You're So Bain, Part II (The Vetting Of Mitt Romney,...)

When Nutraceutical was founded in the early 1990s, it joined a natural products industry in Utah that had a long and colorful history. For example, in a 1979 article, writer Elaine Jarvik said that six Utah herbal companies were not only "the first companies in the world to put herbs in capsules, but they now account for 85 percent of the nation's herb business,…"  

In 1998, the Los Angeles Times ran a four-part series on alternative health. The third article focused on how Utah became what writer David R. Olmos called the "Silicon Valley of herbs." He pointed out that the state's herbal and supplement industry was "bigger even than the skiing trade." In addition to entrepreneurship, Olmos credited Utah's Mormon culture. Although the LDS church had long accepted modern scientific medicine, many of its members used herbs and other forms of alternative healing, partly due to the church's "Word of Wisdom" found in founder Joseph Smith's Doctrine and Covenants. Thus, herbalism, capitalism, and religious factors all took part in creating the history of Utah's herbal products industry.

When we left off, we were unpacking the quote above - in the context of Mitt Romney's ownership of Nutraceutical International through Bain Capital, Inc. - so let's continue putting the quote away (along with the claim Mormons are Christian) by focussing on it's second half:

In it, a claim is made "the LDS church had long accepted modern scientific medicine" but it is "partly due to the church's "Word of Wisdom" found in founder Joseph Smith's Doctrine and Covenants," that "many of its members used herbs and other forms of alternative healing."

This is a schizophrenic statement to say the least (How can someone, both, accept modern medicine yet also go against it, and do so because of a religious con man's anti-science revelation?) It clearly puts LDS members in the same ideological category as NewAge anti-vaccinationists who - because of ignorant revelations from the likes of NewAgers Jenny McCarthy and Suzanne Somers - adopt an anti-science posture while saying they're doing so in the interest of same.

Also, reinforcing the NewAge angle, reader PW sent a link showing Joseph Smith's wasn't the only "Word of Wisdom" the LDS church was fond of.

But wait - how can taking supplements be "anti-science" you ask? Well, let's look at what science has been telling us about this market, which was worth $23.7 billion in 2007 but is expected "to Reach US $107 Billion by 2017":

Diet Supplements or Nutritional Supplements: A Ruse by Any Other Name is Still a Ruse 

Taking vitamin E supplements may actually WEAKEN bones, study shows

Supplements: Not mystical anticancer magic

Health supplements 'could cause cancer': Study finds some products may increase chance of getting disease

Calcium supplements increase the risk of heart attacks, study finds

Soy [Supplement] Shows No Blood Pressure Benefit 

Little cognitive benefit from soy supplements for older women 

Ignore all that hype about antioxidant supplements: Why daily vitamin pills can INCREASE your risk of disease 

And this is the business Honest Abe - I mean, Mitt Romney - made his $250 million dollar fortune in. Boy, considering he loves and looks out for us that much, I can't wait to see what else he does for Americans! But it gets better. According to the original link PW sent me on Nutraceutical, it's "beginnings date to 1993, when Bain Capital, Inc.--a Boston-based private equity company--paired with senior management to organize Nutraceutical and consolidate what its leaders thought was a very divided nutritional supplements industry." And what great timing they had because, fortunately for them, according to the Science-Based Medicine website's article, "DSHEA: a travesty of a mockery of a sham":

In 1994, Congress enacted the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA).

Isn't that brilliant? The laws surrounding supplements were changed one year after Mitt got into the business! Why, it's almost as if he knew it was coming. But how could that be? Was it possible another member of the cult was given a heads-up?

[DSHEA] allows for the marketing and sales of “dietary supplements” with little or no regulation. This act is the work of folks like Tom Harkin (who took large contributions from Herbalife) and Orrin Hatch, whose state of Utah is home to many supplement companies.

Tom Harkin and Orrin Hatch. Well now. A member of the Democrat wing of the NewAge cult and a member of the NewAge Mormon cult, working together on something another of their kind has already heavily invested in. Who'da thunk it? And, considering the Clean Gene credentials of these two great political leaders - and the respective spiritual/religious/cult groups they're involved in - the integrity of the new regulations must be iron-clad, right? Right?

DSHEA has a couple of very important consequences (aside from filling the pockets of supplement makers). 

What does the FDA require of “supplements”? 

Under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA), the dietary supplement manufacturer is responsible for ensuring that a dietary supplement is safe before it is marketed. FDA is responsible for taking action against any unsafe dietary supplement product after it reaches the market. Generally, manufacturers do not need to register their products with FDA nor get FDA approval before producing or selling dietary supplements.* Manufacturers must make sure that product label information is truthful and not misleading. 

To paraphrase: “sell whatever you want, just don’t let us catch you.”

That's just the way NewAgers roll.

Now, since I just did a post on Tom Harkin - and this is supposed to be an investigation into the mayhem behind Mitt Romney and Mormonism - let's focus on that other great Mormon leader involved in the supplement industry for a moment, and by that I mean Orrin Hatch.

He should be called I-Can-Help Hatch because, it seems that, wherever his cult or a cult member needs a helping' hand, ol' Orrin appears to give assistance. Consider:

If the government had been as effective in eradicating religion from public life as George W. Bush likes to insist it has, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) would not have been able to turn public park benches into church pews. But that's pretty much what happened in 1998, when LDS leaders secretly persuaded then-Salt Lake City Mayor Deedee Corradini to sell a block of Main Street to the church for $8.1 million. The church had been coveting the downtown land for years, as it slowly snatched up all the real estate surrounding the Mormon Temple, its religious capital. 

Initially, the church said it would remove the street and build a landscaped park that would "bring a little bit of Paris to Salt Lake," complete with reflecting pool. The city planning commission approved the deal on condition that the new plaza be regulated as a public park. But the city council signed off on a slightly different proposal, which quietly granted the church exclusive rights to proselytize in the park and to keep out those it found undesirable. 

As a result, people crossing the plaza on their way to Nordstrom can now be bombarded with religious brochures and broadcasts of LDS church president Gordon B. Hinckley droning on about the evils of "so-called gays and lesbians." Passersby, however, can no longer use the space to protest (as they did during the debate over the Equal Rights Amendment), listen to music, sunbathe, skateboard, smoke, or do any of the other things they used to be able to do on the city street and sidewalks. Mormon security guards will ensure that the poor schmuck smoking a Newport and sporting an "I'm with shithead" T-shirt finds another route to the mall. 

…Not everyone in Salt Lake was thrilled with the Mormons' "little piece of Paris." The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the First Unitarian Church sued the city, arguing that the deal gave the "indelible impression that the LDS church occupies a privileged position in the community" and blurred constitutional distinctions between church and state. So far, though, they haven't made much headway. But what did they expect? The federal judge hearing the case was a Mormon, hand-picked by fellow church-member Sen. Orrin Hatch.

What a guy - and what a cult. They said they wanted one thing - which no one could argue with - but "signed off on a slightly different proposal," that no one wanted but them,...with Orrin's "help."

Orrin also played everyone (like a piano) on the hosting of Utah's 2002 Olympic games - led by (who else but) Mitt Romney - which,…Oh Hell, read on:

Olympic officials, increasingly frustrated with the U.S. response to their [illegal supplement] concerns,...blamed the surge in nandrolone tests on a single U.S. senator: Orrin Hatch (R-Ut.). Hatch was the chief architect and sponsor of DSHEA, which among other things, prompted supplement makers to flood the market with vitamins, herbal remedies, amino acids, and other "natural products" like andro without any federal safety or purity guarantees. "[Hatch] is directly implicated in this affair," said Prince Alexandre de Merode, chairman of the IOC medical commission. 

The IOC criticism was particularly biting given that Hatch's home state will be hosting the next winter games in 2002, and that one of the games' major sponsors is, in fact, a supplement company. Utah had already produced a major Olympics bribery scandal; all it needed was a reputation as the world's steroid capital just as the IOC was arriving with its drug-test lab.

That's right - an anabolic steroids AND bribery scandal, in the same event, which was lauded by the press as "successful" - are Orrin, Mitt, and their "church" good or what?

Yeah - as good as the journalists who've repeatedly failed to put any of the "nice," salt-of-the-Earth, and filled-to-the-brim with integrity behavior of these so-called "spiritual" groups together. My hat is off to them all.

 To be continued,...

 

You're So Bain, Part I (The Vetting Of Mitt Romney,...)

A promise is a promise, and I promised you something on presidential nominee Mitt Romney, Bain Capital, Mormon leader Joseph Smith, and his love (and his cult's love) for con games and scams - and here it is. If you click on the links - and you'd better if you plan to understand the totality of what I'm saying here - you'll be getting information on LOTS of cultists, cultish thinking, and cult networks, all in an effort to assist you in seeing a more complete picture of The NewAge Movement, than what is merely on the surface of the post. Have you ever heard a NewAger say, "It's all connected"? Well, Chillin's, this is exactly what they're getting at - but re-engineered to expose information rather than obscure it.

Go slow, check out each link, and wait for the "A-ha!" moment. It might take some time as you surf the site but it'll happen - I promise - and, unlike with conspiracy sites, you can rest assured my stuff is all 100% true. It's just a vaguely understood topic, deliberately "occult" (hidden) and so, rarely covered as a whole, rather than in bits and pieces.

So where to begin? (I like how Mitt is all, "Must you?" in this photo above. Yes, I must,…) Let's start with a post I did some time ago on Dan Hurley's outstanding book, "Natural Causes: Death, Lies and Politics in America's Vitamin and Herbal Supplement Industry," back when I was attempting to give you a glimpse at the kinds of criminal lowlife's behind the scam of supplements and vitamins. Birds of a feather always flock together. And look - here's another one now, in the Nutraceutical International promotional link provided by my reader, (Miss) PW:

Nutraceutical's beginnings date to 1993, when Bain Capital, Inc.--a Boston-based private equity company--paired with senior management to organize Nutraceutical and consolidate what its leaders thought was a very divided nutritional supplements industry. Bain Capital's leader was Mitt Romney, the Mormon Republican,...

Well, fancy that. And while Bain Capital is located in Boston, where is this nutritional supplements consolidation machine, Nutraceutical, located? According to it's website, it's plopped down right in the power center of Mormon country, just outside of Salt Lake City:

1400 Kearns Blvd., Second Floor, Park City, UT 84060.

How am I doing so far? You following me? Mitt-Mormon-Bain-Nutraceutical-supplements. Oh, baby, we're cooking with fire now! Let's turn up the flame a bit, because, dammit, I promised you people some Mormon-fried weinies:

When Nutraceutical was founded in the early 1990s, it joined a natural products industry in Utah that had a long and colorful history. For example, in a 1979 article, writer Elaine Jarvik said that six Utah herbal companies were not only "the first companies in the world to put herbs in capsules, but they now account for 85 percent of the nation's herb business,…" 

In 1998, the Los Angeles Times ran a four-part series on alternative health. The third article focused on how Utah became what writer David R. Olmos called the "Silicon Valley of herbs." He pointed out that the state's herbal and supplement industry was "bigger even than the skiing trade." In addition to entrepreneurship, Olmos credited Utah's Mormon culture. Although the LDS church had long accepted modern scientific medicine, many of its members used herbs and other forms of alternative healing, partly due to the church's "Word of Wisdom" found in founder Joseph Smith's Doctrine and Covenants. Thus, herbalism, capitalism, and religious factors all took part in creating the history of Utah's herbal products industry.

O.K., that's already a lot to unpack, but I don't mind because it gives me a chance to show you the deceptive game these "nice" Mormon folks are playing on us. Let's look at a previous quote again:

Bain Capital, Inc.--a Boston-based private equity company--paired with senior management to organize Nutraceutical and consolidate what its leaders thought was a very divided nutritional supplements industry.

If that's true, then why are we, all of a sudden, talking about herbs? Who doesn't like herbs? Herbs aren't even "alternative" medicine - real medicine is made from herbs.

The use of the term "herbs" is a Trojan Horse to lure you in. See, it's like when you're nailing some Left-wing alarmist on "global warming" and they immediately switch to the more slippery "climate change" (and I hate when they do that!) their hope is that you won't catch on to the movement of the goalposts:

"Quackery is a pejorative term. Some time ago we recognized that words raise emotions and mental pictures. We recognized the cognitive dissonance raised by them, so we tried to eliminate quackery. We recognized the cognitive dissonance raised when one discusses acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, and healing at a distance as if they were quackery when we made claims. For a century, most people just could not allow for the possibility that these things really work. 

So over time we recognized that we had to do something about our language. That would be the first step in enabling the thought revolution that is upon us, and changing the paradigm in medicine and science. We simply changed the adjectives, and gave alternate names to the methods, added a few phrases to eliminate negative reactions, and shifted the negative terms to descriptions of the Medical Establishment (and, note the caps in that one.) 

We now use words like unorthodox, nonstandard, unconventional, alternative, complementary, and the latest, “integrative.” They produce no emotional reaction. Along with this we invented false dichotomies, which became accepted facts; like holistic vs. reductionist, Western vs. Eastern medicine, linear vs. non-linear thinking. The dichotomies reinforced people’s feelings that these things were opposites, but of equivalent linguistic and scientific value."

But, of course, they aren't. Herbs and supplements are two totally different things - and Mitt Romney is in the business of supplements - it says so, right there on his company's website:

Welcome to Nutraceutical, one of the nation's largest manufacturers of nutritional supplements sold in health and natural food stores.

Not a word about herbs - or herbs and supplements - are we clear?

ARE WE CLEAR?

Yeah, Big Head, because you won't come clean with us on your own - and nobody else is going to vet you - I'm going to have to do it myself. And I'm the guy who knows EXACTLY what you're doing.

To be cont'd,...

 

HUGE Fart Coming (Prepare For A Bain In The Ass,...)

You know what's wild? I'll tell you what's wild: 

The way people can be looking at something cultish or cult related - I mean staring right at it, like a one eyed cat peeking in a seafood store - and still not see it for what it is.

This is especially bad when I think of journalism, or like, my fellow bloggers, who can actually write "ETHICS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE," while wondering why this little person is always on them about their ethics.

They're BLIND, I tell you, BLIND.

For instance, we've all been reading about Bain Capital, right? Mitt Romney's old firm? You know Mitt Romney, right? He's the cult member. The cult member I get major push-back for calling a cult member because - and I quote - "All the Mormons I've known were/are good, honest people... except for those that are not." Now THAT'S a classic cult endorsement if I've ever seen one!

What anyone's impression of individual cult members means when picking a president, I don't know, but that's the "logic" some have got working for them. I mean, let's forget Mormons for a second. Let's talk about another popular cult for a moment, the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Anybody ever met a mean Jehovah's Witness? There they stand by the subway, holding The Watchtower, not forcing it on you or anything. Nice folks, right?

But do you think, even for a second, that if a Jehovah's Witness was about to become President of the United States, there wouldn't be a few questions directed his way, even by these very same folks crying "bigotry" whenever Romney's "faith" comes up? Say, about presumptive President Jehovah's feelings on, oh I don't know, whether children with cancer should be able to get blood transfusions maybe?

Come on - you people have GOT to be joking.

Anyway, Bain Capital, a great place. Our new shining example of capitalism in action. Or so I am told. Obama calls it an example of "vulture capitalism," but - this is the part where looking right at something comes into play - Obama doesn't know how to sell it, which is why he's pivoting to Romney's time as Governor of Massachusetts. Bad move, NewAge-Cult-Boy, bad fucking move.

Bain Capital is a goldmine. Not only because it's an example of horrible capitalism, but because it also reveals how cults work, and how those "good, honest people" in the Mormon "church" are up to their ears in Joseph Smith's favorite pastime:

Conning the public. 

See, a reader who goes by "PW" noticed I'm not crazy about evertybody's favorite mongoloid Mormon, or "alternative" medicine, and - along with some interesting tales about how those "nice" folks in the Mormon "church" behave in the real world - he directed me to a company called Nutraceutical International that is a *perfect* jumping off point for a bit of the ol' investigative journalism nobody else seems interested in doing because WE MUST DEFEAT OBAMA!

Now, I agree we must, that much has been impressed upon me. But I'm also always impressed when political concerns are allowed to get in the way of exposing the truth - especially about cults - so prepare yourselves:

I'm looking to impress YOU now,...