Saturday, June 30, 2012

Massive global banker scandal revealed – breaking news in the Mainstream Media

Hundreds of bankers across three continents are embroiled in the interest-rate fixing scandal that has left Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond fighting to save his job.

As pressure intensified on Britain’s highest paid banking boss to quit, MPs heard a string of other financial institutions across the world were under investigation.

At least 20 banks are believed to be under suspicion, with growing demands for a criminal investigation.

Barclays Bank Tower at Churchill Place, Docklands: The bank has been fined £290million over attempts to rig money market interest rates. HSBC is also under investigation, it emerged todayBarclays Bank Tower at Churchill Place, Docklands: The bank has been fined £290million over attempts to rig money market interest rates. HSBC is one of the twenty other banks also under investigation, it emerged today

Barclays’ shares crashed by 15.5 per cent in a day as the implications sank in, wiping £3.7billion from its value, with other banks also hit.

Barclays has been fined £290million after devastating emails revealed that its traders manipulated the London Interbank Rate (Libor) – the rate at which banks lend money to each other.

Chancellor George Osborne told the Commons the exchanges ‘read like an epitaph to an age of irresponsibility’.

On the blackest day for Britain’s finance industry since the 2008 economic crisis:

  • Serious Fraud Office investigators were revealed to be in talks with financial watchdogs over the scandal
  • David Cameron and Ed Miliband piled pressure on Mr Diamond to resign
  • Barclays and other banks were braced for a damning verdict today in an official report on mis-selling of complex loans to 28,000 small firms
  • Mr Osborne promised new criminal sanctions for those guilty of market abuse
  • Downing Street faced a growing clamour for a judge-led public inquiry into the ethics of Britain’s banks

'Epitaph to an age of irresponsibility': George Osborne today briefed MPs in the Commons about the unfolding bank trading scandal‘Epitaph to an age of irresponsibility’: George Osborne today briefed MPs in the Commons about the unfolding bank trading scandal

David Cameron, who is at an EU summit in Brussels, described the situation as an ‘extremely serious scandal’.

Mr Diamond, who was in charge of Barclays Capital at the time traders are now known to have been rigging the market, has offered to forgo his short-term bonus for this year. But he is still entitled to millions of pounds in salary and long-term share incentives.

Asked how much wider the rate-fixing scandal might go, the Chancellor told MPs: ‘HSBC and RBS are two of the banks under investigation, but international banks such as UBS and Citigroup are under investigation too, partly for activities conducted in this country.’

Mr Osborne said the total impact on the economy and on individuals was ‘extremely difficult to work out, because the Libor rate was manipulated up as well as down’.

‘Sometimes the rate was too low for the true market price, and sometimes it was too high,’ he said.

‘The Financial Services Authority has made it clear, however, that that contributed to a risk to the country’s financial stability, and the cost of that is enormous.’

Tracey McDermott, director of enforcement at the FSA, said: ‘The initial indications are that Barclays was not the only firm that was involved in this.’

As well as RBS and HSBC, others under scrutiny include Lloyds, JPMorgan Chase, Germany’s Deutsche Bank and Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi.

A number of employees have already been fired, suspended or put on gardening leave at various banks including state-backed RBS, which has sacked and suspended ‘several’ staff, though the bank declined to comment.

SACKED RBS TRADER ACCUSES BANK CHIEFS OF COLLUDING WITH STAFF TO RIG INTEREST RATES

The alleged behaviour at RBS started when Fred Goodwin was chief executiveThe alleged behaviour at RBS started when Fred Goodwin was chief executive

Royal Bank of Scotland managers are accused of colluding to rig the financial markets in court papers filed by a former employee.

Tan Chi Min, a former head of delta trading for RBS’s global banking and markets division in Singapore, alleges that managers condoned collusion between its staff to set the Libor rate artificially high or low to maximise profits.

He names five staff members he claims made requests for the Libor rate to be altered and three senior managers who he said knew what was going on. He also says the practice ‘was known to other members of [RBS]’s senior management’.

Mr Tan, who was eventually sacked for gross misconduct, worked for RBS from August 2006 to November 2011 and it is believed the alleged behaviour started when Fred Goodwin, pictured, was chief executive.

He claims that he was made a ‘scapegoat’ for malpractice condoned by managers and is suing for wrongful dismissal.

In the court papers filed in New York as part of a class action, Mr Lin also implicates hedge fund bosses who have given thousands of pounds to the Conservative Party.

It is claimed that hedge fund Brevan Howard asked RBS to fix financial data by making false submissions. The fund donated £10,000 to the Tories and spent £3,542 on flights for George Osborne to attend a conference in 2008.

RBS said it was confident of mounting a successful defence against Mr Tan’s claims.
Last night there were reports the bank is to be fined £150million for similar offences to those committed by Barclays.

Lloyds said it had suspended two traders. ICAP, the leading City broking firm headed by Tory donor Michael Spencer, has also been dragged into the scandal. It has suspended one employee and placed two on ‘administrative leave’.

A senior manager at U.S. giant Citigroup’s Japanese operation left the firm late last year after his division was temporarily banned from trading linked to Libor and its Tokyo equivalent, Tibor, by the authorities.

Giant Swiss bank UBS said it had approached regulators with information over abuses of the rate-setting system.

The Libor rate is crucial, since it is a key benchmark for trillions of pounds’ worth of financial products.

The £290million fine on Barclays from the UK and U.S. authorities, issued on Wednesday, is likely to be only the beginning of a wave of punishments and civil suits for damages against other banks caught up in the global web of deceit.

The Royal Bank of Scotland Headquarters

The headquarters of Lloyds Banking Group in the City of London

Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds are two other UK-based banks under scrutiny as part of the probe

Experts said banks might have to set aside billions of pounds in damages to cover their liabilities resulting from the conspiracy.

Former Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Lord Oakeshott said that once any criminal probe was underway, a public inquiry – like the one being conducted by Lord Leveson into media ethics – would have to be held.

‘Clearly, the worms that are now crawling out from under the stones at the banking industry are even worse than any of us thought,’ he added.

THE WORDS THAT WILL COME BACK TO HAUNT BANK CHIEF

George Osborne, U.K. chancellor of the exchequer, left, and Bob Diamond, chief executive officer of Barclays Plc, participate in a session on the fourth day of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting 2011 in Davos, Switzerland

Speech: Bob Diamond alongside George Osborne at the Davos World Economic Forum

On 3 November 2011, Bob Diamond, chief executive of Barclays, delivered the BBC Today programme’s inaugural business lecture. Today, his words have come back to haunt him.

‘Rebuilding trust requires banks  to be better citizens. I believe  in this passionately.’

Within a few months of making this statement, Barclays was found guilty of a tax avoidance plot to rob taxpayers of around £500million.

Earlier in 2011, it had been found guilty of enticing elderly customers to gamble their life savings on the stock market. Around 12,000 customers lost half their savings. And this week it was found guilty of a ‘serious and widespread’ attempt to manipulate the Libor interest rates and ordered to pay a fine of £290million.

‘I know how angry customers are about issues such as payment protection insurance. That’s why we are working hard to clear claims as quickly as possible. We want to put things right.’

When a person takes out a credit card or personal loan, they buy the insurance to pay out if they lose their job, or have to stop working due to poor health. But banks, including Barclays, were selling the policies to people who did not need them. Barclays said the PPI scandal would cost them £1billion. Four months after making this speech, he admitted the bill had increased to £1.3billion.

‘But for me the evidence of culture is how people behave when no one is watching them. Our culture must be one where the interests of customers and clients are at the very heart of every decision we make, where we all act with trust and integrity.’

The Financial Services Authority this week found Barclays guilty of misconduct ‘extended over number of years’. The US Department of Justice said simply that the bank was guilty of ‘illegal conduct’ on its attempts to manipulate the Libor rate. The culture of Barclays allowed traders to manipulate Libor in a bid to make sure they scooped millions in bonuses, and to pretend the bank was in a healthier state than it was.

Dr. Mercola Interviews Dr. Huber about GMO

(Mercola) – Internationally renowned natural health physician and Mercola.com founder Dr. Joseph Mercola interviews Dr. Don M. Huber, one of the senior scientists in the U.S about area of science that relates to genetically modified organisms (GMO).

The Coming Revolution in Wireless

The proliferation of mobile broadband – including smartphones, tablets, and other data-centric devices – and applications and services from Facebook to GPS navigation has transformed the wireless world on many fronts and sent ripples throughout the industry. We used to just talk on our mobile phones. Now we text, email, watch videos, stream music, download games, and browse the Web. Based on this trend, industry observers forecast continued exponential growth in data traffic over the coming years.

According to Cisco, global mobile data traffic grew 2.3-fold in 2011, more than doubling for the fourth year in a row. The mobile-data traffic growth rate was higher than anticipated in 2011 and reached a level equivalent to eight times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000. Although mobile-network connection speeds increased 66% to an average of 315 kilobits per second (kbps) in 2011, such gains can't come close to keeping up with demand.

As data usage becomes more intensive, the gap between what systems can deliver and what people need is growing. Cisco forecasts that global mobile-data traffic will increase 18-fold over the next five years, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 78%, reaching 10.8 exabytes per month by 2016. (One exabyte is one quintillion bytes: 1.0 x 1018, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.) In terms of what the expected demand on wireless systems will be versus the projected capacity of those systems, data from Cisco indicate that in the next two years there will be a 20-fold bandwidth gap between what you're going to want to do on your phone and what the network will be able to deliver.

Many of today's networks and products are already becoming overloaded by the explosive demand for data. And this is just the beginning.

Typically, when wireless carriers like AT&T or Verizon want to upgrade their networks to allow for more data flow and higher speeds, they have to purchase more spectrum at auction from the FCC. A recent example of this was the 700MHz auction in 2008. Both AT&T and Verizon bought large swaths of the 700MHz range to help build out their LTE 4G data networks.

The big carriers live and die by their spectrum, and they're spending billions to secure as much as possible. The problem is that we're now facing a spectrum crunch thanks to the growth of those bandwidth-gobbling smartphones and increasing demand for data across wireless networks. And it's not like we can just conjure up more spectrum.

But what if we didn't have to? What if we could boost the capacity of wireless networks by 100- or 1,000-fold without using any more spectrum? Turns out it might be theoretically possible.

The answer could lie in exploiting a relatively obscure property of light. Particles of light, known as photons, carry two kinds of angular momentum – what's known as "spin angular momentum" (SAM) and "orbital angular momentum" (OAM). SAM is associated with photon spin and is manifested as circular polarization, while OAM is linked to the spatial distribution of photons. To borrow a popular analogy, you can think about SAM and OAM like the Earth-sun system. SAM is akin to the Earth spinning on its axis, while OAM can be represented by the Earth's orbital movement around the sun.

The existence of OAM has been known for a long time, but in standard wireless communications like WiFi, we only modulate the SAM of radio waves. It was not until 2004 – when Miles Padgett and coworkers at the University of Glasgow demonstrated that classical information could be encoded in the OAM states of photons – that the wider scientific community began to ponder the use of OAM for communications networks. What's important about this is that while SAM has only two possible values, OAM can theoretically achieve an infinite number of possible states. These different states provide additional degrees of freedom within which to encode information without the need for a new frequency. Thus, since you could send any number of signals over the same frequency, OAM has the potential to tremendously increase the capacity of communications systems. This future may not be as far off as you might think.

Earlier this year, Bo Thidé of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics and while at the University of Padova in Italy, together with some Italian colleagues, confirmed the theory. They demonstrated in a real-world setting that it is possible to use two beams of incoherent radio waves, encoded in two different states of OAM, to simultaneously transmit two independent radio stations on the same frequency. The research opened the door, Thidé says, to the transmission of "an infinite number of channels in a given, fixed bandwidth." The spectrum crunch could be close to being solved.

Additional supporting evidence came just last week, when Alan Willner, an electrical engineer from the University of Southern California, and his team published a paper in Nature Photonics titled Terabit free-space data transmission employing orbital angular momentum multiplexing. Quite a title. But the gist is that through the exploitation of different OAM states, the group was able to transmit eight independent channels of data on the same signal across free space at a whopping 2.56 terabits per second (or 320 gigabytes per second). While this is below the world-record data-transmission speed of 26 terabits per second achieved last year by scientists at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, it's the fastest wireless network so far using OAM.

We're not there yet. While the experimental results from Willner and his team are impressive, it's important to note that the transmission distance in this case was only about a meter, and the experiment took place in a vacuum. When asked about the prospects for transmission over long distances in free space, Willner replied:

This is the main goal. One of the challenges in this respect is turbulence in the atmosphere. For situations that require high capacity or spectral efficiency over relatively short distances of less than 1 km, this approach could be appealing. Of course, there are also opportunities for long-distance satellite-to-satellite communications in space, where turbulence is not an issue.

For now, however, spectrum remains a scarce and expensive resource. But we can imagine a future in which OAM technology pans out and is able to boost the capacity of wireless networks as the theory says it should. The result would be similar to how time division multiplexing (TDM) and code division multiple access (CDMA) technologies brought the price of cellphone access plummeting by allowing more information to transmit faster over existing channels. The large swaths of the electromagnetic spectrum that wireless carriers like AT&T and Verizon have paid billions for would no longer be necessary to ramp up speed and capacity; prices for unlimited data plans would plummet; and the business model for the whole industry would be rewritten overnight.

Chris Wood is the senior analyst for Casey Extraordinary Technology, which covers robotics, biotechnology, software development and every other aspect of the technology sector. He's also the manager of our analyst team, as well as a regular contributor to The Casey Report, our flagship publication, and the Casey Daily Dispatch.

If you enjoyed Chris' article today, you might also find a piece he wrote about advances in cyber warefare to be equally interesting.

Source: Casey Research

Friday, June 29, 2012

Maya archaeologists unearth new 2012 monument

Maya archaeologists unearth new 2012 monument

(Phys.org) -- Archaeologists working at the site of La Corona in Guatemala have discovered a 1,300 year-old year-old Maya text that provides only the second known reference to the so-called “end date” for the Maya calendar on December 21, 2012. The discovery, one of the most significant hieroglyphic find in decades, was announced today at the National Palace in Guatemala.

“This text talks about ancient political history rather than prophecy,” says Marcello A. Canuto, Director of Tulane’s Middle American Research Institute and co-director of the excavations at the Maya ruins of La Corona. “This new evidence suggests that the 13 Bak’tun date was an important calendrical event that would have been celebrated by the ancient Maya; however, they make no apocalyptic prophecies whatsoever regarding the date," says Canuto.

La Corona for many decades has been known as the enigmatic “Site Q,” the source of many looted sculptures whose whereabouts had remained a mystery until its rediscovery only fifteen years ago. For the past five years, Marcello A. Canuto and Tomás Barrientos Q. (Director of the Centro de Investigaciones Arqueológicas y Antropológicas at Universidad del Valle de Guatemala) have directed the La Corona Regional Archaeological Project (PRALC) which has been investigating this intriguing Classic Maya city and its jungle environs.

In 2012, Canuto and Barrientos decided to excavate in front of a building that had been heavily damaged nearly 40 years ago by looters looking for carved stones and tombs. “Last year, we realized that looters of a particular building had discarded some carved stones because they were too eroded to sell on the antiquities black market,” said co-director Barrientos, “so we knew they found something important, but we also thought they might have missed something.” In fact, in 2012, excavations not only recovered 10 more discarded hieroglyphic stones but also something that the looters missed entirely—an untouched step with a set of 12 exquisitely carved stones still in their original location (in total, 22 carved stones were recovered). Combined with the known looted blocks, the original staircase had a total of no less than 264 hieroglyphs, making it one of the longest ancient Maya texts known, and the longest in Guatemala.

Maya archaeologists unearth new 2012 monument

While the archaeological team investigated when and how this particular staircase was built, Dr. David Stuart, director of the Mesoamerica Center of the University of Texas at Austin undertook the decipherment of the many new hieroglyphic texts. Stuart was part of the first archaeological expedition to La Corona in 1997, and has been reading and reconstructing the site’s history ever since. The stairway inscription relates 200-years’ worth of political history of La Corona, its allies, and its enemies. Consistent with these themes, some of these stones portray rulers in various poses accepting tribute, dancing, and preparing to play the Maya ballgame.

Another entirely unexpected discovery was made on another stairway block bearing 56 delicately carved hieroglyphs. Stuart recognized that it commemorated a royal visit to La Corona in AD 696 by the most powerful Maya ruler of that time, Yuknoom Yich’aak K’ahk’ of Calakmul (located in modern Campeche, Mexico), also known as Fire Claw or Jaguar Paw. Calakmul had been an immensely powerful kingdom for centuries until its king was defeated in battle by his longstanding rival Tikal (located in modern Peten, Guatemala) on August 3, 695. “Scholars had assumed that the Calakmul king died or was captured in this engagement” says Stuart, “but this new extraordinary text from La Corona text tells us otherwise.”

Maya archaeologists unearth new 2012 monument

It turns out that the defeated Calakmul king was neither killed nor captured; in fact, in the wake of his inglorious defeat, he was visiting La Corona and perhaps other trusted allies to allay their fears after his defeat. Why the reference to the year 2012? Does it provide a prophecy of what is to come? No, the reference to this important date has much more to do with events in the 7th rather than 21st century.

The key to understanding the reference to 2012 is a unique title that this Calakmul king gives himself. In the text, he calls himself the “13 K’atun lord”—that is, the king who presided over and celebrated an important calendar ending, the 13th K’atun cycle (9.13.0.0.0). This event had occurred just a few years before in AD 692. In order to vaunt himself even further and place his reign and accomplishments into an eternal setting, he connects himself forward in time to when the next higher period of the Maya calendar would reach the same 13 number—that is, December 21, 2012 (13.0.0.0.0).

Rather than prophesy, the 2012 reference served to place this king’s troubled reign and accomplishments into a larger cosmological framework. “This was a time of great political turmoil in the Maya region and this king felt compelled to allude to a larger cycle of time that happens to end in 2012,” says Stuart. This evidence is consistent with the only other reference to the 2012 date in ancient Maya inscriptions—Monument 6 from Tortuguero, Mexico. “What this text shows us is that in times of crisis, the ancient Maya used their calendar to promote continuity and stability rather than predict apocalypse,” says Canuto.

The project continues to study and record these newly carved stones, others of which record other important episodes of ancient history. Furthermore, the project plans to continue to fieldwork at La Corona, directed by Tulane University and the Universidad del Valle de , supported by the Ministry of Culture of Guatemala

Source: Phys.org

Government orders youtube to censor protest videos

In a frightening example of how the state is tightening its grip around the free Internet, it has emerged that You Tube is complying with thousands of requests from governments to censor and remove videos that show protests and other examples of citizens simply asserting their rights, while also deleting search terms by government mandate.< /p>

The latest example is You Tube’s compliance with a request from the British government to censor footage of the British Constitution Group Lawful Rebellion protest,  during which they attempted to civilly arrest Judge Michael Peake at Birkenhead county court.

Peake was ruling on a case involving Roger Hayes, former member of UKIP, who has refused to pay council tax, both as a protest against the government’s treasonous activities in sacrificing Britain to globalist interests and as a result of Hayes clearly proving that council tax is illegal.

Hayes has embarked on an effort to legally prove that the enforced collection of council tax by government is unlawful  because no contract has been agreed between the individual and the state. His argument is based on the sound legal principle that just like the council, Hayes can represent himself as a third party in court and that “Roger Hayes” is a corporation and must be treated as one in the eyes of the law.

The British government doesn’t want this kind of information going viral in the public domain because it is scared stiff of a repeat of the infamous poll tax riots of 1990, a massive tax revolt in the UK that forced the Thatcher government to scrap the poll tax altogether because of mass civil disobedience and refusal to pay.

When viewers in the UK  attempt to watch videos of the protest, they are met with the message, “This content is not available in your country due to a government removal request.”

We then click through to learn  that, “YouTube occasionally receives requests from governments around the world to remove content from our site, and as a result, YouTube may block specific content in order to comply with local laws in certain countries.”

You can also search by country  to discover that Google, the owner of You Tube, has complied with the majority of requests from governments, particularly in the United States and the UK, not only to remove You Tube videos, but also specific web search terms and thousands of “data requests,” meaning demands for information that would reveal the true identity of a You Tube user. Google claims that the information sent to governments is “needed for legitimate criminal investigations,” but whether these “data requests” have been backed up by warrants is not divulged by the company.

“Between July 1 and Dec. 31 (2009), Google received 3,580 requests for user data from U.S. government agencies, slightly less than the 3,663 originating from Brazil,” reports PC World. “The United Kingdom and India sent more than 1,000 requests each, and smaller numbers originated from various other countries.”

With regard to search terms, one struggles to understand how a specific combination of words in a Google search can be considered a violation of any law. This is about government and Google working hand in hand to manipulate search results in order to censor inconvenient information, something which Google now freely admits to doing.

You Tube’s behavior is more despicable than the Communist Chinese, who are at least open about their censorship policies, whereas You Tube hides behind a blanket excuse and doesn’t even say what law has been broken.

Anyone who swallows the explanation that the videos were censored in this case because the government was justifiably enforcing a law that says scenes from inside a court room cannot be filmed is beyond naive. Court was not even in session in the protest footage that was removed, and the judge had already left the courtroom.

The real reason for the removal is the fact that the British government is obviously petrified of seeing a group of focused and educated citizens, black, white, old and young, male and female, go head to head with the corrupt system on its own stomping ground.

In their efforts to keep a lid on the growing populist fury that has arrived in response to rampant and growing financial and political tyranny in every sector of society, governments in the west are now mimicking Communist Chinese-style Internet censorship policies in a bid to neutralize protest movements, while hypocritically lecturing the rest of the world on maintaining web freedom.

Via a combination of cybersecurity legislation and policy that is hastily introduced with no real oversight, governments and large Internet corporations are crafting an environment where the state can simply demand information be removed on a whim with total disregard for freedom of speech protections.

This was underscored last year at the height of the Wikileaks issue, when Amazon axed Wikileaks from its servers following a phone call made by Senator Joe Lieberman’s Senate Homeland Security Committee  demanding the website be deleted.

Lieberman has been at the forefront of a push to purge the Internet of all dissent by empowering Obama with a figurative Internet kill switch that he would use to shut down parts of the Internet or terminate websites under the guise of national security. Lieberman spilled the beans on the true reason for the move during a CNN interview when he stated “Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too.”

Except that China doesn’t disconnect the Internet “in case of war,” it only ever does so to censor and intimidate people who express dissent against government atrocities or corruption, as we have documented.  This is precisely the kind of online environment the British and American governments are trying to replicate as they attempt to put a stranglehold on the last bastion of true free speech – the world wide web.

Source: World Truth TV

GMO Farming, Glyphosate Significant Causes of Water Pollution

water pollution 235x147 GMO Farming, Glyphosate Significant Causes of Water Pollution

Water pollution and air pollution has been and continues to be a serious issue in many nations. Both of these pollution types are successfully bringing down the health of not only humans, but also animals, plant life, and the ecosystem as a whole. While the causes of water pollution and causes of air pollution are many, research is actually pointing a straight finger at GMO farming and chemicals like glyphosate for being important culprits.

Causes of Water Pollution – GMO Farming, Glyphosate Big Contributors

One groundbreaking study found that glyphosate, the active ingredient residing in the ever-so-popular Roundup product from Monsanto, is making its way into groundwater across the nation through widespread contamination of aquifers, wells, and springs. The explosive study that confirmed the contamination effect of Monsanto’s Roundup was published in the journal Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry in late 2011, where researchers discovered that 41% of the 140 groundwater samples taken from Catalonia Spain were actually above the limit of quantification.

The findings indicate that glyphosate actually doesn’t break down rapidly in the environment, and is continuously building up in concerning quantities. With glyphosate growing among the causes of water pollution, it is becoming more and more apparent that the chemical is polluting groundwater in alarming quantities, enough to pose a significant threat to the purity of drinking water wherever it is used.

How prevalent is this issue, really? One study conducted by a German university found very high concentrations of glyphosate in all urine samples tested. The amount of the chemical found in the urine was quite alarming, with each sample containing concentrations of 5 to 20-fold the limit established for drinking water. Unfortunately, the study doesn’t clearly say how many samples were tested for, and needs to be translated using one of the many translators available.

In addition, the issue of water contamination is only part of the pollution problem. Other findings, published in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, came across glyphosate in 60-100% of all air and rain samples tested for. This shows that glyphosate is not only among causes of water pollution, but also resides in the air due to massive overuse.

While GMO farmers and other individuals using Roundup are the heavy contributors, biotechnology giant Monsanto is ultimately fueling water pollution surrounding glyphosate involvement. Monsanto is the world’s largest provider and producer of glyphosate, and dominates the genetically modified crops market. With many of Monsanto’s GM crops being resistant to glyphosate-containing Roundup, glyphosate is sprayed in massive amounts in order to function properly against the resistant crops. In fact, 88,000 tons were used in the US in 2007 alone.

Regarding glyphosate being found in rain and streams in the Mississippi River Basin, Paul Capel, USGS chemist and author of one study has this to say:

“Though glyphosate is the mostly widely used herbicide in the world, we know very little about its long term effects to the environment. This study is one of the first to document the consistent occurrence of this chemical in streams, rain and air throughout the growing season. This is crucial information for understanding where management efforts for this chemical would best be focused.”

With glyphosate becoming more of an issue and player in the causes of water pollution, it is becoming more apparent that the massive use of this chemical needs to cease.

Source: Natural Society

Overcoming the Victim Mentality