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LETTERS / Monsanto Say Their GMOs Are The Best Thing Ever

Dear Editor,

Remember when corporations like GE told us nuclear power was safe; “experts knew what they were doing”. Google Fukushima. Some experts attempted to warn us but couldn’t get their message out because it didn’t support the official story. Similar puppets say fracking is fine, GMO foods are great and “consumers/sheep” accept that because a prestitute said so on TV.

Monsanto say their GMOs are the best thing ever. In the 20 years since GMO crops appeared their advertising has proven untrue. They’ve engineered plants to withstand massive dosing of poisons, functioning as living pesticide factories. Monsanto’s Bt/GMO corn, for example, is an EPA registered pesticide 

Monsanto is buying seed companies, taking over the food supply and lying, for profit, about food safety. Many health problems have been linked to GMO/roundup use. Farmers have reported birth defects and spontaneous abortions in GMO soy- and corn-fed livestock.

FDA scientists had continually warned regulators that GMO crops could create unpredictable, hard to prove side effects. They said long-term studies were needed to fully evaluate the effect of GMO foods on the ecosystem, and human health, but were ignored. Commercial and political interests are what control your future. GMO companies do the research used to make its claims; findings that would be damaging are suppressed. GMOs aren’t labeled. Even Fox news says the mainstream media have shut-out activist concerns around the globe.

In 1997, canola farmer Percy Schmeiser, found that a GMO canola known as “Roundup Ready” had infected his intentional non-GM crop. He discovered this when Monsanto who owned the Roundup Ready patent, sued him for theft. After years of legal battles against Monsanto, that almost bankrupted him, Schmeiser won an out-of-court settlement with Monsanto agreeing to pay the clean-up costs for contaminating his field. Many farmers lose in court with Monsanto.

GMO producers have threatened, and sued to bully farmers. If patented seeds wind drift and are found on neighboring farms, those farmers are charged with “theft.” The clear message; buy the patented seeds or face destruction through legal costs. Courts are buying this phony argument. The Supreme Court upheld Monsanto’s ability to sue farmers whose fields are contaminated by the wind with Monsanto materials. Monsanto has filed over 140 lawsuits against farmers who were unwillingly contaminated, while settling around 700 other cases.

One employee in Nixon’s and Reagan’s FDA, became a Monsanto lawyer, returned to the FDA under Bush the first, and helped get Monsanto’s genetically engineered bovine growth hormone approved, despite it being banned in much of the world. He evidently thought advertising milk as bovine-growth-hormone-free was bad advertising for Monsanto’s product so he wrote a FDA document requiring that labels describing the product as growth-hormone-free must include; “The FDA has determined no significant difference has been shown between milk derived from BGH and non-BGH supplemented cows.”

This statement wasn’t supported by any research. A private company making such unsupported claim could be charged with fraud but since it came out of the FDA, milk producers would be at legal risk by not identifying it so.

Studies show GMO foods are linked to obesity, cancer, liver failure and all sorts of diseases yet government is working with the giant companies to encourage GMO food. Most food sold in America is produced by ten mega corporations who spend millions to defeat state labeling laws; if they were forced to label accurately virtually everything in your grocery store would have a “Contains GMOs” label.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association is pushing a law preventing states from adopting any laws stronger than federal requirements. This bill would exempt identifying ingredients like high fructose corn syrup, made of GM corn, in thousands of grocery products and would allow a GMO-free claim to be made on dairy products from cows fed GMO feed and drugs.

Government response to mad cow disease was to stop testing for it and prevent ranchers and meat processors from testing their cows. The EPA recently raised the allowable amount of a dangerous pesticide by 3,000% pretending that it won’t create health problems.

The American agricultural negotiator for TPP is a former Monsanto lobbyist.  If ratified, the TPP gives corporations like Monsanto rights to demand your taxes pay them for policies corporations judge a barrier to their profits.  They’re writing the TPP to insure you have no control over food safety.

Monsanto partners with 4-H to influence your child’s developing ideas and values. Pro-GMO propaganda is easily woven into 4-H’s program teaching children the art of farming, and in their position of authority, children would never question it.

BroncoBama soon will approve Dow Chemical Company GMO corn and soybeans engineered to tolerate the toxic herbicide “Agent Orange” despite the history of this poison. Vietnam estimates that at least a million people were killed, maimed, or born with birth defects, from America’s use of Agent Orange. There are at least a million people here and there suffering from our Agent Orange/chemical warfare.

Monsanto, Dow, and others ready to profit from these crops, say they’re necessary to combat superweeds which are successful because using Monsanto’s Roundup on crops, genetically engineered to be Roundup-resistant, create superweeds, so farmers spray even more poison. We’ll see the same thing again creating more superweeds and then we’ll need more poison.

DuPont, and two other GMO corporations filed a federal lawsuit against a Hawaiian law to set buffer zones between schools and fields sprayed with pesticide, requiring companies to disclose when and where they’re spraying their poison, as well as report genetically modified crops. Currently chemical companies have few restrictions on where they’re allowed to plant GM crops and how often they’re allowed to spray chemicals making many areas of the island toxic hotbeds, with local residents reporting health problems from exposure to GMOs and crop chemicals.

“Our government” may well stand with the chemical companies, source of “campaign contributions”, forgetting the 90 percent of Americans who want legitimacy. Foods labeled “natural” can contain GM foods.

 Craig Dudley