The Unfolding Monsanto Saga: Europe Rejects GMO Crops; America Seeks Labeling
Monsanto has just announced it’s giving up on most of Europe: people there don’t want GMO food. In America, the struggle is for labeling GMOs.
This is some kind of “fairness doctrine.” Let the US consumer decide what kind of food to buy. Choice. It’s the American way, right?
No, actually it isn’t. The evidence gathered over the last 10 years is staggering. GMO food and the herbicides sprayed on them constitute a major health hazard, to say the least.
And this doesn’t begin to cover the lying business practices of Monsanto, who promised farmers that Roundup would kill weeds in the fields. Instead, the weeds have proliferated to the point where the farmers have to kill everything growing with stronger, more dangerous herbicides, like Paraquat.
In the US, laws exist to prosecute crimes involving endangerment of health and crimes related to false marketing practices. These laws are on the books. When it comes to Monsanto, they’re gathering dust on the shelves.
Choice and fairness apply to competitive products that are safe. The consumer picks one type of tomato over another. The consumer buys walnuts rather than pecans. The consumer chooses black olives over green olives.
Choosing non-GMO corn instead of GMO corn still leaves dangerous GMO corn in produce bins.
Should a bottle of cyanide sit on a store shelf next to a bottle of salt, just to be fair to the consumer? To give him a choice?
Three or four federal law-enforcement agencies would arrest and prosecute the store owners who sell cyanide, as well as the distributors, and the packagers.
But in the case of GMO food, the FDA and USDA, the relevant agencies, do nothing. Neither does the Dept. of Justice.
Aside from several counties in America that have banned the growing of GMO crops, the big push is for labeling of GMO food in stores. That’s it.
The theory is, when consumers have a choice, they’ll overwhelmingly reject GMOs and put a serious crimp in Monsanto’s business. That may or may not happen (if labeling is widespread), but the theory doesn’t directly address Monsanto’s crimes.
The “kinder, gentler” approach is based on two assumptions. One, American consumers need soft activism. They won’t demand legal rejection of GMO food. They will, however, choose the right food.
And two, Monsanto has made such a powerful inroad on food-crop farming, it’s too late to take it back. It’s too late to declare all the GMO crops illegal.
“You see, so many people are taking Vioxx, we can’t go to court over it. It’s a done deal, even though patients are dropping like flies.”
It wasn’t a done deal.
Neither are GMOs.
In a previous article, “Meet Monsanto’s number-one lobbyist: Barack Obama,” I detailed Obama’s horrendous record when it comes to allowing new GMO crops to enter the food chain, and his outrageous appointments of ex-Monsanto stalwarts to important and key positions in his administration.
But Obama is “a good man.” He must be doing the right thing. He’s popular, so it wouldn’t be wise to attack him on the issue. Better to lay back, paste a smile on our faces, and try to secure labeling for GMOs.
Of course, that’s exactly the wrong strategy. But as in all campaigns, the longer people wait and do nothing and remain timid, the less likely it is they can succeed, if and when they decide to move.
That’s why Monsanto now has so many acres of GMO food growing in the United States. That’s why Monsanto has been able to push its unconscionable propaganda down the throat of the American consumer.
That’s why Whole Foods and other major health-food companies decided to surrender the real battles and opt for co-existence with Monsanto.
When there is continuing crime in a community, the people, the citizens have to go after and expose the public officials who are doing nothing about it, who are indeed profiting from it. In the case of Monsanto, the officials are, among others, President Barack Obama, Tom Vilsack, head of the USDA, and Michael Taylor, food czar at the FDA.
But health-food companies, who should be leading the battle, are either friendly or neutral toward these bad actors. They’re hedging their bets. They’re saying, “We’ll inform consumers so they can make good choices, we’ll do labeling, but don’t expect us to be more aggressive than that. Don’t expect us to get mad.”
Neutrality is apparently the American way. First and foremost, the business of America is business. And the idea of consumers staging a full-bore boycott against Whole Foods? Out of the question. No, consumers are too busy loading up bags with groceries.
Monsanto relies on that. Monsanto knows Americans are tuned up to buy, buy, and consume, and then buy more. Americans consider it their right not to be distracted from that obsession.
Obama, like Bush and Clinton before him, are silent on the GMO issue. They all pretend it doesn’t exist. They sell out the people at the drop of a hat, and they don’t lose any sleep over it. Conscience? Never heard of it.
Ditto for major mainstream news outlets. “We don’t cover the Monsanto story in depth because it’s a he-said he-said thing. The scientific issues are complex. People on both sides make interesting points. But there’s no traction…”
That’s a bunch of crap. Make me the managing editor of the Washington Post for a year and I’ll send sales of the paper through the roof. I’ll let the hounds loose on Monsanto 24/7 and pound on the story day after day. The bottom line of the Post will look healthier than it has since Watergate, a minor topic compared to GMOs.
But the Post doesn’t really care about their bottom line. They would go bankrupt before they’d venture into these waters. They’re sold out from the top down. They’re part of the cover-up.
I’ve written about this before, but here it is again. In the early 1990s, when the US health freedom movement was at a fever pitch, when people were going after the FDA for raiding natural practitioners’ offices and trying to limit access to nutritional supplements in stores, I sat in on several significant meetings of activists.
People who controlled those meetings, who were connected to supplement companies, wanted a bill in Congress to protect the consumer. To give the consumer choice and access to supplements. That’s all they wanted.
I told them, in no uncertain terms, that this wouldn’t work over the long term. We had to go after the FDA. We had to attack.
I had a dossier on the FDA. I, like others, knew a lot about their crimes going back a long way.
I was told this was the wrong strategy. “First,” they said, “let’s get a good bill passed in Congress. Then we can attack the FDA.”
They had no such intention, and I told them so. They were never going to support going after the FDA and exposing it down to the ground as a criminal agency.
They had no stomach for it, and they were sold out themselves. They had a confined agenda, which had to do with helping to guard supplement companies’ profits.
They were slick operators. They knew how to present themselves as neutral and rational. They could spout New Age garble at appropriate moments. “Anger can be self-defeating.” “You achieve your aims when you come from a place of doing service.”
The same thing is happening now. “Give people the right to know, the right to choose what’s in their food.” It plays well, because it caters to the wholly absorbed self-interest of the health-food consumer with discretionary income.
It doesn’t work in the long run. It papers over the fact that corporate criminals, in partnership with the highest government officials, are committing RICO crimes against the health of the American people.
The appropriate emotion is outrage.
In case you hadn’t noticed, for the past 40 years there has been a major psyop in progress against righteous outrage and on behalf of Nice. Be nice. Be friendly. Be happy. Be self-contained. Don’t make waves. Anger is a sign of a mental disorder. Outrage isn’t Spiritual. You’ll injure your Karma.
Karma was invented to prop up a caste system. It was used to promote passivity.
Silence is not golden. Profits are.
Labeling food that isn’t poisonous, while permitting the sale of poison, is let’s-pretend virtual reality.
I’ve met so-called health entrepreneurs who’ve adopted squeaky clean New Age cover-personalities to obscure their sleazebag cynical motives. They’re very slippery characters. They do their real work in conference rooms where they look at spread sheets.
The chance of them going after GMO criminals is zero.
Once in a while, if you wait for it, or if you push them a little, you’ll see something come into their eyes. A dead cold nothing. It’s a sign of the personal Arctic region where they really live.
They don’t till, they don’t plant, they don’t harvest. They sell. They’re very much like the Sunday television preachers who are there to hustle dollars.
Only they take a kinder, gentler approach. They’re all about “consciousness” and saving the planet.
If the planet were alive in the way they claim it is, the planet would have long ago consigned them to a desert island under a blazing sun.
Jon Rappoport
The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com
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