crossposted from unbossed

It's an uneven battle for the truth, given Monsanto's money and its stable of people like who will promote Monsanto's profits over our health. Link.  One thing working in Monsanto's favor is that, when things seem complicated, most people will tune out or take the position that the truth likes somewhere between. Another is that Monsanto is well funded, while those who work to publicize the truth are not.

But you can help by being informed and telling others about these shenanigans. And there are other things you can do to support the truth tellers.

crossposted from unbossed

Say you were a blogger and had written, oh, say, 20 or more stories on issues related to the use of Monsanto's rBST in milk. And say each time you wrote about the issue, for example, that the Pennsylvania Secretary of Agriculture had created a fake consumer committee to assess milk labeling, you were asked: "So what's the story with rBST / rBGH?"

How do you explain why rBST in milk is a problem? Now there is an easy way to explain it all.

crossposted from unbossed

Let me see. How many ways has Monsanto used front groups, fake "astroturf" groups, and fake science to get people to (a) stop worrying about the effects of using rBST / rBGH / Posilac / recombinant bovine growth hormone to produce milk and (b) buy more milk produced? And now there's a new one that is a real hoot!

Did you know that injecting dairy cows with Monsanto's recombinant hormones will save the planet for global warming?

Well, if Monsanto says so and uses one of its bought and paid for "scientists" and a Monsanto chemist to do the "study", well, it must be true!

Just because you haven't heard much lately about the Monsanto campaign to take away our right to know how our milk is produced does not mean nothing is happening. In fact, in recent months, in state after state, Monsanto is continuing to push.

This time the state is New York. If you are in New York and want to know whether your milk comes from cows who are not given artificial hormones, then you need to get your comments in immediately. Details below.

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DUBYA: "PROBLEM IS, THEY'RE NOT STARVIN' IN INDIA"

ADMISSION AGAINST INTERESTS: INDIA SAYS, "YEAH, WE ARE"

U.S. "Family Values" Party Leader Tries To Blame Food Shortages On Hungry Asian Families

Another sterling example of your tax dollars at work: U.S. President George "Dubya" Bush has gone out of his way to infuriate and insult two billion people in China and India, in your name. It's not the voracious appetite for fuel, including biofuel, or the rapid globalization and corporatization of agriculture that is causing shortages, skyrocketing prices and food riots around the world. It's those pesky hungry people out there. Thank Gawd we all had Mr. Bush to represent our interests on this. [cont.]
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Corn is the one thing America can produce cheaper than Mexico can.  Illegal immigration exploded in the wake of NAFTA, and corn is largely to blame for our immigration problem.  Mexicans eat a lot of corn, and they used to support a lot of maize farmers.  NAFTA changed that.  A Democratic response to NAFTA can energize unions, appeal to Latino voters concerned about loved ones across the border by promising to improve the Mexican economy.

Southwestern moderates view McCain favorably on immigration, but not his party base.  By going on the offensive with immigration in IN and NC Dems can attack the Republican base in new swing states, build bridges between unions and Latinos, and frame the immigration debate for the fall.

For years, we've been financing our consumption with debt, offshoring our manufacturing base and living large -- at least some of us -- off of one speculative bubble after the next.

We can talk about stagnant wages and how dramatically inequality has increased, but that frames it passively, as a sort of natural phenomenon. But that obscures the fact that it's been an active process, with the wealthiest Americans gaming the system for a bigger piece of the pie at everyone else's expense. Meanwhile, we've been investing bupkis in our future, expecting, perhaps, to remain on the top through nothing more than raw American exeptionalism.

Ethanol May Not Solve Our Energy Problems, But It Makes Lots of People Happy
The successful Chevron test oil well in the Gulf of Mexico last year suddenly changed things for gasoline. With an estimated 3-15 billion barrels of oil newly available in the Gulf, it would seem that arguments to drill in ANWAR and new areas off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts fall flat – there’s no doubt the cost of political battles and arctic drilling expenditures would be way too high, even compared to the increased costs of drilling these new, deepwater oil wells. Oil companies can now shift efforts and money away from that cause and into rushing to get their share of these new reserves pumped out. Thus, even though this new oil is some 5-7 years away from getting into our production system, our gasoline shortage worries are eased, SUV’s are saved, etc, etc.
So what’s going on with ethanol?

Something to think about on this tax day... where will more than a quarter trillion dollars go over the next few years?

^{Answer: The [Food &] Farm Bill.}

The corn kernels you eat, whether on the cob, frozen or canned is sweet corn and is less than 2/10th of 1% of the corn grown.

Independent Lens will be showing the documentary film, King Corn (lots of really good stuff to explore at that link) which was released last October. About a couple guys who buy an acre to see what it takes to grow corn. This is an important film (and pretty fun) since the [Food &] Farm Bill is currently in Congress being reconciled (not too late to call).

 THE PROFIT DRIVEN INDUSTRIAL FOOD COMPLEX
There's actually a huge deficit in nutrition since corn has been tampered with. It's bred for energy (starch) but not actual food value. It gets cows and other animals fat in a hurry which is good for other food industries on the bottom line (though they too are nutritionally deficient in comparison to their more humanely raised counterparts)

So, what do we really think industrial corn does for us whether eaten directly or indirectly via a factory farmed animal? We end up fat yet still hungry. Why? We need to eat more to meet our bodies vitamin and mineral needs.

I've been calling that, Starving Obesity.

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The following is slightly reworked from another comment I made several weeks ago and have recycled several times threatening each time to turn it into a diary. One thing I've learned in life is don't make empty threats so here goes:

A significant spike in grain and commodities prices is driving up the cost of food worldwide and marking the beginning of the collapse of the world economy.  As a result, violent riots have broken out, as described by Vivian Walt (Time, February 27, 2008)

Rocketing food prices — some of which have more than doubled in two years — have sparked riots in numerous countries recently. Millions are reeling from sticker shock and governments are scrambling to staunch a fast-moving crisis before it spins out of control. From Mexico to Pakistan, protests have turned violent. Rioters tore through three cities in the West African nation of Burkina Faso last month, burning government buildings and looting stores. Days later in Cameroon, a taxi drivers' strike over fuel prices mutated into a massive protest about food prices, leaving around 20 people dead.

Here in the U.S., the economic collapse has been "contained" to the housing market and a "few bad apples" (Bear Stearns) in the financial markets, but for how much longer?  Will we see food riots at home?

In 1948 George Kennan, who at the time was a senior US State Department planning official, wrote:

We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.

To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

Later on, in April of 1974 President Gerald Ford, who had replaced Nixon, issued National Security Study Memorandum 200. The title was Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests. President Ford signed an Executive Order making NSSM 200 official US Government Policy. It dealt with food policy, population growth and strategic raw materials. The NSSM was the work of Henry Kissinger and was secret at the time it was issued.

crossposted from unbossed

Today, April 7, is the deadline to sign up to participate in the Pennsylvania hearings whose main purpose seems to be to go after rBST-free milk, this time via a hearing on milk pricing.

And it is also the day a letter was sent to Ohio Governor Ted Strickland by public interest groups asking him not to bar us from knowing whether rBST has been used in producing our milk.

The world is in a deepening food crisis.

Crossposted from UNBOSSED

My family noticed it about a year ago.  Maybe a little more.  Suddenly, our grocery bill seemed to rise.  I didn’t give it much thought a first and didn’t track it too closely but at the end of 2007 when I added up our expenses it was like a hammer in the head!  Our food bill had gone up 10-15%!!

Ouch.  

  This is just a quick summary of a couple of articles in the April 1, 2008 Times Union out of Albany, NY.  As oil prices shoot higher and corn/ethanol gets to be more of a commodity for energy than food, it's having effects in places one might not expect, and a larger impact than might be expected.
Port Aims for Ethanol Project

ALBANY -- An ethanol production plant costing up to $350 million and capable of producing 165 million gallons of the corn-based fuel annually is planned for 18 mostly vacant acres at the Port of Albany.

Corn Costs to Drive Other Prices Up

Corn prices have skyrocketed in recent years, helped by the burgeoning ethanol industry, which turns the crop into fuel, and rising worldwide demand for food. The higher prices have affected poultry, beef and pork companies, who use corn to feed their animals.

(more)

Every time I'm about to finish my story on drought resistant wheat, I come across more horror stories, some of which you may have already heard. In any case this is worth repeating a thousand times: a report by GRAIN and Focus on the Global South has found that new legislation in Iraq has been carefully put in place by the US that prevents farmers from saving their seeds and effectively hands over the seed market to transnational corporations (the relevant passage is 51). This is a disastrous turn of events for Iraqi farmers, biodiversity and the country’s food security. While political sovereignty remains an illusion, food sovereignty for the Iraqi people has been made near impossible by these new regulations.

Welcome to the Monsanto World.

Cross-posted from http://www.politicook.org/

crossposted from unbossed

When Wal-Mart decided to go rBST-free last week,  Monsanto knew it was in big trouble. So it's pulling out the big guns.

Yes, when the going gets tough, Monsanto's astroturf groups get going.