The Comfort of Ignorance

It appears that the initiative, 522, to require food purveyors in Washington state to put GMO labeling on food products is going down to defeat. Like California’s similar Proposition 37 that was defeated last year, Initiative 522 is losing by a 55% NO vote, with 1 million votes counted. Supporters have refused to throw in the towel, insisting that mail-in ballots won’t be counted for another few days, but the conclusion seems clear: once again, big money from outside the state (over $22 million spent on the NO campaign, only $500 or so from within the state) spent on misleading ads has duped enough voters to secure victory for the bigs. These include the usual suspects: Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, Syngenta and “food” purveyors like Coke, Pepsi, and Nestle, as well as the many contributors to the Grocery Manufacturers Association. Their big money has once again turned what appeared to be a 3 to 1 favorable opinion for GMO labeling in September to 55% against in November. The power of corporate money to shape public opinion has never been greater.

As with last year’s vote, I continue to be mystified by who could possibly be among those 55% NO voters. Who, that is, could oppose knowing what’s in the food you eat, especially if it contains genetic alterations, some of whose toxic effects—such as the modified genes in Roundup Ready corn or soybeans that allow corporate farmers to spray so much Roundup (glyphosate) on the crops that it can interfere with human biology in deadly ways—are already known. Who could be in favor of playing toxic roulette in this way?

This question haunts me even if Initiative 522 should eventually pass. Because there’s still that 50 or so percent who vote with the monsters. What impels such people? Are they simply stupid? So opposed to “organic leftists” that they choose to vote against whatever these godless ones propose? Certainly these explanations pertain to some. But I think the motivations go much deeper.

I think, that is, that it has to do with the ‘comfort of ignorance.’ But isn’t that the same as simple stupidity? you may ask. I think not. I am talking about ignorance in its sense of not knowing. Its sense of not wanting to know, fearing to know. I am talking about the same syndrome that pertains when it comes to global warming, or the dying of the oceans, or the propaganda about terrorists. People, masses of people, simply do not want to have to face such facts. They are more comfortable in their ignorance. Because if you admit that human activity is causing global warming—which it is—then you might have to take some responsibility for it. You might have to subject your life to examination regarding how much of that carbon pollution you yourself are contributing to. You might have to admit that your nation, the United States of America, is the chief contributor to greenhouse gases, or has been for the last hundred or so years. And that your American lifestyle, precisely, is what is causing the earth to get warmer and hotter, and to stumble into uncharted territory when it comes to rising oceans, bigger storms, and ecological catastrophe. With regard to GMO foods, you might have to take it upon yourself to understand what is happening to food, how major corporations are buying up the rights, via patents, to all seeds (developed over centuries by individual farmers) and to profit from the hunger, the absolute necessity that they anticipate will drive the sale of those seeds. You might have to take more responsibility—already huge—to find out which foods are healthful and which ones are not and to read labels and food science and it’s all such an additional burden and bother that it’s simply easier and more comfortable to cede your decision to the big guys, kick back and drink another beer.

Nor do I mean to imply that it’s just slovenly beer guzzlers who are subject to this. We all know the syndrome. All of us, in some area or other of our lives, prefer ignorance to knowledge. How many times have you had a pain in some body part, a serious one, and refrained from going to the doctor? Isn’t it common to dismiss it as of no account when the real reason is: I’d rather not know. It is for me. Sometimes, it’s just too much to know another thing. It’s too much to know how many scams there are in the world, what your partner is doing with whom, how much graft and corruption pertains in our political system, how pervasive are the ripoffs from the banks and the phone company and the computer makers and on and on. Better off not to know. Better off to have a beer. And when it comes to the really big one, the one that Tolstoy refers to as the “It” that most people do everything in their power to cover up with useless activity, i.e., the fact not only of our inevitable death but that we will still have no idea why we’re here or what our frantic activity has been worth in any case—then nearly all of us indulge in the comfort of ignorance. Moreover, we are urged to indulge in this by those who arrogate to themselves the giving of advice on how to live. Don’t worry. Be happy. Smell the roses. Sniff the coffee. Stay on the sunny side. Dwelling on the negative leads to unhappiness, to illness, to cancer, to depression even for your neighbors.

And it’s true. Ignorance is bliss. Worrying too much about what cannot be helped does lead to unnecessary suffering. So doing what you can to focus on what you have, your good fortune in even being here, is good advice. But—there’s always a “but”—what GMO labeling is about is one of those things that CAN be helped. We, the people who have to eat the genetically modified corn and soybeans and potatoes and the 60 or 70 percent of all American foods that are already tainted with GMO products in some form or other, we have to have a say in what we eat. It’s not in the constitution, but it should be: the right to eat food that is not contaminated with pesticides; the right to eat food that is not contaminated with unknown genes; the right—and this is the most fundamental right of all—the right to know if the food we’re being urged to buy is contaminated with unknown genes and poisons or not. If that isn’t a right, I don’t know what is.

So, for me, in this area, comfort be damned. The comfort of ignorance be damned. I want to be made uncomfortable. I want to be discomfited by what I know, I demand the right to be discomfited by what I know. And sooner or later, everyone in this nation, in this world, is going to have to demand that right. And the place it has to start is in the minds of those people—and they must know who they are—who have ceded that right to corporate giants. In my opinion, such ceding of critical rights to critical information is a fundamental breach of the contract implied in being human. And somehow, despite the propaganda and the pressure and the fear mongering indulged in by the corporations, people have got to realize that that breach, in the many forms in which it manifests, is one of the major false gods of our time—a god that must be toppled and stomped on and run out of town on a rail, along with the fake corporate priesthood that keeps it going. Comfort be damned.

Lawrence DiStasi

Michael Taylor, Monsanto's Revolver

I have been reading Foodopoly (New Press: 2012), Wenonah Hauter’s (head of Food and Water Watch) new study of the consolidation of food power, and though it can be a difficult read at times—mainly because of the thoroughness of Hauter’s research—it is critical material for all Americans. Its main thrust is this: the corporate food industry in America has been working diligently for years to achieve the level of dominance they now have: Monsanto, for instance, has bought up virtually every seed company in the world and now controls most seeds necessary for agricultural plant life, upon which human life depends; many supposedly organic products are now owned by the likes of Nestle, General Mills and Coca Cola. The corporate food giants have been able to do this because of the intimate collusion between them and the regulatory agencies (including presidents of both parties) charged with controlling them. American corporate food has become as much a part of American hegemony as the Department of “Defense,” and the ability of these international outlaws to promote (force) the planting of American-designed crops (GMOs) in foreign nations—like Mexico, like India, like Argentina and Paraguay—is interconnected with American military power. The American Empire is an empire of designer crops and the chemicals that enable them as much as it is an empire of military hardware.

It is impossible to go through Hauter’s entire book here; I heartily recommend it to everyone. To give some idea of the collusion between government and corporate food giants in Foodopoly, however, the case of one individual, Michael Taylor, can be taken as emblematic. The material on Taylor comes not only from Hauter’s book, but also from several videos and articles devoted to him by the likes of Jeffrey Smith (see his numerous pieces at Huffington Post about Monsanto and Taylor, specifically “You’re Appointing Who?” Huff Post July 23, 2009) and a video available on Top Documentary Films, “The World According to Monsanto” http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-world-according-to-monsanto/).

So who is Michael Taylor? At this writing, he’s the Deputy Commissioner for Foods in Barack Obama’s FDA (Food and Drug Administration.) Like at least one of his other posts (Deputy Commissioner for Policy, also at the FDA, in 1991), this one was newly created, tailored, as it were, to Taylor himself. He has been said to epitomize the “revolving door” in Washington, wherein government officials trade on their government experience to obtain lucrative positions in industry and/or lobbying. His brief vita will explain why. Taylor began as a staff attorney at the FDA in 1976. He stayed there for a few years until 1981, when he left government to become an attorney with the Washington law firm of King & Spaulding, a major legal player in DC specializing in regulatory law. One of King & Spaulding’s clients was Monsanto, and Taylor is said to have “established and led the firm’s food and drug law practice.” Not surprising, since he had just come from the FDA. One of his notable achievements while at King & Spaulding, was an article, “The De Minimis Interpretation of the Delaney Clause.” The Delaney Clause of 1958 had for years prohibited any chemical additive found to be carcinogenic in any amount from entering foods. And for years this seemed a reasonable precaution: why would anyone want to eat cancer-causing material? Taylor thought otherwise, however, especially because, with modern methods, more and more food additives were being found to be carcinogenic. In his article, Taylor argued for a less stringent approach—one which stated that if a carcinogen was present at levels below 1 part in 1 million, the risk was minimal and so the carcinogenic product could be allowed on the market. This was said by Taylor and his supporters to be “reasonable” regulation; organic food advocates argued that this rule was promoted by Taylor to benefit his client, Monsanto, and other large food corporations, with consumers, as usual, taking the risks.

Whatever the conclusion, Taylor thereby became a poster boy for the “de-regulation” movement. He had already proven his worth to both Monsanto and the Reagan Administration in 1984 with his strategy of coming up with an industry-friendly framework for the regulation of the biotech industry. Titled the ‘Coordinate Framework for Regulation of Biotechnology,’ it remains the basis of regulation today, and was designed to head off Congressional rules or statutes that could cause problems for the industry. Even according to Wikipedia, it was developed “to ensure the safety of the public and to ensure the continuing development of the fledgling biotechnology industry without overly burdensome regulation.” The framework policy had three basic parts—1) focus on the product of genetic modification techniques, not the process itself; 2) only regulate based on verifiable scientific risks; 3) GM products are on a continuum with existing products, and therefore, existing statutes are sufficient to review the products. Again, this framework invented by Taylor became the basis for all subsequent rules governing (or not governing) biotechnology today, and contrasted sharply with regulations in Europe and elsewhere demanding that GM foods be labeled. This contrast came into sharp focus in 1992, when Taylor, again passed through the revolving door, left King & Spalding to take a position created for him by President George H.W. Bush as Deputy Commissioner of Policy at the FDA. Here Taylor had a hand in the new FDA policy statement on genetically-engineered plant foods, which policy treats “transferred genetic material and the intended expression product or products” in food derived from GM crops as “food additives” subject to existing food additive regulation. This means that the new genetic material—creating a plant entirely new in genetic history—conveniently slips under the GRAS (generally recognized as safe) rule—whereby the producer, say Monsanto, declares that according to its tests, the material is safe. Well, sure, why not trust old Monsanto? The makers of Agent Orange and PCBs would never lie, now would they?

These two policies, both invented by Michael Taylor (or perhaps by the policy wonks at Monsanto and promoted vigorously by Taylor), have had fundamental and long-lasting consequences. First, the foreign genes used to genetically modify basic life forms were treated as simply another additive, like yellow coloring. And second, and critically, genetically modified foods created in the laboratory were treated the same as—with no substantial difference from—foods produced by nature. Hence, anyone can invent a new genetically modified product (spider genes in pigs, say) and put it out there, without having to notify consumers. It’s all biology, after all.

Taylor was not done, however. Monsanto, his former client, was having trouble with its bovine growth hormone, rBGH, marketed as Posilac. This monster hormone had been created by Monsanto in the 1980s to increase milk production in dairy cows. Monsanto submitted its materials allegedly indicating rBGH safety to the FDA, and amidst growing public concern, the FDA looked briefly at the health impacts (all provided by Monsanto and other biotech companies) of drinking milk produced this way, and concluded there were none. In 1987, Monsanto officially applied for FDA approval; and despite new data suggesting that drinking GMO milk caused increased exposure to the insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1; which has been found to increase the risk of breast, colon, prostate and other cancers ), the FDA in 1989 gave rBGH its approval. Just another additive. The problem was, some milk companies were labeling their milk “rBHG-free,” and Monsanto didn’t like that at all. The label implied that something was wrong with milk containing its rBHG (which was true). Again, Michael Taylor, still at the FDA, came through for his client by writing new regulations governing milk labeling. Arguing that the “rBGH-free” label was unfairly misleading, his regulations mandated that the FDA conclusion had to also be included to “balance” the label. The required FDA statement was: “No significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rbST-treated and non rbST-treated cows” (rbST is the industry’s name for rBGH). And in days, Monsanto sued two dairy farms that had labeled their milk only “rBGH-free,” with King & Spalding weighing in with warning letters to other “non-compliant” dairies.

Most countries, including Australia and Canada, banned the use of rBGH in light of many studies proving that rBGH causes lower birth rates and weights of calves, and diseases such as mastitis (infection of the udders), cystic ovaries, and hoof and leg problems in cows treated with it. Indeed, ‘The World According to Monsanto,’ noted above, reports that milk from such cows is contaminated with pus (from mastitis) and the GMO hormone itself. Tiring of the problems, Monsanto in August 2008 got out of the artificial hormone business, and sold its rBGH operations to the giant pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly. Lilly has now focused its sales efforts on the developing world where there is less publicity about the side effects, and more pressure to industrialize traditional agriculture.

Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall before his client did, Michael Taylor shifted jobs once again in 1994, wangling an appointment with the Clinton administration as the Administrator of the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. Maintaining his old bag of tricks (to come up with toothless regulations before Congress or nosey regulators get the chance to come up with real ones), Taylor at USDA invented and implemented the rules known as HAACP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points system) for meat and poultry production. Wenonah Hauter has a great deal to say about this too, and it’s mostly bad. Basically, what HAACP does is provide meat and poultry producers with relief from those pesky meat inspectors—the ones who, since 1906 when the Food and Drug Administration was created in response to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, had inspected animals before they were cut up and passed through the line. This kept diseased and sick cattle from being slaughtered and entering the food supply. But it also wasted a lot of “perfectly good cows,” slowed down the slaughtering line, and required numerous inspectors. Taylor came up with the “post”-slaughter inspection-and-remediation system: under HAACP, meat was treated at the end of the line with disinfectant chemicals like ammonia, and (possibly) radiation. Thus, animals that had visibly obvious cancerous growths and sores and feces and other gross stuff on them could be simply passed through, and disinfected at the end. Much more scientific, said Taylor. And efficient.

Taylor still hadn’t finished with the revolving door, though. In 1996, he was back at King & Spalding for a couple of years, and then, really cashing in, took a position at his old client Monsanto as Vice President for Public Policy. Whatever that means; propaganda probably. No matter. His move indicated, as nothing else could, his true colors as a creature of corporate America. What’s astonishing is that this blatantly self-serving move did not diminish his credibility in Washington, in government, one bit. It may have enhanced it, in fact. Because in July 2009, to his everlasting shame, President Barack Obama, over howls of protest from the healthy food movement, appointed Michael Taylor as Senior Advisor to the FDA Commissioner. And in January 2013, yet another new post was created for this corporate hack, once again at the FDA, this time as Obama’s Deputy Commissioner for Foods. As Jeffrey Smith said about Taylor after his initial selection by Obama: “The person who may be responsible for more food-related illness and death than anyone in history has just been made the US food safety czar.”

Now you know what Wenonah Hauter’s book is about, and it isn’t pretty. Government agencies are so thoroughly polluted with corporate money and corporate insiders that the boast of Americans about the purity of their food system has become a hollow joke. Unless and until an enraged public rises up to demand some accounting of just who gets appointed and how, and some way of getting rid of the revolving door that puts foxes in charge of the hen houses—Hauter’s material on industrial chicken farms is enough to have me reaching for a weapon—the same cozy relationships will continue to compromise and poison our food supply. Individuals buying organics are no help either. Most organic producers, as I noted at the beginning, have already been bought up by the bigs. And besides, carving out a safe haven at your local Whole Foods Market (another farce; an amazing percentage of products sold there are not even organic) only emboldens the sharks to make a killing off the desire of those who can afford it to eat healthy. No, something fundamental needs to be done, and it needs to get at the root. Organic food was introduced as a concept fifty years ago as a part of restoring a sustainable system of farming, food production and the entire relationship of consumers to food, not as a way to market boutique products to the wealthy. Until that original purpose is revitalized, foodopolies and their corporate revolvers will continue to grow, like the cancers that are their emblem.

Lawrence DiStasi

Land Grab in Africa...Princess Grab in America

There really is no obvious connection between the two elements in my title, but both are on my mind so we’ll see if they come together.

            Africa first. The continent whence we all came (and not that long ago; most archeologists now think it was a mere 50,000 years), Mommy Africa, has been the object of colonial exploitation for centuries, so you’d think that in this “post-colonial era” our continent of origin might be given a break. Not a chance. Now that the slave catchers and British plantation owners and apartheiders have been given the boot, the exploiters simply line up for the next, slightly more subtle phase: getting title to the farmland. The facilitators are the post-colonial governments, all desperately in need of cash and development. The victims are, as usual, the poor farmers trying to eke out a living on small plots they’ve always depended on for subsistence. The villains are big multinational corporations seeking to cash in on what they see as the next big profit-generator: food in a world moving towards mass starvation.  So the smart money is going towards the buying up or long-term leasing of farmland in areas already half starving themselves—sub-Saharan Africa, in countries like Sierra Leone and Ethiopia. That it will put small farmers and their families out of business, push millions more of these victims into large cities or refugee camps where they will be unable to work or feed themselves and provide the next images of babies with swollen stomachs and flies feeding on their eyes—this doesn’t seem to bother or deter these captains of finance. Their only goal is to find the next big cash cow, and food-growing is apparently where they think it’s at.

            The Oakland Institute (www.oaklandinstitute.org) is at the forefront of trying to draw attention to the developing bonanza (or catastrophe, depending on which view you take). Its website features several articles drawing attention to what it calls the “growing global concern about the race for prime farmland in the world’s poorest countries.” The article “Sierra Leone: Local Resistance Grows as Investors Snap up Land,” Guardian, April 11, 2012, for example, points out that between 2000 and 2010, the rush for land had claimed upwards of 200 million hectares of land, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, including 17% of Sierra Leone’s arable land. Another article reporting on a conference sponsored by the Oakland Institute itself, filled in what kinds of commodities the new industrial plantations grow for export: sugarcane for ethanol, crude oil palm, rubber, and large-scale rice production. Speakers at the conference decried these developments, pointing out that just as small farm holdings (they employ about 3.5 million people—roughly 2/3 of the population) were beginning to come back after Sierra Leone’s long civil war, their recovery is being threatened by the land grab. As one farmer, who has lost her cropland to the Swiss investor, Addax Bioenergy, lamented:

 “How are we going to get food security if you give all the upland land to the investors? We beg you to listen to us….We are suffering because we have nowhere to go. You come out from war, build a house and now when you speak out, they lock you up.”

A landowner and member of parliament, Sheka Musa Sam, referred to the recent lease of 6,500 hectares of land in his district by Socfin Agricultural Company:

“There is no way we can just sit down for 50 years without getting a living. We need to come together and form a united front. We can’t let them make us slaves on our own land. This evil thing will make the poor people even poorer.”

What Musa Sam and others referred to were the endless problems caused by the land deals:

            the overwhelming negative impacts on women who lose their livelihoods and food production; the effect on children’s education who have to drop out of school because their mothers can no longer pay their school fees; increased hunger, rising food prices and despoiled water supplies; the devastating environmental effects of the investors’ operations; and also concerns about the way the industrial plantations shred the social fabric of rural communities, causing marriage breakdowns, unwanted teenage pregnancies, increased incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, and even the loss of self-esteem when one loses one’s self-employment.

In short, what is being reproduced in Africa are all the ills of industrial farming and industrial development we have seen globally.

            The Oakland Institute recently wrote a letter to President Obama urging him to discuss the issues of the land-grab in a May 19 meeting he had with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. Whether the letter did any good is anyone’s guess, but we can imagine that concern for African farmers was not nearly as high on the U.S. priority list as keeping Ethiopia from becoming a ‘safe haven’ for terrorists. What was probably also high on that list was making Africa equally ‘safe’ for genetically-engineered seed from the likes of Monsanto. For although this President has direct roots in Africa, he can never forget what another president (the great Calvin Coolidge) once memorably said:

             ..the chief business of the American people is business.

            Which forms a nice segue into the second topic at hand: the business of Princess making. This is the preoccupation of Berkeley writer Peggy Orenstein—who calls it the Princess Industrial Complex. Her recent book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, suggests the idea. What Orenstein, herself the mother of a young girl, has found over several years is that American girls are everywhere bombarded with a self-image that seems cute and harmless on the surface, but in reality masks its own kind of grab: a grab for the minds of children and the dollars of parents so eager to indulge their daughters in the fantasy that they are innocent royals, as to be blind to the gross commercialism in which they are partaking and to the underlying dynamics of this fantasy. In a recent article on the subject, “Dodging Disney in the Delivery Room,” (NPR, Feb. 9, 2011) Orenstein quotes from a NY Times report that

            “Disney has begun sending sales reps into 580 hospitals nationwide. The reps are offering new moms, within hours of giving birth, a free Disney Cuddly Bodysuit for their babies if they sign up for e-mail alerts from DisneyBaby.com. The idea is to encourage mothers to infuse their infants with brand loyalty as if it is mother's milk.”

Yes. You read that right: now, not even the delivery room is safe from the predatory sales pitches of corporate America. This sales “push” is meant to do two things: first, to duplicate the success among preschool girls of the Disney Princess line, hyped up in 2000 to earn a staggering $4 billion annually from a product line numbering no less than 26,000 items! And second, to rectify what Disney execs noticed as a gap in their sales: little girls were not becoming consumers until preschool, “resulting in a good three years of potential revenue loss.” If Disney could get expectant mothers thinking about Disney outfits in the delivery room or earlier, it would be, according to one Disney exec, a “home run.” No wonder. The Advertising Educational Foundation sees 1-year-old infants as an “informed, influential and compelling audience,” able at 12 months to recognize brands and be “strongly influenced” by advertising! Orenstein rightly counters this, pointing out that “studies show that children under 8 years old can’t distinguish between ads and entertainment. Until then, they don’t fully comprehend that advertising is trying to sell them something…” But tell that to the predatory bastards in the executive suites and the ad agencies.

            Orenstein has a lot more to say about the perils of the Princess Industrial Complex, specifically that beneath the cute pink that is pushed upon girls everywhere, even in supermarkets, there is a cultural demand: you are what you look like, what people who look at you think of you. Therefore, what you look like as a girl, as a princess in cute pink dresses, and later as a teen and woman obsessed with appearance, should be your constant, your sole preoccupation in life. Nevermind your ability to run and jump, nevermind your ability to read or calculate or think, nevermind your ability to carve out your own, decent path in life. You are, you better be, a clean, pretty and pink object, period. Orenstein also points out what is less obvious: that beneath this preoccupation with pink innocence lies a parental fear of their daughters growing up, of adulthood, of adult sexuality. It’s of course a mixed message because on the one hand, girls are being schooled to think of themselves as pretty and desirable, but on the other are being schooled in maintaining an impossible innocence. The same dual appeal, of course, lies at the heart of the Disney world in general: a mania to represent historical eras, but stripped of all threat and dirt and reality, rendered innocent and clean as they may exist in fantasy, but never in reality. And the rubes just love it.  

            What can never be forgotten, though, is the main objective here: making money off innocence or the promise of innocence, making a profit from the impulse to escape reality and dwell in the land of Cinderella (her wicked stepmother and sisters cleansed of the reality of the original fairy tale) and the handsome prince who will come to rescue her.            

            Think about it next time you are tempted to buy a princess-themed present for the delightful little girl in your life. And about how perhaps, just perhaps, the African land grab and the American princess grab are cut from the same cloth after all.  

Lawrence DiStasi

Monsanto's Saintly CEO

Here’s a little addendum to the last post on Monsanto. The CEO of Monsanto is a Brit or a Scot named Hugh Grant; he’s also Chairman and President of what, to hear him tell it, is a corporation modeled on the work of Mother Theresa. That’s if you can ignore the “compensation” he gets for all his good works, including, in 2009, a salary of $10.8 million, and, in 2011, his sale of 150,620 shares of his corporation’s stock at $75 a share, amounting to another $11,296,500 (yes, Monsanto’s stock has done well in recent years, with annual average earnings growth of 19.2% over the last 10 years.) Of course, the business pundits don’t feel any need to ignore the compensation: indeed, they seem to take it as indicative of Grant’s prowess, with Barron’s putting him on its annual “most respected CEO” list in 2009, and Chief Executive Magazine naming him its CEO of the year in 2010.

Grant himself seems to agree. In a speech featured on the Monsanto.com website, he spoke, believe it or not, to the 2010 Business Social Responsibility Conference in New York. He started by raising the specter of population growth—“Between the time you got up this morning and the time you’ll go to bed, there will be 210,000 new people on the plant. By 2050, that’s three new Chinas.” Here, according to Grant, is where Monsanto, the alleged champion of “how to do more with less,” comes in as saviour. For Grant, that’s developing new, more efficient agricultural products, specifically a more “water-efficient Maize” that can transform the low-efficiency African farmer (corn farms yielding only 20 bushels/acre) into an operator more akin to his high-tech American counterpart (160 bushels per acre). Grant cited a recent trip he made to Malawi, where one Monsanto project giving villagers American hybrid seed produced so much corn the ecstatic villagers had to use the local schoolhouse to store the bumper crop. For Grant, this pointed to two things: first, new partnerships to produce, store and sell the new bumper crops, and second “the promise in a seed, giving people tools we’ve had for 70 years.” Perfect language for the conference Grant was addressing, the BSR being, according to the article, the “largest and most highly-regarded conference in corporate responsibility.”

Just gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling, doesn’t it? Seeing Monsanto and its CEO being so socially responsible, so concerned about the poor wogs in Africa, about sustainable agriculture for the newly-starving masses? But wait. What about the great GMO products, the ‘frankenfoods’ Monsanto has pioneered? What about the gathering evidence that the application of increasing quantities of glyphosate to Roundup Ready seeds are undermining the most productive agricultural acreage in the world (the American Midwest) with their deleterious effects on microorganisms upon which all life depends? What about the evidence that crops grown in such conditions and fed to livestock are turning the stomachs of the ruminants into breeding grounds for god-knows-what monstrous organisms? What about Monsanto’s lawsuits against small organic farmers whose fields have been contaminated with GMO seeds—which Monsanto terms an unlicensed use of its patented products? What about Monsanto’s corruption of the USDA, the FDA, the EPA to not only accept this genetic tinkering but to try to force it on farmers worldwide? What about the fact that higher food yields inevitably lead to benighted optimism and increasing populations that soon outstrip the new capacity? Grant mentions none of this. Nor, apparently, does the Business for Social Responsibility Conference, nor Barron’s nor Chief Executive. All simply keep on keeping on with “newspeak”—criminality dressed up in the language of empathy and social responsibility that we’ve come to expect. Forget shame. Forget the truth. All is hype and advertising and the most voracious wolves still, after all these years, safe in their sheep’s clothing, still able to persuade the majority of the sheep that steely fur is wool, that rapacious eyes are loving, that razor teeth are not for slashing and tearing but only for nuzzling.
And the lambs, ah, the lambs are silent.

Lawrence DiStasi

Monsanto's Killing Fields

I have recently watched an interview with Dr. Don Huber, Emeritus Professor of Plant Pathology at Purdue specializing in microbiology, that will curl your hair (see the whole 57 minute interview at http://capwiz.com/grassrootsnetroots/issue/alert/?alertid=58601501, and/or another shorter interview with Huber at http://vimeo.com/22997532). It deals with Monsanto’s herbicide, Roundup (main ingredient glyphosate), and its growing panoply of Roundup Ready seeds which have been genetically engineered to resist the killing effects of glyphosate, thus allowing farmers to spray Roundup liberally, killing all other plants and allowing the Roundup Ready ones to ‘thrive.’ Roundup Ready seeds now in use include Soy (87% of the worldwide crop), Corn, Canola, Cotton and the recently-authorized-by-USDA Alfalfa and Sugar Beets (despite Huber’s urging to Ag Secretary Vilsack to delay the approval of Roundup Ready Alfalfa). Corporate Agriculture considers this a miracle of American science and a boon to farmers and profits and even our health (with Roundup Ready crops, we are told, fewer pesticides have to be applied; Roundup alone does the job).

Dr. Huber, however, informs us in his dry, unemotional style, that this is not merely a mirage, it is a con, a disaster, a crime against nature itself (my words, not his.) The reasons are legion. To begin with, glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, is, like many other pesticides, a “chelator.” That means it binds or creates a barrier around essential mineral micronutrients which are critical to the very heart of life and growth, especially enzyme function. Most critically, it is not just plants that require enzyme function; all organisms and microorganisms need them. So, to cripple the efficiency of a plant’s mineral uptake is essentially to kill them, and to counteract this killing, Monsanto has genetically engineered seeds whose plants have an alternative pathway for the uptake of some of these essential nutrients. They can ‘survive’ the poison of Roundup thereby. But the key point is this: the plant that gets sprayed with Roundup, even the GMO plant, still gets dosed with large quantities of the Roundup sprayed upon it. So does the soil, with all its microorganisms. Thus you get crops that have glyphosate on and in them (the glyphosate goes to key parts, like the seeds), and soil whose microorganisms are damaged the same way—microorganisms, one of whose main functions is to fight diseases. According to Huber, there are already 40 newly-thriving pathogens on many of our crops—diseases that used to be managed. No more. What’s worse, since these GMO crops—especially corn, soy and alfalfa—are the main feed we give to our stock animals, they too are being affected. A botulism has been seen recently in the intestinal tract of cows because glyphosate in the feed is killing or disabling the normal organisms in the cow’s gut that used to fight it.

Now here is where it gets scary. As noted above, all life employs the same basic mechanisms. So if glyphosate impairs the gut ecology in animals, we can expect that the effect in human stomachs will be similar if not exactly the same. Studies have already been done showing that in virtually 100% of cases, stock animals are showing a deficiency in manganese (needed for its antioxidant properties, its role in protecting plants from disease, and its enzyme-activating role in digestion) due to the chelating effect of Roundup Ready feed. There are also studies showing high levels of glyphosate in animal manure (so how use this animal manure on crops???) due to the feed they’re eating (all those Roundup Ready crops, now to include alfalfa), plus some new organism from hell (the electron microscope image of this thing is terrifying) that is suspected of causing reproductive failure in farm animals. First noted by vets in 1998, the fertility failure rate in dairy cattle has reached such proportions—45 to 70%--that dairies now worry about maintaining their stocks (note that Roundup Ready soy and corn were first used as feed in 1998.) And of course, the real killer in all this: though hordes of researchers are trying to identify it, no one yet knows what it is. It seems to be about the same size as a virus, it can be cultured, it is self-replicating, there’s lots of it in GMO corn and soy, but scientists don’t know what it is.

Thus publication about its causes is lagging, but not just for reasons of uncertainty, and here the lugubrious Dr. Huber got as animated as he allows himself to get. Monsanto controls the science in this area. Anyone who does research that is not favorable to its products is either silenced, fired, or prohibited access to all products under patent. Why? because Monsanto makes such research illegal. And the EPA and the FDA and the USDA all go along with it, because the lobby for big agribusiness controls the Congress and all government agencies dealing with such products.

So here’s what we’ve got, folks. We’ve got the most widely-used herbicide in the world killing not only plants (including impairing their ability to fix nitrogen from the air) but essential soil microorganisms and beneficial intestinal organisms in animals. We’ve got GMO crops that allow that product to be used in higher concentrations than ever because we’re told the magic of GMO somehow keeps the stuff off the GMO crop in question, when it doesn’t. And we’ve got symptoms now of some new monster organism that seems to be spreading abortions, infertility and premature aging among the farm animals (not only cattle but chickens, pigs and horses too) on whom we depend. And we haven’t even talked about glyphosate’s proven record as an endocrine disruptor—Huber mentions, in this regard, the notably lowered sperm count of human males, less than half of what it was only 20 years ago. And above all, we have a totally compromised government and its agencies supposedly protecting us, but keeping themselves busiest blackballing and outlawing the science and the scientists who have been trying to sound the alarm about all this.

I don’t know about you, but I’m about ready to call for all-out war on Monsanto, on the USDA and Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack, and everyone else involved in the monstrous system we have allowed to thrive. I’m about ready to sign on with Lierre Keith, who recently called for serious radical action—whatever force it takes—to bring the entire sick system down. I mean, what else is there to do? Appeal to their better nature? It is to laugh, because these people—the CEOs, the so-called scientists Monsanto employs, the toadies in Congress who protect them to keep their state revenues jangling—are willing to poison every living thing on earth in order to maintain their stranglehold on the markets they have cornered. They care not a whit for life—plant life, microbial life, animal life, human life. They care only about killing. Why should we care about them or their sick, profit-driven lives? Why should we not begin a movement that a recent Newsweek column (Newsweek! imagine) predicted would include the following:

There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. (Michael Thomas, Newsweek, Dec. 28)

And I believe there will. And if it targets any of the evil bastards who work, in any way shape or form, for the devil-spawned corporate monstrosity called Monsanto, I for one will cheer and salute and encourage it until the beast is choked on its own deadly brew.

Lawrence DiStasi