts. Hedge funds and investment banks are restoring their impaired capital structures with profits made by speculating in highly leveraged oil future contracts, just as real estate speculators flipping contracts pushed up home prices. The oil futures bubble, too, will pop, hopefully before new derivatives are created on the basis of high oil prices. There are other factors affecting the price of oil. The prospect of an Israeli/US attack on Iran has increased current demand in order to build stocks against disruption. No one knows the consequence of such an ill-conceived act of aggression, and the uncertainty pushes up the price of oil as the entire Middle East could be engulfed in conflagration. However, storage facilities are limited, and the impact on price of larger inventories has a limit. Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi recently stated, "There is no justification for the current rise in prices." What the minister means is that there are no shortages or supply disruptions. He means no real reasons as distinct from speculative or psychological reasons. The run up in oil price coincides with a period of heightened US and Israeli military aggression in the Middle East. However, the biggest jump has been in the last 18 months. When Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, the average price of oil that year was about $27 per barrel, or about $31 in inflation adjusted 2007 dollars. The price rose another $10 in 2004 to an average annual price of $42 (in 2007 dollars), another $12 in 2005, $7 in 2006, and $4 in 2007 to $65. But in the last few months the price has more than doubled to about $135. It is difficult to explain a $70 jump in price in terms other than speculation. Oil prices have been high in the past. Until 2008, the record monthly oil price was $104 in December 1979 (measured in December 2007 dollars). As recently as 1998 the real price of oil was lower than in 1946 when the nominal price of oil was $1.63 per barrel. During the Bush regime, the price of oil in 2007 dollars has risen from $27 to approximately $135. Possibly, the rise in the oil price was held down, prior to the recent jump, by expectations that Democrats would eventually end the conflict and restrain Israel in the interest of Middle East peace and justice for the Palestinians. Now that Obama has pledged allegiance to AIPAC and adopted Bush's position toward Iran, the high oil price could be a forecast that US/Israeli policy is likely to result in substantial supply disruptions. Still, the recent Israeli statements that an attack on Iran was "inevitable" only jumped the oil price about $8. Perhaps more difficult to understand than the high price of oil are the low US long-term interest rates. US interest rates are actually below the rate of inflation, to say nothing of the imperiled exchange value of the dollar. Economists who assume rational participants in rational markets cannot explain why lenders would indefinitely accept interest rates below the rate of inflation. Of course, Americans don't get real inflation numbers from their government and have not since the Consumer Price Index was rigged during the Clinton administration to hold down Social Security payments by denying retirees their full cost of living adjustments. According to statistician John Williams, using the pre-Clinton era measure of the CPI produces a current CPI of about 7.5%. Understating inflation makes real GDP growth appear higher. If inflation were properly measured, the US has probably experienced no real GDP growth in the 21st century. Williams reports that for decades political administrations have fiddled with the inflation and employment numbers to make themselves look slightly better. The cumulative effect has been to deprive these measurements of veracity. If I understand Williams, today both inflation and unemployment rates, as originally measured, are around 12 per cent. By pumping out money in an effort to forestall recession and paper over balance sheet problems, the Federal Reserve is driving up commodity and food prices in general. Yet American real incomes are not growing. Even without jobs offshoring, US economic policy has put the bulk of the population on a path to lower living standards. The crisis that looms for the US is the loss of world currency role. Once the dollar loses that role, the US government will not be able to finance its operations by borrowing abroad, and foreigners will cease to finance the massive US trade deficit. This crisis will eliminate the US as a world power. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

Full story/Permalink

Water-fuel car unveiled in Japan

Full story/Permalink

The Fluoride Glut: Sources of Fluoride Exposure

"Dental and Public health administrators should be aware of the total fluoride exposure in the population before introducing any additional fluoride programme for caries prevention." - World Health Organization. (1994). Fluorides and Oral Health. WHO Technical Report Series 846.

---

Contents of Page
I. Current Sources of Fluoride II. Increase in fluoride exposure & dental fluorosis III. Current dental fluorosis prevalence IV. Adding Poison to the Wound: EPA's Fluoride Pesticide Tolerances	V. Warnings & recommendations (from dental community) VI. Current fluoridation policy outdated VII. Complexities with prescribing fluoride in today's environment

---

I. Current Sources of Fluoride (Back to top)

Note: To find out how much fluoride is in the following products, click here.

TOOTHPASTE
For data on how much fluoride children ingest from toothpaste, click here .

"Virtually all authors have noted that some children could ingest more fluoride from dentrifice alone than is recommended as a total daily fluoride ingestion." - Levy SM, Guha-Chowdhury N. (1999). Total fluoride intake and implications for dietary fluoride supplementation. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 59: 211-23.

FLUORIDATED TAP WATER
For data on the water fluoridation status of each state in the US, click here

"Since [the 1940s], the percent of individuals consuming fluoridated water (in the US) has steadily increased. The increase in percentage of communities with fluoridated water has resulted in an increase in the mean content of fluoride not only in soft drinks and fruit juices, but in canned goods (notably soups), leading to increased intake of fluoride by individuals in communities with nonfluoridated water." - Fomon SJ, Ekstrand J, Ziegler EE. (2000). Fluoride intake and prevalence of dental fluorosis: trends in fluoride intake with special attention to infants. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 60(3):131-9.

"Because the main component of most beverages is water, the fluoride content of these products closely parallels the fluoride content of water used in their processing." - Levy SM, Guha-Chowdhury N. (1999). Total fluoride intake and implications for dietary fluoride supplementation. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 59: 211-23.

"We cannot... ignore water fluoridation as a major source of ingested fluoride." - Heller KE, et al (1997). Dental Caries and Dental Fluorosis at Varying Water Fluoride Concentrations. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 57: 136-143.

INFANT FORMULA
For further information on fluoride exposure from infant formula, click here

"[I]nfant formulas reconstituted with higher fluoride water can provide 100 to 200 times more fluoride than breastmilk, or cows milk." - Levy SM, Guha-Chowdhury N. (1999). Total fluoride intake and implications for dietary fluoride supplementation. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 59: 211-23.

"Our analysis shows that babies who are exclusively formula fed face the highest risk; in Boston, for example, more than 60 percent of the exclusively formula fed babies exceed the safe dose of fluoride on any given day." - Environmental Working Group, "EWG Analysis of Government Data Finds Babies Over-Exposed to Fluoride in Most Major U.S. Cities", March 22, 2006.

"[M]ore than 50 percent of infants are currently formula fed by 1 month of age, and these infants are likely to be continuously exposed to high intakes of fluoride for 9 or 10 months - a circumstance quite rare in the 1960s and early 1970s." - Fomon SJ, Ekstrand J. (1999). Fluoride intake by infants. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 59(4):229-34.

"Fluoride is now introduced at a much earlier stage of human development than ever before and consequently alters the normal fluoride-pharmacokinetics in infants. But can one dramatically increase the normal fluoride-intake to infants and get away with it?" - Luke J. (1997). The Effect of Fluoride on the Physiology of the Pineal Gland. Ph.D. Thesis. University of Surrey, Guildford. p. 176.

"Parents should therefore be advised that they may be able to protect their children from dental fluorosis by breastfeeding their infant and by extending the duration for which they breastfeed. When infants are formula-fed, parents should be advised to reconstitute or dilute infant formula with deionized water (reverse osmosis, distilled, or low-fluoride bottled water) in order to reduce the amount of systemically ingested fluoride." - Brothwell D, Limeback H. (2003). Breastfeeding is protective against dental fluorosis in a nonfluoridated rural area of Ontario, Canada. Journal of Human Lactation 19: 386-90.

“Breastfeeding of infants should be encouraged, both for the many documented, general health benefits and the relative protection against ingestion of excessive fluoride from high quantities of intake of fluoridated water used to reconstitute concentrated infant formula early in infancy.” - Levy SL, et al. (1995). Sources of fluoride intake in children. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 55: 39-52.

PROCESSED CEREALS

"[F]ood processing often concentrates fluoride, and foods processed with fluoridated water typically have higher fluoride concentrations than foods processed with non-fluoridated water... A study that found marked differences between cereaals processed in fluoridated and non-fluoridated areas showed that cereals processed in a fluoridated area had fluoride concentrations ranging from 3.8 ppm to 6.3 ppm..." - Warren JJ, Levy SM. (2003). Current and future role of fluoride in nutrition. Dental Clinics of North America 47: 225-43.

"[D]uring manufacturing, infant dry cereals are processed in a slurry and placed in a revolving drying drum. The water from the slurry evaporates, and the fluoride from the water remains in the cereal. Thus, the fluoride concentration of the water used during processing can substantially affect the final fluoride concentration... Infants who eat large quantities of dry infant cereals reconstituted with fluoridated water could ingest substantial quantities of fluoride from this source." - Heilman JR, et al. (1997). Fluoride concentrations of infant foods. Journal of the American Dental Association 128(7):857-63.

JUICE
For published data on fluoride levels in juice, click here

"Our data suggest that young children who regularly or frequently drink substantial quantities of [juice] possibly should not receive dietary fluoride supplements, since they might be at increased risk of developing dental fluorosis." - Kiritsy MC, et al. (1996). Assessing fluoride concentrations of juices and juice-flavored drinks. Journal of the American Dental Association 127(7):895-902.

SODA

"Seventy-one percent of the [sodas] had fluoride levels exceeding 0.60 ppm, which is considered to contain sufficient fluoride so that dietary fluoride supplements are contraindicated."- Heilman JR, et al. (1999). Assessing fluoride levels of carbonated soft drinks. Journal of the American Dental Association 130(11):1593-9.

"Schulz (1976) found that nearly all soft drinks then manufactured in optimally fluoridated Baltimore (1.10 ppm) had fluoride concentrations of 0.8 ppm or greater. Shannon (1977) tested soft drinks manufactured in Houston, Texas... He found that fluoride concentrations... closely matched the fluoride concentrations of the bottling plants' water supplies. This conclusion was also reached in other studies, including the authors' published and unpublished analyses of fluoride concentrations in 332 soft drink products." - Warren JJ, Levy SM. (1999). Systemic fluoride: Sources, amounts, and effects of ingestion. Dental Clinics of North America 43: 695-711.

TEA
For USDA data on fluoride levels in US tea, click here (pdf file).

"Appropriate regulation of the fluoride content of tea commodities should be an urgent matter for public food safety policy." - Cao J, et al. (2004). Fluoride in newer tea commodities. Fluoride 37: 286-300.

"Instant tea, one of the most popular drinks in the United States, may be a source of harmful levels of fluoride... The researchers found that some regular strength preparations contain as much as 6.5 parts per million (ppm) of fluoride, well over the 4 ppm maximum allowed in drinking water by the Environmental Protection Agency." - 'Potentially harmful fluoride levels found in some instant tea'', Washington University School of Medicine, January 25, 2005.

"Another important source of fluoride ingestion is tea...[T]he fluoride content of tea has been found to range from 0.1 to 4.2 ppm fluoride, with an average of about 3 ppm." - Levy SM, Guha-Chowdhury N. (1999). Total fluoride intake and implications for dietary fluoride supplementation. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 59: 211-23.

"[M]ost of the iced teas studied contained considerable fluoride concentrations. If infants ingest larger amounts of them because of their sweet taste, there is a risk of uncontrolled overdosing as a result of additional fluoride intake from other sources at the same time. " - Behrendt A, Oberste V, Wetzel WE. (2002). Fluoride concentration and pH of iced tea products. Caries Research 36(6): 405-410.

"The average fluoride concentration of infusions prepared from decaffeinated (green & black) tea in this study is 3.19 ppm and ranged from 1.01 to 5.20. This is unexpectedly higher than caffeinated tea and such a difference is statistically significant. If decaffeinated tea were prepared with optimally fluoridated water, the fluoride content would be increased by 1 ppm and would reach an average of 4.19 ppm." - Chan JT, Koh SH. (1996). Fluoride content in caffeinated, decaffeinated and herbal teas. Caries Research 30:88-92.

WINE
For USDA data on fluoride levels in Californian wines, click here.

"[A]nalyses of nineteen California wines revealed fluoride concentrations ranging from 0.23 to 2.80 ppm (mean 1.02 ppm, with seven samples above the international limit of 1 ppm)." - Burgstahler AW, et al. (1997). Fluoride in California wines and raisins. Fluoride 30: 142-146.

"Researchers from California State University in Fresno conducted a 5 year study (1990-1994) on vineyards throughout the San Joaquin Valley. They found that '[m]ultiple applications of Cryolite during the growing season significantly increase fluoride in wines.' Notably they found fluoride levels between 3 - 6 ppm in Zinfandel, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chenin Blanc, Thompson Seedless, Barbera, Muscat Candi, Ruby Cabernet; and levels between 6 - <9>At 6 ppm one glass of wine (175 ml) would have delivered as much fluoride as about a liter of optimally fluoridated water!" - Connett E, Connett P. (2001). Fluoride: The Hidden Poison in the National Organic Standards. Pesticides and You 21: 18-22.

BEER

"Beers brewed in locations with high fluoride water levels may contribute significantly to the daily fluoride intake, particularly in alcohol misusing subjects and this may contribute to alcohol-associated bone disease." - Warnakulasuriya S, et al. (2002). Fluoride content of alcoholic beverages. Clinica Chimica Acta 320: 1-4.

"Soda pop and beer bottled with fluoridated water contain 0.7 to 1 ppm fluoride; consumption of these beverages is almost certainly more variable among individuals than consumption of water... If beer contains 0.7 ppm fluoride, heavy beer-drinkers may ingest more than 4 mg daily from beer alone." - Groth, E. (1973), Two Issues of Science and Public Policy: Air Pollution Control in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Fluoridation of Community Water Supplies. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, May 1973.

MECHANICALLY DEBONED CHICKEN

"[F]oods made with mechanically separated chicken have the potential to be a major contributor to total fluoride intake... Fluoride contributed by foods made with mechanically separated chicken could increase the risk of mild dental fluorosis for children less than eight years of age when combined with other sources of fluoride exposure." - Fein NJ, Cerklewski FL. (2001). Fluoride content of foods made with mechanically separated chicken. Journal of Agricultural Food Chemistry 49(9):4284-6.

"[W]e found that infant foods containing chicken were high in fluoride. Thus, any infants who regularly eat more than a couple of ounces of infant foods containing high-fluoride-content chicken would be at elevated fluorosis risk." - Heilman JR, et al. (1997). Fluoride concentrations of infant foods. Journal of the American Dental Association 128(7):857-63.

FISH/SEAFOOD

"Food categories with the highest mean fluoride levels were fish [2.118 ppm], beverages [1.148 ppm], and soups [0.606 ppm]. Individual samples with the highest fluoride levels were tea [4.97 ppm], canned fish [4.57 ppm], shellfish [3.36 ppm], cooked veal [1.23 ppm], and cooked wheat cereal [1.02 ppm]." - Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) (2001). Toxicological Profile for Fluorides: Draft Profile for Public Comment. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Public Health Service.

TEFLON PANS

"Teflon-lined cookware may contribute to the fluoride ingested by humans. Full and Parkins boiled fluoridated water at a moderate rate until a one-third or one-half reduction in volume was attained, then determined the fluoride content of the residual water... In Teflon-coated ware, the concentration of fluoride ion increased to nearly 3 ppm. This result requires confirmation; but, if it is correct, then the release of fluoride into foods during cooking in plastic-coated wares requires investigation." - Marier J, Rose D. (1977). Environmental Fluoride. National Research Council of Canada. Associate Committe on Scientific Criteria for Environmental Quality. NRCC No. 16081.

FLUORIDATED SALT

The use of fluoridated salt is becoming increasingly widespread across the globe. While the US & Canada do not yet have salt fluoridation programs, it is currently estimated that more people in the world are exposed to fluoridated salt than fluoridated water. Thus, this source of fluoride exposure is becoming increasingly important and insidious. Fluoridated salt usually contains about 250 ppm fluoride, which would result in a daily intake of 2.5 mg of fluoride per day for people consuming 10 grams of salt. Countries with extensive salt fluoridation programs include: Austria, Bolivia, Columbia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, France, Germany, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Switzerland, and Venezuela. To learn more, click here

ANAESTHETICS (Enflurane, Isoflurane & Sevoflurane)

"In the 1960s, the widespread use of the inhalational anaesthetic methoxyflurane was associated with a significant occurrence of postoperative renal dysfunction. This was attributed to hepatic biotransformation of methoxyflurane and subsequent release of inorganic fluoride ions into the circulation. Based upon the clinical experience with methoxyflurane, serum fluoride concentrations exceeding 50 mumol/l were considered to be nephrotoxic... Enflurane and even isoflurane may, when used during prolonged operations, also yield anorganic fluoride levels in excess of 50 mumol/l. " - Nuscheler M, et al. (1996). [Fluoride-induced nephrotoxicity: fact or fiction?]. Anaesthesist 45 Suppl 1:S32-40.

"Sevoflurane administration can result in increased serum inorganic fluoride ion concentrations, which have been associated with inhibition of renal concentrating ability." - Goldberg ME, et al. (1996). Sevoflurane versus isoflurane for maintenance of anesthesia: are serum inorganic fluoride ion concentrations of concern? Anesthesia and Analgesia 82(6):1268-72.

"[T]here were significant increases in the serum fluoride in group I (isoflurane) at 5, 10, 24 and 48 hours. The peak serum fluoride was 35.4 (8.5) µmol/L at 10 hours. Group S (sevoflurane) also showed similar significant increases in the serum fluoride concentration compared to baseline at all times of the study. The peak serum fluoride in the group S was 71.2 (19.3) µmol/L at 24 hours... After prolonged anaesthesia, metabolism of sevoflurane to inorganic fluoride is of a greater magnitude than that of isoflurane and exceeds the nephrotoxic threshold." - Abdel-Latif, MM, et al. (2003). Serum fluoride ion and renal function after prolonged sevoflurane or isoflurane anaesthesia. Egyptian Journal of Anaesthesia 19: 79-83.

CIGARETTES

"Cigarettes may be another significant source of fluoride intake by humans." - Marier J, Rose D. (1977). Environmental Fluoride. National Research Council of Canada. Associate Committe on Scientific Criteria for Environmental Quality. NRCC No. 16081.

II. Increase in fluoride exposure (Back to top)

"Fluoride is a persistent bioaccumulator, and is entering into human food-and-beverage chains in increasing amounts." - Marier J, Rose D. (1977). Environmental Fluoride. National Research Council of Canada. Associate Committe on Scientific Criteria for Environmental Quality. NRCC No. 16081.

"Based on this review, we conclude that fluoride intakes of infants and children have shown a rather steady increase since 1930, are likely to continue to increase, and will be associated with further increase in the prevalence of enamel fluorosis unless intervention measures are instituted." - Fomon SJ, Ekstrand J, Ziegler EE. (2000). Fluoride intake and prevalence of dental fluorosis: trends in fluoride intake with special attention to infants. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 60(3):131-9.

"[T]he prevalence of dental fluorosis in the United States has increased during the last 30 years, both in communities with fluoridated water and in communities with nonfluoridated water." - Fomon SJ, Ekstrand J, Ziegler EE. (2000). Fluoride intake and prevalence of dental fluorosis: trends in fluoride intake with special attention to infants. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 60(3):131-9.

"The increase in [dental fluorosis] suggests that the total systemic fluoride exposure for children during dental development has changed since the 1940s." - Pang D, et al. (1992). Fluoride intake from beverage consumption in a sample of North Carolina children. Journal of Dental Research 71: 1382-1388.

"[A] few cases of more severe fluorosis can be found now in some communities. Because the prevalence of fluorosis is now higher than 50 years ago, we can conclude that fluoride availability... has increased in North American children." - Rozier RG. (1999). The prevalence and severity of enamel fluorosis in North American children. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 59(4):239-46.

III. Current dental fluorosis prevalence (Back to top)

"The majority of children in this research study drank water witih the optimal fluoride level (0.7-1.2 ppm) and overall 34.5% had definitive fluorosis on at least two teeth. This result is generally consistent with most contemporary prevalence studies of fluorosis in North America." - Levy SM, Hong L, Warren JJ, Broffitt B. (2006). .Use of the fluorosis risk index in a cohort study: the Iowa fluoride study. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 66(2):92-6.

"Current studies support the view that dental fluorosis has increased in both fluoridated and non-fluoridated communities. North American studies suggest rates of 20 to 75% in the former and 12 to 45% in the latter." - Locker, D. (1999). Benefits and Risks of Water Fluoridation. An Update of the 1996 Federal-Provincial Sub-committee Report. Prepared for Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care.

"[S]everal reports of prevalence for mostly mild fluorosis are in the 20 percent to 80 percent range." - Levy SM, Guha-Chowdhury N. (1999). Total fluoride intake and implications for dietary fluoride supplementation. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 59: 211-23.

IV. Adding poison to the wound: EPA's fluoride pesticide tolerances (Back to top)

Despite repeated warnings that humans, particularly children, are currently receiving too much fluoride from their diets (see section V), fluoride pesticides continue to be added to the food supply under extremely lax regulations from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Currently, the main fluoride pesticide used in the US is cryolite (sodium aluminum fluoride). The EPA currently allows up to 7 ppm of fluoride on over 30 fruits and vegetables treated with cryolite. This 7 ppm fluoride tolerance applies to: apricots, beets, blackberries, broccoli, brussel sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, citrus fruits, collards, cranberries, cucumbers, eggplants, grapes, kale, lettuce, melons, nectarines, peaches, peppers, plums, pumpkins, radishes, raspberries, squash, strawberries, tomatoes and turnip.

A 2 ppm standard has also been established for potatoes, which are second to grapes for total cryolite usage.

The EPA's standard of 7 ppm for fluoride residues is over 5 times greater than the standard set by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1933. In 1933, the USDA established the maximum level for fluoride residues on fruits and vegetables at 1.2 ppm, which was the same standard the USDA established for arsenic. While arsenic pesticides have since been phased out of use in the US, fluoride pesticides remain.

In fact, the current tolerance levels for fluoride pesticides could become even higher - if the US EPA, under intense pressure from DOW Chemical, approves sulfuryl fluoride as a replacement fumigant for methyl bromide.

If EPA approves sulfuryl fluoride (an indoor fumigant that has never before been used on food) as the replacement for methyl bromide, there will be a substantial increase in the fluoride contamination of the food supply.

In a recent petition (February 15, 2002) to the EPA, DOW Chemical asked for extremely high fluoride tolerances on a wide number of common foods, including, 98 ppm for wheat germ, 40 ppm for wheat bran, 31 ppm for rice bran, 30 ppm for a variety of nuts, 28 ppm for corn meal, 26 ppm for corn flour, 25 ppm for millet grain, 25 ppm for wild rice grain, 25 ppm for sorghum grain, 25 ppm for wheat grain, and 17 ppm for oat grain!

V. Warnings & recommendations (from dental community) (Back to top)

Minimize Ingested Fluoride

"'In consideration of the currently understood mechanisms of cariostasis and fluorosis, our efforts should be focused on minimizing levels of ingested fluorides. The control of fluoride levels in infant formulas, the recent reductions in the fluoride supplement schedule, and the calls for lower fluoride pediatric toothpastes are all laudable efforts. We cannot, however, ignore water fluoridation as a major source of ingested fluoride." - Heller KE, et al (1997). Dental Caries and Dental Fluorosis at Varying Water Fluoride Concentrations. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 57: 136-143.

Do Not Use Fluoridated Water to Reconstitute Infant Formula

“When infants are formula-fed, parents should be advised to reconstitute or dilute infant formula with deionized water (reverse osmosis, distilled, or low-fluoride bottledwater) in order to reduce the amount of systemically ingested fluoride.” - Brothwell D, Limeback H. (2003). Breastfeeding is protective against dental fluorosis in a nonfluoridated rural area of Ontario, Canada. Journal of Human Lactation 19: 386-90.

“[W]e recommend use of water with relatively low fluoride content (e.g. 0 to 0.3 ppm) as a diluent for infant formulas and recommend that no fluoride supplements be given to infants.” - Fomon SJ, Ekstrand J, Ziegler EE. (2000). Fluoride intake and prevalence of dental fluorosis: trends in fluoride intake with special attention to infants. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 60: 131-9.

“Breastfeeding of infants should be encouraged, both for the many documented, general health benefits and the relative protection against ingestion of excessive fluoride from high quantities of intake of fluoridated water used to reconstitute concentrated infant formula early in infancy.” - Levy SL, et al. (1995). Sources of fluoride intake in children. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 55: 39-52.

“Use of powder concentrate would be recommended only for those with low-fluoride water.” - Levy SL, et al. (1995). Sources of fluoride intake in children. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 55: 39-52.

"to limit fluoride intakes to amounts <0.1> - Buzalaf MA, et al. (2001). Fluoride content of infant formulas prepared with deionized, bottled mineral and fluoridated drinking water. ASDC Journal of Dentistry for Children 68(1):37-41, 10.

“Our results suggest that the fluoride contribution of water used to reconstitute formulas increases risk of fluorosis and could be an area for intervention... Supporting long-term lactation could be an important strategy to decrease fluorosis risk of primary teeth and early developing permanent teeth.” - Marshall TA, et al. (2004). Associations between Intakes of Fluoride from Beverages during Infancy and Dental Fluorosis of Primary Teeth. Journal of the American College of Nutrition 23:108-16.

“The recommendation is that bottled or deionized water be used instead (of fluoridated water) to dilute the formula." - Ekstrand J. (1989). Fluoride intake in early infancy. Journal of Nutrition 119(Suppl 12):1856-60.

Ingestion of Fluoride from Toothpaste should be Reduced

"To reduce the risk of fluorosis, it has been suggested that use of higher concentration of fluoride dentrifices by preschool children be avoided, that only small quantities of paste be used under parental direction and supervision, that further development and testing of lower concentration fluoride dentrifices be encouraged, and that dentrifice tubes dispense smaller quantities so that inappropriate eating of fluoride dentrifice is avoided." - Levy SM, Guha-Chowdhury N. (1999). Total fluoride intake and implications for dietary fluoride supplementation. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 59: 211-23.

"WARNING: Keep out of reach of children under 6 years of age. If you accidentally swallow more than used for brushing, seek professional help or contact a poison control center immediately." - FDA Mandated Warning on Fluoride Toothpaste Labels Sold in U.S.

Uniform Dosages Should be Reconsidered

"[W]e recommend that uniform dosages of fluoride supplementation should be reconsidered... The FDA should examine the testing and labeling of [juices and sodas] with respect to fluoride concentration so that practictioners and consumers can make an informed choice. Thorough washing of grapes should occur to eliminate any insecticide contamination of the juice. Manufacturers and bottlers should identify sources of fluoride within their products, and when necessary reduce fluoride levels to age-appropriate levels, as recommended by the American Dental Association and the American Academy of Pediatric Dentists." - Stannard JG, et al. (1991). Fluoride levels and fluoride contamination of fruit juices. Journal of Clinical Pediatric Dentistry 16(1):38-40.

Some Children Receive More Fluoride Than 'Optimum' from just One Source of Exposure

"[I]n most reports, a smaller proportion of children, often 10 percent to 20 percent of the study population, received several times as much exposure as the mean. Because of this finding, most authors commented that some children in their studies probably ingested sufficient quantities of fluoride from only the single source or category being studied to exceed the 'optimal' fluoride intake and be at increased risks of dental fluorosis." - Levy SM, Guha-Chowdhury N. (1999). Total fluoride intake and implications for dietary fluoride supplementation. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 59: 211-23.

"Virtually all authors have noted that some children could ingest more fluoride from dentrifice alone than is recommended as a total daily fluoride ingestion." - Levy SM, Guha-Chowdhury N. (1999). Total fluoride intake and implications for dietary fluoride supplementation. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 59: 211-23.

Greater Attention Needs to be Paid to Total Fluoride Exposure

"When considering fluoride recommendations on a group basis, all major sources of fluoride ingestion, such as diet, dentrifice, and fluoride supplements, must be considered so that total daily intake of fluoride can be estimated. To this end, efforts should be renewed to determine and regularly monitor the fluoride levels of beverages and foods and have their fluoride levels made available to the profession and the public. If necessary, fluoride levels of infant formulas and other products should be modified. In addition, attempts must be made to avoid excessive ingestion of fluoride dentrifice and further investigate the cariostatic effect of lower fluoride concentration dentrifices." - Levy SM, Guha-Chowdhury N. (1999). Total fluoride intake and implications for dietary fluoride supplementation. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 59: 211-23.

"The amount of infant foods containing chicken consumed should be considered when assessing the total fluoride intake, as it could contribute a substantial amount of fluoride. Children who regularly consume quantities of infant foods containing chicken should also be monitored to make sure that they do not ingest too much fluoride from other sources such as fluoride dentrifice, dietary fluoride supplements or fluoridated water." - Heilman JR, et al. (1997). Fluoride concentrations of infant foods. Journal of the American Dental Association 128(7):857-63.

"[W]e recommend that dentists who are considering prescribing dietary fluoride supplements for those with nonfluoridated water inquire about young children's fluoride exposure from all important sources, including dentrifice, infant formula (type, brand, and quantity), water (sources, quantities and filtration system) and beverages (including specific juices and juice-flavored drinks)." - Kiritsy MC, et al. (1996). Assessing fluoride concentrations of juices and juice-flavored drinks. Journal of the American Dental Association 127(7):895-902.

VI. Current fluoridation policy outdated (Back to top)

"The early recommendations concerning 'optimal levels' of fluoride in water have not been reviewed since [water fluoridation began], despite developments which could drastically alter the underlying assumption that fluoride intake from sources other than drinking water is relatively low. For example, as fluoridation has become widespread, more and more food processing plants have used fluoridated water, with generally unknown effects on the fluoride content of processed foods. Also, dehydrated and reconstituted food products, virtually unknown to consumers in the 1940s when most of the fluoride surveys were done, are today commonplace. As a result, although orange juice and potatoes are inherently poor sources of fluoride, this is no longer so if they have been concentrated and reconstituted with fluoridated water." - Prival M, Fisher F. (1974). Adding Fluorides to the Diet. Environment 16(5): 29-33.

"Current standards for water fluoridation in the United States have stood since 1962. Many things have changed since then, however, and these data suggest that perhaps it is time to reconsider these standards." - Heller KE, et al (1997). Dental Caries and Dental Fluorosis at Varying Water Fluoride Concentrations. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 57: 136-143.

VII. Complexities with prescribing fluoride in today's environment (Back to top)

"[P]recisely estimating total fluoride intake is quite difficult in research studies and clearly not feasible in clinical practices." - Kiritsy MC, et al. (1996). Assessing fluoride concentrations of juices and juice-flavored drinks. Journal of the American Dental Association 127(7):895-902.

"If fluoride supplements are to be used, then accurate information on not only fluoride content of the residential water source, but on background levels of fluoride intake from food and beverages, type of feeding, kind of water used in reconstituting foods and beverages, use of beverages versus water at home or at child care, the possibility of a diffusion effect, and the use and ingestion of dentrifice and even mouthrinses and gels may need to be considered in making recommendations for appropriate dosages of fluoride supplements in children. These complex sets of data are difficult to obtain even on a research basis, much less in daily dental and medical practice." - Levy SM, Guha-Chowdhury N. (1999). Total fluoride intake and implications for dietary fluoride supplementation. Journal of Public Health Dentistry 59: 211-23.

"With no fluoride levels marked on the soft drink products or easily available from the manufacturers, it is not possible for clinicians or consumers to directly estimate fluoride ingestion from carbonated beverages.Therefore, to reduce the risk of dental fluorosis, dental and medical practitioners should be cautious about prescribing dietary fluoride supplements to preschool-aged children in nonfluoridated areas who consume large quantities of carbonated soft drinks." - Heilman JR, et al. (1999). Assessing fluoride levels of carbonated soft drinks. Journal of the American Dental Association 130(11):1593-9.

Full story/Permalink

Mercury Fillings Shattered!

(NaturalNews) The FDA has, for decades, ridiculously insisted that mercury fillings pose no health threat whatsoever to children. While dismissing hundreds of studies showing a clear link between mercury amalgam fillings ("silver fillings") and disastrous neurological effects in the human body, the FDA denied the truth about mercury and effectively protected the mercury filling racket that has brought so much harm to so many people. For over a hundred years, a cabal of "mercury mongers" made up of the American Dental Association, mercury filling manufacturers and indignant dentists have reaped windfall profits by implanting toxic fillings into the mouths of children, all while insisting that mercury -- one of the most toxic heavy metals known to modern science -- posed no health threat whatsoever.

Today, that reign of toxicity is about to end. Thanks to the tireless, multi-year efforts of people like Charles Brown, National Counsel for Consumers for Dental Choice (www.ToxicTeeth.org), the FDA has now been forced to acknowledge a fact so fundamental that, by any measure of honest science, it should have adopted the position decades ago. What position is that? Simply that mercury is toxic to humans.

Why the FDA has to be sued to do its job of protecting consumers

The FDA's stonewalling on this issue has been nothing less than a circus of politically-motivated denials, much like the Big Tobacco executives swearing under oath that "Nicotine is not addictive." In similar style, the FDA insisted for decades that "Mercury is not toxic." Both statements, as any sane person can readily conclude, are the outbursts of lunatics. Sadly, those lunatics somehow remain in charge of our nation's food, drugs and cosmetics (and dental care), meaning that any real progress to protect the People must come from outside the FDA.

And that's exactly what just happened. Consumers for Dental Choice teamed up with Moms Against Mercury (www.MomsAgainstMercury.org) to sue the FDA and its commissioner whose name sounds like an evil-minded villian right out of a Marvel comic book: Von Eschenbach. The lawsuit, entitled, Moms Against Mercury et al. v. Von Eschenbach, Commissioner, et al was concluded earlier this week with a reluctant agreement by the FDA to both change its website on the issue of mercury and to reclassify mercury within one year, following a period of public comment (which the agency will no doubt try to drag out as long as possible in order to avoid actually sticking to the terms of the lawsuit agreement).

Remarkably, the FDA's website no longer claims mercury is harmless. The language has now been changed in dramatic fashion, reading: "Dental amalgams contain mercury, which may have neurotoxic effects on the nervous systems of developing children and fetus."

There's still a lot of fudging there. Note the careful use of the word "may," which means the FDA still isn't sure whether mercury is neurotoxic, but it might be. This is the FDA's way of continuing to stonewall this issue, even as it lost its lawsuit. For any FDA officials who don't yet think mercury is toxic to the human nervous system, I invite them to chug a few milliliters of the substance themselves and find out what the effects might be. It certainly couldn't make them any more mad than they are already!

Why the FDA is as mad as a hatter

Speaking of people going mad with mercury, that's the history of the term "as mad as a hatter." As explained by Wikipedia:

There is scientific evidence behind the meaning of insanity. Mercury was used in the process of curing felt used in some hats. It was impossible for hatters to avoid inhaling the mercury fumes given off during the hat making process. Hatters and other men in working mills died early due to the residual mercury caused neurological damage, as well as confused speech and distorted vision. As the mercury poisoning progressed to dangerously high levels, sufferers could also experience psychotic symptoms, such as hallucinations. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_hatter... to read more.

Interestingly, the symptoms of mercury toxicity quite accurately describe the mental state of the top decision makers at both the FDA and the American Dental Association, both of which have hallucinated for decades that mercury was safe for children to swallow! These people also exhibit symptoms of serious neurological damage such as malfunctioning frontal lobes -- the part of the brain responsible for reasoning. They also seem to lack proper functioning in the part of brain responsible for empathy and compassion towards fellow human beings.

Perhaps top FDA and ADA officials have been chemically lobotomized in some way, and there's no question that the leaders in conventional dentistry suffer from advanced stages of psychosis, too. This could very well be due to the fact that their ongoing use of mercury fillings has exposed them to decades of mercury vapors and airborne particles which have entered their nervous systems and damaged their brains, making them appear quite mad.

Thus, the modern version of "mad as a hatter" might be, "mad as a dentist."

Not all dentists are mad, mind you, but the ones that still work with mercury no doubt suffer very real neurological damage as a result.

What's next for the FDA

Despite this lawsuit victory, please keep in mind that the FDA has not agreed to immediately ban toxic mercury fillings. They have merely agreed to consider reclassifying mercury at some future date -- a commitment they will probably break, given their history of lying about mercury and refusing to do what they've agreed to do on this subject (see the interview, below, for more details on that).

At every opportunity throughout recent history, the FDA has gone out of its way to censor the truth about the toxicity of mercury fillings, thereby directly supporting the continued exposure of literally hundreds of millions of children, adults and senior citizens to a substance that every reasonable scientist in the modern world knows to be highly toxic to the human nervous system. And in this way, the FDA is guilty of crimes against the People. To know that a substance is highly toxic, and yet to continue allowing it to be implanted into the mouths of children, teens and adults (even when you have the power to ban it) is not merely irresponsible, it is downright criminal.

I can only hope that a nationwide class action lawsuit against the ADA, the FDA, local dentists and mercury manufacturers will emerge from this action. Countless Americans have been poisoned by mercury fillings, and the whole scam has been orchestrated by the usual suspects: Powerful corporations and industry groups that sought to exploit the People for profits, regardless of the harm it might cause them. The fact that a substance as toxic as mercury has been allowed to be implanted into the mouths of children for so long reveals precisely how corrupt, outdated and downright dangerous our system of modern dentistry has really become. Much of what comes out of the mouths of dentists, it turns out, is pure poison... and not coincidentally, that's exactly what those same dentists put into the mouths of their own patients!

But I don't want to give the impression that all dentists are evil. In fact, more and more dentists are now practicing mercury-free dentistry, and I strongly recommend that if you need to see a dentist in the future, insist on seeing one that has given up using mercury. This is more than a personal health issue, it's also an environmental issue. Where do you think all the mercury goes after you chew on those silver fillings and swallow little mercury bits? The mercury molecules that aren't absorbed by your body and lodged in your brain cells are eliminated from the body and flow right into the environment. Ever wonder why all the seafood bring harvested from the ocean these days is contaminated with mercury? Well now you know: It's due to all the toxic consumers peeing away the mercury they've swallowed from their silver fillings!

See my related CounterThink Cartoon, Seafood Mercury Warning at http://www.naturalnews.com/021690.html

The FDA remains steadfastly clueless about mercury

So now, thanks to this lawsuit, the FDA has changed its website to read: "Pregnant women and persons who may have a health condition that makes them more sensitive to mercury exposure, including individuals with existing high levels of mercury bioburden, should not avoid seeking dental care, but should discuss options with their health practitioner."

This sentence says nothing conclusive of course, and it doesn't urge consumers to avoid mercury in any way, but it does at least imply that perhaps there is a link between dental care and mercury poisoning. If you're interested in being amused, you can read all this distorted language yourself at: http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/consumer/amalgams.html

This document, by the way, reveals the outright stupidity of FDA "experts" as they stumble from one topic to the next. For example, one question asked on the page is:

Should pregnant women and young children use or avoid amalgam fillings?

The FDA's answer to that is: The recent advisory panel believed that there was not enough information to answer this question.

In other words, the FDA advisory panel selectively chose to avoid all the evidence showing mercury to be extremely harmful to the nervous system of a fetus or a child, and they have decided to pretend to be uninformed on the subject rather than take any real stance on protecting human beings from the toxicity of mercury. Wow, and to think, these are the people running our national food supply and drug approval processes, too! Is it any wonder so many drugs are deadly? If the FDA thinks mercury is safe, no wonder they think deadly pharmaceuticals don't harm people either!

Exclusive interview with Charles Brown, Consumers for Dental Choice

In the days leading up to this lawsuit with the FDA, I spoke to Charles Brown over the phone and explored the timeline of events involving the FDA and mercury. This interview, published below, is nothing short of astonishing! In it, you'll learn about the FDA's stonewalling tactics, the lies and deceptions of the American Dental Association, and why it took an outside consumer group suing the FDA to get the agency to do its job of protecting consumers from toxic mercury.

Here's the full interview. Be sure to learn more at www.ToxicTeeth.org

Mike: The story here is that you and the organization – Consumers for Dental Choice are now suing the Food & Drug Administration to seek removal of mercury fillings from the U.S. marketplace. Can you give us some details about this lawsuit? Why you think suing the FDA is the best way to go here.

Charlie: Well sure Mike, the FDA is the spoke of the wheel here. I mean they are the ones that make decisions on whether products should be on the market or should not be on the market. They approve, they classify. In the case of devices – a device is something that is used in healthcare and it is separately regulated under a set of rules. One category of devices is implants. Implants are what goes in the body but does not dissolve. It stays in the body at least six months and does not dissolve.

Dental fillings are an implant. The FDA is deciding instead of classifying, instead of regulating it, it will do nothing and it has done nothing on mercury amalgam – encapsulated mercury fillings - decade after decade. They continue to promise to act and actually, last year they made me a written promise and I foolishly believed them. I actually thought when they promised, in writing, that they would begin the classifying process and put together the first step.

They promised me specifically what the step would be, I naively thought, "Well, gee maybe these people are honorable and telling the truth." Actually, once again, they have just pretended. Under pressure, they will say they are going to do something – pressure from Congress, pressure from the Courts, pressure from petitioners, pressure from the press.

They will say, "Sure, we are going to do something." They do nothing. They have left this mercury amalgam out there unclassified, unregulated with no warnings and just a few news releases, which have nothing to do with what they are supposed to be doing.

Mike: So mercury fillings – let me just get this straight from the beginning here, have never been classified by the FDA, which means they have never been really approved by the FDA, correct?

Charlie: Correct, this is a primitive filling in the first place but the pre-primitive – the pre-historic system in the 19th and early 20th Century was where was the dentist mixed the mercury with a powder. That lasted until the 20th Century with the old-fashioned offices. It is now prohibited in several states but that was the way where the dentists would mix a bottle of mercury and powder. That has been classified – not together, but the powder has been classified and the bottle of mercury.

No dentist does that anymore. They are not allowed to do it that way where the ADA tells them not to do it. The state government tells them not to do it. Everybody tells them they cannot do it that way and they do not do it that way. They take the capsule that they receive in the mail. The capsule has never been classified. The FDA knows to classify. Any step that the FDA takes, that the Food & Drug Administration takes toward addressing mercury fillings they know it is the beginning of the end.

Mike: That is my next question. Do you think there will be a cascading effect here? I mean if the FDA honestly begins to apply the law; it would then have to mean the end of mercury.

Charlie: It is the end of the mercury fillings if they apply law so they have intentionally done nothing. If they classify amalgam, they know they are going to have to classify it similar to other mercury devices so they do not do it.

Mike: They just try to delay this and hope no one notices.

Charlie: They will delay until they retire – not delay until next week. They will delay until they retire. Then they will get the golden retirement egg from the American Dental Association. They also know that if they did an Environmental Impact Statement it is the end of mercury fillings.

Mike: Well, that is my next question.

The environmental impact of mercury fillings in dentistry

Charlie: Environmental... yes, sure – the Environmental Impact Statement says it does not require you to go a certain step but if you say if we use mercury fillings, it is the largest source of mercury in the wastewater. Its cremation is the largest source of mercury in the air except in communities that have many power plants is something.

In communities with no other industrial mercury uses it is the largest source of mercury in the air and is the largest source of mercury in the water in every community in America -- the huge contributor in coming out of cemeteries and so on. So you say if we continue mercury fillings, it is an environmental disaster. If we ban them, it is environmentally the right thing to do. Once they have done that the logical step since you could go either way is to take the environmentally friendly move.

They will not do an Environmental Impact Statement. It is a conscious decision inside FDA of protectors of mercury fillings – people like Susan Runner, people like Norris Alderson who have decided that they will protect the use of these fillings on behalf of organized dentistry and they will defy the laws of the land to do so.

Mike: I have so many questions to ask you about this. Let us start with one that I think any intelligent reader would be asking himself or herself and that is if this mercury is so toxic to human biochemistry and if it has such a detrimental impact on the environment, how could so many dentists and the American Dental Association be in such strong support of it.

Charlie: Yes, it is amazing. It is amazing. It really goes to the foundation stone. Clearly if we had it to do over again we would not build the combustion engine. The invention of the combustion engine may have been the decision that destroys our planet unless we can reverse that. I mean clearly that is the main reason we are turning our planet into a heat box.

However, the foundation stone is the combustion engine in which Henry Ford put us. The foundation stone of dentistry is mercury fillings. If there had been no mercury fillings, there would have been no dental profession. That is a certainty. We now have physicians of the ear, nose, and throat. In the 19th Century, there were physicians of the mouth. They said to use mercury is malpractice.

The barbers put the mercury in. It worked better than gold, which was very hot then. It hurt you to go in. Whereas, the mercury was nice and smooth and people were drinking mercury for syphilis so they were able to put it in there because medicine had not yet pushed it out of their profession. They pushed it out again not counting vaccines but they pushed it out of medicine around 1900, but dentistry was something different.

By then dentistry had gotten their market niche. Their market niche was we are going to take care of the mouth. They created an entirely different profession – one that basically is not related to healthcare. They take the position the mouth is so different from the rest of the body we will just worry about the mouth and nothing else and you doctors will not worry about the mouth at all. We have the most grotesque healthcare system where physicians even refuse to look at the mouth. People in the hospital – you can be in the hospital, you can be so sick and nobody is going to look at your mouth except the dentist.

It is like a division of labor where they both make their money and the person harmed is the public, so organized dentistry took the position since mercury is safe by definition because we use it and we are doctors, anything we put in the mouth is safe. They just put in... they put beryllium in there.

They put anything in there with the idea of we are immune because we are doctors. We know what we are doing and it is just a tragedy. It is just unbelievable that we ended up with a profession so wedded to the most neuro-toxic element on the planet.

Why dentists are walking away from mercury fillings

Mike: Well, you hinted at the arrogance of the professionals who continue to support this mercury and you mentioned the history quite a bit there. I have to wonder that given that nearly a hundred years have passed since this was being widely introduced into dentistry and with all the information about mercury's toxicity over the years, how could dentists still say that this substance is not harmful? What is their argument now?

Charlie: Well, half of them do not use it now. See half of them have walked away from it. Here is what happened – enter the institutional powerhouse, the American Dental Association, to impose a top down system. The ADA realizing that they had a secret. The ADA became the whole player on the field. The ADA is opposite the AMA in many ways and I am not – believe me I am not a supporter of the American Medical Association. I do not mean to say that but in this one area the AMA has a set of ethics that make sense, which is we do not endorse products for money. The AMA ventured into that I think in about the '30s and decided they had better stop and then they ventured into it again in the '90s and they realized they could not.

They promised their membership. They had to fire their executive director, break this contract with Sunbeam, and promise they will never endorse products for money. That is the AMA's ethical position and it is an ethical position. The ADA – the American Dental Association has no such ethics, Mike. They endorse products for money.

The ADA, starting in the '50s really, the 1950's, they really took off at that point. A product endorsement system, business studies show that Crest was a minor toothpaste product compared to Colgate. Crest surpassed Colgate because the they poured money into the ADA coffers and the ADA, in turn, gave their name to Crest to say we endorse this Crest toothpaste. It became such an advantage for Crest that the other toothpaste makers decided they would slop money to the ADA too, which they did.

The ADA was not only unethically telling the public a product is safe when they did not know if it was safe. They were not testing it. The ADA was even taking money from their members for joining and then turning around and saying to their members you should use this product because we endorse it, because it is safe and effective when they had no idea if it was safe and effective.

They were serving two masters but the corporate master to ADA was paramount and so they took these sums of money from every dental products manufacturer, became a dental products endorsement machine more than a professional group – much more than a professional group. You had that basic powerhouse – the ADA saying go buy these products.

Then the ADA saw the criticism of mercury amalgam coming in the 1980's and they knew they had to do something because they were getting money from the manufacturers and they had dentists that did not want the public to know. The ADA adopted a gag rule in their code of ethics in 1987 and it said that dentists should not tell anybody about the toxicity of mercury.

Mike: Really?

Charlie: Yes, absolutely.

Mike: They adopted a gag rule about mercury fillings?

Charlie: They adopted a gag rule. In the Goldwater Center, the Phoenix based Goldwater Center wrote an essay condemning the gag rule in 1998 – a decade later. They were the first ones to do it.

They are a think tank, kind of a libertarian think tank I guess you would call it – the Goldwater Center. Modeled after the thinking of their namesake of the group, of course, Senator Goldwater... he did not found it but it was founded on his principles and Congressman Flake was the executive director. He is now a Congressman.

When he was executive director, Mark Gingrich – a former reporter at the Arizona Republic, who joined that group, wrote a whole report on the gag rule and how bad it was. That was the libertarian from the right if you will. The libertarian on the left – the American Civil Liberties Union, took the same position. They sued the Connecticut Dental Board here on the other coast, said you cannot have this gag rule, and won.

Then the attorney general of Oregon, the attorney general of Iowa said you have to stop the gag rule so bit by bit, piece by piece, the gag rule has been dismantled but the value of it was the ADA protecting its product.

I will tell you something else when they adopted the gag rule, I left this out: the ADA had patents on mercury amalgam. Not only did they get money for promoting the product. They even got patents on amalgam to protect its use, then told dentists do not talk about this product.

Mike: This sounds like just a financial racket here.

Charlie: The ADA is a financial racket. There is no question about it. To break the control over mercury fillings you not only have the history, they have to protect their profession, which was founded on mercury. I mean it is not that now but it was founded on mercury – the foundation stone. They have to protect their own history and their own pocketbooks.

Now with the gag rule crumbling they have many problems. The ADA has huge problems with this. They are in retreat. Mike, the one thing is they are definitely this year they began retreating. We gave them an exit strategy. December of 2006 I sat down in the ADA headquarters and said you guys know you have to get out of this and I have a cost-free exit strategy that will not destroy your reputation. We presented – Consumers for Dental Choice presented the ADA – the American Dental Association with an exit strategy on mercury fillings based on the environment where the ADA could say they would not have to concede any health issues. They would say we recognize that mercury amalgam is an environmental problem. Alternatives exist, therefore, we are announcing a phase out over the following number of years.

I asked for one year and they said it would have to be longer and I said okay, but I said we have to have an end. People have said to me well let us take them on like cigarettes and I will tell that is about the worst prototype I can think of where the lawyers became billionaires and kids are still smoking.

I am not going to tolerate that kind of end where a bunch of people get rich and the kids are still harmed... because poor kids are still getting mercury fillings and poor Latino pregnant women and Native American children and so on are getting this. We are not going to accept that. There has to be an end date.

They were willing to do it. The lawyers were willing to do it at this discussion – December 14, 2006 at the ADA offices in Chicago but they just could not pull the trigger with the ADA. They just could not have a second meeting. They have decided instead through 2007 they are doing a gradual retreat. There is no question they are. It is coming, but the gradual retreat continues to harm millions of people in America and around the world. Their gradual retreat is not acceptable. We are not going to have a Vietnam ending where we have eight years to withdraw.

Mike: Right, now, I mean obviously the ADA does not want to admit that mercury fillings were ever a hazard because then they could open themselves up to huge class-action lawsuits, right.

Charlie: Absolutely and I told them I hope they do get huge class-action lawsuits and some day they will because they would not walk away from it. They had their chance and they continued to give this nonsensical stuff about how mercury exposure is okay as long as they do it. It is just outrageous. It is morally outrageous and they know it.

The scientific reports that they produce are cooked. They are unethical. They have no scientific aspect. They are simply PR machines where they find some dentist – not a real scientist but just their fellow dentists to write reports. It is an effort to say we are going to protect ourselves, we are going to have our government do it, the government is going to do it for us, and the FDA is about as compliant a government agency as ever existed.

Mike: Now, what happens if your lawsuit succeeds with the FDA? I mean essentially, what has to happen next for the FDA to ban mercury fillings?

Charlie: Well, they could take many routes. They could just ban it. They could start doing their job. If they start the classifying process then amalgam is gone. The ADA has admitted that. The ADA warned its members the FDA is probably going to put restrictions on amalgam. That process has started. They promised us they were starting then the FDA just stopped. They just stopped because within the organization they reversed the course and decided effectively that dentists are more important to them than consumers. It is just so tragic that dental economics out-trumps children's health but that is the way the FDA operates.

Mike: Well but that cannot be a surprise to anyone who follows the FDA...

Charlie: Well it is a surprise to those of us that had an assumption that we actually believed what we were told. I know if you follow FDA, it is not a surprise. The FDA needs to be totally reorganized. They need to stop having a system where those with a self-interest in the product are the ones that get to make the decisions.

The idea that Susan Runner, a practicing dentist, is at the FDA doing the work for the ADA and has actually had a sort of agenda to cover up mercury decade after decade and it is still being covered up in the Dental Devices Branch. The fact that Dan Schultz – the physician who's head of Devices will not remove her or allow anybody but a dentist to be in charge, this shows the professional courtesy that physicians give to dentists. Schultz simply closes his eyes.

He knows it is a problem but he is a physician. He wants dentists in charge because that is the deal they made a hundred years ago that dentists are in charge of the mouth and the public is shut out and physicians are to blame as well on this for shutting their eyes. Dan Schultz is as morally culpable and legally culpable at the FDA as Susan Runner is. That is why we sued him and sued her both and several other people.

Arresting top FDA officials and charging them with crimes against the People

Mike: Now, I am on the record saying that I believe the FBI should march into the FDA offices and arrest these individuals and we should prosecute them for criminal behavior against the American people. Do you think that is going way too far or do you think that's quite reasonable?

Charlie: That is probably not going too far. We filed a series of complaints with the Inspector General. We filed complaints with the in-house FDA Inspector and then filed a complaint with the U.S. Inspector General last Fall. They have decided they will not comply with the law. They know they have to classify mercury amalgam. They will not do it.

They know environmental impact statements are required or environmental assessments are required – the first step. They will not do it. They know that they warn about all of the mercury exposures such as fish or they warn against as a matter of precaution mercury exposure to children from all other sources. They banned mercurochrome years ago. They took it out of childhood vaccines – actually not of them but they said they would take it out of all of them.

They gave warnings on fish for children and pregnant women. They have decided that they will stand silent on mercury and it is truly a conspiracy of silence. That is why our lawsuit did not just sue the FDA. We sued five deep into the bureaucracy. We know whom the players are who are ignoring their duty and we have named them because we are tired of the FDA having a system where they all can hide behind each other. I hope that system ends and our lawsuit plays a role in exposing it.

Mike: Now, you just mentioned mercury in fish and that is a great point. Do you happen to know how many times more mercury there is in a typical filling than would be found in a serving of fish?

Charlie: Well, it is a more severe exposure because in the fish it is locked in. The mercury from the fish is mainly going through the body. It is a lesser exposure. The mercury in the amalgam is implanted. The mercury in the fillings is thousands of times more because it is half a gram. That is 500,000 micrograms per filling.

Mike: Where we are talking micrograms in the fish, right?

Charlie: Yes, yes we are. We are so I mean it is so much more but it is a way for medicine and dentistry to change the subject and to blame the fish. It is the fish's fault.

Mike: So the FDA says well, mercury in fish is dangerous to you but mercury in your mouth, in your teeth is harmless.

Charlie: Well, the FDA has said that. You know the FDA does not speak through its news releases. The FDA speaks through its regulations and its warnings. It has never officially said anything about mercury amalgam. They know it cannot stand the light of day. Yes, they make off-the-cuff comments.

They come out with a white paper, which has nothing to do with a regulation – and they refuse to say who wrote it. If FDA staff has furtively sneaked out interviews, white papers, other ways to say mercury fillings are safe but officially, FDA is not saying that at all. Officially, FDA is taking the position that they have never taken a position that it is safe.

When forced by the Court to say is mercury safe or not in the first lawsuit we filed, the first bombs against mercury versus FDA, the FDA admitted five times that it does not know if mercury fillings are safe. I can give you all five quotations from their brief or I can give people the website to look it up.

Meet Consumers for Dental Choice

Mike: Can you tell us a little bit, about where your passion comes from on this topic and people would like to know a bit about your background and your organization – Consumers for Dental Choice.

Charlie: Well, sure. Consumers for Dental Choice were founded a decade ago. Came up with the idea in 1996 – it was an idea of Bob Jones who is an inventor from Colorado and now in Texas. He is a former airline pilot, former U2 pilot earlier than that. He is just an outstanding man and inventor and an engineer. He has many patents.

He got very sick from mercury fillings and realized the impact of them was severe. He got to know many of the pioneering dentists like Hal Huggins and Scott McAdoo. He was out west and in the east Sue Ann Taylor, a journalist in Atlanta came up with the idea that we really need a consumer movement to fight this. Bob Jones had a conference, which he paid for and sponsored in Denver in 1996.

I was in a law firm that represented a lot of alternative health practitioners and interests and consumer groups in the kind of cutting edge alternative health issues many of which no longer were cutting edge because of the work of the senior partner, Jim Turner.

Anyway so Jim Turner and I went to that and we decided we would start up the group but Jim came up with the idea we called it the Consumers for Dental Choice and it became a project of another non-profit and then became its own organization in 1999.

Then it became a spin off, I left the law firm with it in 2002 to become a full-time consumer group with an office and so on. It has been around for 12 years. It has been a stand-alone organization for six. I got into it representing alternative health groups. I represented many alternative health ideas. I have been a state attorney general of West Virginia in the 1980's. I have been a political activist in the past and had interesting kinds of legal challenges I think.

This has just appealed to me and I guess the more I get into it the more I realize how many children are being hurt and how many animals are being poisoned and we have to do something. The way to do it is to have a very aggressive activist organization. It needs to get right in the face of federal or state regulators or the private sector interests like manufacturers or the ADA.

Mike: What about your funding? Where does your funding come from?

Charlie: We get some money from foundations – the Garfield Foundation is a wonderful funder, has funded us for seven years. For a long time we were funded by the Wallis Research Foundation, a family foundation. The patriarch was H. B. Wallis, an inventor from Iowa. He then lived in Scottsdale near you Mike.

He died a couple of years ago and that funding ended at that point from the Wallis Research Foundation but Garfield funds us and then individual dentists and that number grows each year... dentists who have decided to give money off their credit card every month or give an annual contribution and it is very exciting. These people are mercury-free. They are the people who know the ADA is wrong and know we need to fight and they are so much a part of our team that quite a few of them give money. It is terrific.

Mike: How quickly is that movement accelerating towards mercury-free dental care?

Charlie: Well, fast. The number of mercury-free dentists, if that is any measurement, was 9% in 1995. This is according to the Clinical Research Associates run by the preeminent dentist scholar, very neutral. He has no dog in our fight – Gordon Christensen out of Orem, Utah.

One of the things he surveys in dentists is who is mercury-free and it was 9% in 1995. Then 27% of dentists were mercury-free by 2001; by 2005, it was 32%. In 2007, a different survey – this was by a dental magazine said that 52% of the dentists are now mercury-free. It may have reached that number. It may have reached half. It may have reached the tipping point. The progress on dentists is huge. The progress of consumers, the number of mercury fillings was far over 50% when we started, like 60% or something like that I believe or more.

The ADA says it is fewer than 30%. I am sure it is but that is the good news. The bad news is it could well get frozen at that number where we have two-tier dentistry where middle-class adults get no mercury but the poor, the children, the working class people, minorities, children, they keep getting mercury and that is absolutely both immoral and unacceptable.

Mike: How much mercury is actually released into the environment or put into people's mouths each year through dentistry?

Charlie: Well, I do not have that but the expert is the Mercury Policy Project and Michael Bender. They are really the experts. Their website is www.MercuryPolicy.org. Michael has written just some seminal reports on this. About every two years, he writes another one. If the folks want to go to www.MercuryPolicy.org they will definitely see what they need to do.

Mike: While we are mentioning websites, I want to mention yours again. It is www.ToxicTeeth.org

Charlie: Yes it is.

Mike: Can consumers also financially support your organization with a donation?

Charlie: Sure, our address is 316 F Street Northeast, Suite 316, Washington, D.C. 20002 and again our website is www.ToxicTeeth.org

Why conventional dentists are so arrogant about mercury and fluoride

Mike: Okay and I will check out www.MercuryPolicy.org too. I will take a close look at that. Getting back to the dentists themselves it is encouraging to see that perhaps as many as half of practicing dentists are now shunning the use of mercury. You have to wonder what the other half are thinking though.

I have had numerous conversations, debates, arguments with dentists. I find that those who are still using mercury also still support mass fluoridation of the water supply. They are some of the most arrogant people I have ever met. It is infuriating because his or her position is that no one has any right to question mercury or fluoridation. It makes you wonder. Where are these people coming from that they think they already know so much about mercury that they have declared it to be harmless and no one can challenge that?

Charlie: Albert Einstein once said it is always unusual to find someone for whom curiosity survives a formal education. There are so many dentists and they are not alone in this among professionals who get that degree and now they can turn off their brain and make money. These people have decided just to read the ADA propaganda and that is it.

You hear that these pro-mercury dentists defend their use of mercury fillings and they will not use the word "mercury" they will give false information as if it is inert. It is not. They know it is not. If they read anything, they know it is not inert.

They may just decide to believe it themselves and their big rationale and every pro-mercury dentist that you talk to will give this rationale within the first two minutes. We know it is safe because we have used it for 150 years. Now, I guess the first response to that is what other part of pre-civil war medicine do you endorse?

The second point is that it is the most absurd scientific reasoning to say something has been used a long time and therefore is safe. I mean cigarettes must be safe. I have this article, a copy of it, from the British Lancet. Lancet is the British equivalent of the American Medical Association Journal but it is much better. It is much less sleazy in its connection to special interest groups, which the AMA Journal certainly is.

The Lancet had an article in 1860, an editorial in 1860 that said cigarettes are the universal product around. If it were dangerous as if its critics said people would be dropping dead in the streets, and clearly its universal use proves that it is safe and it is time to quit criticizing it. That is what things are with amalgam. They make jokes. Well, nobody dropped dead in my office, they say.

Well, if somebody gets sick later he or she does not go back to the dentist. The dentist says I am just in charge of the mouth and just the metals I put in the mouth. I do not have any other role. If I cut you while I am putting it in, well I know I have to deal with that because then I have done something that is in the mouth.

Any total body effect of what I do leaves with the patient. They get that patient out of the office. They are done with them and then they have this wall of silence and nobody can get back in and beat them in court, although we are going to beat them in court soon. Dentists literally say it is safe because we have done it for 150 years. Does that make it good? – is this good if we do it for 150 years?

It was the same argument for slavery. It was the same argument for cigarettes. It is the same argument for everything. If we do it long enough it must be good. That is just the most absurd thing for a man of science or a woman of science to say but by goodness, they do.

Mike: Yes, they do. I know you are not focusing on fluoridation but of course, this issue extends to fluoridation where I personally find many of the same similarities – a complete lack of scientific evidence supporting it, a denial of the dangers of fluoridation and the extreme arrogance and unwillingness to consider any possibility that they might be wrong.

Charlie: Yes, absolutely, absolutely and I think that is why you would say well how could this continue for so long. I mean how segregation could continue for a hundred years. I mean how could it take 70 years to ban lead in gasoline?

In the early 1920's as they started to mass produce gasoline with lead in it the people started dying. Workers died. Workers died in large numbers and everyone knew lead was the culprit... I mean everyone knew. Just as everyone knows mercury is toxic. Everyone knew lead in the 1920's knew lead was toxic.

The gasoline industry and the oil industry came up with two solutions. One is they thought of the funny word that said we have added ethyl to the gas. It means lead but they thought just as the dentists say silver fillings or amalgam. To protect the workers they raised the steam stacks in the plants where the gasoline was made.

In other words, rather than the workers getting sick and dying immediately from the lead exposure, the chimneys were raised so high that the lead went into the higher atmosphere and started just polluting the whole country. The workers were semi-saved in the sense they were not dying on the spot and the whole country was getting to the point of huge toxicity.

The study showed that as we took the lead out of gasoline in the '70s the level of violence committed by teenagers started going down immediately because each year they were less lead-toxic and the ones growing up were not starting out with lead toxicity. Lead toxicity like mercury toxicity causes people to be violent because they are poisoned. They just strike out.

It took from the '20s to the late '70s and everybody knew it was toxic and again with mercury fillings because the oil industry had such well-placed lobbyists and they were able to revert the question, saying we do not have to prove it is safe, you have to prove it is unsafe. That is what the dentists keep doing. We have done it for 150 years so prove it. Well, okay we can prove it. But they say, now you are not going to prove it with us having the government in our pocket.

The government people are in their pocket. Randall Luter, who had a lot of promise, he was Deputy Commissioner. He has just decided to sleep on it. Let the dentists and the bureaucrats' be back in charge of this issue at FDA; those people have decided we do not care. We are going to protect special interest groups or we are going to let others at FDA protect special interest groups so we have a similar resolve.

How to stop the FDA with a lawsuit

Mike: To conclude this – getting back to the lawsuit itself, if you win the lawsuit can it force the FDA to rule on this? Why cannot the FDA just say we will deal with it later? I mean can they not just continue to delay even if you win the lawsuit?

Charlie: Well, that is a challenge. You pointed to that. I mean if a court just looks at the FDA and says hurry up and do it, the FDA will nod, oh your honor we certainly will. We will hurry as fast as we can. In that sense, it may not do anything. We are trying to build accountability of public officials and that is why we have asked for the remedy that the court should simply take it off the market until FDA does its job.

Then I will bet they start moving fast. That is a challenge – a challenge to get that kind of remedy. Nonetheless, we have to begin. We sued them in the U.S. Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals gave us a roadmap to go to district court. We were all set to file in May of 2007 and the FDA said no they would like a meeting. Please do not file. They would like a meeting. We had a meeting. We said we need an answer in 30 days.

In 30 days, the FDA answered and said yes, we will do an advanced notice and a proposed rule. I got a letter from the lawyer for the FDA, Wendy Vincente saying speaking for the FDA we will do this... we assumed that the FDA was telling us the truth. We were wrong so we waited and waited and waited because we would have filed this suit in June.

The FDA just bought six, seven months of time simply by telling another bald faced lie, which was that they were going to start moving forward to classify amalgam when... I think some people at the FDA probably have that intention. I think there was good faith from some people but the bureaucrats – the ones that want to keep mercury fillings unclassified, protected for dentistry like Susan Runner - have won out.

The FDA is so badly organized, its lead scientist – the Associate Commissioner for Science, the top science person of the agency, degree is in veterinarian medicine.

Mike: Their degree is in veterinarian medicine?

Charlie: Veterinarian medicine – not a toxicologist, not a chemist, the top person has a degree in veterinarian medicine.

Mike: Well, let me just say right here let me offer that when it comes time to apply grassroots pressure give me a call because we can put out an action alert to our reader base, which is now over one million people.

Charlie: That is fantastic.

Mike: If we coordinate it with what you are doing then we can create this real surge of grassroots pressure because I think what you are finding out is that if you take the FDA's word on anything, then nothing is done. If we can pressure them from another angle that can really assist your lawsuit effort or other efforts in applying pressure. What we need is a re-launch of a campaign as you had "Mothers Against Mercury." We need, what I call, a Web sticker – like a bumper sticker on the Web. We need a little graphic, name like that "Mothers Against Mercury", launch this campaign, and let it go viral all across the Web tied to action items such as grass roots complaints or protests – those kinds of things.

Charlie: Well, I will tell you where we are going to work grass roots and I am happy because I have already told the company we are, Dentsply, is the second largest manufacturer of mercury fillings. They make others. They make resin. They make composite.

They also make the alternatives – porcelain and so on I think. I know they make a resin composite. They make many other dental products and Wall Street report said Dentsply would be better off if amalgam was banned, they would be more profitable. Dentsply nonetheless has dug in its heels and said we are going to keep making mercury fillings. Basically, Dentsply has turned its back on its own shareholders.

The Wall Street has said stop and they said we are not going to stop. Now whether this is just some kind of backroom deal with the ADA or pressure from the ADA that they cannot stand or some other reason that they will not explain to me. I have written them and their counsel wrote me back a "back of the hand" letter... about a two-paragraph letter or three paragraphs saying [nothing substantial]. Dentsply is not only harming consumers and dentists – dental employees, dental workers, the environment all of which they could be sued for.

They have an easy exit route. They could make the non-mercury fillings. That is an area we are going to work on – they are based in York, Pennsylvania. I think their day is going to come.

Mike: Well, what if we can organize all kinds of protests around that company even maybe not in person but phone calls, faxes, emails...

Charlie: Well, why not in person? Anybody who is listening to this and wants to contact me or anybody around the York, PA area or anybody in Pennsylvania that wants to help us ought to contact me that want to go in person. My email is Charlie@ToxicTeeth.org We would like to get people to write but we want folks that are somewhere in the Maryland, eastern half of Pennsylvania...

Mike: We have readers all over the country and I know we could get people there. I do not know how many. I do not know if it is ten, 100, or what but I know we have people emailing us all the time asking what we can do. What can we do to fight these evil corporations? If we get some people out there protesting with signs – "Mercury poisoned my child" on their sign. If we get that up on YouTube this could have just a huge domino effect not only make more people aware of your organization but also the mercury toxicity issue.

Charlie: Okay, I will. Thank you sir.

Prologue

Following this interview, Charles Brown won a significant court victory over the FDA, and now the FDA has promised it will reclassify mercury by June, 2009. Between now and then, NaturalNews will be working closely with ToxicTeeth.org to rally grassroots support for an outright ban on mercury amalgam fillings.

Stand by for action alerts on internet protests, petitions, and perhaps even in-person protests. We must work together to demand that toxic mercury fillings be banned. Then we will end the hundred-year reign of neurotoxic terror that has been orchestrated by the ADA, the FDA and the conventional dentistry industry. We will also support a national class-action lawsuit against not just the ADA and FDA, but even against the individual dentists who have installed these toxic mercury fillings into the mouths of children over the last ten years, despite the incredible amount of scientific evidence proving that mercury fillings cause irreparable harm to human health.

It is time to stop poisoning our children and our planet with mercury. The era of mercury poisoning must come to an end. NOW. And those responsible for this chemical attack against our people must be made to compensate for the harm they have unleashed and serve time for their crimes against the People.

The revolution will be announced via e-mail. Full story/Permalink

The truth is out there

By Peter Barber

FT.COM

When Cynthia McKinney speaks the words of Martin Luther King Jr, they resound through the church with some of King’s cadence. “A time comes,” declares the former US congresswoman from Georgia, “when silence is betrayal.” The congregation answers with whoops and calls of “That’s right!” King was talking about America’s war in Vietnam. More than 40 years later, before the packed pews of the Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, McKinney is speaking of the American government’s war on its own people. The shock and awe phase of this conflict, we had been told earlier, began on September 11 2001, when the Bush administration launched attacks on New York and Washington, or at least waved them through.

According to a show of hands that February afternoon, several hundred people in the immaculate church believe this to be true. Some came in T-shirts bearing the words “9/11 was an inside job”. One wore a badge demanding that you “Examine your assumptions”. Quite a few bought the DVDs on sale in the foyer, most of which bore photographs of the Twin Towers spewing smoke. They had all come to hear the message of Architects, Engineers & Scientists for 9/11 Truth, one of the dozens of groups across the US which campaign to persuade us that everything we think we know about 9/11 is wrong.

Marion Cotillard, actress

“There was a tower in Spain which burnt for 24 hours. It never collapsed”

Last winter, “Investigate 9/11” banners seemed to be popping up all over the place. Bill Clinton was heckled by “truthers” in Denver while campaigning for his wife. Truthers picketed the Academy Awards in LA – despite this year’s winner of the best actress Oscar, Marion Cotillard, reportedly being one of them. But then, she’s French. Literature lovers in that country pushed Thierry Meyssan’s L’Effroyable imposture (The Appalling Fraud) – which asserts that 9/11 was a government plot to justify invading Iraq and Afghanistan and increase military spending – to the top of the bestseller list in 2002.

Country music star Willie Nelson is assuredly not French, but a week or so before the Oscars he described as naive the notion that the “implosion” of the Twin Towers was caused by crashing jets. Meanwhile the European Parliament screened the Italian documentary Zero, in which Gore Vidal, Italian playwright Dario Fo, and Italian MEP Giulietto Chiesa blame the US government, not al-Qaeda, for 9/11. The following month, Japanese MP Yukihisa Fujita raised his own doubts about the official story at a seminar in Sydney. A busy season for the “9/11 Truth” movement.

The events of 9/11 were recorded in many thousands of images, from crisp agency photographs to amateur camcorder footage. Every recorded trail of smoke, every spray of sparks is pored over by an army of sceptics, collectively described as the 9/11 Truth movement. They believe that the key to the mystery is hidden somewhere within the pictures, just as some people think that clues are contained in the Zapruder film which captured the moment of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Allied against them is a smaller group of rival bloggers who have taken it upon themselves to debunk what they claim are dangerous conspiracy theories.

Gore Vidal, writer

“If there ever was great cause for impeachment, it would be over 9/11”

There is some evidence that the truthers are swaying the rest of us. A New York Times/CBS News poll in 2006 revealed that only 16 per cent of Americans polled believed the Bush administration was telling the truth about 9/11. More than half thought it was “hiding something”. This is not the same as believing the government actually launched the attacks, but a Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll the same year found that more than a third of those questioned suspected that federal officials assisted in the attacks or took no action to stop them so that the US could go to war.

The truthers certainly believe that they are on a roll. The crowd in the Immanuel Presbyterian Church seemed electrified. As the donated sound system pumped out angry rap, a giant video screen showed images of protesters demanding a new investigation into 9/11. The symbols and the language were borrowed from the civil rights struggle, but the truthers are an eclectic group, including anti-Bush, anti-war liberals and anti-government libertarians. A young man in a “Vote Ron Paul” T-shirt scuttled through the hall, filming us as we took our seats on wooden pews.

First up was Richard Gage, a San Francisco architect who founded Architects, Engineers & Scientists for 9/11 Truth, which now claims to have 379 professional members. Gage told us that the collapse of the Twin Towers could not have been due merely to gravity, the impact of the airliners and the resulting jet fuel fires – which would not have been hot enough to weaken the steel sufficiently. Behind him on the video screen was the south tower of the World Trade Center. Smoke poured from its upper floors. A respectful silence fell over the audience, followed by gasps as the building appeared to dissolve before our eyes.

What happened to building 7?

To the truthers, the third building in the World Trade Center complex to collapse on September 11 is evidence that the mainstream media is in on the plot

While I have seen this footage countless times, it seems that I had clearly never understood what I was seeing. The destruction of the Twin Towers, along with the collapse of the nearby 47-storey World Trade Center 7 building, had all the hallmarks of controlled demolition, according to Gage. They all came straight down, almost at the speed of a free-falling object, right into their own footprints. Steel-framed buildings had never collapsed because of fires before. On this day three did, one of which, “Building 7”, was not even hit by an aircraft.

Gage, who had worked himself into a fever, exhorted the audience to stand up and be counted: “A country is at stake.” Then he welcomed on to the stage the star of the evening, Steven Jones. A softly spoken physicist, Jones is the movement’s designated martyr and seems to promise what the truthers so desperately need: scientific credibility.

Jones entered into truther lore in 2006 when he was put into early retirement by Brigham Young University in Utah after giving public lectures on his paper “Why indeed did the WTC buildings collapse?”, which he published on the website of the university’s physics department. Jones contended that the towers were demolished by cutter charges which had been placed throughout the buildings, probably involving an incendiary called thermite. BYU’s College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and the structural engineering faculty, followed by the university administration, disowned him.

Still, Jones is no fool. He has published more than 50 scholarly papers, including pieces on cold nuclear fusion in journals such as Scientific American and Nature. He invented a cooker which uses solar power and has donated models to poor families in the developing world. Jones tells us he believes laboratory testing of dust from Ground Zero will reveal residue from a thermite reaction.

As soon as the seminar is over, Jones is mobbed by people asking him to pose for photos and offering their own views on the 9/11 plot, as well as others such as the presence above our heads of chemtrails (deadly toxins sprayed by unidentified aircraft, which some believe are part of a secret global depopulation programme). This is the world Jones now inhabits – it seems a long way from a Utah physics department. I ask him later by phone if he has any regrets about publishing that fateful paper: “No regrets. I’ve thought of Galileo a few times. He got a little worse than I did, I suppose.”

Jones is typical of many 9/11 researchers in that the subject has taken over his professional life. Down the coast in Santa Barbara is another of the movement’s luminaries. On the beach at Isla Vista, one of the most expensive real-estate spots in the US, lives David Ray Griffin, a former theology professor. As his dogs scratch excitedly on the sliding door, Griffin explains that America’s primary faith is not Christianity, but nationalism. “Other countries do really terrible things. Our leaders never would. And that [belief] has been the biggest impediment to getting people to look at the evidence, because they just know a priori that that is ridiculous.”

Michael Meacher, UK politician

“It is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11”

Griffin now thinks the evidence to the contrary is incontrovertible. Until 2002, he had busied himself far from the rancour of public controversy writing rather obscure philosophical books and teaching philosophy of religion at the Claremont School of Theology. But the course of his research changed abruptly when he heard a visiting British theologian question the official account of 9/11. Two years later, Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor, with a foreword by British MP Michael Meacher, became a touchstone in the 9/11 Truth movement. He has since written others, including one detailing the “omissions and distortions” of the 9/11 Commission, the report of which fits the definition of “conspiracy theory” neatly, he says. “They started with the conclusion that al-Qaeda did it and didn’t even consider the alternative that it was an inside job.”

Griffin was a script consultant on Loose Change Final Cut, part of the internet phenomenon that set off the current explosion of low-budget 9/11 DVDs. The previous version was viewed more than 10 million times on Google Video, according to Vanity Fair. In 2002, armed only with a laptop and off-the-shelf video production software, Dylan Avery, an 18-year-old resident of Oneonta, New York, set about making a fictional film about discovering, with his friends, that 9/11 was orchestrated by the US government. At some point in his research, Avery had a “Dude, this shit is real!” moment and Loose Change entered the realm of agit-prop documentary. Final Cut makes a bold new allegation: the Twin Towers were packed with deadly asbestos, which would have cost billions to clean up. “If you bring down the buildings,” says Griffin, “not only do you not have to pay ... to clean them up, somebody is going to make billions of dollars on the insurance.”

September 11 as insurance job? This seems to expand the circle of conspirators somewhat. Griffin ventures another possible explanation: the psychological impact. “You had these massive explosions, which rather looked like a nuclear blast,” he says. “That’s always been the deep fear of America. In the run-up to the Iraq war, that’s what they were talking about – we cannot wait until we have a nuclear cloud.”

Griffin offers one further speculation, this time on a question which is controversial even among 9/11 sceptics: what hit the Pentagon? Thierry Meyssan was the first to claim that it was not Flight 77 – an American Airlines 757 carrying 64 passengers – but a cruise missile that hit the west wall of the Pentagon at 9.37am on September 11. Websites have followed suit, pointing to the apparent lack of plane debris on the Pentagon lawn and the fact that the hole left in the outer ring of the building looks too small to accommodate the wingspan of a 757. Retired US Air Force captain Russ Wittenberg from Pilots for 9/11 Truth asserted that no inexperienced pilot could have performed the manoeuvre the 9/11 Commission concluded that al-Qaeda conspirator Hani Hanjour pulled off that morning: a 330° turn, 2,200ft descent, a full-throttle dive and then a 530 miles per hour plunge at ground level into the Pentagon. Call it “the magic plane theory”: doubters believe that, just as the bullet that killed Kennedy appeared to defy the laws of physics, so the plane that struck the Pentagon was like no other in existence.

And just as Nasa was forced to counter claims the moon landings were faked, these and other claims have forced the US State Department into the debunking business. Its Identifying Misinformation website states that debris from Flight 77 was indeed recovered, as were the remains of passengers and crew. Many witnesses saw the plane come in, and a number of passengers made phone calls to their loved ones telling them their flight had been hijacked.

There is also another obvious problem: if a missile hit the Pentagon, what happened to Flight 77? “There was a rumour that an airliner had gone down on the Ohio/Kentucky border and that was taken very seriously early on by the Federal Aviation Authority,” says Griffin. It later rejected the story. But Griffin claims the only evidence that Flight 77 was aloft after that was an alleged phone call from Barbara Olsen to Ted Olsen, the solicitor-general of the United States.

So how does he explain that phone call? Ted Olsen is a Bush administration insider, he says. Another possible answer, though, is “voice-morphing technology”. This would also explain the flurry of phone calls from United Airlines Flight 93, which, as the official story has it, crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers revolted against their hijackers.

Glossary of doubt

No-planers
People who claim that it wasn’t an aircraft, but a missile, that hit the Pentagon on September 11 2001. Some have taken it a step further and argued that no aircraft hit the twin towers, either. What the world saw that day, these sceptics argue, was either video trickery or cruise missiles disguised through image technology as aircraft.

Mihops
Truthers who believe the US government “Made it happen on purpose”, “it” being the destruction of September 11.

Lihops
A more moderate strain of truther who believe the government “Let it happen on purpose”.

Scholars for 9/11 Truth
Started by James Fetzer, the group advocates looking at all possible explanations of what happened on September 11, no matter how improbable.

Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice
The more moderate splinter group of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, led by Steven Jones. Endorses an “evidence-based approach” to questioning the 9/11 story.

It’s not just supporters of the official story who roll their eyes at these claims. They put Griffin in the camp of the “no-planers”, at least as far as the attack on the Pentagon is concerned. The no-planers enrage the rest of the truthers, who accuse them of sabotaging the credibility of the movement. The claim that no plane hit the Pentagon is a Trojan horse, they say – disinformation that serves the conspirators. Some – such as former MI5 whistleblower David Shayler – have even asserted that no planes, but missiles disguised by “cloaking technology”, hit the Twin Towers. Shayler, incidentally, proclaimed himself the Messiah last year.

If the 9/11 truth movement is fighting a kind of asymmetric war against official sources of knowledge, it is also battling itself. As the movement morphs into an international activist group, it recognises that if it is to convince middle Americans, it must distance itself from its exotic fringe. Once, it was the Mihops versus the Lihops. These factions, who sound like warring species from an H.G. Wells story, are those who believe the government Made It Happen On Purpose and those who think it Let It Happen On Purpose. The Mihops are in the ascendancy.

The genesis of all this can be traced back to a schism that followed the first real attempt to bring scholarly credibility to the 9/11 sceptics. In 2005, Steven Jones was invited to form a group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth by James Fetzer, a professor in the philosophy department at the University of Minnesota and the author of some 20 books on the philosophy of science and artificial intelligence. Fetzer teaches critical thinking, and is nothing if not critical. He has been campaigning for more than a decade to prove that the Zapruder film is a hoax perpetuated by the same government intelligence agencies that orchestrated JFK’s assassination.

But within a year, Jones had written to all members of Scholars announcing that he and others no longer wanted to be associated with Fetzer, who was, in the rebels’ opinion, holding them up to ridicule. Fetzer had backed a theory by Judy Wood, a former assistant professor in mechanical engineering at Clemson University, proposing that the Twin Towers were brought down by a “directed energy” weapon developed as part of the US government’s Star Wars programme. It prompted a stampede to a new group, Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice, headed by Jones. Confusing the two groups would be like mistaking Monty Python’s Judean People’s Front for the People’s Front of Judea: this was a major doctrinal split.

Fetzer’s view is that any serious inquiry into what happened on 9/11 should look at all possibilities. Supporters of the directed energy hypothesis keep popping up at 9/11 Truth lectures to heckle what Python fans might call the “splittist” thermite theorists. Among the advocates of the Star Wars theory is Morgan Reynolds, perhaps the first prominent US government official to claim that 9/11 was an inside job. At the time of the attacks, Reynolds was chief economist at the US Department of Labor.

Some Star Wars supporters, in turn, accuse proponents of the thermite hypothesis of being government shills. One, on CheckTheEvidence.com, alleges that Jones’s public denunciation of Star Wars theories is actually a Trojan horse; he notes that Jones once worked at Los Alamos, where directed energy weapons are researched. This line of conjecture also entangles Norman Mineta, US transportation secretary on September 11 2001. Mineta was the man who grounded all civilian aircraft on that morning. But he was also once vice-president of Lockheed Martin, a founding member of the Directed Energy Professional Society ... In this outer reach of the blogosphere, no one is ever more than six degrees of separation from the heart of the conspiracy.

Jones did, in fact, do post-doctoral research at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility for the University of Wyoming, but he says it was peaceful and non-weapons-related. He says the more out-there theories, including those of the no-planers, are harming the movement. “First, they discourage others who are trying to do serious work, and they tend to be quite vocal about their heckling,” he says. “More serious is that when we’re really trying to look at an evidence-based approach, we get lumped in with these people and then dismissed as a whole.”

Two days before Jones’s lecture in LA, his erstwhile colleague was taking his own campaign on the road on the other side of the country. After addressing Student Scholars for 9/11 Truth in New Hampshire, Fetzer was off to that seat of academic respectability, Yale University. To prepare for our meeting, I watched a DVD of a 9/11 symposium he held in his new hometown of Madison, Wisconsin last year. The star of this show was Alfred Lambremont Webre, a judge on former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad’s alternative international War Crimes Tribunal in Kuala Lumpur and co-author of the Space Preservation Treaty. He delivers what might be the most momentous opening line in the history of town hall seminars. “Fellow Citizens... 9/11 was a false flag operation by an international war crimes racketeering organisation to provide a pretext to engage in a genocidal and ecocidal depleted uranium bombing of central Asia, Afghanistan and Iraq in order to secure vast oil and uranium reserves; to roll out a terror-based national security state system worldwide and ... to implement the final stages of a world depopulation policy.” There are two more “false flag” operations in the pipeline, he says. The first is the war against asteroids, the second the “war against the evil aliens”.

Hearing this, you either experience the thrill of revelation or the sinking feeling that the person you are listening to is having some kind of breakdown. Within 30 minutes, Webre has folded into the 9/11 plot the Skull & Bones society at Yale University – or the “Brotherhood of Death”, as he calls it – neocon think-thank the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rothschilds, the Queen and the City of London. I wondered how all these conspiracies could be maintained without the whole conceit unravelling.

The answer, of course, is that there is only one conspiracy. Pearl Harbour, the moon landing, JFK, 9/11, the Illuminati, the Black Helicopters, Skull & Bones, chemtrails: all faces of the same demon. The plot goes all the way to the top, and all the way back in time. You could come to believe that it involves everyone except yourself – at which point it’s all over for you. And as I listened, I just waited for him to say the Word. And, inevitably, Webre brought it all back to the “international neo-Zionist organisation”.

I asked Fetzer about this as we sat in a cafe across from Yale, home of the Brotherhood of Death: how did he keep his scholars on message? “It’s obvious to me that you have to consider all the possible alternatives,” he says. “You can’t exclude any, lest, as you proceed in your investigation and eliminate hypotheses, you eliminate the true hypothesis because you’ve never allowed it to be considered.”

Fetzer’s talk later that night does not go well. A Yale student had promoted the lecture on Facebook Events, but fellow students had apparently been unwilling to add their names, which anyone can see, perhaps for fear of ridicule. Only six show up. When it becomes clear that Fetzer is implicating some kind of Star Wars weapon, the two next to me begin scrolling distractedly through their mobile phone messages. Within 10 minutes, they have left.

Lewis Lapham, journalist

“Americans are very good at dreaming up these scenarios”

The conclusion of the 9/11 Commission – the official story – is that the 2001 attacks got through because those charged with protecting America had not truly conceived of the threat: in its author’s evocative phrase, they had suffered a “failure of imagination”. After trawling the internet in search of 9/11 Truth, it seems to me the American imagination is strong. “Americans are very good at dreaming up these scenarios,” says Lewis Lapham, the former Harper’s magazine editor and a prominent critic of the Bush administration post-September 11. “We are open to all kinds of magical theories,” he says, citing the continuing fascination with the assassination of JFK. “We are also good at creating religions.” Lapham thinks the theory that 9/11 was an inside job follows in this long tradition, but also reflects cynicism among Americans towards their government. He does not accept that the Bush administration planned 9/11 or even allowed it to happen. Nonetheless, he thinks a new investigation is warranted. In 2004, Harper’s ran a trenchant piece describing the 9/11 Commission as a “whitewash” and a “cheat and a fraud” for downplaying evidence that warnings of the al-Qaeda threat were ignored. Such flaws allowed space for alternative theories to develop, Lapham says.

In this, there are shades of the Warren Commission into the assassination of President Kennedy, which served merely to deepen popular distrust. But if we have seen the likes of the 9/11 Truth movement before, it also represents something new. “With the Kennedy assassination, pretty soon after the events themselves there were fairly significant questions being raised by people of all types and stripes about what actually happened,” says Mark Fenster, a University of Florida law professor and author of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. “But whereas then it was a generalised, amorphous kind of response, the amount of organisation – politically and through alternative media – is far more striking now than it was back then.”

Fenster thinks that the 9/11 Truth movement is in some ways a typical American response to a surprising and traumatic event. But it also represents a step change in its use of telecommunications technology. “One of the interesting things, particularly in the beginning of this movement, was the extent to which there were a lot of local groups in different cities organising protests ... and they could co-ordinate and create a national and international movement,” he says. “Whether that translates into more people actually believing in the conspiracy theory is a completely different question.”

Fenster believes the few published polls on the subject, rather than showing any real depth of suspicion about 9/11, demonstrate declining trust in the Bush administration generally. The author of one of the most rigorous of the websites that aim to debunk the conspiracy theories, Debunking911.com, notes that the most recent Zogby poll on attitudes towards 9/11 found only 4.6 per cent of Americans believe the Bush administration blew up the Twin Towers. “If you follow the website hits, you’ll find that since Debunking911 came into existence, conspiracy sites have been losing readership,” he says via e-mail. “I think all they needed was someone to fill in the parts conspiracy theorists left out of the conspiracy story and their numbers begin to shrink.”

Perhaps the 9/11 Truth movement is what one would expect in the dying days of an unpopular administration, and with no end in sight to a costly war. Whether it can maintain momentum when that government leaves office next year is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, some on the left accuse it of letting the leaders they so vehemently distrust off the hook. “They make a mockery of [civil rights] causes by associating their nonsense with genuinely important issues, and by diverting a large number of people who should know better into a unicorn hunt,” says British writer and activist George Monbiot. Monbiot is regularly heckled by 9/11 truthers at public events after accusing them in The Guardian of undermining genuine political opposition. His first column on the truthers prompted a near-record number of postings on the paper’s Comment Is Free website – 777 – many accusing him of being part of the conspiracy.

“It’s very interesting to see,” he says, “particularly in the United States, how the anti-war movement has been largely co-opted in many places by the 9/11 Truth movement. And we desperately need an active anti-war movement, because there is a lot of reckoning to be done.”

Peter Barber is the FT’s deputy comment editor

Full story/Permalink

The Motive and Under-Currents of Reality

by Walter Burien - 06/06/08 - http://CAFR1.com

Crude oil yesterday 06/05/08 after a two week decline hit a low on the July futures contract of 121.68, and then today 06/06/08 a straight push up to 139.12 a "$17.44" increase from low to high in one day. Somethings up? [The largest increase in a 24hr period for Crude Oil that I have ever seen in thirty years trading the Commodity Futures Market]

For this type of 24hr bounce, it is not normal to say the least. The big boys may know something everyone else does not to make this type of commitment for a one day move. Iran factor this weekend?

The following copied article on the general driving forces behind prices is a good one. I do note that it does not mention who the large speculators are that are driving the market, so let me fill in that blank: It is our own local and federal government investment portfolios. As a few trillion dollars are squeezed out of our pockets, they are transfered right into the account balances of those government investment portfolios. And you thought government inflated their pockets with tax revenue, well that is their second source of income now. Return on investments is now #1. Slight tad bit of conflict of interest here me thinks at the publics expense and intentionally played void of comprehension per the under currents of reality driving the market place for profit. (Government's not yours) Who owns it all by investment? Our own play-you-every time government. You're no dummy, you should know that.

You have heard that expression: "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Well, government investments have created a composite monopoly of no equal. All others are just steam rolled when it comes to being contrary to governments bottom line driving ever forward in the black... The definition of Greed = "Governments unrestrained ability to make a profit and expand."

Yours truly,

Walter J. Burien, Jr.
P. O. Box 2112
Saint Johns, AZ 85936

Tel: 928-445-3532

Website: http://CAFR1.com

--------------------------------
Pension funds pay a salary and benefits at retirement. Any local government can be restructured to meet their annual budget needs "Without" taxes. TRF (Tax Retirement Funds) paying for every City, County, State’s annual budgetary needs! This now makes the people the true owners with government being the true service provider. Government has already shown that a TRF works by example through the management of their own combined multi-trillion dollar pension funds! CAFR1 says: Make it law and make it so!
----------------------------------
To automatically subscribe to CAFR1 posts, send a blank email to: NATIONAL@CAFR1.com with: subscribe in the subject line, or to unsubscribe from CAFR1 posts if subscribed, just put: unsubscribe in the subject line.
--------------------------------

MONEYANDMARKETS» Friday, June 6, 2008

YOUR BEST SOURCE FOR THE UNBIASED MARKET COMMENTARY YOU WON'T GET FROM WALL STREET

Forget IF there's speculation in commodities.
Ask "WHY?"
by Mike Larson

Dear Subscriber,

Congress is up in arms. And the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is on the warpath. Their target: Speculators in the natural resources market.

The CFTC said this week that it's investigating a dramatic rise in cotton prices from earlier this year. It also plans to tighten some rules that apply to investors in the broader agricultural futures markets. Those steps come just a few days after the regulatory body said it would investigate oil trading activity to see if prices are being manipulated.

Meanwhile, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee just held a hearing on commodities speculation. At the gathering, legendary hedge fund manager George Soros said:

"There is a strong prima facie case against institutional investors pursuing a commodity index-buying strategy ... It is intellectually dishonest, potentially destabilizing and distinctly harmful in its economic consequences."

A gentleman by the name of Gerry Ramm, who runs an oil company in Washington, was even more blunt. He said:

"Excessive speculation on energy-trading facilities is the fuel that is driving this runaway train in crude oil prices"

George Soros, the enormously successful financier, philanthropist and bestselling author, testified before the U.S. Congress on Tuesday.

My take? I think there have been serious fundamental forces driving the price of oil and other commodities higher in the past few years. They include strong overseas demand, booming growth in China, India, and all over Asia, a lack of investment in mining and drilling when commodity prices were low, and so on.

But you've got natural resource experts like Sean Brodrick and Larry Edelson who can tell you all about those forces. My focus today is on how fiscal and monetary policymakers have made a bad problem — at least, from the perspective of commodity CONSUMERS — much worse.

The irony here is what precipitated all this ...

The Role of the Fed and the Dollar
In the Commodity Boom

Officially, we've had a strong dollar policy in the U.S. for several years. Unofficially, we've had anything but.

Treasury Secretaries, including the current one Henry Paulson, have occasionally released mealy-mouthed statements designed to give the buck a boost. But none of them had any lasting impact. The dollar has persistently declined since 2001 amid a dollar policy of benign neglect.

Now stop for a minute and put yourself in the shoes of an executive at a foreign firm that produces oil ... or copper ... or virtually any other commodity. Your commodities are priced in dollars. You're getting paid in dollars. Yet month after month, the value of those dollars is declining.

Fields of Gold: A bushel of spring wheat, which has historically traded between $3 and $7, recently spiked as high as $24.

What are you going to do? You're going to raise your prices! You need more dollars from each sale of a barrel of oil or metric tonne of copper to compensate for the loss of the purchasing power of those dollars.

Large speculators and big money investors aren't idiots. They figured out long ago that the U.S. administration couldn't care less about the dollar. And they knew their dollars were losing purchasing power, too. So what'd they do? They started plowing money into commodities themselves. That money flow — that "asset allocation" into commodities — continues to this day.

So yes, I do believe that investors have played a role in driving prices higher. But it's the government's own fault!

The same policymakers who are whining about investors buying resources are the ones who haven't been willing to step up and take a stand to defend the dollar.

Meanwhile, on the interest rate front, the Federal Reserve embarked on a massive cutting campaign after the dot-com bust. It slashed the funds rate all the way to 1% ... and left it there for a long time. Then it raised rates so slowly that the "real" fed funds rate was negative for several quarters. [Editor's Note: See Mike's May 2 Money and Markets for more details.]

Last year, as the credit crisis started hammering the markets, the Fed obliged Wall Street once again. It aggressively slashed interest rates, driving them well below the rate of inflation.

What impact did this fresh bout of negative real rates have on commodities? Take a look at this chart showing the funds rate (black line) and the price of crude oil futures (blue line). You tell me if maybe, just maybe, this flood of "cheaper than free" money from the Fed has had a role to play in the surge in commodity prices.

The way I see it, the Fed's moves were like throwing red meat into a cage full of hungry lions. Or maybe pouring gasoline on an already-raging fire. You can pick your own favorite metaphor. But I think you catch my drift.

The Fed keeps acting surprised about the run up in commodities prices. It seems "shocked, SHOCKED!" that they have gone up. Has anyone at the Fed tried looking in the mirror recently? That's where at least part of the fault lies.

If They Want to Get Prices Under Control,
They Need to Hike Interest Rates!

In sum, most of Wall Street and Washington are asking: "Are speculators driving commodity prices higher?" I think that's the wrong question. What they SHOULD be asking is: "WHY are speculators and investors pouring into the natural resources market?"

The answer is simple: Because they have both the motive (they're trying to protect themselves against the declining purchasing power of their dollars) and the means (better-than-free money, courtesy of Ben Bernanke's reckless monetary policy) to do so.

So listen up Washington: You want to stop commodity prices from going up? You want to give consumers a break at the gas pump and the grocery store? You want to punish the speculators and end this madness?

Then quit whining about those meanies in the commodities pits. Quit dinking around with margin and reporting requirements. Hike interest rates. Now! Push them a percentage point or two above the current rate of inflation (or barring that, above the expected future rate of inflation). That'll stem the flow of easy money into natural resource markets, drive the dollar higher, and cause prices to collapse.

Will that harm the economy? Will it cause some pain? Absolutely. But nobody said running the Fed was an easy job. Sometimes you have to take the politically painful path in the short term to restore long-term credibility and to keep inflation under control.

Until next time,

Mike

Full story/Permalink