Corporate Kneebiters
World According To Monsanto, pt 7, Informed Consent
Published June 24, 2009 @ 07:24AM PT
Would it be all right with you if your parents, if you are an adult on your own recognizance, were still allowed to decide what cities or towns you could live in? Would your answer be any different if your parents were real estate agents and would probably make good decisions?
Would it be all right with you if the government made up a national menu and required you to eat only that food to conform? Would your answer be any different if the menu contained your favorite foods?
Well, I think I'd have to say no on both counts, and in case of both contingencies.
Believing in self-determination, free will and informed consent as I do, I couldn't approve of such policies. This is the level of choice that I see being removed from each of us when the government refuses to require the labeling of transgenic foods.
By way of self-reported studies and captive university research laboratories whose future grant funding depends on the favor of the biotech industry, the FDA has approved numerous transgenic crops that are processed in the regular food supply and sold to an unsuspecting marketplace.
They've been allowed to patent self-replicating, living organisms and release them into the wild without the public even having a chance to debate the implications.
'Oh,' the biotech folks will say, and have said in the comments at this blog, 'but you can buy organic food.'
First, it's as ridiculous that I should have to pay a premium to have food that wasn't sprayed with poison in the first as that I should have to pay a premium in order to know what I'm eating. Second, I can't be sure that I know what I'm eating, not even if I buy organics.
Market Consolidation and Anti-Trust
Published June 23, 2009 @ 08:39PM PT
There's a play on words in there somewhere, where could it be ... Oh, right, back to the task at hand. Jill Richardson explains the need for livestock competition reform:
... When [a government pricing error and evidence of industry market manipulation, including underpayment of meat producers,] came to light, the rancher mentioned above, Herman Schumacher of South Dakota, joined with two others and sued the beefpacking companies (Tyson, Excel, and Swift) to obtain the money lost during those six weeks. (Schumacher, by the way, has long been a thorn in the side of Big Beef, testifying on the injustice in the beef industry before the Senate Ag Committee in 1998.) The ranchers won - and then the case went to appeal and they lost. Whereas a jury sided with Schumacher (and awarded the class of cattle producers $9.25 million - about $40 per cow), [but the award was appealed, and the appeals court decided that it wasn't enough to have proved that the packers broke the law.]
... Now Schumacher is undergoing retaliation by Tyson, who demands that he pay their court costs - a hefty $15,881.38. And, according to R-CALF, the U.S. Marshals have been called in to enforce this by seizing Schumacher's home if he does not pay. ...
The USDA failed to enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act (PSA) of 1921 for the whole of the Bush administration and now the courts have found that ranchers don't even have standing to sue for damages over it unless they can prove 'intent.'
Such are the perks of big business-class, corporate citizenship. The law doesn't apply to you. You can harm the interests of consumers and small businesses almost with impunity.
Though it's a situation that would have disgusted the people who dreamed of a nation of laws and not men. It would have disgusted Adam Smith, the moral philosopher who invented capitalism, to see such powerful monopolies still running the show and claiming to be following the system he proposed to rid the world of mercantilism and all-powerful guilds.
This isn't democracy and it isn't capitalism. And whatever it should be called, I doubt the proper term is very polite.
(Photo credit: Sunfox on Flickr.)
Collin Peterson, Congress in Denial
Published June 23, 2009 @ 02:24PM PT
Collin Peterson may be the only person in politics who believes in global warming and is thrilled about its prospects for agriculture. Ahem. That this suggests, as Brad Johnson points out over at the Wonkroom, that he doesn't actually believe in it must remain in the realm of conjecture for now.
But seriously, Peterson said, "We’ve just had the biggest floods and coldest winters we’ve ever had. They’re saying to us [that climate change is] going to be a big problem because it’s going to be warmer than it usually is; my farmers are going to say that’s a good thing since they’ll be able to grow more corn."
Are there actually any farmers who are pro-flood and drought? That question sort of answers itself. As further noted at the Wonkroom:
The report Peterson dismissed as being good news for farmers also shows that if no action is taken to halt global warming, the U.S. grain belt could see one to two months of heat waves over 100°F and two to three months of heat waves over 90°F by the end of the century. Corn, by the way, “will fail to reproduce at temperatures above 95°F.”
Chris Bowers amply described the political situation around Peterson's hold up of the climate bill, which got around 300 pages added to the still-fluid legislation.
Peterson's getting information in hearings and political backing from people like American Farm Bureau Federation President Bob Stallman, who thinks the only agricultural implications of climate change are higher energy costs.
World According to Monsanto, pt 6, Lies and Lying Liars
Published June 21, 2009 @ 08:34AM PT
This portion of the "World According to Monsanto" documentary covers Monsanto's ruinous lies about dioxin, an acutely toxic carcinogen and a chief ingredient in Agent Orange. They falsified data to say that the chemical wasn't carcinogenic. The US government took them at their word and many Vietnam veterans were denied healthcare claims based on those lies.
Ask yourself: if they'd lie about giving US soldiers cancer, what else would they lie about?
As it happens, their entire line about how genetically engineered crops are needed to feed the world and save the poor. Their products are simply unnecessary.
In a world where the USDA's and FDA's idea of safety checking is tantamount to voluntary self-reporting, why trust without verification?
I linked recently to a Seed Magazine debate between sustainable food activists and GMO supporters, at the link, participant Tom Philpott notes that no well-credentialed academics invited such that a false front of scientific unity could be projected in favor of crops that are 'just the same' as other crops, yet require ferocious intellectual property protection. Yet what I noticed about reading the opposition arguments in the full discussion was how defensive they were of the biotech corporations:
Pamela Ronald, professor of plant pathology at the University of California, Davis: ... My overwhelming sense is that public skepticism about GM crops, and the foods derived from them, is not about the science—it is about US corporations. Some consumers have not forgotten that Monsanto was a producer of Agent Orange for the US military during the Vietnam War. Others worry that corporations will control the global seed supply. ...
Yes, Dr. Ronald, I am worried about that. If you're worried about my being worried about it, then something must be getting through to the industry. Their exceptionally bad previous and current behavior, as well as their stranglehold on academia, combined with widespread regulatory breakdowns at every level of food safety monitoring in recent decades, seems to lead naturally to positions of deep skepticism.
Where's the immediate evidence of harm, industry boosters say? Do the independent safety testing, I say.
MTBE was introduced in 1979. In 2005, the EPA finally got around to realizing that it was a 'likely' cause of cancer.
That's 26 years of a product being on the market before definitive proof of harm was discovered.
Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) had been provided to menopausal women since the 1930s, giving them low doses of estrogen, a compound their bodies naturally produced when they were younger. It took forty years for suspicions to surface that it caused cancer, but until the beginning of this decade for the link to be conclusively proven and long-term HRT therapy stopped.
That's somewhere around 70 years from introduction to definitive proof of serious harm.
I give these examples in connection with cancer, but there have been studies linking pesticides with organic brain diseases as well as gastrointestinal and liver diseases. There was a cholesterol medication pulled from the market after the FDA approval process which was found to cause renal failure and myopathy. All this damage from chemicals introduced to our environments with the purported goal of improving our lives.
If you're an older person who gets a brain disease at about the usual age, or suffer muscle degeneration, die of renal failure, the cause could easily be masked if someone wasn't looking carefully for one. Even young people die of fluke diseases, everybody's heard of that happening. Even if there are synthetic chemical-related clusters of deaths, it can take a lot of investigation to uncover that and not all local governments keep the sort of statistical records needed to uncover patterns of increased long-term illness.
Point is, bodies are complicated and we don't always know what will happen if we introduce a new variable. We might not know for many years. That's just how it goes.
Consider what happened with bovine growth hormone. In 1998, two Fox News reporters in Florida were fired for refusing to kill and never again speak about a story they recorded about the potential cancer effects in humans and damage to the health in cows of Monsanto's drug Posilac, (a.k.a., bovine growth hormone, rBST, rBGH, bovine somatotropin) because Monsanto threatened Fox. The story was highlighted as part of the documentary, "The Corporation", and you can see the clip below:
It wasn't until last year that Monsanto lost their fight to get states to pass laws against labeling milk rBGH/rBST-free, so that consumers who had concerns could choose to buy milk that wasn't contaminated with their potentially carcinogenic product. They fought, literally, to make it illegal for you to know if their drug's breakdown products were in your milk.
Has anyone you know dropped dead from drinking milk? Probably not. Might they, or you, have an elevated risk of certain reproductive system cancers from being unknowingly exposed for a number of years? Maybe. You wouldn't know a thing like that for a very long time. That's what they're counting on.
In almost every case where companies have had to recall these synthetics because of unwanted human health side effects, investigators have often uncovered evidence that the possible damage was already known to the company in question. Yet these products are still sold to an unsuspecting public over and over because, dammit, a lot of money was invested in their research and manufacture and if they can sneak a few more years of profit in under the wire, well, go for it.
They make enough money from selling their lousy junk for a few years than they have to pay in fines to regulatory agencies or, usually, in court settlements to their victims. Often, there is no penalty beyond having to stop selling in the US.
These are the people we're entrusting with the safety of the world's crop DNA.
Umm, no. Not that anyone asked me, but I prefer not to take these people at their word. Not that anyone was willing to label the food they sold me so I could make my own choice, but the food-equivalent concoctions of the people who brought us Agent Orange? ... Do. Not. Want.
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World According to Monsanto, pt 6, Lies and Lying Liars
Published June 21, 2009 @ 08:34AM PT
This portion of the "World According to Monsanto" documentary covers Monsanto's ruinous lies about dioxin, an acutely toxic carcinogen and a chief ingredient in Agent Orange. They falsified data to say that the chemical wasn't carcinogenic. The US government took them at their word and many Vietnam veterans were denied healthcare claims based on those lies.
Ask yourself: if they'd lie about giving US soldiers cancer, what else would they lie about?
As it happens, their entire line about how genetically engineered crops are needed to feed the world and save the poor. Their products are simply unnecessary.
In a world where the USDA's and FDA's idea of safety checking is tantamount to voluntary self-reporting, why trust without verification?
I linked recently to a Seed Magazine debate between sustainable food activists and GMO supporters, at the link, participant Tom Philpott notes that no well-credentialed academics invited such that a false front of scientific unity could be projected in favor of crops that are 'just the same' as other crops, yet require ferocious intellectual property protection. Yet what I noticed about reading the opposition arguments in the full discussion was how defensive they were of the biotech corporations:
Pamela Ronald, professor of plant pathology at the University of California, Davis: ... My overwhelming sense is that public skepticism about GM crops, and the foods derived from them, is not about the science—it is about US corporations. Some consumers have not forgotten that Monsanto was a producer of Agent Orange for the US military during the Vietnam War. Others worry that corporations will control the global seed supply. ...
Yes, Dr. Ronald, I am worried about that. If you're worried about my being worried about it, then something must be getting through to the industry. Their exceptionally bad previous and current behavior, as well as their stranglehold on academia, combined with widespread regulatory breakdowns at every level of food safety monitoring in recent decades, seems to lead naturally to positions of deep skepticism.
Where's the immediate evidence of harm, industry boosters say? Do the independent safety testing, I say.
MTBE was introduced in 1979. In 2005, the EPA finally got around to realizing that it was a 'likely' cause of cancer.
That's 26 years of a product being on the market before definitive proof of harm was discovered.
Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) had been provided to menopausal women since the 1930s, giving them low doses of estrogen, a compound their bodies naturally produced when they were younger. It took forty years for suspicions to surface that it caused cancer, but until the beginning of this decade for the link to be conclusively proven and long-term HRT therapy stopped.
That's somewhere around 70 years from introduction to definitive proof of serious harm.
I give these examples in connection with cancer, but there have been studies linking pesticides with organic brain diseases as well as gastrointestinal and liver diseases. There was a cholesterol medication pulled from the market after the FDA approval process which was found to cause renal failure and myopathy. All this damage from chemicals introduced to our environments with the purported goal of improving our lives.
If you're an older person who gets a brain disease at about the usual age, or suffer muscle degeneration, die of renal failure, the cause could easily be masked if someone wasn't looking carefully for one. Even young people die of fluke diseases, everybody's heard of that happening. Even if there are synthetic chemical-related clusters of deaths, it can take a lot of investigation to uncover that and not all local governments keep the sort of statistical records needed to uncover patterns of increased long-term illness.
Point is, bodies are complicated and we don't always know what will happen if we introduce a new variable. We might not know for many years. That's just how it goes.
Consider what happened with bovine growth hormone. In 1998, two Fox News reporters in Florida were fired for refusing to kill and never again speak about a story they recorded about the potential cancer effects in humans and damage to the health in cows of Monsanto's drug Posilac, (a.k.a., bovine growth hormone, rBST, rBGH, bovine somatotropin) because Monsanto threatened Fox. The story was highlighted as part of the documentary, "The Corporation", and you can see the clip below:
It wasn't until last year that Monsanto lost their fight to get states to pass laws against labeling milk rBGH/rBST-free, so that consumers who had concerns could choose to buy milk that wasn't contaminated with their potentially carcinogenic product. They fought, literally, to make it illegal for you to know if their drug's breakdown products were in your milk.
Has anyone you know dropped dead from drinking milk? Probably not. Might they, or you, have an elevated risk of certain reproductive system cancers from being unknowingly exposed for a number of years? Maybe. You wouldn't know a thing like that for a very long time. That's what they're counting on.
In almost every case where companies have had to recall these synthetics because of unwanted human health side effects, investigators have often uncovered evidence that the possible damage was already known to the company in question. Yet these products are still sold to an unsuspecting public over and over because, dammit, a lot of money was invested in their research and manufacture and if they can sneak a few more years of profit in under the wire, well, go for it.
They make enough money from selling their lousy junk for a few years than they have to pay in fines to regulatory agencies or, usually, in court settlements to their victims. Often, there is no penalty beyond having to stop selling in the US.
These are the people we're entrusting with the safety of the world's crop DNA.
Umm, no. Not that anyone asked me, but I prefer not to take these people at their word. Not that anyone was willing to label the food they sold me so I could make my own choice, but the food-equivalent concoctions of the people who brought us Agent Orange? ... Do. Not. Want.
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Michelle Obama Linking Food and Health
Published June 20, 2009 @ 03:06PM PT
Via Obamafoodorama, the First Lady talks about food and health outcomes at the White House garden harvest celebration:
Michelle Obama: ... But unfortunately, for too many families, limited access to healthy fruits and vegetables is often a barrier to a healthier diet. In so many of our communities, particularly in poorer and more isolated communities, fresh, healthy food is simply out of reach. With few grocery stores in their neighborhoods, residents are forced to rely on convenience stores, fast food restaurants, liquor stores, drug stores and even gas stations for their groceries.
These food deserts leave too many families stranded and without enough choices when it comes to nourishing their loved ones. And sadly, this is the case in many large cities and rural communities all across this nation. So we need to do more to address the fact that so many of our citizens live in areas where access to healthy food, and thus a healthy future, is simply out of reach. ...
It's a resonant message, one that people across the country have been coming to independently, as evidenced by the spread of urban rooftop gardening and edible landscaping. (It's even spread beyond our borders, with Britain's Queen Elizabeth joining the kitchen garden movement.)
Even the American Medical Association, staunch opponents of serious health coverage reform otherwise, are saying that we need to reform food policy.
Indeed, money spent on good food policy now is far less expensive than treating diet-related diseases later.
We are what we eat, as much as we ever were. Why not take it seriously?
World According to Monsanto, pt 5, Consensus
Published June 19, 2009 @ 10:26AM PT
Seed magazine hosts a discussion of GMO crops, with three cheerleaders, plus Tom Philpott and Raj Patel, who do a good job poking holes in the opposition case. Key takeaways:
- There isn't scientific consensus.
- There hasn't been adequate safety testing.
- Other promising methods of improving farming get starved of funding in favor of profitable GMO research that benefits private companies.
From Philpott:
... Thus in the first-ever multi-generational study of the effects of GMO food, evidence of serious reproductive trouble comes to light: reduced birth weight and fertility. If the reproductive system can be viewed as a proxy for broad health, then the Austrian study raises serious questions about the effects of consuming foods derived from transgenic crops—i.e., upwards of 70 percent of the products found on U.S. supermarket shelves.
... The Austrian results raise an obvious question: why did the first multigenerational study of the health effects of GMOs emerge more than a decade after their broad introduction in the United States?
... A recent event reported by the New York Times illustrates the lack of independence—and thus, arguably, rigor—that surrounds too much GMO research. A group of 23 US scientists signed a letter to the EPA declaring that, “No truly independent research [on GMOs] can be legally conducted on many critical questions.” The Times reported that because of draconian intellectual property laws, scientists can’t grow GMO crops for research purposes without gaining permission from the corporations that own the germplasm—permission which is sometimes denied or granted only on condition that the companies can review findings before publication.
Stunningly, “The researchers … withheld their names [from the EPA letter] because they feared being cut off from research by the companies,” The Times reports. So this is the sort of scientific consensus around GMOs that environmentalist should bow to—one literally based on fear among tenured faculty? ...
Philpott also points to the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), which ends up recommending an approach that leans heavily towards the agroecological and encourages crop diversification, while warning against the effects of restrictive intellectual property laws and the search for technological magic bullets. That's the international scientific consensus on agriculture, where they say outright that much of what's being done right now in agriculture isn't sustainable.
And of course, there's the consensus among US government regulatory agencies on the safety of genetically modified foods, because that government is riddled with former Monsanto employees who don't require all GMO crops to be submitted for independent safety testing. Or, at least, if government employees think otherwise, they're not going to be allowed to say so without a lawsuit.
