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Individual Rights and Freedoms Under Siege in Era of COVID

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In a letter to 100,000 lawyers, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Children’s Health Defense (CHD) chairman and chief legal counsel, urges his fellow attorneys to read “Protecting Individual Rights in the Era of COVID-19,” a special report prepared by the CHD team.

The report explores the legal rights to informed consent, bodily integrity, the right to refuse unwanted medical interventions, religious expression and autonomy. All of these rights will be “dramatically constricted” if employers, states and/or the federal government impose vaccine mandates.

Dear Colleague,

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven an opportunity of convenience for totalitarian elements who have put individual rights and freedoms globally under siege. A medical cartel composed of pharmaceutical industry, government regulators, financial houses, and telecom and internet billionaires are systematically obliterating freedom of speech and assembly, religious worship, property rights, jury trial, due process, and — ultimately — America’s exemplary democracy.

That’s why I am sending you this new Special Report, “Protecting Individual Rights in the Era of COVID-19.”

As a fellow lawyer who has practiced in our country’s courts for more than 40 years, I am alarmed by the growing power of global corporations to overwhelm our justice system, obliterate our constitutional liberty, and destroy public health. Throughout my career as a litigator, law professor, public advocate and author, I have worked to hold corporate giants and government institutions accountable. My life’s work has provided me with a unique perspective on our individual rights to clean air, clean water, unobstructed access to the commons, and our rights to make our own decisions about our bodies.

As chairman and chief legal counsel for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), I have now dedicated myself to protecting children’s health by ending harmful environmental exposures to children, ending the exploding chronic disease epidemic that has debilitated over half of American kids born after 1989, and to holding those responsible accountable.

A 2006 Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) study found that 54% of America’s children today have chronic health conditions — allergies, ADHD, autism, eczema, asthma, obesity, autoimmune conditions and more. When I was growing up, most of these conditions were rare or unknown. When I was a boy, I received three vaccines. Today, children receive 72 mandated doses of 16 vaccines, prior to age 18. A mountain of peer-reviewed studies points to vaccines as the primary culprit in this public health calamity. That isn’t stopping our health authorities from mandating more hugely subsidized, shoddily tested, zero-liability vaccines for children. Our vaccine safety program falls dangerously short of what our children deserve.

The COVID-19 pandemic has allowed captive corporate regulators to hold the population hostage to justify the transfer of $45 billion of taxpayer money to pharmaceutical companies to finance a gold rush of new vaccines.

Protecting individual rights in the era of COVID-19 is essential 

I urge you to read this short legal dossier, “Protecting Individual Rights in the Era of COVID-19”, with an open mind and to draw your own conclusion about the legal and ethical implications of one-size-fits-all vaccine mandates for zero-liability, heavily subsidized mandatory vaccines.

Current vaccine mandates now require most school children to receive between 50-75 shots just to attend school. A vaccine-injured child, or adult, cannot sue the healthcare provider or the vaccine producer — but rather must go to a rigged national injury compensation program to sue the very government that ordered vaccine compliance in the first place. After studying this subject for years, I am more horrified than ever by the system’s pervasive corruption.

Given existing federal legislation and judicial precedents, it is all but impossible to hold vaccine manufacturers or healthcare providers accountable for vaccine injury in the courts. Vaccine injuries are not rare — HHS’s own studies show that the agency claims that injuries only occur with “1 in a million” vaccines is a mendacious canard. The true injury rate is actually 1 in every 39 vaccines, according to the Federal Agency for Health Research Quality.

Problems with vaccine safety aren’t isolated just to children 

Federal and State officials are considering mandates for the new COVID-19 vaccine. The New York State Bar Association, an organization for which I have great respect, has given its imprimatur to a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for all New Yorkers if “experts” deem that necessary. But those experts are mainly regulators from captured public health agencies with pervasive and corrupt financial entanglements with pharmaceutical manufacturers.

The pharma-controlled media’s advice that we “trust the experts” is anti-democratic and anti-science. You and I know that “experts” can differ on scientific questions and that their opinions can vary in accordance with and demands of politics, power, and financial self-interest. In every lawsuit, leading, highly credentialed experts from opposite sides routinely offer diametrically antithetical positions based on the same set of facts. The trouble is that today, in the political arena, dissenting voices that question government policies and corporate proclamations are silenced by censorship and vilification.

In this special report, our CHD Team explores the legal rights to informed consent, bodily integrity, the right to refuse unwanted medical interventions, religious expression and autonomy. All of these rights will be dramatically constricted if employers, states and/or the federal government impose vaccine mandates.

I hope that “Protecting Individual Rights in the Era of COVID-19” can help you work with any future clients as you navigate the uncertain COVID-19/vaccine mandates landscape.

Sincerely yours,

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Chairman, Children’s Health Defense

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How Canadian churches are helping their communities cope with the wildfires

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As wildfires burn across Canada, churches are finding ways to support their members and the broader community directly impacted by the crisis.

According to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, as of June 13, there are 462 active fires across Canada – and 236 of them classified as out of control fires.

Whether it’s through phone calls or donations to community members, here’s how a few churches across Canada are handling active wildfires and the aftermath in their regions.

Westwood Hills, N.S.: St. Nicholas Anglican Church

In Nova Scotia, St. Nicholas Anglican Church and other churches in the area are collecting money for grocery cards to give to families impacted by the Tantallon wildfire. 

Right outside of Halifax, N.S., the Tantallon wildfire destroyed 151 homes. More than 16,000 people evacuated the area due to the fire.

The fire is now considered contained, but Tanya Moxley, the treasurer at St. Nicholas is organizing efforts to get grocery gift cards into the hands of impacted families.

As of June 12, four churches in the area – St. Nicholas, Parish of French Village, St Margaret of Scotland and St John the Evangelist – raised nearly $3,500. The money will be split for families’ groceries between five schools in the area impacted by the wildfire.

Moxley said she felt driven to raise this money after she heard the principal of her child’s school was using his own money to buy groceries for impacted families in their area.

“[For] most of those people who were evacuated, the power was off in their subdivision for three, four or five days,” she said. “Even though they went home and their house was still standing, the power was off and they lost all their groceries.”

Moxley said many people in the area are still “reeling” from the fires. She said the church has an important role to help community members during this time.

“We’re called to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and house the homeless and all that stuff, right? So this is it. This is like where the rubber hits the road.”

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Is it ever OK to steal from a grocery store?

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Mythologized in the legend of Robin Hood and lyricized in Les Misérables, it’s a debate as old as time: is it ever permissible to steal food? And if so, under what conditions? Now, amid Canada’s affordability crisis, the dilemma has extended beyond theatrical debate and into grocery stores.

Although the idea that theft is wrong is both a legally enshrined and socially accepted norm, the price of groceries can also feel criminally high to some — industry data shows that grocery stores can lose between $2,000 and $5,000 a week on average from theft. According to Statistics Canada, most grocery item price increases surged by double digits between 2021 and 2022. To no one’s surprise, grocery store theft is reportedly on the rise as a result. And if recent coverage of the issue rings true, some Canadians don’t feel bad about shoplifting. But should they?

Kieran Oberman, an associate professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom, coined the term “re-distributive theft” in his 2012 paper “Is Theft Wrong?” In simplest terms, redistributive theft is based on the idea that people with too little could ethically take from those who have too much.

“Everybody, when they think about it, accepts that theft is sometimes permissible if you make the case extreme enough,” Oberman tells me over Zoom. “The question is, when exactly is it permissible?”

Almost no one, Oberman argues, believes the current distribution of wealth across the world is just. We have an inkling that theft is bad, but that inequality is too. As more and more Canadians feel the pinch of inflation, grocery store heirs accumulate riches — Loblaw chair and president Galen Weston, for instance, received a 55 percent boost in compensation in 2022, taking in around $8.4 million for the year. Should someone struggling with rising prices feel guilty when they, say, “forget” to scan a bundle of zucchini?

https://broadview.org/stealing-groceries/
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The homeless refugee crisis in Toronto illustrates Canada’s broken promises

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UPDATE 07/18/2023: A coalition of groups arranged a bus to relocate refugees to temporarily stay at a North York church on Monday evening, according to CBC, CP24 and Toronto Star reports.

Canadians live in a time of threadbare morality. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Toronto’s entertainment district, where partygoers delight in spending disposable income while skirting refugees sleeping on sidewalks. The growing pile of luggage at the downtown corner of Peter and Richmond streets resembles the lost baggage section at Pearson airport but is the broken-hearted terminus at the centre of a cruel city.

At the crux of a refugee funding war between the municipal and federal governments are those who have fled persecution for the promise of Canada’s protection. Until June 1, asylum seekers used to arrive at the airport and be sent to Toronto’s Streets to Homes Referral Assessment Centre at 129 Peter St. in search of shelter beds. Now, Toronto’s overcrowded shelter system is closed to these newcomers, so they sleep on the street.

New mayor Olivia Chow pushed the federal government Wednesday for at least $160 million to cope with the surge of refugees in the shelter system. She rightly highlights that refugees are a federal responsibility. In response, the department of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada points to hundreds of millions in dollars already allocated to cities across Canada through the Interim Housing Assistance Program, while Ontario says it has given nearly $100 million to organizations that support refugees. But these efforts are simply not enough to deliver on Canada’s benevolent promise to the world’s most vulnerable.

The lack of federal generosity and finger-pointing by the city has orchestrated a moral crisis. It’s reminiscent of the crisis south of the border, where Texas governor Greg Abbott keeps bussing migrants to cities located in northern Democratic states. Without the necessary resources, information, and sometimes the language skills needed to navigate the bureaucratic mazes, those who fled turbulent homelands for Canada have become political pawns.

But Torontonians haven’t always been this callous.

In Ireland Park, at Lake Ontario’s edge, five statues of gaunt and grateful refugees gaze at their new home: Toronto circa 1847. These statues honour a time when Toronto, with a population of only 20,000 people, welcomed 38,500 famine-stricken migrants from Ireland. It paralleled the “Come From Away” event of 9/11 in Gander, N.L., where the population doubled overnight, and the people discovered there was indeed more than enough for all. It was a time when the city lived up to its moniker as “Toronto, The Good.”

Now, as a wealthy city of three million people, the city’s residents are tasked with supporting far fewer newcomers. Can we not recognize the absurdity in claiming scarcity?

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