Last month, the University of San Francisco made an alarming discovery, that 93% of Americans tested had traces of a chemical called glyphosate in their urine. Last year, the World Health Organization deemed glyphosate a “possible carcinogen”.

Glyphosate is the main ingredient in biotech giant Monsanto’s flagship product: Roundup, an herbicide sprayed all over almost every acre of food grown. Not only has Roundup been dumped around the world more than any other weed killer in history, but the US is its largest customer. According to the US Geological Survey, a record 280 million pounds were used in 2010 alone, nearly a pound of poison for every American.

Monsanto has already proven it cannot be trusted to care about anything but money, especially when lives are at stake. In this episode of The Empire Files, Abby Martin issues a scathing exposé on the corporate polluter, chronicling its rise to power, the collusion of its crimes with the US government, and the serious danger it poses today.

Monsanto, America’s Monster

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WATCH // YouTube.com/EmpireFiles

It’s been estimated that an average American living in cities sees up to 4,000 ads a day. This toxic culture of mindless consumption exploits our innermost insecurities and desire to meet impossible standards. The corporate PR machine is enormously successful due to model created by a man named Edward Bernays nearly a century ago.

The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays is considered the father of modern propaganda, or public relations. An Austrian aristocrat, Bernays first contribution to the United States was helping President Woodrow Wilson sell the idea of World War I as a noble mission to spread democracy in Europe. In order to create the engineering of consent, Bernays argued, you must appeal to the unconscious mind. 

And on behalf of numerous corporate clients, Bernays helped perfect the tools of manipulation and conditioning that are used today. To understand more about the history of propaganda and the collusion between the U.S. Empire and the fourth estate, Abby Martin sits down with Professor of Media Studies at NY University, Mark Crispin Miller, who wrote the intro to the new edition of Bernays 1928 seminal book, Propaganda.

Propaganda and the Engineering of Consent for Empire with Mark Crispin Miller

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WATCH // YouTube.com/EmpireFiles

On Memorial Day, politicians will speak at ceremonies all over the country and repeat their favorite mantra: “Support the troops.”

This pledge is hammered into the American psyche at every turn. But there’s a hidden, dark history that shows that the politicians are in fact no friend to service members–but their greatest enemy.

An easy way to prove this is to look at how they so quickly betray and abandon their soldiers after purposely ruining their lives, and even after using them as literal lab rats. 

In this disturbing chapter of The Empire Files, Abby Martin documents decades of experimentation on unwitting US troops—from nuclear tests to psychotropic drugs—as well as knowingly exposing them to deadly poisons, from Agent Orange to sarin gas.

Most infuriating is that the hundreds of thousands of veterans seeking help from the government for the side-effects of these tests are always met with lies and denial. Be prepared to be armed with info and pissed off about how veterans are really treated in the US Empire.

Used & Betrayed: 100 Years of US Troops as Lab Rats

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FOLLOW // @EmpireFiles & @AbbyMartin

WATCH // YouTube.com/EmpireFiles