Monsanto’s Bad Record Gets Major Publicity in Vanity Fair

Monsanoto is going to get a major spanking in May’s Vanity Fair magazine. Highlighted are their KGB tactics to investigate small town farmer’s for “stealing” Monsanto’s genetically altered seeds and the subpeopenas and  lawsuits that result. Also, I learned a little more about the history of Monsanto, the companies beginning and their deplorable record of pollution from chemical manufacturing and their bid to own the food supply.  This is one company that should get all the bad publicity they deserve. I just hope Vanity fair doesn’t get sued for their article. Monsanto obviously has the money and time to do it considering all the time they spend suing small farmers. But then again Monsanto knows many small farmers don’t have a  lot of extra money to fight a court case. So the more farmers they intimidate and scare into having to buy their seed, the more they win the battle to own the food supply.

My Ongoing Research Questions???

Recently I posted a blog about the Monsanto’s ties to government. Most disturbing to me was this excerpt from the Organic Consumer’s website about these government ties. http://www.organicconsumers.org/monlink.cfm 

 “In order for the FDA to determine if Monsanto’s growth hormones were safe or not, Monsanto was required to submit a scientific report on that topic. Margaret Miller, one of Monsanto’s researchers put the report together. Shortly before the report submission, Miller left Monsanto and was hired by the FDA. Her first job for the FDA was to determine whether or not to approve the report she wrote for Monsanto. In short, Monsanto approved its own report. Assisting Miller was another former Monsanto researcher, Susan Sechen. Deciding whether or not rBGH-derived milk should be labeled fell under the jurisdiction of another FDA official, Michael Taylor, who previously worked as a lawyer for Monsanto.”

 Because GM food is not labeled people may not be making a connection between GM food and increased incidence or new diseases. I started wondering what other products were out there that the FDA had approved or considered food that didn’t need testing like GM Food? Or what foods had been tested that did harm, but were approved anyway, because corporate profit has outranked consumer safety?  What about new diseases or increased incidence of disease and what those possible links might be?   I came up with two right away. One is the product Apartame and the second a new disease called Morgellans disease.

First of all Aspartame, the sweetener that is in almost everything labeled diet. It came out in 1981 and seems to have a  link to increased incidence to brain tumors and other symptoms.  

Note:   This information required a Freedom Of Information Act request to pry it from the reluctant hands of the FDA.

Nutrasweet (brand name for Aspartame) was not approved until 1981, in dry foods. For over eight years the FDA refused to approve it because of the seizures and brain tumors this drug produced in lab animals. The FDA continued to refuse to approve it until President Reagan took office (a friend of Searle) and fired the FDA Commissioner who wouldn’t approve it. Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes was appointed as commissioner. Even then there was so much opposition to approval that a Board of Inquiry was set up. The Board said: “Do not approve aspartame”. Dr. Hayes OVERRULED his own Board of Inquiry.

Shortly after Commissioner Arthur Hull Hayes, Jr., approved the use of aspartame in carbonated beverages, he left for a position with G.D. Searle’s Public Relations firm.  Here is the link to the website this information came from. http://www.relfe.com/Aspartame_92.html 

Here is why Aspartame causes problems.

Aspartame Structure
The structure of aspartame seems simple, but what a complicated structure aspartame really is. Two isolated amino acids in aspartame are fused together by its third component, deadly methanol. In this structure, methanol bonds the two amino acids together, but when released at a mere 86 degrees Fahrenheit, the methanol becomes a poisonous free radical.Methanol breaks down into formic acid and formaldehyde, embalming fluid. Methanol is a dangerous neurotoxin, a known carcinogen, causes retinal damage in the eye, interferes with DNA replication, and causes birth defects.Aspartic acid makes up forty percent of the structure of aspartame. Under excess conditions, the structure of aspartic acid can cause endocrine (hormone) disorders and vision problems. Aspartic acid is a neuroexicter, which means its structure affects the central nervous system. Hyperactivity is stimulated by aspartic acid, so this structure is not good for ADD/ADHD conditions and should be avoided during pregnancy. Adverse reactions to aspartic acid are: headaches/migraines, nausea, abdominal pain, fatigue, sleep disorders, vision problems, anxiety attacks, depression, and asthma/chest tightness. The second isolated amino acid in aspartame’s chemical structure is phenylalanine, fifty percent of aspartame’s 3-D structure. Too much phenylalanine causes seizures, elevated blood plasma, is dangerous for pregnancy causing retardation, PMS caused by phenylalanine’s blockage of serotonin, insomnia, and severe mood swings. Read more about Aspartame Side Effects

 Morgellans

 Morgellans is a bizarre skin disease that was written off as a hoax or hypochondria.  Here is a brief article about Morgellans. The CDC website has  a been exploring the cause of this disease and at their website a link for people who may be having symptoms to let them know. This article links Morgellans to GM food, but also states that Morgellans may have been around in the 17th century. That might be a conflict.  Because GM food has been modified by taking a gene from on species and implanting it in another might there be new proteins created that create new gene expressions never before known. One reason why scientists use bacteria to grow DNA is because it mutates so fast. Will we see new mutations that were never intended in nature in humans. It is already happening to bugs and has created new species of weeds. Here is that article about Morgellans.  

Skin Disease May Be Linked to GM FoodMorgellons
12-Oct-2007 

Many people—and most physicians—have written off Morgellons disease as either a hoax or hypochondria. But now there is evidence that this mysterious disease may be REAL and related to GENETICALLY MODIFIED food! The skin of Morgellons victims oozes mysterious strands that have been identified as cellulose (which cannot be manufactured by the human body), and people have the sensation of things crawling beneath their skin. The first known case of Morgellons occurred in 2001, when Mary Leitao created a web site describing the disease, which had infected her young son. She named it Morgellons after a 17th century medical study in France that described the same symptoms. In the Sept. 15-21 issue of New Scientist magazine, Daniel Elkan describes a patient he calls “Steve Jackson,” who “for years” has “been finding tiny blue, red and black fibers growing in intensely itchy lesions on his skin.” He quotes Jackson as saying, “The fibers are like pliable plastic and can be several millimeters long. Under the skin, some are folded in a zigzag pattern. These can be as fine as spider silk, yet strong enough to distend the skin when you pull them, as if you were pulling on a hair.” Doctors say that this type of disease could only be caused by a parasite, but anti-parasitic medications do not help. Psychologists insist that this is a new version of the well-known syndrome known as “delusional parasitosis.” While this is a “real” disease, it is not a physically-caused one. But now there is physical evidence that Morgellons is NOT just psychological. When pharmacologist Randy Wymore offered to study some of these fibers if people sent them to him, he discovered that “fibers from different people looked remarkably similar to each other and yet seem to match no common environmental fibers.” When they took them to a police forensic team, they said they were not from clothing, carpets or bedding. They have no idea what they are. Researcher Ahmed Kilani says he was able to break down two fiber samples and extract their DNA. He found that they belonged to a fungus.

 

An even more provocative finding is that biochemist Vitaly Citovsky discovered that the fibers contain a substance called “Agrobacterium,” which, according to New Scientist, is “used commercially to produce genetically-modified plants.” Could GM plants be “causing a new human disease?”

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8464

And from Morgellons.org :

“Morgellons is an unexplained and debilitating condition that has emerged as a public health concern.  Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has received an increased number of inquiries from the public, health care providers, public health officials, Congress, and the media regarding this condition.   Persons who suffer from this condition report a range of coetaneous symptoms including crawling, biting and stinging sensations; granules, threads or black speck-like materials on or beneath the skin; and/or skin lesions (e.g., rashes or sores) and some sufferers also report systemic manifestations such as fatigue, mental confusion, short term memory loss, joint pain, and changes in vision”

 Follow this link for a 2007 CDC document which gives a more detailed description of Morgellons disease.

 

From what I learned in about an hours time researching these two things I that I see a pattern here. 

• The FDA seems to be approving products that are known to cause harm in humans.
• Some people who work for the FDA have worked for the corporate products they approve.
• Government ties to corporations who make products that need FDA approval. This presents a conflict of interest.
• The FDA is not requiring genetically modified food to be tested or labeled making it hard to be in charge of my own safety.
• Because GM crops have been allowed to enter the food chain without knowing what the consequences might be we are the giant genetic experiment. We are the lab rats.   Consequences are happening because of GMO crops and food.
• I should be on the lookout for what might be happening myself.

How to Organize a Protest

Step 1:
Determine what kind of protest you want. If you want to shout your message loud and clear with an in-your-face protest, or stage an equally effective silent vigil.

Step 2:
Educate the public about the issue and cultivate public opinion. Write letters to newspaper editors and stage town hall-style meetings. Publicize the meetings in the papers. Solicit campus clubs for supporters of your issue. Participate in clubs that have the same values that you do. I joined the Sustainability Club. And we have a large number of people who garden or use the local food co-op and farmers market who might help support the cause. Do you want to draw more people to your side of the issue? Set up an information booth on school campus about the issue to help educate the public about what the problem is and how they can get involved. Tell them how they can write elected officials, be informed on which candidates support your side of the problem, and which websites will explain the problem in further detail, so they can become informed themselves.

Step 3:

Pick a popular and highly visible location, such as the town square, a centrally located park, campus mall, or a busy shopping mall parking lot. But be certain that the rally spot also relates to what you are protesting. For example, if your fight is to clean up the ocean, stage your protest or march at the beach.  If your fight is for labeling of GM food products think about the grocery store, or Monsanto.

Step 4:
Choose effective, high-profile speakers such as a city councilor or local celebrity. You and other protesters should also prepare speeches to rally the troops. Make signs that clearly state the issue. Make sure that most of the participants know the issue so they can answer questions people have, or make small flyers that list the reason you are protesting. In my case I would inform people about what I have learned about the issue of GM food and that we should at least have labeling so we can decide if we want to eat it or not.

Step 5:

Prepare participants for non-violent protest. Practice repsonses to people who may shout back disagreements so as not to encite violence against yourself or others.

Prepare for possible arrest or police violence. Protest, even non-violent protest has become  more and more criminalized in America.

Video

The story in the first short film “GM food and you” is a journey through the maze of complexities surrounding genetic modification. New technologies have a great influence on our daily lives and plant biotechnology is no exception. After all, plants provide us with the food we need to survive. However, plant biotechnology is a controversial area where both the basic research and its application to our daily lives is viewed with suspicion by members of the public like myself. Legitimate concerns have been raised. The content of this short film addresses the role genetic modification and plant biotechnology plays and is likely to play in our society. Is GM food safe to eat? What about the impact on our environment? Do we need it? Is all the truth told about GM crops? What about our right to choose? Can GM crops help the third world?
This second short film is about what is happening in India to farmers who are committing suicide after they buy Monsanto’s cotton seed only to find that without irrigation(which most don’t have), chemical fertilizers or pesticides the cotton withers in the feild leaving the farmer with a debt to pay and no way to pay it.

The 3rd film is Monsanto’s commercial depicting happy Indian Farmers growing Monsanto cotton.

New Links

This is PubMed’s introduction. I wanted to get this link on here, because there are so many articles published on GM food, crop, lab techniques and studies on GM food and it’s affect from a scientific point of view. I have not had time to go through it yet. But I wanted to give other searchers a chance to check it out. This is a searchable database. When I typed in genetically modified food it gave me 733 listings to look through.

This is the link PubMed, available via the NCBI Entrez retrieval system, was developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).  Entrez is the text-based search and retrieval system used at NCBI for services including PubMed, Nucleotide and Protein Sequences, Protein Structures, Complete Genomes, Taxonomy, OMIM, and many others.  PubMed provides access to citations from biomedical literature. LinkOut provides access to full-text articles at journal Web sites and other related Web resources. PubMed also provides access and links to the other Entrez molecular biology resources.

You can watch Democracy Now’s webbroadcast at this link. This weeks feature is at talk with Dr. James Hansen a NASA climatologist, about how his research and the truth about global warming was sensored by the White House. This is very enlightening on the truth about censorship by the US government, especially when it goes against what the government wants the public to know.

The Problem with GM Foods is Systemic.

As I have looked back on my blog this week and all the issues genetically modifying food brings up, it occurs to me that I couldn’t have picked a better topic for my social justice class.  It has been so easy for Monsanto to take advantage of the American people and the world. They manufacture a product that when it goes on the shelves in the store, and then on the plate, or in the milk glass, you can’t taste it, see it, or smell it. You can’t even tell it is there. You can’t tell that what you are eating has been genetically modified with bacteria, viruses and/or antibiotic marker genes. There have only been a couple of cases that we know for sure that gmo’s have caused allergies and death. Yes GMOs have caused deaths, but that could be because  some  symptoms may take a long time to occur, and because we have no labeling to tell us that the product we consumed was GM, we  likely cannot connect the symptoms to that product.  That is the way the corporate producers want it. No connection mean no liability.

            I got a comment on my blog this week. This is just one persons view but it really opened my eyes to the fact that maybe many people really don’t mind, don’t care or don’t know what harm GMOs could be causing. If you can’t tell if it’s doing harm then it must be fine.

 “Like millions of other Americans, I happen to enjoy genetically modified foods, its all about the taste. Who cares where it comes from as long as it tastes goog, is good for you, and doesn’t kill anyone in the process. If we have the technology to enhance the productivity and effectiveness of our foods, then by all means do so.” 

This person is the genetically modified producer’s best consumer. Perhaps this person just doesn’t know about the super weeds, super bugs, the creation of evolutionary change in our environment, the flora, fauna and possibly in himself.

            We are told that GM food will help feed the poor by helping to increase production. That would be a good thing. But that argument just won’t wash. The truth is there is enough food being produced right now to feed everyone on the planet and plenty of it. The reason people are starving in most cases is the unequal distribution of resources. Rich countries are not making it easy for poorer countries to survive, in fact just the opposite. People in poor countries are starving because their country is in debt, and their government took a loan from the World Bank. To get that loan that poor country had to switch from growing crops for their own people to growing crops for companies for export to rich countries. Probably, to get that loan they had to privatize their water and other social services,  and as part of the loan agreement give the contracts to the rich  countries who come in and charge and arm and a leg for water. Perhaps as much as 25% of their monthly income. The people can now not afford to pay the high price being charged to water their crops, or in some cases to even to drink or bathe. And then they are so busy trying to survive they have no time to complain about anything. Or, as is the case in India, their government allowed because of the loan , test plots of genetically modified cotton to be grown that contaminates the rest of the cotton when they are cross pollinated. Animals that eat the genetically modified cotton have died.

            This  issue brings out all the things that are wrong in our American democracy and all the topics we have covered in class so far. It seems like a small thing, the genetic modification of food, considering we have a war going on right now and an election to attend to, but it is not a small thing. I have said this before, but I will gently repeat it: the genetic modification of our food and the way it is being allowed by our corporate sponsored government, and our consumer society is but a symptom of a larger disease.  

            The wealthy people, and rich companies like Monsanto, who is supported by government institutions like the WTO, the FDA and our elected officials, depend on the disempowerment of the middle class and poor people to not fight back. We have lost our voice, we feel powerless to do anything about it. But by not saying or doing anything we give our consent, even unaware. We are all allowing the patenting of nature, the genetic modification of our a life source in food, allowing it to be fed to us. Without labeling, we don’t even get a say in whether we eat it or not. Mainly because from what I can learn the only way to make sure food is not genetically modified is to buy organic or grow it ourselves, but even that won’t work for long, because all food will soon be contaminated with transgenic genes just by cross pollination. And then who can afford organic food at 2 to 3 times the cost of the average food market. Not the poor. So the poor never get a say at all whether they eat gm products. The poor are fenced off from access to non genetically modified food. And the middleclass average American couple today that needs two incomes to sustain their lifestyle is working so hard many times when the choice comes down to taking the time to go the  food coop where the organic food is, they won’t do it. Not all, but most won’t take the time.  

            To take it a step further we never even got a say in whether we wanted to allow the patenting of nature.  We never got a say in whether we wanted a few companies to hold all the rights to all the genetics on earth, except for most human genes. Those aren’t supposed to be patented yet. We never got a say in whether we wanted to eat gm food. We will have to fight to make sure it is labeled. Like many other things wrong with our democracy we are not getting to decide before it is done. The patenting of genes or genetic life was not allowed for 200 years, and because a couple of guys got to patent a micro-organism to eat oil, all the rest of the genes will now be patented. So it is not just that people aren’t voting, they no longer are allowed a vote before a decision is made.

            Corporations are allowed to contribute to a political candidates campaign, and government officials are allowed to take money from lobbyists. In essence if you have enough money you can buy a politician. Check out all the government officials who have worked for Monsanto in the past or held positions on the board of directors in my earlier blog. In the Future of Food video on this page we are shown that lobbyists buy elected officials special interest votes all the time. That is the way it is done in the US.

            And last but not all, and certainly not least, we have the Washington Consortium, made up of the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank who have been created by government politicians as means of helping the world and the US, but really what have they done? They have allowed the exportation of misery, by giving out loans as I mentioned earlier tied to structural adjustment policies. These loans allow the poor countries to pay the interest on previous loans. The country never gets out of debt, and the people are the ones who suffer. The WTO then fights for corporations, even if that corporation is harming the people or the environment. In the case  of the EU where the people do not want GM contaminated food or crops, the WTO has said we will sanction and sue you if you don’t allow our corporations to sell you GM seeds and food products. They say it is a barrier to free trade to force US corporations to label the food we sell you. Basically they say the people in the EU don’t need to know they are eating GM food, we don’t care if GM seed harms the environment, you have to take it. The EU wants to be cautious, to do more testing to be sure before GMO’s are allowed. The WTO gets away with forcing countries to conform to their policies all the time, without regard for regard for health safety or well being of the people and more so with poor countries. The poor don’t argue as much.  Richer countries are arguing more. They shouldn’t have to argue. If other countries want to protect themselves from transgenic contamination they should be allowed to with no questions asked. Unfortunately it is the US government who has the most say in the WTO. The people of the US have no say and don’t even know how the decisions are made. We just see the results.

            So what do we do? I know that I feel like a lot of people, we shouldn’t have to be fighting to get our country to do the right thing. But we do, and I have accepted that. But how? How do we start to change things? And what do we want that change to look like?  I know I would like to have more of a say in what happens with big issues, at least one vote, which means a more direct democracy. In my next blog I will start to explore how we can start express dissent in opposition to a company like Monsanto, or the government, by exploring how other protesters have done it before. The different methods they used to get results. What the consequences of that dissent might be where increasingly dissent in this country is criminalized. I am not talking about overthrowing the government. I am talking about having a voice in matters that affect myself, our environment, and possibly every other human on the planet.

All photos from Google Images

Women Invade Monsanto Fields in Brazil

 This article was published on the website Infoshop News. I have to give kudos to the women who are standing up to Monsanto in Brazil.

 

Friday, March 07 2008 @ 03:25 PM PST
Contributed by: Oread Daily

Hundreds of Brazilian women activists from the group Via Campesina today raided a research unit of U.S. agricultural biotech company Monsanto destroying a tree nursery and an experimental field of genetically modified corn. The women were angry over the Brazilian government’s decision last month to give clearance for two varieties of GMO corn for commercial use.

 

The action happened four days after hundreds of members of the same group invaded a corporate tree farm owned Swedish-Finnish paper maker Stora Enso near Brazil’s border with Uruguay to protest the planting of trees that are harvested to make pulp.

In that case, police fired rubber bullets to oust the demonstrators, triggering a series of protests throughout southern Brazil that they had employed excessive force.

 

A spokesperson for Via Campesina, a group defending peasants and land reform, told Reuters by telephone today, “The authorization of these varieties shows once more that (President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s) government favors agribusiness and big foreign companies…

 

Via Campesina said the companies behind the engineered corn had presented studies that were “completely inadequate and insufficient to guarantee the safety of these products in terms of human health.”

It said it also feared the man-made seeds would contaminate natural crops, with unpredictable results for the environment.

Via Campesina charges expanded use of genetically modified seeds harms Brazil’s environment and makes it difficult for poor farmers to compete with the nation’s rich landowners and agribusiness companies.

letter from the Campaign for a GM-Free Brazil, reports ISP, said that sowing transgenic maize will inevitably contaminate native varieties of maize, which can be grown organically and are ecologically sound.

The measure, it said, is a “flagrant and unconstitutional imposition that sets the economic interests of companies interested in growing GM maize commercially above the health of the population, the need to protect the environment, and also the interests of farmers and consumers who do not want to plant or eat transgenic foods.”

According to da Costa, considering the “harm done to people” due to soybeans and other transgenic crops in Brazil, “the disasters that will be caused by the authorization of GM maize will be of far greater proportions.”

She said that maize, in particular, which was first domesticated in Latin America, will now suffer “a great loss of biodiversity, as well as genetic degeneration and impoverishment.”

She said that native seeds cultivated by small farmers and indigenous peoples “run the risk of disappearing through cross-contamination.”

Unlike soybean plants which are almost entirely self-pollinating, maize is generally cross-fertilised, and its pollen “can be carried several kilometres and contaminate other types of maize at great distances, transported by insects and the wind,” she said.

Furthermore, she said, farmers will have no legal recourse for any complaints against contamination of their crops, because jurisdiction is unclear.

And if contamination of their maize does occur, they will have to resort to other seeds, and they will become dependent on the transgenic species, because GM seeds are designed to produce a second generation of seeds that will not germinate.

“The food sovereignty of small farmer communities will be endangered, because they will have to buy seeds outside the community, and they will have to pay royalties to the transgenic seed companies,” said da Costa. At present, farmers save their seed from year to year for the next planting.

She also called attention to the technical studies cited by the Science and Technology Ministry in support of the authorization of transgenic maize, noting that most of them were carried out abroad, and fail to take into account the uniqueness of Brazil’s diverse ecosystems.

GM-True Food Shopping Guide-2003

I found a  web site that has a list of foods that use genetically modified ingredients and it also lists the ones that don’t have GM ingredients. This list is from 2003, so I hesitated to post it, but it is the only one I have been able to find so far. If anyone else has more recent information on foods that are GM Free please let me know. Since 2003 there has been a great increase in the production of canola, corn and just about every other seed that Monsanto sells. Unless for example, a cracker company makes a special effort to buy GM free wheat and other cracker ingredients, they are going to buy whatever is the cheapest to produce their crackers.  Because products don’t have to be labeled GM freee in the US the cracker producer is not going to care whether the the cheapest corn is GM free or not. Plus wind blow seeds and pollen so who can tell what is what anymore without genetic testing. Testing is expensive, so unless the product is going to be labeled organic, the farmer probably won’t care as long as he can sell the product. I would hazard a guess that most of the oil you buy, especially canola, corn and vegetable oil is going to be a GM product these days. Which is to say this list is terribly out of date. Anyone with a more up to date source of GM free food, please let me know.

http://www.truefoodnow.org/shoppersguide/guide_printable.html#breakfast

Monsanto’s Government Ties

A Monsanto official told the New York Times that the corporation should not have to take responsibility for the safety of its food products. “Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food,” said Phil Angell, Monsanto’s director of corporate communications. “Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA’s job.”

It would be nice to think the FDA can be trusted with these matters, but think again. Monsanto has succeeded in insuring that government regulatory agencies let Monsanto do as it wishes. Take a look at Monsanto’s ties to government:

Prior to being the Supreme Court Judge who put GW Bush in office, Clarence Thomas was Monsanto’s lawyer.

 Former US Secretary of Agriculture Anne Veneman was on the Board of Directors of Monsanto’s Calgene Corporation.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was on the Board of Directors of Monsanto’s Searle pharmaceuticals.

Former US Secretary of Health, Tommy Thompson, received $50,000 in donations from Monsanto during his winning campaign for Wisconsin’s governor.

The two congressmen receiving the most donations from Monsanto during the 2000 election were Larry Combest (Former Chairman of the House Agricultural Committee) and Missouri Senate candidate John Ashcroft (later to be named Attorney General). (Source: Dairy Education Board)

More Ties

In order for the FDA to determine if Monsanto’s growth hormones were safe or not, Monsanto was required to submit a scientific report on that topic. Margaret Miller, one of Monsanto’s researchers put the report together. Shortly before the report submission, Miller left Monsanto and was hired by the FDA. Her first job for the FDA was to determine whether or not to approve the report she wrote for Monsanto. In short, Monsanto approved its own report. Assisting Miller was another former Monsanto researcher, Susan Sechen. Deciding whether or not rBGH-derived milk should be labeled fell under the jurisdiction of another FDA official, Michael Taylor, who previously worked as a lawyer for Monsanto.

http://www.organicconsumers.org/monlink.cfm

Jeffrey Smith Author of “Seeds of Deception” Speaks about the Dangers of GM Food

This is an addition to last weeks blog.  

“Food related illness doubled between 1994 and 2001, while new genetically engineered products were being introduced to the market.” 

This video is part 2 of 3 from YouTube. Jeffrey Smith explains what he found out about GM companies like Monsanto and their bid to shove genetically modified food down the throats of Americans.  

I am also going to link here to the Campaign.org, a grassroots campaign to get labeling on genetically modified food. They make it very easy to contact your representatives to tell them you want labeling. More and more I am starting to believe labeling is not enough. I want conclusive testing done by an independent laboratory or two that says GM foods are no harm before I want it in the store, with or without a label. From what I am learning about how most corporations run with the bottom line profit as the only goal I find it hard to believe anything they say anymore. It is hard to sort out who it telling the truth anymore.