Saturday, July 31, 2010
Friday, July 30, 2010
Monsanto: The world's poster child for corporate manipulation and deceit
Friday, July 30, 2010
by: Jeffrey M. Smith
(NaturalNews) At a biotech industry conference in January 1999, a representative from Arthur Anderson, LLP explained how they had helped Monsanto design their strategic plan. First, his team asked Monsanto executives what their ideal future looked like in 15 to 20 years. The executives described a world with 100 percent of all commercial seeds genetically modified and patented. Anderson consultants then worked backwards from that goal, and developed the strategy and tactics to achieve it. They presented Monsanto with the steps and procedures needed to obtain a place of industry dominance in a world in which natural seeds were virtually extinct.
This was a bold new direction for Monsanto, which needed a big change to distance them from a controversial past. As a chemical company, they had polluted the landscape with some of the most poisonous substances ever produced, contaminated virtually every human and animal on earth, and got fined and convicted of deception and wrongdoing. According to a former Monsanto vice president, "We were despised by our customers."
So they redefined themselves as a "life sciences" company, and then proceeded to pollute the landscape with toxic herbicide, contaminate the gene pool for all future generations with genetically modified plants, and get fined and convicted of deception and wrongdoing. Monsanto's chief European spokesman admitted in 1999, "Everybody over here hates us." Now the rest of the world is catching on.
"Saving the world," and other lies
Monsanto's public relations story about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are largely based on five concepts.
1. GMOs are needed to feed the world.
2. GMOs have been thoroughly tested and proven safe.
3. GMOs increase yield.
4. GMOs reduce the use of agricultural chemicals.
5. GMOs can be contained, and therefore coexist with non-GM crops.
All five are pure myths -- blatant falsehoods about the nature and benefit of this infant technology. The experience of former Monsanto employee Kirk Azevedo helps expose the first two lies, and provides some insight into the nature of the people working at the company.
In 1996, Monsanto recruited young Kirk Azevedo to sell their genetically engineered cotton. Azevedo accepted their offer not because of the pay increase, but due to the writings of Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro. Shapiro had painted a picture of feeding the world and cleaning up the environment with his company's new technology. When he visited Monsanto's St. Louis headquarters for new employee training, Azevedo shared his enthusiasm for Shapiro's vision during a meeting. When the session ended, a company vice president pulled him aside and set him straight. "Wait a second," he told Azevedo. "What Robert Shapiro says is one thing. But what we do is something else. We are here to make money. He is the front man who tells a story. We don't even understand what he is saying." Azevedo realized he was working for "just another profit-oriented company," and all the glowing words about helping the planet were just a front.
A few months later he got another shock. A company scientist told him that Roundup Ready cotton plants contained new, unintended proteins that had resulted from the gene insertion process. No safety studies had been conducted on the proteins, none were planned, and the cotton plants, which were part of field trials near his home, were being fed to cattle. Azevedo "was afraid at that time that some of these proteins may be toxic."
He asked the PhD in charge of the test plot to destroy the cotton rather than feed it to cattle, arguing that until the protein had been evaluated, the cows' milk or meat could be harmful. The scientist refused. Azevedo approached everyone on his team at Monsanto to raise concerns about the unknown protein, but no one was interested. "I was somewhat ostracized," he said. "Once I started questioning things, people wanted to keep their distance from me. . . . Anything that interfered with advancing the commercialization of this technology was going to be pushed aside." Azevedo decided to leave Monsanto. He said, "I'm not going to be part of this disaster."
Monsanto's toxic past
Azevedo got a small taste of Monsanto's character. A verdict in a lawsuit a few years later made it more explicit. On February 22, 2002, Monsanto was found guilty for poisoning the town of Anniston, Alabama with their PCB factory and covering it up for decades. They were convicted of negligence, wantonness, suppression of the truth, nuisance, trespass, and outrage. According to Alabama law, to be guilty of outrage typically requires conduct "so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society."(1)
The $700 million fine imposed on Monsanto was on behalf of the Anniston residents, whose blood levels of Monsanto's toxic PCBs were hundreds or thousands of times the average. This disease-producing chemical, used as coolants and lubricants for over 50 years, are now virtually omnipresent in the blood and tissues of humans and wildlife around the globe. Ken Cook of the Environmental Working Group says that based on Monsanto documents made public during a trial, the company "knew the truth from the very beginning. They lied about it. They hid the truth from their neighbors." One Monsanto memo explains their justification: "We can't afford to lose one dollar of business." Welcome to the world of Monsanto.
Infiltrating the minds and offices of the government
To get their genetically modified products approved, Monsanto has coerced, infiltrated, and paid off government officials around the globe. In Indonesia, Monsanto gave bribes and questionable payments to at least 140 officials, attempting to get their genetically modified (GM) cotton accepted.(2) In 1998, six Canadian government scientists testified before the Senate that they were being pressured by superiors to approve rbGH, that documents were stolen from a locked file cabinet in a government office, and that Monsanto offered them a bribe of $1-2 million to pass the drug without further tests. In India, one official tampered with the report on Bt cotton to increase the yield figures to favor Monsanto.(3) And Monsanto seems to have planted their own people in key government positions in India, Brazil, Europe, and worldwide.
Monsanto's GM seeds were also illegally smuggled into countries like Brazil and Paraguay, before GMOs were approved. Roberto Franco, Paraguay's Deputy Agriculture Ministry, tactfully admits, "It is possible that [Monsanto], let's say, promoted its varieties and its seeds" before they were approved. "We had to authorize GMO seeds because they had already entered our country in an, let's say, unorthodox way."
In the US, Monsanto's people regularly infiltrate upper echelons of government, and the company offers prominent positions to officials when they leave public service. This revolving door has included key people in the White House, regulatory agencies, even the Supreme Court. Monsanto also had George Bush Senior on their side, as evidenced by footage of Vice President Bush at Monsanto's facility offering help to get their products through government bureaucracy. He says, "Call me. We're in the 'de-reg' business. Maybe we can help."
Monsanto's influence continued into the Clinton administration. Dan Glickman, then Secretary of Agriculture, says, "there was a general feeling in agro-business and inside our government in the US that if you weren't marching lock-step forward in favor of rapid approvals of biotech products, rapid approvals of GMO crops, then somehow, you were anti-science and anti-progress." Glickman summarized the mindset in the government as follows:
"What I saw generically on the pro-biotech side was the attitude that the technology was good, and that it was almost immoral to say that it wasn't good, because it was going to solve the problems of the human race and feed the hungry and clothe the naked. . . . And there was a lot of money that had been invested in this, and if you're against it, you're Luddites, you're stupid. That, frankly, was the side our government was on. Without thinking, we had basically taken this issue as a trade issue and they, whoever 'they' were, wanted to keep our product out of their market. And they were foolish, or stupid, and didn't have an effective regulatory system. There was rhetoric like that even here in this department. You felt like you were almost an alien, disloyal, by trying to present an open-minded view on some of the issues being raised. So I pretty much spouted the rhetoric that everybody else around here spouted; it was written into my speeches."(4)
He admits, "when I opened my mouth in the Clinton Administration [about the lax regulations on GMOs], I got slapped around a little bit."
Hijacking the FDA to promote GMOs
In the US, new food additives must undergo extensive testing, including long-term animal feeding studies.(5) There is an exception, however, for substances that are deemed "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS). GRAS status allows a product to be commercialized without any additional testing. According to US law, to be considered GRAS the substance must be the subject of a substantial amount of peer-reviewed published studies (or equivalent) and there must be overwhelming consensus among the scientific community that the product is safe. GM foods had neither. Nonetheless, in a precedent-setting move that some experts contend was illegal, in 1992 the FDA declared that GM crops are GRAS as long as their producers say they are. Thus, the FDA does not require any safety evaluations or labels whatsoever. A company can even introduce a GM food to the market without telling the agency.
Such a lenient approach to GM crops was largely the result of Monsanto's legendary influence over the US government. According to the New York Times, "What Monsanto wished for from Washington, Monsanto and, by extension, the biotechnology industry got. . . . When the company abruptly decided that it needed to throw off the regulations and speed its foods to market, the White House quickly ushered through an unusually generous policy of self-policing." According to Dr. Henry Miller, who had a leading role in biotechnology issues at the FDA from 1979 to 1994, "In this area, the U.S. government agencies have done exactly what big agribusiness has asked them to do and told them to do."
The person who oversaw the development of the FDA's GMO policy was their Deputy Commissioner for Policy, Michael Taylor, whose position had been created especially for him in 1991. Prior to that, Taylor was an outside attorney for both Monsanto and the Food Biotechnology Council. After working at the FDA, he became Monsanto's vice president. He's now back at the FDA, as the US food safety czar.
Covering up health dangers
The policy Taylor oversaw in 1992 needed to create the impression that unintended effects from GM crops were not an issue. Otherwise their GRAS status would be undermined. But internal memos made public from a lawsuit showed that the overwhelming consensus among the agency scientists was that GM crops can have unpredictable, hard-to-detect side effects. Various departments and experts spelled these out in detail, listing allergies, toxins, nutritional effects, and new diseases as potential problems. They had urged superiors to require long-term safety studies.(6) In spite of the warnings, according to public interest attorney Steven Druker who studied the FDA's internal files, "References to the unintended negative effects of bioengineering were progressively deleted from drafts of the policy statement (over the protests of agency scientists)."(7)
FDA microbiologist Louis Pribyl wrote about the policy, "What has happened to the scientific elements of this document? Without a sound scientific base to rest on, this becomes a broad, general, 'What do I have to do to avoid trouble'-type document. . . . It will look like and probably be just a political document. . . . It reads very pro-industry, especially in the area of unintended effects."(8)
The FDA scientists' concerns were not only ignored, their very existence was denied. Consider the private memo summarizing opinions at the FDA, which stated, "The processes of genetic engineering and traditional breeding are different and according to the technical experts in the agency, they lead to different risks."(9) Contrast that with the official policy statement issued by Taylor, Monsanto's former attorney: "The agency is not aware of any information showing that foods derived by these new methods differ from other foods in any meaningful or uniform way."(10) On the basis of this false statement, the FDA does not require GM food safety testing.
Fake safety assessments
Monsanto participates in a voluntary consultation process with the FDA that is derided by critics as a meaningless exercise. Monsanto submits whatever information it chooses, and the FDA does not conduct or commission any studies of its own. Former EPA scientist Doug Gurian-Sherman, who analyzed FDA review records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, says the FDA consultation process "misses obvious errors in company-submitted data summaries, provides insufficient testing guidance, and does not require sufficiently detailed data to enable the FDA to assure that GE crops are safe to eat."(11)
But that is not the point of the exercise. The FDA doesn't actually approve the crops or declare them safe. That is Monsanto's job! At the end of the consultation, the FDA issues a letter stating:
"Based on the safety and nutritional assessment you have conducted, it is our understanding that Monsanto has concluded that corn products derived from this new variety are not materially different in composition, safety, and other relevant parameters from corn currently on the market, and that the genetically modified corn does not raise issues that would require premarket review or approval by FDA. . . . As you are aware, it is Monsanto's responsibility to ensure that foods marketed by the firm are safe, wholesome and in compliance with all applicable legal and regulatory requirements."(12)
The National Academy of Sciences and even the pro-GM Royal Society of London(13) describe the US system as inadequate and flawed. The editor of the prestigious journal Lancet said, "It is astounding that the US Food and Drug Administration has not changed their stance on genetically modified food adopted in 1992. . . . Governments should never have allowed these products into the food chain without insisting on rigorous testing for effects on health."(14)
One obvious reason for the inflexibility of the FDA is that they are officially charged with both regulating biotech products and promoting them -- a clear conflict. That is also why the FDA does not require mandatory labeling of GM foods. They ignore the desires of 90 percent of American citizens in order to support the economic interests of Monsanto and the four other GM food companies.
Monsanto's studies are secret, inadequate, and flawed
The unpublished industry studies submitted to regulators are typically kept secret based on the claim that it is "confidential business information." The Royal Society of Canada is one of many organizations that condemn this practice. Their Expert Panel called for "completely transparent" submissions, "open to full review by scientific peers" They wrote, "Peer review and independent corroboration of research findings are axioms of the scientific method, and part of the very meaning of the objectivity and neutrality of science."(15)
Whenever Monsanto's private submissions are made public through lawsuits or Freedom of Information Act Requests, it becomes clear why they benefit from secrecy. The quality of their research is often miserable, and would never stand up to peer-review. In December 2009, for example, a team of independent researchers published a study analyzing the raw data from three Monsanto rat studies. When they used proper statistical methods, they found that the three varieties of GM corn caused toxicity in the liver and kidneys, as well as significant changes in other organs.(16) Monsanto's studies, of course, had claimed that the research showed no problems. The regulators had believed Monsanto, and the corn is already in our food supply.
Monsanto rigs research to miss dangers
(17)
Monsanto has plenty of experience cooking the books of their research and hiding the hazards. They manufactured the infamous Agent Orange, for example, the cancer and birth-defect causing defoliant sprayed over Vietnam. It contaminated more than three million civilians and servicemen. But according to William Sanjour, who led the Toxic Waste Division of the Environmental Protection Agency, "thousands of veterans were disallowed benefits" because "Monsanto studies showed that dioxin [the main ingredient in Agent Orange] was not a human carcinogen." But his EPA colleague discovered that Monsanto had allegedly falsified the data in their studies. Sanjour says, "If they were done correctly, [the studies] would have reached just the opposite result."
Here are examples of tinkering with the truth about Monsanto's GM products:
• When dairy farmers inject cows with genetically modified bovine growth hormone (rbGH), more bovine growth hormone ends up in the milk. To allay fears, the FDA claimed that pasteurization destroys 90 percent of the hormone. In reality, the researchers of this drug (then owned by Monsanto) pasteurized the milk 120 times longer than normal. But they only destroyed 19 percent. So they spiked the milk with a huge amount of extra growth hormone and then repeated the long pasteurization. Only under these artificial conditions were they able to destroy 90 percent.
• To demonstrate that rbGH injections didn't interfere with cows' fertility, Monsanto appears to have secretly added cows to their study that were pregnant BEFORE injection.
• FDA Veterinarian Richard Burroughs said that Monsanto researchers dropped sick cows from studies, to make the drug appear safer.
• Richard Burroughs ordered more tests on rbGH than the industry wanted and was told by superiors he was slowing down the approval. He was fired and his tests canceled. The remaining whistle-blowers in the FDA had to write an anonymous letter to Congress, complaining of fraud and conflict of interest in the agency. They complained of one FDA scientist who arbitrarily increased the allowable levels of antibiotics in milk 100-fold, in order to facilitate the approval of rbGH. She had just become the head of an FDA department that was evaluating the research that she had recently done while an employee of Monsanto.
• Another former Monsanto scientist said that after company scientists conducted safety studies on bovine growth hormone, all three refused to drink any more milk, unless it was organic and therefore not treated with the drug. They feared the substantial increase of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) in the drugged milk. IGF-1 is a significant risk factor for cancer.
• When independent researchers published a study in July 1999 showing that Monsanto's GM soy contains 12-14 percent less cancer-fighting phytoestrogens, Monsanto responded with its own study, concluding that soy's phytoestrogen levels vary too much to even carry out a statistical analysis. Researchers failed to disclose, however, that they had instructed the laboratory to use an obsolete method of detection -- one that had been prone to highly variable results.
• To prove that GM protein breaks down quickly during simulated digestion, Monsanto uses thousands of times the amount of digestive enzymes and a much stronger acid than what the World Health Organization recommends.
• Monsanto told government regulators that the GM protein produced in their high-lysine GM corn was safe for humans, because it is also found in soil. They claimed that since people consume small residues of soil on fruits and vegetables, the protein has a safe history as part of the human diet. The actual amount of the GM corn protein an average US citizen would consume, however, if all their corn were Monsanto's variety, would be "about 30 billion to four trillion times" the amount normally consumed in soil residues. For equivalent exposure, people would have to eat as much as 22,000 pounds of soil every second of every day.
• Monsanto's high-lysine corn also had unusual levels of several nutritional components, such as protein and fiber. Instead of comparing it to normal corn, which would have revealed this significant disparity, Monsanto compared their GM corn to obscure corn varieties that were also far outside the normal range on precisely these values. On this basis, Monsanto could claim that there were no statistically significant differences in their GM corn content.
Methods used by Monsanto to hide problems are varied and plentiful. For example, researchers:
• Use animals with varied starting weights, to hinder the detection of food-related changes;
• Keep feeding studies short, to miss long-term impacts;
• Test Roundup Ready soybeans that have never been sprayed with Roundup -- as they always are in real world conditions;
• Avoid feeding animals the GM crop, but instead give them a single dose of GM protein produced from GM bacteria;
• Use too few subjects to obtain statistical significance;
• Use poor or inappropriate statistical methods, or fail to even mention statistical methods, or include essential data; and
• Employ insensitive detection techniques -- doomed to fail.
Monsanto's 1996 Journal of Nutrition study, which was their cornerstone article for "proving" that GM soy was safe, provides plenty of examples of masterfully rigged methods.
• Researchers tested GM soy on mature animals, not the more sensitive young ones. GMO safety expert Arpad Pusztai says the older animals "would have to be emaciated or poisoned to show anything."
• Organs were never weighed.
• The GM soy was diluted up to 12 times which, according to an expert review, "would probably ensure that any possible undesirable GM effects did not occur."
• The amount of protein in the feed was "artificially too high," which would mask negative impacts of the soy.
• Samples were pooled from different locations and conditions, making it nearly impossible for compositional differences to be statistically significant.
• Data from the only side-by-side comparison was removed from the study and never published. When it was later recovered, it revealed that Monsanto's GM soy had significantly lower levels of important constituents (e.g. protein, a fatty acid, and phenylalanine, an essential amino acid) and that toasted GM soy meal had nearly twice the amount of a lectin -- which interferes with the body's ability to assimilate nutrients. Moreover, the amount of trypsin inhibitor, a known soy allergen, was as much as seven times higher in cooked GM soy compared to a cooked non-GM control. Monsanto named their study, "The composition of glyphosate-tolerant soybean seeds is equivalent to that of conventional soybeans."
A paper published in Nutrition and Health analyzed all peer-reviewed feeding studies on GM foods as of 2003. It came as no surprise that Monsanto's Journal of Nutrition study, along with the other four peer-reviewed animal feeding studies that were "performed more or less in collaboration with private companies," reported no negative effects of the GM diet. "On the other hand," they wrote, "adverse effects were reported (but not explained) in [the five] independent studies." They added, "It is remarkable that these effects have all been observed after feeding for only 10 to 14 days."(18)
A former Monsanto scientist recalls how colleagues were trying to rewrite a GM animal feeding study, to hide the ill-effects. But sometimes when study results are unmistakably damaging, Monsanto just plain lies. Monsanto's study on Roundup, for example, showed that 28 days after application, only 2 percent of their herbicide had broken down. They nonetheless advertised the weed killer as "biodegradable," "leaves the soil clean," and "respects the environment." These statements were declared false and illegal by judges in both the US and France. The company was forced to remove "biodegradable" from the label and pay a fine.
Monsanto attacks labeling, local democracy, and news coverage
• On July 3, 2003, Monsanto sued Oakhurst dairy because their labels stated, "Our Farmers' Pledge: No Artificial Growth Hormones." Oakhurst eventually settled with Monsanto, agreeing to include a sentence on their cartons saying that according to the FDA no significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rbGH-treated and non-rbGH-treated cows. The statement is not true. FDA scientists had acknowledged the increase of IGF-1, bovine growth hormone, antibiotics, and pus, in milk from treated cows. Nonetheless, the misleading sentence had been written years earlier by the FDA's deputy commissioner of policy, Michael Taylor, the one who was formerly Monsanto's outside attorney and later their vice president.
• Monsanto's public relations firm created a group called the Dairy Coalition, which pressured editors of the USA Today, Boston Globe, New York Times and others, to limit negative coverage of rbGH.
• A Monsanto attorney wrote a letter to Fox TV, promising dire consequences if the station aired a four-part exposé on rbGH. The show was ultimately canceled.
• A book critical of Monsanto's GM foods was three days away from being published. A threatening letter from Monsanto's attorney forced the small publisher to cancel publication.
• 14,000 copies of Ecologist magazine dedicated to exposing Monsanto were shredded by the printer due to fears of a lawsuit.
• After a ballot initiative in California established Mendocino County as a GM-free zone -- where planting GMOs is illegal, Monsanto and others organized to push through laws in 14 states that make it illegal for cities and counties to declare similar zones.
Monsanto's promises of riches come up short
Biotech advocates have wooed politicians, claiming that their new technology is the path to riches for their city, state, or nation. "This notion that you lure biotech to your community to save its economy is laughable," said Joseph Cortright, an Oregon economist who co-wrote a report on the subject. "This is a bad-idea virus that has swept through governors, mayors and economic development officials."(19) Indeed, The Wall Street Journal observed, "Not only has the biotech industry yielded negative financial returns for decades, it generally digs its hole deeper every year."(20) The Associated Press says it "remains a money-losing, niche industry."(21)
Nowhere in the biotech world is the bad-idea virus more toxic than in its application to GM plants. Not only does the technology under-deliver, it consistently burdens governments and entire sectors with losses and problems.
Under the first Bush administration, for example, the White House's elite Council on Competitiveness chose to fast track GM food in hopes that it would strengthen the economy and make American products more competitive overseas. The opposite ensued. US corn exports to Europe were virtually eliminated, down by 99.4 percent. The American Corn Growers Association (ACGA) calculated that the introduction of GM corn caused a drop in corn prices by 13 to 20 percent.(22) Their CEO said, "The ACGA believes an explanation is owed to the thousands of American farmers who were told to trust this technology, yet now see their prices fall to historically low levels while other countries exploit US vulnerability and pick off our export customers one by one."(23) US soy sales also plummeted due to GM content.
According to Charles Benbrook, PhD, former executive director of the National Academy of Sciences' Board on Agriculture, the closed markets and slashed prices forced the federal government to pay an additional $3 to $5 billion every year.(24) He says growers have only been kept afloat by the huge jump in subsidies.(25)
Instead of withdrawing support for failed GM crops, the US government has been convinced by Monsanto and others that the key to success is to force open foreign markets to GMOs. But many nations are also reeling under the false promise of GMOs.
Canola crashes on GM
When Canada became the only major producer to adopt GM canola in 1996, it led to a disaster. The premium-paying EU market, which took about one-third of Canada's canola exports in 1994 and one-fourth in 1995, stopped all imports from Canada by 1998. The GM canola was diverted to the low-priced Chinese market. Not only did Canadian canola prices fall to a record low,(26) Canada even lost their EU honey exports due to the GM pollen contamination.
Australia benefited significantly from Canada's folly. By 2006, the EU was buying 38 percent of Australia's canola exports.(27) Nonetheless, Monsanto's people in Australia claimed that GM canola was the way to get more competitive. They told farmers that Roundup Ready canola would yield up to 30 percent more. But when an investigator looked at the best trial yields on Monsanto's web site, it was 17 percent below the national average canola yield. When that was publicized, the figures quickly disappeared from the Monsanto's site. Two Aussie states did allow GM canola and sure enough, they are suffering from loss of foreign markets.
In Australia and elsewhere, the non-GMO farmers also suffer. Market prices drop, and farmers spend more to set up segregation systems, GMO testing, buffer zones, and separate storage and shipping channels to try to hold onto non-GMO markets. Even then, they risk contamination and lost premiums.
GM farmers don't earn or produce more
Monsanto has been quite successful in convincing farmers that GM crops are the ticket to greater yields and higher profits. You still hear that rhetoric at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). But a 2006 USDA report "could not find positive financial impacts in either the field-level nor the whole-farm analysis" for adoption of Bt corn and Roundup Ready soybeans. They said, "Perhaps the biggest issue raised by these results is how to explain the rapid adoption of [GM] crops when farm financial impacts appear to be mixed or even negative."(28)
Similarly, the Canadian National Farmers Union (NFU) flatly states, "The claim that GM seeds make our farms more profitable is false."(29) Net farm incomes in Canada plummeted since the introduction of GM canola, with the last five years being the worst in Canada's history.
In spite of numerous advertising claims that GM crops increase yield, the average GM crop from Monsanto reduces yield. This was confirmed by the most comprehensive evaluation on the subject, conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2009. Called Failure to Yield, the report demonstrated that in spite of years of trying, GM crops return fewer bushels than their non-GM counterparts. Even the 2006 USDA report stated that "currently available GM crops do not increase the yield potential of a hybrid variety. . . . In fact, yield may even decrease if the varieties used to carry the herbicide tolerant or insect-resistant genes are not the highest yielding cultivars."(30)
US farmers had expected higher yields with Roundup Ready soybeans, but independent studies confirm a yield loss of 4 to 11percent.(31) Brazilian soybean yields are also down since Roundup Ready varieties were introduced.(32) In Canada, a study showed a 7.5 percent lower yield with Roundup Ready canola.(33)
The Canadian National Farmers Union (NFU) observed, "Corporate and government managers have spent millions trying to convince farmers and other citizens of the benefits of genetically-modified (GM) crops. But this huge public relations effort has failed to obscure the truth: GM crops do not deliver the promised benefits; they create numerous problems, costs, and risks. . . . It would be too generous even to call GM crops a solution in search of a problem: These crops have failed to provide significant solutions."(34)
Herbicide use rising due to GMOs
Monsanto bragged that their Roundup Ready technology would reduce herbicide, but at the same time they were building new Roundup factories to meet their anticipated increase in demand. They got it. According to USDA data, the amount of herbicide used in the US increased by 382.6 million pounds over 13 years. Monsanto's Roundup Ready soybeans accounted for 92 percent of the total increase. Due to the proliferation of Roundup resistant weeds, herbicide use is accelerating rapidly. From 2007 to 2008, herbicide used on GM herbicide tolerant crops skyrocketed by 31.4 percent.(35) Furthermore, as weeds fail to respond to Roundup, farmers also rely on more toxic pesticides such as the highly poisonous 2,4-D.
Contamination happens
In spite of Monsanto's assurances that it wouldn't be a problem, contamination has been a consistent and often overwhelming hardship for seed dealers, farmers, manufacturers, even entire food sectors. The biotech industry recommends buffer zones between fields, but these have not been competent to protect non-GM, organic, or wild plants from GMOs. A UK study showed canola cross-pollination occurring as far as 26 km away.(36)
But pollination is just one of several ways that contamination happens. There is also seed movement by weather and insects, crop mixing during harvest, transport, and storage, and very often, human error. The contamination is North America is so great, it is difficult for farmers to secure pure non-GM seed. In Canada, a study found 32 of 33 certified non-GM canola seeds were contaminated.(37) Most of the non-GM soy, corn, and canola seeds tested in the US also contained GMOs.(38)
Contamination can be very expensive. StarLink corn -- unapproved for human consumption -- ended up the US food supply in 2000 and resulted in an estimated price tag of $1 billion. The final cost of GM rice contamination in the US in 2006 could be even higher.
Deadly deception in India
Monsanto ran a poster series called, "TRUE STORIES OF FARMERS WHO HAVE SOWN BT COTTON." One featured a farmer who claimed great benefits, but when investigators tracked him down, he turned out to be a cigarette salesman, not a farmer. Another poster claimed yields by the pictured farmer that were four times what he actually achieved. One poster showed a farmer standing next to a tractor, suggesting that sales of Bt cotton allowed him to buy it. But the farmer was never told what the photo was to be used for, and said that with the yields from Bt, "I would not be able to buy even two tractor tires."
In addition to posters, Monsanto's cotton marketers used dancing girls, famous Bollywood actors, even religious leaders to pitch their products. Some newspaper ads looked like a news stories and featured relatives of seed salesmen claiming to be happy with Bt. Sometimes free pesticides were given away with the seeds, and some farmers who helped with publicity got free seeds.
Scientists published a study claiming that Monsanto's cotton increased yields in India by 70 to 80 percent. But they used only field trial data provided to them by Monsanto. Actual yields turn out to be quite different:
• India News(39) reported studies showing a loss of about 18 percent.
• An independent study in Andhra Pradesh "done on [a] season-long basis continuously for three years in 87 villages" showed that growing Bt cotton cost 12 percent more, yielded 8.3 percent less, and the returns over three years were 60 percent less.(40)
• Another report identified a yield loss in the Warangal district of 30 to 60 percent. The official report, however, was tampered with. The local Deputy Director of Agriculture confirmed on Feb. 1, 2005 that the yield figures had been secretly increased to 2.7 times higher than what farms reported. Once the state of Andhra Pradesh tallied all the actual yields, they demanded approximately $10 million USD from Monsanto to compensate farmers for losses. Monsanto refused.
In sharp contrast to the independent research done by agronomists, Monsanto commissioned studies to be done by market research agencies. One, for example, claimed four times the actual reduction in pesticide use, 12 times the actual yield, and 100 times the actual profit.(41)
In Andhra Pradesh, where 71 percent of farmers who used Bt cotton ended up with financial losses, farmers attacked the seed dealer's office and even "tied up Mahyco Monsanto representatives in their villages," until the police rescued them.(42)
In spite of great losses and unreliable yields, Monsanto has skillfully eliminated the availability of non-GM cotton seeds in many regions throughout India, forcing farmers to buy their varieties.
Farmers borrow heavily and at high interest rates to pay four times the price for the GM varieties, along with the chemicals needed to grow them. When Bt cotton performs poorly and can't even pay back the debt, desperate farmers resort to suicide, often drinking unused pesticides. In one region, more than three Bt cotton farmers take their own lives each day. The UK Daily Mail estimates that the total number of Bt cotton-related suicides in India is a staggering 125,000.
Doctors orders: no genetically modified food
A greater tragedy may be the harm from the dangerous GM foods produced by Monsanto. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) has called on all physicians to prescribe diets without GM foods to all patients.(43) They called for a moratorium on GMOs, long-term independent studies, and labeling. They stated, "Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food," including infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system. "There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects. There is causation…"
Former AAEM President Dr. Jennifer Armstrong says, "Physicians are probably seeing the effects in their patients, but need to know how to ask the right questions." Renowned biologist Pushpa M. Bhargava believes that GMOs are a major contributor to the deteriorating health in America.
Pregnant women and babies at great risk
GM foods are particularly dangerous for pregnant moms and children. After GM soy was fed to female rats, most of their babies died -- compared to 10 percent deaths among controls fed natural soy.(44) GM-fed babies were smaller, and possibly infertile.(45)
Testicles of rats fed GM soy changed from the normal pink to dark blue.(46) Mice fed GM soy had altered young sperm.(47) Embryos of GM soy-fed parent mice had changed DNA.(48) And mice fed GM corn had fewer, and smaller, babies.(49)
In Haryana, India, most buffalo that ate GM cottonseed had reproductive complications such as premature deliveries, abortions, and infertility; many calves died. About two dozen US farmers said thousands of pigs became sterile from certain GM corn varieties. Some had false pregnancies; others gave birth to bags of water. Cows and bulls also became infertile.(50)
In the US, incidence of low birth weight babies, infertility, and infant mortality are all escalating.
Food that produces poison
Monsanto's GM corn and cotton are engineered to produce a built-in pesticide called Bt-toxin -- produced from soil bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis. When bugs bite the plant, poison splits open their stomach and kills them. Organic farmers and others use natural Bt bacteria spray for insect control, so Monsanto claims that Bt-toxin must be safe.
The Bt-toxin produced in GM plants, however, is thousands of times more concentrated than natural Bt spray, is designed to be more toxic,(51) has properties of an allergen, and cannot be washed off the plant.
Moreover, studies confirm that even the less toxic natural spray can be harmful. When dispersed by plane to kill gypsy moths in Washington and Vancouver, about 500 people reported allergy or flu-like symptoms.(52)(53) The same symptoms are now reported by farm workers from handling Bt cotton throughout India.(54)
GMOs provoke immune reactions
GMO safety expert Arpad Pusztai says changes in immune status are "a consistent feature of all the [animal] studies."(55) From Monsanto's own research to government funded trials, rodents fed Bt corn had significant immune reactions.(56)(57)
Soon after GM soy was introduced to the UK, soy allergies skyrocketed by 50 percent. Ohio allergist Dr. John Boyles says "I used to test for soy allergies all the time, but now that soy is genetically engineered, it is so dangerous that I tell people never to eat it."
GM soy and corn contain new proteins with allergenic properties,(58) and GM soy has up to seven times more of a known soy allergen.(59) Perhaps the US epidemic of food llergies and asthma is a casualty of genetic manipulation.
Animals dying in large numbers
In India, animals graze on cotton plants after harvest. But when shepherds let sheep graze on Bt cotton plants, thousands died. Investigators said preliminary evidence "strongly suggests that the sheep mortality was due to a toxin. . . . most probably Bt-toxin."(60) In one small study, all sheep fed Bt cotton plants died; those fed natural plants remained healthy.
In an Andhra Pradesh village, buffalo grazed on cotton plants for eight years without incident. On Jan. 3, 2008, 13 buffalo grazed on Bt cotton plants for the first time. All died within three days.(61) Monsanto's Bt corn is also implicated in the deaths horses, water buffaloes, and chickens in the Philippines.(62)
Lab studies of GM crops by other companies also show mortalities. Twice the number of chickens fed Liberty Link corn died; seven of 40 rats fed a GM tomato died within two weeks.(63) And a farmer in Germany says his cows died after exclusively eating Syngenta's GM corn.
GMOs remain inside of us
The only published human feeding study revealed that even after we stop eating GMOs, harmful GM proteins may be produced continuously inside of us; genes inserted into Monsanto's GM soy transfer into bacteria inside our intestines and continue to function.(64) If Bt genes also transfer, eating corn chips might transform our intestinal bacteria into living pesticide factories.
Hidden dangers
Biologist David Schubert of the Salk Institute says, "If there are problems [with GMOs], we will probably never know because the cause will not be traceable and many diseases take a very long time to develop." In the nine years after GM crops were introduced in 1996, Americans with three or more chronic diseases jumped from 7 percent to 13 percent.(65) But without any human clinical trials or post marketing surveillance, we may never know if GMOs are a contributor.
Un-recallable contamination
In spite of the enormous health dangers, the environmental impacts may be worse still. That is because we don't have a technology to fully clean up the contaminated gene pool. The self-propagating genetic pollution released into the environment from Monsanto's crops can outlast the effects of climate change and nuclear waste.
Replacing nature: "Nothing shall be eaten that we don't own"
As Monsanto has moved forward with its master plan to replace nature, they have led the charge in buying up seed businesses and are now the world's largest. At least 200 independent seed companies have disappeared over 13 years, non-GMO seed availability is dwindling, and Monsanto is jacking up their seed prices dramatically. Corn is up more than 30 percent and soy nearly 25 percent, over 2008 prices.(66)
An Associated Press exposé (67) reveals how Monsanto's onerous contracts allowed them to manipulate, then dominate, the seed industry using unprecedented legal restrictions. One contract provision, for example, "prevented bidding wars" and "likely helped Monsanto buy 24 independent seed companies throughout the Farm Belt over the last few years: that corn seed agreement says that if a smaller company changes ownership, its inventory with Monsanto's traits 'shall be destroyed immediately.'"
With that restriction in place, the seed companies couldn't even think of selling to a company other than Monsanto. According to attorney David Boies, who represents DuPont -- owner of Pioneer Seeds: "If the independent seed company is losing their license and has to destroy their seeds, they're not going to have anything, in effect, to sell," Boies said. "It requires them to destroy things -- destroy things they paid for -- if they go competitive. That's exactly the kind of restriction on competitive choice that the antitrust laws outlaw." Boies was a prosecutor on the antitrust case against Microsoft. He is now working with DuPont in their civil antitrust lawsuit against Monsanto.
Monsanto also has the right to cancel deals and wipe out the inventory of a business if the confidentiality clauses are violated:
"We now believe that Monsanto has control over as much as 90 percent of (seed genetics). This level of control is almost unbelievable,' said Neil Harl, agricultural economist at Iowa State University who has studied the seed industry for decades."
Monsanto also controls and manipulates farmers through onerous contracts. Troy Roush, for example, is one of hundreds accused by Monsanto of illegally saving their seeds. The company requires farmers to sign a contract that they will not save and replant GM seeds from their harvest. That way Monsanto can sell its seeds -- at a premium -- each season.
Although Roush maintains his innocence, he was forced to settle with Monsanto after two and a half years of court battles. He says his "family was just destroyed [from] the stress involved." Many farmers are afraid, according to Roush, because Monsanto has "created a little industry that serves no other purpose than to wreck farmers' lives." Monsanto has collected an estimated $200 million from farmers thus far.
Roush says, "They are in the process of owning food, all food." Paraguayan farmer Jorge Galeano says, "Its objective is to control all of the world's food production." Renowned Indian physicist and community organizer Vandana Shiva says, "If they control seed, they control food; they know it, it's strategic. It's more powerful than bombs; it's more powerful than guns. This is the best way to control the populations of the world."
Our food security lies in diversity -- both biodiversity, and diversity of owners and interests. Any single company that consolidates ownership of seeds, and therefore power over the food supply, is a dangerous threat. Of all the corporations in the world, however, the one we should trust the least is Monsanto. With them at the helm, the impact could be cataclysmic.
source http://www.naturalnews.com/029325_Monsanto_deception.html
by: Jeffrey M. Smith
(NaturalNews) At a biotech industry conference in January 1999, a representative from Arthur Anderson, LLP explained how they had helped Monsanto design their strategic plan. First, his team asked Monsanto executives what their ideal future looked like in 15 to 20 years. The executives described a world with 100 percent of all commercial seeds genetically modified and patented. Anderson consultants then worked backwards from that goal, and developed the strategy and tactics to achieve it. They presented Monsanto with the steps and procedures needed to obtain a place of industry dominance in a world in which natural seeds were virtually extinct.
This was a bold new direction for Monsanto, which needed a big change to distance them from a controversial past. As a chemical company, they had polluted the landscape with some of the most poisonous substances ever produced, contaminated virtually every human and animal on earth, and got fined and convicted of deception and wrongdoing. According to a former Monsanto vice president, "We were despised by our customers."
So they redefined themselves as a "life sciences" company, and then proceeded to pollute the landscape with toxic herbicide, contaminate the gene pool for all future generations with genetically modified plants, and get fined and convicted of deception and wrongdoing. Monsanto's chief European spokesman admitted in 1999, "Everybody over here hates us." Now the rest of the world is catching on.
"Saving the world," and other lies
Monsanto's public relations story about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are largely based on five concepts.
1. GMOs are needed to feed the world.
2. GMOs have been thoroughly tested and proven safe.
3. GMOs increase yield.
4. GMOs reduce the use of agricultural chemicals.
5. GMOs can be contained, and therefore coexist with non-GM crops.
All five are pure myths -- blatant falsehoods about the nature and benefit of this infant technology. The experience of former Monsanto employee Kirk Azevedo helps expose the first two lies, and provides some insight into the nature of the people working at the company.
In 1996, Monsanto recruited young Kirk Azevedo to sell their genetically engineered cotton. Azevedo accepted their offer not because of the pay increase, but due to the writings of Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro. Shapiro had painted a picture of feeding the world and cleaning up the environment with his company's new technology. When he visited Monsanto's St. Louis headquarters for new employee training, Azevedo shared his enthusiasm for Shapiro's vision during a meeting. When the session ended, a company vice president pulled him aside and set him straight. "Wait a second," he told Azevedo. "What Robert Shapiro says is one thing. But what we do is something else. We are here to make money. He is the front man who tells a story. We don't even understand what he is saying." Azevedo realized he was working for "just another profit-oriented company," and all the glowing words about helping the planet were just a front.
A few months later he got another shock. A company scientist told him that Roundup Ready cotton plants contained new, unintended proteins that had resulted from the gene insertion process. No safety studies had been conducted on the proteins, none were planned, and the cotton plants, which were part of field trials near his home, were being fed to cattle. Azevedo "was afraid at that time that some of these proteins may be toxic."
He asked the PhD in charge of the test plot to destroy the cotton rather than feed it to cattle, arguing that until the protein had been evaluated, the cows' milk or meat could be harmful. The scientist refused. Azevedo approached everyone on his team at Monsanto to raise concerns about the unknown protein, but no one was interested. "I was somewhat ostracized," he said. "Once I started questioning things, people wanted to keep their distance from me. . . . Anything that interfered with advancing the commercialization of this technology was going to be pushed aside." Azevedo decided to leave Monsanto. He said, "I'm not going to be part of this disaster."
Monsanto's toxic past
Azevedo got a small taste of Monsanto's character. A verdict in a lawsuit a few years later made it more explicit. On February 22, 2002, Monsanto was found guilty for poisoning the town of Anniston, Alabama with their PCB factory and covering it up for decades. They were convicted of negligence, wantonness, suppression of the truth, nuisance, trespass, and outrage. According to Alabama law, to be guilty of outrage typically requires conduct "so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society."(1)
The $700 million fine imposed on Monsanto was on behalf of the Anniston residents, whose blood levels of Monsanto's toxic PCBs were hundreds or thousands of times the average. This disease-producing chemical, used as coolants and lubricants for over 50 years, are now virtually omnipresent in the blood and tissues of humans and wildlife around the globe. Ken Cook of the Environmental Working Group says that based on Monsanto documents made public during a trial, the company "knew the truth from the very beginning. They lied about it. They hid the truth from their neighbors." One Monsanto memo explains their justification: "We can't afford to lose one dollar of business." Welcome to the world of Monsanto.
Infiltrating the minds and offices of the government
To get their genetically modified products approved, Monsanto has coerced, infiltrated, and paid off government officials around the globe. In Indonesia, Monsanto gave bribes and questionable payments to at least 140 officials, attempting to get their genetically modified (GM) cotton accepted.(2) In 1998, six Canadian government scientists testified before the Senate that they were being pressured by superiors to approve rbGH, that documents were stolen from a locked file cabinet in a government office, and that Monsanto offered them a bribe of $1-2 million to pass the drug without further tests. In India, one official tampered with the report on Bt cotton to increase the yield figures to favor Monsanto.(3) And Monsanto seems to have planted their own people in key government positions in India, Brazil, Europe, and worldwide.
Monsanto's GM seeds were also illegally smuggled into countries like Brazil and Paraguay, before GMOs were approved. Roberto Franco, Paraguay's Deputy Agriculture Ministry, tactfully admits, "It is possible that [Monsanto], let's say, promoted its varieties and its seeds" before they were approved. "We had to authorize GMO seeds because they had already entered our country in an, let's say, unorthodox way."
In the US, Monsanto's people regularly infiltrate upper echelons of government, and the company offers prominent positions to officials when they leave public service. This revolving door has included key people in the White House, regulatory agencies, even the Supreme Court. Monsanto also had George Bush Senior on their side, as evidenced by footage of Vice President Bush at Monsanto's facility offering help to get their products through government bureaucracy. He says, "Call me. We're in the 'de-reg' business. Maybe we can help."
Monsanto's influence continued into the Clinton administration. Dan Glickman, then Secretary of Agriculture, says, "there was a general feeling in agro-business and inside our government in the US that if you weren't marching lock-step forward in favor of rapid approvals of biotech products, rapid approvals of GMO crops, then somehow, you were anti-science and anti-progress." Glickman summarized the mindset in the government as follows:
"What I saw generically on the pro-biotech side was the attitude that the technology was good, and that it was almost immoral to say that it wasn't good, because it was going to solve the problems of the human race and feed the hungry and clothe the naked. . . . And there was a lot of money that had been invested in this, and if you're against it, you're Luddites, you're stupid. That, frankly, was the side our government was on. Without thinking, we had basically taken this issue as a trade issue and they, whoever 'they' were, wanted to keep our product out of their market. And they were foolish, or stupid, and didn't have an effective regulatory system. There was rhetoric like that even here in this department. You felt like you were almost an alien, disloyal, by trying to present an open-minded view on some of the issues being raised. So I pretty much spouted the rhetoric that everybody else around here spouted; it was written into my speeches."(4)
He admits, "when I opened my mouth in the Clinton Administration [about the lax regulations on GMOs], I got slapped around a little bit."
Hijacking the FDA to promote GMOs
In the US, new food additives must undergo extensive testing, including long-term animal feeding studies.(5) There is an exception, however, for substances that are deemed "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS). GRAS status allows a product to be commercialized without any additional testing. According to US law, to be considered GRAS the substance must be the subject of a substantial amount of peer-reviewed published studies (or equivalent) and there must be overwhelming consensus among the scientific community that the product is safe. GM foods had neither. Nonetheless, in a precedent-setting move that some experts contend was illegal, in 1992 the FDA declared that GM crops are GRAS as long as their producers say they are. Thus, the FDA does not require any safety evaluations or labels whatsoever. A company can even introduce a GM food to the market without telling the agency.
Such a lenient approach to GM crops was largely the result of Monsanto's legendary influence over the US government. According to the New York Times, "What Monsanto wished for from Washington, Monsanto and, by extension, the biotechnology industry got. . . . When the company abruptly decided that it needed to throw off the regulations and speed its foods to market, the White House quickly ushered through an unusually generous policy of self-policing." According to Dr. Henry Miller, who had a leading role in biotechnology issues at the FDA from 1979 to 1994, "In this area, the U.S. government agencies have done exactly what big agribusiness has asked them to do and told them to do."
The person who oversaw the development of the FDA's GMO policy was their Deputy Commissioner for Policy, Michael Taylor, whose position had been created especially for him in 1991. Prior to that, Taylor was an outside attorney for both Monsanto and the Food Biotechnology Council. After working at the FDA, he became Monsanto's vice president. He's now back at the FDA, as the US food safety czar.
Covering up health dangers
The policy Taylor oversaw in 1992 needed to create the impression that unintended effects from GM crops were not an issue. Otherwise their GRAS status would be undermined. But internal memos made public from a lawsuit showed that the overwhelming consensus among the agency scientists was that GM crops can have unpredictable, hard-to-detect side effects. Various departments and experts spelled these out in detail, listing allergies, toxins, nutritional effects, and new diseases as potential problems. They had urged superiors to require long-term safety studies.(6) In spite of the warnings, according to public interest attorney Steven Druker who studied the FDA's internal files, "References to the unintended negative effects of bioengineering were progressively deleted from drafts of the policy statement (over the protests of agency scientists)."(7)
FDA microbiologist Louis Pribyl wrote about the policy, "What has happened to the scientific elements of this document? Without a sound scientific base to rest on, this becomes a broad, general, 'What do I have to do to avoid trouble'-type document. . . . It will look like and probably be just a political document. . . . It reads very pro-industry, especially in the area of unintended effects."(8)
The FDA scientists' concerns were not only ignored, their very existence was denied. Consider the private memo summarizing opinions at the FDA, which stated, "The processes of genetic engineering and traditional breeding are different and according to the technical experts in the agency, they lead to different risks."(9) Contrast that with the official policy statement issued by Taylor, Monsanto's former attorney: "The agency is not aware of any information showing that foods derived by these new methods differ from other foods in any meaningful or uniform way."(10) On the basis of this false statement, the FDA does not require GM food safety testing.
Fake safety assessments
Monsanto participates in a voluntary consultation process with the FDA that is derided by critics as a meaningless exercise. Monsanto submits whatever information it chooses, and the FDA does not conduct or commission any studies of its own. Former EPA scientist Doug Gurian-Sherman, who analyzed FDA review records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, says the FDA consultation process "misses obvious errors in company-submitted data summaries, provides insufficient testing guidance, and does not require sufficiently detailed data to enable the FDA to assure that GE crops are safe to eat."(11)
But that is not the point of the exercise. The FDA doesn't actually approve the crops or declare them safe. That is Monsanto's job! At the end of the consultation, the FDA issues a letter stating:
"Based on the safety and nutritional assessment you have conducted, it is our understanding that Monsanto has concluded that corn products derived from this new variety are not materially different in composition, safety, and other relevant parameters from corn currently on the market, and that the genetically modified corn does not raise issues that would require premarket review or approval by FDA. . . . As you are aware, it is Monsanto's responsibility to ensure that foods marketed by the firm are safe, wholesome and in compliance with all applicable legal and regulatory requirements."(12)
The National Academy of Sciences and even the pro-GM Royal Society of London(13) describe the US system as inadequate and flawed. The editor of the prestigious journal Lancet said, "It is astounding that the US Food and Drug Administration has not changed their stance on genetically modified food adopted in 1992. . . . Governments should never have allowed these products into the food chain without insisting on rigorous testing for effects on health."(14)
One obvious reason for the inflexibility of the FDA is that they are officially charged with both regulating biotech products and promoting them -- a clear conflict. That is also why the FDA does not require mandatory labeling of GM foods. They ignore the desires of 90 percent of American citizens in order to support the economic interests of Monsanto and the four other GM food companies.
Monsanto's studies are secret, inadequate, and flawed
The unpublished industry studies submitted to regulators are typically kept secret based on the claim that it is "confidential business information." The Royal Society of Canada is one of many organizations that condemn this practice. Their Expert Panel called for "completely transparent" submissions, "open to full review by scientific peers" They wrote, "Peer review and independent corroboration of research findings are axioms of the scientific method, and part of the very meaning of the objectivity and neutrality of science."(15)
Whenever Monsanto's private submissions are made public through lawsuits or Freedom of Information Act Requests, it becomes clear why they benefit from secrecy. The quality of their research is often miserable, and would never stand up to peer-review. In December 2009, for example, a team of independent researchers published a study analyzing the raw data from three Monsanto rat studies. When they used proper statistical methods, they found that the three varieties of GM corn caused toxicity in the liver and kidneys, as well as significant changes in other organs.(16) Monsanto's studies, of course, had claimed that the research showed no problems. The regulators had believed Monsanto, and the corn is already in our food supply.
Monsanto rigs research to miss dangers
(17)
Monsanto has plenty of experience cooking the books of their research and hiding the hazards. They manufactured the infamous Agent Orange, for example, the cancer and birth-defect causing defoliant sprayed over Vietnam. It contaminated more than three million civilians and servicemen. But according to William Sanjour, who led the Toxic Waste Division of the Environmental Protection Agency, "thousands of veterans were disallowed benefits" because "Monsanto studies showed that dioxin [the main ingredient in Agent Orange] was not a human carcinogen." But his EPA colleague discovered that Monsanto had allegedly falsified the data in their studies. Sanjour says, "If they were done correctly, [the studies] would have reached just the opposite result."
Here are examples of tinkering with the truth about Monsanto's GM products:
• When dairy farmers inject cows with genetically modified bovine growth hormone (rbGH), more bovine growth hormone ends up in the milk. To allay fears, the FDA claimed that pasteurization destroys 90 percent of the hormone. In reality, the researchers of this drug (then owned by Monsanto) pasteurized the milk 120 times longer than normal. But they only destroyed 19 percent. So they spiked the milk with a huge amount of extra growth hormone and then repeated the long pasteurization. Only under these artificial conditions were they able to destroy 90 percent.
• To demonstrate that rbGH injections didn't interfere with cows' fertility, Monsanto appears to have secretly added cows to their study that were pregnant BEFORE injection.
• FDA Veterinarian Richard Burroughs said that Monsanto researchers dropped sick cows from studies, to make the drug appear safer.
• Richard Burroughs ordered more tests on rbGH than the industry wanted and was told by superiors he was slowing down the approval. He was fired and his tests canceled. The remaining whistle-blowers in the FDA had to write an anonymous letter to Congress, complaining of fraud and conflict of interest in the agency. They complained of one FDA scientist who arbitrarily increased the allowable levels of antibiotics in milk 100-fold, in order to facilitate the approval of rbGH. She had just become the head of an FDA department that was evaluating the research that she had recently done while an employee of Monsanto.
• Another former Monsanto scientist said that after company scientists conducted safety studies on bovine growth hormone, all three refused to drink any more milk, unless it was organic and therefore not treated with the drug. They feared the substantial increase of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) in the drugged milk. IGF-1 is a significant risk factor for cancer.
• When independent researchers published a study in July 1999 showing that Monsanto's GM soy contains 12-14 percent less cancer-fighting phytoestrogens, Monsanto responded with its own study, concluding that soy's phytoestrogen levels vary too much to even carry out a statistical analysis. Researchers failed to disclose, however, that they had instructed the laboratory to use an obsolete method of detection -- one that had been prone to highly variable results.
• To prove that GM protein breaks down quickly during simulated digestion, Monsanto uses thousands of times the amount of digestive enzymes and a much stronger acid than what the World Health Organization recommends.
• Monsanto told government regulators that the GM protein produced in their high-lysine GM corn was safe for humans, because it is also found in soil. They claimed that since people consume small residues of soil on fruits and vegetables, the protein has a safe history as part of the human diet. The actual amount of the GM corn protein an average US citizen would consume, however, if all their corn were Monsanto's variety, would be "about 30 billion to four trillion times" the amount normally consumed in soil residues. For equivalent exposure, people would have to eat as much as 22,000 pounds of soil every second of every day.
• Monsanto's high-lysine corn also had unusual levels of several nutritional components, such as protein and fiber. Instead of comparing it to normal corn, which would have revealed this significant disparity, Monsanto compared their GM corn to obscure corn varieties that were also far outside the normal range on precisely these values. On this basis, Monsanto could claim that there were no statistically significant differences in their GM corn content.
Methods used by Monsanto to hide problems are varied and plentiful. For example, researchers:
• Use animals with varied starting weights, to hinder the detection of food-related changes;
• Keep feeding studies short, to miss long-term impacts;
• Test Roundup Ready soybeans that have never been sprayed with Roundup -- as they always are in real world conditions;
• Avoid feeding animals the GM crop, but instead give them a single dose of GM protein produced from GM bacteria;
• Use too few subjects to obtain statistical significance;
• Use poor or inappropriate statistical methods, or fail to even mention statistical methods, or include essential data; and
• Employ insensitive detection techniques -- doomed to fail.
Monsanto's 1996 Journal of Nutrition study, which was their cornerstone article for "proving" that GM soy was safe, provides plenty of examples of masterfully rigged methods.
• Researchers tested GM soy on mature animals, not the more sensitive young ones. GMO safety expert Arpad Pusztai says the older animals "would have to be emaciated or poisoned to show anything."
• Organs were never weighed.
• The GM soy was diluted up to 12 times which, according to an expert review, "would probably ensure that any possible undesirable GM effects did not occur."
• The amount of protein in the feed was "artificially too high," which would mask negative impacts of the soy.
• Samples were pooled from different locations and conditions, making it nearly impossible for compositional differences to be statistically significant.
• Data from the only side-by-side comparison was removed from the study and never published. When it was later recovered, it revealed that Monsanto's GM soy had significantly lower levels of important constituents (e.g. protein, a fatty acid, and phenylalanine, an essential amino acid) and that toasted GM soy meal had nearly twice the amount of a lectin -- which interferes with the body's ability to assimilate nutrients. Moreover, the amount of trypsin inhibitor, a known soy allergen, was as much as seven times higher in cooked GM soy compared to a cooked non-GM control. Monsanto named their study, "The composition of glyphosate-tolerant soybean seeds is equivalent to that of conventional soybeans."
A paper published in Nutrition and Health analyzed all peer-reviewed feeding studies on GM foods as of 2003. It came as no surprise that Monsanto's Journal of Nutrition study, along with the other four peer-reviewed animal feeding studies that were "performed more or less in collaboration with private companies," reported no negative effects of the GM diet. "On the other hand," they wrote, "adverse effects were reported (but not explained) in [the five] independent studies." They added, "It is remarkable that these effects have all been observed after feeding for only 10 to 14 days."(18)
A former Monsanto scientist recalls how colleagues were trying to rewrite a GM animal feeding study, to hide the ill-effects. But sometimes when study results are unmistakably damaging, Monsanto just plain lies. Monsanto's study on Roundup, for example, showed that 28 days after application, only 2 percent of their herbicide had broken down. They nonetheless advertised the weed killer as "biodegradable," "leaves the soil clean," and "respects the environment." These statements were declared false and illegal by judges in both the US and France. The company was forced to remove "biodegradable" from the label and pay a fine.
Monsanto attacks labeling, local democracy, and news coverage
• On July 3, 2003, Monsanto sued Oakhurst dairy because their labels stated, "Our Farmers' Pledge: No Artificial Growth Hormones." Oakhurst eventually settled with Monsanto, agreeing to include a sentence on their cartons saying that according to the FDA no significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rbGH-treated and non-rbGH-treated cows. The statement is not true. FDA scientists had acknowledged the increase of IGF-1, bovine growth hormone, antibiotics, and pus, in milk from treated cows. Nonetheless, the misleading sentence had been written years earlier by the FDA's deputy commissioner of policy, Michael Taylor, the one who was formerly Monsanto's outside attorney and later their vice president.
• Monsanto's public relations firm created a group called the Dairy Coalition, which pressured editors of the USA Today, Boston Globe, New York Times and others, to limit negative coverage of rbGH.
• A Monsanto attorney wrote a letter to Fox TV, promising dire consequences if the station aired a four-part exposé on rbGH. The show was ultimately canceled.
• A book critical of Monsanto's GM foods was three days away from being published. A threatening letter from Monsanto's attorney forced the small publisher to cancel publication.
• 14,000 copies of Ecologist magazine dedicated to exposing Monsanto were shredded by the printer due to fears of a lawsuit.
• After a ballot initiative in California established Mendocino County as a GM-free zone -- where planting GMOs is illegal, Monsanto and others organized to push through laws in 14 states that make it illegal for cities and counties to declare similar zones.
Monsanto's promises of riches come up short
Biotech advocates have wooed politicians, claiming that their new technology is the path to riches for their city, state, or nation. "This notion that you lure biotech to your community to save its economy is laughable," said Joseph Cortright, an Oregon economist who co-wrote a report on the subject. "This is a bad-idea virus that has swept through governors, mayors and economic development officials."(19) Indeed, The Wall Street Journal observed, "Not only has the biotech industry yielded negative financial returns for decades, it generally digs its hole deeper every year."(20) The Associated Press says it "remains a money-losing, niche industry."(21)
Nowhere in the biotech world is the bad-idea virus more toxic than in its application to GM plants. Not only does the technology under-deliver, it consistently burdens governments and entire sectors with losses and problems.
Under the first Bush administration, for example, the White House's elite Council on Competitiveness chose to fast track GM food in hopes that it would strengthen the economy and make American products more competitive overseas. The opposite ensued. US corn exports to Europe were virtually eliminated, down by 99.4 percent. The American Corn Growers Association (ACGA) calculated that the introduction of GM corn caused a drop in corn prices by 13 to 20 percent.(22) Their CEO said, "The ACGA believes an explanation is owed to the thousands of American farmers who were told to trust this technology, yet now see their prices fall to historically low levels while other countries exploit US vulnerability and pick off our export customers one by one."(23) US soy sales also plummeted due to GM content.
According to Charles Benbrook, PhD, former executive director of the National Academy of Sciences' Board on Agriculture, the closed markets and slashed prices forced the federal government to pay an additional $3 to $5 billion every year.(24) He says growers have only been kept afloat by the huge jump in subsidies.(25)
Instead of withdrawing support for failed GM crops, the US government has been convinced by Monsanto and others that the key to success is to force open foreign markets to GMOs. But many nations are also reeling under the false promise of GMOs.
Canola crashes on GM
When Canada became the only major producer to adopt GM canola in 1996, it led to a disaster. The premium-paying EU market, which took about one-third of Canada's canola exports in 1994 and one-fourth in 1995, stopped all imports from Canada by 1998. The GM canola was diverted to the low-priced Chinese market. Not only did Canadian canola prices fall to a record low,(26) Canada even lost their EU honey exports due to the GM pollen contamination.
Australia benefited significantly from Canada's folly. By 2006, the EU was buying 38 percent of Australia's canola exports.(27) Nonetheless, Monsanto's people in Australia claimed that GM canola was the way to get more competitive. They told farmers that Roundup Ready canola would yield up to 30 percent more. But when an investigator looked at the best trial yields on Monsanto's web site, it was 17 percent below the national average canola yield. When that was publicized, the figures quickly disappeared from the Monsanto's site. Two Aussie states did allow GM canola and sure enough, they are suffering from loss of foreign markets.
In Australia and elsewhere, the non-GMO farmers also suffer. Market prices drop, and farmers spend more to set up segregation systems, GMO testing, buffer zones, and separate storage and shipping channels to try to hold onto non-GMO markets. Even then, they risk contamination and lost premiums.
GM farmers don't earn or produce more
Monsanto has been quite successful in convincing farmers that GM crops are the ticket to greater yields and higher profits. You still hear that rhetoric at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). But a 2006 USDA report "could not find positive financial impacts in either the field-level nor the whole-farm analysis" for adoption of Bt corn and Roundup Ready soybeans. They said, "Perhaps the biggest issue raised by these results is how to explain the rapid adoption of [GM] crops when farm financial impacts appear to be mixed or even negative."(28)
Similarly, the Canadian National Farmers Union (NFU) flatly states, "The claim that GM seeds make our farms more profitable is false."(29) Net farm incomes in Canada plummeted since the introduction of GM canola, with the last five years being the worst in Canada's history.
In spite of numerous advertising claims that GM crops increase yield, the average GM crop from Monsanto reduces yield. This was confirmed by the most comprehensive evaluation on the subject, conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2009. Called Failure to Yield, the report demonstrated that in spite of years of trying, GM crops return fewer bushels than their non-GM counterparts. Even the 2006 USDA report stated that "currently available GM crops do not increase the yield potential of a hybrid variety. . . . In fact, yield may even decrease if the varieties used to carry the herbicide tolerant or insect-resistant genes are not the highest yielding cultivars."(30)
US farmers had expected higher yields with Roundup Ready soybeans, but independent studies confirm a yield loss of 4 to 11percent.(31) Brazilian soybean yields are also down since Roundup Ready varieties were introduced.(32) In Canada, a study showed a 7.5 percent lower yield with Roundup Ready canola.(33)
The Canadian National Farmers Union (NFU) observed, "Corporate and government managers have spent millions trying to convince farmers and other citizens of the benefits of genetically-modified (GM) crops. But this huge public relations effort has failed to obscure the truth: GM crops do not deliver the promised benefits; they create numerous problems, costs, and risks. . . . It would be too generous even to call GM crops a solution in search of a problem: These crops have failed to provide significant solutions."(34)
Herbicide use rising due to GMOs
Monsanto bragged that their Roundup Ready technology would reduce herbicide, but at the same time they were building new Roundup factories to meet their anticipated increase in demand. They got it. According to USDA data, the amount of herbicide used in the US increased by 382.6 million pounds over 13 years. Monsanto's Roundup Ready soybeans accounted for 92 percent of the total increase. Due to the proliferation of Roundup resistant weeds, herbicide use is accelerating rapidly. From 2007 to 2008, herbicide used on GM herbicide tolerant crops skyrocketed by 31.4 percent.(35) Furthermore, as weeds fail to respond to Roundup, farmers also rely on more toxic pesticides such as the highly poisonous 2,4-D.
Contamination happens
In spite of Monsanto's assurances that it wouldn't be a problem, contamination has been a consistent and often overwhelming hardship for seed dealers, farmers, manufacturers, even entire food sectors. The biotech industry recommends buffer zones between fields, but these have not been competent to protect non-GM, organic, or wild plants from GMOs. A UK study showed canola cross-pollination occurring as far as 26 km away.(36)
But pollination is just one of several ways that contamination happens. There is also seed movement by weather and insects, crop mixing during harvest, transport, and storage, and very often, human error. The contamination is North America is so great, it is difficult for farmers to secure pure non-GM seed. In Canada, a study found 32 of 33 certified non-GM canola seeds were contaminated.(37) Most of the non-GM soy, corn, and canola seeds tested in the US also contained GMOs.(38)
Contamination can be very expensive. StarLink corn -- unapproved for human consumption -- ended up the US food supply in 2000 and resulted in an estimated price tag of $1 billion. The final cost of GM rice contamination in the US in 2006 could be even higher.
Deadly deception in India
Monsanto ran a poster series called, "TRUE STORIES OF FARMERS WHO HAVE SOWN BT COTTON." One featured a farmer who claimed great benefits, but when investigators tracked him down, he turned out to be a cigarette salesman, not a farmer. Another poster claimed yields by the pictured farmer that were four times what he actually achieved. One poster showed a farmer standing next to a tractor, suggesting that sales of Bt cotton allowed him to buy it. But the farmer was never told what the photo was to be used for, and said that with the yields from Bt, "I would not be able to buy even two tractor tires."
In addition to posters, Monsanto's cotton marketers used dancing girls, famous Bollywood actors, even religious leaders to pitch their products. Some newspaper ads looked like a news stories and featured relatives of seed salesmen claiming to be happy with Bt. Sometimes free pesticides were given away with the seeds, and some farmers who helped with publicity got free seeds.
Scientists published a study claiming that Monsanto's cotton increased yields in India by 70 to 80 percent. But they used only field trial data provided to them by Monsanto. Actual yields turn out to be quite different:
• India News(39) reported studies showing a loss of about 18 percent.
• An independent study in Andhra Pradesh "done on [a] season-long basis continuously for three years in 87 villages" showed that growing Bt cotton cost 12 percent more, yielded 8.3 percent less, and the returns over three years were 60 percent less.(40)
• Another report identified a yield loss in the Warangal district of 30 to 60 percent. The official report, however, was tampered with. The local Deputy Director of Agriculture confirmed on Feb. 1, 2005 that the yield figures had been secretly increased to 2.7 times higher than what farms reported. Once the state of Andhra Pradesh tallied all the actual yields, they demanded approximately $10 million USD from Monsanto to compensate farmers for losses. Monsanto refused.
In sharp contrast to the independent research done by agronomists, Monsanto commissioned studies to be done by market research agencies. One, for example, claimed four times the actual reduction in pesticide use, 12 times the actual yield, and 100 times the actual profit.(41)
In Andhra Pradesh, where 71 percent of farmers who used Bt cotton ended up with financial losses, farmers attacked the seed dealer's office and even "tied up Mahyco Monsanto representatives in their villages," until the police rescued them.(42)
In spite of great losses and unreliable yields, Monsanto has skillfully eliminated the availability of non-GM cotton seeds in many regions throughout India, forcing farmers to buy their varieties.
Farmers borrow heavily and at high interest rates to pay four times the price for the GM varieties, along with the chemicals needed to grow them. When Bt cotton performs poorly and can't even pay back the debt, desperate farmers resort to suicide, often drinking unused pesticides. In one region, more than three Bt cotton farmers take their own lives each day. The UK Daily Mail estimates that the total number of Bt cotton-related suicides in India is a staggering 125,000.
Doctors orders: no genetically modified food
A greater tragedy may be the harm from the dangerous GM foods produced by Monsanto. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) has called on all physicians to prescribe diets without GM foods to all patients.(43) They called for a moratorium on GMOs, long-term independent studies, and labeling. They stated, "Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food," including infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system. "There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects. There is causation…"
Former AAEM President Dr. Jennifer Armstrong says, "Physicians are probably seeing the effects in their patients, but need to know how to ask the right questions." Renowned biologist Pushpa M. Bhargava believes that GMOs are a major contributor to the deteriorating health in America.
Pregnant women and babies at great risk
GM foods are particularly dangerous for pregnant moms and children. After GM soy was fed to female rats, most of their babies died -- compared to 10 percent deaths among controls fed natural soy.(44) GM-fed babies were smaller, and possibly infertile.(45)
Testicles of rats fed GM soy changed from the normal pink to dark blue.(46) Mice fed GM soy had altered young sperm.(47) Embryos of GM soy-fed parent mice had changed DNA.(48) And mice fed GM corn had fewer, and smaller, babies.(49)
In Haryana, India, most buffalo that ate GM cottonseed had reproductive complications such as premature deliveries, abortions, and infertility; many calves died. About two dozen US farmers said thousands of pigs became sterile from certain GM corn varieties. Some had false pregnancies; others gave birth to bags of water. Cows and bulls also became infertile.(50)
In the US, incidence of low birth weight babies, infertility, and infant mortality are all escalating.
Food that produces poison
Monsanto's GM corn and cotton are engineered to produce a built-in pesticide called Bt-toxin -- produced from soil bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis. When bugs bite the plant, poison splits open their stomach and kills them. Organic farmers and others use natural Bt bacteria spray for insect control, so Monsanto claims that Bt-toxin must be safe.
The Bt-toxin produced in GM plants, however, is thousands of times more concentrated than natural Bt spray, is designed to be more toxic,(51) has properties of an allergen, and cannot be washed off the plant.
Moreover, studies confirm that even the less toxic natural spray can be harmful. When dispersed by plane to kill gypsy moths in Washington and Vancouver, about 500 people reported allergy or flu-like symptoms.(52)(53) The same symptoms are now reported by farm workers from handling Bt cotton throughout India.(54)
GMOs provoke immune reactions
GMO safety expert Arpad Pusztai says changes in immune status are "a consistent feature of all the [animal] studies."(55) From Monsanto's own research to government funded trials, rodents fed Bt corn had significant immune reactions.(56)(57)
Soon after GM soy was introduced to the UK, soy allergies skyrocketed by 50 percent. Ohio allergist Dr. John Boyles says "I used to test for soy allergies all the time, but now that soy is genetically engineered, it is so dangerous that I tell people never to eat it."
GM soy and corn contain new proteins with allergenic properties,(58) and GM soy has up to seven times more of a known soy allergen.(59) Perhaps the US epidemic of food llergies and asthma is a casualty of genetic manipulation.
Animals dying in large numbers
In India, animals graze on cotton plants after harvest. But when shepherds let sheep graze on Bt cotton plants, thousands died. Investigators said preliminary evidence "strongly suggests that the sheep mortality was due to a toxin. . . . most probably Bt-toxin."(60) In one small study, all sheep fed Bt cotton plants died; those fed natural plants remained healthy.
In an Andhra Pradesh village, buffalo grazed on cotton plants for eight years without incident. On Jan. 3, 2008, 13 buffalo grazed on Bt cotton plants for the first time. All died within three days.(61) Monsanto's Bt corn is also implicated in the deaths horses, water buffaloes, and chickens in the Philippines.(62)
Lab studies of GM crops by other companies also show mortalities. Twice the number of chickens fed Liberty Link corn died; seven of 40 rats fed a GM tomato died within two weeks.(63) And a farmer in Germany says his cows died after exclusively eating Syngenta's GM corn.
GMOs remain inside of us
The only published human feeding study revealed that even after we stop eating GMOs, harmful GM proteins may be produced continuously inside of us; genes inserted into Monsanto's GM soy transfer into bacteria inside our intestines and continue to function.(64) If Bt genes also transfer, eating corn chips might transform our intestinal bacteria into living pesticide factories.
Hidden dangers
Biologist David Schubert of the Salk Institute says, "If there are problems [with GMOs], we will probably never know because the cause will not be traceable and many diseases take a very long time to develop." In the nine years after GM crops were introduced in 1996, Americans with three or more chronic diseases jumped from 7 percent to 13 percent.(65) But without any human clinical trials or post marketing surveillance, we may never know if GMOs are a contributor.
Un-recallable contamination
In spite of the enormous health dangers, the environmental impacts may be worse still. That is because we don't have a technology to fully clean up the contaminated gene pool. The self-propagating genetic pollution released into the environment from Monsanto's crops can outlast the effects of climate change and nuclear waste.
Replacing nature: "Nothing shall be eaten that we don't own"
As Monsanto has moved forward with its master plan to replace nature, they have led the charge in buying up seed businesses and are now the world's largest. At least 200 independent seed companies have disappeared over 13 years, non-GMO seed availability is dwindling, and Monsanto is jacking up their seed prices dramatically. Corn is up more than 30 percent and soy nearly 25 percent, over 2008 prices.(66)
An Associated Press exposé (67) reveals how Monsanto's onerous contracts allowed them to manipulate, then dominate, the seed industry using unprecedented legal restrictions. One contract provision, for example, "prevented bidding wars" and "likely helped Monsanto buy 24 independent seed companies throughout the Farm Belt over the last few years: that corn seed agreement says that if a smaller company changes ownership, its inventory with Monsanto's traits 'shall be destroyed immediately.'"
With that restriction in place, the seed companies couldn't even think of selling to a company other than Monsanto. According to attorney David Boies, who represents DuPont -- owner of Pioneer Seeds: "If the independent seed company is losing their license and has to destroy their seeds, they're not going to have anything, in effect, to sell," Boies said. "It requires them to destroy things -- destroy things they paid for -- if they go competitive. That's exactly the kind of restriction on competitive choice that the antitrust laws outlaw." Boies was a prosecutor on the antitrust case against Microsoft. He is now working with DuPont in their civil antitrust lawsuit against Monsanto.
Monsanto also has the right to cancel deals and wipe out the inventory of a business if the confidentiality clauses are violated:
"We now believe that Monsanto has control over as much as 90 percent of (seed genetics). This level of control is almost unbelievable,' said Neil Harl, agricultural economist at Iowa State University who has studied the seed industry for decades."
Monsanto also controls and manipulates farmers through onerous contracts. Troy Roush, for example, is one of hundreds accused by Monsanto of illegally saving their seeds. The company requires farmers to sign a contract that they will not save and replant GM seeds from their harvest. That way Monsanto can sell its seeds -- at a premium -- each season.
Although Roush maintains his innocence, he was forced to settle with Monsanto after two and a half years of court battles. He says his "family was just destroyed [from] the stress involved." Many farmers are afraid, according to Roush, because Monsanto has "created a little industry that serves no other purpose than to wreck farmers' lives." Monsanto has collected an estimated $200 million from farmers thus far.
Roush says, "They are in the process of owning food, all food." Paraguayan farmer Jorge Galeano says, "Its objective is to control all of the world's food production." Renowned Indian physicist and community organizer Vandana Shiva says, "If they control seed, they control food; they know it, it's strategic. It's more powerful than bombs; it's more powerful than guns. This is the best way to control the populations of the world."
Our food security lies in diversity -- both biodiversity, and diversity of owners and interests. Any single company that consolidates ownership of seeds, and therefore power over the food supply, is a dangerous threat. Of all the corporations in the world, however, the one we should trust the least is Monsanto. With them at the helm, the impact could be cataclysmic.
source http://www.naturalnews.com/029325_Monsanto_deception.html
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Four Shocking Bombshells Bernanke Did NOT Tell Congress About Last Week
In his testimony before Congress last week, Ben Bernanke lifted the Fed’s skirt and gave us a glimpse of the disasters now sweeping through the U.S. economy.
But there are four bombshells he did NOT talk about:
FIRST and foremost, what’s CAUSING the economy to sink? The stock market has not yet crashed. Interest rates have not yet surged. Gasoline prices have not skyrocketed. There has been no recent debt collapse, market shock, or terrorist attack.
So what is the invisible force that’s suddenly gutting the housing market, driving consumer confidence into a sinkhole, and killing the recovery that Washington was so avidly touting just a few months ago?
Bernanke won’t say. But the answer is clear: The recovery had very little substance to begin with. Rather, it was, in essence, a mirage — a dead cat bounce bought and paid for by Washington’s massive bailouts, stimulus programs, and money printing.
Put another way, the recession never really ended. Yes, we saw some growth in GDP. And yes, thanks to that growth, some companies are still reporting better earnings — the news that spurred a rally in the stock market last week. But at the core of the economy, the fires that started the recession are still burning intensely.
SECOND, Bernanke failed to point how that …
The U.S. Housing Market Is Now LOCKED Into a Chronic, Long-Term Depression
Houseing sector resumes worst collapse in U.S. history!
Housing starts — the most important measure of the housing industry — is still a disaster zone.
Beginning in January 2006, they suffered their worst plunge in recorded history — from an annual rate of 2.3 million to a meager 477,000 in April 2009. Thus …
In just three years, 79 percent of America’s largest industry, impacting more Americans than any other, was wiped away.
Then, despite a series of government agency programs to shore up the industry … plus $1.25 trillion poured in by the Fed to buy up mortgage-backed securities … plus a big tax credit for new homebuyers, housing starts perked up ever so slightly: They recovered to an annual rate of 612,000 in January of this year.
But this recovery was so small, it retraced just 7.5 percent of the prior fall. In other words,
Even after massive government efforts, and even at the highest point in their recovery this year, the housing industry recouped less than one-tenth of its historic three-year bust from 2006 to 2009.
Worse, the housing industry has now resumed its decline.
The most alarming factor: Widespread “strategic defaults” on home mortgages.
These are defaults by homeowners who can afford to meet their monthly mortgage payments, but have deliberately decided to stop paying.
They realize their home is worth less than they owe on the mortgage — transforming it into a dead asset they’re willing to give up. They know their bank, already overwhelmed with foreclosures, won’t get around to evicting them for as long as two years, allowing them to live in the house cost-free. They also know this tactic can give them tens of thousands of dollars in extra cash. So they’re defaulting en masse and getting away with it.
End result:
* New supplies of foreclosed homes hitting the market as far as the eye can see …
* Bankers who would rather cut their wrists than finance new homes, and …
* A new slump in housing that’s worse than even some pessimists were expecting.
THIRD, despite his now-famous quote that this is “the worst labor market since the Great Depression,” Bernanke failed to reveal that …
Official Government Data GROSSLY Understates the Magnitude of Unemployment
Long-term joblessness worst ever recorded!
Bernanke did not mention that the percentage of long-term unemployed in America is the worst it’s been since the government began keeping records in 1948. Two facts:
Fact #1: A record 4.39 percent of the work force — or 46.2 percent of the unemployed — have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. That’s DOUBLE the worst level ever recorded and TRIPLE the peak level seen in five of the past six recessions.
Fact #2: On average, America’s unemployed have been out of work for 35.2 weeks, also the highest on record.
Bernanke did not remind Congress that, based on the government’s own broad measure, the true unemployment rate in the U.S. is not 9.5 percent. It’s 16.5 percent — or seven full percentage points more than the figure Mr. Bernanke likes to refer to.
This broader measure includes workers seeking full-time employment, but temporarily settling for lower paying part-time jobs. Plus, it’s supposed to also include “discouraged workers” — those who have given up looking for work because there are no jobs to be found.
Nor did Bernanke confess that, during the Clinton administration, discouraged workers were “redefined” to EXCLUDE those who had been out of work for more than a year — and that definition continues to be used to this day.
That makes absolutely no sense. If they’re out of work for a year, they’re discouraged. But as soon as they’re out of work for a year and one day, it’s suddenly assumed they’re happily going about their life?!
Thus, precisely when economists now recognize that one of the biggest challenges of this Great Recession is long-term unemployment … the Obama administration, both parties in Congress, and all U.S. government agencies continue to exclude the longest term unemployed from every single one of their unemployment statistics.
This could go down in history as one of the greatest deceptions about the true state of U.S. labor markets. And according to John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics, it’s big:
When you add these long-term discouraged workers back into the jobless count, you find that the real unemployment rate in the U.S. is actually 21.6 percent!
FOURTH, Bernanke failed to point out that all this is happening despite …
The Biggest Government Interventions of ALL TIME!
The full scope of the government’s interventions is now official:
In its July 21 Quarterly Report to Congress, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) tabulates the government’s bailouts, stimulus programs, and money printing escapades since the debt crisis struck in 2007, as follows:
Incremental Financial System Support
href="http://images.moneyandmarkets.com/1793/chart1.gif">
by Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D. 07-26-10
According to SIGTARP, at mid-year 2010,
* The Fed has pumped in $1.7 trillion through its massive purchases of mortgage bonds, Treasury bonds, and agency bonds.
* The FDIC has thrown another $300 billion into the pot, shutting down over 100 banks so far this year.
* The Treasury has pumped in a net of $300 billion in TARP money (even after paybacks), plus another $500 billion in money outside of the TARP program.
* Plus, several other government agencies have chipped in another $800 billion.
These official numbers are actually LARGER than we were estimating. We had the total pegged at $3.5 trillion (not billion), including the 2009 stimulus package.
SIGTARP has it at $3.7 trillion, excluding the stimulus but including a myriad other rescue programs — by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), the Government National Mortgage Association (GNMA), the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and the Veterans Affair (VA).
But no matter how you count it, some outstanding facts are absolutely self-evident:
FACT: The enormous magnitude of the government’s intervention FAR surpasses anything ever witnessed in the history of humankind.
FACT: It’s not working! Housing is still collapsed. Long-term unemployment is the worst ever recorded. And the recovery, already anemic, is aborting prematurely.
FACT: Most important, it’s winding down! Through mid-2009, the government intervention programs tabulated by SIGTARP were being ramped up at a furious pace — a total of $3 trillion overall.
So over the 12-month period from mid-2008 through mid-2009, we estimate they were running at the average monthly pace of about $160 billion.
But since mid-2009, they have been far slower, running at an average monthly pace of only $58 billion, or just one-third the prior level.
And right now, the pace of new funds injected into the economy through these government rescues are merely a trickle compared to their earlier rate:
* No new stimulus is in the works.
* No new TARP funds are forthcoming.
* The Fed has wrapped up its bond buying splurge.
* And the ONLY significant continuing programs are for housing — the one area where the government has admittedly seen the WORST overall results, according to SIGTARP.
Bottom line:
If you were counting on the government to prevent the second major leg in this great double-dip recession, don’t hold your breath. To the contrary, the primary CAUSE of the second dip is the government’s conspicuous absence from sectors where it was, until now, the biggest mover, shaker, buyer, and financier.
Your ACTION
With this rapidly shifting quicksand, you must NOT be lured by Wall Street’s siren songs. You must not get trapped again in vulnerable stocks, mutual funds, or ETFs. Instead …
1. Greatly reduce your exposure to stocks, especially in sectors tied to housing, such as construction, home improvement, consumer appliances, and mortgage finance.
2. Move the proceeds to cash and cash equivalent, regardless of low yields.
Good luck and God bless!
Martin
http://www.moneyandmarkets.com/four-shocking-bombshells-bernanke-did-not-tell-congress-about-last-week-39735
New Study Shows Vaccines Cause Brain Changes Found in Autism
By Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill
Abnormal brain growth and function are features of autism, an increasingly common developmental disorder that now affects 1 in 60 boys in the US. Now researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Thoughtful House Center for Children in Austin, Texas, have found remarkably similar brain changes to those seen in autism in infant monkeys receiving the vaccine schedule used in the 1990’s that contained the mercury-based preservative thimerosal.
The group’s findings were published yesterday in the journal Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis. They used scanning techniques that assessed both brain growth and brain function in the same animals over time. The research team was able to see differences in the way the brains of vaccinated and unvaccinated animals developed. Scans were performed before and after the administration of primary MMR and DTaP/Hib boosters that were given at the human equivalent of 12 months of age.
Throughout the study period, vaccinated animals showed an increase in total brain volume – a feature of the brain in many young children with autism - when compared with unvaccinated animals. However, a specific part of the brain associated with emotional responses that is thought to be important in autism, the amygdala, did not show abnormalities until after the 12-month vaccines had been given. In addition, after the 12-month vaccines only, the functional brain scans showed significant differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. These functional scans looked at the activity of receptors for morphine-like compounds (opioids) that may play a role in the brain of children affected by autism. Vaccine administration was associated with an increase in opioid binding activity in the amygdala compared with a decrease in the unvaccinated group.
The results indicate that multiple vaccine exposures during the previous 3-4 months may have had a significant impact on brain growth and development in ways that are consistent with the published data on autism. For the amygdala, the novel findings of abnormal growth and function appear to be a function of more recent vaccine exposures - the 12-month primary MMR vaccine and the DTaP and Hib boosters.
In an accompanying editorial Dr. Kris Turlejski, the Editor-in-Chief, described the findings as “alarming”, “support[ing] the possibility that there is a link between early immunization and the etiology of autism.”
In the same primate model, the research team has already identified delayed acquisition of vital brainstem reflexes in infants exposed to the thimerosal-containing hepatitis B vaccine on the first day of life, compared with unvaccinated animals. A larger, second phase study is currently underway to see if these findings can be replicated.
Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who is not a listed author but whose support in the design of the study is acknowledged, said “I hope the model will not only provide important insights into the origins of autism, but also ways of safely testing possible new autism treatments and vaccines.”
source http://www.ageofautism.com/2010/07/new-study-shows-vaccines-cause-brain-changes-found-in-autism.html
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
When Globalism Runs Its Course ... The Year America Dissolved
The first clans organized around local police forces. The conservatives’ war on crime during the late 20th century and the Bush/Obama war on terror during the first decade of the 21st century had resulted in the police becoming militarized and unaccountable.
As society broke down, the police became warlords. The state police broke apart, and the officers were subsumed into the local forces of their communities. The newly formed tribes expanded to encompass the relatives and friends of the police.
The dollar had collapsed as world reserve currency in 2012 when the worsening economic depression made it clear to Washington’s creditors that the federal budget deficit was too large to be financed except by the printing of money.
With the dollar’s demise, import prices skyrocketed. As Americans were unable to afford foreign-made goods, the transnational corporations that were producing offshore for US markets were bankrupted, further eroding the government’s revenue base.
The government was forced to print money in order to pay its bills, causing domestic prices to rise rapidly. Faced with hyperinflation, Washington took recourse in terminating Social Security and Medicare and followed up by confiscating the remnants of private pensions. This provided a one-year respite, but with no more resources to confiscate, money creation and hyperinflation resumed.
Organized food deliveries broke down when the government fought hyperinflation with fixed prices and the mandate that all purchases and sales had to be in US paper currency. Unwilling to trade appreciating goods for depreciating paper, goods disappeared from stores.
Washington responded as Lenin had done during the “war communism” period of Soviet history. The government sent troops to confiscate goods for distribution in kind to the population. This was a temporary stop-gap until existing stocks were depleted, as future production was discouraged. Much of the confiscated stocks became the property of the troops who seized the goods.
Goods reappeared in markets under the protection of local warlords. Transactions were conducted in barter and in gold, silver, and copper coins.
Other clans organized around families and individuals who possessed stocks of food, bullion, guns and ammunition. Uneasy alliances formed to balance differences in clan strengths. Betrayals quickly made loyalty a necessary trait for survival.
Large scale food and other production broke down as local militias taxed distribution as goods moved across local territories. Washington seized domestic oil production and refineries, but much of the government’s gasoline was paid for safe passage across clan territories.
Most of the troops in Washington’s overseas bases were abandoned. As their resource stocks were drawn down, the abandoned soldiers were forced into alliances with those with whom they had been fighting.
Washington found it increasingly difficult to maintain itself. As it lost control over the country, Washington was less able to secure supplies from abroad as tribute from those Washington threatened with nuclear attack. Gradually other nuclear powers realized that the only target in America was Washington. The more astute saw the writing on the wall and slipped away from the former capital city.
When Rome began her empire, Rome’s currency consisted of gold and silver coinage. Rome was well organized with efficient institutions and the ability to supply troops in the field so that campaigns could continue indefinitely, a monopoly in the world of Rome’s time.
When hubris sent America in pursuit of overseas empire, the venture coincided with the offshoring of American manufacturing, industrial, and professional service jobs and the corresponding erosion of the government’s tax base, with the advent of massive budget and trade deficits, with the erosion of the fiat paper currency’s value, and with America’s dependence on foreign creditors and puppet rulers.
The Roman Empire lasted for centuries. The American one collapsed overnight.
Rome’s corruption became the strength of her enemies, and the Western Empire was overrun.
America’s collapse occurred when government ceased to represent the people and became the instrument of a private oligarchy. Decisions were made in behalf of short-term profits for the few at the expense of unmanageable liabilities for the many. Overwhelmed by liabilities, the government collapsed.
Globalism had run its course. Life reformed on a local basis.
source http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20302
The Last Bastion of American Morality Is Under Assault
opednews.com
Paul Craig Roberts
The morality of the American people now resides, insecurely, in the Presbyterian Church. Every other institution of American society -- the evangelical churches, the bought-and-paid-for American media, both houses of Congress, the executive branch, both political parties, the corporations, the financial sector, the universities -- all support Israel's genocide against the Palestinians. Only the Presbyterians dissent.
The genocide is cloaked behind the propaganda that no Palestinians lived in Palestine until after the Israelis arrived, that all Palestinians are terrorists who want to murder innocent peace-loving Israelis, and that the terrorist Palestinians are armed by the few remaining Muslim governments that so far have escaped becoming American puppet states.
The solution, of course, is for the few remaining independent countries in the Middle East to be brought by force under US and Israeli hegemony.
The Presbyterian Church, as it is the only US organization that is not under the Israel Lobby's suzerainty, is included among the independent institutions that must be brought to heel.
The Presbyterian Church, which alone in America has a moral conscience, has been disturbed for some time by the Israeli/American policy of Palestinian extermination. In violation of international law and under the protection of US diplomacy and America's UN veto, Israel has evicted Palestinians from their homes and villages since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967 and even before. The remaining small parts of the West Bank in which Palestinians still reside have been turned by Israel into ghettos cut off from the rest of Palestine.
The Presbyterians, being meek Christians, have only mild criticisms of Israel, which are packaged together in the church's Middle East Study Committee's report with the Presbyterians' commitment to Israel's continued existence and to "our American Jewish Friends." The Presbyterian report even disavows divestment from Caterpillar, the US company that supplies Israel with the machines that destroy Palestinian homes, thus driving Palestinians from their lands so that zionist settlers can confiscate their properties. It was a Caterpillar bulldozer that killed the American Rachel Corrie who was protesting Israel's destruction of Palestinian homes.
The Presbyterian report expresses concern that "the window of opportunity for an end to the occupation and the viability of a two-state solution is rapidly closing." The Presbyterians fear that violence begets violence, and that the two sides are sliding into wanton willful murder of one another in violation of God's commandments.
The Presbyterian document states: "We do affirm the legitimacy of Israel as a state, but consider the continuing occupation of Palestine (West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem) to be illegitimate, illegal under international law, and an enduring threat to peace in the region. Furthermore, we recognize that any support for that occupation weakens the moral standing of our nation internationally and our security."
For Israel and the vast media and American political apparatus that Israel controls, this was too much. Israel is never guilty of anything. Only Palestinians are guilty. Anyone who criticizes Israel is anti-semitic and aligned with terrorists who want a second Holocaust.
The extreme Zionist Jerusalem Post; the moderate American Jewish newspaper, the Forward, and even a Mormon blog declared war on the Presbyterian Christians.
Israel, of course, denies that there is any illegal occupation of Palestine despite this being the finding of every country, the UN, and even Israel's American protector, the US government. The Jerusalem Post accuses the Presbyterians of expressing "contempt for Israel" attempting "to delegitimize Israel" and justifying "Palestinian terror against the Jewish state."
And there you have it. Any person or organization that is not all apologies for Israel's dispossession of Palestinians from their homes, villages, and lands, any person or organization that does not accept that 5-year old Palestinian children shot down in the streets by Israeli soldiers or zionist settlers were terrorists about to bring down the Israeli state, anyone who does not genuflect before the Israeli line on everything is an anti-semite who wants to renew the Holocaust and exterminate the Jewish people.
The Rabbis in every American community will buttonhole the Presbyterian ministers and ask them to explain why they are anti-semites and beat their wives. The Presbyterian General Assembly, which meets in July, will again be intimidated, as it was previously, and vote down the recommendations in the church's report on the Israeli/Palestinian issue.
The weak forces of morality will again be defeated by the Israelis, and the extermination of the Palestinians will continue.
source http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Last-Bastion-of-Americ-by-paul-craig-roberts-100628-809.html
Paul Craig Roberts
The morality of the American people now resides, insecurely, in the Presbyterian Church. Every other institution of American society -- the evangelical churches, the bought-and-paid-for American media, both houses of Congress, the executive branch, both political parties, the corporations, the financial sector, the universities -- all support Israel's genocide against the Palestinians. Only the Presbyterians dissent.
The genocide is cloaked behind the propaganda that no Palestinians lived in Palestine until after the Israelis arrived, that all Palestinians are terrorists who want to murder innocent peace-loving Israelis, and that the terrorist Palestinians are armed by the few remaining Muslim governments that so far have escaped becoming American puppet states.
The solution, of course, is for the few remaining independent countries in the Middle East to be brought by force under US and Israeli hegemony.
The Presbyterian Church, as it is the only US organization that is not under the Israel Lobby's suzerainty, is included among the independent institutions that must be brought to heel.
The Presbyterian Church, which alone in America has a moral conscience, has been disturbed for some time by the Israeli/American policy of Palestinian extermination. In violation of international law and under the protection of US diplomacy and America's UN veto, Israel has evicted Palestinians from their homes and villages since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967 and even before. The remaining small parts of the West Bank in which Palestinians still reside have been turned by Israel into ghettos cut off from the rest of Palestine.
The Presbyterians, being meek Christians, have only mild criticisms of Israel, which are packaged together in the church's Middle East Study Committee's report with the Presbyterians' commitment to Israel's continued existence and to "our American Jewish Friends." The Presbyterian report even disavows divestment from Caterpillar, the US company that supplies Israel with the machines that destroy Palestinian homes, thus driving Palestinians from their lands so that zionist settlers can confiscate their properties. It was a Caterpillar bulldozer that killed the American Rachel Corrie who was protesting Israel's destruction of Palestinian homes.
The Presbyterian report expresses concern that "the window of opportunity for an end to the occupation and the viability of a two-state solution is rapidly closing." The Presbyterians fear that violence begets violence, and that the two sides are sliding into wanton willful murder of one another in violation of God's commandments.
The Presbyterian document states: "We do affirm the legitimacy of Israel as a state, but consider the continuing occupation of Palestine (West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem) to be illegitimate, illegal under international law, and an enduring threat to peace in the region. Furthermore, we recognize that any support for that occupation weakens the moral standing of our nation internationally and our security."
For Israel and the vast media and American political apparatus that Israel controls, this was too much. Israel is never guilty of anything. Only Palestinians are guilty. Anyone who criticizes Israel is anti-semitic and aligned with terrorists who want a second Holocaust.
The extreme Zionist Jerusalem Post; the moderate American Jewish newspaper, the Forward, and even a Mormon blog declared war on the Presbyterian Christians.
Israel, of course, denies that there is any illegal occupation of Palestine despite this being the finding of every country, the UN, and even Israel's American protector, the US government. The Jerusalem Post accuses the Presbyterians of expressing "contempt for Israel" attempting "to delegitimize Israel" and justifying "Palestinian terror against the Jewish state."
And there you have it. Any person or organization that is not all apologies for Israel's dispossession of Palestinians from their homes, villages, and lands, any person or organization that does not accept that 5-year old Palestinian children shot down in the streets by Israeli soldiers or zionist settlers were terrorists about to bring down the Israeli state, anyone who does not genuflect before the Israeli line on everything is an anti-semite who wants to renew the Holocaust and exterminate the Jewish people.
The Rabbis in every American community will buttonhole the Presbyterian ministers and ask them to explain why they are anti-semites and beat their wives. The Presbyterian General Assembly, which meets in July, will again be intimidated, as it was previously, and vote down the recommendations in the church's report on the Israeli/Palestinian issue.
The weak forces of morality will again be defeated by the Israelis, and the extermination of the Palestinians will continue.
source http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Last-Bastion-of-Americ-by-paul-craig-roberts-100628-809.html
Accused murderer receives liver organ transplant while others wait to die
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
(NaturalNews) Johnny Concepcion is 42 years old. After divorcing his wife, she was found stabbed to death in their home, suffering at least 15 stab wounds. Concepcion reportedly confessed to his friends that he killed his wife, and he soon found himself the subject of a city-wide manhunt in New York City. On the run from authorities, Concepcion decided to kill himself by drinking a container of rat poison.
But that's not where this story gets weird. The weird part is that after the rat poison destroyed his liver, Concepcion found himself at the top of a liver transplant list at a hospital in New York City. With over 16,000 other people waiting for a liver -- many of whom undoubtedly are not murderers -- somehow Concepcion was chosen to receive the next available liver from an organ donor.
At a cost of several hundred thousand dollars (probably paid by taxpayers), Concepcion was given the new liver transplant and then arrested and taken to jail. He now awaits an August 11 court hearing to face the charge of murder.
Huge problems in the organ transplant industry
I've been an outspoken opponent of the organ transplant industry for several years. While admittedly the industry does save some lives, it has been apparent for a long time that the industry is far more interested in profit than compassion. Organ transplants make hundreds of millions of dollars for the hospitals, surgeons, organ transportation companies and other specialists involved in transplants. The families whose loved ones donate those organs, meanwhile, receive absolutely nothing for the gift of valuable organs they donate to this system.
This is a case where a "product" (the organ) is given freely to an industry that then turns around and seeks to maximize its profits often without regard to quality of life. And this case of Johnny Concepcion demonstrates this perfectly: Rather than giving the liver to a human being who truly deserves a second chance, the doctors decided to give it to a man accused of murder... and a man who destroyed his own liver by drinking rat poison.
To which I say, "Are you crazy?"
Shouldn't organ transplants go to those who deserve them?
If you drink rat poison and destroy your own liver, that should probably disqualify you from the transplant list. Why? Because you've already proven you don't value your own God-given organs. Why should modern medicine hand over a new one?
The answer, of course, is because there's big money to be made in transplants. So even the guy who consciously drinks poison and destroys his own liver is still on the transplant list. I suppose if someone shoots themselves in the chest, they'd still be on the list to receive a heart transplant too, right?
Well, the sad truth of the matter is that -- get this -- most people (but not all) on organ transplant lists have destroyed their own organs!
Yep, I said it. I told the truth: The majority (but not all) of heart, lung, liver and kidney transplant patients are those who suffer from a history of chemical abuse or nutritional abuse of their bodies. These people include lifelong smokers, drug addicts, alcohol abusers and junk food eaters.
Again, this is most but not all organ transplant recipients. Some of those waiting for organ transplants are truly innocent victims who suffered a car crash, for example, or a rare disease affliction through no fault of their own.
Now what I'm proposing here is going to be extremely unpopular in the organ transplant industry, but it makes sense from a human ethics point of view:
Shouldn't transplants first go to those who most DESERVE a second chance?
Commonsense guidelines for organ transplants
In other words, if your hospital has one spare liver, and you have to choose between three people who all need it (and they're all a recipient match), and the first person is an alcoholic who destroyed his own liver with drinking, and the second person destroyed his own liver with rat poison, but the third person was in a construction accident and lost half his liver through no fault of his own, shouldn't the third person get the liver?
Because, let's face it: There are not enough livers to go around. Not by a long shot. Most people on the transplant waiting list never get a transplant. Even some truly deserving people. And far too often, livers go to people who arguably don't deserve them because they decided to destroy their first liver.
In my view, we should start organizing transplant recipients along the lines of medical ethics, rating each person's "deserving" score based on their level of personal responsibility with the organs they already have. Why should taxpayers, in particular, pay for a half million dollar heart transplant procedure for someone who smokes three packs of cigarettes a day and lives on processed junk food while refusing to exercise? Isn't that a terrible waste of health care dollars?
I mean, if a guy wants to kill himself with cigarettes and junk food, that's his choice. And he's got one set of organs to destroy, and that's it. It's not right to give him a second set and let him destroy those too, especially when someone else may put them to a better use.
Seriously. I know these are not popular questions, and if we had enough livers to go around for everyone, we wouldn't need to ask these questions, but in an environment where livers are limited and funds are limited does it make any sense for a murderer to get a liver while some other innocent car crash victim dies while waiting for one?
Of course not. And the fact that the transplant industry awards these precious organs to the wrong people just demonstrates how far it has veered from the path of medical ethics. (The term "medical ethics" is almost an oxymoron these days...)
Let's nail down some simple rules for organ transplants. We'll call these "common sense rules" for an industry that has lost common sense:
• Rule #1) Murderers should not qualify for organ transplants. No brainer.
• Rule #2) People who consciously destroy their own organs (such as by drinking rat poison) should not qualify for organ transplants.
• Rule #3) People who choose to live unhealthy lifestyles by consuming processed junk foods, abusing drugs or avoiding basic self-care (exercise) should not quality for organ transplants either. Why? Because it's a waste to give a valuable organ to someone who isn't going to take care of it.
• Rule #4) Those individuals who lost their own organs through no fault of their own should move up to the top of the organ transplant waiting lists.
• Rule #5) People should be required to sign a contract before receiving an organ transplant, and that contract should commit them to avoiding alcohol and drugs (including dangerous OTC painkillers which cause liver damage, for example) and pursuing a healthful diet that will support their lifelong health.
Trading in human flesh
You might call these the five basic rules for sensible organ transplantation. These rules probably make perfect sense to you and me, but they make no sense whatsoever to the organ transplant industry. That industry, you see, earns the same amount of profit regardless of whether an innocent victim gets the organ or a convicted murderer gets it. It's all the same to them.
In fact, the organ transplant industry is rife with corruption and misdeeds. I've covered stories in the past where doctors and hospitals were caught secretly trading body parts for profit. Many U.S. hospitals now engage in the black market trafficking of illegally harvested organs (http://www.naturalnews.com/028994_o...). In fact, 44 people, including medical personnel, were recently arrested in the United States for their involvement in organ trafficking.
In addition -- here's another horrifying thought -- many of the organs offered up for transplantation are diseased organs to begin with. Sometimes organs are harvested from people who are riddled with cancer! These organs are then transplanted right into recipients with no warnings about the cancer. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027353_h...)
So what you have is an industry that will harvest an organ from just about anybody (cancer patients, smokers, drug users, chemotherapy victims, etc.) and transplant that organ into anybody else (murderers, rapists, smokers, etc.) and earn a hefty profit doing so.
It doesn't sound so nice when you look at the real story here, does it? The organ transplant industry is a lot darker and dishonest than what it's publicly made out to be.
Publicly, it's all sold to you as "saving lives." But behind the scenes, it's really about profiting from human flesh, regardless of whether it actually helps a human being who deserves it.
Reforms desperately needed
Again, this is not to say that the organ transplant industry doesn't sometimes do the right thing. I have no doubt it ends up saving many deserving lives, but this does not seem to be the driving factor behind its (literal) operations. The industry seems a lot more interested in finding any diseased organ it can get its hands on and thrusting it into any living recipient they can find without engaging in any sort of calculation about quality of life or human compassion.
And that's where the industry has gone terribly wrong.
Today, those who donate their organs have to face the very real possibility that their organs could be given to a murderer who may then use them to go out and commit even more murderers.
At the same time, those who receive organ transplants have no way to know whether those organs were harvested from cancer patients, drug abusers or chemotherapy victims. So even if you're "lucky enough" to receive an organ, it might already be riddled with cancer anyway. You're stuck with the transplant bill but might die of cancer from the organ you received!
Read this story, Body part harvesting company sold parts from dead cancer patients, drug users for use in surgery recipients (http://www.naturalnews.com/020109_o...)
Such is the status of the organ transplant industry today.
It doesn't have to be this way, however. There is arguably a place for organ transplants for true victims of accidents or other causes outside of their control. But for people who just eat junk foods, abuse drugs and alcohol, avoid exercise and live a toxic life, an organ transplant makes no scientific sense. But it does make money... and that's why they keep being performed.
Is it ethical to donate your organs to this system?
Make no mistake: Many U.S. hospitals deal in human flesh. They are waiting for car crash victims, suicide victims and other recently dead in order to rip their organs out of their body and transplant them for profit. And although this is beyond the scope of this particular article, I have seen disturbing evidence that if you list yourself as an organ donor on your driver's license, there is a chance your organs may actually be harvested before you are truly dead.
When you're an organ donor, there's a rush, after all, to cut out your heart, liver, lungs, kidneys and other parts before they lose too much oxygen. And the very best way to do that, medically speaking, is to make sure your heart is still beating when they begin harvesting.
I truly believe there are cases where organ donors have been turned over to the organ harvesting team rather than the resuscitation team even when they were not truly dead. But we'll probably cover that in another story on another day.
In the mean time, I strongly urge you to think carefully about your own organ donation status and how your organs could end up in the body of a murderer. I realize that not all organ donations are bad, and some organ transplants truly do save deserving lives, but until the organ transplant industry reforms itself and disavows the abuses outlined here, I personally will not support it, and I will urge others to avoid it.
This is sad because I know that many deserving victims of accidents need organ transplants. But the system in place today too often denies them access to those organs while wasting them on others who simply don't deserve new organs.
Above all, remember this: the best way to save lives is to take care of the organs you were born with. If you don't destroy the liver you already have, you won't need a new one!
What destroys livers? Pharmaceuticals and over-the-counter medications, for one thing. So does chemotherapy. Isn't it fascinating that the treatments of one branch of medicine (oncology) create more business for the transplant industry by destroying livers, hearts and kidneys? That's called repeat business.
If you really want to destroy your liver, by the way, take some acetaminophen painkillers (http://www.naturalnews.com/026565_d...). This common painkiller has also been linked with kidney damage (http://www.naturalnews.com/001523.html).
Think about it: If the medical industry really cared about protecting your liver, they wouldn't keep prescribing medicines that destroy livers!
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
(NaturalNews) Johnny Concepcion is 42 years old. After divorcing his wife, she was found stabbed to death in their home, suffering at least 15 stab wounds. Concepcion reportedly confessed to his friends that he killed his wife, and he soon found himself the subject of a city-wide manhunt in New York City. On the run from authorities, Concepcion decided to kill himself by drinking a container of rat poison.
But that's not where this story gets weird. The weird part is that after the rat poison destroyed his liver, Concepcion found himself at the top of a liver transplant list at a hospital in New York City. With over 16,000 other people waiting for a liver -- many of whom undoubtedly are not murderers -- somehow Concepcion was chosen to receive the next available liver from an organ donor.
At a cost of several hundred thousand dollars (probably paid by taxpayers), Concepcion was given the new liver transplant and then arrested and taken to jail. He now awaits an August 11 court hearing to face the charge of murder.
Huge problems in the organ transplant industry
I've been an outspoken opponent of the organ transplant industry for several years. While admittedly the industry does save some lives, it has been apparent for a long time that the industry is far more interested in profit than compassion. Organ transplants make hundreds of millions of dollars for the hospitals, surgeons, organ transportation companies and other specialists involved in transplants. The families whose loved ones donate those organs, meanwhile, receive absolutely nothing for the gift of valuable organs they donate to this system.
This is a case where a "product" (the organ) is given freely to an industry that then turns around and seeks to maximize its profits often without regard to quality of life. And this case of Johnny Concepcion demonstrates this perfectly: Rather than giving the liver to a human being who truly deserves a second chance, the doctors decided to give it to a man accused of murder... and a man who destroyed his own liver by drinking rat poison.
To which I say, "Are you crazy?"
Shouldn't organ transplants go to those who deserve them?
If you drink rat poison and destroy your own liver, that should probably disqualify you from the transplant list. Why? Because you've already proven you don't value your own God-given organs. Why should modern medicine hand over a new one?
The answer, of course, is because there's big money to be made in transplants. So even the guy who consciously drinks poison and destroys his own liver is still on the transplant list. I suppose if someone shoots themselves in the chest, they'd still be on the list to receive a heart transplant too, right?
Well, the sad truth of the matter is that -- get this -- most people (but not all) on organ transplant lists have destroyed their own organs!
Yep, I said it. I told the truth: The majority (but not all) of heart, lung, liver and kidney transplant patients are those who suffer from a history of chemical abuse or nutritional abuse of their bodies. These people include lifelong smokers, drug addicts, alcohol abusers and junk food eaters.
Again, this is most but not all organ transplant recipients. Some of those waiting for organ transplants are truly innocent victims who suffered a car crash, for example, or a rare disease affliction through no fault of their own.
Now what I'm proposing here is going to be extremely unpopular in the organ transplant industry, but it makes sense from a human ethics point of view:
Shouldn't transplants first go to those who most DESERVE a second chance?
Commonsense guidelines for organ transplants
In other words, if your hospital has one spare liver, and you have to choose between three people who all need it (and they're all a recipient match), and the first person is an alcoholic who destroyed his own liver with drinking, and the second person destroyed his own liver with rat poison, but the third person was in a construction accident and lost half his liver through no fault of his own, shouldn't the third person get the liver?
Because, let's face it: There are not enough livers to go around. Not by a long shot. Most people on the transplant waiting list never get a transplant. Even some truly deserving people. And far too often, livers go to people who arguably don't deserve them because they decided to destroy their first liver.
In my view, we should start organizing transplant recipients along the lines of medical ethics, rating each person's "deserving" score based on their level of personal responsibility with the organs they already have. Why should taxpayers, in particular, pay for a half million dollar heart transplant procedure for someone who smokes three packs of cigarettes a day and lives on processed junk food while refusing to exercise? Isn't that a terrible waste of health care dollars?
I mean, if a guy wants to kill himself with cigarettes and junk food, that's his choice. And he's got one set of organs to destroy, and that's it. It's not right to give him a second set and let him destroy those too, especially when someone else may put them to a better use.
Seriously. I know these are not popular questions, and if we had enough livers to go around for everyone, we wouldn't need to ask these questions, but in an environment where livers are limited and funds are limited does it make any sense for a murderer to get a liver while some other innocent car crash victim dies while waiting for one?
Of course not. And the fact that the transplant industry awards these precious organs to the wrong people just demonstrates how far it has veered from the path of medical ethics. (The term "medical ethics" is almost an oxymoron these days...)
Let's nail down some simple rules for organ transplants. We'll call these "common sense rules" for an industry that has lost common sense:
• Rule #1) Murderers should not qualify for organ transplants. No brainer.
• Rule #2) People who consciously destroy their own organs (such as by drinking rat poison) should not qualify for organ transplants.
• Rule #3) People who choose to live unhealthy lifestyles by consuming processed junk foods, abusing drugs or avoiding basic self-care (exercise) should not quality for organ transplants either. Why? Because it's a waste to give a valuable organ to someone who isn't going to take care of it.
• Rule #4) Those individuals who lost their own organs through no fault of their own should move up to the top of the organ transplant waiting lists.
• Rule #5) People should be required to sign a contract before receiving an organ transplant, and that contract should commit them to avoiding alcohol and drugs (including dangerous OTC painkillers which cause liver damage, for example) and pursuing a healthful diet that will support their lifelong health.
Trading in human flesh
You might call these the five basic rules for sensible organ transplantation. These rules probably make perfect sense to you and me, but they make no sense whatsoever to the organ transplant industry. That industry, you see, earns the same amount of profit regardless of whether an innocent victim gets the organ or a convicted murderer gets it. It's all the same to them.
In fact, the organ transplant industry is rife with corruption and misdeeds. I've covered stories in the past where doctors and hospitals were caught secretly trading body parts for profit. Many U.S. hospitals now engage in the black market trafficking of illegally harvested organs (http://www.naturalnews.com/028994_o...). In fact, 44 people, including medical personnel, were recently arrested in the United States for their involvement in organ trafficking.
In addition -- here's another horrifying thought -- many of the organs offered up for transplantation are diseased organs to begin with. Sometimes organs are harvested from people who are riddled with cancer! These organs are then transplanted right into recipients with no warnings about the cancer. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027353_h...)
So what you have is an industry that will harvest an organ from just about anybody (cancer patients, smokers, drug users, chemotherapy victims, etc.) and transplant that organ into anybody else (murderers, rapists, smokers, etc.) and earn a hefty profit doing so.
It doesn't sound so nice when you look at the real story here, does it? The organ transplant industry is a lot darker and dishonest than what it's publicly made out to be.
Publicly, it's all sold to you as "saving lives." But behind the scenes, it's really about profiting from human flesh, regardless of whether it actually helps a human being who deserves it.
Reforms desperately needed
Again, this is not to say that the organ transplant industry doesn't sometimes do the right thing. I have no doubt it ends up saving many deserving lives, but this does not seem to be the driving factor behind its (literal) operations. The industry seems a lot more interested in finding any diseased organ it can get its hands on and thrusting it into any living recipient they can find without engaging in any sort of calculation about quality of life or human compassion.
And that's where the industry has gone terribly wrong.
Today, those who donate their organs have to face the very real possibility that their organs could be given to a murderer who may then use them to go out and commit even more murderers.
At the same time, those who receive organ transplants have no way to know whether those organs were harvested from cancer patients, drug abusers or chemotherapy victims. So even if you're "lucky enough" to receive an organ, it might already be riddled with cancer anyway. You're stuck with the transplant bill but might die of cancer from the organ you received!
Read this story, Body part harvesting company sold parts from dead cancer patients, drug users for use in surgery recipients (http://www.naturalnews.com/020109_o...)
Such is the status of the organ transplant industry today.
It doesn't have to be this way, however. There is arguably a place for organ transplants for true victims of accidents or other causes outside of their control. But for people who just eat junk foods, abuse drugs and alcohol, avoid exercise and live a toxic life, an organ transplant makes no scientific sense. But it does make money... and that's why they keep being performed.
Is it ethical to donate your organs to this system?
Make no mistake: Many U.S. hospitals deal in human flesh. They are waiting for car crash victims, suicide victims and other recently dead in order to rip their organs out of their body and transplant them for profit. And although this is beyond the scope of this particular article, I have seen disturbing evidence that if you list yourself as an organ donor on your driver's license, there is a chance your organs may actually be harvested before you are truly dead.
When you're an organ donor, there's a rush, after all, to cut out your heart, liver, lungs, kidneys and other parts before they lose too much oxygen. And the very best way to do that, medically speaking, is to make sure your heart is still beating when they begin harvesting.
I truly believe there are cases where organ donors have been turned over to the organ harvesting team rather than the resuscitation team even when they were not truly dead. But we'll probably cover that in another story on another day.
In the mean time, I strongly urge you to think carefully about your own organ donation status and how your organs could end up in the body of a murderer. I realize that not all organ donations are bad, and some organ transplants truly do save deserving lives, but until the organ transplant industry reforms itself and disavows the abuses outlined here, I personally will not support it, and I will urge others to avoid it.
This is sad because I know that many deserving victims of accidents need organ transplants. But the system in place today too often denies them access to those organs while wasting them on others who simply don't deserve new organs.
Above all, remember this: the best way to save lives is to take care of the organs you were born with. If you don't destroy the liver you already have, you won't need a new one!
What destroys livers? Pharmaceuticals and over-the-counter medications, for one thing. So does chemotherapy. Isn't it fascinating that the treatments of one branch of medicine (oncology) create more business for the transplant industry by destroying livers, hearts and kidneys? That's called repeat business.
If you really want to destroy your liver, by the way, take some acetaminophen painkillers (http://www.naturalnews.com/026565_d...). This common painkiller has also been linked with kidney damage (http://www.naturalnews.com/001523.html).
Think about it: If the medical industry really cared about protecting your liver, they wouldn't keep prescribing medicines that destroy livers!
Monday, July 26, 2010
America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution
The American Spectator
By Angelo M. Codevilla from the July 2010 - August 2010 issue
As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets' nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.
When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term "political class" came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public's understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the "ruling class." And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.
Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several "stimulus" bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government's agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about "global warming" for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class's continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.
Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and "bureaucrat" was a dirty word for all. So was "social engineering." Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.
Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.
The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, "prayed to the same God." By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God "who created and doth sustain us," our ruling class prays to itself as "saviors of the planet" and improvers of humanity. Our classes' clash is over "whose country" America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: "if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand."
The Political Divide
Important as they are, our political divisions are the iceberg's tip. When pollsters ask the American people whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever pollsters add the preferences "undecided," "none of the above," or "tea party," these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans trail far behind. That is because while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well. Hence officeholders, Democrats and Republicans, gladden the hearts of some one-third of the electorate -- most Democratic voters, plus a few Republicans. This means that Democratic politicians are the ruling class's prime legitimate representatives and that because Republican politicians are supported by only a fourth of their voters while the rest vote for them reluctantly, most are aspirants for a junior role in the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats. But some two-thirds of Americans -- a few Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents -- lack a vehicle in electoral politics.
Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority's demand for representation will be filled. Whereas in 1968 Governor George Wallace's taunt "there ain't a dime's worth of difference" between the Republican and Democratic parties resonated with only 13.5 percent of the American people, in 1992 Ross Perot became a serious contender for the presidency (at one point he was favored by 39 percent of Americans vs. 31 percent for G.H.W. Bush and 25 percent for Clinton) simply by speaking ill of the ruling class. Today, few speak well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes, and talked down to the American people. Americans' conviction that the ruling class is as hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so.
While Europeans are accustomed to being ruled by presumed betters whom they distrust, the American people's realization of being ruled like Europeans shocked this country into well nigh revolutionary attitudes. But only the realization was new. The ruling class had sunk deep roots in America over decades before 2008. Machiavelli compares serious political diseases to the Aetolian fevers -- easy to treat early on while they are difficult to discern, but virtually untreatable by the time they become obvious.
Far from speculating how the political confrontation might develop between America's regime class -- relatively few people supported by no more than one-third of Americans -- and a country class comprising two-thirds of the country, our task here is to understand the divisions that underlie that confrontation's unpredictable future. More on politics below.
The Ruling Class
Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us?
The most widespread answers -- by such as the Times's Thomas Friedman and David Brooks -- are schlock sociology. Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector. Similarly fanciful is Edward Goldberg's notion that America is now ruled by a "newocracy": a "new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of globalization -- including the multinational manager, the technologist and the aspirational members of the meritocracy." In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.
Other explanations are counterintuitive. Wealth? The heads of the class do live in our big cities' priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Boston's Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate -- just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists. Rather, regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative "nonprofit" and "philanthropic" sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government. They vote Democrat more consistently than those who live on any of America's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Streets. These socioeconomic opposites draw their money and orientation from the same sources as the millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees in the middle ranks who aspire to be the former and identify morally with what they suppose to be the latter's grievances.
Read More
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Why the U.S. Need Not Fear a Sovereign Debt Crisis: Unlike Greece, It Is Actually Sovereign
Author Ellen Brown
Posted: July 23, 2010 10:45 AM
Last week, a Chinese rating agency downgraded U.S. debt from triple A and number one globally, to "double A with a negative outlook" and only 13th worldwide. The downgrade renewed fears that the sovereign debt crisis that began in Greece will soon reach America. That is the concern, but the U.S. is distinguished from Greece in that its debt is denominated in its own currency, over which it has sovereign control. The government can simply print the money it needs or borrow from a central bank that prints it. We should not let deficit hawks and short sellers dissuade the government from pursuing that obvious expedient.
We did not hear much about "sovereign debt" until early this year when Greece hit the skids. Investment adviser Martin Weiss wrote in a February 24 newsletter:
On October 8, Greece's benchmark 10-year bond was stable and rising. Then, suddenly and without warning, global investors dumped their Greek bonds with unprecedented fury, driving its market value into a death spiral.
Likewise, Portugal's 10-year government bond reached a peak on December 1, 2009, less than three months ago. It has also started to plunge virtually nonstop.
The reason: A new contagion of fear about sovereign debt! Indeed, both governments are so deep in debt, investors worry that default is not only possible -- it is now likely!
So said the media, but note that Greece and Portugal were doing remarkably well only three months earlier. Then, "suddenly and without warning," global investors furiously dumped their bonds. Why? Weiss and other commentators blamed a sudden "contagion of fear about sovereign debt." But as Bill Murphy, another prolific newsletter writer, reiterates, "Price action makes market commentary." The pundits look at what just happened in the market and then dream up some plausible theory to explain it. What President Franklin Roosevelt said of politics, however, may also be true of markets: "Nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."
That the collapse of Greece's sovereign debt may actually have been planned was suggested in a Wall Street Journal article in February, in which Susan Pullian and co-authors reported:
Some heavyweight hedge funds have launched large bearish bets against the euro in moves that are reminiscent of the trading action at the height of the U.S. financial crisis.
The big bets are emerging amid gatherings such as an exclusive 'idea dinner' earlier this month that included hedge-fund titans SAC Capital Advisors LP and Soros Fund Management LLC.
[...]
There is nothing improper about hedge funds jumping on the same trade unless it is deemed by regulators to be collusion. Regulators haven't suggested that any trading has been improper.
Regulators hadn't suggested it yet; but on the same day that the story was published, the antitrust division of the U.S. Justice Department sent letters to a number of hedge funds attending the dinner, warning them not to destroy any trading records involving market bets on the euro.
Represented at the dinner was the hedge fund of George Soros, who was instrumental in collapsing the British pound in 1992 by heavy short-selling. Soros was quoted as warning that if the European Union did not fix its finances, "the euro may fall apart." Was it really a warning? Or was it the sort of rumor designed to make the euro fall apart? A concerted attack on the euro, beginning with its weakest link, the Greek bond, could bring down that currency just as short selling had brought down the pound.
These sorts of rumors have not been confined to the Greek bond and the euro. In The Financial Times, Niall Ferguson wrote an article titled "A Greek Crisis Is Coming to America," in which he warned:
It began in Athens. It is spreading to Lisbon and Madrid. But it would be a grave mistake to assume that the sovereign debt crisis that is unfolding will remain confined to the weaker eurozone economies.
America, he maintained, would suffer a sovereign debt crisis as well, and this would happen sooner than expected.
The International Monetary Fund recently published estimates of the fiscal adjustments developed economies would need to make to restore fiscal stability over the decade ahead. Worst were Japan and the UK (a fiscal tightening of 13 per cent of GDP). Then came Ireland, Spain and Greece (9 per cent). And in sixth place? Step forward America, which would need to tighten fiscal policy by 8.8 per cent of GDP to satisfy the IMF.
The catch is that the U.S. does not need to satisfy the IMF.
"Sovereign debt" Is an Oxymoron
America cannot actually suffer from a sovereign debt crisis. Why? Because it has no sovereign debt. As Wikipedia explains:
A sovereign bond is a bond issued by a national government. The term usually refers to bonds issued in foreign currencies, while bonds issued by national governments in the country's own currency are referred to as government bonds. The total amount owed to the holders of the sovereign bonds is called sovereign debt.
Damon Vrabel, of the Council on Renewal in Seattle, concludes:
The sovereign debt crisis... is a fabrication of the Ivy League, Wall Street and erudite periodicals like the Financial Times of London.. It seems ridiculous to point this out, but sovereign debt implies sovereignty. Right? Well, if countries are sovereign, then how could they be required to be in debt to private banking institutions? How could they be so easily attacked by the likes of George Soros, JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs? Why would they be subjugated to the whims of auctions and traders? A true sovereign is in debt to nobody...
Unlike Greece and other EU members, which are forbidden to issue their own currencies or borrow from their own central banks, the U.S. government can solve its debt crisis by the simple expedient of either printing the money it needs directly, or borrowing it from its own central bank which prints the money. The current term of art for this maneuver is "quantitative easing," and Ferguson says it is what has so far "stood between the US and larger bond yields" -- that, and China's massive purchases of U.S. Treasuries. Both are winding down now, he warns, renewing the hazard of a sovereign debt crisis.
"Explosions of public debt hurt economies..." Ferguson contends, "by raising fears of default and/or currency depreciation ahead of actual inflation, [pushing] up real interest rates."
Market jitters may be a hazard, but if the U.S. finds itself with government bonds and no buyers, it will no doubt resort to quantitative easing again, just as it has in the past -- not necessarily overtly, but by buying bonds through offshore entities, swapping government debt for agency debt, and other sleights of hand. The mechanics may vary, but so long as "Helicopter Ben" is at the helm, dollars are liable to appear as needed.
Hyperinflation: A Bogus Threat Today
Proposals to solve government budget crises by simply issuing the necessary funds, whether as currency or as bonds, invariably meet with dire warnings that the result will be hyperinflation. But before an economy can be threatened with hyperinflation, it has to pass through simple inflation; and today the world is struggling with deflation. The U.S. money supply has been shrinking at an unprecedented rate. In a May 26 article in The Financial Times titled "US Money Supply Plunges at 1930s Pace as Obama Eyes Fresh Stimulus," Ambrose Evans-Pritchard observed:
The stock of money fell from $14.2 trillion to $13.9 trillion in the three months to April, amounting to an annual rate of contraction of 9.6pc. The assets of institutional money market funds fell at a 37pc rate, the sharpest drop ever.
So long as workers are out of work and resources are sitting idle, as they are today, money can be added to the money supply without driving prices up. Price inflation results when "demand" (money) increases faster than "supply" (goods and services). If the new money is used to create new goods and services, prices will remain stable. That is where "quantitative easing" has gone astray today: the money has not been directed into creating goods, services and jobs but has been steered into the coffers of the banks, cleaning up their balance sheets and providing them with cheap credit that they have not deigned to pass on to the productive economy.
Our forefathers described the government they were creating as a "common wealth," ensuring life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for its people. Implied in that vision was an opportunity for employment for anyone wanting to work, as well as essential social services for the population. All of that can be provided by a government that claims sovereignty over its money supply.
A true sovereign need not indebt itself to private banks but can simply issue the money it needs. That is what the American colonists did, in the innovative paper money system that allowed them to flourish for a century before King George forbade them to issue their own scrip prompting the American Revolution. It is also what Abraham Lincoln did, foiling the Wall Street bankers who would have trapped the North in debt slavery through the exigencies of war. And it is what China itself did successfully for decades, before it succumbed to globalization. China got the idea from Abraham Lincoln through his admirer Sun Yat-sen; and Lincoln took his cue from the American colonists, our forebears. We need to reclaim our sovereign right as a nation to fund the common wealth they envisioned without begging from foreign creditors or entangling the government in debt.
source http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-brown/why-the-us-need-not-fear_b_656177.html
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)