The Darker Side of India: Religious Violence

SOHAIL MAHMOOD

The history of modern India has several incidents of religious violence. In the 1947 Partition when both India and Pakistan achieved their independence from the British Raj there took place one of the greatest migrations in history when Muslims left India for Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs left Pakistan for India. It is estimated that between 10 and 12 million people crossed the border between India and Pakistan in 1947. In the ensuing violence between the Muslims and Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs between 1.5 to 2 million lost their lives.

Since independence hundreds of religious riots have been recorded in Indian which thousands have been killed, mostly Muslims Minorities in India, especially Sikhs, Muslims and Christians, are being persecuted by Hindu nationalists belonging to the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This has been widely reported in the media and by international watch dog organizations. There has also been a rise in communal and sectarian violence in India. For instance, a Muslim has been beaten to death in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand after reportedly asking a group to stop playing loud music on New Year’s Day. Earlier this year, a Muslim man was reportedly killed by a mob who accused him of transporting beef in his car. On January 26, 2018, Hindu youth clashed with Muslims in Kasganj, Uttar Pradesh in which one person was killed. This led to riots in the town for a couple of days.

Vigilante cow protection groups harassed and attacked people in states including Gujarat, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka in the name of upholding laws prohibiting the killing of cows.

Earlier, the bodies of two Muslim cattle traders were found hanging from a tree in Jharkhand. In June, members of a cow protection group in Haryana forced two Muslim men, who they suspected were beef transporters, to eat cow dung. A woman in Haryana said that she and her 14-year-old cousin were gang-raped by men who accused them of eating beef. A team formed to reinvestigate closed cases related to the 1984 Sikh massacre identified 77 cases for further investigation and invited people to testify. The functioning of the team continued to lack transparency.

Ananya Bhattarya claimed in his article published in Quartz, April 14, 2017that India is the fourth-worst country in the world for religious violence.

According to civil rights groups there is an extensive list of brutalities in the name of religion in India. For instance, the killing of at least 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. Since independence in 1947, the Muslim community has been subject to and engaged in sectarian violence in Gujarat state. In 2002,Hindu extremists carried out acts of violence against the Muslim minority population. The starting point for the incident was the Godhra train burning which was allegedly done by Muslims. During the incident, young girls were sexually assaulted, burned or hacked to death. These rapes were condoned by the ruling BJP, whose refusal to intervene lead to the displacement of 200,000. Death toll figures range from the official estimate of 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus killed, to 2,000 Muslims killed. Then Chief Minister Narendra Modi has also been accused of initiating and condoning the violence, as have the police and government officials who took part, as they directed the rioters and gave lists of Muslim-owned properties to the extremists. In 2007,Tehelka magazine released The Truth: Gujarat 2002 which was a report based on a six-month-long investigation and involving video sting operations. It  stated that the violence was made possible by the support of the state police and the then Chief Minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi for the perpetrators. The report and the reactions to it were widely covered in Indian and international media. The recordings were authenticated by India’s Central Bureau of Investigation There was great media interest in the report’s description of Narendra Modi’s role in the riots, based, for example, on video footage of a senior Bajrang Dal leader saying that at a public meeting on the day of the fire, “he had given us three days to do whatever we could. He said he would not give us time after that, he said this openly.”

The only conclusion from the available evidence points to a methodical pogrom, which was carried out with exceptional brutality and was highly coordinated.

According to Human Rights Watch, the violence in Gujarat in 2002 was pre-planned, and the police and state government participated in the violence. In 2012, Modi was cleared of complicity in the violence by a Special Investigation Team appointed by the Supreme Court. As expected, the Muslim community was very angered by the development and viewed it as a betrayal of trust.

On 6 December 1992, riots took place between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai in which at least 11 people were killed in various incidents in the city. The riots changed the demographics of Mumbai greatly, as Muslims moved to Muslim-majority areas and Hindus moved to Hindu-majority areas.

The 2002 Godhra train burning incident in which Hindus were burned alive allegedly by Muslims led to the Gujarat riots in which mostly Muslims were killed. According to the death toll given to the parliament on 11 May 2005 by the United Progressive Alliance government, 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed, and another 2,548 injured. Some 223 people are missing. According to one advocacy group, the death tolls were up to 2000. According to the Congressional Research Service, up to 2000 people were killed in the violence.

Tens of thousands were displaced from their homes because of the violence. According to New York Times report, witnesses were dismayed by the lack of intervention from local police, who often watched the events taking place and took no action against the attacks on Muslims and their property.

Sangh leaders as well as the Gujarat government maintain that the violence was spontaneous and uncontrollable reaction to the burning. However, the Government of India has implemented almost all the recommendations of the Sachar Committee to help Muslims.

In its annual human rights reports for 1999, the United States Department of State criticized India for “increasing societal violence against Christians.” The report listed over 90 incidents of anti-Christian violence, ranging from damage of religious property to violence against Christian pilgrims.

In Madhya Pradesh, unidentified persons set two Statues inside St Peter and Paul Church in Jabalpur on fire. In Karnataka, religious violence was targeted against Christians in 2008.

A 1999 Human Rights Watch report states increasing levels of religious violence on Christians in India, perpetrated by Hindu organizations. In 2000, acts of religious violence against Christians included forcible reconversion of converted Christians to Hinduism, distribution of threatening literature and destruction of Christian cemeteries.

In 2007 and 2008 there occurred a massacre of more than 100 Christians and torching of thousands of homes in Orissa and Karnataka.

Undoubtedly, religious intolerance is very high in India. A Pew Research Center analysis of 198 countries has ranked India as fourth worst in the world for religious intolerance. Tensions between religious communities, especially Hindus and Muslims, has long divided India. However, the rifts have intensified lately.  Muslims in India at times experience attacks by Hindus because of alleged cow slaughter. In addition, there are multiple incidents of rioting and mob violence involving the two communities. Officials of the BJP have made declarations that India should be exclusively Hindu.  Minority communities, including Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, complained of numerous incidents of harassment by Hindu nationalist groups. There is a government ban on buying cows for slaughter in animal markets. Also, there is the promotion of Hindi, and there are the appointments of Hindutva sympathizers to top posts in educational and cultural organizations.

In Gujarat state anti-conversion laws do not allow people to adopt a religion without permission from the district magistrate, also hampering religious autonomy. In Haryana state the Hindu holy text, the Bhagwad Gita, has been included in the school curriculum. The Hindu nationalist wing of the governing BJP, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has organizes mass ghar wapsi (return to Hinduism) ceremonies, which are also viewed as an attempt to dismantle minority religions.

Most troubling is the role of the BJP in religious violence in the country. The party has been complicit in many incidents of religious violence, especially against Muslims. The historical development of the BJP is intrinsically tied to its minorities, especially Muslim, populist bashing catering to its Hindu nationalist base. The development of the party took place because of this stance against minorities, especially Muslim. In 1983, right-wing Hindu zealots from the Vishva Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal destroyed the 16th Century Babri mosque, declaring, without any proof. that it was built on the site of a temple destroyed by Muslim rulers.

Many political analysts trace the rise of the Party BJP since that event. It is believed that the demolition of the mosque was indeed the most blatant act of defiance of law in India and a watershed for Indian nationhood. Then the BJP had hoped that the demolition of the mosque would consolidate Hindu votes in its favor, but the party failed in coming into power until 1999.

Later, a 2010 Allahabad court ruled that the site was indeed a Hindu monument before the mosque was built there, based on evidence submitted by the Archaeological Survey of India. This action had caused great humiliation to the Muslim community. The resulting religious riots caused at least 1200 deaths. The Government of India then blocked off the disputed site and the matter lingers on in the court.

Much later, the BJP achieved its first absolute majority in parliament in 2014 and Narendra Modi became prime minister. Since then he has actively promoted Hindu nationalism and has started to implement the BJP’s Hindutva agenda.

Human Rights Watch, an influential global human rights watchdog organization, in is latest World Report 2018 states:

Vigilante violence aimed at religious minorities, marginalized communities, and critics of the government—often carried out by groups claiming to support the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—became an increasing threat in India in 2017. The government failed to promptly or credibly investigate the attacks, while many senior BJP leaders publicly promoted Hindu supremacy and ultra-nationalism, which encouraged further violence. Dissent was labeled anti-national, and activists, journalists, and academics were targeted for their views, chilling free expression. Foreign funding regulations were used to target nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) critical of government actions or policies. Lack of accountability for past abuses committed by security forces persisted even as there were new allegations of torture and extrajudicial killings, including in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Chhattisgarh, and Jammu and Kashmir…. Mob attacks by extremist Hindu groups affiliated with the ruling BJP against minority communities, especially Muslims, continued throughout the year amid rumors that they sold, bought, or killed cows for beef. Instead of taking prompt legal action against the attackers, police frequently filed complaints against the victims under laws banning cow slaughter. As of November, there had been 38 such attacks, and 10 people killed during the year. In July, even after Prime Minister Narendra Modi finally condemned such violence, an affiliate organization of the BJP, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), announced plans to recruit 5,000 “religious soldiers” to “control cow smuggling and love jihad.” So-called love jihad, according to Hindu groups, is a conspiracy among Muslim men to marry Hindu women and convert them to Islam.

The Indian media acknowledges that hate crimes are taking place in India. Lynching of Muslims suspected of consuming beef, a taboo for Hindus, have become commonplace. Paranoid extremist Hindus accuse Muslim men of engaging in “love jihad” or converting Hindu women by seducing them into marriage.  Christians also face the same sort of allegations. Today, it is common that Hindu extremists beat up a Hindu-Muslim couple in India. Recently, a court annulled a marriage between a Muslim man and a 25-year-old Hindu woman in medical school.

Although Modi constantly proclaims his aim is to develop India for all Indians, Muslims are barely represented in BJP governments in the center and in the states. The chief minister Modi has selected to govern Uttar Pradesh, is renowned for his hostility to Muslims. The state is the most important one in India because of its population and political significance. Meanwhile, the voices of the country’s vulnerable Muslim minority are being stifled, as never in history. These incidents of religious persecution aren’t new in India. In the past, the country has witnessed numerous incidents of religious violence, mostly against religious minorities. Often religious tensions are a product of narratives that seek to justify violence based on certain myths.

Although, the country’s constitution provides for religious freedom, India does not always practice it. Indeed, it is a tragedy that India, under Modi and the BJP, has turned more intolerant of religious minorities who continue to suffer under the Hindu nationalists rule. Given India’s success in economic development, it is tragic indeed that religious violence is tearing the country’s social fabric and thereby hurting the country’s overall development as a global power. We wish it was not so.

Yemen’s Crisis Belong to All of Us

Robert Koehler

What’s a little cholera — excuse me, the worst outbreak of this preventable disease in modern history — compared to the needs of a smoothly functioning economy?

A week before he was kicked out of British Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet for allegedly having watched pornography on his government computer, former First Secretary of State Damian Green was quoted in the Guardian as saying that British weapons sales to Saudi Arabia were necessary because: “Our defense industry is an extremely important creator of jobs and prosperity.”

That statement is not the scandal — just business as usual. And of course Great Britain only supplies a quarter of the weaponry Saudi Arabia imports to wage its devastating war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The United States supplies more than half, with 17 other countries also cashing in on this market.

This amounts to a huge portion of the world at war, with a lot of winners and only a few, easily ignored losers. The losers include most of the population of Yemen, which has become an abyss of hopelessness, with famine and infectious disease intensifying the hell they are being forced to endure, as international players struggle for regional domination.

This sort of insanity has been going on since the dawn of civilization. But the voices crying out against war remain as marginalized and without political clout as ever. War is too useful politically and economically to be susceptible to a moral challenge.

“Our understanding of war . . . is about as confused and unformed as theories of disease were roughly 200 years ago,” Barbara Ehrenreich notes in her book Blood Rites.

This is an interesting observation, considering that “The cholera epidemic in Yemen has become the largest and fastest-spreading outbreak of the disease in modern history,” with more than a million suspected cases reported, and some 2,200 deaths. “About 4,000 suspected cases are being reported daily, more than half of which are among children under 18,” according to Kate Lyons of the Guardian. “Children under five account for a quarter of all cases.”

Lyons quotes Tamer Kirolos, director of the Save the Children NGO in Yemen: “There’s no doubt this is a man-made crisis,” she said. “Cholera only rears its head when there’s a complete and total breakdown in sanitation. All parties to the conflict must take responsibility for the health emergency we find ourselves in.”

I repeat: This is a man-made crisis.

The results of this strategic game of power include the collapse of Yemen’s sanitation and public health systems. And fewer and fewer Yemenis have access to . . . clean water, for God’s sake.

And it’s all part of the strategic game of power. In order to rout the Shiite rebels backed by Iran, the Saudi coalition “has aimed to destroy food production and distribution” with its bombing campaign, according to London School of Economics researcher Martha Mundy. When I read this, I couldn’t help but think about Operation Ranch Hand, the U.S. strategy during the Vietnam War to destroy crops and forest cover by inundating the country with some 20 million gallons of herbicides, including the notorious Agent Orange.

What military or political end could possibly warrant such action? The reality of war transcends all description, all outrage.

And the global antiwar movement has, as far as I can tell, less traction than it did half a century ago. U.S. politics is unraveling, not realigning itself to create a sane, secure future. Donald Trump is the president.

Following his State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which has moved its iconic Doomsday Clock forward to two minutes to midnight, released a statement:

“Major nuclear actors are on the cusp of a new arms race, one that will be very expensive and will increase the likelihood of accidents and misperceptions. Across the globe, nuclear weapons are poised to become more rather than less usable because of nations’ investments in their nuclear arsenals. President Trump was clear in his State of the Union Address last night when he said ‘we must modernize and rebuild our nuclear arsenal.’ . . .

“Leaked copies of the forthcoming Nuclear Posture Review suggest that the U.S. is about to embark on a less safe, less responsible and more expensive path. The Bulletin has highlighted concern about the direction that countries like the United States, China and Russia are moving, and momentum toward this new reality is increasing.”

This is a man-made crisis. Or is it something less than that — a crisis of the worst of human instincts? In Yemen, cholera and famine have been unleashed by men in pursuit of victory for their cause. The faces of suffering and dying children — the consequences of this pursuit — provoke shock. This is so clearly wrong, but geopolitically, does anything change?

Violence is still sold as a necessity of security. “We must modernize and rebuild our nuclear arsenal.” And it’s still being bought, at least by those who think the violence is aimed at someone else.

Huge Military Budgets Make Us Broke, Not Safe

Miriam Pemberton

We’re all tense. Hearing about our fellow citizens in Hawaii scrambling around, looking for a place to hide from a nuclear bomb, will do that to you. So will contests between two unstable world leaders over the size of their nuclear buttons.

Now, some politicians say they’ll protect us by adding massive amounts to the Pentagon budget. This seems like a no-brainer: feel threatened, give more money to the military. But it isn’t.

Practically everyone from the president on down, though, seems to take it as a given. “In confronting these horrible dangers,” Donald Trump said during his State of the Union, “I’m calling on Congress” to “fully fund our great military.”

The president and his party are now looking to add somewhere between $30 and $70 billion more in military spending to their budget for next year — on top of the increases for this year. Democrats seem willing to go along, with a few caveats.

Nobody seems worried anymore about adding to the financial hole we just dug for ourselves and our children with $1.5 trillion in tax cuts for the rich.

It’s true that the military needs predictability, which has been hobbled by politicians who can’t get it together to pass a real budget. Every enterprise, except maybe improv comedy, does. But it’s not true that the military needs more money.

The portrait of a “starved” military, which Trump and his secretary of defense like to complain about, airbrushes out a few facts.

We’re now spending more on the military, adjusted for inflation, than at any time since World War II — including during the Reagan and George W. Bush buildups. We spend more than the next eight countries put together.

Worse still, the military can’t even say what it’s actually spending — it’s still the only federal agency that can’t pass an audit. The brass says they’ll really try this year, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Trusting the Pentagon to rein in its own waste hasn’t worked. Back in 2015, the Pentagon’s own commissioned report found $125 billion in administrative waste that could be cut over five years. But then they simply buried the report.

Here’s what we really need to feel safer: Leaders who are working to reduce nuclear tensions rather than rev them up.

Instead, in addition to firing off scary tweets, Trump repeated calls in his State of the Union to “modernize and rebuild our nuclear arsenal,” to the tune of $1.7 trillion. Why? The 4,000 nukes we currently have — enough to destroy the entire planet — seem like an adequate deterrent.

Leaders are meanwhile working on designs for new “lower yield” nukes, envisioning them as tools for “limited” nuclear war. That makes nuclear war seem more feasible, and therefore more likely. Feeling safer yet?

And they want to build up the arsenal of conventional weapons, mostly to counter China. But China is expanding its influence around the world not mainly through military spending — its military budget is only a third of ours — but through its civilian investments.

As the U.S. retreats from providing development aid, China is filling the vacuum. As the U.S. cuts off its previous investments in clean energy technology, China has become the solar panel provider to the world.

Our new security strategy, by the way, has also airbrushed out climate change. A military that previously identified climate change as “an urgent and growing threat to national security” is now barred by the administration from talking about it at all.

While we contemplate spending money we don’t have for weapons we don’t need, the urgency of this threat continues to grow.

The Paradox of Equal Justice

Ralph Nader

Almost every day, entertainment, sports, media, political and even some business organizations are jettisoning their top officials and incumbents after reported accusations of sexual harassment and sexual assaults of their subordinates. They’re not waiting for prosecutors, courts or regulators to take action. “Get out now” is the first punishing order. Then the work product of these asserted offenders—whether music, comedy shows, etc.—are often scrubbed, and recipients of political contributions are under pressure to give these sums to charity. In addition a wider arc of resignations by the heads and Boards of Directors, accused of lax monitoring is emerging.

The speed of punishment is unprecedented. One day millions of people watched Bill O’Reilly, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer and others. The next day they were vanished. Although this is only the tip of the iceberg—and there is more to come—the velocity of expulsions coming from these accusations—even when they are denied—is unprecedented. (A major exception, however, are the escapades of Donald Trump over the years.)

What do the expellers know that spurs them to make these instant decisions often to the detriment of their own economic interest, such as Fox, PBS, NBC or NPR evicting their four, lucrative star performers?

Could it be that the media was quick to report these abuses and that more was coming to produce even more damaging publicity to their brand? Could it be that they wanted to avoid their companies being stigmatized as a perilous or toxic workplace for future talent considering careers there? Were they trying to avoid potential lawsuits? Could it be that some of these executives wanted to get rid of the spotlight that might reach their own transgressions, even though they think they were of lesser seriousness?

To all of these the answer is probably, “partly.” But it is also important for the media outlets, political parties, and Hollywood studios to react in the most responsible manner: that is, when abuses come to light, they may not need to wait for due process; they should react in order to protect their employees, who could become victims, as well as their reputation and their sizeable audience/constituency. While many of these organizations waited far too long to remove abusers, as in the case of Michigan State University and the United States Olympic Committee, the act of removing serial predators from their powerful positions signals a degree of belated resolve and compassion, and is in line with their responsibility to protect their workplace.

So why is it that when corporations and financial institutions commit broad-scale crimes that endanger or take the lives of millions of people, they receive absolute impunity? Indeed, their executives are rewarded for their own chronic, dangerous lawlessness. When their numerous crimes or criminogenic actions come to light, why are these bosses not immediately removed from their positions, in the manner of the many powerful men who have fallen as the #MeToo movement gains momentum?

Who knows? Time will tell perhaps. What is known is that corporations get away with very serious crimes—deaths, lifetime injuries, massive assaults on the economic necessities of millions of innocent people, the sickening of children and loss of their lives, the poisoning of water, air, land, food, perilous workplaces—all while paying off the political system that would have exacted punishment—and without appropriate sanctions.

None of the bailed-out Wall Street bosses who crashed the economy in 2008-2009 were prosecuted. These repeat-offenders took 8 million jobs away from the American people with their crimes, deceptions, cover-ups and rampant speculation with the very pensions and mutual funds that had been entrusted to them by their clients. Some Wall Street predators retired with huge severance packages—worth many millions of dollars—while others stayed put and resumed their roles as people of influential status and approbation.

Look at George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who together initiated a criminal war of aggression that sent tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers to death, illness and permanent disability while destroying the lives of over a million Iraqis and leaving the country and its impoverished survivors devastated. They left public office in January 2009, above the laws they broke, and the Constitution they violated, to the accolades of Republicans and some Democrats. Lucrative speeches, book advances and other goodies flooded into their “retirements.”

People like Bill Clinton helped rehabilitate Mr. Bush with collaborative projects and joint appearances. The Bush Presidential library is thriving without mention of his and Mr. Cheney’s war crimes.

Over and over again, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CBS’s Sixty Minutes, corporate crime, violence and fraud do not result in punishment. All too often the rewards and luxuries accorded to these powerful executives continue unabated.

Even when the Justice Department occasionally nails a big drug company for crimes costing thousands of lives and billions of dollars, “deferred prosecution agreements” let the bosses off and allow the companies themselves to get away with fines that appear large but are far less than the ill-gotten gains that finally caught the attention of the underfunded Department’s prosecutors.

In 2011 I filled a book titled Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism with dozens of documented corporate crimes that ultimately resulted in a little bad publicity, some fines and infrequent enforcement actions, but no real justice. But in all of the many egregious accounts detailed in Getting Steamed, did the business bosses lose their jobs, their retirement, even the esteem of their colleagues, as a result of their chronic predation? Very rarely.

With over 450,000 Americans dying every year from tobacco-related diseases and with documentation piling up on how these tobacco titans deliberately marketed cigarettes to youngsters to hook them for life, none of these company officials went to jail or were even personally fined. Remember the celebrated Congressional hearings when about a dozen tobacco executives, under oath, said they didn’t believe there was a connection between their heavily promoted products and disease? There was no prosecution for perjury then or later when it became abundantly clear these executives knew all about the health impacts from evidence inside the companies.

The same impunity and immunity attached to the asbestos and lead manufacturers whose bosses knew for decades of the lethal impacts on millions of their long suffering victims.
So why the difference? The sexual harassment reactions came because the perpetrators had done demonstrable damage—to their victims, to the cultures of their workplaces, to productivity, and, of course, to the public relations of the organizations writ large. Weren’t the companies that brought about the recession or criminally destroyed lives also afraid of losing sales and talent if they didn’t rid themselves of the culpable perpetrators?

One difference may be that the evicted sexual assaulters did their deeds personally and directly, unlike the more remote corporate bosses or even middle management, their crimes more abstract within the enormity of the bureaucratic machines that they’ve rigged to avoid accountability. The other difference is that the public outrage was more personal and intense over the high-profile victims in the Hollywood episodes, which set the level of high media visibility. But what are the other factors at work?

EU Imposes Anti-Union Law on Greece

Will Podmore

Under instructions from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the Greek government pushed through the most anti-union legislation in Europe on Monday 15 January.

The move was demanded, along with other draconian measures, as a condition of the latest tranche of what is called Greece’s bailout but which in reality is bailing out the European financial institutions which recklessly encouraged Greek borrowing.

The key concession required from the Syriza government was that industrial action would now require a yes vote from more than half of the total number of union members in a workplace, regardless of the actual turnout. This is even worse than the provisions in the Trade Union Act which came into law in the UK in March 2016.

Astonishingly – or perhaps not – there has been not one word about this from the TUC, which continues its scaremongering about the effect of Brexit on workers’ rights. While it prattles on, the European Union is turning the screw on the most fundamental of all workers’ rights, the right to strike, and using Greece as a test bed for policies it would like to see across all member states.

Without the right to take effective strike action, workers have no protection save the courts, and capitalist courts consistently favour the employers.

The European Court of Justice ruled (in the Laval case, 18 December 2007), that employers have the right to bring workers from a low-wage EU state to a higher-wage EU state on the wages payable in the cheaper country, regardless of any collective bargaining agreements in the higher-wage state. It has also ruled (in the Viking case, 11 December 2007) that effective industrial action to stop outsourcing to cheaper countries is illegal.

In the Alamo­–Herron case (18 July 2013), involving Unison members transferred out of local authority employment, it ruled that whatever their contracts said, benefits collectively negotiated for local authority workers could be ignored by their new employers. “This case is an appalling attack on collective bargaining and is at least as serious as Viking and Laval,” wrote Britain’s leading employment barrister, John Hendy.

Hendy went on to say, “The EU has become a disaster for the collective rights of workers and their unions.”

As we have consistently said, strong trade union organisation backed up by effective industrial action if need be is the only way to secure and defend advances in the workplace. The EU murmurs about “rights” while consistently attacking the basis of workplace organisation.

Not one line of the Trade Union Act introduced by the Cameron government, or the even worse White Paper that preceded it, was contrary to EU law. The sooner Britain leaves the EU, the better it will be for trade union members (though some so-called leaders will resent being kicked off the Brussels gravy train). At least then we will just have our own employers to deal with.

Tearing Down The Facade of Legitimacy: Industrial Agriculture And The Agrochemical Industry

Colin Todhunter

The chemical-intensive industrial model of agriculture has secured the status of ‘thick legitimacy’. This status stems from on an intricate web of processes successfully spun in the scientific, policy and political arenas. It status allows the model to persist and appear  normal and necessary. This perceived legitimacy derives from the lobbying, financial clout and political power of agribusiness conglomerates which, throughout the course of the last century (and continued today), set out to capture or shape government departments, public institutions, the agricultural research paradigm, international trade and the cultural narrative concerning food and agriculture.

Critics of this system are immediately attacked for being anti-science, for forwarding unrealistic alternatives, for endangering the lives of billions who would starve to death and for being driven by ideology and emotion. Strategically placed industry mouthpieces like Jon Entine, Owen Paterson and Henry Miller perpetuate such messages in the media and influential industry-backed bodies like the Science Media Centre feed journalists with agribusiness spin.

From Canada to the UK, governments work hand-in-glove with the industry to promote its technology over the heads of the public. A network of scientific bodies and regulatory agencies that supposedly serve the public interest have been subverted by the presence of key figures with industry links, while the powerful industry lobby hold sway over bureaucrats and politicians.

Monsanto played a key part in drafting the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights to create seed monopolies and the global food processing industry had a leading role in shaping the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (see this). From Codex, the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture aimed at restructuring Indian agriculture to the proposed US-EU trade deal (TTIP), the powerful agribusiness lobby has secured privileged access to policy makers to ensure its preferred model of agriculture prevails.

In her numerous documents, Dr Rosemary Mason has highlighted high-level collusion and subterfuge that has served to keep glyphosate on the commercial market. Claire Robinson and Jonathan Latham have described how an industry-backed campaign set out to smear science and scientists which were critical of proprietary technology. And Carol Van Strum and Evaggelos Vallianatos have indicated fraud and corruption involving the US Environmental Protection Agency that have resulted in industry interests prevailing at the expense of public health and the environment.

On a wider more geopolitical level, Michel Chossudovsky has examined how transnational agribusiness working with USAID effectively dismantled indigenous agriculture in Ethiopia. Ukraine’s agriculture sector is being opened up to Monsanto. Iraq’s seed laws were changed to facilitate the entry of Monsanto. India’s edible oils sector was undermined to facilitate the entry of Cargill.

Whether it involves the effects of NAFTA in Mexico or the ongoing struggle against the Monsanto across South America, traditional methods of farming are being supplanted by globalised supply chains dominated by transnational companies policies and the imposition of corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive (monocrop) agriculture.

The ultimate coup d’tat by the transnational agribusiness conglomerates is that government officials, scientists and journalists take as given that profit-driven Fortune 500 corporations have a legitimate claim to be custodians of natural assets. These corporations have convinced so many that they have ultimate legitimacy to own and control what is essentially humanity’s common wealth. There is the premise that water, food, soil and agriculture should be handed over to powerful transnational corporations to milk for profit, under the pretence these entities are somehow serving the needs of humanity.

Tearing down the façade of legitimacy

In recent times, Dr Rosemary Mason has been campaigning against the effects of agrochemicals on human health and the environment. She has a nature reserve in South Wales and noticed that flora and fauna was becoming increasingly degraded to the point that the reserve now resembles little more than a dead zone in comparison to what it had once been.

In her dozens of carefully researched and fully-referenced letters to key officials in the UK, EU and US, Dr Mason has documented the effects agrochemicals on her nature reserve as well as on health and the environment not only in Wales but globally.

She has, moreover, gone to great lengths to describe the political links between industry and various government departments, regulatory agencies and key committees that have effectively ensured that ‘business as usual’ prevails.

Mason recently received a response from Public Health England (PHE) to this open letter she had sent to the four chief medical officers for England, Scotland Wales and Ireland. The PHE enquiries team which responded to Mason failed to answer any of her questions about the cosy relationship between the British government, the agrochemical corporations, the pharmaceutical industry and the corporate media.

The response did not even acknowledge the warning given by the UN Human Rights Council about the dangers of pesticides in food and water and how this especially undermines the development and rights of children.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the PHE reply is along the lines of thanks, now move along because officialdom has everything covered.

Clearly, given the concerns raised by Mason, things are not ‘covered’. In a new letter to the chief medical officer for England, she spells out the unsatisfactory nature of the response received from PHE and also attaches this 45-page document that sets out why the response is both inadequate and wholly flawed. The contents of Mason’s document are below. Readers are urged to read the document in full as well as her initial open letter to PHE.

Where have all our insects and birds gone?	1
Widespread global contamination with pesticides	3
Emerging pathogens wipe out wildlife species	8
British Government in the hands of the pesticides industry	10
Farming with chemicals	14
UK ‘watchdogs’ are controlled by corporations	15
The science behind GMOs is fraudulent	22
We are eating food poisoned with pesticides	23
UN warns about the dangers of pesticides	25
Chemical damage to the brains of our children	27
Other diseases associated with glyphosate	28
The International Monsanto Tribunal in The Hague	36
The Monsanto Papers	39
Monsanto’s activities in Wales	41
Conflicts of interest in the European Commission	41
Evidence that the health of British people is deteriorating	43
US Scientists sound the alarm over global mass poisoning	44

Whether it concerns PHE or any of the other bodies Mason has written to over the years, any response she has received is usually quite dismissive of her concerns.

But is this any surprise? The corporations which promote industrial agriculture and the agrochemicals Mason campaigns against have embedded themselves deeply within the policy-making machinery on both national and international levels. The US government has indeed promoted an exploitative ‘stuffed and starved‘ strategy that weds consumers and farmers across the world to the needs of transnational agribusiness and its proprietary inputs.

From the overall narrative that industrial agriculture is necessary to feed the world to providing lavish research grants and the capture of important policy-making institutions, global agribusiness has secured a perceived thick legitimacy within policy makers’ mindsets and mainstream discourse.

If you – as a key figure in a public body – believe that your institution and society’s main institutions and the influence of corporations on them are basically sound, then you are probably not going to challenge or question the overall status quo. Once you have indicated an allegiance to these institutions – as such figures do by the very fact they are part of them and often receive good salaries as employees – it is ‘irrational’ to oppose their policies, the very ones you are there to promote.

And it becomes quite ‘natural’ to oppose with dogmatic-like zeal any research findings, analyses or questions which question the system and by implication your role in it. Little surprise therefore that Rosemary Mason appears to run into a brick wall each time she raises issues with key figures.

But once you realise and acknowledge that the integrity of society’s institutions have been eroded by corporate money, funding and influence – and once you are in a position to offer a credible alternative to corporate agriculture and all it entails based on authentic values that are diametrically opposed to those of corporate conglomerates – you can ask some very pertinent questions that strip away perceived legitimacy.

The questions being asked by Rosemary Mason and others are part of the wider process of stripping away the fabricated reality and perceived legitimacy that the whole system of industrial agriculture rests on.

Struggle For democracy: Problems With Plunderocracy And Imperialist Intervention

Farooque Chowdhury

The problems mentioned in this article are in view of recent developments in a number of countries including Iran. The questions appeared stark during the days imperialism was preparing ground for invasions/interventions in Iraq, Libya, Syria and a group of progressives from these countries effectively or indirectly lent support to imperial interventionists (2i).

All the banner bearers: Rightists, ultra-rightists, fascists, storm troopers of imperialist capital, propagandists and practitioners of medieval ideology and institutions, sectarian and divisive forces, dictators, camouflaged and uncovered imperialist organizations, banks and financial institutions, so-called rights-organizations/activists and juvenile organizations sponsored by imperialists, monarchists, a part of the mainstream media, imperial interventionists (2i), and other birds of reactionary feathers are engaged with the business of “democracy”. One faction of the 2i at the center of the world imperialist system is now a “steadfast” “democracy”-monger. Very often, 2i organize mobilizations in the name of democracy. Platform for invoking imperialist intervention including R2P (so-called Right to Protect) are organized with the appearance of “democracy” and “rights”.

A confusing reality: People regularly face a foxing reality in many countries while they try to organize struggle for democracy. Upholding the streamer of “democracy” by the 2i is a regular incident in many countries. Very often, people find their organizations and movements de-activated, subverted and demolished by the 2i and anti-people “democracy”-mongers.

At the same time, people occasionally find “hop-step-and-jump”-moves in the name of struggle for democracy. People also experience sporadic, disjointed and incoherent democracy-slogan-mongering by a group of leaders in the rank of people although the tasks of spreading political education among people and methodical preparation for struggle for democracy are completely neglected, which ultimately turn into thrusting knife into the back of people’s movement.

Capital’s tactics: Capitals in countries practice a number of tactics to subvert and/or suppress people’s struggle for democracy: dominating capital takes the posture of sentinel/defender of “democracy”, or, raises the slogan of “national”-interest, -security, -integrity and -sovereignty, or, begins hue and cry about the specter of 2i whenever people initiate their struggle for democracy. Sometimes, these tactics are lumped together into one, and at times, these are applied in compartmentalized style. The machine of repression is run with full force while the slogans of “national” interest, security, sovereignty, 2i, etc. are propagated by the dominating capital. Plunder of people’s wealth/resources including the commons, appropriation of surplus value and curtailment/negation of rights are carried on unabatedly under the umbrella of securing “democracy”, “national” interest and sovereignty, and “opposing” 2i.

The problems: This reality creates a number of immediate problems in the struggle for democracy:

1. Should the struggle for democracy be suspended or slowed down in the face of threat, actual or propagated, to “national” interest, etc., and/or in the face of 2i, actual or propagated?
2. Should not plunder of resources, appropriation of surplus value, negation of rights, and repression of people be opposed by the struggle for democracy while there’s actual threat of 2i, etc.?
3. Should the threat of 2i be ignored by the struggle for democracy while organizing/initiating the struggle for democracy or opposing/resisting plunder, repression, etc.?
4. Is there scope for alliance with proxies of imperialism/forces engaged to further 2i, and, should the proxies, etc. be allowed space in the struggle for democracy?
5. Is there no approach, which can simultaneously initiate the struggle for democracy, struggle to resist plunder, etc., and oppose/resist 2i and its proxies/hirelings?

Working questions: These all are functional questions, which are being faced by all responsible leadership in the struggle for democracy in countries experiencing plunder, repression, and 2i; and there’s no scope to avoid the task of finding out functional solutions to these problems. The reason is: democracy can’t be organized and people’s life can’t be improved by ignoring imperialism and plunder, etc. Democracy and imperialism are opposed to each other as democracy strives to secure people’s interest while imperialism shackles and loots people. The same is the case of democracy and plunder as democracy empowers people while plunder’s function is its opposite: snatch away people’s resources, and thwart people’s control over resources. People’s control over resources is one of the fundamental material conditions for building up democracy for people. The opposing positions of these three – democracy, and imperialism and plunder – are well-defined by their characters and roles: democracy upholds people’s interest while imperialism, plunder, etc. demolishes the interest.

Thence, the problems in the struggle for democracy assume definite shape and character:

1. No scope for ignoring 2i and plunder, and lending space to imperialists and its proxies/hirelings while organizing the struggle for democracy. So, the stand is: oppose 2i and plunder, and don’t deactivate the march to democracy.
2. No scope to get enveloped with proxies/hirelings and anti-democratic forces while widening alliance in the struggle for democracy.

How: The problems mentioned above jointly raise a single question: how? How to organize/carry on the two tasks simultaneously? Failure in simultaneously organizing/carrying on these tasks leads either to:

1. accommodating imperialists and its proxies, and paving path to 2i; or
2. accommodating plunder, etc.

Any of the failures hurt people, and their struggle for democracy. So, “how”, as mentioned above, is a crucial question with the power of determining the path of the struggle for democracy: success or failure.

Groups of “progressives” in a number of countries have already stepped into one of these booby traps: either suspend struggle for democracy in the face of 2i or ignore/accommodate 2i while waging struggle for democracy. Implications of getting ensnared into these traps are people’s suffering, living in non-democracy, having a shackled and undignified life, having no access to prosperity, thwarted development, no scope to develop productive forces, having no space to furthering struggle for equity and equality. And, expecting to achieve people’s democracy, liberty and rights with imperialist patronage and backing, and by working as proxy of imperialism is nothing but bibere venenum in auro, to drink poison from a cup of gold, as imperialism never stands for people, as interest of imperialism is opposed to interest of people, as imperialism is ally of class enemies of people, as the economy imperialism depends on and defends exploits and robs people.

“Big Sugar” and metabolic syndrome, killers of millions annually worldwide

Gary Joad

As reported in a WSWS article last November, the Public Library of Science (PLOS) has published a major exposé of the sugar industry’s “manipulation of science” for its “commercial advantage.” This involved the suppression of findings and defunding of projects that were adding to a growing body of evidence in the 1950s and 1960s about the role of sugar consumption in the causation of coronary heart disease (CHD) and bladder cancer.

Internal documents dating from 1965, reviewed by Cristin E. Kearns, Dorie Apollonio, and Stanton A. Glantz, revealed that the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) secretly funded research in the United Kingdom that demonstrated that sugar (or sucrose, composed of one molecule of fructose and one molecule of glucose) in rats significantly raised triglyceride lipids linked to heart disease and heart attacks. The study also demonstrated the association of sucrose consumption with elevated levels of urinary beta-glucuronidase, an enzyme previously linked to human bladder cancers.

After the SRF examined the preliminary findings that were very likely to become commercially disadvantageous, the industry cut off funding for the completion and confirmation of the first results at Birmingham University. The findings were never published and were buried for subsequent decades until the recent unearthing of industry documents.

In November 2016, the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine division (JAMA/IM) published a Special Communication titled, “Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research, A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents” by Kearns, Laura A. Schmidt, and Glantz. Previously, Dr. Glantz was involved in the exposure of the tobacco industry’s decades-long disinformation campaign to conceal the human toll from cancer and heart disease wrought by cigarette smoking.

World Cat, a global catalogue of library collections, was used to search for documents of the aforementioned refined sugar trade group SRF, subsequently changed to the Sugar Association (SA), as well as documents of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the National Research Council, the US Public Health Service, American Heart Association (AHA), and the American Medical Association, among others.

The JAMA/IM investigators also found documents from the 1950s and 1960s archived at Harvard University and the University of Illinois, and other academic institutions, exhuming communications between nervous post-World War II sugar industry executives and academics regarding the findings that had already emerged in Europe and in North America as to the probable role of sucrose in the causation of CHD and heart attacks, which today retains first place in human mortality.

Prior to World War II and well into the 1950s, health authorities and nutrition scientists worldwide insisted that the rising consumption of refined sugars, along with starch and refined carbohydrates such as potatoes, rice and breads, contributed significantly to human obesity. Increasingly, European and American researchers began connecting CHD, diabetes, and strokes to heavy sugar consumption, which was on the rise with the postwar soft drink, snack and confectionery industries.

The campaign to exonerate sugar

In a strategic move to protect and increase market share and to counter the emerging scientific evidence unfavorable to sucrose consumption, Big Sugar launched a campaign in 1954 to dispute the adverse scientific findings and resulting publicity.

The main target was John Yudkin, professor of nutrition at Queen Elizabeth College, University of London, who later, in 1972, published a review of his research group’s studies titled Pure, White And Deadly, How Sugar Is Killing Us And What We Can Do to Stop It.

Yudkin demonstrated that the worldwide rise in the incidence of heart disease tracked very closely the rise of refined sugar consumption globally. Similar associations of sucrose consumption and heart attack rates were published by “the Iowa (US) group,” Alfredo Lopez, Robert Hodges and Willard Krehl. Articles appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine in June 1965 linking sugar to CHD, reporting population studies that strongly suggested blood glucose levels were superior predictors for future heart attacks than serum cholesterol and high blood pressure. Another article suggested provocatively (as far as the sugar monopolies were concerned) that “perhaps fructose, a constituent of sugar … was the agent mainly responsible (for heart disease).” An editorial appearing at the same time remarked, “sucrose must be atherogenic (causative of hardening and thickening of arteries).”

On July 11, 1965, the New York Herald Tribune ran a full-page article about the Annals of Internal Medicine findings, concluding that new research strengthened the argument that sucrose was responsible for the rise in heart attacks.

Enlisting Harvard and the FDA

Investigators’ examination of the archived documents show that the sugar industry enlisted Fredrick Stare, chair of Harvard University’s School of Public Health Nutrition Department, to join the Sugar Advisory Board (SAB) that year. Stare had solicited funds from the food industries for his department since 1943 and consulted for the NAS, the National Heart Institute and the AHA. The SA and its vice-president John Hickson launched Project 226 and hired Stare and two other researchers at Harvard, D. Mark Hegsted and Robert McGandy, to author a series of articles favorable to Big Sugar.

The researchers were paid $6,500 ($48,900 in 2016 dollars) for the eventual appearance in July and August, 1967 of two articles in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that effectively shifted the blame for CHD from sucrose consumption to the ingestion of saturated fats. The payment by Big Sugar for the findings was not disclosed at the time of the NEJM publication.

Stare’s department at Harvard had broken ground in 1960 on a $5 million new building with donations from General Foods, maker of Kool-Aid and Tang. In the early 1970s, the SA ranked him amongst its most reliable academic allies, while his department collected funds from Coca-Cola, Gerber, Kellogg and Carnation.

The 1967 NEJM articles declared there was “no doubt” that the only dietary intervention required to arrest the rising onslaught of heart attacks and to prevent CHD was to reduce dietary cholesterol and substitute polyunsaturated fat for saturated fat in the American diet.

In the fall 2016 publication of the JAMA/IM investigation, Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, commented in an accompanying editorial that the documents provided “compelling evidence (that Big Sugar had initiated research) expressly to exonerate sugar as a major risk factor for coronary heart disease. I think it’s appalling.”

According to a Mother Jones article in November, 2012, the SA went on to establish its Food and Nutrition Advisory Council in the 1970s, funding it with $60,000 a year, and comprised of six physicians and two dentists who agreed to defend sugar’s place in a healthy diet. The group wrote an 88-page paper titled “Sugar in the Diet of Man,” which the SA printed 25,000 copies of to be distributed to mass media outlets nationwide. The accompanying press release prominently declared, “Scientists dispel sugar fears.”

The SA concocted plans for the broadcast of three-minute radio spots by Stare extolling sugar’s virtues by hundreds of radio stations, until he was exposed in 1976 by the Center for Science in the Public Interest in an article titled “Professors on the Take.”

Big Sugar cast Stare aside and moved on to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which formed a committee to vet the safety of processed food substances and additives, or what was termed “generally regarded as safe (GRAS).” Sufficient numbers of the committee were advocates for Big Sugar to yield industry-favorable decisions by the FDA. The GRAS committee ran into trouble briefly from the USDA’s Carbohydrate Nutrition Laboratory, which reported “abundant evidence that sucrose is one of the dietary factors responsible for obesity, diabetes and heart disease.” But the committee’s sugar section won out, reporting in January 1976 that, while sugar might cause tooth decay, it was not a “hazard to the public,” and dismissing the link to diabetes and heart disease as “less than clear” and “circumstantial.”

The SA immediately blasted the American media with headlined ads, “Sugar is Safe!”, explaining it “does not cause death-dealing diseases … there is no substantiated scientific evidence indicating that sugar causes diabetes, heart disease or any other malady,” and accusing all opposition of being either “discredited” Yudkin followers or liars.

At the University of Minnesota, Ancel Keys, a nutritionist who had accepted funds from Big Sugar since the early 1940s, stepped forward in the 1960s and 1970s as the chief US proponent of the hypothesis of fat as the primary driver of CHD. The SA also recruited Edwin Bierman of the University of Washington as its top diabetes expert, who insisted that diabetics did not need to pay seriously strict attention to sugar intake, and who joined Keys in declaring that dietary fat caused heart disease.

All of this drove federal health and nutrition guidelines policy regards sucrose safety for the ensuing decades.

In 1980, per-person sugar consumption in the US stood at 120 lbs annually, and by 2010 had seen an increase to 132 lbs. The percent of adults termed obese in 1980 was 15 percent, and by 2010 it had risen to 35.7 percent. The percent of obese children in 1980 stood at 5.5 percent, and by 2010 it had tripled to 16.9 percent, in large measure because of the soft drink industry. The percentage of Americans with diabetes in 1980 was 2.5 percent, which tripled by 2010 to 6.8 percent. So-called adult onset diabetes was diagnosed for the first time in adolescents and children.

Metabolic syndrome

Despite the SA and soft drink makers buying findings at major institutions, the tide of scientific facts has been relentless, given the burden of disease linked to sugar consumption and the emergence of metabolic syndrome (MS), an umbrella term referring to the hormonal and biologic dysfunction in a human being consuming excessive amounts of sugar and its chemical relative, high fructose corn syrup. The human being’s digestive systems treat the two compounds identically, and it is apparently the fructose portion of sucrose and high fructose corn syrup that uniquely affects humans.

Metabolic syndrome includes an obesity that involves “visceral” fat deposition, most prominently around the waistline, fat which is also infiltrating internal organs, especially the liver, rising blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, elevations in triglycerides, and so-called insulin resistance. Insulin resistance refers to the human being’s cells becoming insensitive to insulin’s vital regulation of blood sugar. The blood sugar then keeps rising, and the pancreas keeps pouring out more and more insulin, which in turn provokes more eating and more weight gain, and further ramps up blood pressure.

Varman Samuel, who studies diabetes and insulin resistance at the Yale School of Medicine, told the New York Times Magazine in 2011 that “when you deposit fat in the liver, that’s when you become insulin-resistant.” As Gary Taubes put it for New York Times Magazine, the body’s cells begin ignoring insulin, even to the point of pancreatic exhaustion of insulin manufacture, which is when blood sugar control is lost completely.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in 2012 that 75 million Americans have metabolic syndrome, and that for heart attack victims, more likely than not, MS is the root cause. An estimated 100,000 Americans are dying with complications of MS a year. MS has also been linked to declining cognitive function, where brain cells “ignore” insulin, and neurons degenerate for lack of glucose derived energy.

Another New York Times Magazine article in 2002, again by Taubes, and headlined, “What If It’s All Been A Big Fat Lie?,” observed that “calorie for calorie, (processed starches and refined carbohydrates) are the cheapest nutrients for the food industry to produce, and they can be sold at the highest profit.”

Metabolic syndrome has also become associated with the rise in global cancer rates, according a 2007 report by the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research, titled “Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity and the Prevention of Cancer.” Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York told Taubes that the effects of insulin resistance spur the output of more insulin and at least another insulin-like hormone that promotes tumor growth, and also that pre-malignant cells utilize the elevated insulin growth factors to mutate in the setting of MS, obesity, and diabetes. Craig Thompson at Sloan-Kettering told Taubes that he believes numerous pre-cancer cells would never undergo life-threatening changes without the hyper-insulin levels and related growth factors driven by MS.

Thompson and Lewis Cantley at the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School make the case that if sugar is causing insulin resistance, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that sugar causes cancer, in at least some cases. Cantley leads a scientific team working on a specific insulin-signaling gene, PI3K, that is said to drive breast and some other women’s tumors. On a personal note, they both explained that this is why they avoid eating sugar.

Nature Magazine published an article in February 2012, titled “The Toxic Truth About Sugar,” by Robert Lustig, MD, Laura Schmidt and Claire Brindis. Lustig (a self-described Yudkin disciple) is professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of California at San Francisco and author of Fat Chance, published in 2012, in which he describes MS as “the new scourge.” The Nature article reported that CHD, diabetes and cancers claim 35 million lives annually worldwide, for the first time in history outstripping infectious disease as a killer.