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View Full Version : Worldwide Protest Against MonSatan - May 25, 2013



FORD
05-24-2013, 05:59 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M_jvLu0YHY

ELVIS
05-24-2013, 09:54 PM
Whatever...

I don't eat the poison sheep food...

Obomba is in bed with Monsanto...

FORD
05-24-2013, 10:16 PM
All the more reason to stand in solidarity against them then, right?

ELVIS
05-24-2013, 10:40 PM
Of course, but you have to be 100% against the Obomba administration to be against Monsanto...

FORD
05-24-2013, 11:28 PM
Well, I'm probably about 80% against them these days.....

Though I still think Hillary, McCain/Moosealini, or Mittens/Munster would be worse. :(

ELVIS
05-25-2013, 01:03 AM
It would be exactly the same with a few different social issues...

Obomba is Bush on steroids...

And I don't blame either one personally...that's just how it is and it's only getting much worse quickly...

Nitro Express
05-25-2013, 04:48 AM
It used to be the government wouldn't allow patents on living things. Then the supreme court ruled that oil eating bacteria could be patented. Then Monsanto applied that ruling to their Round Up Ready seeds. Monsanto was sending investigators to farms without the farmer's consent or a warrant and finding plants grown from their seed in the farmer's field. What was happening is the wind was blowing the seeds into the fields. Monsanto then was suing farmers for having Monsanto Round Up Ready plants without having a contract to legally grow them. Some courts ruled that the farmer was guilty of theft even when they didn't plant the seeds but the wind brought them over.

Monsanto has been using the legal system to break farmers and take competing seed off the market. In the end Monsanto will have a seed monopoly and control a large amount of the food supply. Also what they are growing is immune from herbicide and even creates it's own insecticide. It won't be natural food and it can contaminate the natural source of seeds.

FORD
05-26-2013, 03:16 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etg-WT0iYvk

Nitro Express
05-26-2013, 04:59 PM
Monsanto is not just a menace in the US but it's a menace worldwide. If people thought Standard Oil was bad a century ago, Monsanto is far worse. It has the potential to permanently screw up the world's food supply on top of it's sharkish business practices. Monsanto clearly needs to be taken down and out. The Food and Drug Administration has proven itself to be a joke because it's become Monsanto's enforcer. That is the problem with giving too much power to government agencies as well. They can be bought and become the attack dogs for the corporations.

About the only thing that is going to change things is people striking the fear of God into the politicians by raising one hell of a stink. Politicians are typically wimps. Once it becomes clear they just may not get re-elected that is when they start to change their tune. They love a distracted public that is obsessed by what's on television. They hate a public that actually knows what is going on and gives a damn.

ELVIS
05-26-2013, 05:06 PM
The first part of your post is 100% true...

It's a text book example of the Federal government and the President openly taking sides with and being bought off by a huge global corrupt corporation...

That's why we must scale back the scope of the Federal monster we have in place now...

FORD
05-28-2013, 10:37 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlMf8hGF4YI

ELVIS
05-29-2013, 05:45 AM
Link! (http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/15856-how-monsanto-went-from-selling-aspirin-to-controlling-our-food-supply)


Forty percent of the crops grown in the United States contain their genes. They produce the world’s top selling herbicide. Several of their factories are now toxic Superfund sites. They spend millions lobbying the government each year. It’s time we take a closer look at who’s controlling our food, poisoning our land, and influencing all three branches of government. To do that, the watchdog group Food and Water Watch recently published a corporate profile of Monsanto.

Patty Lovera, Food and Water Watch assistant director, says they decided to focus on Monsanto because they felt a need to “put together a piece where people can see all of the aspects of this company.”

“It really strikes us when we talk about how clear it is that this is a chemical company that wanted to expand its reach,” she says. “A chemical company that started buying up seed companies.” She feels it’s important “for food activists to understand all of the ties between the seeds and the chemicals.”

Monsanto the Chemical Company

Monsanto was founded as a chemical company in 1901, named for the maiden name of its founder’s wife. Its first product was the artificial sweetener saccharin. The company’s own telling of its history emphasizes its agricultural products, skipping forward from its founding to 1945, when it began manufacturing agrochemicals like the herbicide 2,4-D.

Prior to its entry into the agricultural market, Monsanto produced some harmless – even beneficial! – products like aspirin. It also made plastics, synthetic rubber, caffeine, and vanillin, an artificial vanilla flavoring. On the not-so-harmless side, it began producing toxic PCBs in the 1930s.

According to the new report, a whopping 99 percent of all PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, used in the U.S. were produced at a single Monsanto plant in Sauget, IL. The plant churned out toxic PCBs from the 1930s until they were banned in 1976. Used as coolants and lubricants in electronics, PCBs are carcinogenic and harmful to the liver, endocrine system, immune system, reproductive system, developmental system, skin, eye, and brain.

Even after the initial 1982 cleanup of this plant, Sauget is still home to two Superfund sites. (A Superfund site is defined by the EPA as “an uncontrolled or abandoned place where hazardous waste is located, possibly affecting local ecosystems or people.”) This is just one of several Monsanto facilities that became Superfund sites.

Monsanto’s Shift to Agriculture

Despite its modern-day emphasis on agriculture, Monsanto did not even create an agricultural division within the company until 1960. It soon began churning out new pesticides, each colorfully named under a rugged Western theme: Lasso, Roundup, Warrant, Lariat, Bullet, Harness, etc.

Left out of Monsanto’s version of its historical highlights is an herbicide called Agent Orange. The defoliant, a mix of herbicides 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, was used extensively during the war in Vietnam. The nearly 19 million gallons sprayed in that country between 1962 and 1971 were contaminated with dioxin, a carcinogen so potent that it is measured and regulated at concentrations of parts per trillion. Dioxin was created as a byproduct of Agent Orange’s manufacturing process, and both American veterans and Vietnamese people suffered health problems from the herbicide’s use.

Monsanto’s fortunes changed forever in 1982, when it genetically engineered a plant cell. The team responsible, led by Ernest Jaworski, consisted of Robb Fraley, Stephen Rogers, and Robert Horsch. Today, Fraley is Monsanto’s executive vice president and chief technology officer. Horsch also rose to the level of vice president at Monsanto, but he left after 25 years to join the Gates Foundation. There, he works on increasing crop yields in Sub-Saharan Africa. Together, the team received the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1998.

The company did not shift its focus from chemicals to genetically engineered seeds overnight. In fact, it was another 12 years before it commercialized the first genetically engineered product, recombinant bovine growth hormone (rbGH), a controversial hormone used to make dairy cows produce more milk. And it was not until 1996 that it first brought genetically engineered seeds, Roundup Ready soybeans, onto the market.

By 2000, the company had undergone such a sea change from its founding a century before that it claims it is almost a different company. In Monsanto’s telling of its own history, it emphasizes a split between the “original” Monsanto Company and the Monsanto Company of today. In 2000, the Monsanto Company entered a merger and changed its name to Pharmacia. The newly formed Pharmacia then spun off its agricultural division as an independent company named Monsanto Company.

Do the mergers and spinoffs excuse Monsanto for the sins of the past committed by the company bearing the same name? Lovera does not think so. “I'm sure there's some liability issues they have to deal with – their various production plants that are now superfund sites,” she responds. “So I'm sure there was legal thinking about which balance sheet you put those liabilities on” when the company split. She adds that the notion that today’s Monsanto is not the same as the historical Monsanto that made PCBs is “a nice PR bullet for them.”

But, she adds, “even taking that at face value, that they are an agriculture company now, they are still producing seeds that are made to be used with chemicals they produce.” For example, Roundup herbicide alone made up more than a quarter of their sales in 2011. The proportion of their business devoted to chemicals is by no means insignificant.

Monsanto’s pesticide product line includes a number of chemicals named as Bad Actors by Pesticide Action Network. They include Alachlor (a carcinogen, water contaminant, developmental/reproductive toxin, and a suspected endocrine disruptor), Acetochlor (a carcinogen and suspected endocrine disruptor), Atrazine (a carcinogen and suspected endocrine disruptor), Clopyralid (high acute toxicity), Dicamba (developmental/reproductive toxin), and Thiodicarb (a carcinogen and cholinesterase inhibitor).

Roundup: The Benign Herbicide?

Defenders of Monsanto might reply to the charge that Roundup is no Agent Orange. In fact, the herbicide is viewed as so benign and yet effective that its inventor, John E. Franz, won the National Medal of Technology. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, kills everything green and growing, but according to Monsanto, it only affects a metabolic pathway in plants, so it does not harm animals. It’s also said to break down quickly in the soil, leaving few traces on the environment after its done its job.

Asked about the harmlessness of Roundup, Lovera replies, “That’s the PR behind Roundup – how benign it was and you can drink it and there’s nothing to worry about here. There are people who dispute that.” For example there is an accusation that Roundup causes birth defects. “We don’t buy the benign theory,” continues Lovera, “But what’s really interesting is that we aren’t going to be having this conversation pretty soon because Roundup isn’t working anymore.”

Lovera is referring to “Roundup-resistant weeds,” weeds that have evolved in the past decade and a half to survive being sprayed by Roundup. Nearly all soybeans grown in the United States is Monsanto’s genetically engineered Roundup Ready variety, as are 80 percent of cotton and 73 percent of corn. Farmers spray entire fields with Roundup, killing only the weeds while the Roundup Ready crops survive. With such heavy use of Roundup on America’s farmfields, any weed – maybe one in a million – with an ability to survive in that environment would survive and pass on its genes in its seeds.

By 1998, just two years after the introduction of Roundup Ready soybeans, scientists documented the first Roundup-resistant weed. A second was found in 2000, and three more popped up in 2004. To date, there are 24 different weeds that have evolved resistance to Roundup worldwide. And once they invade a farmer’s field, it doesn’t matter if his crops are Roundup-resistant, because Roundup won’t work anymore. Either the weeds get to stay, or the farmer needs to find a new chemical, pull the weeds by hand, or find some other way to deal with the problem.

“We’ve wasted Roundup by overusing it,” says Lovera. She and other food activists worry about the harsher chemicals that farmers are switching to, and the genetically engineered crops companies like Monsanto are developing to use with them.

Currently, there are genetically engineered crops waiting for government approval that are made to tolerate the herbicides 2,4-D, Dicamba and Isoxaflutole. (These are not all from Monsanto – some are from their competitors.) None of these chemicals are as “benign” as Roundup. Isoxaflutole is, in fact, a carcinogen. Let’s spray that on our food!

Corporate Control of Seeds

No discussion of Monsanto is complete without a mention of the immense amount of control it exerts on the seed industry.

“What it boils down to is between them buying seed companies outright, their incredible aggressive legal maneuvering, their patenting of everything, and their enforcement of those patents, they really have locked up a huge part of the seed supply,” notes Lovera. “So they just exercise an unprecedented control over the entire seed sector. Monsanto products constitute 40 percent of all crop acres in the country.”

Monsanto began buying seed companies as far back as 1982. (One can see an infographic of seed industry consolidation here.) Some of Monsanto’s most significant purchases were Asgrow (soybeans), Delta and Pine Land (cotton), DeKalb (corn), and Seminis (vegetables). One that deserves special mention is their purchase of Holden’s Foundation Seeds in 1997.

George Naylor, an Iowa farmer who grows corn and soybeans, calls Holden’s “The independent source of germplasm for corn.” Small seed companies could buy inbred lines from Holden’s to cross them and produce their own hybrids. Large seed companies like Pioneer did their own breeding, but small operations relied on Holden’s or Iowa State University. But Iowa State got out of the game and Monsanto bought Holden’s.

Monsanto’s tactics for squashing its competition are perhaps unrivaled. They use their power to get seed dealers to not to stock many of their competitors products, for example. When licensing their patented genetically engineered traits to seed companies, they restrict the seed companies’ ability to combine Monsanto’s traits with those of their competitors. And, famously, farmers who plant Monsanto’s patented seeds sign contracts prohibiting them from saving and replanting their seeds. Yet, to date, U.S. antitrust laws have not clamped down on these practices.

With the concentrated control of the seed industry, farmers already complain of lack of options. For example, Naylor says he’s had a hard time finding non-genetically engineered soybean seeds. Most corn seeds are now pre-treated with pesticides, so farmers wishing to find untreated seeds will have a tough time finding any. Once a company or a handful of companies control an entire market, then they can choose what to sell and at what price to sell it.

Furthermore, if our crops are too genetically homogenous, then they are vulnerable to a single disease or pest that can wipe them out. When farmers grow genetically diverse crops, then there is a greater chance that one variety or another will have resistance to new diseases. In that way, growing genetically diverse crops is like having insurance, or like diversifying your risk within your stock portfolio.

Food and Water Watch Recommendations

At the end of its report, Food and Water Watch lists several recommendations. “There are a lot of ways that government policy could address the Monsanto hold on the food supply,” explains Lovera. “The most important thing is that it’s time to stop approval of genetically engineered crops to stop this arms race of the next crop and the next chemical.”

She also calls Monsanto “the poster child for the need for antitrust enforcement” – something that the Justice Department has yet to successfully deliver up. In fact, last November the government ended a three-year antitrust investigation of Monsanto.

A third recommendation Lovera hopes becomes a reality is mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods. “If we had that label and we put that information in consumers’ hands, they could do more to avoid this company in their day-to-day lives,” she says.

In the meantime, all consumers can do to avoid genetically engineered foods is to buy organic for the handful of crops that are genetically engineered: corn, soybeans, canola, cotton, papaya, sugar beets, and alfalfa.


:elvis:

ELVIS
05-29-2013, 05:48 AM
Herbicide caused temporary paralysis, prompted switch to organic farming

Non-GMO Report (http://www.non-gmoreport.com/articles/june2012/farmerdangers24-Dherbicide.php)

Klaas Martens provides a cautionary tale about the toxicity of 2,4-D herbicide, which will be used extensively if Dow Agroscience’s new “Enlist” corn genetically engineered to tolerate the herbicide is approved by the USDA.

http://www.non-gmoreport.com/graphics/articlephotos/klaasmartensherbicideparalysis.jpg

One day more than 20 years ago, Martens, who farms in Penn Yan, New York, was putting his pesticide sprayer away after spraying his fields with 2,4-D. He tried folding the sprayer, but discovered that he couldn’t move his right arm. It was paralyzed.

“It was scary,” says his wife, Mary-Howell, recalling the incident.

Klaas believes that his instant paralysis was caused by exposure to the 2,4-D he sprayed on the couple’s 1300-acre farm.

“I spent a whole summer with my right arm paralyzed,” Klaas says.
Other pesticide-related health problems

He later regained movement in the arm thanks to chiropractic treatments, but the paralysis was the latest in a series of health problems caused by exposure to 2,4-D and other pesticides. There were also headaches and nausea.

Klaas dreaded spraying. “I knew I would feel rotten for a month after,” he says.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t careful. While spraying, Klaas wore a white, head-to-toe Tyvek suit with green plastic gloves to protect himself.

Mary-Howell hated to see her husband suffer. Years later, she wrote, “We wanted to believe that it (his sickness) was due to ‘just a germ’ since he had been working such long hours, but we knew better. My husband was slowly being poisoned.”

Klaas Martens isn’t alone in suffering health problems from exposure to 2,4-D, which was a component of Agent Orange, the notorious defoliant used during the Vietnam War. According to Charles Benbrook, research professor at Washington State University, multiple studies link 2,4-D applications on farms to reproductive problems, spontaneous abortions, and birth defects. Farm workers in California employed by operations spraying 2,4-D had dramatically elevated risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

“The health risks of 2,4-D are well documented,” Klaas says.
Switched to organic farming

In 1991, Klaas and Mary-Howell Martens reached a crossroads. They farmed “conventionally” using pesticides because they saw no alternative. But, according to Mary, they “hated what it might be doing to us, our family, our land, and our environment.”

Later that year, they read a classified ad in a farm newspaper looking for organic wheat. Klaas called, and the Martens decided to try organic farming.

By switching to organic, the Martens stopped using pesticides, and by doing so, dramatically reduced their health risks associated with pesticides.

They have been farming organically ever since. They see continuing improvement in soil quality with fewer weeds. They earn a good living, enjoy the independence, and can set their own destiny. Without the pesticides, Mary-Howell says, “The farm is a safe place.”
“Major miscalculation of biotech industry”

To this day, Klaas still has bad reactions to 2,4-D. “Since then if anyone is spraying 2,4-D, even a long ways away, I can feel it and it makes me feel sick.”

He says dicamba, another older herbicide that will be used with a new GM soybean from Monsanto, is even worse. “It can volatize (convert from liquid to gas) and a day later will turn up a mile or two away. If you can smell it you are being exposed.”

Klaas sees problems with the new GM corn and soybeans that will be used with 2,4-D and dicamba. Even conventional vegetable farmers oppose the new GMOs, which will dramatically increase usage of 2,4-D and dicamba and threaten vegetable crops due to drift.

Klass says: “I can still remember grape farmers sending letters to their neighbors who used 2,4-D that said: ‘Grapes are very sensitive to 2,4-D damage. If our grapes are damaged by drift from your sprayer, we will expect you to pay for the damages.’ There were several cases in our neighborhood where drift damaged grapes and the injured parties were awarded large cash settlements.”

He continues: “I suspect that this will turn out to be a very foolish move on the part of the biotech industry. This will not be mild, invisible, or ambiguous damage like pollen drift or chemical drift from materials like Roundup. It will be easily detected, ugly, and smelly. The health risks are well known. The term ‘Agent Orange’ touches an emotional nerve with a lot of people.”


:elvis:

ELVIS
05-29-2013, 05:54 AM
Here's an excellent source of GMO information...

Institute For Responsible Technology (http://www.responsibletechnology.org/)


:elvis:

ELVIS
05-29-2013, 06:00 AM
:elvis: