Monsanto’s Pyrrhic Victory

Whoa! Did you see that? No one seems to notice yet that we’re winning the battle against genetically modified foods!

Over the last few years voters in Colorado, Washington State, Oregon and California created unsuccessful ballot initiatives to mandate labeling of GMOs. The Big Grocery and Big Chemical lobbies outspent the grassroots by tens of millions of dollars, were unconstrained by either the truth or ethics, and showed up on the winning side of each election. That left us on the losing side.

Or so we thought.  If we mistakenly believed we’d lost the battle, the GMO lobby mistakenly thought they’d won. But we didn’t, and they didn’t. It’s a sure bet that the Monsanto knows it, too, although they fight on.

Two things happened during the elections.

One, the referendums, the endless pro-GMO commercials, and the enormous sums spent to defeat something that seemed like a very reasonable idea, made the national news and seemed to raise consciousness and concern across the country and among many who might not have otherwise been paying attention.

Two, some grassroots businesses decided that giving their customers the non-GMO they demanded could be a profitable and winning proposition. How right they were. There is currently such a demand for organic foods, which are non-GMO by definition, that American farms can’t keep up. At least not yet. We are now importing organics from abroad to fill the demand.

Organic foods, which result in non-GMOs without any fight over labeling, is making a major appearance at grocery store chains like Kroger whose commitment to giving consumers the food they want with fewer surprises has quickly expanded. Kroger, an early convert to organics, has become the talk of the industry as its organic selection, variety and profitability jumps. As the selection and variety of organics has improved, prices have fallen. As prices fall, more consumers show up at the cash register.

Kroger is simply the leader of the bankwagon. Other grocery chains will follow.

There’s more.

Chipotle, the enormously popular fast-casual Mexican restaurant, announced this week that it is in the process of eliminating all genetically modified ingredients from its stores.

Trader Joes and others are rejecting genetically modified salmon before the FDA has a chance to approve it. A number of other modified fish are in Big Chemical’s pipeline but will only appear if Monsanto and others turn a blind eye to the obvious consumer disdain.

Whole Foods is requiring complete labeling including all foods with GMOs.

Vermont passed a GMO labeling law and is now spending a small fortune fighting Big Business which is spending a bigger fortune to defeat the will of the voters. Whether Vermont gets to keep its law or not, the slow learners at Monsanto are shooting themselves in the foot once again. .

Several of the Hawaiian Islands became sufficiently disgusted with GMO pollution and banned the use of genetically modified seeds. Monsanto and other Big Chemical and Big Agra predators are now, once again, fighting the popular will in court.

The consumer’s tsunami in favor of organic and against genetically modified food continues, despite the deep desire of those who want to control our diet for their own benefit. The GMO industry has been prevented from flooding other countries with genetically contaminated food and they are learning that they can’t do it here either. But only because of our resistance.

One of the real reasons Monsanto and friends are so opposed to labeling is at least partly because they are afraid to have us find out how ubiquitous GMOs are. Almost every processed food in the grocery store is made with poorly tested Round-Up resistant soybeans, corn, canola or sugar beets. As one Monsanto executive famously said, using GMO labels would be like putting a skull and crossbones on a package.

Organic food sales increased from $6 million dollars in 2000 to $39 million in 2014, a development for which Monsanto certainly deserves our thanks.

Monsanto’s jig is almost up.

We are winning!

Sources:

http:www.NaturalNews.com
http:www.RT.com
http:www.Politico.com
http:www.HuffingtonPost.com
http://www.Infowars

 

GM, Gasses, Irradiation and Big Business: Subversion in the Grocery Store

Cameron Salisbury

see also: Arthritis-Alternatives.com

Wouldn’t you know it. Just when we thought that we had made choices that made the adulterated American food supply manageable, Corporate Agriculture finds new ways to quietly and unobtrusively pollute our lunch. We figured a way around the colors, texturizers, hidden gluten, preservatives and taste enhancers with unpronounceable names, and thought we were home free at dinner time.

That’s the way it used to be. As the twenty-first century arrived the dark clouds that had been gathering for several decades finally turned American food production into a torrent of bad news for consumers and a bonanza for agribusiness.

The new food productions and preservation techniques, like genetically modified seeds, irradiation of everything that doesn’t move, and gasses that create the appearance of freshness no matter how old the meat, were originally introduced for commercial use in the latter years of the 20th century. None of these changes to the food supply were designed to benefit the health of the consumer. In fact, our regulatory watchdogs, the FDA and USDA have allowed their wholesale introduction into our food supply without serious testing or monitoring.

To keep the consumer in the dark, the USDA and FDA deliberately colluded with Corporate Agriculture by allowing them to introduce their spiffy new methods of polluting the food supply and enhancing their bottom line without the labeling that would have allowed the consumers to make their own decisions. The consumer no longer has even the illusion of protection.

We are on our own.

There has never been more than one purpose to the unending adulteration of the food supply in the U.S., and it certainly was not to benefit us. All of the new pollution methods have been to extend shelf life into infinity and beyond, to sell more and cost Monsanto and ArcherDanielsMidland as little as possible to do it. They have the full collusion of the major grocery chains.

Some of the changes to the food supply, like irradiation, indiscriminately kills organisms, the good and the bad alike, and eliminates the need for growers and processor to maintain sanitary conditions on the farm and at the factory. You may be buying and eating filth but at least it has been sterilized.

Treatment with radiation also inhibits sprouting in potatoes and delays fruit ripening. In other words, it allows food to be transported long distances and extends shelf life far into the future with no change in appearance.

Public Citizen, the Center for Food Safety, and Food and Water Watch have declared the use of radiation on the food supply to be an experiment on the American consumer without informed consent.

Radiation-induced changes in human DNA can produce cancer. Do DNA changes to veggies create synthetic eats without the usual life supporting properties? No one knows what food irradiation kills besides pests, or if the food is functionally the same after.

And then there are the production problems with the radiation itself: there has already been radioactive leakage from a processing plant into the water supply in a suburb of Atlanta.

Thus far, despite continuing industry pressure, the FDA has maintained that irradiated food must contain a radiation symbol, which has limited its use since food processors fear that making consumers aware will hurt their profits. Lobbyists for Corporate Agriculture are working relentlessly to get the requirement for disclosure rescinded.

On the flip side of the disclosure issue are the growing and processing methods for which consumers may legally be kept in the dark. Almost all U.S. produced corn, soybean, cotton and beet sugar are now GM. But, have you ever seen a label in the grocery store that would alert you to the presence of something in your veggies, meat, or corn flakes that you might not want to eat or feed your family? No? Unlike European countries where an informed public has ferociously fought the introduction of GM food, it is probable that every pantry and frig in the clueless U.S. contains it.

And then there are the gasses, one of the newest unstudied innovations for contaminating food that is also legally allowed to remain undisclosed to the buyer. Most consumers are not aware that virtually all meat, fish and poultry sold at retail has been treated with a gas to extend the surface appearance of freshness.

In the old days, say, a year or so ago, only packaged ground meats were treated with gas. Since the gas created a tight, balloon-like appearance to the packaging, they were easy to spot and avoid.

These days, processors, with the collusion of large grocery stores, are in the habit of gassing everything possible. Even the fresh fish in the deli has almost always been gassed on its way to you, with the butcher often none the wiser. Packaged fruits and vegetables are also increasingly treated with gas.

Food processors were able to convince the FDA and USDA that the gasses they use, nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, occur naturally in the atmosphere and therefore qualify as GRAS – Generally Regarded As Safe – and in no need of labeling disclosure.

Apparently none of the regulators thought to ask if gasses that enter the airways are metabolized the same as the identical gas that enters the digestive system by way of food.

As the millions of people with an impaired immune system already know, they are not.
It will probably take many years, as consumers gradually become aware of the impact of contaminated food on their bodies, to undo these regulations.

Even without counting the endless list of preservatives, artificial colors and texturizing agents, quietly and invisibly the food supply of the United States has become the most legally polluted on earth.

The US Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, federal agencies created to protect the public from polluted food and unsafe medications, have been undermined by the corporate, capitalism-at-any-cost, mindset of one presidential administration after another. As mind-numbing as it seems, the activities of these federal regulators are often subsidized and compromised by their corporate regulatees. Scientists who object to the latest toxin proposed for grocery store aisles often have their careers threatened by the regulated, the ones actually calling the shots.

In the meantime, U.S. life expectancy and average height, major indicators of the health of a population, today fall far behind other nations.

Food allergies and asthma are an increasingly prominent causes of illness, death and disability.

When you get a chance, tune in to this video:

 

The Stimulus and The Confidence Game

by Cameron Salisbury

The Sears appliances I bought last summer came with great teaser financing from Citibank available only if I took out a new credit card. The interest rate on the card was a bargain at only 19% because of my sterling credit history. The accompanying disclosure statement informed me that the rate could go as high as 32% if I screwed up and went over my credit limit, paid late, missed a payment, acted badly with any of my other creditors, jaywalked, yelled at my kids or did anything else they frowned on.

Their disclosure statement was not required to tell me that if I paid no more than their monthly minimum my balance would double every few years.

Last week, along with a notice that their interest charges were going up, they sent a note defending the increase by shamelessly blaming the current tough economic climate – the one that they have relentlessly and unapologetically done so much to create.

Everyone knows that U.S. consumers have put away their wallets. But while American consumption and the use of credit cards is dropping like a millstone, the total amount of outstanding debt remains ominously, bizarrely, unchanged (Federal Reserve, release G 19). Because the unregulated credit industry is allowed to change the rules, their interest rates and conditions, and your indebtedness in the middle of the game, spending less does not mean owing less.

In Detroit, the elderly freeze to death when their gas is turned off. In Florida, the formerly employed live in cars for months and longer. Roughly one in nine homes are now vacant and no one seems to have a good handle on whatever has become of the foreclosed families.

The evening news is filled with stories about the newly unemployed, the newly uninsured, and those watching in their living rooms feel a chill of recognition. They look so much like the rest of us. How long before we’re a part of, instead of a spectator at, society’s unraveling?

Despite the illogical daily bluster of the Wall Street swindlers, their academic and government enablers and TVs talking bobble-heads, the trillion dollar bail out of the financial sector, has not, will not, and cannot solve the nation’s economic problems.

All that ever actually sustained our financial system was an illusion that has evaporated: confidence in the protective capacity of our government and regulatory systems. The most critical obstacle to economic recovery now is the national sense of alienation from the institutions and the government we once thought would protect us from the capitalist crapshoot. The public’s deep sense of anxiety, distrust and betrayal, the crisis of confidence, will not be fixed until our institutions are, with or without full employment.

During the 1930s President Franklin Roosevelt initiated regulatory reforms of Wall Street and the banking industry that restored a battered nation’s faith in the future. With the introduction of the Social Security safety net to protect the unemployed, the aged, the disabled and the widowed, the launching platform for the ‘American Century’ was in place.

It lasted 50 prosperous years until Reagan, Clinton, and Bush II systematically deep-sixed as many of those guaranteed protections as they could get away with, and handed the levers of the nation’s well-being to privateers. American economic power shifted from a manufacturing base to the mainly East Coast, mainly Wall Street, financial sector. Anti trust laws were decimated and mergers infested the economy leaving consumers with fewer and more expensive choices as well as declining wages and increasing responsibility for themselves, their families and their future. Now, corporations reign anew, the safety net is in tatters, and people are scared. Again.

Thanks to our politicians, much of the way back has been sealed off.. Shoring up American workers and American jobs is decried as ‘protectionism’ by the same lost souls in the media and government who brought us ‘free trade’ and the current national and personal catastrophe.

There won’t be a return to the American century, but there can be a good life in our future, and a workable transition now, if we strengthen the safety net while we work for re-regulation and responsive politicians. Here are my suggestions:

First, people thrown out of work by Wall Street grifters and their government enablers deserve a little dignity in the form of a guaranteed income for the duration. Unemployment benefits should be extended until the economy recovers, possibly ten years. Pay for it by yanking back, clawing back, and redirecting the $1.7 (so far) trillion bail out for banking and Wall Street hucksters whose behavior throughout has been the very definition of criminal, a fact that only our politicians seem to misunderstand.

Second, the banking system must be reformed from the ground up. The American people are starved for honesty, accountability and transparency in finances that now seem out of their hands and out of control. Bring ethics, reason and capitalism back to the financial sector by letting banks that have driven themselves into bankruptcy fail and regulating the new ones that form. Stop using the American taxpayer to protect the lawless from the results of their own behavior.

Usury laws must return to the financial system to keep credit users from being thrown under the bus by rapacious and unpredictable creditors, and to lessen the sense of chaos in the social fabric.

Third, stop foreclosures by freezing the teaser rates for anyone who still has a job and a house they want to keep. Our wealthy bankers can afford to make a reasonable profit instead of a windfall on every transaction, but if it can’t, well, taxpayers should foreclose them.
The feds have a huge problem with buying toxic mortgage assets because no decision maker wants to admit that they have no value. If derivatives were ‘marked to market’, investors could lose big time, and politicians Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner certainly don’t want to inconvenience the wealthy. Better to stick taxpayers with a fairy tale and let us restore those fortunes.

In return for our unwilling largesse, the least bankers can do is ‘mark to market’ personal mortgages so homeowners are paying on actual value instead of the false prices created by the policies of the banking system. The banks have it coming. Couldn’t happen to nicer people. Besides, what else are they using their bailout billions for?

The most recent ‘stimulus’ theory, that banks should reconfigure mortgages to 31% of a person’s income with the Treasury subsidizing the difference up to 38% of income, is crazy. We don’t need to provide additional taxpayer dollars to hedge funds. Banks should lower mortgage payments to 31% of income because we’ve already given them boatloads of loot! Like all the other bits of insanity drifting out of the fog in Washington, D.C., this one is on track to become the latest citizen-financed boondoggle.

Fourth, health care must be provided to the increasing numbers of uninsured by federally funding Medicaid and taking the burden off the fiscally drowning states. We must also rethink Medicare. To control costs we’ll have to give up the outdated, corrosive and costly third party payer system as well as the flagrant violation of common sense that prevents the government from negotiating drug prices. It will require political will and WE – you and I – have to supply that. It can’t be trusted to anyone else.

Fifth, forget the stop-gap teensy tax cut drivel and permanently eliminate the payroll tax on everyone making less than $75,000 a year as well as on the vulnerable small businesses that provide so many jobs. That will put another 7.65% of personal earnings into the economy and give businesses another 7.65% of payroll to use as needed.

Now that’s a stimulus!

The payroll tax is unconscionably regressive, hitting hardest those making the least. It should be replaced with a tax on all earnings above the $75,000 threshold, not just wages, and it should not be capped. That should guarantee the future of Social Security and eliminated one endless, tiresome conversation from the national discourse. Instead, maybe we can begin to discuss the cost of keeping military bases in 100 countries. Or we can talk about how to elect a responsive government.

Contributing their share to the Social Security system seems like the least the wealthy can do given the massive financial rewards they’ve received from the political and economic stability our tax dollars buy them. Not to mention the tax dollars that are now restoring their fortunes. I’m sure they’ll be happy to do their part.

That’s my plan.

In the meantime, I’ve cancelled my Citibank credit card.

 

Indestructible Food: With Love from America, Inc.

There can be no doubt that the United States has one of the most legally polluted food supplies in the Western world. Antibiotics and hormones have long been allowed in chicken and cattle feed, a practice forbidden in Europe. Plastics, which release compounds that interfere with normal cell division, are present in baby bottles, soda cans, and milk and water bottles We have more additives of all kinds: preservatives, dyes, color enhancers, taste enhancers, texture enhancers, sugar substitutes, emulsifiers, thickeners, all labeled ‘GRAS’, generally regarded as safe, by the porous safety net charged with protecting our food supply: the Food and Drug Administration.

Especially since about 1970, as more chemicals and other ‘enhancements,’ like genetically modified ingredients, have inundated the grocery store, other things have also been happening. Consider that, with no known cause: A girl entering puberty at age eight is no longer considered an anomaly; the U.S. no longer grows the tallest people on earth- in fact, we aren’t even in the top 5; our life expectancy has fallen behind many other nations; we are among the heaviest people on earth; the rate of the devastating condition known as autism is mushrooming.

There is no research linking these facts to our food supply because there seems to be no research whatever on the impact of a degraded food supply on human health. But the incidental evidence is causing plenty of unease. The legal contamination of the food supply has now reached levels where no one can predict the outcome, and the adulteration just keeps on coming.

Like genetic modification. GM tampering can produce plants with ingrown pesticides, herbicides, color enhancers, preservatives or other. The possible results of manipulating a plant’s (or an animal’s) DNA are limited only by the creativity of the scientist, the money and motivation of Big Agra, and the unwitting compliance of the uninformed consumer. The United States produces more genetically engineered crops than the rest of the world combined, and, unlike 35 other nations, requires no labeling.

Since virtually all corn and soybeans grown in the U.S. is now genetically manipulated, frankenfood is a staple in all but the most obsessively organic kitchens. It is now estimated that approximately 70% of everything in the grocery store contains genetically modified ingredients. That includes a clear, sweet, inexpensive sludge with an infinite shelf life that has almost replaced sugar in processed foods made in the U.S.: High Fructose Corn Syrup.

HCFS is insidious not just because it contains genetically engineered ingredients of unproven safety, and not because of the unnerving list of health consequences seen in animal research, but because it bypasses the satiety center in the brain. We can eat almost all the pastries, pies, cakes, soda and candy we like without getting that full feeling that shuts down our compulsion to eat. We and our kids get rounder and sicker.

We are consuming literally tons of other concoctions from the chemistry labs run by agribusiness that they would prefer we know nothing about.

For example, have you noticed the other worldly quality of ground meat these days? It can now last for months without losing that fresh pink glow.

That’s because of yet another hushed innovation of the food processing industry. The use of gases like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide to preserve meats poultry and fish is rapidly gaining ground and may soon replace safe and effective, and preservative-free, vacuum packing. The healthy pink patina these gases give meat lasts far into the future, like Styrofoam. This poses a question about the safety of the meat at the end of, say, three months. Does that deathless fresh color cover up organisms we’d rather not eat? The European Union has banned this method of preservation also.

Irradiation, another method of creating indestructible meats, fruits and vegetables, may soon be coming to a store near you, after agribusiness finishes pressuring the FDA into sanitizing the name of the process into something that consumers are more likely to buy. They prefer ‘pasteurization.’

Since zapping edibles with radiation kills germs and any other malfeasants that may be lurking about, food items become ‘sterilized’ quickly and cheaply. And by the way, it relieves Big Agra of the responsibility for producing clean food. The filth they leave in the food will be germ free filth.

Possibly best of all for Big Agra, radiation increases the life expectancy of a food to what seems like eternity, another bonanza to the corporate bottom line and something the FDA lists as a benefit.

The statement in the FDA’s 2004 report that radiation induces “chemical changes [that] can ultimately have biological consequences” is neither explained nor integrated into their contention that irradiation “causes little change in the composition of food beyond that which would occur from cooking.”

Although research has been done on the impact of GM, gas and irradiation on the vitamin content, taste and texture of foods, I could find no evidence that the impact of changes to the architecture of food on the people who will consume it has even been seriously considered, despite clear evidence from laboratory testing that all may not be well in the land of falsified edibles.

Genetic engineering, irradiation and gas all work their magic by changing the molecular structure of food. The low-profile adoption of new, unadvertised, untested and often unlisted, potential toxins in the food supply, lobbied hard by corporations and decreed harmless by the FDA, is a walk into the unknown.

by Cameron Salisbury