Showing posts with label GMOs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GMOs. Show all posts

Monday, May 20, 2013

Monsanto

partial reprint of an article by David Swanson

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been taken over by an outside organization. The organization is called Monsanto. Monsanto is, of course, the world's largest biotech corporation.  These are the people who brought us Roundup weed killer and the resulting superweeds and superbugs, along with growth hormones for cows, genetically engineered and patented seeds, PCBs, and Agent Orange, which Monsanto now wants us to use as herbicide on genetically engineered corn and soybeans. 

This chemical company - responsible for environmental disasters that have destroyed entire towns, and a driving force behind the international waves of suicides among farmers whose lives it has helped ruin - 
has monopolized our food system largely by taking over regulatory agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture. A recent study links Roundup to autism, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's.   

While Hungary has just destroyed all Monsanto genetically engineered corn fields, and Peru has also banned GM seeds, the USDA takes an entirely different approach toward the chemical giant. The USDA has, in fact, never denied a single application from Monsanto for new genetically engineered crops.  Not one.  Not ever.

Monsanto's growth hormones for cows have been approved by Michael Taylor, a former Monsanto lobbyist turned USDA administrator and FDA deputy commissioner.  This was after Margaret Miller, again, a former Monsanto employee, oversaw a report on the hormones' safety and then took a job at the FDA where she approved her own report.

Islam Siddiqui, another former Monsanto lobbyist, wrote the USDA's food standards, allowing corporations to label irradiated and genetically engineered foods as "organic."
Genetic use restriction technology, colloquially known as "terminator technology", produces plants that have sterile seeds. If put into use, these seeds prevent farmers from implementing the age-old basic farming method of planting seeds they harvest, requiring them to repurchase seed for every planting, because the terminator seeds are sterile! 

The recently passed and signed law nicknamed the Monsanto Protection Act strips federal courts of the power to halt the sale and planting of genetically engineered crops during a legal appeals process.  The origin of this act can be found in the USDA's deregulation of Roundup Ready sugar beets in violation of a court order.  The USDA argued that any delay would have caused a sugar shortage, since Monsanto holds 95% of the market. 

Monsanto's board members have worked for the EPA, advised the USDA, and served on President Obama's Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations. Clearly, an investigation of large-scale government corruption by this singularly destructive corporation is long overdue. Why do the people need to hold protest marches against these kinds of company dealings? How can the USDA fall down to endangering people instead of looking after them? 

Is this just one more step in the Government versus the People movement? Can anyone in Government explain this? Why is the mainstream media not asking the questions? It's not just the hippies protesting anymore, it is the people. YOU are the people, and you need to be heard.



Be afraid folks. It is all true. 

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

How bad IS WikiLeaks?

WikiLeaks, under huge pressure right now by the US Government, recently revealed more information about nefarious doings by US diplomats.
'U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks reveal the Bush administration drew up ways to retaliate against Europe for refusing to use genetically modified seeds. In 2007, then U.S. ambassador to France Craig Stapleton was concerned about France’s decision to ban cultivation of genetically modified corn produced by biotech giant Monsanto. He also warned that a new French environmental review standard could spread anti-biotech policy across Europe.'

The French do have a reputation for going in their own direction. And they have influenced the EU to ban GMOs.

This latest cable shows that US Diplomats in Europe were instigating their own government to find ways to PUNISH the EU farmers because they did NOT want to buy MONSANTO genetically modified seeds (GMOs) or food products! The side effects suspected by GMOs is staggering, including modified organisms that have NEVER been in the human food chain! The recent upsurge of allergies in children for instance, is being blamed on global warming ... but ...
Strangely enough, while linking this subject of Monsanto and GMO side effects, I found more than a few websites about this subject to have redirections or other insertions that disallow you to see the site. Hacking? By who? Let your own mind mull that one.

Many who have travelled or visited France, understand their reverence for food. The French style of food production, preparation and quality takes precedence over everything else! When you are on a passenger train, it can actually be rerouted to a side rail while a food train bringing fresh Strawberries from Provence to Paris races by at breakneck speed, so important is that freshness. And dining is what many tourists go to Europe for in the first place. American lobbyists have for decades been trying to change the German Purity Law (reinheitsgebot) to allow certain chemicals and ingredients to be added to beer brewing. GMO wheat for one example.
The EU has banned GMOs in general, but you can see that they are under huge pressure to change.

It is estimated that in North America, 80% of all the foods we now eat contain GMO products. Which by the way, are suspected of all those harmful side effects or possibly even DNA altering effects? Compliments of Monsanto Chemicals and others. And many wonder why the FDA is not protecting Americans?

It was also revealed in the latest cables released that some US diplomats were working directly FOR Monsanto! No wonder the USA is mad at Julian Assange but we can only hope they keep revealing these things.

Is WikiLeaks all bad for spilling this? Didn't they also reveal lately information about how the big banks cheat the world? Didn't they also reveal the duplicity of the Chinese with information showing while they were calling for the West to reduce satellite potential weapons they were secretly developing their own? Do we want to continue to hush and pretend these revelations don't concern us? Will we go on believing that the powers that be are working in OUR best interests? Is America complicit in their attitude to corporations who have no interest in the well being of the populace other than profit? Is the USA becoming the rogue state in the world! Are there things we need to know that no one but WikiLeaks will tell us?

Get going on your own research and see where it leads you. Are you some of the people some of the time? Or all of the people all of the time?
So again; Is WikiLeaks bad or good?

http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_11361.cfm

http://www.natural-law-party.org.uk/UKmanifesto/geneticengineering4.htm