Dear friends,
I write you as a burdened Cassandra, someone who has begun to see too much of what is going on, and needing to warn good people to be careful, to make plans to protect yourselves. i have believed as you do in the wholeness of things and in the inherent goodness of people, and from that in the growth of millions of small efforts to improving our world that would coalesce bit by bit into a better and healthier and lasting world.
But having been immersed in awareness of Monsanto and its way of operating and of some of its plans, I see that some multinational corporations have immense designs to disrupt then destroy the sustainable agricultural movement and its twin, the alternative health movement - which support all people and have arisen from the wisdom of indigenous people.
Please bear with me as I lay out some facts, which I hope will begin to limn the size of what is coming at you.
- I assume you are aware that genetic engineering is not about improving crops or increasing yields, despite all PR to that effect, but about "owning" nature. Break something apart, and because of the CHANGES IN THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAWS, you have just "invented" something that can be patented and thus "owned," including DNA, or biology itself. Monsanto accomplished this by having the first Bush put Clarence Thomas, a former employee, on the Supreme Court in time to rule that GMOs were the same as normal organisms, and for the vast changes in intellectual property laws that gave legal fangs to anyone "inventing" GMOs.
- I assume you know that the FDA has been attacking alternative health treatments for decades, literally destroying cancer treatments that proved valuable and gentle and cheap, and wrecking not only the access to them but the lives of doctors involved. http://www.ahealedplanet.net/...
- I assume you know that Monsanto is deeply involved in the FDA and literally ran it during the Clinton administration when it approved the first GMO ever - rBGH, a bovine growth hormone - it's own product - and over the warnings of doctors of the link to cancer. http://www.localforage.com/... assume you know that those warnings have multiplied and a citizens' petition tot the FDA cited a 7 fold increased risk of breast cancer and an increased risk of prostate (I believe it's 4 times) and colon cancer. http://www.sustdev.org/... I assume you know that Monsanto has worked to keep dairy products from that hormone unlabeled, going state to state to do so. http://nonais.org/...
- Did you know that Monsanto doctored numbers to get rBGH approved and when scientists at the FDA reported them to Congress, the scientists were fired and Burson Marsteller, one of the largest PR firms in the world (a firm that also represents Exxon Mobil, Union Carbide (Bhopal disaster), Blackwater, the former Argentinian junta, etc.) was hired to clean up the split GMO milk and get the public to drink it? http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/... http://www.corporatewatch.org/... Did you know the CEO of Burson Marsteller is Mark Penn who was Hillary Clinton's campaign advisor, or that Charlie Black, McCain's, heads BKSH, a subsidiary of B-M ? http://rawstory.com/...
- I don't know if you are aware that Monsanto has been going state to state to attempt to vest all agricultural decisions, such as whether GMOs are planted or not, in a single ag committee, pre-empting all farmer and democratic community control. Look carefully, for this is the lead in to what will follow which is larger and more threatening.
http://www.corporatepolicy.org/...
"Big Biotech's backlash against democracy. The growing rural resistance to frankenseeds has companies like Monsanto running to their allies in at least nine US states -- California, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Dakota, Iowa, Idaho, Indiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Arizona, and West Virginia -- to pass or introduce legislation that would preempt local cities and counties that want to restrict the sale of genetically modified seeds. These bills (some of which would also overturn other local restrictions on factory farms and other unwanted land uses) represent a coordinated attempt to block the spread of GMO-free ordinances like the ones passed by citizens in Mendocino and Marin counties in California in 2004. Another local GMO-free law will be voted on in Sonoma County, CA this coming November. The well-coordinated corporate counterstrategy represents a desperate attempt to squash the new populist resistance to corporate rule. Like other laws passed in Pennsylvania, Sonoma's proposed ten-year moratorium is part of a greater fight for local decision-making authority that is spreading across the country. For more model state and local policies, go here."
- I am sure you have heard of the USDA's efforts to ban raw milk in California and Pennsylvania. http://www.counterpunch.org/... I assume you know that Monsanto has great "influence" with the USDA, where Big Ag basically runs the agency. Monsanto's rBGH which is linked to cancer, is not stopped by the FDA, but raw milk farmers are arrested. The corporate influence over food is also one over science and the FDA and USDA have been active in scaring the public about natural products in order to try to eliminate them as healthy and growing competition for the corporations running both agencies - whether cancer treatments or raw milk - while leaving in place treatments and drugs that are toxic.
- Perhaps you've heard that the FDA - Monsanto is involved again - is planning to eliminate vitamin companies. Once again, the inexpensive, non-proprietary, harmless but proving increasingly effective material is put out of reach, treated as dangerous. Meanwhile, the expensive, patented, dangerous and questionably effective and more violent corporate treatments are maintained, even when proven dangerous (rBGH as an example). Like with the Nazis, plans to do such astounding things - for eliminating vitamin companies means destroying the alternative health movement itself - are mentioned, denied, reassurances are given, more denials, then suddenly the reality is put in place, resistance having been confused and scattered by the shifts in messages. Though the FDA was reorganized in 2007 and the bill itself mentions eliminating vitamin companies, a health food store owner in Atlanta recently said she has heard this for years and at this point doesn't believe it because no one is talking about it. Efforts to warn her landed as I believe they were meant to, as calling wolf. (The wolves have gotten very smart.)
http://soundofcannons.blogspot.com/...
http://www.rumormillnews.com/...
http://www.naturalnews.com/...
Why is Teddy Kennedy involved? http://www.dailykos.com/...
- In Canada, they are considering a bill now that would criminalize vitamin C. You read that right. And I assume you know enough about vitamin C to know it is imminently harmless, and is excreted if one takes too much. It has finally showing itself to be what Linus Pauling said it was, an ideal chemotherapy that doesn't harm normal cells but is toxic to cancer cells. 5 million dollars and 2 years in prison. But notice first who is behind it - the FDA, the USDA, the WTO, and the FAO (that is, Monsanto et al). And then notice that it is worse than the insanity of denying access to a vitamin which is, in fact, critical for human beings who can't, like animals, manufacture their own. The bill goes much further and this is where all those who care for sustainable and alternative should feel their hackles go up, for the bill redefines nutrients as "toxins." Consider the implications of the assertion of state control over all nutrients (that is potentially everything that grows). And then it goes further than that and redefines "sell" to mean distributing to one, two or more people even without consideration. Without money. That is, sharing. Giving. You are looking at the potential criminalization of seed banking, or herb sharing, of raw milk producers using cow shares rather than direct sales, or at anything at all to do with the sustainable or alternative movement. Not able to control indigenous plant material or non-proprietary vitamins and supplements, Monsanto and other corporations are using state control to put them out of reach. But it is in the legal redefinitions, as in the extension of the intellectual property laws, that the deeper moves are being made that have this have the potential to wipe out everything good, just as the intellectual property laws are taking control of everything else. http://articles.mercola.com/...
- NAIS. Do you know what it is? if you don't, it is testimony to how truly vulnerable the sustainable movement is right now. Because NAIS is a sweeping Monsanto-driven plan that appears to be a take over of all US farmland (with animals on it) putting it under the control of the USDA. NAIS - National Animal identification System - is ostensibly about tracking every farm animal in the country (29 species) by inserting global tracking tags in them, and again, ostensibly is for the purported purposes of being able to track diseases back to their source. But the ones behind it are the corporations that ground animals into feed (considered the source of Mad Cow by some) , that produce organophosphates that were sold to poured on the spines of cattle to treat them (another potential source of Mad Cow) and who run the filth-ridden feedlots, the grotesque poultry and pig factories, and disgusting, warp-speed slaughter houses, all of which are related to the worse diseases. NAIS proposes nothing to address any of these actual sources. NAIS is to farmers and ranchers what NSA-spying is to progressives - an totalitarian attack on freedom. We get NSA-spying using terrorism as the excuse and they get NAIS using food scares as the driving force. In both cases, whipped up public fear - over something actually caused by corporations (diseases or undermining foreign countries for oil) is being used to spy on and control us. Only it is many times worse for farmers and ranchers because they are being forced to pay for being tracked, and face outrageous bankrupting penalties if they attempt to escape. I can't think of another instance in which penalties for making a mistake on a form are so draconian. http://www.opednews.com/...
The property ID component of NAIS shifts the person from property owner to "stake holder," a lesser form of ownership, and opens the question of who controls the land, then. Presumably, it is the USDA, the same agency run by and for Big Ag ... and Monsanto. Given that Monsanto has take control of biology through intellectual property law changes, and given that it has already been going state to state to pre-empt all democratic control over what is planted, it is not a stretch to believe that if all US farmland goes under the control of the bought-out USDA, that it might easily determine in a food shortage that GMO crops are critical for national security and order ALL farmers, even organic ones, to plant them. And to keep the farms free of infestations of some threatening pest, pesticides could also be ordered at the federal level.
If you look at the penalties that farmers and ranchers are already facing and consider the arrests of farmers simply selling raw milk or at the criminalization of vitamins, you may feel as I do that large plans are moving into place to destroy everything we trust was going to solve things, and that they are not adverse to using massive state power to ensure that loss.
While we are assuming the millions of burgeonings of awareness and interest in sustainable and alternative health will continue to grow and come together into a better world, other plans are being laid, right now, that are capable of destroying both in a second. No one is looking. USDA (using NAIS) and FDA plans threaten all we value.