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Hillary, Will You
Renounce Your Ties to Monsanto?
By Linn Cohen-Cole
Dear Hillary,
10/02/08 "Counterpunch"
-- - By polling logic, I should be
your supporter -- Democrat, woman, white, liberal. But this past
summer I saw a News Hour show on farmers committing suicide in Maharastra, India, which affected me deeply. I started learning
what was happening to farmers and to food and how the Clintons
are connected.
The News Hour piece said
Monsanto, a US agricultural corporation, hired Bollywood actors
to sell illiterate farmers Bt (genetically engineered) cotton
seeds, promising they'd get rich from big yields. The expensive
seeds needed expensive fertilizer and pesticides (Monsanto's)
and irrigation. There is no irrigation there. Crops failed.
Farmers had immense debt and couldn't collect seeds to try again
because Monsanto seeds are "patented" as "intellectual
property").
"Genetic Engineering is
often justified as a human technology, one that feeds more
people with better food. Nothing could be further from the
truth. With very few exceptions, the whole point of genetic
engineering is to increase sales of chemicals and
bio-engineered products to dependent farmers."
David Ehrenfield: Professor
of Biology, Rutgers University.
Monsanto has a $10 million budget and 75 person staff to
prosecute farmers.
Since the late 1990s (as
industrial agriculture took hold in India),166,000 Indian
farmers have committed suicide and 8 million have left the land
(P. Sainath, The Hindu). Farmers in Europe, Asia, Africa,
Indonesia, South America, Central America and here, have all
protested Monsanto and genetic engineering.
What does this have to do with
you?
Your Orwellian-named "Rural
Americans for Hillary" were Monsanto's lobbyists. My greater
concern, though, is you former-employer, Rose Law Firm,
representing Monsanto, world's largest GE (GE - genetic
engineering) corporation; Tyson, world's largest meat producer;
Walmart, the world's largest retailer. Rose is home to
Industrial FOOD.
Rose's cozy connections: Jon
Jacoby, senior at the Stephens Group - one of the largest
shareholders of Tyson, Walmart, DP&L - is C.O.B. of DP&L,
arranged the Wal-Mart deal. Jackson Stephens' Stephens Group
staked Walton, financed Tyson. Monsanto bought DP&L. Walmart's
board invited you on, Tyson executive helped you do $100,000
trade just before Bill' governorship, Jackson Stephens backed
Bill for Governor, then President (donating $100,000).
Monsanto made Agent Orange,
PCBs, nuclear weapons components, pesticides, and with that
diverse background in death, are now "doing" food.
Bill in office:
USDA immediately significantly weakened chicken
waste/contamination standards, easing Tyson's poultry-factory
expansion.
1. Monsanto people were put in
charge of food, ...
2. FDA okayed Monsanto's rBGH (bovine growth hormone), first
GE-product ever approved.
3. Despite bovine illness/death,
FDA didn't recall or warn.
4. When dairymen labeled milk
"rBGH-free," USDA threatened confiscation.
5. Organic food was the last way
around unknown danger. FDA tried to close that escape with new
"organic" standards, to include: genetic engineering of
plants/animals, food irradiation , sewage sludge fertilizer.
USDA backed down from public response 20 times greater than to
anything before American food:
Oils: Indian sheep died
eating from Bt cotton fields. Our children eat Bt cottonseed
oil in peanut butter, cookies.
Grains: 49 per cent of corn
acreage planted in Bt corn in 2007. A French study indicates
it causes kidney and liver toxicity. . Monsanto controls
US's two main crops, soy (90% GMO, 90% of traits "belong" to
Monsanto) and corn, the largest crop (60% GMO, nearly 100%
Monsanto "owned" traits).
Meat: Steroids bulk
athletes, Monsanto steroids fatten animals, our fattening
children eat steroid-laced meats. FDA allowed "known
TSE-positive (Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy Mad
Cow Disease) material to be used in pet food, pig, chicken
and fish feed." Monsanto's GE-hormone increases risk sick
cows are entering US food chain
Poultry: USDA weakened waste/contamination standards. Waste
from transnational poultry industry is now implicated as the
source of bird flu. The poultry industry is using the crisis
to push out small farmers.
Milk: Scientific studies
indicate Monsanto's rBGH increases risks of breast cancer by
up to seven-fold, increases colon, prostate cancers risks.
Canada, 29 European nations, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, New
Zealand, Australia, South Africa ban U.S. rBGH dairy
products. Bill's USFDA put no restrictions, warning labels,
or any labels.
Control out of control.
Monsanto's Terminator genes make
plants sterile after one season, posing apocalyptic risk of
breaking out into nature. GE breakouts have contaminated maize
and weeds, already.
Monsanto, meat-packers, and the
USDA are pushing NAIS (National Animal Identification System), a
corporate database tracking small farmers' livestock.
Monsanto pushing state laws taking control from farmers,
communities, over GE planting.
Cattle living in filth, 12,000-year-old seed loss, poultry
industry implicated in bird flu, Mad Cow disease, bee colony
collapse, poisoned soil, depleted water, Superweed), lawsuits
against farmers, loss of family farms throughout the world, ...
farmers committing suicide. Industrial agriculture.
Bees and farmers, dead
canaries in that mine.
Your proposed "Department of
Food Safety" centralizes control over food into whose hands?
Tough talk on labeling "foreign" food but Bill degraded US food
and prevented minimally sane labeling. You never objected.
Monsanto uses child labor in
India.
You take Monsanto donations.
Blacks, our poorest group, have to eat Monsanto's
steroid/hormone/antibiotic-filled GE food. You take Monsanto
donations.
Who are you protecting? National
Black Farmers Association, boycotting Monsanto? Babies drinking
rBGH milk? Women fearing breast cancer? Despairing farmers?
Suffering animals? Children fed kidney-and-liver-toxic Bt-corn?
Or Monsanto?
I am a person before I am a
woman. Your gender is irrelevant. Given deadly threats to my
grandchildren's future by your corporate connections (Edwards
was right), I don't believe your talk of "caring" about
Blacks/women/children/health/farmers/food.
I will vote for someone
committed to small farmers - our ONLY real food safety. Your
friends, though, are the heart of an international industrial
agricultural nightmare.
Linn Cohen-Cole
Atlanta
Disclaimer. I am not a
scientist. I have read for months on this subject, and am
including only a tiny portion of the horrifying things I have
learned. I am expressing my opinion as person and may be wrong.
Perhaps things are swell out there and rBGH is fabulous and TSE-laced
feed is great, and genetic engineering is the best thing since
manna. But I am scared for my family and I have not only a right
to say so but an obligation to do so. I am angry that Monsanto
was allowed the influence it had and has done the things it
definitely seems to have. I am disgusted by industrialization of
every tender and beautiful part of our world and hope, for all
our children's sake, we are not too late to pull back.
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