Corporations // Current TV

SAN JUAN TEOTIHUACÁN, Mexico — Wal-Mart longed to build in Elda Pineda’s alfalfa field. It was an ideal location, just off this town’s bustling main entrance and barely a mile from its ancient pyramids, which draw tourists from around the world. With its usual precision, Wal-Mart calculated it would attract 250 customers an hour if only it could put a store in Mrs. Pineda’s field.

One major obstacle stood in Wal-Mart’s way.

After years of study, the town’s elected leaders had just approved a new zoning map. The leaders wanted to limit growth near the pyramids, and they considered the town’s main entrance too congested already. As a result, the 2003 zoning map prohibited commercial development on Mrs. Pineda’s field, seemingly dooming Wal-Mart’s hopes.

But 30 miles away in Mexico City, at the headquarters of Wal-Mart de Mexico, executives were not about to be thwarted by an unfavorable zoning decision. Instead, records and interviews show, they decided to undo the damage with one well-placed $52,000 bribe.

The plan was simple. The zoning map would not become law until it was published in a government newspaper. So Wal-Mart de Mexico arranged to bribe an official to change the map before it was sent to the newspaper, records and interviews show. Sure enough, when the map was published, the zoning for Mrs. Pineda’s field was redrawn to allow Wal-Mart’s store.

Problem solved.

Wal-Mart de Mexico broke ground months later, provoking fierce opposition. Protesters decried the very idea of a Wal-Mart so close to a cultural treasure. They contended the town’s traditional public markets would be decimated, its traffic mess made worse. Months of hunger strikes and sit-ins consumed Mexico’s news media. Yet for all the scrutiny, the story of the altered map remained a secret. The store opened for Christmas 2004, affirming Wal-Mart’s emerging dominance in Mexico.

The secret held even after a former Wal-Mart de Mexico lawyer contacted Wal-Mart executives in Bentonville, Ark., and told them how Wal-Mart de Mexico routinely resorted to bribery, citing the altered map as but one example. His detailed account — he had been in charge of getting building permits throughout Mexico — raised alarms at the highest levels of Wal-Mart and prompted an internal investigation.

More in the Series Wal-Mart Abroad »

Part 1: At Wal-Mart in Mexico, a Bribe Inquiry Silenced

But as The New York Times revealed in April, Wal-Mart’s leaders shut down the investigation in 2006. They did so even though their investigators had found a wealth of evidence supporting the lawyer’s allegations. The decision meant authorities were not notified. It also meant basic questions about the nature, extent and impact of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s conduct were never asked, much less answered.

The Times has now picked up where Wal-Mart’s internal investigation was cut off, traveling to dozens of towns and cities in Mexico, gathering tens of thousands of documents related to Wal-Mart de Mexico permits, and interviewing scores of government officials and Wal-Mart employees, including 15 hours of interviews with the former lawyer, Sergio Cicero Zapata.

The Times’s examination reveals that Wal-Mart de Mexico was not the reluctant victim of a corrupt culture that insisted on bribes as the cost of doing business. Nor did it pay bribes merely to speed up routine approvals. Rather, Wal-Mart de Mexico was an aggressive and creative corrupter, offering large payoffs to get what the law otherwise prohibited. It used bribes to subvert democratic governance — public votes, open debates, transparent procedures. It used bribes to circumvent regulatory safeguards that protect Mexican citizens from unsafe construction. It used bribes to outflank rivals.SAN JUAN TEOTIHUACÁN, Mexico — Wal-Mart longed to build in Elda... more

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This Is What We Are Facing

At this very moment, your body is under direct assault. At the cellular level, your biology is being attacked in such a manner that it is actually altering your very genetic coding. Your DNA is under consistent bombardment through not only the food you are eating, but by environmental factors that are literally ripping apart your DNA. Fragmenting your genetic blueprint, the ‘fingerprint’ of your humanity.

It’s all been admitted in peer-reviewed research that is continually ignored by the mainstream medical establishment. In fact, major government groups backed by financial corporate interests are actually streamlining the very biology-crushing technology that is to blame for an explosive rate of disease across the nation. Despite being linked to sterility, infant mortality, organ damage, depletion of micro-organisms within the biosphere (essential for the cultivation of food on our planet), mutant insects and ‘super’ weeds, the USDA has actually decided to fast-track biotechnology giant Monsanto’s approval process.

Upwards of 90 plus percent of many different crops are already genetically modified and placed on your dinner plates — a number that is not satisfactory for Monsanto, who now seeks to dominate 100% of the entire agricultural industry with its genetic manipulation.

Chemicals like BPA line the plastics used by millions worldwide, and despite being linked in hundreds of studies to cancer (particularly breast cancer), the FDA has repeatedly sided with the multi-billion dollar BPA industry, who will generate over 8 billion dollars by creating more than 4.7 million metric tons of death-linked BPA this year. This is a chemical that has peer-reviewed research has tied to diabetes, heart disease, cancer, behavioral disorders, and many other conditions.

The healthcare juggernaut that is the mainstream medical establishment also continues to pump out pharmaceutical drugs that are now known to kill more people per year than traffic-related fatalities. In 2009, it was conservatively estimated that pharmaceutical drugs trumped traffic fatalities with around 37,485 deaths nationwide. The overall death toll regarding known pharmaceutical drug deaths and medical mistakes alone, only around 10% of which are believed to accurately be reported, comes in at 783,936 per year.

On average, a pharmaceutical drug contains 70 side effects. Many contain around 525. These side effects may include death, or in the case of drugs like Prozac, suicidal thoughts and tendencies. Of course the link between Prozac and suicide was covered up for decades by the drug maker Eli Lilly & Co. In 2005 it was revealed by a Hardvard-based whistle blower who released the information to the public, proving to the world that Eli Lilly lied for over 15 years and covered up studies linking Prozac use to suicide. In his own words, he said the public was being treated like ‘guinea pigs’.

The same events can be interchanged with virtually any drug company, many of which are now being forced to pay millions for false advertising and the resulting deaths that came from the use of their products.

In the realm of chemotherapy, it is now being admitted that the procedure actually kills patients more quickly and destroys the body itself.

I am not here to scare you into isolation. I am not here to sell you a solution in a bottle. This is what we are facing.

It is up to YOU to sound the alarm and restore order to the medical paradigm. We now have the opportunity to either sit idly by and allow ourselves to succumb to the healthcare juggernaut that lives within the United States or take back our health. The information surrounding the healing power of natural herbs and whole food items is bountiful, with studies finding that turmeric and ginger alone shrink tumors by anywhere from 50-81% in a number of weeks. Alternative cancer treatment centers are being targeted by the United States government and natural healers are being imprisoned for selling organic herbs from their own farms.
The time is now to reclaim our health freedom, and it requires YOUR involvement.

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